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Abstract
This essay sets out some key qualities of love according to the philosophy of critical realism, together with Roy Bhaskar's arguments for them. It then considers how Bhaskar's claims stack up with the findings of modern physics, indicates how the category of love unifies the philosophical system of critical realism and critiques Luc Ferry's view that the reign of love has already begun in the West, before briefly discussing the practical application of Bhaskar's philosophy of love in the work of feminist critical realist social theorist Lena Gunnarsson.
Notes
1 CitationGoethe [1832] 2003, lines 11866-74 (Wie Felsenabgrund mir zu Füssen | Auf tiefem Abgrund lastend ruht, | Wie tausend Bäche strahlend fliessen | Zum grausen Sturz des Schaums der Flut, | Wie strack mit eignem kraftigen Triebe | Der Stamm sich in die Lüfte trägt:| So ist es die allmächtige Liebe, | Die alles bildet, alles hegt). The translation is by A. S. Kline, whose superb translations of a great deal of classic Western (and some Eastern) poetry from the time of the ancient Greeks on are a wonderful gift to the human species, entirely in keeping with Bhaskar's philosophy of love. http://www.poetryintranslation.com.
2 In philosophy, see e.g. Rawls Citation1971 and Honneth Citation1995, for whom love is a mere form of recognition in primary or intimate personal relations, albeit perhaps the most important one. For Habermas Citation1999, solidarity and recognition are on a par, the other side of the same coin.
3 See Žižek Citation2012; CitationLordon [2010] 2014.
4 While metaRealism goes beyond critical realism, it arguably both presupposes, and is broadly presupposed by, the latter, such that the two form a single system, which I refer to throughout as ‘critical realism’.
5 Most fundamentally estrangement from our essential selves (absence of totality), the split of alienation is not between a fixed inner real self and one's actual self, but between what one has become (essentially is and is tending to become) and what one socially is obliged to be or thwarted from becoming. Its possibility is situated by the transformational model of social activity (TMSA), in which people and society are understood as, though interdependent, ‘radically different kinds of thing’ (CitationBhaskar [1979] 2015, 33).
6 See Bhaskar Citation2012, 22–3. Some readers find Bhaskar's MELD schema, and its extension in MELDARA/Z perplexing or alienating, but a basic understanding of it is essential to grasping his system of philosophy overall. It is not so difficult. The system is articulated in terms of seven dimensions of the self-structuration of being or ontological-axiological chain — that is, its dialectic is a seven-term one, as follows (where ‘1M’ [first moment] stands for non-identity, ‘2E’ [second edge] for negativity, ‘3L’ [third level] for totality, ‘4D’ [fourth dimension] for human transformative praxis, ‘5A’ [fifth aspect] for reflexivity understood as spirituality, ‘6R’ [sixth realm] for (re-)enchantment, and ‘7A/Z’ [seventh awakening/zone] for nonduality, and where ‘ < ’ stands for ‘is constellationally contained by’): 1M < 2E < 3L < 4D < 5A < 6R < 7A/Z; or, omitting the numerals, MELDARA or MELDARZ. This is by no means a purely mnemonic device: Moment signifies something finished, behind us, determinate — a product: transfactual (structural) causality, pertaining to non-identity; first is for founding. Edge speaks of the point of transition or becoming, the exercise of causal powers in rhythmic (processual) causality, pertaining to negativity. Level announces an emergent whole with its own specific determinations, capable of reacting back on the materials from which it is formed — process-in-product: holistic causality, pertaining to totality. Dimension singles out a geo-historically recent form of causality — product-in-process: human intentional causality, transformative agency or praxis. Aspect is for the sake of euphony, signifying the spirituality presupposed by emancipatory projects; Realm is for realms of enchantment that the shedding of disenchantment discloses; Awakening is to understanding nonduality and the experience of being being, rather than thinking being, when, as the saying goes, we are ‘in the Zone’. The deployment of such schemas is not of course peculiar to Bhaskar (see e.g. note 66, below).
7 CitationBhaskar (e.g. [2002c] 2012, 180–81) acknowledges conventional categorizations of love but prefers to speak simply of love and its five circles (for the latter, see below). In relation to the conventional distinctions between eros, philia and agape, the concept of love in what follows refers to the constellational containment of eros and philia within agape; eros and philia are prone to consort with reciprocity and conditionality (cf. CitationBoltanski [1990] 2012, 102–28), but this is contained and transcended in agape. Love can be understood theologically as God's free gift to the world or in more secular vein as the emotional ground-state power immanent within being.
8 Graeber Citation2011, 101. Graeber's term for this ground is ‘baseline communism’. Graeber has independently argued within anthropology a position similar to that of critical realism; like nonduality in Bhaskar's account, baseline communism is pervasive in social life but largely unrecognized. In Western philosophy the principle of the priority of love to reciprocity and justice goes back at least to the ancient Greeks and is an important theme within modern feminist theory and the emerging field of love studies; see especially Gilligan Citation1982, Tronto Citation1993, Gunnarsson Citation2014, Jónasdóttir and Ferguson, eds, Citation2014. Cf. Assiter Citation2009.
9 Cf. CitationAdorno [1951] 2005, 191. If for Adorno ‘[l]ove is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar’ in the transitive dimension, for Bhaskar it also is that similarity (intransitive dimension) — ‘the principle of union behind all unions without which nothing could cohere’ (Citation[2002c] 2012, 189).
12 Cf. CitationBoltanski [1990] 2012, 94, who however restricts himself to ‘a psychology of relationships’ in contemporary French society.
14 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 198; cf. Bhaskar 2000, 65 and CitationKierkegaard [1847] 1962, 17.
15 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 190, original emphasis. ‘[C]ompare Juliet in Romeo and Juliet [ii. 1. 175–77: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep;] the more I give to thee, The more I have”.’ CitationHegel [1798a] 1961, 307.
16 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 190, original emphasis. See the important discussion of this in Gunnarsson Citation2014, ch. 7.
17 Gerhardt Citation2004.
18 Cf. Keller Citation2002, 11.
21 Kierkegaard, cited in CitationBadiou with Truong [2009] 2012, 14. One does not have to understand this power as divine as distinct from natural. It is immortally rendered palpable by Rembrandt in Isaac and Rebecca, popularly known as The Jewish Bride (c. 1665).
23 CitationBadiou with Truong [2009] 2012, 14; this is Badiou's gloss on Kierkegaard.
24 For an unsurpassed account see CitationGoethe's novel Elective Affinities ([1809] 2008).
26 Quinney Citation2009, 166.
27 The theme of the dialectical unity of life and death is magnificently developed in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
29 Ferry Citation2013, 32, is surely mistaken in holding that his ‘humanism of love’ is ‘an entirely new point of view’; see in particular Graeber Citation2011.
30 Marx's concept of free development is an improvement on the Golden Rule of the religious traditions that has come to be known as the Platinum Rule. It should be interpreted, not as an abstract universal, but as ‘presupposing dialectical universality and concrete singularity’: do unto others, not as you would do unto yourself, but as you would do unto them if you were they, not you. CitationBhaskar [2002b] 2012, 344–45. By ‘spiritual’ I mean centrally concerned with unity, wholeness and at-homeness (cf. Bhaskar with Hartwig Citation2011, 187–8).
31 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, ch. 7, s. 6 ‘The meta-critique of Marx's critique of Hegelian dialectic’ (353–7). On Enrique Dussel's persuasive reading, Marx does actually theorize the non-commodified creativity of ‘living labour’, which by contrast to the commodity labour power stands outside capital as ‘not-capital’ and is the ultimate source of value, though of course he cannot ground this at the level of the absolute. See Dussel Citation2001 and Arthur Citation2002.
34 See, for Bhaskar's account of this method, CitationBhaskar [1986] 2009, 10–27 and, for my understanding of it, Hartwig Citation2015.
35 Cf. Gunnarsson Citation2014, 130, n. 4; CitationOllman [1971] 1996, 263–4.
36 Cf. CitationBhaskar [1993] 2008, 243, where the desire to love and be loved is considered, with the early Hegel, ‘a paramorph for the desire for de-alienation, that is, for the restoration, perhaps in a much more complex and differentiated totality, of the unity between the agent and everything essential to her nature’.
37 See CitationHartwig 2010, 251, 260 n. 58. See also Bhaskar 2000, 24 n.4, 44.
38 Cf. Bhaskar with Hartwig Citation2011, 199. One can of course argue that such experience presupposes the existence of a ground-state quality of love as a condition of its possibility, but then one is back on the terrain of transcendental argument.
39 Cf. Shkliarevsky Citation2011, 79–80.
40 Goethe Citation[1826] 2011, 655.
41 Mason Citation2015. Werner Heisenberg himself held that ‘the mode of reality of the quantum state … is potentiality as contrasted with actuality’ (Shimony Citation2009, original emphasis).
42 Kastner Citation2013.
43 Kastner Citation2013, 135, 153. As Kastner points out, Shimony Citation2009 makes a similar point.
44 Cf. Porpora Citation2000. Kastner uses the metaphor of the tip of an iceberg floating on a sea or ocean to describe the relationship between the domains of the actual and the real — a similar metaphor to that used by CitationBhaskar ([1993] 2008, 5) to describe the relationship between the positive and the negative.
45 CitationBhaskar [1993] 2008, original emphasis.
46 Kastner Citation2013, 151.
47 Kastner Citation2013, 153–4; cf. Mason Citation2015.
48 Already in CitationBhaskar [1979] 2015, 111, ‘human beings, like any other empirically given object’ are conceptualized as ‘fields of effects’ (my emphasis). The metaReal, as I understand it, is the most fundamental sub-stratum of the real.
49 For an account of string theory that assumes no training in mathematics or physics, see CitationGreene [1999] 2000. Like many physicists, Greene is reductionist and too prone to believe that string theory may well provide the grand theory of everything.
50 CitationBhaskar [1993] 2008, 256. The concepts of constraint1 and constraint2 align with negentropy and entropy, respectively.
51 Santner Citation2006, 107, citing Sebald.
52 See e.g. CitationBhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 104.
53 Bhaskar Citation2000, 100.
54 Crockett Citation2013, 159. See also CitationDeleuze [1968] 1994, ch. 5. Both Crockett and Deleuze are vulnerable to the critical realist critique of the analysis of change exclusively in terms of difference Citation(Bhaskar [1993] 2008), but this does not affect the point at issue here.
55 Smolin Citation2013, 159, 194, 196–207. The view that the universe is a timeless whole in which there is a simultaneous co-existence of all times and events is critiqued by Bhaskar [1993] 2008 as ‘blockism’ or ‘block universalism’. Cf. Kastner 2013, ch. 8, who contrasts blockism's ‘block world’ with PSI's world of becoming. Brian Greene's (Citation2011) argument for the reality of ‘many worlds’ — a multiverse of possibly infinite parallel universes — is premised on just such a blockism in which every possible universe is realized. In critiquing blockism, Smolin unfortunately seems to commit the converse fallacy of punctualism, according to which only the here-now is real (‘all that's real is real in the present moment’, which is always ‘one of a succession of moments’, Smolin Citation2013, 222, 240). On blockism and punctualism see CitationBhaskar [1993] 2008 and Hartwig Citation2007.
56 For an account of dynamical self-organization in the biosphere, see Deacon Citation2012 and my (2013) review essay of it. The binding force of gravity in the Bhaskarian system aligns it with love. For the theological tradition that stresses God's radical transcendence of the cosmos, by contrast, gravity is sometimes seen as the opposite of love (agape) — God withdraws from the world in order to allow it to exist. See e.g. Ferry Citation2013, 39. Transcendence in Bhaskar is always transcendence-within-immanence.
57 Rilke Citation1975, 132. It is of course possible that the tendency of the universe towards complexity will reverse at some time in the future.
58 Gould Citation1997. For a critique see Shkliarevsky Citation2011.
59 Gould Citation1997.
60 Paul Éluard, cited in Patrick CitationWhite [1966] 1969, epitaph. These lines are White's rendition of part of a sentence that appears in Éluard Citation1969, p. 986: ‘Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci…’ (cited by Wark Citation2014).
61 Note, again, that the real includes the metaReal. Cf. Kastner Citation2013.
62 Cf. Hegel's argument that, in the words of Robert M. Wallace (Citation2014), ‘a God who is separate from the world is thereby finite and fails to be infinite’ — a point understood by ‘quite a few’ Christian and other theologians but not by many philosophers who comment on Hegel.
63 CitationBhaskar 2002a, ch. 13, 339–63. This started life as a workshop talk in the beautiful gardens of Tagore's ashram in Bengal, India, in 2001.
64 CitationBhaskar 2002c, ch. 4, 172–232.
65 This substitutes for Hatha Yoga, ‘the path of physical strength or grace’, in the four traditional yogas (Bhaskar [2002c] 2012, 182).
66 The four truth procedures of Alain Badiou's philosophy — science, art, love and politics — correspond to the moments of MELD, and are likewise unified by love, but in a decidedly anthropic and aleatory register. Love for Badiou depends upon a highly contingent singular encounter between humans, an event in which the power of ‘the void of being … is gathered within a subject’ (Badiou Citation2003, 33), whereas for Bhaskar it is present everywhere as a ground-state force, sustaining everything we and other creatures and beings do.
67 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, xlii.
68 CitationBhaskar [2002a] 2012, 187.
69 See especially CitationBhaskar [2002a] 2012, 187–9.
70 CitationBhaskar [2002a] 2012, 182.
71 Cf. CitationKierkegaard [1847] 1962; Assiter Citation2009. As Gunnarsson Citation2014 (111, n. 2 and ch. 7) argues, any dualism of self-love and love for others is thus a (real) illusion. CitationFoucault [2001] 2005 traces ‘the gradual elimination of the notion of care of the self from philosophical thought and concern’ (25) in Western modernity.
72 CitationBhaskar [2002a] 2012, 351, 359, original emphases. Cf. CitationAdorno [1958] 1991, 72, ‘love is always directed as much to love itself as to the beloved’.
73 CitationHegel [1798a] 1961, 307, which has ‘drink love out of every life’, but, pace Hegel's de facto dualism of matter and spirit, there is no reason to confine our drinking to the biosphere.
74 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 225.
75 CitationBhaskar [2002a] 2012, xliv.
76 Alcoff and Caputo, eds, Citation2011, 12.
77 At the level of the embodied personality the coherence of love is conceptualized as the ‘loop of love’. Love and the emotions are ‘crucial mediators between mind and body [cf. the path of truth] and embodied personality and the world [cf. the path of practice]’, including all four planes of social being. CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 186, 328.
78 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 191; see also 332–53.
79 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, ch. 7.
80 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 175, 255.
81 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 198.
82 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012,184.
83 CitationBoltanski [1990] 2012.
84 Cf. Graeber Citation2011, 94–102.
85 Ferry Citation2013, 82.
86 Graeber Citation2014.
87 An Achilles' heel critique is an immanent critique that fastens on the point deemed by the proponents of a theory to be its strongest.
88 Ferry Citation2013, 30, 35–6.
89 See the discussion of what happens to love in the capitalist demi-real below.
90 See Ferry Citation2013, 50–51, 66–7, 95–8. Such sacrifices, Ferry unrealistically holds, ‘are not death-dealing’ (95). This stance is at one with the ‘sacrificial myth of modernity’ pinpointed in Enrique Dussel's writings. The ‘culpably immature’ (‘lazy’, ‘cowardly’) non-European, as Kant put it in a passage of What is Enlightenment? that is a favourite with Ferry, must be sacrificed to the onward march of euro-enlightenment. See CitationDussel [1993] 1995; Hartwig Citation2011, 497, n. 54.
91 Ferry Citation2013, 103.
92 Ferry Citation2013, 104.
93 See esp. Ferry Citation2013, 87. Bhaskar's philosophy agrees with Ferry that the idea of individual autonomy is one of the main strengths of Western modernity but departs radically from him on the issue of europism (see Hostettler Citation2013) and the extent to which the idea of autonomy has been translated into practice.
94 Ferry Citation2013, 98.
95 Ferry Citation2013, esp. 29–30. Cf. the fundamental critique of anthropocentrism and related forms of centrism throughout Bhaskar's oeuvre. Bhaskar's dialectical work develops a powerful argument that centrism, triumphalism and endism are underpinned by the epistemic fallacy, the speculative and positivist illusions and ontological monovalence, respectively; together these errors comprise the ‘unholy trinity’ of irrealism.
96 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 198.
97 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 243, 326–32; cf. Gunnarsson Citation2015.
98 CitationBhaskar [2002c] 2012, 198.
99 Gunnarsson Citation2014.
100 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 54, 56, 124, 167.
101 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 60 n. 9, citing Jónasdóttir.
102 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 11.
103 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 119–20, 164.
104 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 123.
105 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 29 n. 3.
106 Gunnarsson's analysis is mainly in terms of heterosexual relations, but much of it would also apply, she suggests, to same-sex relations.
107 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 264 et passim.
108 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 149, emphasis removed. This holds for power2 in general, of course: it is ultimately parasitic on the ground-state qualities of people. The concepts of love power1 (love in its alienated form in the demi-real, cf. the commodity labour power) and love power0 are only implicit in Gunnarsson's account, which could I think be further sharpened by their introduction. For the distinction between power2, power1, and power0 see Despain Citation2011, 309–11, who follows the logic of Bhaskar's account. In terms of Bhaskar's metatheory of the person, love power1 corresponds to the embodied person, love power0 to the real self.
109 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 163.
110 Gunnarsson Citation2014, ch. 9.
111 ‘Each Man is in his Spectre's power| Until the arrival of that hour| When his Humanity awake| And cast his Spectre into the Lake.’ Blake Citation1804, 41. Cf. Quinney Citation2009, whose analysis of Blake's thought, which effects a brilliant critique of empiricism, demonstrates that Blake has a profound implicit understanding of both demi-reality and metaReality (though of course he does not use these terms, and neither does Quinney). ‘Spectre’ or ‘Selfhood’ is Blake's term for the illusory atomistic ego in the Bhaskarian analysis of the self.
112 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 2, 153–4.
113 Gunnarsson (2014, 158–9) notes a similar theme in the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray, who speaks of returning to the selves we really are, letting go old selves and conceptions, ‘being faithful to our own Being’.
114 Gunnarsson Citation2014, 1.
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Mervyn Hartwig
Mervyn Hartwig is general editor/book review editor of JCR.
Correspondence to: Mervyn Hartwig, 37 Stockwell Green, Stockwell, London SW9 9HZ, UK. Email: [email protected]
