Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 09:12:28 -0400
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: Identity - follow up questions, really curious


Hi Mervyn,

You commented on two things that I am really curious about.

First, you wrote, "All critical realists can agree with you that mind is irreducible to being, i.e. non-identical with it in a formal logical sense, though dialectically or constellationally identical."  Then you quote RB (?): 'Thus one can write, within a materialist context, of the constellational identity of being and thought in the sense that thought is both a) within being, but b) over-reached by being as c) an emergent product of being.'

I would want to say something a lot stronger than that mind (I like "consciousness" better, but whatever) is not LOGICALLY identical with being (I like "material entitites and processes").   I'm not even sure what it would mean to say that they are logically identical.  I would want to say that they are not ontologically identical.  Material beings are conscious.  But material beings are not consciousNESS.  I can't understand what materialism, as opposed to absolute idealism, means, if not (in part) this.

Also, "identity" (albeit "constellational" identity) seems such an odd way to express the idea of the NON-identity of thought and being.  I don't know who else has used the term/image "constellation" (maybe Benjamin?), but what is really interesting is that Adorno definitely did (though in a different way).  And the thing about Adorno is that he is very clear that neither (a) nor (c) above change the fact that thought and being are ontologically non-identical [(b) just IS the claim that they are non-identical].  Neither aspect of a sophisticated materialism make it necessary to re-introduce the concept of "identity" into the name of the position.  Again I think that this really raises the question of the ontological difference between materialism and absolute idealism.  

Second, you wrote "On a strong reading, Bhaskar could be saying that being(s) have an objective intelligibility ('implicit consciousness' etc) which makes them what they essentially are, and which is just that -- intelligible (in virtue of co-presence - the fine structure all beings have in common):  if we get it, we get it, in that moment, directly..."

Is the position, then, that we directly apprehend the inherent consciousness of physical objects/processes?  If so (and even if we just directly apprehend their "alethic truth," Bhaskar does seem to have moved a long way from under-labouring for Locke.  [Not that there's anything wrong with that :-)]. 

r.     




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