Subject: BHA: body-cosmic and body-actual
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 15:41:32 -0000


Hi Jamie, Hi Ruth,

 

Then where do you both stand on Andrew Collier's distinction between the
body-cosmic and the body-actual?  (First chapter of his IN DEFENCE OF
OBJECTIVITY, Routledge, 2003).  It would appear that your positions
entail the view that only the body-actual exists and that the
body-cosmic is a redundant piece of metaphysics.  For if the ethics of
freedom is to be about actual context dilemmas and only about that, then
you seem to be somewhere around the position of Richard Rorty
(PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE) in which he argues that ethics is
just about decision-procedures.  This is the hegemonic pragmatist
conception of ethics.  The view that the body-actual is sufficient to
uphold realism is a version of what Roy Bhaskar has called the
anthropomorphic fallacy, in that human social activity is defined by a
human-centredness that denies a meaningful objective relation to the
wider independent reality of nature and the universe.  (DPF 394 passim).
In the book to celebrate Andrew's life that is shortly to appear I have
a chapter in which I reinterpret the body-cosmic/body-actual distinction
in a dialectical materialist way.  Materialism creates a more credible
conception of the body-cosmic and body-actual relation because it has an
ontological starting point in the universality and objectivity of matter
in motion.  On this objective basis, it is possible to establish the
interconnections between the primacy of a non-human body-cosmic and its
relation to the specificity and dynamism of the body-actual of human
society.  (Engels, ANTI-DUHRING, Moscow, 1954, section entitled:
"Natural Philosophy: Cosmogony, Physics, Chemistry). 

 

Phil 



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