Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 07:37:10 -0600 (MDT)
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-econ.utah.edu>
Subject: BHA: DPF C 2.10



Nick, and others,

yes, I am trying to go in the direction which Nick considers
so dangerous.  I am grateful for you pointing out the
pitfalls, but right now I think the pitfalls can be overcome
and they are not a necessary consequence of my general
direction.  Please bear with my trying to argue myself
around your objections.  I myself am curious how far it gets
me.  My background is different than that of most of you, I
am a single-minded reader of Marx, Bhaskar, a little bit of
Hegel, and not much else in philosophy, but then I also know
some mathematics, physics, probability theory, statistics,
and economics.  If I overlook something that is obvious
to a philosopher, please point this out to me.

Nick summarizes my last posting as follows:

> On dialectic, you say that what it registers are self-absenting absences. 
> On the 'substance' of dialectics you speak of the causal efficacies of 
> absences. In respect of absolute reason you relate it to the realisation of 
> the eudaimonistic society. 

> Hans. Are you suggesting that we should be understanding Roy to be  using 
> absence to refer to self realising potentialities? 

Potentialities which realize themselves are not
potentialities but necessities.  I want to keep them
potentialities.  But I think absences *can* have causal
powers, consequently also potentialities can have causal
powers as potentialities.  The fact that Pierre is not in
the cafe at a certain night can have causal effects.  The
fact that money is purchasing power which does not have to
be redeemed in specific use values, but that it is pure
potentiality, has an effect (not the effect that this
potentiality must be actualized, i.e., the money must be
spent, but on the contrary the effect that the money will be
accumulated without bound).

Perhaps I must distinguish between (a) the claim that
absences have causal powers and (b) the question under what
circumstances do these causal powers contribute to the
absenting of the absences?  Let's stay with the money: the
boundless accumulation of money leads to capitalism with all
its excesses, which leads to painful struggles to abolish
capitalism and to do away with money, ending up in
production for use value instead of monetary profit.  Isn't
that a much more satisfactory "absenting of the absences"
than your "self realising potentialities"?


> It is one thing to speak of the existing structure of the world in terms of 
> realised and unrealised possibilities (presences and absences) which in 
> turn give rise to a structure of possibilities, some of which are realised 
> while others go unrealised. This gives us a persistent dialectic of absence 
> and presence, or an account of emergence within polyvalent being. 

> To speak of causally efficacious absences with self-actualising capacities 
> seems to me to be a form of the teleological which wholly subordinates the 
> positive to the negative. This reading is much closer to the way that I 
> would read FEW. 

I don't want to go in the direction of FEW either.  But
although I like the openness of your account I think it is
too open.  My hunch is: If the world were as you describe it
we would almost never get realized potentialities.  We would
have lots of monkeys sitting at lots of pianos and none of
them ever playing Beethoven's fifth symphony.  If the
absences themselves wouldn't help us along a little, we
would never be able to absent them.


> On your final note, if absences are self realising why shouldn't we speak 
> of the necessity of the self realisation of eudaimonia? In FEW, after all, 
> the 'absolute' is 'fundamentally constitutive' of all being so that 
> Eudaimonia is a transhistorically necessary absence/possibility. 

I have no problem with this last conclusion.  Even with a
completely different geo-history of modes of production I
think humankind would still be going in the direction of
societies in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all.  But, as I tried
to argue, one does not need an actualist notion of self
realizing possibilities to get there.



Hans Ehrbar.


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