Asymmetrical Grounding

Definition

Some grounding relations are symmetrical in the sense that the grounded things "participate" in and share the nature of their source — parts of a common substance that could, in principle, run in reverse. Robert Neville's alternative is a strictly asymmetrical relation: determinate things depend entirely on their ontological ground for existing, but that ground does not in turn depend on them, and — because it is genuinely indeterminate rather than a "fullness" that gets subdivided — it cannot be treated as a bigger version of what it produces.

In the Book

Robert Neville's Chapter 9 divides ground-of-being theologies into two types: "fullness-of-being conceptions" (which he attributes to Neoplatonism, Thomism, and perhaps the Kyoto School), where God is the plenitude of being and creation happens by "diremption" — introducing negation to finitize portions of that fullness — and "ex nihilo conceptions," where God is the creative act itself, giving rise not only to the world but to the divine nature as creator. He labels the first type symmetrical and the second asymmetrical, and argues the fullness-of-being model cannot actually explain novelty: if creation just breaks fullness into finite bits, any positive finite reality was already latent in the original fullness and so isn't new, while pure negations can't coherently be said to be "created." Neville concludes ex nihilo asymmetry is the simpler and more defensible hypothesis, since it "gives rise to determinate things that have positive being and definite negations or limitations together" without needing the source to already contain what it produces.

May Sim's earlier chapter (Ch. 2) tests this same asymmetry against Chinese philosophy, examining Neville's claim that Daoist, Confucian, and Neo-Confucian sources of "ontological creativity" are asymmetrically related to the determinate world in the same way. She grants surface similarity — the sources do seem to transcend and asymmetrically relate to the world of things — but argues in detailed textual analysis that the Chinese sources differ from Neville's ex nihilo model in important respects, showing the asymmetry claim is not free of interpretive difficulty even where it looks most exportable.

Why It Matters

Asymmetrical grounding names a dependency shape that recurs anywhere something is claimed to be a genuine, novel source rather than a rearranged piece of a pre-existing stock: it forces the question "does the source already contain what it produces (symmetrical, a repackaging) or does it produce something the source itself lacks (asymmetrical, a real origination)?" That question sharpens debates about emergence, about whether a generative process (evolutionary, computational, economic) can output real novelty versus recombination, and about whether a "foundation" in any domain is genuinely prior to what it grounds or secretly co-dependent with it.