Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2003 18:49:29 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Identity


Hi all,

A few comments on this interesting thread, for what they're worth (my 
name came up a number of times...).

1. Nobody within CR that I know of is asserting the identity of thought 
and being, as in identity-thinking, let alone the absolute idealist 
identity of thought and being in thought (as in Hegel, on a metaphysical 
reading). There is a sharp and sustained critique of this in DPF, 
presumably influenced significantly by Adorno, from  which I see no 
textual evidence that Bhaskar has resiled. One of the exegetical tasks 
awaiting us is to spell out the relationship between the philosophy of 
identity (meta-Reality), presupposing as it does the non-identity of the 
world analysed by CR, and the critique of identity-thinking in DPF. 
Bhaskar clearly does not intend that the one should annul the other.

2. As I see it the later Bhaskar upholds a thesis not of identity 
between us or our thought and the object as such but of the possibility 
of '(transcendental)identity *consciousness*' with the *inner structure* 
or form of the object. As I see it, identity consciousness has two 
aspects.

a) We grasp in thought, in the TD,  the objective intelligibility of the 
object. I don't understand why the emergence of mind with its powers of 
thought should be a problem for this - it is rather, as I think Jamie 
has suggested, a necessary condition of its possibility! Science of 
course proceeds on the assumption that the world is so intelligible, and 
successfully. I think Andy sees it as a problem because he's conflating 
mind and its powers with their exercise in thought/ consciousness. Since 
mind is emergent
(though by no means sheerly other) no-one is claiming that it is 
identical to other strata (this seems to me a red herring)  only that in 
grasping in thought the objective intelligibility of the object, we 
really do apprehend (aspects of) its inner structure. Jamie is surely 
right too that SEPM does not delineate or put limits on the powers of 
mind. (Whether this meets all relevant philosophical critieria for 
identity I don't know. A sentence or a
mathematical formula is clearly not identical to or even like the form 
it seeks to capture, yet there is a sense it seems to me in which it 
enables us tograsp the structure of the object, or we would indeed be 
like
(blind) owls without wings.)

b) By a valid perspectival switch which locates everything in the ID (so 
that epistemology is a distinction within ontology) we see that a) is 
possible because *we* are an emergent *part of* the world and its fields 
of possibility. This is where the Hegel-derived docrtine of co-presence 
comes in, together with Platonic anamnesis, an implicate order, etc. 
Doubtless there are philosophical problems with all this, some indicated 
by Jamie, but I think we should take a hard look at what the philosophy 
of meta-Reality has to offer here because CR has never explained at all 
satisfactorily how it is we do get across the TD/ID 'divide'. (Of 
course, there are strands of thought within CR that hold that we don't - 
we only get to know theoretical objects - but that doesn't seem very 
satisfactory either.)

3. Re 'materialism' and 'consciousness', realism and 'mind-independence' 
etc.  You must remember that the ontology is one of possibility. Qua 
possibility, consciousness is implicit in the world. If there was a big 
bang, consciousness must have been implicit in the exploding particles. 
Is that not so? Such a view still leaves plenty of room for non-identity 
and emergence. I don't see that the view that (the possibility of) mind 
is enfolded in matter, is fatal for emergent powers materialism either. 
If you think it is, there's always the option of viewing the 
'materialism' in SEPM as it perhaps was intended, viz., as having no 
necessary metaphysical implications, but rather invoking the 
Aristotelian notion of a 'material cause': the given, that from which 
the new emerges. Nor do I think it affects what Andy called 'the 
fundamental basis of realism', 'mind-independence'. When critical 
realists deploy this (problematical) notion, it doesn't mean that no 
mind, so to speak, has gone into the constitution of the object - in the 
case of social objects it ungainsayably has - rather that objects are 
existentially and/or causally intransitive with respect to our current 
efforts to understand them. Intransitivity, hence realism, applies 
whether the objects are 'ideal' (as in a theory) or 'material'.

Thanks,

Mervyn



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