From: "Howard Engleskirchen,WSU/FAC" <howarde-AT-wsulaw.edu>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:48:18 -0800PST
Subject: Re: Re BHA: Dialectic:the Pulse of Freedom Ch. 2.3





Louis =96

Sorry I was not able to respond promptly to your points.  I=92ve been out 
of town and have a harder time getting on the net these days.  

Perhaps I spoke inartfully.  It would not be the first time.   I don=92t want to 
reduce being to our knowledge of it, or statements about being to 
statements of our knowledge of being.  I suppose I had in mind rather 
the idea that the object of study determines the method of studying it, 
although I don=92t mean by this either that we can assume our 
understanding automatically reflects the way the world is.

Anyway, for me the issue is ontological.  I do think, as an ontological 
matter, that sheer difference among the things of the world has the 
tension you want and qualifies as contradiction.  I questioned in my 
post the idea that contradiction must involve, in the case of human 
action, the satisfaction of one end at the expense of another.   However 
that be resolved, in reflecting on this I thought the essential point 
Bhaskar immediately makes to explain does make sense:  
contradiction is a constraint or bind.

I=92d been reading about the liberal idea of freedom.  Hobbes writes that 
=93Liberty, or freedom, signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition; by 
opposition, I mean external impediments of motion.=94  It =93consisteth in 
this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire or 
inclination to do.=94  In other words freedom means acting without 
constraint or bind.  But this is an incoherent notion, because if there is 
no external impediment there is nothing for freedom to act on.  In other 
words action in the world is always action on things.  But things are 
never wholly inert.  The tree dulls the saw that cuts it.   Any time we act 
we meet resistance, and any material thing is not only different from 
other things, but meets resistance in them.  They are related in the 
constraint they offer one another, and thus we can refer to such 
relationships as contradictions.  


Howard

Howard Engelskirchen


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