Re: BHA: absence

[Louis Irwin <lirwin1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ruth,

>Question #1:  If I am right in understanding that Bhaskar believes thoughts
>to be emergent phenomena of actual physical beings, upon what (or whom) are
>the ideas that I determinately do not have, and/or the fact of my not having
>had such an idea, emergent?

I am not sure you are right in that understanding.  I view Bhasker as saying
that subjectivity and mental activity are powers that emerge from a lower
level physical base, but once a specific individual has acquired the power
of mental activity, we don't have to think of each and every idea produced
by that power as emerging.  The things that are said to emerge are powers,
not the products of the exercise of powers.  Thoughts and ideas are the
products of the exercise of a power that has already emerged.  If I am
right, it is a category mistake to impute the existence, much less the
non-existence, of a thought or idea to a base from which it emerges.

>These real but non-existence absences seem to
>be free-floating conceptual entities.  For that matter, if the answer is
>that a new one is generated every time I think about something (determinate)
>that didn't happen, then how are these ideas different from any other ideas?
>You don't have to say that absences are entities to say that the idea of
>absence is crucial and as real as any other idea.  The whole thing still
>seems like just so much reification, to me.

It sounds like you are subjectifying absence.  Bhaskar's intent is surely
that real non-existent absences are not in general conceptual entities at
all, free-floating or not, except for the special (and very important) case
of conceptual absences.  These real non-existents are not supposed to depend
on whether you think about them or not, except for the special case of
absent thoughts.  Maybe I am misreading you, and you are just focusing on
conceptual absences in particular.

You are certainly correct about the reification charge if the necessity of
referring to absences cannot be eliminated from causal analyses.  If all the
talk about absence were a convenient manner of speaking that could be
eliminated in principle, then the charge of reification would be accurate.
Could the theses of DPF be reformulated this way?  I'm not so sure.  (Of
course we must also ask if those theses are correct.)

>Question #2:  If you really want to have a *negative* dialectics, do you not
>need a category of genuinely thorough-going negation?  To add that absences
>are in fact real albeit non-existent "de-onts" -- that everything
>determinate is real -- seems to weaken the force of the negative
>considerably.  [Besides, what does it mean to say that something is real but
>non-existent (as opposed to real but not actual)?]

I surmise that you see a problem in construing reality as comprising both
existence and non-existence, because the positive side comprises unanalyzed
givens and lets in a residual positivism.  So even the priority of the
negative over the positive is not enough.  Something like that?  One
difficulty with that worry is that the alternative is that everything is
negative with no positive at all.  This seems to give us nothing a negation
with nothing to negate.  So we seem to be stuck between admitting some
positivism on the one side and admitting a negation that has nothing to
negate on the other hand.  My sense of the matter is that the worry is valid
only if the positive is viewed as comprisng unanalyzable atoms.  Once we
recognize that the the positive side of reality can itself be highly
structured and complex, is there really a problem here?  I'm not saying
there isn't, merely that comprehending reality as comprising a positive and
a negative side need not necessarily imply positivism.

>Definitions:  I'm not clear about the meanings of and logical relations
>between the concepts of "real", "existent", "present" and "to be" (and, by
>extension, their opposites).  Again, if the concept of absence is to have
>meaning, and if we are also to say that absence is/absences are "real", then
>it seems to me that real-ness can have nothing to do with existence.  The
>meaning of which, as I've just noted above, I don't understand.

Here is my suggestion for nomenclature.  Consider some examples.  Let's say
Sally is in the cafe and Pierre is not. Let's consider Socrates and Santa
as well, giving us the following four statements:

-Sally is real, exists, and is present.
-Pierre is real and exists, but he is absent.
-Socrates is real, but he does not exist and therefore cannot be present.
-Santa is not real, does not exist and therefore cannot be present.

I suggest that these four exhaust the typology regarding the logical
relations between "real", "exists", and "absent".  So, existence implies
reality, but not conversely: whoever exists in the examples is real, but
Socrates is real without existing (he did exist, but no longer does).
Non-existence implies absence though not conversely (Pierre is absent but
exists).  Unreality implies non-existence, though not conversely (Socrates
is non-existent but is real).

Louis Irwin



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