File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0201, message 49


From: "Phil Walden" <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Down with theocracy!
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 17:57:51 -0000


Hi Mervyn and listers,

Mervyn, first some prior comments before I respond to your posts below.

You claim that there is evidence that an earlier "society" you call a
hunter-gatherer society was not alienated.  Surely this is simply wrong.
Where is the evidence for your assertion?

You seem to hold something similar to Rousseau's idea of the "noble savage".
Engels had some sympathy with this but Marx completely rejected it.  Marx
regarded it as an anthropomorphic fallacy to believe that there is something
in early man's nature which entitles him to survival.  (This is also
relevant to John Roberts's posts).

Descartes's ontology was clearly wrong because he thought the mind was an
immaterial substance.  This seems to imply that ideas are not matter, and
thus sets up an illicit dualist ontology and split in the universe between
the material and the (illusory) immaterial.  The idea of one, unitary,
monistic universe cannot be defended if we accept Descartes's ontology.  In
this sense the truth is the whole.  I can make no sense of Bhaskar's (?)
concept of "pluriverse", which seems to concede a great deal of ground to
split, dualism, and alienation.

However, Descartes's epistemology looks like a philosophical breakthrough to
me.  "I am thinking, therefore I am" seems to establish the philosophical
subject as an object to itself and thus makes possible a process of
reflection which is closed off if one relies on an ontological argument
about the existence of God in order to try to situate oneself in the
universe.  And anyway, if God is "established" by an ontological argument
for the existence of God, what role is left for human beings?  This is also
connected to what I said in my earlier post about Hegel admitting the
existence of God as alienated ideology, but arguing that through the use of
reason this alienated ideology can be overcome.

Best regards (and more below),

Phil


> >Hi Phil,
> >
> >Well, there's nothing wrong with a bit of liveliness.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
> >
> >>We are not
> >>just creatures of instinct
> >
> >IMO Bhaskar's theory of human nature doesn't imply that we are; it is
> >profoundly historical and social.

What I am saying is that Hegel got it right when he argued for prioritizing
reason over instinct, will, emotion, and faith.  I don't find theories of
human nature edifying.  I prefer theories of human potential.  And you are
quite wrong, Mervyn, to suggest that the mature Hegel believed in spirit.
The term is not used at all in his magnum opus THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC which
was written about a decade after THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT.  I am not a
German speaker, but I believe the term "Geist" does not have as many
religious connotations as the word "Spirit" does in English, and they can
both clearly be used in a secular sense.  It seems that at least part of the
motivation of the PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT was to appeal to Christians to
accept the light of reason into their lives.  The mature Hegel stopped
making so many accommodations to Christianity.
> >
> >>Alienation is not a needs-based thing,
> >>Alienation is an ideology-based thing.  The root cause of our species'
> >>alienation lies at the level of ideology - alienated ideology, such as
> >>religion or bourgeois reformism.
> >
> >I'm really puzzled by this formulation. If alienation is ideology-based,
> >what are we alienated *from*?

We are alienated from our human potential if we are religious.

Religion as ideology is alienation from our
> >essential human nature. Cf Bhaskar's definition at DPF114: '
> >"Alienation" ... means *being something other than*, (having been)
> >separated, split, torn or estranged from, oneself, or *what is essential
> >... to one's nature* or identity.'

Here everything hangs on what we understand by "one's nature or identity".
I strongly suspect that Roy holds a biological determinist view, missing the
main role of ideas - development.  Ideas are matter, but they are not
subject to biological laws.  Rather, ideas are a product of the "unity and
conflict of opposites".  It seems to me that some version of reflection
theory needs to be defended - something similar to Adorno's version in
NEGATIVE DIALECTICS.
> >
> >>Bourgeois ideology fails to grasp the true essence of humanity,
> >
> >Bhaskar certainly agrees with that
> >
> >>whereas
> >>materialist ideology comes closer to grasping this because it
> understands
> >>that we are material beings both in a bodily sense and in a mental sense
> >>(ideas are matter).
> >
> >and if you'd said 'ideas are an expression of an emergent power of
> >matter, i.e. mind' Bhaskar could come close to agreeing with this too.

Here we have Roy's alienated split and dualism for all to see.  There is
matter over here, and over there (emergent) are ideas.  No.  The
relationship is more intimate and intertwined than that, and the
relationship is monistic, not dualist like Roy's.  Ideas are not "an
expression" of matter, ideas *are* matter.

> >Cf his November 2001 talk on 'Who am I?' in which he said that he
> >doesn't reject [ontological] materialism, but doesn't accept it either:
> >either mind is implicitly enfolded in matter or matter is enfolded in
> >mind.

Dialectics rejects such metaphysical either/ors.  It's not matter over there
and mind over here, or vice versa.  Rather, matter and mind are in a
dialectical relationship that reflects the unity and conflict of opposites.

 This also seems to mean that to refer to him as a metaphysical
> >idealist, as I have done in print, isn't true to his own self-
> >understanding - he doesn't reject or accept that either. I think he's
> >claiming that both are sublated in his ontological realism, according to
> >which idealism and materialism are seen (by valid perspectival switch)
> >to be distinct but inter-enfolded aspects of the one ultimate reality.

That is to see the materialism/idealism relation *externally*.  But if Hegel
is right the relation is to be seen by us *internally*.  In other words, we
are inside this relation - we are not some sort of detached observer lying
outside this relation.

> >While Hegel equally seems to have thought that mind is enfolded in
> >matter and vice versa, you may have a point in regarding him as more
> >(metaphysically) 'materialist' than Bhaskar in that he rejects any
> >notion of a disembodied spiritual reality whereas Bhaskar seems to
> >accept it in such notions that of discarnate souls; but this is not to
> >say that for Hegel 'ideas *are* matter'.

Maybe not, but for Hegel ideas and matter are in an internal relation to one
another.  Joseph Dietzgen, a worker contemporary of Marx, made the advance
to seeing ideas as matter in THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY.
> >
> >But why call 'materialist ideology' by the name of ideology? Surely you
> >mean 'materialist or realist science'?

I didn't use the term "materialist ideology", and I don't understand the
point you are making.
> >
> >>But when
> >>Roy says that "all we need to do is to shed our illusions" I
> have to come
> >>back to my point about alienation lying at the level of
> ideology.  We are
> >>all trapped within alienated ideology at an epistemological and a
> >>philosophical level, because idealist ideas are so dominant
> over materialist
> >>ones.  Thus ALIENATION IS ACTUALLY MUCH MORE PROFOUND THAN ROY
> THINKS IT IS.
> >
> >I'm not quite sure how it could be more profound because Roy says once
> >we've entered the web of *maya* there is 'scant chance of escape' (FEW
> >9). 'All (!) we need to do is to shed our illusions' - he makes it very
> >clear this is enormously difficult.

Apologies, Mervyn, but I would need to re-read FEW before I could reply to
this.  But I'm pretty sure that what Roy means by *maya* is a long way from
what I mean by alienated ideology.  Is there a Western equivalent of *maya*?
It seems to be similar to Kierkegaardian existentialism?  In other words, an
alienated split off from the real material relations of humanity and nature.
> >
> >I said in my previous that ideology according to Roy is the result of
> >alienation; actually I think it would be better if I put that the other
> >way around - alienation is the result of ideology - i.e. ideology is the
> >more fundamental, though of course they reinforce each other.

Hmmm.  I am inclined to agree.  An originary alienation from nature (as
some commentators have Adorno as holding) would seem to be subject to the
criticism that we need religious ideas like redemption, reconciliation, etc.
in order to "come back to nature".

 In FEW
> >what gives rise to alienation is categorial error resulting from the
> >exercise of free will,

In what sense is will free here?  And why isn't Roy arguing for constraining
it through the power of reason?

 above all the absenting of ontology in the
> >doctrine of actualism;

That seems fine to me at the level of ontology.  However, at the level of
epistemology Roy fails to combat actualism, because he thinks a rich
ontology will make up for the analyticist formalism, linearity, and
rationalist compartmentalization of his reasoning.  Whether some of this is
remedied in FEW I strongly doubt.

 and more fundamentally yet, the absenting of the
> >concept of absence itself,

I am suspicious of the concepts of "absence" and "presence" in Bhaskar.  If
one asks what are the relations between the two answer comes there none from
Bhaskar.  This is in complete contrast to the way Hegel deals with
opposites - he usually tries to see how they are internally related to each
other.  This is one of the many aspects of Hegel's epistemology that Roy
seems not to have grasped.  Absence/presence seems to remain a metaphysical
either/or in Roy's work.

 and therefore of God and the true nature of
> >humans and their "social-natural Totality" (33), in the doctrine of
> >ontological monovalence. I suppose getting things fundamentally wrong
> >could be said to be an epistemological issue. But I take it that the
> >reason why you're empasizing 'epistemology' is because the bourgeois
> >Enlightenment was (inter alia) an epistemological revolution - which
> >precisely endorsed the above 'errors' (and ended up with a mechanistic
> >and atomistic theory of the human being and society based on them).

I think my above comments suggest why it is not me who is uncritically
upholding the Enlightenment (bourgeois or spiritual).  And the last thing
you could accuse Hegel of is mechanism or atomism, I would have thought.

> >
> >>Certainly at one level Hegel was trying to reconcile
> >>Christianity with reason.  But I think that if you read Hegel
> carefully you
> >>will see that in all his mature writings the word *God* is used by him
> >>merely as a metaphor, and to take on board Christian ideas (and
> >>Christians!).
> >
> >Yes, Phil. But a metaphor for what?

For dialectical reason.

For the intrinsic structuring of the
> >universe (the principle of *Geist* i.e. cosmic spirit) such that it
> >necessarily produces and sustains self-conscious, eventually fully
> >rational, life. I.e. such life is not some cosmic accident. History is
> >'meaningful'.

I would say that history started to become meaningful with Descartes's
discovery of the cogito, which overthrew the Thou-Thou way of thinking of
the theologians and inaugurated the possibilities of an I-Thou way of
thinking.

 Terry Pinkard has an excellent discussion of Hegel's
> >philosophy of religion in his biography of Hegel. He insists that
> >Hegel's own self-understanding is that this 'was a *religious* attitude
> >... because it expressed itself in a reverential attitude towards life
> >and divinity [the intrinsic structuring] in general

Here I would disagree with Pinkard.  "A reverential attitude" suggests awe.
I prefer to say open-minded and methodical - or something like what Adorno
means by reflection.

 ... Faith in God was
> >faith in the everlastingness of life (though not of one's own individual
> >life) and the goodness of being, in the conviction that what was
> >absolutely good in life was written into the structure of things

For me, this is not Hegel.  However, it does seem to be close to what Andrew
Collier argued in BEING AND WORTH.  I do not understand what Andrew means
when he says that stones are good.  It seems like an anthropomorphic fallacy
to me.  For why should the structure of reality be invested with our moral
categories?

 and
> >that we, humanity as a whole, were collectively capable of gradual
> >realizations of that good and of substantial realizations in our own
> >lives.' Chas Taylor 486 also unambiguously asserts that Hegel saw
> >himself as a Lutheran Christian and dismisses the notion that he saw no
> >role for religion (as defined above, ie basically the practice of
> >devotion, of a reverential attitude to the structure of Being) in the
> >reconciled society.

Again, for me this has nothing to do with Hegel.  Taylor is just asserting
that Hegel saw himself in this way, without evidence.  In fact the whole
body of Hegel's work suggests pretty unambiguously that he was a secular
campaigner against theological obscurantism.  The idea that Hegel practiced
"devotion" is laughable in that it suggests that Hegel had an *external*
relation to reality rather than an *internal* one.
> >
> >If Hegel's view isn't religious, then I think it follows Bhaskar isn't
> >religious and you're tilting at windmills. For, while there are
> >important differences between Bhaskar's philosophy of religion and
> >Hegel's, it is of the essence of Bhaskar's position that the intrinsic
> >structuring of the pluriverse is such that self-conscious rational life
> >is possible. This is basically what Bhaskar means by 'God'. (NB.
> >'possible' not 'necessary' - Bhaskar imo offers no cosmic guarantee, for
> >the world is open; he is not, like Hegel, an expressivist or Platonic
> >'absolute idealist' in the sense that the cosmos and human history -
> >everything that exists - can be seen as an expression of rational
> >necessity, of the Idea).

Everything you say above about Bhaskar suggests that he sees himself as in
an *external*, spectator, relation to reality.  Instead of the one universe
to be in, Roy has to try to create more room for himself by conjuring up a
*pluriverse*, so that he can flee from the universe.  And I don't read Hegel
as reducing the possible to the necessary, rather I read him as carefully
elaborating the tools you need to try  determine whether something is
necessary or (merely) possible.  There may be more truth in your assertion
that Hegel reduces reality to the Idea, because Hegel concludes THE SCIENCE
OF LOGIC with the self-comprehending Notion.  But might this not be
interpreted as an appeal for an *internal*, committed, approach to reality -
which would seem to be different from Plato's more external, less committed,
Idea.
> >
> >I should perhaps add that this is a position I myself have come to
> >accept, so to that extent I suppose I'm no longer 'agnostic'. One of the
> >main considerations that has moved me is that in order for the universe
> >by sheer chance to be 'just right' for the production of self-conscious
> >life, we need to postulate an infinity of universes.

I don't understand this at all.  Why should the postulation of an infinity
of universes affect what really happened in the one, unique, real, material,
universe that we are in?  Or are you saying that self-conscious life has not
yet arisen?  Either way, this *pluriverse* concept strikes me as both
nonsense and an evasion.

 But in that case we
> >are already into one of the attributes of 'God'.... There's a sense in
> >which it can be said of course that it's precisely because the species
> >has lost a sense of reverential awe for the structuring of the cosmos
> >and stopped putting it into practice that we're heading for ecological
> >disaster.

If you are awed by something you adopt a passive and distanced stance
towards it.  This sounds like Heidegger to me - stand back and try to deny
your own essence.  Now of course there are problems with the Enlightenment
instrumental stance towards nature, as Adorno has outlined, but when all is
said and done we do have to get into an active relationship with nature
simply in order to survive.  That seems to be Marx's view.
> >
> >>The mature Hegel had no religious commitment.  He sought
> >>secular answers to the real, material problems he saw in the
> world.  He saw
> >>that that meant trying to assimilate backward and reactionary
> Christianity
> >>into progressive secularism.  (Instead of what some critical
> realists seem
> >>to be trying to do, which is to regress back a few centuries
> and assimilate
> >>secularism into religion).
> >
> >'Progressive', and 'secular answers', yes, but not 'secularism'. In fact
> >Hegel thought modern Protestant Christianity (as reinterpreted within
> >his own philosophical framework) the first truly 'human' or universal
> >religion. (Such 'imperialism' contrasts with the notion sustained I
> >think by Bhaskar, that every religion is in Ranke's phrase 'immediate to
> >God').

Hmmm.  I found this quote: "...everything speculative [has] disappeared,
being sublated in the relationship of the community.  The Reformed Church
[is] therefore the place where divinity and truth collapse into the prose of
the Enlightenment and of mere understanding, into the processes of
subjective particularity.  Luther [was] fully justified in not yielding,
however much he was assailed for it."  (HEGEL LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF
RELIGION, vol III, University of California Press, 1998 paperback version,
pp155-156).  This seems to be a defence of speculative reasoning and the
reference to "divinity" seems to be an ironic comment on the Reformed Church
more than a positive endorsement of Lutheran Christianity.  Also note that
Hegel seems to position himself in opposition to the Enlightenment.
> >
> >As for 'regress', if everyone, including scientists, come to approach
> >their work with the religious attitude (as above), that is not 'regress'
> >in your terms, it's 'progress';

See my comment above about Heideggerian passivity.

 we would have escaped your rightly
> >dreaded 'bourgeois ideology'. Your own hero Hegel holds that as a
> >species we necessarily move from the primitive identity of thought and
> >life, reason and nature; to the divorce of the two as exemplified in the
> >bourgeois Enlightenment; to their reconciliation in a higher unity as
> >raw nature is made to be an expression of reason and as reason comes to
> >see nature itself as part of a rational plan. (This from Chas. Taylor,
> >Hegel, 86).

True to form, this Taylor-type interpretation of Hegel is completely void of
dialectics - which I see as at the heart of Hegel's mature work, especially
THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC.  What has happened to the unity and (especially)
conflict of opposites - Taylor has gutted it from Hegel.

 (I agree with James Daly though that there are problems
> >about the idea of progress; may be one should speak instead of the
> >'recuperation' or 'redemption' of our essential humanity, or of
> >'reconciliation'. One can equally well view the bourgeois enlightenment
> >as 'regressive' - back to the market-inspired views of the Sophists
> >etc.)

Hang on a minute Mervyn, when did I ever speak up for the "bourgeois
Enlightenment", or for the Enlightenment for that matter?  It is possible,
as Hegel did, to see the development of reason as happening despite the b.E.
or the E.  I am not in favour of speaking of "redemption" or "recuperation"
or "reconciliation" of our "essential humanity" because this implies that
humanity needs to recapture a lost innocence - we are back to the
anthropomorphic fallacy of the noble savage again.
> >
> >>Descartes is not "up-himself", that is to fail to credit Descartes with
> >>opening up vistas in philosophy that the pre-bourgeois and bourgeois
> >>medieval and Renaissance religious "thinkers" were closing off
> all the time
> >>through their own obtuseness and conformism.  It is the
> religious thinkers
> >>of old and today who are "up-themselves".  Their reading of the
> history of
> >>philosophy is instrumentally designed to fit their pre-existing
> views (in
> >>other words, closed-minded), and because of that they have to attack the
> >>most open-minded figures in the history of philosophy such as
> Descartes and
> >>Hegel.
> >
> >I think you've got a big problem here because your two heroes are
> >fundamentally at odds with one another. Descartes' theory of the
> >subject, with its accompanying mind-body, spirit-nature dichotomy
> >(dualism), underpins Enlightenment mechanism,

Half true.  See my comments above about the breakthrough represented by
Descartes's epistemology.  In my opinion Roy has a bigger spirit-nature
alienated split than Descartes.

 whereas Hegel (while
> >endorsing some aspects of this) basically rebels against it, opposing
> >mechanism and reasserting the unity of the human and divine mind (anti-
> >dualism).

Hegel knew from Descartes that if you admitted the existence of the human
mind then to postulate the existence of a divine mind was redundant.  It's
all in the SCIENCE OF LOGIC.

 If one takes Charles Taylor's understanding of the essential
> >difference between the modern enlightenment understanding of the subject
> >and that which it displaced (the view of Plato, Aristotle, the neo-
> >Platonists etc) - 'the modern subject is self-defining, where on
> >previous views the subject is defined in relation to a cosmic order' -
> >Descartes comes down on one side, Hegel (and Bhaskar and arguably Marx)
> >on the other.

Taylor's view fails to rise above Kantian scepticism, because he rejects
dialectics and fails to draw out the interconnections and contradictions
involved in the subject-object relationship.  Descartes lacks dialectics,
but inaugurates reflection theory, and thus strikes a blow against theocracy
in human affairs.  Bhaskar thinks you can have creation ex nihilo (a view
put forward by that arch reactionary St Augustine).  Both Hegel and Marx
disagree with this.  Here Parmenides's idea of reality as a plenitude is
actually more ontologically viable than St Augustine or Roy, for if
something can come from nothing why should we reflect or reason?
> >
> >>For freedom of thought,
> >
> >Indeed. *Think* then! (:-  (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

It is you and the theocrats who need to do some reflecting, Mervyn.
> >
>
>
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