Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2003 09:04:58 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.


Hi Jamie,

Seems to me you're taking the free development slogan in a Humean, 
abstractly universalist way whereas for both Marx and Bhaskar (in DPF, 
not just MR) it's in the mode of dialectical universality whose pulse of 
freedom moves as a real geo-historical tendency, given generative 
separation and generalized master-slave-type relations, from the 
concretely singular towards the concretely universal. A constant 
conjunction between my flourishing and that of others is not being 
asserted; any exception to it does not negate the real tendency nor 
gainsay real progess made towards its actualization, though there is a 
sense in which my freedom is not *fully* complete until that of everyone 
else is known to be (a not in principle impossible condition in an 
interconnected world).

I'm aware that Bhaskar has spoken of himself as working 'from within the 
analytic tradition'. However, the contrast in the context (entry on 
ontology in Outhwaite ed. the Dictionary of Modern Social Theory) is 
with Heidegger and continental philosophy; he's also spoken of all his 
early work as 'implicitly dialectical'; and note the 'from' (he doesn't 
just say 'within')--'from within' it to a dialectical account, I would 
suggest, and this is what is going on in SRHE I think: he explicitly 
raises the dialectical flag on a number of occasions eg 156 'we need to 
be able to think the simultaneity of distinctions and connections'.

As for cultural relativism, the short answer is that I reject it. 
Dialectical universalizability is premised precisely on non-acceptance 
of cultural or historico-specific reductionism. The arguments for it 
take their departure from human intentionality as such, and it 
recognizes other universal human powers and needs; in virtue of our 
common biology and our practical, embodied encounter across history and 
cultures with the same laws of nature, all people have in common basic 
potentials (powers), liabilities and needs (hence rights), including the 
need  for autonomy and free flourishing, however these get culturally 
construed and mediated in myriad ways. That they are necessarily 
culturally mediated in no way entails that they are not real or only 
empty abstractions. If this is so, an infinite regress of radical 
relativism doesn't apply and there's nothing that dialogue informed by 
explanatory critique can't in principle resolve. This is not to deny 
that there are in the world examples of your kind of regress, e.g. women 
who wear the veil in some Muslim societies experience the veil of the 
commodity-form worn by many women in the west as their own unfreedom, 
and vice versa. The logic of universalizability would tend to dispense 
with both practices as manifestations of oppressive social forms in 
favour of dress (or non-dress -- the Naked Rambler wouldn't raise an 
eyebrow)  that expressed our own rich individuality.

Mervyn


jamie morgan <jamie-AT-morganj58.fsnet.co.uk> writes
>The point of the question is the conceptual ambiguity of condition as
>necessity in the theoretical system allowing analytical problems to arise -
>modalities of (un)known, (non)caused extensions to the notion of condition
>implying that if it is necessary then freedom may be impossible and if it
>isn't necessary what is its status as ontology:
>
>a) the possibility that one can never be free because there is always the
>known possibility that there is an unknown entity that is not free
>somewhere. This may sound silly but since the original argument for ethical
>imperatives is made in SRHE in the form of analytical philosophy and
>conditional necessities or imperatives - the very form of argument entails
>its own counterargument in this form. A problem that is extended by the MR
>thesis. Call it the permamenent psychic turbulence principle of incomplete
>knowledge of a complete totality of connections.
>b) the possibility that one cannot be free because others do not recognize
>your concept of freedom but experience themselves as free - since one aspect
>of the full argument for ethical imperatives and emancipation is that others
>must recognise and work on their own oppression  it becomes possible that
>cultural relativism becomes a significant argument - if some aspect of
>culture y is considered oppresive by culture x but not culture y members of
>culture x cannot be free whilst members of culture y exist - even if members
>of culture y think of themselves as free - you would thus have the paradox
>of x designating y as unfree and thus experiencing their own unfreedom at
>the same time as y experiences themselves as free if they do not hold as a
>conditon of their own freedom the ful flourishing of culture x (which is not
>free because it feels Y as unfree) Or if Y also is subject tot he unfreedom
>condition then Y would simultaneously hold themsleves to be free on the
>basis of their own beleif int heir own culture but simultaneously feel
>unferee on the basis that X thinks of Y as unfree and is thus itself unfree
>on the basis of that beleif - an infinite regress of mutual sense of a
>cultures own freedom but unfreedom on the basis of other perspectives. This
>is possible if ethics can vary yet still all entail flourishing at the same
>time as knowledge is partial and from some standpoint - includign the ethics
>of ethics. It is resolvable by dialogue but niot necessarily so since its
>perpetuation is conceivable
>
>Jamie
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Mervyn Hartwig" <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
>To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
>Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 11:43 AM
>Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
>
>
>> Hi Jamie,
>>
>> Interesting questions, but a little disappointing not to have the whiff
>> of an answer.
>>
>> >Is the free flourishing of all really a CONDITION of the free flourishing
>of
>> >each as an ontological imperative to ethical action conditioned by the
>> >nature of reality?
>>
>> I'd say so. The arguments for dialectical universalizability in DPF flow
>> from the nature of human intentionality (action and the judgement form).
>> I can't see anything wrong with them. They of course assume a core
>> universal human nature and are informed by knowledge of the increasing
>> objective interconnection of the species globally.
>>
>> >1. Is it the condition because another's oppression occurs or because
>> >another's oppression is known?
>> >2. Is it a condition because another's oppression is caused by the
>society
>> >in which another who may feel 'free' lives?
>> >3. Are 1 & 2 both important (causation and knowledge)?
>>
>> It is a condition regardless of whether oppression occurs, but given
>> that it occurs, there is a conatus to inform ourselves about  and
>> abolish it.
>>
>> >4. If MR is RB's current positiion and there is a fundamental level of
>> >connecitivity does MR imply that:
>> >a) my free flourishing is conditioned on the free flourishing of all
>> >sentient creatures joined by the 'cosmic envelope'? Am I free if martians
>> >are bound?
>> >b) my free flourishing is conditioned on the free flourishing of all
>> >matter-energy - sticks and stones and bones and bunnies?
>> >
>> >What is the status of a basic ontological drive towards freedom expressed
>> >beyond the self?
>>
>> This is not just a meta-Reality position. Marx spoke of nature as our
>> 'inorganic body' and that is a position endorsed in DPF, and must I
>> think be at the heart of any sustainable sustainability. Because we
>> emerged from and are fundamentally dependent upon and connected to our
>> inorganic body (and indeed, as Shakespeare reminds us, 'this sensible
>> warm motion' of all of us eventually 'become[s] a kneaded clod'), the
>> subsumption of having and getting, dominating and controlling, under
>> being and doing entails an ethic of world care (I got this from Kathryn
>> Dean who got it  from Arendt, I think) and a recognition of the value of
>> Being and a yearning to see it unfold which is at the heart of the
>> spirituality of the later Bhaskar. If there are Martians then a drive to
>> free flourishing according to their natures obviously applies there too,
>> and unless it interferes with our own flourishing could only be a source
>> of joy and possibly wonder to us.
>>
>> Is there a 'beyond the self'? Are we not fundamentally connected, from
>> quivering strings to self-consciousness, to Totality?
>>
>> Mervyn
>>



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