Re: BHA: negativity wins

["Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Ruth--

Madman that I am, I'm gonna give this one more shot.  Let me pull out two
things you wrote:

> That's fine.  The language is difficult.  The point, as I understand it,
is
> that we are being asked to grant that the category of "what exists" (or
> "ontology," as Bhaskar puts it on p. 47) includes all of the people,
places,
> things, events, processes, states of affairs, etc., that don't exist
and/or
> didn't take place.  In Bhaskar's words: "We thus have the theorem:
ontology
> > ontics > de-onts." (47)  No?

> "If it is the case that *everything* that does not exist, did not happen,
> etc., is real - and therefore, according to Tobin, a potential causal
agent,
> then what, if anything, can fail to meet the causal criterion for
> existence/reality?"

What these two passages share is the idea that "de-onts are things that
don't exist, and all things that don't exist are de-onts."  I think this is
a serious misunderstanding, and you won't get anywhere by thinking this way
about de-onts -- you'll run into precisely the difficulties you've been
hitting.  The only way forward is to drop this premise.

As I understand it, anyway, the idea is this: De-onts are "things" that do
exist, but do so *negatively*.  That sounds weird, but it's easy to find
examples.  Such as, a hole in your sock: you don't say, "My, my, in this
spot my sock fails to exist," but rather, "Damn, there's a hole in my sock."
After all, the sock fails to exist in all sorts of places, such as 1.753
meters above the Eiffel Tower, and no-one gives a hoot.  The whole in your
sock, however, is a real "thing" that can't be anywhere but in your sock --
but strictly speaking it is a non-thing, an absence (in this case, of sock
threads).  And it potentially has real effects, such as making your foot
cold, allowing you to get a blister, or embarrasing you on an interview.

So it is *not* true that all things that don't exist are de-onts.  It's also
*not* true that de-onts are things that don't exist.  So don't think of them
that way.  De-onts are *absences*, in the sense of determinate gaps, spaces,
slippages, failures, etc.  The sock's nonexistence 1.753 meters above the
Eiffel Tower is *not* a de-ont.  Or really I should say, probably not, since
conceivably there could be a situation in which the sock should be there --
a real stretch of the imagination, but one that re-asserts the fact that
absences are relational.  Examples from not-history may be helpful: Hitler's
crushing victory over the Allies that ended World War Two, Lao Tse's
discovery of gene 43 on human chromosome 12, and my Nobel Prize for
Literature are *not* de-onts: they are fictions (and as such, they have a
positive -- not negative -- existence).  In real history, on the other hand,
the Nazi's unawareness that the British had cracked the Enigma code *is* a
de-ont, one which contributed to their defeat.

I don't get why people are worrying that we don't know how to count de-onts.
After all, we don't know how to count onts either.  We constantly discover
new subatomic and cosmological entities, previously unknown species, and so
forth -- and how could one ever enumerate ideas, when people keep creating
new ones (including ideas about each other, such as in the formation of
friendships)?  Besides, why counting should be important to CR escapes me
entirely.

This brings me to Caroline's view that:

> de-onts and absences are parasitic on onts and presences for their
> specificity.  The causal powers of an absence depend on the causal powers
of
> the thing that is absent, i.e. on the nature and structure of this thing,
> since an absence can't have nature and structure in its own right. So if
> de-onts are real, they are real by virtue of the reality of the thing that
> exists

In the case of the hole in the sock, the absence does have a structure, but
one can indeed argue that it's "parasitic" on the structure of the sock and
its material.  (I'm not saying I think that's the hole -- oops, whole --
truth, but it's certainly a reasonable view.  Of course it tempts a
Derridean critique, but I'll save that for a sunny day.)  But let's think
about the quest for knowledge.  That's an effort to reduce ignorance, to
fill in a gap in knowledge -- dare I say, absent an absence of knowledge.
Now, the quest for knowledge is certainly structured by things we already
know, but only to a certain point.  After that, what we have are simply
questions.  And while questions can determine answers, it's also possible to
ask the wrong questions (a possibility that arises because we don't know
enough and don't know the right questions).  More than that, we don't know
where our answers will take us.  We have absolutely no idea how large or
small our ignorance may be: perhaps we're near the end of the line, but
maybe (and more likely) the range of our ignorance is vaster than humanity
will ever know.  And we have no idea how the ocean of our ignorance might
structured -- nor can we know, since human knowledge is in part a social
product (and so it may be yet to come) and in part a product of our specific
physical mode of being in the world (and so we won't know what it's really
like to be a newt, except through human metaphors).  Yet, amazingly, we
strive for knowledge of things we know not.  But I think it would be right
to say that our efforts to gain knowledge are principally determined,
structured and caused by what we don't know (at least by what we know we
don't know, but always potentially including things that we don't know we
don't know).  No?

With luck you are now so baffled that you'll surrender to my brilliance, but
well do I know that's a no-no.

Cheers & beers, especially to the MIA, T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus@xxxxxxxx
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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