Being out there was Re: BHA: anybody out there?

[Gary Maclennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 20:42 1/11/00 -0500, you wrote:
> What is this TDCR stuff? I'm sorry, but I'm just not buying it. I feel for
> Professor Bhaskar's personal position. He has created an Earth-shattering
> philosophy, and gets no credit or recognition. Nevertheless, the new
> project of
> East-West synthesis seems mystical and syncretic to me. The new book seems
> too postmodern and anecdotal.
>
> These are my initial thoughts, before finishing the book.
>
> regards,
>
> Andrew Hagen
> Lindenwold, New Jersey
> xah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi Andrew,

Unfortunately work prevents me getting back to my response to FEW and the
"TDCR stuff". However I hope to finish my review some time soon. But I will
repeat what I have said on this list that there are wise and beautiful
things in FEW and hopefully when I get a little freer I will be able to
document at least some of these.

Now I am not sure what you mean by "syncretic" but I agree that yes FEW
does have its mystical moment.  Does that then condemn it.  Is "mystical"
yet another curse word like "idealist"?  Is it something we chant over the
fence at our opponents?  The problem with curse words is that they can
preclude engagement. So they have to be used with care.

Let me take a comment from Caroline's post. I do not have her email in
front of me because that is on my home computer, so she will have to
forgive me if my memory falters.  She raised the question off the novella
component of FEW.  I was pleased to see her touch upon this. There is
almost, I feel,  an embarasment about this section of the book in Critical
Realist circles. Thus it seems to me that the critics, with the possible
exception of Mervyn, have been happiest engaging the philosophy of the
first part of the book.

Yet the lives are crucial to the whole enterprise. They do have of course
their therapeutic personal moment and I would not back away from that, but
crucially they also represent the most thorough going attempt to engage
Eastern thought.  Indeed it is here that I would emphasize my disagreement
with Alan's remarks at the conference that there was not much that was very
Eastern about FEW (This from memory again,.  I do not have my conference
notes with me).  One can only maintain that position if one ignores the lives.


Let us take the instance that Caroline objects to.  One of the lives of the
soul is that of a female.  I found this life to be very moving.  It deals
with how one should respond to human suffering. Caroline demurred I
recall.  But *if* one takes the notion of the reincarnation of souls
seriously then it is surely a nonsense or worse to suggest that a soul can
only be reincarnated as a male or as a female.   Did I detect a whiff of
separatism in Caroline's post? It almost reminds me of the very sharp
debate we had in the Brisbane gay community in the 70s about whether
transexuals should be allowed to use the female toilets in the gay bars.
Whatever the case is the notion that one's soul can have been reincarnated
as a female so  hard to accept? If it is so, then the objection springs
partly from a failure, if I may be so bold to say so, to think of
constructs like the soul and God in non-gendered terms.  Of course there is
a politics to raising the very possibility of a terrain or domain of the
non-gendered.

There are two things I would like to stress here.  The reincarnation of
souls is a theological point and again moves us from the terrain of
empirical proof to that of faith.  Roy does offer some arguments for
reincarnation such as the phenomenon of deja vu.  Frankly for me they are
unconvincing.    I see no alternative to the argument that in theological
matters one is either a believer or one is not.  Of course there is the
allied point that it is difficult to restrain the power of faith.  In other
words what is it reasonable to believe in?  Or can one even formulate such
a question?  Is faith totally outside the realm of reason?

I am currently reading Pascal's Pensees and it is interesting to see a
truly brilliant man set about the task of justifying faith.  He begins by
pointing out the limitations of reason.  We can neither fathom the Nothing
or the Infinite.  Yet according to him we come from one and are heading for
the other. One has only to look up- at the night sky to get some *feeling*
for Pascal's arguments. Mystery and wonder are everywhere. As Heidegger put
it so well - "Why are there beings rather than nothing?"

As I said at the conference, it is part of Roy's  particular makeup as a
philosopher that he will boldly go. I suppose one could say it is his
karma. By contrast Heidegger refused to define Being.  He took refuge in
tautology - "Sein is selbst".  Adorno too refused to leave the via
negativa.  He followed Kierkegaard in this.  He resolutely declined to
outline in positive terms what we ought to do or what being part of
humanity was all about.  He had much fun with Heidegger in Jargons of
Authenticity, but when the mockery subsides we are still left with the
question "What is the meaning of Being?'"

What astonishes me about FEW is that Bhaskar attempts to answer this
question.  He also attempts to depart from the via negativa.  tod do so he
constructs a mystical theological framework- a framework of belief.

My final point is that believing in reincarnation is not or it certainly
should not be taken as proof that one has lost the plot or abandoned the
struggle for a better world.  My reading of Bhaskar is that he is still
part of the movement for a better world.  He is still capable of writing
and arguing brilliantly about philosophy. I will repeat what I have said in
an earlier post.  We need a broad progressive movement if we are to get out
of the mess we are in. We need to rediscover the moment of the 19th century
when to be a Marxist was to part of great movement to construct utopia here
on Earth.  Thus some of the early Marxists in the USA doubled as
clairvoyants and mystics and saw no contradiction.

To say this I know takes me away from the "Leninist-Trotskyist" tradition
to build the workers' party.  Bhaskar as a libertarian socialist never
belonged to this tendency.  I however did.  I feel that this have given me
the ability to see the weakness of so much that has passed for Leninism and
Trotskyism.  For me one of the crucial weaknesses of the dominant Marxist
tendency of the 20th century was due to Lenin's personal hostility to
religion and mysticism and eventually even to aesthetics in that it
beckoned one in the direction of what Roy calls "unconditional love".

regards

Gary





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