Hi Ruth, Dick, Martti, Mervyn, Gary, listers
In DPF p111 when introducing his concept of "monovalence" Bhaskar writes:
"The effects of monovalence are easy to demonstrate. If thought is included
within being, no change is possible; if it is excluded from being, epistemic
but not ontic change is possible and so the world must be assumed to be
*closed*."
Just above this Bhaskar writes that (the alleged error of) monovalence
derives ultimately from Parmenides. Now what is involved in Bhaskar's
statement that "If thought is included within being, no change is
possible..."? The idea seems to be that thought must be 'outside' being in
some way, in order for change to be possible. And the alleged error of
Parmenides is therefore that his 'universe as a plenitude' unduly restricts
thought, because, after all, Bhaskar might say, if there is only one
universe then there must only be a limited number of things to think about.
This could be one reason why Bhaskar has taken his 'spiritual turn', and why
he is talking about multiple universes (pluriverse), because he finds it
psychologically intolerable that we start from where we are in this
universe. Having said that, it must also have been a dismal and shocking
experience for Bhaskar when a work on the scale of DPF received almost no
comment, and no serious polemic, from the professional philosophical
community in Britain. It might also have helped if Bhaskar had discussed
his major theses more with other philosophers.
So how is change possible if thought *is* included within being? Well
Parmenides (cited by Hegel in LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, volume
one, University of Nebraska Press, 1995) suggests:
"Thought, and that on account of which thought is, are the same. For not
without that which is, in which it expresses itself, wilt thou find Thought,
seeing that it is nothing and will be nothing outside of that which it is."
Thus for Parmenides, and for Hegel, thought arises from nature. Thought
does not have any autonomy from nature, despite what Sartre tried to
maintain (and Sartre has influenced Bhaskar in this).
Now to come to my question to Dick about where to put spirit, which I grant
exists. Hegel, again citing Parmenides in the same book, writes:
"The dead do not feel light or warmth or hear voices, because the fire is
out of them; they feel cold, stillness and the opposite, however, and,
speaking generally, each existence has a certain knowledge."
Hegel comments: "In fact, this view of Parmenides is really the opposite of
materialism, for materialism consists in putting together the soul from
parts, or independent forces (the wooden horse of the senses)."
So here we find Hegel referring to materialism. And perhaps this is Roy's
understanding of materialism when he comments "metaphysical materialism is
not very well developed". To both Hegel and Bhaskar it appears to be
intolerable that a human being should in any way be a sum of parts. Rather,
to Hegel and Bhaskar, a human being contains a soul and it is this that
makes a human being a sacred whole. But if Hegel is right in his commentary
on Parmenides, the "fire" that is in us is brought about mainly by the
senses, and not by the reflection of the intellect, which is not touched on
by Parmenides according to Hegel. I would suggest that spirit resides
precisely here, in the intellect, for Hegel. And historical spirit resides
in the general intellect. This suggests a big problem for Bhaskar's
ontology, since for Bhaskar spirit resides at the level of phenomenal forms,
in terms of people's reaction to their immediate surroundings, and in terms
of immediate information. The question of the mediations in the mediated
development of the general intellect is glossed over in Bhaskar. From a
Hegelian perspective, Bhaskar has a greatly impoverished conception of the
movement of spirit in history. From this we can see that Freedom in history
comes from Man's self-consciousness of her/his true position in the
universe. This Hegelian stance is not, contra Bhaskar and Mervyn, anything
to do with a logicist reduction of reality to logical forms, rather it is
the result of philosophical reflection on reality by the general intellect.
Does that mean that Hegel is beyond criticism? If we return to the above
quote from Hegel we find Hegel saying "...for materialism consists in
putting together the soul from parts". This appears to be a derogatory
comment by Hegel - he seems to be saying: "How could the soul possibly be
dependent in any way on the base and mere material?". In other words, we
can see here that Hegel, even though he has comprehended the essence of
historical spirit (which Bhaskar has not), has an illicit split between soul
(the intellect) and matter. This split is addressed in the dialectical
materialism of Joseph Dietzgen, who put forward the view that spirit exists
as part of matter, and that we have a natural tendency to think that spirit
is autonomous from matter, but this is an illusion which we must oppose.
Dietzgen's philosophy can be found in THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY,
(Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, 1906).
Finally, Mervyn, on co-presence. Bhaskar comments at p141 of DPF that:
"One could develop a concept of 'strong negative presence' in the case of
causally efficacious memory, but as the remembered is always liable to play
a causal role and we are no longer dealing with purely Hegelian dialectic I
would prefer not to embark on that road." Now, I do not accept that Bhaskar
has a more inclusive dialectics than Hegel (I think it is the other way
around), but I am interested in what you think about this quote. It seems
that Bhaskar is saying that it does not matter what is remembered by
society - note the "always" in that "the remembered is always liable to play
a causal role" - here we find Bhaskar in a Heideggerian fashion appealing to
an abstract future to spare us from the problems of (generally)
intellectually comprehending the presence of the past in the present.
Phil
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