Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 18:30:30 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Identity -- one last thought


Hi Ruth, Andy,

You can find the stuff on Newton achieving transcendental 
identitification in consciousness with gravity in the  later writings 
e.g. Reflections on Meta-Reality (use index), also in the interview in 
JCR (incorporating Alethia) 5,1 May 2002 and in the debate with 
Callinicos in JCR 1, 2 May 2003. I paste in below the relevant passage 
from the last (p. 103).

Andy wrote:

>Random remark: if I remember rightly DPF explicitly denies
>'achieved identity', as well as other forms of identity.

I take it this doesn't include 'constellational identity' (and 
specifically the constellational identity of thought and being) and 
'constellational unity', because you've acknowledged DPF's acceptance of 
them previously.

Mervyn

*****************
Let's just take science for a moment. Consider what happens when Newton 
is painfully working away and is getting very close to the concept of 
gravity but hasn't quite got it, takes a walk in the afternoon, isn't 
thinking, sees an apple fall to the ground, and wow! gravity: it's not 
the apple falling to the ground, the earth is pulling the apple. Things 
are constituted by fields of force in virtue of which heavy bodies are 
pulled to them. So you have that huge shift from the Aristotelian world 
view there. This comes out of the blue. Do you think I'm teasing you 
when I say that this is absolutely necessary for science? I certainly 
believe that science does follow a pattern which is roughly that in the 
transitive dimension as described by Kuhn. You have an absence--I'm 
dialectizing it--an incompleteness, it generates a contradictory problem 
field, and these contradictions mount to the point where they become 
intolerable. Whenever a period of revolutionary science begins, a 
sublating concept--this is the co-existence of positive contraries and 
negative sub-contraries--which couldn't be induced or deduced from the 
existing problem-field comes out of the blue, in a flash. This is the 
really important thing. There's no algorithm for this magical logic, 
this transcendental moment in which something comes out of the blue. All 
creativity is like that. It wouldn't be creativity if it could be 
induced or deduced from what was there before! That's just why you need 
a revolution, why you need a transformation, why you need the production 
of something new, something that wasn't there before. But does this 
epistemic transcendence, this moment of transcendence within the 
epistemological process, mean that it's ontologically transcendent? No, 
because if it was ontologically transcendent it would not belong to our 
cosmos. Newton and gravity would be members of non-intersecting cosmic 
fields. What I conjecture happens when a moment of scientific 
breakthrough like that occurs is that the scientist, who has worked very 
hard, gone as far and as close as he can to the point of breakthrough, 
comes into alethic union--comes into contact with the alethic truth of 
the phenomenal field. He actually comes into a relationship of identity 
with the truth which is going to revolutionize and transform the 
conceptual field. Of course, that's only the beginning; he then has to 
recast the whole of the knowledge structure in the light of this new 
concept. But, at that moment of breakthrough, there's a point of 
identity or union between the scientist and what he has discovered.
*******************



In message <3EEDCE2D.30178.563A86-AT-localhost>, Andrew Brown 
<Andrew-AT-lubs.leeds.ac.uk> writes
>Hi Ruth,
>
>I think the quote about Newton was brought up in one of Mervyn's
>earlier posts, possibly an interview with RB?
>
>Your description of Aristotle's notion of identity sounds like
>isomorphism, i.e. identity of form. I take CR and DCR to deny this,
>not least via SEPM [RB is explicit about this in SRHE]. I take it
>that Adorno denies this too?
>
>Random remark: if I remember rightly DPF explicitly denies
>'achieved identity', as well as other forms of identity.
>
>Many thanks,
>
>Andy
>
>
>> Hi Andy,
>>
>> You wrote:
>>
>> >I guess my intended meaning was the one about the special case of
>> >talking about knowledge claims. I was, and still am, trying to grasp
>> >what Jamie has in mind by 'identity' (and also Mervyn and RB, e.g. on
>> >Newton becoming identical with his Law's)
>>
>> I haven't read the claim about Newton -- where is it, by the way?  Do
>> you or does anyone else know?
>>
>> I do think that some of this way of thinking can be traced back to
>> Aristotle. Even though I associated his theory of knowledge with the
>> "epistemological" sense of the concept of "identity" that you and
>> Jamie were considering in relation to SEP Materialism (whew),
>> Aristotle's theory of knowledge does, as I understand it, involve the
>> idea (no pun intended) that in the act, or moment, or whatever, of
>> knowledge-production, the FORM of the object and the conceptual form
>> in the mind of the knower really are, in fact, identical.  Part of why
>> this is perhaps marginally less problematic than it might seem at
>> first is that the claim is not that matter and thought are identical;
>> the claim is that the FORM of the matter and the FORM in the mind of
>> the knower are identical.  But still, it's an ontological identity
>> that is being achieved, or better, actualized, via the activity of
>> cognition.
>>
>> Anyway, although for later dialectical thinkers you get the Aristotle
>> via Hegel, I think that this is helpful in understanding the general
>> approach.
>>
>> If you (or others) are interested in Adorno, there is a secondary
>> source that is a very good place to start.  It's Simon Jarvis' book,
>> 1998, called *Adorno*.  It is very clearly written, and unlike others
>> he doesn't fudge by just quoting Adorno when the going gets
>> particularly tough.  In terms of reading Adorno himself, I think that
>> the very best place to start is the recently released (though
>> available now in paperback) *Lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure
>> Reason* (Stanford, 2000 or 2001).  The problem with Adorno is that,
>> because of how he writes (at least in translated), he is one of those
>> thinkers whose work you can really only understand once you already
>> undertand it.  The thing about the lectures on Kant, though, is that
>> (for better or for worse) his rhetorical style there is absolutely
>> crystal clear.  So even though it's still easier to pick out the part
>> of the content that is unique to him (and which shows up in more
>> detail in his written work) if you already know what he thinks, still,
>> there's no comparison with the written material in terms of
>> accessibility.  Nowhere in his translated written work is utter
>> transparency his rhetorical objective.  (This is also true of the
>> lectures on moral philosophy, though less so in the lectures on
>> metaphysics and not so, in my view, of the lectures on Hegel.)
>>
>> Blah, blah, blah ... sorry.  It's a rainy Friday afternoon.
>>
>>
>> Warmly,
>> r.
>>
>>
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>
>
>
>
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