From: "Nick Hostettler" <nh8-AT-soas.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 12:02:02 GMT Subject: BHA: Dialectics and ontological distinctions This discussion of the ontological distinctions between transitivity and intranstivity raises some interesting questions about the difficulties we face when trying to use dialectical categories. I would like to suggest that in a world dominated by analytic thought there is always going to be the difficulty of sustaining the dialectical character of ontological categories. Analytics fixes substantive content and meaning in its defintions. The abstract categories of dialectics, like these ones, do not have any given or fixed substantive content. Instead, they are used to refer to differing aspects of a changing reality. When describing some process with such categories only the abstract and universal meanings of these categores remains relatively fixed, but the substantive contents are continually transformed. In using transitivity and intransitivity to describe aspects of some process, the features of the process variously referred to under these terms will be constantly and differentially changing: what is transitive or intransitive at one moment need not be at the next. As realities change, the categories they embody, or they way they are embodied, change. Without keeping this in mind it is easy to slip into using the intransitive-transitive distinction in an analytic way to refer to too sharply distinguished ontological spheres. Because these terms refer to ontological relations, and because such relations change, there can be no fixing of what these terms substantively refer to. To use the terms we have to force ourselves to sustain what Bhaskar calls the 'separation' of the universal and the particular. For instance, if transitive is taken as an abstract universal that refers to that which human activity is sustaining or changing in some way, then all human activity could be said to 'transtivise' aspects of its objects in some way by engendering transitive features. However,such substantive features remain transitive only as long as they are dependent on social relations. All activities entail both change and persistence at different levels or aspects of reality (what Althusser refers to as the compex and differential temporality of reality). However, some activities always entail intransitive objects: The non-conceptual obects (things that are thought about) of isolated thought (more or less prolonged moments of reflection) are always intransitive in that thinking of them does not change them. Such non-conceptual realities, though, can become transitivised to the extent that social relations and practices sustain change in them through their action on them. Conceptual objects (thoughts) can be intranstive if they are also objects of thought: thinking about an idea does not change the idea you are thinking about. But intellectual practices can produce new conceptual objects, new ways of thinking about something. The world acquires new meaning each time this happens. *Dialectic* is about change. Change to natural things and to social things, including persons. The transitive dimension of science to which Bhaskar pointed in RTS was primarily conceptual change: the transformation of intellectual practices. It did though also include the changes to the more practical practices of experimentation. These "know how" aspects of practices are not themselves cognitive. They are exercises of non-cognitive capacities (like riding a bike and so on) but which are sometimes the intransitive objects of reflexive monitoring. They are intransitive in that they can be referentially detached and made objects of cognition. They, or some features of them, are also transitive, in that they can be made objects of practical change. Praxis combines these two features, the practical and the cognitive, along with the experiential, in a wide variety of ways. How they are combined cannot be prejudged. Each aspect of Praxis can be thought about. They might also be subject to change. The exercise of practical capacities does have objects. Riding a bike has the bike as its object. Persuasion has the thoughts of others as its objects. The practices of science have real objects in the same way. Scientific knowledge, like all knowleldge, depends on these practical, cognitive and experiential aspects of engaging with the relevant objects. Some features of these objects can also be transitive, in as much as those features are mediated by social relations and practices. Even in the experimental sciences, processes of change mediated by social relations have a transitive dimension. The particular effects generated in the experiment, the realisation of this possibility as opposed to that, the moment of the creation of a novelty, like a GMO. All of these socially mediated changes are transitive processual moments. Whether long or short lived, the consequences of socially mediated change retain a transitive dimension to the extent that their persistence depends on social relations. The duration of such things is not important, the relation to social activity is all. Society, for instance depends on the practical activity of people for its ongoing existence and is therefore always transitive in this sense. As an object of abstract thought, however, it is always intranstive. So is the process of global warming an intransitive object to thought. But it must be thought of as embodying a temporal process in which its existence, persistence and transformation are transitive to the extent they depend on human activity. Take Carol's example of depression. Carol is quite right to say that a knowledge of depression depends on the existence of the experience. (This applies to all knowledges: a conception has a real object, even if it is only another conception.) How such knowledge relates to such experience, though, needs to be differentiated. When Carol says she doesn't 'know' about the depression in the thankful times of the absence of those terribly bleak and painful experiences, she doesn't say that she knows nothing about depression, for the experience can become referentially detached and be an object of cognition. The abstract character of such cognition does not reproduce the experience (The knowledge of sugar is not sweet: Althusser). This kind of abstract cognition lacks the intensity of feeling entailed by depression, but even without that, Carol knows people can exist in that state of experience. She does not have to experience it directly herself to know this (though her feeling for those that did might be different if she had not had the experience). It would also be possible for her, and all those of us who have had similar experiences, to speak about depression even if we had not directly experienced it, eg. we could know of other people's depression from their own accounts, or less directly through, say, psychoanalysis or drama. With this kind of knowledge it is even possible to identify someone as depressed who doesn't know it. Any and all knowledge of depression, or of any other experience, depends on the existence of some experience. Just in giving it a name there is a moment of detachment in which it becomes intranstive. Using the name to express one's own depression, like crying out in pain, might though just be a part of the experience - though the simultaneous experiences of pain and of detachment from it can be a peculiar part of depression. How appropriate, then, that Howard raises questions of Alethia and happiness. Curing depression might be a case in point - or better yet, creating the conditions under which depression was less likely to occur. In psychoanalysis, the knowledge of the psyche, mediated through the interpretative practices of the analyst and through the abstract knowledges and concrete experiences of the analysand, transforms the psyche, perhaps of both. By making the psyche and depressive states intransitive objects of cognition they can be subject to practical engagment and, with luck, transitivised - changed in the context of social relations. This is what Howard described as the knowledge passing over into the object, in this case through the mediations of practice and experience. At its best, the effects will be a transformed psyche that will give rise to experiences of a qualitatively different kind. Hopefully too, the transformed psyche persists in the absence of the relations with the analyst. Perhaps it even contains the capacity for self-analysis and healing. There has to be a continuous disentangling of the transitive and intransitive moments in such a process of active transformation, as these are constantly shifting depending on the intellectual, interpretative, and other practices of the analyst and on the cognitive and experiential practices of the analysand and their combined effects over time. The process is dialectical in that these dimensions are continually recombining in new complex totalities in which the transitive and intranstive dimensions have changed. Similar things could be said of the dialectics embodied in all social practices. --------------------------------- Nick Hostettler, Department of Political Studies, SOAS (University of London), Thornaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG --------------------------------- --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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