File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1999/bhaskar.9902, message 96


Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 14:23:44 +1000
From: John.Ridgway-AT-env.qld.gov.au (John Ridgway)
Subject: Re: BHA: DPF Reading ch 2.4 Full reading...




Howard Engleskirchen,WSU/FAC wrote:

> Mervyn –
>
> Where I grew up your “meta comment” would be called a put down.  I
> know this is done with good intentions and fellow feeling, but my own
> guess is that it does not forward the progress of the list.  One of the
> frequent things list lurkers say when they post is that they hesitate to
> post because they are intimidated by the “high quality” of discussion on
> the list.   I’m always disappointed in this wishing that people actually felt
> they could comfortably ask questions.

> My idea of proceeding through Dialectic, as I have made clear, is to
> imagine myself showing up for a study group in somebody’s living room.
>  I have prepared the material and have some contributions I can make
> and a ton of questions to ask.  I do not think the progress through
> Dialectic will be either very interesting or very helpful if people just
> present sections one after the other and no one engages the material in a
> way that places their puzzlements on the table.  Someone said after
> Colin’s posts recently “I don’t have anything to add,” but my guess is
> that that person still stumbles over a line or two in C 2.4 that would be
> worth asking about.  I wish everybody were asking those questions.  I
> am a person of  “ordinary intelligence” and am assured in the first
> paragraph of Dialectic that Bhaskar’s objective is to make the dialectic
> plain to persons like me.   I think persons of ordinary intelligence are
> likely to have lots of questions about  C2.3 and C2.4.
>
> Also consider the effect of reminding everyone to mind their
> hermaneutics before they dare to question.  Caroline’s question on
> constellationality was not responded to.  Why couldn’t someone else in
> the living room have jumped in and said, “well, I don’t understand it very
> well, but this is how I’ve worked it through so far .”  Academic pride
> being what it is, there are enough inhibitions already.  Or shall we wait
> for you to respond to every question?  You don’t have the time.  Your
> comments on Xegel were interesting and helpful to me, but a little brisk
> and confusing for that, and your argument about the essential point on
> dialectic as  the art of thinking was no argument at all.
>
> In the same spirit Gary it would be a good thing to give up your
> impatience with what you perceive as an anti-DPF line whatever that
> means.  Howie Chodos, for example, has posted long, carefully and
> conscientiously to this list.  He has provoked in a good sense many of
> us.  The thing distracting us from engaging DPF in a serious way is
> people’s reluctance to be frank about what they don’t understand.
> That’s also a barrier to people using it in their own work.  DIALECTIC is
> not user friendly for the person of ordinary intelligence.  I mean there are
> many things that are just not careful about it.  We all post because we
> think there are some very careful ideas being expressed so we put up
> with that.   Anyway, as an old voluntarist I once studied used to
> observe, seek unity with those with whom you disagree.  As for the ones
> you agree with, you’re already united with them.

As a lurker it is not intimidation but time that  keeps me from participating
more. I have to say that I have found the interventions of Gary and Mervyn have
brought some discipline to the list. The reading of the DCF has been highly
productive and interesting.  Certainly more helpful to my understanding than the
observation that it is difficult or that there is a 'lack of modesty' attached to
claims to have resolved the text book problems of philosophy. In that context
DCR's unpacking of positivism and post modernism seems a reasonable basis for
claims to have resolved some pretty serious problems.


>
>
> As for bracketing, I never learned to unpack texts either.  I generally find
> your strategy Mervyn a good one, but my preconceptions are also the
> critical lens through which I read.  Marx forms a lot of them.  You might
> read me in a first instance assuming I made some sense.  It is not taking
> the contradiction out of contradiction to suggest that things get
> reproduced and insofar as internal contradictions characterize the
> essence of things, to reproduce something is to reproduce its
> contradictions.  This usually takes the form of resolving them to
> reproduce them.  For example, the thing that contains the germ of all the
> contradictions of capitalist society is the commodity and what makes the
> commodity a commodity is that it is a useful product useless to its
> owner.  That’s a contradiction.  It is resolved by exchange.  The owner
> exchanges the product and gets money in return.  But now the money is
> a useful thing useless to its owner in the sense that it can’t be eaten,
> worn, slept on, etc.  So the money is exchanged for another product.
> That product is consumed in the production of another useful product
> which is useless to its owner.  In other words the original contradiction is
> resolved in order to be reproduced.  The same analysis applies to the
> propertylessness of the worker.  It is a condition of her exchange with
> capital.  But the exchange leaves her propertyless again.  This usage,
> incidentally, is not inconsistent with Bhaskar’s argument in C2.3 that
> “The resolution of all contradictions, including logical contradictions, is
> practical both in the sense  (a) that they consist in the trnsformative
> negation of the pre-existing (contradictory) state of affairs and (b) that,
> qua actions, they are moments of social practices. . . . “  (The lack of
> agreement between the number of the pronoun and the number of its
> reference is not user friendly.)
>
> You write that “Dialectical contradictions cannot I take it be self-
> reinforcing because they are constituted by mutually antagonistic
> tendencies . . . . “  It would be worth reading more Mao.  The elements of
> a contradiction are opposed but that does not mean they are inevitably
> antagonistic.  Perhaps Bhaskar thinks differently.  At p. 59 he writes:
> “Dialectical contradictions may be more or less antagonistic, in the sense
> of expressing or representing or even constituting the opposed interests
> of (or between) agents or collectivities; and, if antagonistic, they may be
> partial or latent or rhythmically dislocated, and manifest to a greater or
> lesser extent in conflict, which in turn can be covert or overt, transfactual
> or actual, as well as being conducted in a variety of different modes.”
> Does this mean they are always antagonistic, though sometimes only
> slightly so, or does it mean that they are sometimes not antagonistic at
> all?  In the table just below this text he writes “dialectical contradictions
> [are greater than or equal to] antagonisms . . . . “
>

My guess is that you are right not all dialectical contradictions are
antagonisms, for some reason I am thinking of the tree within the acorn.


>
> There is a political dimension to this.  The contradiction between workers
> and peasants in both the Russian and Chinese revolution was dialectical,
> but not always antagonistic, and because of that there could be
> revolutionary success.  Earlier I suggested ethnic conflict today could be
> viewed in the same way.  The contradiction between black and white
> working people can be antagonistic or mutually reinforcing.  Among
> growing things, biodiversity promotes flourishing.
>
> Since Xegel got me sent to the back of the class, I’ll leave him to his own
> devices.  The thing I’ve been concerned with is the concept which I took
> from Mao about the pervasiveness of contradiction.  There is a very
> interesting critique of the Deborin school of philosophy.  Mao writes:
> “This school does not understand that each and every difference already
> contains contradiction and that difference itself is contradiction.”  This is
> what I’m interested in.  I take it Bhaskar’s argument is different.

As I recall, I don't have the book with me, RB argues that any change involves
internal contradiction in that for something to change it must contain within it
the liability to negation. Ch 4 section on diffraction I think. RB is careful to
make a distinction between change and difference.
But there seems to be no reason that difference between elements at different
levels of reality would be necessarily contradictory. Am I contradicted by a
star. is the sun contradicted by the moon.

> Mao
> says that the problem with the Deborin view is that if we maintain that
> contradiction does not appear at the inception of a process, but only
> when it has developed to a certain stage, then the cause of the
> development of a process before that stage would be external not
> internal and that this reverts to metaphysical  [Humean] theories of
> external causality and of mechanism.

I suspect that difference and change are being conflated or else how is
difference a process. If the process here is change then the there is probably
agreement.


> So there is a legitimate question
> posed here.  Are there connections and relations which are not
> contradictions.

This I don't know,

> No one has really argued the point.  It has only been
> assumed.  Nor is it an answer to say “How does Mao know.”  That is not
> the issue.  The issue is what is the argument of  DIALECTIC.
>
> I’ve got more to say, and, in particular, wanted to emphasize some very
> fertile and positive thing I learned from the Xegel response, but I’ve got
> to get this in the mail.  My server shuts down in minutes.
>
> Howard

I am sorry I have not more time to be more precise but this is my lunch hour and
I do not have DPF with me. Just a quick response to Gary's lurks question: I am
attempting to use DCR in the context of public policy analysis. I have found the
notions of absence, constraints, deep structrue and alethic truth,  useful so
far, but I am only on my second reading and the first was a crash course in
terminology only now am I begining to get it.


--
+--------------------------------+
John Ridgway
Policy Coordination Unit
e-mail: John.Ridgway-AT-env.qld.gov.au




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