From: "Phil Walden" <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: RE: BHA: Are we dialectical materialist realists or empiricist realists?
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2002 12:08:57 +0100


Hi Mervyn,

Your post is so littered with errors that I will not have time to correct
them all.  Maybe if there is someone else out there who cares about the way
Marxism is (mis)represented they will join in.  I will here confine myself
to a few points.

(1)  Ideas are patently *not* immaterial.  If ideas were immaterial we would
not be able to discourse about them, for they would be nothing.  Ideas are
something.  They are matter, but of a different form to your workaday
scientific matter.

(2)  Marx and Engels did *not* argue that "mental phenomena are irreducible
to, but emergent from, matter".  In ANTI-DUHRING, the text of which was
approved by Marx, Engels argues that the universe is matter in motion.
Clearly he meant that ideas are part of this matter in motion.  He did not
mean that ideas are outside this matter in motion.  Your formulation is
highly inaccurate (false), because it denies philosophical materialism let
alone dialectical materialism.  The concept of emergence is a bit of a
nonsense here because although inanimate matter certainly preceded
consciousness, that relation of emergence has almost nothing to do with the
concrete question of what ideas win out in debate in contemporary society.
It is obvious to me (though apparently not to you) that philosophy, not
science, plays the overwhelmingly more important role here.

(3)  Our difference is most certainly *not* semantic.  Your post reveals
that you do not know what dialectical materialism is.  You say "DM as I
understand it holds that 'matter' is radically, even infinitely, creative
and transformative, dialectically leaping over itself, as it were, to
produce the stratified, differentiated and changing world that we know."
This characterization of dialectical materialism might have passed muster in
the 1930s Communist Party but it is a complete falsification.  For one
thing, it assumes a telos of movement from lower-to-higher, thus denying
(the possibility of) regression within reality.  For another thing, it
reduces matter to a scientistic conception of matter which denies the role
of the conflict of ideas in human affairs.  In the real (material) world
people are responsible for their ideas and the way they express them (or
don't express them).

(4)  Bhaskar's position is empiricist realist because although he has
correctly taken from Kant some transcendental arguments about what makes
*science* possible, he has missed the much more important transcendental and
dialectical arguments from Kant and Hegel about what makes *philosophy*
possible.  In particular, there are questions about essence and appearance
which Hegel deals with in a vastly superior way to Bhaskar.  By the way,
this explains why Bhaskar's promise in (was it?) RECLAIMING REALITY that his
next book would be a study of Kant and Hegel, was not kept in good faith.
Bhaskar realized that it would be a revolutionary undertaking to write such
a book, and that it would have compelled him to avow himself a dialectical
materialist.

(5)  By "intentionality" I do not mean teleology or inevitability.  I mean
that Bhaskar with his ground states and his non-dual states and the rest of
the recent paraphernalia (some of which I have to confess might actually
contain some content) seems to me to be focussing on the intentions of human
beings rather than placing these intentions within the wider context of
material reality with its *structural* alienation, *structural* fetishism,
etc.  (But may dialectical materialism save us from "structural sin"!).
Mervyn you said in reply to me on this list that Bhaskar was working
primarily with a Freudian conception of the ego.  I think this helps to
explain why he, with the latest batch of books, has gone down what is
largely a blind alley.  The *philosophically* important conception of the
ego is the *transcendental* ego, which is ultimately far more influential
than the Freudian psychoanalytic one.

(6)  If Bhaskar wants to learn about (dialectical) materialism then he
should debate it at the CCR Seminar with Dr Phil Sharpe.  I suggested this
to Roy at the CR Conference but he affected that disdain which people affect
when they are paralysed with fear.  But have no fear Roy, there will be
(more) life after your conversion to dialectical materialism.

Finally, following up Andy's question to you, it would be good if we could
have all the arrangements fixed for the CCR Seminar on materialism in prompt
and unbiased time - and stick to those arrangements!  Roy told me at the CR
Conference that the seminar would take place on November 1st, but he
remained totally tight-lipped about the format.

Phil
>
>
> Hi Phil,
>
> I'm not trying to get away with anything (!), just saying what I
> provisionally think, I hope with some supporting argument.
>
> I don't accept that ideas *are* matter (scientifically or
> philosophically). While they depend on a material substrate for their
> articulation (brain states, books, computer technology etc) they seem to
> me, like relations, patently immaterial (what is 'material' about Marx's
> concept of a 'yellow logarithm' for example? Your position looks like
> reductionism, which as you know Marx and Engels opposed, arguing that
> mental phenomena are irreducible to, but emergent from, matter. I don't
> know Dietzgen or Adorno well enough to argue the toss with you about
> them. Certainly, Adorno saw himself as a philosophical materialist, but
> I doubt very much that he espoused your kind of apparent identity
> thinking.
>
> On the other hand, it could be that our difference is largely semantic.
> You want to defend 'dialectical materialism' which you see as providing
> answers to the 'spiritual' question of the meaning of life. DM as I
> understand it holds that 'matter' is radically, even infinitely,
> creative and transformative, dialectically leaping over itself, as it
> were, to produce the stratified, differentiated and changing world that
> we know. When you add to this your (philosophical) notion that 'ideas
> [are] a material part of reality', is this so very different
> (terminology aside) from the position Bhaskar currently espouses, i.e.
> that ideas (mind) are enfolded qua possibility within matter? I can't
> see how the latter is an 'empiricist realist' position. It is arrived at
> by transcendental argument. Nor does it reduce everything to
> intentionality. The ontology is still imo one of open possibility.
>
> Bhaskar claims in his latest books that materialism is a very
> underanalysed concept and wants to discuss what it is with Marxists at
> the Centre for Critical Realism seminar in London in November. I don't
> know how far he's developed his own analysis. There's a brief critique
> of the reductive materialism characteristic of modernity in
> *Reflections* which I believe is developed more fully in one of the
> still unpublished volumes of *Meta-Reality*. It's early days in the
> reception and assessment of his latest position.
>
> Opponents (for want of a better word) of the spiritual turn keep asking
> me what's the point, aren't there better things to do? I'm sure you'll
> agree with me that the struggle for a better world must proceed at every
> level, including philosophy. As I very broadly see it, Bhaskar is trying
> to help undermine the philosophical props of the status quo, to show
> that a better world is possible and to help forge a worldview fitting
> for such. This doesn't preclude, but calls for and hopes to inform and
> encourage, more substantive contributions at other levels.
>
> Mervyn
>
>
>
> Phil Walden <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk> writes
> >Hi Mervyn, all,
> >
> >Mervyn you write that you hold "with Bhaskar that mind *as
> possibility* is
> >enfolded in matter from the outset both qua causal power and 'implicate
> >order' or the potential stratification of being.".
> >
> >You then go on to say that relations cannot be material in a metaphysical
> >sense because "they are just an irreducible category: the universe is so
> >constituted that relations are causal".
> >
> >Question: are ideas *philosophically* matter?  My PhD thesis argued that
> >indeed they are, and that this means much more than the obvious
> view (which
> >Bhaskar holds) that ideas are *scientifically* matter.  When
> Adorno writes
> >about contradiction and about ideas changing into their opposite
> he has done
> >this on the basis of a laborious case he has made for the view that ideas
> >are *philosophically* matter.  So I'm sorry Mervyn but I can't
> let you (or
> >Bhaskar etc) get away with your reduction of materialism to realism.
> >
> >You say "the only sense in which [relations] can be material is in the
> >Aristotelian sense of 'material cause': that which pre-exists and enables
> >and constrains and is in turn shaped by activity.".  No Mervyn,
> even if it
> >is a very popular view.  Relations are *dialectically* material in that
> >there is a constant struggle of conflicting ideas, all those
> ideas being a
> >material part of reality.  Or is reality to be reduced to what merely
> >*appears* to us?  It is in this sense that consciousness has
> come to be the
> >dominant ontological element of (material) reality, not in the sense that
> >Bhaskar has recently been outlining because (as far as I can make out) he
> >has now reduced everything to intentionality.  What Bhaskar and
> you lack is
> >a conception of the *philosophical* materiality of ideas and
> what that means
> >in terms of human relations within material reality.  You will find the
> >beginnings of a theory of this in the work of Adorno and (more
> digestibly)
> >in the work of Joseph Dietzgen entitled  THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF
> PHILOSOPHY.
> >
> >So the problem is not one of historical materialism versus historical
> >idealism (and your dialectical supersession of these alternatives, as you
> >pose it) but it is really, much as you may dislike this, a philosophical
> >problem about the defence of dialectical materialism.  For it is
> not just a
> >question of how we view history (although it is that) but it is also a
> >'spiritual' (or how we invest meaning) question about how we view the
> >meaning of human life.  I don't think realism can directly help
> us with that
> >(though it clearly can help us with building up a more accurate
> ontology of
> >the universe, which seems to me to be the basic role of realism).
> >
> >Phil Walden
> >
> >
> >
> >     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
> --
> Mervyn Hartwig
> 13 Spenser Road
> Herne Hill
> London SE24 ONS
> United Kingdom
> Tel: 020 7 737 2892
> Email: <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
>
> There is another world, but it is in this one.
> Paul Eluard
>
>
>
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>



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