Date: Tue, 7 Mar 1995 14:56:47 -0300 From: Juan Inigo <jinigo-AT-inscri.org.ar> Subject: Re: Why dialectics? Fellini writes: >Juan, I don't have a problem with your interpretation, but still I have a >question (assuming, of course, that I understand your point). Do you >have an account of the reality, or matter, so that we can understand these >'potencies' as 'necessities to be realized'? If you have such an account >about the necessities in the (material) reality, then your writings >makes sense to me. (As far as I can see, Bhaskar has such an account >explaining 'natural necessity', as the potentialities or tendencies, not >'potencies', to be realized because of the very constitution of >'things', without forgetting that the reality is essentially 'open', >there are no 'constant conjunctions' with which we can explain the >empirical reality. Of course it is quite possible that he is wrong.) > >On the other hand, related to this, I have a hard time with the idea that >people should be considered as "personifications of some social >necessities", for it seems to reject 'free will' or intentional human >agency. Are you saying something similar to the (Spinozist) idea that >'freedom is the knowledge of the necessity (or the laws of nature)'? If for "an account of the reality, or matter" I must understand a philosophical view, an interpretation of the world," I do not. I do not start, as Bhaskar does, asking myself an abstract question: "what is the world like to allow scientific cognition to exist?" The question with which I start is, "what am I to do in facing this immediate circumstance, in this very moment and place?" So my only pre-scientific cognition is an "immediate cognition." And my scientific problem is precisely to account for the necessity of the concrete form of reality I am facing. The fact that I need to answer through my though about which form my action should take, starts to tell me that this is an action whose necessity transcends it. If my own action and, therefore, me myself, are determined beyond ourselves, my action can only be a free one if I rule it by having completely discovered its necessity, its determination. To do it, I have to reproduce the complete unfolding of this necessity through thought until discovering the concrete form my action is going to take, as its concrete form of realizing itself. "Free" will is a completely determined will, not the abstract negation of its determination. If my action realizes a necessity that transcends my immediate self and, rather, it is a concrete form that the social metabolism process takes, isn't it a "personification" of this process? Moreover, if real concrete forms are of any interest for us, let alone a nebulous abstractly contemplative one, isn't it because, as potencies, they can affect us on realizing themselves and, rather, because we can realize the potencies they are with our action? And, if our action is thus determined as a concrete form through which the necessity of a real form, at first alien to ourselves, is realized, aren't we a personified concrete form of this real form? I will quote here my work, concerning the form real necessity takes on determining our action as a free action: " At first, an abstract form exhausts its potency on becoming its corresponding concrete form. Still, as any other, the very form of realizing necessity undergoes its own development. Now, the abstract form is in itself not one but many different necessities to be realized. Moreover, these are potencies whose realized forms mutually exclude themselves as the same concrete form, potencies that exist together with their contraries. Such potencies do not have their actual existence in the abstract form as a simple power to be, but as a power to be that is, at the same time, a power not to be: as possibility or contingency. The abstract form exhausts its necessity only on becoming a diversity of concrete forms, each of them solving the mutual compatibility of those potencies as realized ones. Abstract forms thus determine themselves as genus; their concrete forms, as differentiated species in which the genus realizes its necessity. Since it is a concrete form determination takes, possibility itself develops into a necessity actually existing as a possible potency, that has the necessity of the very course of its realization determined as a possible potency. The determination of species by genus thus develops through the mediation of possibility as a specific form the realization of possibility itself takes. As an already realized possibility, a species is completely impotent concerning the determination of its own possibility. From its viewpoint, the realization of necessity - causality - takes the form of casualness, of accidentalness, of the necessity that, at the same time, is no necessity whatsoever. Each species thus appears as the absolute materialization of the generic potencies that have directly determined it; and these potencies, as its circumstances or conditions. Life is the overcoming of species' impotence concerning their own determination as concrete modalities through which possibility is realized: it is the concrete form that has the potency of appropriating its own conditions and transforms them into concrete existences, thus determining itself as an abstract form. Life advances in its real potency by appropriating its conditions in their very virtuality. Life is so determined as the transforming action that regulates itself through the cognition of its own necessity. Seen from the outside, just because it is completely determined as a necessary concrete form of matter, human action can transform other forms of matter into forms for itself; and, therefore, can transform itself. And only because it finds itself thus determined, human action necessarily becomes, in the historical process, a free action: an action that integrally cognizes its own necessity." I'm leaving today for six weeks, so this will be my last post to the list for the time being. But I look forward to continue with this discussion on my return. Hasta pronto a todos. Juan Inigo jinigo-AT-inscri.org.ar --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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