Re: BHA: negativity wins

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Howard, Gary

Thanks for your post Howard, it's made me think a number of issues
through more adequately (I hope).

Certainly Bhaskar's argument at first glance seems to be idealist in the
sense you indicate - it seems to confuse logical possibility (in the
transitive) with real possibility (in the intransitive) dimension, hence
to be an example of the epistemic fallacy, of identity-thinking.

I (now) don't think it is/does however. First, it's a transcendental
argument and such arguments by definition seek to go beyond what is
given in thought to what is not, i.e they assume that logical
possibility is not identical with real possibility. In the early pages
of SRHE, where he is at pains to establish the credentials of
transcendental realism (TR) over transcendental (subjective) idealism
(TI), Bhaskar claims to have 'snapped' the 'umbilical cord uniquely
tying thought to things in traditional philosophy' (4) - and the warrant
for this is 'discontinuism' in science ie the fact of scientific
revolutions. A condition of possibility of scientific change is that
what there is to know is not given in our means of knowing - a kind of
meta-justification for transcendental argument as such is derived from
the history of scientific practice, later from practice as such. (This
does not entail that TR is incompatible with objective or ontological
idealism, at least where such ontology is emergentist or stratified.) Of
course, a logical argument (what else?) is used to establish this
position, but that is not at all the same as conflating logic with the
real. If this is not so, TR or scientific realism collapses.

Second, IMO Bhaskar does not in fact in this passage or anywhere else
equate logical with real possibility.

When you yourself say:

>our initial premise is the real as a unity of positive and
>negative existence as opposites

aren't you assuming what you need to prove (your conclusion is in your
premises)? If you say (as you do), Well, that's just how the world
'presents itself', isn't that (idealist!) empiricism i.e. identity-
thinking?

Bhaskar doesn't disagree with your conclusion. But instead of just
assuming it to be true, takes as his premise what very few would
dispute: 'beings exist'. The question is whether non-beings do too, and
if they do, how they relate to beings.

I must say I long found myself perplexed by several things in the
lengthy footnote to the passage you cited. On the face of it, it seems
to contradict the passage by calling into question that there could have
been a unique beginning to everything out of nothing:

1) It says that the presupposition in much cosmological discussion that
the beginning of our cosmos was '*the* unique begining of everything -
and in particular of matter, energy, space and time, the concepts of
which therefore cannot be employed for or outside it' is called into
question by 'the Lucretian dictum "nil ... fieri de nihilo" [nothing ...
would be made out of nothing] and the Hobbesian maxim that "nothing
taketh a beginning from itself'.

2) It also seems to suggest that the 'beginnings of our cosmos were 'of
a dyadic/polyadic-fusing kind (e.g. as involving an asymmetric
compression of *pre-existing forces*)'. [My emphasis].

Of course one of the main points of these remarks is doubtless that
there may be 'parallel and multiple universes, or ... an infinite and
unbounded extension (plurality) of universes' (as Bhaskar now says in
FEW, 50). So does he mean, I wondered, before *them* there could have
been nothing? But if 'nothing would be made out of nothing', where does
that leave creation ex nihilo?? It looks as if he's conceding Howard's
point - from nothing you can only get nothing, not something positive.

And of course he *is* conceding it. As so often with Bhaskar, when you
think you have caught him out contradicting himself and then go back to
the text and reconsider, you discover that he hasn't. He does not in
fact claim that there could have been a unique beginning to everything
out of nothing. The text carefully uses and emphasises the hypothetical
or conditional (the emphases are omitted in Howard's copy):

>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.>

It doesn't say there *was* a unique beginning to everything from
nothing, nor even that there *could* have been. *On the contrary*. The
conclusion (at the beginning of the next para) is that

'Within the world as we know it, non-being is at least on a par with
being. Outwith it the negative has ontological primacy.'

This is a through and through relational view of absence and presence,
and, pace Howard, fully caters for contradiction (as we know from the
section on 'Contradiction' in DPF, being is pervasively contradictory
for Bhaskar.) Even 'outwith' the world as we know it, the negative only
has 'primacy' over the positive, it doesn't exist alone (nor could it,
logically, given that beings exist). (He does say that that logically
there *could* have been just nothing [surely correct]; in fact, however,
there *is* something, and given that there is, absence and presence must
be viewed relationally.) Moreover, as we now know from FEW he now
believes that there was *not* in fact a unique beginning of everything,
nor was there  in fact ever just nothing - God/the cosmos is
beginningless; the big bang of our universe is just one little event
within it...

The only possible unique beginning we're witnessing in these passages is
that of Bhaskar's own belief in God - and even that was very probably a
rebirth, if you'll excuse the pun. The fundamental logic of what he's
doing here is to use the extraordinary achievements of science to show
just how limited science really is - this paves the way for the
synthesis of science and religion in FEW in which a religious or
Romantic worldview overreaches and embraces the scientific outlook - as
James Daly has tried to tell us.

Where does this leave creation ex nihilo and God as the 'dynamic void'
in FEW? Possibly intact. One way of putting it would be to say that God
(the cosmos/cosmoi) is an infinite totality in which absence has primacy
over presence and whose creativity is ultimately ex nihilo in that to
absent is to cause is to change. God is of course by no means *just*
nothing, a void. (To say that would be transcendent, not transcendental,
realism ie a form of irrealism, 'purveying "news from nowhere"' - see
SRHE 8-10). So when Bhaskar says 'ex nihilo' he does not, and cannot
with hermeneutical adequacy be taken to, mean 'ex nihilo solo' ('from
nothing alone' - 'absolutely nothing' in Howard's words), only that real
non-being is fundamentally involved.

This position *is* of course an (objective) idealist one, but that is
something that critical realists of whatever ilk might have to learn to
live with. As I've argued in a post re Sean's book, given that it is
emergentist as well as avowedly conditional (praxis-dependent), such
idealism is quite compatible with scientific realism (= transcendental
realism = epistemological realism) and with practical materialism and
historical materialism.

BTW, I don't think the process of abstraction can be *equated* with
transcendental argument or deduction; the latter is involved in the
former, but that's not all that's involved...

Mervyn

PS. Corrections, please, if I've got any Latin wrong.
--
Mervyn Hartwig
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