Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or anabsencebepresent?

["Louis Irwin" <louisirwin9@xxxxxxx>]

Mervyn,

You say that I "seem to want to say that positive existences are causal,
negative existences aren't or can always be parsed as positive."  You are
simply trying to set me up as a strawman -  I don't see how you can
attribute that to me based on my short post.  I believe that I appreciate
the general point, which you illustrate with the motor example.  But Howard
raised some points that seem to make problems for the view, then Nick
commented on that, but it seemed to me that Nick's examples did not address
the problems raised by Howard.  You entered the discussion and simply
restated the general position (which I think I grasp).  It's not clear why
your re-statement of the general position makes the problems go away. This
is the way good argumentation goes: someone states what seems like a good
position, then others raise problems.  It is not helpful to respond that we
don't have to worry about the problems, because the theory is sound and
consistent.  Well, maybe - or else there is dogmatism present.

Louis

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mervyn
Hartwig
Sent: Saturday, December 08, 2007 7:05 AM
To: 'Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List'
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or
anabsencebepresent?

Louis

OK, you weren't attributing the notion of "pure absence of action" to me, so
I should have just responded that imo there's no such thing.

I didn't discuss the specifics because there didn't seem a lot of point
given that our basic presuppositions seem to be so different. You seem to
want to say that positive existences are causal, negative existences aren't
or can always be parsed as positive. I think they're always both involved in
causation. Think of the causal power of a motor. Now abstract all the spaces
inside it that would be visible to the naked eye were you to be able to see
inside. No causal power of that specific kind. Now abstract all the gaps
between the elementary particles. No causal power period, because nothing
could move. Now abstract its external boundary which defines it in relation
to things that it is not and you don't even have a determinate object. I
can't begin to make sense of the notion that just the positive bits are
causal. Nothing can come from just nothing, true, but there never is just
nothing.

If our basic paradigms are so different we likely won't be able to talk very
constructively about specifics. Needless to say, I might be wrong that they
are so different. The position that only the positive is causal is more
explicit in Howard than in you.

Re the origins of the thread or sub-thread: what I see when I go through my
files is that you asked me to post the dictionary entry on "ont/de-ont",
then Howard came in with the post headed as above.

Mervyn 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Louis
Irwin
Sent: 07 December 2007 22:37
To: 'Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List'
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or
anabsencebepresent?

Mervyn,

If you actually read my post with minimal comprehension, you will see that
it attributes nothing whatsoever to you, contrary to what you assert, as in:
"...yet here you are attributing to me the notion of "pure absence of
action"".  I simply put out a possible analysis (not necessarily mine) for
discussion and asked if you agreed with it.  Certainly no basis for your
whining.  Why are you so defensive?  I note that you completely avoided
addressing the specifics of my post, saying where you think it goes wrong,
etc.  Instead you do what you always do: restate your general position and
ignore any attendant complications.

Also you are wrong about the origins of this sub-thread.  I made a comment
to Nick, and then you jumped in, and here we are.

Louis

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Louis
Irwin
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2007 5:24 PM
To: 'Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List'
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or
anabsencebepresent?

Mervyn,

I may have misread Nick's example on inaction of "the inaction that could
have saved the life".  Which of the following is Nick's example: (A) An
action whose presence would have saved the life; or (B) an absence of an
inaction which would have saved the life? I understood it to be (A), but
Nick's words (I now see) and your reply seem to take it to be (B). (B) seems
rather recondite, a case where apparently some damaging action was taken but
whose absence would have saved the life; in other words, what was absent was
the absence of the damaging action.  The absence of the damaging action was
present, and its absence (the absence of an inaction) would have save the
life.  I wonder if that is really what Nick had in mind, but in any case
your riposte seems to deal with (B).  I think the other examples he offered
were of the straightforward kind (A) rather than the recondite form (B).

Louis

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mervyn
Hartwig
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 7:17 PM
To: 'Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List'
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or an
absencebepresent?

Louis

An 'absence of causal structure and efficacy' is itself causal as the
examples imply. Inaction that did not save a life is by no means the same as
action that would have  saved it -- as you will discover if you are ever
involved in a situation in which an action could have saved a loved one's
life and didn't. Cf. Pierre's absence from the café - by no means the same
as his presence somewhere else. It's palpable and causally impacts those
present.

The main thing is the world is polyvalent, not monovalent or filled with
pure presence. Every action is also an absenting. To cause as such is to
absent an existing state of affairs. The positive is shot through with the
negative (not to mention surrounded by it - the bottomless and endless sea
of negativity), and couldn't move without it. The negative enters
fundamentally into the very constitution of 'causal structure and efficacy'.
In the end it expresses the incontestable transience and finitude of what we
think of as the positive.

Mervyn


-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Louis
Irwin
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 6:26 PM
To: 'Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List'
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or an absence
bepresent?


Nick,

Your examples don't seem to refute Howard's contention that absence means
the absence of causal structure and causal efficacy.  For example:

** "The inaction that could have saved the life?"  Is that not a case where
what is absent is the causal structure and efficacy that an action would
have brought with it?

** "The money we didn't put aside for the holiday?"  Is that not a case
where what is absent is a causal structure whose presence would have caused
things to be different?

** Howard did not say that droughts reduce to absence of rainfall.  He said
rather that "What a drought causes is a result of the causal structures in
place, not of absent non-structures that aren't there."  So your comment
seems beside the point. All those various things you point out are absent do
seem to be again absence of causal structures.

Louis Irwin

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Nick
Hostettler
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 5:36 PM
To: critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Critical-Realism] How can a de-ont exist or an absence be present?

Dear Howard,
Do we not speak of causal absences everyday? The inaction that could have
saved the life? The money we didn't put aside for the holiday? The absence
of mind that caused me not to bring the milk home? What about the lack of
care, attention, consideration and love that left the child with its
neurosis? What about the nail missing from the hoof of the horse needed by
the messenger to carry the vital piece of information - "and all for the
want of a horse shoe nail"? 

Or how about this? Are the social consequences of a drought really reducible
to the absence of rainfall? Is not the absence of a water distribution
system a cause of the absence of water? Or just the hole in the pipe, the
absence of a complete pipe? If we could have built the water system, but did
not, then its not being there is the cause of the lack of water. if we could
have repaired it, but did not, then the absence is causal. The absence, or
disintegration, of the water distribution system has become integral to the
causal structures which now distribute water.

One of Roy's important insights is that there is no positive description of
any state of affairs which necessarily entails the precise absence we are
referring to when we speak of a determinate absence. We cannot describe
inaction by refering solely to actions actually undertaken. So all of those
examples I just gave are the absences of something specific, something we
cannot describe in purely positive terms. We can only understand things
fully if we encompass both presences and absences. 

Politically, how do we explain the neo-liberal formation of capitalism? In
part we do so with reference to the weakness, the lack of strength, of
organised labour. Class society is consituted by the balance of class power;
that in turn is a consequence of class struggle. Right now we live with
those political defeats which produced the de-ont of the organised working
class. We live with that de-ont every day; it is a part of virtually every
sphere of life; it is deeply constitutive of the structures of the present.
We feel it working through the academy, for instance. Again, a purely
positive description of our times would not register that. 

Mervyn was saying that the class of de-onts includes both things that can
never be anywhere, such as phlogiston, and things that could have been
somewhere but weren't, such as the water sytem, and things that were there
but aren't any longer, such as the sadly deceased. 

To put that another way. That first class of de-onts is simply the class of
impossibilities - absolute non-entities. Another class of de-onts are
possibilities that are not realised - potential entities, processes, or
parts of entities or processes etc. Yet another is the class of
possibilities that have been realised only then to suffer their demise -
ex-entities or processes, ex-characteristics of entities or processes. We
can readily think of absences like this, in terms of classes of
possibilities, and we can think of structures as having integral absences,
and of their having come about through the partial realisation of
possibilities or perhaps through the failure to sustain them in all their
fullness. 

Dialectic is about openness, and perhaps one way to integrate absence into
our thinking is to embrace the language of possibility. If we see our world
as being filled with stunted and deformed lives, and as being full to
bursting of unrealised possibilities, and if we see our role in the world as
struggling against the constraints that keep those possibilities from being
realised, then we adhere to a dialectics premised on absence. 

All the best,
Nick 


-----Original Message-----
From: Howard Engelskirchen <howarde@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
<critical-realism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:37:48 -0600
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Side note on clear writing and Bourdieu

What is the causal efficacy of phlogiston?

Not what someone thought or thinks about phlogiston, but of the de-ont?

The point generalizes.  An absence, absence of being, means an absence of
causal structure and hence of causal efficacy.

This is a point I have raised from time to time.  I find I cannot get my
brain around alternatives.

There is undoubted value in speaking informally about what absences cause.
And plainly we act causally by absenting absences.  There is enormous value
in thinking dialectically.

But causal structure is a feature of being.

What a drought causes is a result of the causal structures in place, not of
absent non-structures that aren't there.

That the existence of being presupposes non-being is a separate question.
Cause itself is an expression of the existence of being in a context of the
absence of being.  But non-being doesn't cause the dependence of being on
non-being.

How can a de-ont exist or an absence be present?  We cannot confuse the way
we talk with the way the world is.  When we speak of the presence of an
absence, there is actually no causal structure to which we refer.

howard



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