File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0203, message 25


Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 18:04:33 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Re: Epistemological relativism


Hi Marko

Marko Beljac <beljac-AT-optushome.com.au> writes

>Could anyone clarify the issue for me?

I'll try.

>I was lead to Bhaskar via a work by Peter Wilken on Chomsky who argued that
>Chomsky's methodological naturalism has strong parallels with Bhaskar.

I think this is correct and that it's Bhaskar's understanding too.

> If
>Bhaskar shares a socially constructed conception of Human Nature then this
>is grossly misleading. I assumed that in Bhaskar there was finally an
>emancipatory politics that rejected the social constructivist view of Human
>Nature that to me has dominated, unfortunately, much emancipatory social
>theory to date. 

I think this is true up to a point, but one-sided. IMO your reductionism
is getting in the way of understanding both the Chomskyan and the
Bhaskarian position, but let's stick to Bhaskar. (In my view, some of
the other discussants in this thread have erred in the opposite
direction.)

As I see it, Bhaskar operates with a *two-fold* conception of human
nature:

1. Your universal human nature or essence, but with the difference that
Bhaskar sees it as (slowly) evolving and changing, and not static, as
you do. This he calls in DPF our 'core universal human nature', and in
FEW our 'essential self' or 'dharma'. This can be thought of as the
psycho-biological capacities and potentials we are borne with as
infants, which as you say are fundamentally similar no matter where you
are in history or society. To be consistent, however, I think you need
to take its non-static nature on board, because you yourself correctly
say that it is profoundly influenced by social evolution. As the work of
critical realists like Peter Dickens (see the last JCR) is showing this
psycho-biological human nature is being slowly changed right now 'in the
image of capital'. Social constructionism denies the reality of human
nature in this sense; Bhaskar is not a social constructionist.

2. - and this is a level that you omit because of your anti-emergentism
- 'four-planar' human nature (in FEW the empirical self and karma),
corresponding to Marx's social being or human nature as 'the ensemble of
social relations'. This is 1. as manifested and mediated in any
particular region of geo-history. It both is an expression of 1. and
overlays and occludes it (alienation, the structures of ideology). 

A note on your reductionism: 2. is (unfortunately from the point of view
of emancipation) emergent i.e. not synchronically reducible to 1.
However, again Bhaskar can go part of the way with you - it is of course
*diachronically* reducible to 1 (and presumably ultimately to the
fundamental dispositional and cagegorial properties of the cosmos). I
think this was missed in the discussion: we need to distinguish between
synchronic and diachronic reduction. At the level of synchrony, Bhaskar
espouses *entity relationism* - what a thing essentially is is
determined by its internal relatedness to other things (as in the
example of H2O). There's nothing supernatural about this - it's just the
way nature is, relations are causal.

Bhaskar would I think agree with you that 1. is indispensable for
sustaining a notion of universal human emancipation. It sustains the
notion that we are one species, and that we are as such free, with a
fundamental need not to be alienatied from the rest of nature, our
labour and each other.

On the subject of epistemological relativism, I thought some of the
other discussants overlooked that Bhaskar sustains a notion of the
rationality of scientific revolutions, i.e. a notion that science
actually (contingently) gets somewhere in terms of a deeper
understanding of the world. Earlier theories are not so much proved
false as incorporated into a higher-order theory ('sublated') which
penetrates deeper into the strata of the Real. I.e. I think Bhaskar is
less 'relativist' than some (probably including Heikki) understand him
to be, but not as 'non-relativist' as you!

Hope this helps,

Mervyn



Marko Beljac <beljac-AT-optushome.com.au> writes
>I would agree that the discussion is getting somewhat out of hand, and for
>others may be difficult to follow. So let me make a few remarks on what I
>believe to be the core of the issue.
>
>I will leave to one side issues concerning the philosophy of science. My
>post was on epistemic relativism and may have been somewhat misleading I
>concede that it did not bring out my main concern with "social
>constructivism". Subsequent commentary nonetheless brought out what I
>believe
>to be the central issue for anybody interested in emancipatory politics,
>namely Human Nature.
>
>I find it very hard to accept the view that Human Nature is socially
>constructed as has been argued in response to my postings. Let us say take
>the concept of "Human Rights". If we accept that "Human Rights" is a social
>construction, that the meaning of  "Human Rights" means one thing in
>Australia and another in China how is "Human" emancipation possible? Any
>conception of "Human Rights" must be grounded in a conception of "Human
>Nature" that is a universal species character.Of course the dominant textual
>theme of Marx was socially constructivist in this sense, but I fail to see
>how his concept of alienation makes sense without taking seriously a
>conception of Human Nature that puts emphasis on a species wide essence and
>his views on alienation in his early work for mine is the blood and guts of
>his critique of Capitalism. But to say that Human Nature is socially
>constructed is to cut the ground under any attempt at constructing a
>conception of  human emancipation. I recall a posting on the semantics of
>the
>Chinese language, which was correctly quite suspicious of the following
>claim,  that being that  because Freedom can have a different meaning in
>Chinese than English one cannot speak at all of a concept such as "Human
>Freedom" as applying across cultures. But if one speaks to a Chinese peasant
>who lived through the Japanese occupation one need only ask him about
>freedom and one will see that freedom is something we can both agree upon
>but how could we do this if Human Nature is socially constructed? Or take
>say Koori rights in Australia. Do Koori's really have a different "nature"
>than settler Australian's?
>
>If we accept that Human Nature is constructed by geo-historical processes
>then in fact it is social constructivism that shares its doctrines with
>positivism. For if Human Nature is constructed by geo-historical processes
>then we are born as a blank slate, a conception that constructivism shares
>with positivism. Of course a positivist may argue that Human Nature is
>constructed through sense experiences or what not, anyway both
>constructivism and positivism share the blank slate hypothesis which I would
>reject.
>
>I was lead to Bhaskar via a work by Peter Wilken on Chomsky who argued that
>Chomsky's methodological naturalism has strong parallels with Bhaskar. If
>Bhaskar shares a socially constructed conception of Human Nature then this
>is grossly misleading. I assumed that in Bhaskar there was finally an
>emancipatory politics that rejected the social constructivist view of Human
>Nature that to me has dominated, unfortunately, much emancipatory social
>theory to date. Could anyone clarify the issue for me?
>
>
>
>Marko.
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, Journal of Critical Realism (incorporating 'Alethia')
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Tel: 020 7 737 2892
Email: <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>

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