File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0103, message 45


Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 03:07:16 -0500
From: lynne engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: BHA: Events and Mechanisms


Jan,

I thought your post was great!  It seems we really do make some progress!

I agree with your first two points, absence at the De and the Da.  The real
challenge is to be clear what we mean regarding absence or the negative in
the Dr.  Here I don't really find your matchbox example helpful, nor the
invocation of a world without negativity.  What we need are examples of
absence in Dr.

Here I think we must deal with generative mechanisms as such and as a unity
of positive and negative being.  In the section from RTS just after the
section just posted, at p. 186, RB states that "Causal powers can only be
known not shown to exist."  That means if we use a methodology relying only
on the presence of the positive we miss them.  We locate absence in the Dr,
I think, in causal laws.  That is the significant thing.  Laws are the ways
of acting of things.  They account for a thing's capacity to endure.  They
are the way a thing negates itself.  They are a thing's intrinsic limits.
They are the tendencies according to which it works changes on itself and
other things.  Early on in this exchange I gave an example from the 19th
century American philosopher Charles Peirce that, once you actually allow
it muddle your brain, is telling:  he stood in front of a Harvard audience
and held a stone.  He said if I let go you know it will fall.  But how do
you know?  By clairvoyance?  Do you have experience of the future the way
you might have experience of an event just past?  He concludes that there
must be some active general principle in nature, that general principles
are really operative in nature.  (He also added, as I mentioned before,
taunting, I think, that this is the doctrine of scholastic realism!)

Now pure positivity cannot capture active general principles that cause
things to fall in the future.

So it must be to the enduring powers of a thing and the tendencies
according to which it acts that we must look for the presence of absence in
Dr.

But if the search is for pure absence as an intransitive object in Dr and a
generative mechanism in its own right, then I wonder if the search won't
fail.  Anyway, someone has to come up with an example.  I don't know of one
yet.

Howard





At 02:46 AM 3/5/01 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi Howard,
>
>thanks for your thought provoking considerations, i guess we're very
>much in agreement with eachother on most issues, yet i'm still wrestling,
>so let me try to rephrase briefly my thoughts along the lines of Bhaskar's
>Dr > Da > De scheme, buttom up:
>
>1. i think we both agree that *absences* exist in the De, and/or that
>reference to them makes sense there, in any case that was the objective
>and trust of my list of personally experienced de-onts to Ruth; but, of
>course, there are also various sets of unperceived, undetected, un-
>experienced absences, both on personal and collective level; sure, the
>skill to detect absences is a learning proces.
>
>2. as your post so eloquently agrues, it too makes a lot of sense to view
>absences as (occuring in) *events* in the Da, in which case we can also
>speak of the eventuation of actualized and not-actualized absences.
>
>3. the last question is: "Is absence a real categorial necessity in the Dr ?"
>imho Bhaskar's answer to this question is YES, and he provides various
>transcendental arguments to support this claim, e.g. that to the transcen-
>dental question: "what must the world be like for change to be possible ?"
>(or cf. my matchbox metaphor: what must the content of the matchbox be
>like for the movement of the matches to be possible ?) Bhaskar offers the
>insight that absence is an apriori ontological necessary, but not sufficient,
>transcendental condition for change to be possible (or cf. the matchbox
>metaphor: we need free space to move the matches)
>
>if there is/was no absence in the Dr, then the world (universe) would be
>in a constant static blockist state, i.e. purely positive world, without any
>negativity (i.a. deep absence, whether realized or unrealized), is a world
>wherein change is inconceivable and incomprehensible imo; but we know
>the world is changing, and thus absence must be an esssential ontological
>ingredient, or category, of our world
>
>and, yes, i'll readily agree with you that the only thing we can say (and
>know) about the reality of absences in the Dr is via the deployment of
>transcendental arguments, and this is not nothing :-)
>
>...... hmm, what do you think, does this make any sense ...... ?
>
>yours,
>jan
>
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>


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