Re: BHA: negativity wins

[lynne engelskirchen <lhengels@xxxxxxx>]

Gary --

I'm glad you make the reference to Heidegger.  Bhaskar refers to this
point, but I know it not at all.  Anyway, I don't think I can support the
proposition that you have quoted from my last post.  I abandon that.  But I
don't want to abandon the challenge to either "negativity wins" or "The
great void . . . is still out there waiting to reclaim us."  I don't think
there is any warrant for those assertions.  Here's Bhaskar's argument:

DPF 46 "If a totally positive material object world -- a packed world
without absences -- is impossible, there is no a priori reason to exclude
the opposite -- namely a total void, literally nothing.  Negativity is
constitutively essential to positivity, but the converse does not follow.
Leave aside the Heidegerrian question of why there is something rather than
nothing.  There could have been nothing rather than something.  Of course
this is a counterfactual.  Beings exist.  But by transcendental argument,
non-being is constitutively essential to being.  Non-being is a condition
of possibility of being.  No non-being is a sufficient condition of
impossibility of being.  But there is no logical incoherence in totally no
being.  Dialectical arguments establish the condition of possibility (dr')
of the conditions of impossibility (dc') of some initially established
result or posit.  Now, employing a strategy of 'dialectical detachment'
from our initial premises -- positive existence -- in the metacritical
end-game, we can argue that not only is a total void possible, but if there
was a unique beginning to everything, it could only be from nothing by an
act of radical autogenesis.  So that if there was an originating Absolute,
nothing would be its schema or form, constituted at the moment of
initiation by the spontaneous disposition to become something other than
itself.  Similarly, if there was a unique ending to everything it would
involve a collapse to actualized nothingness, absolutely nothing.  In sum,
complete positivity is impossible, but sheer indeterminate negativity is
not." DPF 47

I think this is an idealist argument.  Also, I think the converse does
follow:  positivity is constitutively essential to negativity.  Negativity
expresses positivity's limits.  Without positivity there is nothing
negativity is a negation of.

The question is whether dialectics is a matter of the way the world is or a
matter of logic.  That is why the issue is one of idealism.  Marx is
important here.  In the "Method of Political Economy," Marx insists the the
scientific method starts with things as they present themselves and then
proceeds by means of narrower and narrower abstraction s, simpler ones,
ones that abstract to fewer essential elements, to the simplest
determinations of things.  Then from these simple determinations you
reconstruct the concrete in thought.  This process of abstraction can
certainly be considered retroductive or transcendental in Bhaskar's sense.
You start with the question, what must be the case for this to exist.
Then, having answered that question by saying , well xyz must exist, you
ask,. well what must be the case for xyz to exist, and so on.

But as Marx makes clear elsewhere in the Introduction to the Grundrisse,
there is a limit to the process.  You cannot abstract to, for example,
"production in general."  There is no production in gneral.  Production
occurs only in historically specific social forms.  So as a logical matter
you can abstract to features shared by all modes of production, but this is
a logical abstraction, not abstraction as a tool to identify simple
features of the world that exists.

The lesson works here.  You cannot abstract to Absolute Nothing because
that is not the world as it presents itself to us and there is nothing
about the world as it presents itself to us that suggests that as a real
inference.  I can imagine a prime minister with bananas growing out of his
ears, but my imagining it doesn't make it a real possibility.  We can and
must abstract to the positivity of being and to the negativity of being.
But abstracting to Absolute NOthing is a pure logical exercise.  It does
not and cannot explain the world.  There is "no logical incoherence to
totally no being."  Granted.  But that establishes nothing except the
facility of our mind to manipulate logical abstractions.

The real presents itself as a unity of opposites -- as a unity of the
positive and the negative.  Acknowledging this means contradiction is an
essential starting point for the self-movement of the real and to any
analysis.  But contradiction is not essential to "absolutely nothing."

There's another way to approach this.  RB says, "employing a strategy of
'dialectial detachment' from our initial premises -- positive existence . .
. "

Why is "positive existence" our initial premise?  This would be so only if
we adopt an ontologically monovalent view of the world.  In other words if
we start from the premise that what exists is the actual, and only the
actual, then we have idealism in an empiricist form and I suppose we can
get to the great void as its negation, still operating on the terrain of
idealism.  But our initial premise is the real as a unity of positive and
negative existence as opposites, and this expresses the limit of our
ability to abstract to simpler and simpler determinations of the real.  We
can negate this, sure, but it is to negate the real itself, and to come up
with idealist speculation.

What do you think?

All the best,

Howard







At 08:24 AM 2/18/01 +1000, you wrote:
>At 10:30  16/02/01 -0500, you wrote:
>
>>I'm with Ruth on this.  I'd like to explore, in particular, "negativity
>>wins."  I've been wondering whether this isn't a positive presentation of
>>negativity.  But I want to get my thoughts together a bit.
>>
>>Howard
>
>
>Howard this is exactly the problem Heidegger deals with when he asks the
>question, 'How goes it with the nothing?'  From memory, as I do not have
>the article with me, he points out the problem that once we touch upon a
>notion such as 'nothing' or negativity or absence we render them
>positive.  However that I suppose is an epistemic operation.  The great
>void or whatever is still out there waiting to reclaim us.
>
>regards
>
>Gary
>
>
>
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