File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0003, message 10


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
---------------------------------


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