File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-04-21.144, message 36


Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 00:20:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: ontology of common purpose


A couple of months ago I raised a question about the status of
corporate entities or groups within the ontology of critical
realism.  I'd like to push that question further.
 
RB says there are structures on the one hand which are reproduced
or transformed but do not purpose or intend, and agents on the
other, which do purpose or intend:  the garbage person's reasons
are not (normally) the reason garbage is collected.
 
Social life generates structures of waste production and its
disposal.  Such structures, which exist only through the activity
of individual agents, provide positioned practices within which a
particular agent fits.  The agent, pursuing his or her own
purposes, acts intentionally and in so doing reproduces the
structures of waste disposal.
 
My question concerns WASTE MANAGEMENT, LTD., INC.  Is the company
a structure or an agent?  WMLI presumably exists to make a profit,
in fact by law it owes a duty to its shareholders to maximize
profits.  As such it is what Marx called a "traeger" or bearer of
the economic relation of capital.  Capital is surely a social
structure.  But WMLI does all sorts of intentional things like
buying new trucks, laying off workers, gathering garbage at this
address, but not next door, expanding service to another town,
etc., etc.
 
Or take a union which pickets.  The legality or illegality of its
action will depend on the purpose for which it picketed -- for
recognition, to protest a discriminatory firing, etc.  Is the union
a structure or an agent?  What is the ontological status of its
"purpose"?
 
The soup, I think, thickens with this observation:  under
capitalism the means of production are socialized.  That means that
the action which occurs by means of which things get produced is
action of associated workers.  The collective worker.  Now from the
fact that the world is transformed by associated labor -- the
transformative negation of the given takes place through the
activity of associated labor -- we can infer intent from what is
actually done.  This is nothing different from what we do all the
time with individuals -- why did she pull the trigger?  Because she
intended to kill him.  And we can imagine that in the instance of
the associated laborer it would often be the case that the intent
we would infer would not correspond to the intent of any particular
individual engaged in the common action.  We would not suppose that
the garbage person's intent is the intent realized in WMLI's
action.  So what is the ontological status of this intent we infer? 
This is the collective intent of the union or the corporation or
the state or the legislature or the university, or the board of
directors, or political party, etc.   Is the intent real?  That
question depends on whether it causes anything to be different than
it would otherwise be in the material world.  Does it?
 
The self, RB, argues in DIALECTIC, is the agent's "dispositional
identity with her changing causal powers" (p149).  The causal
powers which drive our action are plainly a composite of both
social and psychological structures.
 
Does the collective agent also have a real or, using the words with
ontological specificity, actual "self" that can also be
characterized by its dispositional identity with the collective
agent's changing causal powers?  Then what of the union's,
political party's, corporation's, legislature's, university's,
nation state's reasons for action?  Are they real in the sense that
reasons are causes just as for an individual reasons are causes?
 
Or is it the case, as Colin not long ago reminded us, "that nothing
happens in society save in or in virtue of something human beings
do or have done?"   Do we read a rigorous little parentheses before
"human" with the word "(individual)"?  Yes, only individuals act,
but when they act in common, they act within the framework of
structures that are real, and which they reproduce or transform,
and they act often to realize common purposes.  What is the
ontological status of those common purposes?
 
Take an example.  Suppose a group proposes to do a thing, but they
can't agree on "what is to be done."  (The question here is indeed
a question of laying a common line.  What is the ontological status
of a political line?)  
 
Scenario 1.  The group fusses and fumes and never agrees and winds
up doing nothing.  
 
Scenario 2.  The group fusses and fumes and finally comes to a
common understanding and acts on it.  The common purpose agreed to
by the individuals in the group guides their action.  And it may
actually not correspond to the individual purpose of any of the
individuals in the group.  
 
What is the ontological status of the common purpose?  Plainly
there is something in Scenario 2 there was not in Scenario 1, and
it makes a difference.  In Scenario 2 there is an articulated (or
implicit) common purpose according to which individual human agents
have aligned their individual purposes.  
* * * 
 
For Tobin --
 
What Oscar Wilde forgot is what every real socialist knows -- we
work for a society where meetings are life's prime need!  Why even
today I know of an academic dean or two who thinks that way.
 
 
 
Howard
 
 
Howard Engelskirchen
Western State University
 
     "What is there just now you lack"   Hakuin


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005