File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9705, message 11


Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 18:01:22 +1000 (EST)
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: BHA: Startingg DCR
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


The QUT reading Group has made a beginning with DCR.  Somewhere Robert
Bridges said that the Wreck of the Deutschland was like a dragon (or was it
a lion ?) barring the way to Gerald Manley Hopkins' poetry.  DCR is a bit
like that.  Mighty intimidating and prone to make one long for the Royal
Road. But for all that is badly written it is still a truly great book,
full I know of the most marvellous and suggestive of insights.  It is our
intention at this stage to read and write a summary/commentary on what we
have covered.  I don't really know how far we will get with this approach.
Perhaps colleagues on the list might volunteer to do a commentary on
certain sections.  We will see.

regards

Gary

Our first task is the Introduction.  I have earmarked what I believe are
key sentences (i.e. I understand them!) from Section 1.  They are:-

"To put this in a nutshell, most philosophical aporiai derive from taking
an insufficiently non-anthropocentric, differentiated, stratified, dynamic,
holist (concrete) or agentive (practical) view of things."

and

"More generally, philosophy's current anthropmorphizing, actualising,
monovalent and detotalising ontology acts, I shall argue, as a block on the
development of the social sciences and projects of human emancipation - for
this ontology currently informs much of their practice. (p 3)"

It is my habit when reading Bhaskar to note the words that I simply do not
understand and then try and look them up later.  The margin indicates that
"monovalent" caused me some difficulty.  This is however explained later
when he come to deal with absence.  But what I got mostly from this section
was the notion that at the heart of critical realism lay a depth ontology
as opposed to the common sense -"Thus I refute him" - ontology of a Dr.
Johnson. 

There is also the near triumphalist note that if we adapt a depth ontology
many of the problems of contemporary philosophy are transcended.
Irritating I am sure to other philosophers but I am a believer and this
poses little problem for me.

On P 3 there is a summary of Bhaskar's new dialectic:-

At the beginning, in this new dialectic, there is non-identity - at the
end, open unfinished totality.  In between, irreducible material structure
and heteronomy, deep negativity and emergent spatio-temporality."

I'll postpone discussion of this until section 4, but it is still a useful
short orientation to come back to when one is lost or desperate.



Section 2. Dialectic: An initial Orientation

Here the plot thickens. Bhaskar distinguishes his dialectic from the
familiar Hegelian :- thesis - anti-thesis and synthesis triadic dialectic.
Though one should note that he does not use these terms!  But this clash of
opposites leading to transcendence is what one normally means by dialectic.
 So how is Bhaskar's dialectic different?   Well the processes involved in
Bhaskarian dialectics do not always lead to 'sublation'.  This is a
difficult word to come to grips with. It is a translation of aufhebung
which according to my dictionary means in Hegel both to destroy and
preserve.  

Bhaskar says his dialectic does not always supersede (destroy) or preserve.
 Nor de we necessarily have a class of opposites. We can have relations of
connection, separation or juxtaposition. A quick trip to the glossary is
helpful here.  So far we have established that dialectic is  "Anything from
any relation between differential elements..."

Having established something of what he means by the dialectic
Bhaskar next deals with types of dialectics.  He lists four types.
Ontological, epistemological, relational, practical, ethical, aesthetic and
meta-epistemological dialectics. The concept of relational dialectics gives
me considerable trouble.  They are defined as "in so far as knowledge
circulates in and/or out of what it is about". (p 3)  Presumably relational
dialectics are those that connect the epistemological to the ontological.
But what would be an instance?  There is a note though that all dialectics
are ontological and that "relational dialectics can never abolish the
intransivity of the relata".
 
This section ends with a stirring sentence on truth and freedom mediated in
practice by wisdom.  I have read with interest Michael's posts on
transitions.  I am inclined mostly to agree with them but part of me thinks
betimes that Bhaskar's ideas are more than simply marked "utopian" and
"Only to be opened after the revolution."  One has only to think of the
hegemony of ordinary language philosophy in England to realise what a fresh
 beginning Bhaskar represents.

Section 3. Negation    

a. This is surely the most radical step in DCR - the recognition and
inclusion of absence as a key category.  The decisive break is with the
tradition begun by Parmenides for whom reality consisted solely of the
positive.  For Bhaskar absences are real and prior to the positive.  

He labels the doctrine of Parmenides as "ontological monovalence" and says
that the "chief result of ontological monovalence in mainstream philosophy
is to erase the contingency of existential questions and to despatialise
and detemporalise (accounts of) being" (p 7). 

Some of us in the QUT reading group are interested in the question of the
"grunge realists".  It is interesting to think here of this type of
literature as groaning under the tyranny of the actual and without any
concept of absence and thus unable to see the contingency and the temporal
and spatial specificity of the "reality" (i.e. actuality) that it is
describing.

b. Bhaskar next deals with three types of negation :- real, transformative
and radical.  The real contains the transformative which contains the
radical.  Real negation represents absence.  It has what Bhaskar terms a
"four-fold polysemy."  I have to confess here that I have been reading and
re-reading this passage and still don't quite get it.  I do though
understand that he wishes to use 'absent' as both a verb and an adjective,
both as a process and a product.  The other aspects of the polysemy are
process-in-product and product-in-process.

Other interesting aspects of this section are that radical negation
represents the process of self-emancipation and that we can refer to
non-being.

The section concludes with a real flurry of 16 synonyms for the verb
"negate".  I hope he had to consult a thesaurus, but I fear he may not have
had to.

Section 4

This section deals specifically with the changes to Critical Realism.  I
think the trick here is not to get over excited.  We now are dealing with a
four stage/level model. ( At some stage we need to take into account that
in Plato Etc a firth stage is added.) The levels/stages are termed 1M -
first moment, 2E -second edge, 3L - third level, and 4D -fourth dimension.
I do not detect any significance to the choice of the words 'edge',
'dimension' or 'level'.  What has happened is that CR now deals with
absence, totality and agency as well as non-identity.

Section 5

Moving on from that splendid piece of over-simplification we have a
reflexive thought about the brave new world we have entered.  I read this
section as a backward glance at the good old days of underlabouring.
Personally I have always been for the new. However to be serious about this
section there are some very important statements.  On p 15 we have a
declaration that science is not a "supreme or overriding value".  I suspect
that this will turn out to be significant when we get to read the latest
Bhaskar, especially his engagement with the East.

There is also the remark that Bhaskar is committed to moral realism and
ethical naturalism and wants to envisage an adjacent position in
aesthetics.  Aesthetics is defined as the "art of living well".  There is
so much suggested here and so little said.  Very frustrating for those of
us whose primary interests lie in aesthetics and ethics.

Finally for this section there is, what is for me, an absolutely key sentence

"Reality is a potentially infinite totality, of which we know something but
not how much". (p 15)

And finally finally, Bhaskar's politics peep out when he constructs a
wonderfully reductive and slightly crazy continuity leading from Laplace to
Lenin through diamat (i.e. Stalin) to command economies and omniscient
parties.  Poor old Laplace.  What did he do to deserve to be put into this
company?  My reaction to Bhaskar's politics here is to jump up and down and
bellow "moderate", which as some of you may be aware is a serious insult
among us Irish.

To be continued...(380 pages to go!)




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