Re: [OPE-L] resnick and wolff on the commodity form

[Ian Wright <wrighti@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Howard,

One small observation regarding overdetermination and Freud. Freud
made enormous strides in ontology. He began as a kind of
neuro-physicist, but rejected the idea that what we can see when we
open up brains exhausts the ontology of the mind. His creative
modelling efforts to identify an embryonic information processing
level of description (id, ego, super-ego, libidinal energy etc.) that
attempts to explain various clinical phenomena, such as repression,
are not only quite brilliant, but also primarily about conjecturing
the existence of underlying mechanisms to account for visible
behaviour, the stream of events. Freud's methodology and work is not
at all connected to the idea of "constituitive causality", if that
means there is no depth, no levels, no enduring dispositions and
essences. One of his great scientific achievements was precisely to
posit a hitherto hidden depth and verticality -- the unconscious, a
collection of hidden agencies responsible for various surface
phenomena.

-Ian.