Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 22:14:57 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Ex-nihilo? was Re: For Ruth was Re: BHA: de-onts


Dear Dai (and James),

Great to hear from you again so soon.

I think it's very worthwhile to recall this useage, and you've given me
a far better understanding of what Bhaskar means by 'primary
polyadization' than anything I could ever wrest from his work itself.

>What I'm trying to highlight here is the concurrent
>development of inner and outer relations. What we need is co-causative,
>co-constitutive interaction across space and through time. I don't quite see
>where this is in Mervyn's schema. 

I think your idea is brilliant, and could be very fertile for
understanding the way Bhaskar sees things - though it probably takes
many of us (certainly me) out of our depth. I think we could be dealing
with more than an analogue. 

The polyadic Schillerian schema is flat - all (!) you have to do is
inflate it into holistic, diversifying, stratified  processuality in
which ontogeny mirrors phylogeny mirrors cosmogony and (in FEW at any
rate) 'the created world becomes ... the material embodiment of God'
(FEW 44). Also, you need to make it circular. In FEW, Being is a kind of
dynamic circle, in which our beginningless souls, in their sequence of
rebirths and redeaths are 'essentially on a journey to the concrete
universal' (p. 92). In the course of their odyssey, they come to
appreciate that 'Hegel was very wise to see that "I" indexes both
someone unique, someone in particular and everyone and anyone at all'
(p. 102), and at the end of it they 'return, in self-consciousness, ...
after the experience of ... the relative (including demi-real) realm of
being, to [their] basic sel[ves] as spirit' (pp. 132-3).


>Inputs of inert
>matter are transformed into consciousness almost before our very
>eyes...

I'm not sure what you mean by this - my fault probably ('inert' and
'almost' are the stumbling blocks).


>I suspect RB has a notion of an "initial
>set of moves" that depends on his systematic concept of negation, but I'm
>blessed if I know what it is.

In the FEW schema of 1) Absolute being 2) Relative being  and 3) Demi-
real relative being, the Absolute as I understand it is eternal, so
there can't be any 'initial set of moves' to constitute 1). But that of
course doesn't hold with respect to 2), let alone 3). In FEW
'referential detachment' gets us into 2) - this is presumably the
emergence of our human form of consciousness. Falling into error, hence
into the 'bad infinite' of desire, then gets us into 3).

To come into being, 2) must be a transformative negation of 1). But is
1), as [inter alia?] 'pure dispositionality' (or its 'absolute ground'),
itself pure negativity (though not of course 'just nothing')? - As is
perhaps suggested by such phrases as 'the dynamic being of the great
void' in FEW. 

James - could I ask what you think? How is it conceptualized in negative
dialectical theology? (Sorry to be ignorant).

Mervyn



Dafydd Roberts <dafydd.r-AT-btinternet.com> writes
>on 1/3/01 12:41 am, Mervyn Hartwig at mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk wrote:
>
>> 
>> The Schillerian dialectic, however, is 'monadic', not 'dyadic' or
>> 'polyadic' ('singular', not 'dual' or 'multiple'). For a world that is
>> now more adequately apprehended by the diffracted dialectic and all that
>> goes with it, the schema must be minimally 'dyadic', viz:
>> 
>>                1) Eden etc
>> 2a) Fallen world One    2b) Fallen world Two
>> 3a) Paradise One        3b) Paradise Two
>> 
>> comprising five in all. This, to repeat, is *minimal* only, 'without
>> allowing for indeterminate or subsequent multiple negation' (each
>> 'level' negates the preceding one, and proliferates). In FEW the
>> diffraction is polyadic (multiple) *to infinitude*.
>
>Hi everyone,
>
>and more particularly to Mervyn, and to Jonathan (if you're anywhere out
>there), with whom I spent an enjoyable evening on Tuesday, after the CR
>seminar at King's College, London. Hello too to Alan Norrie.
>
>Have been lurking about the past few weeks, waiting for people to decide
>what they were going to do next...and as soon as you did, and got stuck into
>the current discussion, I found myself overwhelmed with work, with hardly
>the time to read posts, never mind read DPF and contribute myself.
>
>On a point so obscure, however, I feel free to chip in with an observation,
>without feeling discouraged.
>
>It seems to me that it might be worthwhile to remember that one of the uses
>of the concept of "polyad" in Bhaskar's work is in the notion of "primary
>polyadization", i.e. the formation of the individual subject in the social
>interaction of the infant, whereby the subject becomes real to itself as
>others become real to it, in a process of reflection, projection and
>introjection. This self is first considered to emerge in the dyadic relation
>of "mother"* and child, in a form then classically sublated by its induction
>into the Oedipal triad (considered as an instantiation of the polyadic)
>leading to a more complex and highly differentiated consciousness of self
>and world. This individual is both bounded and intrinsically,
>constitutionally related to others past and present who are the conditions
>of its emergence and its sustainability as a (psychologically) bounded,
>perduring (though changing) system.
>
>         *"mother" because primary care-giver not necessarily female etc.
>
>
>What we have here, in some sense, may be an analogue for the dialectical
>coming-to-be of complex being, the spatio-temporal co-constitution of the
>"society" of beings that makes up being. And if this is so, matter may be
>more like consciousness than we thought...
>
>We should not forget, either, that though life and then consciousness
>emerged a long time ago, they keep on doing this every day. Inputs of inert
>matter are transformed into consciousness almost before our very
>eyes...ontogeny recapitulating ontology.
>
>I don't quite see how what I think is a suggestive analogy fits in with the
>note exactly. What I'm trying to highlight here is the concurrent
>development of inner and outer relations. What we need is co-causative,
>co-constitutive interaction across space and through time. I don't quite see
>where this is in Mervyn's schema. I suspect RB has a notion of an "initial
>set of moves" that depends on his systematic concept of negation, but I'm
>blessed if I know what it is.
>
>
>Dafydd Roberts
>28 Huntingdon Street, London N1 1BS
>


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