Re: [Critical-Realism] thoughts, ideas and action

["Mervyn Hartwig" <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Melanie

Good question. At any rate, it's got me thinking.

Imo, what Bhaskar has in his sights here is the paradigm of instrumental
action, whereby a means-ends account of it exhausts what it is, and thought
is always prior to acting. (This is a key part of his overall critique of
the discourses of modernity).  Planning ahead and acting in order to achieve
an end is real enough (as in your writing a sentence to illustrate a point,
or my writing to respond) but there's much more to an account of action than
that.  It "needs to be understood as being rich, a differentiated holistic
complex totality, in a way self-structuring and self-developing" (p. 65). If
you theorise it solely from an instrumental point of view you are leaving a
lot out, and if you just focus on the end when you're acting, you'll split
or impoverish your holistic structured and developing intentionality.

He's not saying that reasons are not causes (compare the page before which
stresses the "enormous causality" of mind), but as you say drawing attention
to what he argues to be the non-dual basis of all action, whereby at some
level we are able to just act, immediately and spontaneously, without
thinking (what he calls basic action). If this weren't so, he argues, we
couldn't act at all. We still act for reasons (which may be unconscious as
well as conscious, and may differ from what we give out [rationalisations]),
and when we do our action is in part caused by those reasons. But all
actions have a non-dual basis which doesn't involve thought. And often we
are just acting spontaneously, intuitively, without really thinking at all -
especially "in the practical sphere" (e.g. just typing or gardening); it's
in this context that "the thought of the action is not the cause of the
action". Here, if you're thinking, you're not doing; and if you're doing,
you're not thinking.This even applies to thinking itself considered as a
form of acting. In order to respond to you, I did some thinking (and
reading). But when I was thinking, I was just thinking - ie not thinking
about what I was doing, just doing it.

I don't think Bhaskar distinguishes between a "thought" and an "idea". But
of course he runs a critique, related to the above, of "the discursive
intellect" - the idea that thought is all there is to the
intellect/creativity.

There's much more could be said, but hopefully this will give some pointers.



Mervyn 
 

-----Original Message-----
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Sent: 08 December 2007 04:22
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Subject: [Critical-Realism] thoughts, ideas and action

Hey there, I have a small query. 

I am having a bit of trouble reconciling two different things that Bhaskar
has written about the relationship 
between thoughts, ideas, and action.

In The philosophy of meta-Reality Volume 1: creativity, love and freedom
(Vol. 1), Bhaskar writes about 
how "the paradigm of thinking leading to action is false" (footnote 18, page
82). I think the main point of 
this argument is that at some level of determinacy action must be
spontaneous and 'unthought', and in 
leading to this point he argues that 'the thought of the action is not the
cause of the action'. And yet in 
his article 'On the Ontological Status of Ideas', Bhaskar argues that ideas
are real because they are 
causally efficacious (1997 p.143). 

Let me try to illustrate my point. 

I can have the thought "I will write a sentence to illustrate my point",
which (from my perspective) actually
 causes me to write a sentence to illustrate my point. Of course, the actual
act of typing the sentence 
may be spontaneous and unthought, but without the initial thought or idea to
write it, I really don't think I 
would have written it. In this sense, my thought or idea was causally
efficacious, and yet in the 
philosophy of meta-Reality Bhaskar seems to be suggesting that thoughts do
not cause action. Can you 
see what I am getting at? How do I reconcile this? 

Perhaps there is a subtle difference between what Bhaskar refers to when he
speaks of 'thoughts' and 
the act of 'thinking', and what he refers to when he speaks of 'ideas'. I
seem to use the words 'thought' 
and 'idea' interchangeably, for example, "I had a thought" or "I had an
idea", in this respect, my referent 
for both 'thought' and 'idea' are the same. And yet, it appears that this
may be different for Bhaskar. 

Hmmm, any ideas or thoughts?

thanks,
Melanie

Melanie McDonald
PhD Candidate
School of Education
Southern Cross University
Lismore 2480 Australia
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