BHA: FEW

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gary,

Good to see you back on deck, and still hankering after those Sirens.
Am I wrong in hoping the review might be for Alethia?

You wrote:
>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
I'm glad you 'possibly excepted' me. Once I got rid of the hostility to
the lives induced by knowledge that 'the details' were provided by two
clairvoyants, I found that they did indeed deliver on the promise made
in the first part that they would elaborate and develop the theory, and
it's there that the Bhuddist and Vedic thing comes through most
strongly. Great chunks of them, too, are straight philosophy.

Re the Eastern influence, I think we need to go further and see the
whole Bhaskarian ontology and dialectics as very 'Eastern' influenced
all along, as Jan suggested some time ago. Except (as James Daly
suggests in a review he's done for Alethia), this could be to reify
geographical divides - i.e. the grand idealist (I think you're right re
this - objective idealism) and metaphysical tradition Roy draws on
derives from the 'West' (influenced by 'East') and 'Middle East' as
well. I.e. it's a great *human* philosophical and religious tradition.

This is not to say that Roy has been an objective idealist all along -
on the contrary, until this book he was a realist and (heuristically, at
any rate) a materialist, and while my criticism has mellowed a bit (in
particular, I no longer think the FEW conception of human nature is
radically de-historicised and de-socialised), I still think there are
some damaging inconsistencies within TDCR (viewed as a development of
the earlier stuff, which is how Roy asks us to view it). This does not
mean that you are wrong when you claim he is still on the side of human
emancipation (though I think there are some (quite unintentional)
regressive tendencies), nor that we can't all work together.

I know Alan, pressed for time, and badly advised by me, concentrated on
Part 1 when he did his conference paper. He may have changed his view
since then.

> For me it is obviously
>possible to have a Void but impossible to have a purely positive
>world.  Absence is primary.
It is *logically* possible and impossible in the way you suggest. You
then (like Roy) say that absence *is* primary. Isn't this a version of
the epistemic fallacy - the conflation of a logical point in the TD with
what there is in the ID? Why should the Real accord with your or Roy's
logic? To assume that it does, according to Roy himself, is at the heart
of irrealism. For that reason, I agree with Nick that this argument
gives no warrant on critical realist premises for the view that absence
is 'ontologically prior'.


Mervyn
--
Mervyn Hartwig
13 Spenser Road
Herne Hill
London SE24 ONS
United Kingdom
Tel: 020 7 737 2892
Email: mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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