Re: BHA: absence

[LH Engelskirchen <lhengels@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis, Ruth, Caroline, and all --

Louis writes:  "Are you saying that if there were a fact of
something's non-existence, it would be a presence that belies its
negativity . . . ?" and goes on to argue that there would then not
really be negativity.

On the contrary, how can it be otherwise?  Necessarily we know
absence by presence.  We have access to the real only through the
sensible.  Something present can be the sign of an absence, but
those absences to which we have access are those which are somehow
expressed materially.

In Book II of the Physics Aristotle writes:  "Further the same
thing is the cause of contrary results.  For that which by its
presence brings about one result is sometimes blamed for bringing
about the contrary by its absence.  Thus we ascribe the wreck of a
ship to the absence of the pilot whose presence was the cause of
its safety."

So too we ascribe the increase in skin cancer to the absence of the
ozone layer.  It was the protective presence of the ozone layer
that blocked ultra-violet light.  We blame its absence for the
contrary result.

But there is this difference:  we can identify generative processes
which block radiation.  Does absence have generative processes?

Bronze is the material cause of a statute.  If you have no bronze
but only wood, it will be a different statute.  If you have neither
wood or bronze but only sand, different still.  If you have no
solid at all (at sea perhaps with all this), you will have no
statute.  In that sense absence functions like a material cause.

But are we meant to search out the generative causal processes of
absence?  Has anyone ever suggested an example of one such?  Does
absence rather negate causal possibility precisely for lack of
generative mechanisms, leaving other causal mechanisms operative?
For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.  But not every time you
can't find one.

At p. 48 RB offers the example of a "telling pause."  An absence of
speech.  This absence does have a generative process.  I shut my
mouth.  Or music, which depends for its aesthetic effect on there
not being sound every bit as much as there being sound.  But the
silence when I shut my mouth does not communicate an absence of
meaning, and I think the same applies to music.  In fact we are
incapable of behaving in a manner which will negate the presence of
meaning.  So this is not a direction which will lead us to
absence's generative processes.

Howard

Howard Engelskirchen


     --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---