The thesis that there is only one type of existence, namely presence, comprising phenomena which essentially are experienced, or at least experiencable. With no concept of absence, there can be no concept of a stratified world involving generative mechanisms whose effects may not be present. Under that constraint the only realism which can be affirmed is a form of actualism. Actualists or empiricists do not deny the reality of, say, atomic structure; however, they analyze that structure in terms of actual or possible experience of the effects of atomic structure, so they recognize no transfactual activity that occurs independently of intellection. At a higher level, Kant understood space and time as presuppositions for the very possibility of experience, but he placed them in the structure of mind as organizing principles for managing the actualist stream of events.
By monovalence there is no absenting and hence no change; there is merely a set of eternalized facts--past, present, future--which exist once and for all in a closed set (blockism). Alternatively, there is merely a set of features of an unchanging Parmenidean one (punctualism, indexicalism--see Change). Bhaskar sees ontological monovalence as blocking the raising of what he terms "existential questions": if tautologically everything exists, there is no way to say something does not exist, much less to claim that its absence is causally efficacious (DPF 234). For example, the absence of resources for self-development is a constraint on freedom (DPF 280). Ontological monovalence prevents the recognition of the existence of such a constraint, which cannot be produced. Politically, legally, and morally a monovalent society sees nothing that prevents a person living in poverty from becoming a millionaire, and freedom is understood as the absence of a legalist prohibition, which is the narrower concept of liberty or negative freedom.
Although Bhaskar views absences as real and apparently subscribes to the view that everything is real, the quantifier "everything" has to be understood as ranging over whatever is real, not simply over whatever exists, at least if "exists" refers to presences and not absences. With existence, reality, and quantifiers understood this way, the answer to the question of what exists is narrower than the answer to the question of what is real.
Copyright © 1997 Louis Irwin
| Abbreviations |
|
All Works by Roy Bhaskar:
|
