Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 03:10:41 -0800 (PST)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: cause and meaning


 
 
 
I seem to have irritated Tobin, but I'm not interested in a
quarrel.  There is so much opened up by questions of meaning for
critical realist analysis, its hard to imagine the subject
exhausted, even starting with Aristotle, by a few paragraphs
exchanged.  Anyway I'm not interested in dragging anyone into a
discussion they're not interested in, and Tobin can drop the
subject.  But I do hope to persist in these questions.   Also,
there do seem to be some significant differences presented and
claiming their persistence is the result of obtuse or wilful
misreading will not make them go away.  
 
My interest is in finding my way in contemporary analysis, not
Aristotelian scholastics, but I usually find Aristotle very solid,
materialist, and in any case I haven't yet found the limits others
have found on the question of cause.  Instead I've found pausing to
actually grapple with his distinctions provocative and helpful. 
I've found considering their extension to social analysis helpful. 
If nothing else, they're a vehicle for thinking through
distinctions in a step by step way where otherwise I would jumble
things together.  But I've not felt locked in by them.  2500 years
does lend a sense of distance.
 
Anyway, the limits we find in Aristotle's analysis should be real
limits.  Marx's observation that the impossibility of imagining the
equality of labor in Aristotle's society prevented even his genius
from understanding the value relation is well known.  But it would
be quite wrong to say there is no or little place for labor in
Aristotle's causal analysis.  The housebuilder building is the
efficient cause of a house, the sawer sawing of dividing, the
sculptor sculpting of the statute.  The efficient cause is the
source of motion or change in things.  It is the agent, the mover,
the maker.  If there are no bricks or stones the house will not
come to be.  But the change in things that transforms them into a
house is the labor of the builder.  Thus means of production are
not efficiently causal in either Marx or Aristotle.  Means of
production such as raw materials are the material cause, the
substance reproduced or transformed.  This is true of the tool also
which bit by bit is transformed in the course of labor.  Dead labor
is a material cause.  It's value is passed unchanged to the
product.  Living labor is the thing that works transformations.
  
As far as insults slamming doors go, the example is a good one and
I'd like to clarify my own understanding without being the
efficient cause of more impatience.  Material, formal, efficient
and final: "The matter, the form, the mover, and that for the sake
of which."  We often think of ourselves as being motivated or
"impelled" by the purpose we have in view:  "the end is that for
the sake of which."  It is the goal which "draws" things forward,
the reason things get transformed:  "health is the cause of walking
about. ("Why is he walking about?" We say, "To be healthy.")"  
 
"Why did he slam the door?" "Because he was insulted," is not quite
so transparent.  The way I would understand it is this:  by
understanding noises as an insult a social relation is established. 
A particular interpersonal relation.  This is a thing capable of
being reproduced or transformed.  It is "the matter."  My purpose
in responding to the insult is to transform the interpersonal
relation which I have characterized as insulting.  That
transformation is the end, the that for the sake of which.  It is
the thing that motivates me, the final cause.  The efficient cause
is activity for the sake of that end.  It is like walking for the
sake of health.  After the door has slammed I have succeeded in
transforming the interpersonal relation we started with.  I have
accomplished my end.  My reason for slamming the door is a cause
and it is real.  But for it the door would not have been slammed. 
But it is a final, not an efficient cause.  Otherwise what would we
do with "akrasia," or weakness of will?  I want to slam the door,
the insult motivates and impels me to do it, but I'm too chicken. 
 
Also I think it's worth clarifying one way to interpret the quote
from RB all this started with:  "It is methodologically incorrect
to search for an efficient cause of society . . . " (RTS 197). 
Although no one has suggested it, it would be possible to
understand this statement to say "it is incorrect to search for an
efficient cause of changes in society or social relations."  A
friendship is lost, a state dissolves; it is incorrect to search
for agents of these transformations.  I assume this is NOT what
RB's observation means.  Instead I understand social relations or
society as a total structure of social relations to be a product of
human agency.  When workers engage in production they produce not
only products but social relations as well and I take it they are
the efficient cause of both.  The RTS sentence instead means, as I
understand it, that society and social forms, structures or
relations cannot themselves be efficient causes.
 
As for Aristotle there is much I do not understand in his analysis
and I'm happy to cop to that.  But there's much also I find
stimulating in reflecting on his simple differentiation.  I write
to the list to discover my misunderstandings.
 
I think the question of reasons as causes of human actions has not
been developed so finely in CR as to have made clear the maker or
mover of our actions as a matter of substantive psychological
science.  I'd love to know more about this.  More do-able, I hope
the question of the efficient cause of the meaning of a text of any
sort, poem or sonata or statute (marble or legislative) gets
addressed.  But I'm ready to leave questions of agency behind in
favor of those of form.  What place does meaning have in the real
definition of social things?  And what does critical realism have
to contribute that's distinctive to the question of whether meaning
depends on reference or reference on meaning?  What does meaning
have to do with natural kinds?  And Colin do you think there are
real definitions of social things in substantive social science? 
Or is that one of the parts of RTS we have to leave behind?
 
Howard
 
     "What is there just now you lack"  Hakuin
 
Howard Engelskirchen


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