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Chapter 5 Relative Canonists Contextualism The anti-canonists overstate their case. By rejecting the claim that all things are elements of one overarching system, understandable ultimately in terms of a Unified Theory of Everything governed by a single normative method of inquiry, we are not compelled to reject a belief in systems or unified theories or normative methods. “All” and “none” are logical contraries: both are denied by “some.” Arthur Lovejoy points out that the notion of a Great Chain of Being, which we argued in chapter 2 was a presumption of the content canonists’ foundationalism, rests on a “principle of plenitude”: “It is this strange and pregnant theorem of the ‘fullness’ of the realization of conceptual possibility in actuality, . . . that no genuine potentiality of being can remain unfulfilled, that the extent and abundance of the creation must be as great as the possibility of existence” (52). This principle entails a second one: the “principle of continuity,” which asserts that there are no breaks in nature, no disjunctions or ruptures. Given any two kinds of things, if there is a way to exist that is in any sense intermediate between the two, then there must exist some third kind of things that exemplifies that difference (58). Two further principles then follow, says Lovejoy. One is the “principle of gradation,” which indicates that the key continuity among kinds of things is with respect to their perfection, resulting in a hierarchical arrangement of kinds from the least to the most perfect, from the transient to the permanent. The “principle of sufficient reason ” then asserts that the reason why anything exists can be explained by indicating the role it plays, the place it occupies, in this hierarchy. 72 Higher Education in the Making Lovejoy quotes Alexander Pope as summing up these four principles in “two neat couplets”: Of systems possible if ‘tis confest That wisdom infinite must form the best, [then] . . . all must full or not coherent be, And all that rises, rise in due degree. A hierarchy of this sort, however, a system in which “everything is so rigorously tied up” with its Source or Apex, which in turn “is so rigorously implicative of the existence of everything else,” allows no room for “conceivable additions or omissions or alterations” (328). Such a world is thoroughly deterministic, and hence is timeless with respect to its structure, with respect to the nature and pattern of the kinds of things there are. Yet, argues Lovejoy, the world is obviously not that way: it is “a world of time and change” (329), “a world of impossible contradictions” (331). “It is, in short, a contingent world; its magnitude, its pattern, its habits, which we call laws, have something arbitrary and idiosyncratic about them” (332). If there is no great chain, however, there are nonetheless plenty of little chains. Contingency and idiosyncracy are not modes of chaos. The world has laws and patterns even if they change over time, and even if the laws are not all compatible nor the pattern of the patterns coherent. William James walks this same middle road. A system, he says, is any collection of things that “hang together,” that are linked by “lines of influence.” In some cases, those influences may be purposive, so that the ways of the hanging together “work out a climax,” go together to “tell a story.” Were there no such “conductors,” the “parts of the universe” would be like so many “detached grains of sand.” Were there nothing but conductors, never any “non-conductors,” the parts would comprise a totality—the universe would be a solid “block” of things. “In point of fact,” however, James contends, “all stories end.” The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we can not unify them completely in our minds. . . . It is easy to see the world’s history pluralistically , as a rope of which each fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each crosssection of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life, is harder. (67) There are hierarchies, but the claim that they fit together into a single overarching hierarchy is problematic. Any such unity is certainly not a given, a precondition for what we experience. It is, at best, something to be [52.14.85.76...

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