File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1998/bhaskar.9806, message 6


Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 09:59:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: absence


Okay, so I wrote a whole long carefully worded message that couldn't
possibly be misconstrued and then my f*&%#$g computer froze and insisted
that I sacrifice the message.  Then I started *this* message and
accidentally deleted it.  So it's not been a good morning.

I'll cut to the chase.  Sorry about the no nuances part.  You'll just have
to trust me that they *were* there, and pretend that they still *are* there.
(And I'll spare us the meta-commentary on that last sentence...)

Here's what I wrote: 2 questions, one need for definitions.  

Question #1:  If I am right in understanding that Bhaskar believes thoughts
to be emergent phenomena of actual physical beings, upon what (or whom) are
the ideas that I determinately do not have, and/or the fact of my not having
had such an idea, emergent?  These real but non-existence absences seem to
be free-floating conceptual entities.  For that matter, if the answer is
that a new one is generated every time I think about something (determinate)
that didn't happen, then how are these ideas different from any other ideas?
You don't have to say that absences are entities to say that the idea of
absence is crucial and as real as any other idea.  The whole thing still
seems like just so much reification, to me.

Question #2:  If you really want to have a *negative* dialectics, do you not
need a category of genuinely thorough-going negation?  To add that absences
are in fact real albeit non-existent "de-onts" -- that everything
determinate is real -- seems to weaken the force of the negative
considerably.  [Besides, what does it mean to say that something is real but
non-existent (as opposed to real but not actual)?]  

Definitions:  I'm not clear about the meanings of and logical relations
between the concepts of "real", "existent", "present" and "to be" (and, by
extension, their opposites).  Again, if the concept of absence is to have
meaning, and if we are also to say that absence is/absences are "real", then
it seems to me that real-ness can have nothing to do with existence.  The
meaning of which, as I've just noted above, I don't understand.

It's starting to seem like I'm kind of a physicalist, actualist weenie, eh?
Seriously, though, if my "persistence", as Colin so sweetly put it, is
taxing your collective patience, feel free to drop this.  I can happily
grumble about it to myself.

R.



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