Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 03:20:27 +0800
From: nicola taylor <nmtaylor-AT-carmen.murdoch.edu.au>
Subject: RE: BHA: Roy Bhaskar Interviewed


Dear Howard, you wrote:
>
>I was intrigued by the following excerpt from the interview quoted by
>Charles Brown:
>
>	"And science was seen as a process in motion attempting to
>capture ever deeper and more 	basic strata of a reality at any moment
>of time unknown to us and perhaps not even 	empirically manifest."
>
>Does anyone else have trouble with this?  What can be said about the
>empirically unmanifest?  Aren't we back to a new version of the
>unknowable thing in itself?  I mean that's okay.  There may be all kinds
>of things in the universe we know nothing about and will never know
>anything about.  That's part of fallibility.  But what in the world can
>be said scientifically or philosophically about the empirically
>unmanifest?
>

In Science and Society, 1998, vol 62 (3) p.446,  Bill Livant attacks this
problem in a fun kinda way.  He calls his 10 point exposition "The Hole in
Hegel's Bagel", and it goes as follows:-

1.  Hegel's great insight is that the truth is the whole.
2.  What about the hole?  Is this hole part of the whole?
3.  On first sight, it appears that it isn't, that in the hole there is
nothing.  But this is deceptive.
4.  The etymology of the word "hole" refers not to an emply place, but to a
place where something is hidden.
5.  Recall that Marx claimed that if everything were immediately
perceptible there would be no need for science.  Finding what is hidden
requires work.
6.  For Marx, too, the hidden parts of anything are often what is most
important for grasping both their systemic and dynamic character.
7.  This is at the heart of the distinction he makes between appearance and
essence, and explains the priority he gives to the latter in his studies.
8  How does one get to the hole in the center of the bagel?  Only by eating
your way through, by moving.  But if your mind can't walk, can't move, you
can't get there.  And if you con't get there, there seems to be nothing
there.  Appearances seem to be all that there is. 
9.  Only by analyzing - getting into and then going beyond - appearances
can we arrive at the essence of anything.
10.  In sum, the whole without a hole is really a part in drag trying to
pass itself off as everything, which, come to think of it, isn't a bad
definition of ideology.

I take this to mean that essence and appearance are not at polar opposites
(in a dualistic sense) but are interrelated parts of a whole (in a
dialectical sense).  For Hegel, being is like the brushstroke outlines of a
portrait (when the painter begins to conceptualise her subject) and
nothingness is not the lack of outline but the lack of features that
further specify the particularity of the subject - they are potentially
present in the painters initial strokes, but at the same time are not
present, in the sense that they have yet to become (this happens in the
process of the painters activity).  Seems to me that what Bill is getting
at in his description of the process of the dialectical movement in Hegel
might also apply to Bhaskar's idea that the empirically manifest also
contains within it other empirical features that are not yet manifest.
Maybe??

  



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