File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0103, message 9


Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2001 15:15:09 +0000
Subject: Re: Ex-nihilo? was Re: For Ruth was Re: BHA: de-onts
From: Dafydd Roberts <dafydd.r-AT-btinternet.com>


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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