Postformal operations and postmetaphysicality continued

Continued from this post:

In this post Balder reminded us of Bhaskar’s critique of IT in that it fails to recognize the generative mechanisms driving development. I.e., IT has a morphogenetic involutionary groove pulling it up, a skyhook. Whereas for Bhaskar development is more driven by contingent environmental and social forces, not by some teleological and metaphysical skyhook. In this post and the one following DeLanda too has the virtual realm acting as a bootstrap, but not from the sky. Bryant from TDOO:

"Here it is crucial to note that the concept of attractors is not a teleological concept. Attractors are not goals towards which a substance tends, but are rather the potentialities towards which a substance tends under a variety of different conditions in the actualization of its qualities. [...] In this respect, DeLanda's attractors are extremely close to Bhaskar's generative mechanisms" (111-12).

Also recall this post quoting from Bryant’s blog post:


"This is one reason I’ve elsewhere proposed that the proper being of objects has the status of a ghost or a poltergeist. The proper being of an object is not its parts (other objects), but is rather a ghostly endo-relational structure that cannot directly be perceived but only inferred.... It is that assemblage of powers, attractors, or singularities (tendencies presiding over the entity as act) that make up its proper being."

So it is at this precise point where the bifurcation occurs in real (postmetaphysical, transcendental) and false (metaphysical, transcendent) reasoning. And in how postformal stages are described and enacted based on the view. Another element in this difference is the metaphysics of presence, which is maintained in a metaphysical view and not in the real postmetaphysical view. The former skyhook is directly perceived via the highest state-stage: “The net result, at supermind, is that all of the basic rungs or basic structures—and all of the major states—are still in existence, and now fully integrated [my emphasis]; but any exclusive identity with any of them is negated, transcended, let go of” (see this post). Which is still the same claim the Lingam made about nirodh (causal) states as direct access to the transcendent (see here). And which are still part and parcel of a metaphysical view.

So how this plays out in the lateral sub-phases of post-formal reason is critical on the above point, since they do not continue on in the linear fashion of a hierarchical and restricted complexity a la the MHC but rather an involved and integrated form of general complexity like in this thread. And all related to the virtual yet constructed endo-structural relations of elements. More later.