BHA: Re: de-onts, etc.

["james.daly" <james.daly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I haven't paid a lot of attention to that part of Bhaskar's writing, but
> I've been kind of surprised to hear it characterized as deontological.  I
> would have thought that a focus on eudaimonistic flourishing would put
> Bhaskar in with the other guys (I forget just now what they get called in
> the literature - the non-deontological people).
>
> Any help with this?
>
> r.
Dear Ruth -- -- hope your cold is getting better.  Talk of values brings me
out of the woodwork, or wherever lurkers hide.  My understanding is that the
misguided modern division into teleology and deontology is based on the
Cartesian matter/mind dichotomy, and makes ethics exclusively either
utilitarian hedonism or Kantian legalism.  The two aspects thus exclusively
separated are dialectically united in the eudaimonistic approaches of
Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Marx and Bhaskar.

Although I am delighted to be learning so much from the list correspondence,
I have not had time to reread DPF recently, and I don't know if RB himself
makes an etymological connection between deontology and de-onts.  I always
assume there is no etymological connection between ontology (from on, being,
with which de-ont seems to be connected by the use of the prefix de-) and
deontology (from dein, must); but I agree -- I hope -- with Mervyn that an
ontological lack is a key to an understanding of values as the fulfilment of
essence.  That lack is also an "ought" or "owed", Latin "debitum",
duty(French "devoir").

The lack is real, objective, "out there".  In that respect, it is like the
absence of Peter from the cafe.  RB is thus challenging Sartre, for whom
both values and "meanings" are subjective, "in here".

Isn't there a connection between the negativity problematic and the
empiricist problem of negative facts (the world is the sum of what is the
case, which is the same as what can be sensibly experienced; but how can a
negative fact cause a positive experience?) Phenomenology bypassed this; the
relationship between the world and consciousness is not causal, at least in
that mechanical positivist way; intentionality can be of non-existent
things.

Warmly -- James.

james daly
james.daly@xxxxxxxxxxxx




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