Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 12:17:57 +1000
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: Re: BHA: DPF & DCR


At 02:00 PM 5/13/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi all, 
>
>Gary thanks for taking the lead on DPF once again.
>
>(1) The central topic (Colin questioning Gary) whether Bhaskarian 'real
>negation' can be understood as "simply meaning that everything that is will
>not be.  Or to put it in Bhaskarian terms, everyting that is present now will
>be absent".  This went on to a discussion, mainly between Tobin and Louis
>(also Michael, Howard, and Colin) about more general realist debates about
>mathematics and geometry.  These debates may be very interesting ... but they
>can be left aside in this case.  This is not a debate about the category of
>*Change*, it concerns rather the category of *Absence*.  We should not
>understand 'real negation' as Gary put it ... although perhaps Bhaskar would
>commit himself to this way of thinking (though i doubt it) ... better i think
>is to say in the end negativity wins, and absences are absolutely necessary,
>they exist(!), but it is contingent what is absent, and what gets absented,
>etc.  
>
>Real negation is the acknowledgment that absences are never absent.
Moreover,
>absence is necessary for the possibility of change, emergence, agency, etc.
>Finally, not everything can be *absented*, perhaps Tobin offered some
>interesting examples, but DCR must be committed to the idea that absence
>itself, can never be absented.  In otherwords, there is always forms of
>absence. 
>

Hi Hans,

Now I do not have my DPF with me here but I will track down the page where
Bhaskar says that it is the fate of everything to perish.  This is what I
had in mind when I defined real negation as I did.  Marx too captured this
sentiment in his famous "Mors immortalis." Only death is immortal.

When you say "absences are never absent" what do you mean?  To me this
sounds like the Hegelian dialectic in that it conserves what has been
negated.  As I read Bhaskar there is a finality about what has been
absented.  this makes him so much more radical than Hegel.  

Somewhere in DPF there is a passage where he discusses the notion of the
eternal return and contrasts his Dialectical Critical realism with it.  

>(2) i did not care for Gary's examples of our attraction to villian
characters
>as a form or desire to absenting (e.g. the status quo), i don't know that i
>like this way of employing the notion absence, that is in a teleological way.
>i think the category is more transcendental than it is teleological.



Actually this is the part of my post, Hans, that I was most pleased with!
You have got it absolutely right.  My argument here is teleological and so
is Bhaskar's.  He talks repeatedly of what he terms in one place the
'conatus to freedom'.  This is the elementary desire present at our first
impulse to absent something.  

This is the "will to freedom" and unites Bhaskar with thinkers siuch as
Chomsky.  Moreover it provudes a very interesting contrast with
post-modernist neo-Nietzschean notions of the will to power.  It is, BTW,
on this terrain that I think that Critical Realism is at its strongest in
relation to post modernism.

I have to say that I do not understand your use of the term
'transcendental' here.

warm regards

Gary


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