File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-12-14.144, message 45


From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 00:53:08 -0500 (EST)
Subject: BHA: Triangles, etc.



               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 117777

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            12-Nov-1996 00:19am EST
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu )
 
Subject: Triangles, etc.

Tobin has made many of the relevant points that I would like
to have urged in response to Howard, but there are two small
differences I wish to note between what I think is a sustainable
realist view and things mentioned by Howard and Doug.

Howard wrote that society exists (his word) only in its effects.
Doug helpfully drew a comparison with a magnetic field, arguing
that neither it nor society "exists" only in its effects.
I take it that Howard had something like the Althusserian
slogan that "the structure [of society] is visible only its
effects."  I don't have my copy of READING CAPITAL readily
available, but I think Althusser may go on to say something
more akin to what Howard wrote.  If so, Althusser is quite wrong,
>from a realist point of view.  It may be that like the magnetic
field, social structures can only be observed in their 
effects (we can't observe surplus value directly from the
prices of commodities, but we can, through complex calculations,
determine the surplus value extraction from prices and costs),
but their existence is not contingent on our capacity to
observe these effects--a point Bhaskar makes about real
mechanisms over and over again.  That was in part Marx's
point against classical economy:  the latter could not recognize that
surplus value was being extracted at the point of production,
which did not mean that value was not being produced through
all the prior decades of capitalist social relations.

Contra Doug, I would not say that the entities projected in
non-Euclidean geometries aren't real, just because we can't
"see" them, viz., observe figures that correspond to what are
demonstrated in the proof.  Those figures are every bit as
real as the standard figures one learns to recognize in
Euclidean geometry, although they are often difficult to
envision (as mathematics textbooks demonstrate:  the figures
they put on the page are often laughably confusing).  At 
least some of these entities express real relations of physical
objects, e.g., the paths of sub-atomic particles.  To revert
to the original topic of this discussion, the real and
the observable (which I take to be what the experiential
designates) are distinct domains.

All of which leads me to conclude:  Santa Claus exists with
or without the red suit, although unlike sub-atomic particles,
he didn't always exist, and it's just possible that, given
a sufficiently radical transformation in the socialization of
very many members of the human species, he will cease to exist one
day--just as acceptance of feudal relations of service have
been pretty well eradicated from extensive areas of the globe.
But neither feudalism nor Santa Claus was ever a Platonic
form, which latter, per definition (in Plato at least), was
unobservable.

Michael Sprinker


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