Re: BHA: Re: starting up DPF readings again.

[Alan Norrie <alan.w.norrie@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Intrepid DPF readers,

Having been away for a few days just after Gary sent out his email on ch2.1
(Absence), I must admit to having felt overwhelmed by the responses that it
has generated.  Where do you start to respond to so much?  I decided anyway
to try to stick to the straight and narrow, not a very dialectical concept
admittedly, and just to read the section by itself and in the light of
Gary's comments.

I found Gary's comments really helpful, because this is a rather shapeless
section, or, to be more polite, one in which the shape is more implicit
than explicit.  Thinking of those who are keen to read DPF and are perhaps
doing so for the first time, this is a difficult place to start because one
doesn't have the benefit of having read ch.1, and, in any case, this
section is establishing a case the significance of which will become
clearer as we proceed through ch.2.  But, just taking it cold, a lot has to
be just taken on trust.

That's the bad news.  The good news is that, having read it again in the
light of Gary's sub-division, it seems to me that there are parts of the
section that contain the nub of the argument, and parts which fill the
argument out with dialogue with other philosophers, digressions, and
anticipation of counter-arguments.  So I am going to stick to the bits I
think set up the core of the argument.  On my reading, the really important
bits are on p.38-(incomplete para at) top of p.40, very bottom of p.41
through to mid p.44, pp. 47-49.


pp.38-40

The starting point of ch.2.1 recalls ch.1.3 and the concept of 'real
negation' which at p.5 RB describes as 'real determinate absence or
non-being'.  His aim in the book is to 'revindicate negativity' against an
entire tradition in western philosophy that goes back to Parmenides who
established a 'purely positive, complementing a purely actual, notion of
reality', the doctrine of ontological monovalence.  From this doctrine
comes both the ontic and the epistemic fallacies.

When we come to the beginning of ch.2, RB picks this up at the bottom of
p.38 where he describes real negation as 'the presence ... of an absence'
and he then sets out his stall, as British football managers put it, at the
foot of p.39: to maintain

'1. that we can refer to non-being, 2. that non-being exists, ... 4. [that]
non being has ontological priority over being.'

What might this be about? At the top of p.40, we get a useful direction:
that he wants to 'foreground the contingency - both epistemological and
ontological - of existential, not least human existential, questions which
the tradition of ontological monovalence screens'.  Here his target is
firstly methodological, but there are a number of ideologies he wants to
clatter: 'endism', 'fixism', monism, reductionism, fundamentalism,
triumphalism - see the brackets at foot p.45 for a catalogue.



pp.41-43

This is the real nub of the section.  One of the really attractive things
about DPF is its sheer intellectual power across issues that it is very
tempting to see as disconnected.  But at the foot of p.41, we see that real
negativity, the presence of absence, is vital to dialectic as 'the logic of
change', the 'logic of freedom' and is 'the whole point of argument'.
Perhaps it's a bit too neat to say that absence, at the core of dialectic,
is therefore central to ontology, ethics and epistemology on the basis of
this three part description, but I've said it.

p.42 then gives a good illustration of the dialectic in action, and p.43
says that the typical problems of irrealist theories at 1M, 2E, 3L and 4D
are repaired by DCR by noting the typical absences at the different levels.
 There is then a swipe at 'fixism' - 'fixed subjects in the traditional
subject-predicate propositional form', which elsewhere RP refers to as
'identity thinking'.

(A good illustration of identity thinking and its attached analytical
protocols is given in Russell's 'Problems of Philosophy' at p.40 where
certain laws of thought are held to be self evident.)

I think an illustration of this, not to be outdone by Gary, is in Woodie
Allen's 'Deconstructing Harry' where first Robin Williams and then Allen
himself go, literally, all fuzzy or blurry on screen.  What I found quite
clever about this was when it happened to Allen, he was talked out of it by
his companion who reminded him of who he was, what he was doing, etc.  In
other words, his identity was put back together in a dialogue with another.
  I think this is a real insight into the ways in which identity is
relational, contingently fixed.

At the foot of p.43, RB picks up again the importance of absence and
dialectic for learning and for agency and the sense of dialectic, premised
on absence and absenting absence, as the 'great loosener' (p.44) is a great
image linked to what I just said about anti-fixism and identity thinking.



pp.47-48

This is interesting because RB proposes a distinction between a discussion
of absence outwith the world as we know it, and within it.  I am not sure I
quite understand this, but the discussion of the latter to which this gives
rise is important.  The absence of a sense of absence lies behind the
problems of irrealist philosophies in their three modern forms: analytical
philosophy, hitherto existing dialectical varieties, and post-Nietzschean
forms. Parmenides had a lot to answer for.  Follow these forms of thought
and the devil take the hindmost (top of p.48).

Alternatively, go with DCR and 'welcom[e] negativity and later totality and
agency alongside ... non-identity, depth and transfactuality to our
ontology' (p.48) and a world of intellectual riches awaits.  In the final
para of the section, RB's ideas, as Gary puts it, explode off the page.

Alan Norrie



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