From: "Phil Walden" <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: what is the role of philosophy?
Date: Sun, 5 May 2002 05:12:09 +0100


Dear listers,

I would be interested in responses to the following:

According to Hegel, the role of philosophy is to develop knowledge towards
the Absolute.  The concept comes to know itself as the Absolute Idea.  (And
before Dick tells me that "only people can come to know themselves" I will
appeal to the dialectics of nature - something which had the stamp of
approval of not only Hegel but also Marx and Engels).  Thus the point of
philosophy is to facilitate the coming-to-know itself of the Absolute
through the exercise of reason.  Nothing is unknowable - there are none of
Kant's things-in-themselves - since the mere positing of a thing's
unknowability means that it exists and is therefore knowable.  Scepticism is
thus refuted by reason.

But what do we find when we look at Critical Realists?  Take Bhaskar and
Collier for example.  They are Kantian sceptics.  For them the role of
philosophy is to be an "underlabourer" to science - a conception that
regresses back to the time of Locke who of course knew nothing of
dialectical logic or dialectical contradiction but had instead a purely
formal and mechanical conception of the relation between being and thought.
This underlabourer conception of philosophy creates an irrational and
irrealist split between things which are to be known by science on the one
hand, and things which are to be known by revelation (or by accident) on the
other.  The role of reason is effectively bifurcated and relegated to that
of a commentator on the results of science and revelation.  Thus we have a
massive alienated split in Critical Realism, despite what it has
contributed.

It does not help to say: "ah but some of us Critical Realists do not rely on
religion, since we are good Kantians or Aristotelians or Piercians or
Wittgensteinians" because the alienated split is still there.  Reason is
bifurcated into "what we can know and what we can't know", and this despite
the fact that Hegel showed the absurdity of this bifurcation almost 200
years ago.  This is not playing with words.  If the intellect posits that it
cannot know something (X), it is at the same time positing that X exists,
and for Hegel (and for me) if we can posit that X exists then we must be
able to come to know X.  This is part of the development of reason through
history.

Now Bhaskar argues in DPF that Hegel is guilty of ontological monovalence
because Hegel fails to recognise the self-dirempt state of the world and,
allegedly, Hegel holds out hope to this self-dirempt world.  I accepted, or
at least didn't criticise, this Bhaskarian depiction of Hegel but not any
more.  It is surely necessary to separate Hegel's core philosophical
conclusions and achievements, presented in the two LOGICS, from the
fallacious opinions he held about the politics of his time.  The fact that
Hegel held, or at least put forward (for whatever reason), some reactionary
views about the Prussian bourgeois state, doesn't amount to a hill of beans
compared to the transformation he wrought on philosophy.  It is imo, despite
what the myriad anti-philosophers say, with Hegel that humanity becomes
self-conscious and reason overcomes scepticism.  So if we look beyond the
now obvious difficulty that Hegel had in comprehending the phenomenal
political reality around him, which is pointed up by Bhaskar, and we come to
examine Hegel's method or philosophical principles, it then becomes
difficult to assent to Bhaskar's verdict on Hegel in terms of monovalence.
Indeed it seems that Bhaskar's idea of monovalence suffers from some serious
problems, including positivism (facts above principles), and actualism or
anachronism (present knowledge projected onto past circumstances).  Imo the
account that Bhaskar gives of Hegel in DPF is so wide of the mark that
something will have to give way, and I hope it is that Roy does a thorough
revision of his views on Hegel.

Phil



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