Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 12:17:03 +1000 (EST)
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: BHA: DCR2
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


Reading DCR: Part 2

I] Introduction

The imperatives of academic life have caught up with us here at QUT in a
rather brutal way but we are still struggling through the Introduction.
Jeezuss alone knows when or even if we will get this book finished but we
are deriving considerable satisfaction out of the close reading of the text.

This post concerns section 6 on the Hegelian dialectic.  A major problem is
that none of us are philosophers and so we simply do not have the
background to judge and respond to Bhaskar's reading of Hegel. Perhaps
someone else on the list can help us here.

II] On the sources and General Character of the Hegelian Dialectic (DCR:
15-22) : Section 6

Firstly the rather commonplace observation that to use the word "dialectic"
at all is to sound distinctly unrespectable.  I still remember a colleague
who taught philosophy at the then College smiling indulgently at a paper I
wrote in the 70s about the dialectics of the Strong State in Queensland.  

Bhaskar however has revived and substantially redefined the term.  He
begins by telling us that for Hegel the dialectic is how reason operates
and it is also the motor force that drives reason on.  There are it seems
two sources for the dialectic.  The first and best known is Zeno of Elea
which gives us the Eleatic component of Hegel's dialectic.  There is also
an Ionian tradition. (:17)

Firstly the Eleatic tradition.  (BTW there are remarks here (:15) about
Zeno's paradoxes and Eleatic cosmology which I do not even begin to
understand. As is so often the case in DCR, they serve not to illustrate
but to demoralise the uninitiated.  It is important though not to be side
tracked.)
The principal feature of the Eleatic component of the dialectic is the
notion of "conversational interplay and exchange, involving the assertion,
contradiction, distinction and qualification of theses" (:16)  

When attempting to give my students some sort of hold on the concept of
dialectic I ask them to think of "dialogue". Dialectic then is two elements
in conversation/argument/dispute with each other.

There follows in DCR a little potted history of the fate of the dialectic :- 

with Socrates/Plato the dialectic is regarded as the supreme method;  
with Aristotle its prestige declines and we get the beginning of the
analytical versus dialectical reasoning distinction, where dialectical
reasoning is seen as inferior;  
this is carried on in Kant who also leaves us with a world which is
dominated by a series of key splits which cannot be resolved unless through
Aesthetics. Some of the splits mentioned are knowledge and thought,
knowledge and faith, theory and practical reason, duty and inclination,
this world and the next. (:17) 

However for Bhaskar what is really important is what happens to the
dialectic after Kant. Hegel includes a second strand drawn from the Ionian
idea of dialectic as an automatic self generating process. This is the
aspect of the dialectic that Marxists such as Brecht turned to when
confronted with the monstrosities of Nazism or that I take up when in my
cups (occasionally) I refer to the dialectic as "remorseless" and express
the hope that I will live to see it bite the powerful on the arse.  This
use of the dialectic is fine as aesthetic consolation but it rather tends
to negate the concept of agency.

The Ionian strand has two forms.  It consists of the descent from the
perfect higher reality to the imperfect actuality, or the ascent from the
imperfect to the higher perfect form.  So with Hegel we begin with the
perfect Idea or Absolute.  Then this is imperfectly realised and the trick
is to see how the dialectic will somehow get us back to the perfect Absolute.

Bhaskar next gives us the three basic keys to Hegel's thoughts.  these are
1. spiritual monism, 2. realised idealism and 3. immanent teleology

1. Spiritual Monism

Monism is a general name for those philosophies which deny the duality of
matter and mind.  Marxism dissolves the duality on the matter side whereas
with Hegel's system the duality is replaced by a spiritual or idealist unity.
2. Immanent teleology

For "immanent" substitute internal.  Teleology has of course to do with
goal or end.  With Hegel the entity x has within it at the beginning its
ultimate goal or destination. How this can be reconciled with change or
development I am not at all clear.  But as I understand him one of
Bhaskar's key criticisms of Hegel is that his dialectic does not allow for
change or emergence.

The following quotation from Hegel makes clearer, I think, what Hegel means:-

"The bud disappears in the bursting forth of the blossom, and it may be
said that the one is contradicted by the other;  by the fruit, again, the
blossom is declared to be a false existence in the plant, and the fruit is
judged to be its truth in the place of the flower.  These forms not only
distinguish themselves from one another, but likewise displace one another
as mutually incompatible.  But the transient and changing condition
converts them into moments in an organic unity in which not alone do they
not conflict, but in which one is as necessary as the other; and this very
necessity first constitutes the life of the whole." (in Rogers, A.K. A
Student's History of Philosophy, New York: MacMillan, 1963:409-10)

A key problem in translating such a view of the dialectic from the natural
into the social world is surely that there is a tendency to see everything
as pre-planned.  In this way of thinking the current social formation can
be viewed as the logical and necessary end or outcome of previous social
formations and so we can arrive at the "end of history" thesis. Bhaskar by
contrast argues for the radical openness of the social and so avoids making
the kind of conservative conclusions that are implied in the Hegelian
dialectic.

Bhaskar next introduces a dialectical figure - "constellational identity".
Here in the case of two terms one of them (the major) "over reaches
envelops and contains the other term (the minor).  I think that this is a
very interesting way to escape certain dualistic traps.  Bhaskar gives the
examples of causes and reasons.  In stead of seeing these as opposed
reasons can be contained with causes.

If in Cultural Studies we take the very vexed instance of the clash between
the subjective and the objective we might be able to argue that
"constellational identity" helps us resolve the endless arguments about the
possibility or otherwise of objectivity.  Here the objective would over
reach, envelop and contain the subjective, and thus act as a guarantor of
the possibility of the subjective.  Subjectivity after all has to be about
something. Just as if there is no truth there can be no lies, so if there
is no objectivity there can be no subjectivity.

Bhaskar now gets to the Hegelian dialectic proper.  I will try and make a
more general summary here (:19-22) rather than follow him paragraph by
paragraph.

Within the Hegelian system we have

1. Pre- reflective understanding.  

This is the "reasonableness of ordinary life which tolerates contradictions
without finding anything problematic about them".(:21) In many ways it
parallels the Gramscian notion of "common sense".  Gramsci described this
as :-

"the 'philosophy of non-philosophers' or in other words the conception of
the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural
environments in which the moral individuality of the average man in
developed." ( Hoare, Q & Smith, G. N. (eds) Selections from the Prison
Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York: International Publishers, 1971 :419)

It should be noted here that for Gramsci "common sense", though incoherent
and fragmentary, is still a kind of philosophy and it does contain what he
calls a "healthy nucleus". (:328) This is the recognition for the necessity
to control the passions and give a "conscious direction to one's
activities." (:328)

For my purposes the notion of PRT is a very useful insight. Pre-reflective
thought is what I like to think of as the defence mechanism of the organism
- the source of bad faith if you like.  We exist in this state for most of
the time and we attempt to return to it as soon as possible, largely
because the price of agency/freedom can be very high. To put this another
way pre-reflective thought is a bad way of resolving theory-practice
inconsistency.

I line the notion of pre-reflective thought up with reflective thought and
then meta-reflective self-totalising thought and use this as a means of
critiquing whether a particular documentary film helps us get to the truth
of the problem field it is addressing or whether it is facilitating the
resurgence of pre-reflective thought.

To get from  Reflective thought to Understanding we have the ro(r) transform.

2. Understanding

This is an advance on 1 (PRT). Rogers defines Understanding as "the mental
temper which insists upon taking things in their isolation, which cannot
see more than one side of a truth at a time, and which will always have it
either that a thing is so or that it is not so without compromise or
limitation..." (op cit:409)

As Bhaskar puts it Understanding is analytical thought.

3. Dialectic. This is the process and method which get us beyond
Understanding.  Bhaskar here is careful to insert the notion of agency.
Thus we have the dialectician ans an observer and then a commentator. The
dialectic process is dividing into two.  First is the sigma (s) transform.
Here the dialectician discovers contradictions, anomalies or inadequacies
in the category. 

Second is the taf(t) transform.  In this case the anomalies etc are
resolved and the category is folded into Reason.

3. Reason. 

Bhaskar has a very good sentence here (!) which I feel precludes for once
the need for paraphrase :-

"Dialectical...thought grasps concepts and forms of life in their
systematic interconnections, not just their determinate differences, and
considers each development as a product of a previous less developed phase,
whose necessary truth or fulfilment it...is; so there is always some
tension, latent irony or incipient surprise between any form and what it is
in the process of becoming." (:22)

4. Post-philosophic Wisdom (PPW) 

This is the state we reach after the dialectic. It entails a "return to
life". Bhaskar posits an epsilon (u) transform between Reason and PPW. The
diagram on page 22 is puzzling here. (Surprise, surprise!) What does the
dotted line mean as opposed to the full line?  How can we return or slip
back into Pre-Reflective thought (PRT) if we have been through the
dialectic?  Shouldn't there be some notion here of a spiral or an accretion
of wisdom?  

On page 27 Bhaskar does say that "Linear radical negation...is clearly
untypical." and much of his critique of the Hegelian dialectic is indeed
over its linear nature. Moreover in Section 9 he radically transforms the
picture set out in fig 1.1 p 22.

My own thoughts are that the notion of wisdom is a useful counter to
conservative thought to the extent that it indicates another moment of
stratification.  If we look for instance at the absolute mess that nuclear
scientists have left us with, we can see that there is indeed a very good
case for making a distinction between knowledge (Understanding or Reason)
and Wisdom.

III] Signing Off

So much for section 6. Only 363 pages to go.

Chris Butler of the QUT group will tackle a summary/commentary on 7 & 8.
And section 9 should enable us to get the Introduction into a coherent
perspective.  Hopefully it will not detain us too long. 

Thanks to Colin for the response to the first post.  What did Ruth or John
think?  Who else is reading DCR with us? It would be great if we could get
someone from the list to read a particular section and write up a response. 




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