MetaRealism

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Notes

1 Groff, ed., 2009.

2 Morgan, ed., 2013.

3 Although metaRealism goes beyond original and dialectical critical realism, it arguably both presupposes, and is broadly presupposed by them, such that the three form a single system, which I refer to throughout as ‘critical realism’. As noted in Hartwig 2015b, this carries no implication that deploying critical realist metatheory to orient one's work entails accepting ‘the whole package’. On the contrary, since the later phases presuppose the earlier, work making use of any of the phases in either their specificity or their constellational unity must be deemed equally valuable and important.

4 Cf. Seo 2014. For my understanding of Bhaskar's concepts of transcendence, the transcendental and spirituality see Hartwig 2015c.

5 See especially Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 127–8 (which calls attention to related paradoxes of wholeness and alienation, abundance and scarcity), 156, 171–2. Note that emphasis on emancipation does not entail that we preface our search for truth with our politics; on the contrary, as the theory of explanatory critique seeks to show, our politics can flow from the search for truth.

6 The next half a dozen paragraphs draw heavily on Hartwig 2015d and other pieces of mine referenced there, and retrace some of the ground covered in Hartwig 2015b.

7 The fundamental structure of a TINA compromise formation, the concatenation of which constitutes the demi-real, is identical with the structure apprehended, tacitly or otherwise, in emancipatory thought: ‘the suppression by the false of the truth on which it depends and which sustains it’. Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 219.

8 Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 172, 217.

9 Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 187. Cf.: ‘[O]ne's account of the real grounds or reasons for something is fallible, but the grounds themselves are not … Ontological “infallibilism” is necessary for epistemic fallibilism.’ Bhaskar and Hartwig 2010, 131–2.

10 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 183, 301.

11 See Mason 2015 and Hartwig 2015a.

12 Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, xii. This does not mean, Bhaskar subsequently explains (ibid., 244), that knowledge is, as for Plato, ‘basically recollection’; rather that the potential to see it, which is always already enfolded within us, is awakened.

13 Bhaskar [1994] 2010, 154.

14 Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 277.

15 Bilgrami's (2014) recent interesting attempt to show that the world is intrinsically valuable or enchanted relies, like Bhaskar's, on transcendental arguments about human practical agency, but is marred (as in the case of so many other Romantics) by a positivistic understanding of science and naturalism. There is a burgeoning literature in this domain.

16 Bhaskar [2002b] 2012, 356.

17 Bhaskar [2002b] 2012, 12, 356 n. 10. On Enrique Dussel's persuasive reading, Marx does actually theorize the non-commodified creativity of ‘living labour’, which by contrast to 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 [1988] 2001 and Arthur 2002.

18 Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 266.

19 Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 171; see also 128–9, 156.

20 Bhaskar [2002b] 2012, 129.

21 Hartwig 2015b, 2015d.

22 See Bhaskar 2012, 22–3.

23 Graeber 2011, 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 non-duality 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 1982, Tronto 1993, Gunnarsson 2014, Jónasdóttir and Ferguson, eds, 2014. Cf. Assiter 2009.

24 Cf.: ‘[N]ature without humanity contains almost all the categories of the dialectic’, with the exception of categorial error (Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 77). The charge of ‘anti-naturalism’ has been brought against Bhaskar's The Possibility of Naturalism (Benton 1981), but in my view Bhaskar rescues naturalism by thoroughly revising our understanding of nature. ‘[H]ow strange the truth about physical reality must be’, writes Galen Strawson, professed Spinozan (a)theist and ‘new Humean’, ‘given that consciousness is itself a wholly physical phenomenon’ (Strawson 2011, 26). But of course there is a sense in which it is not so strange, it is natural, and we are natural beings. It is we who are estranged from an adequate understanding of our relation to nature (cf. Dickens 2011). According to metaRealism, the potential for consciousness as we know it is implicitly enfolded in ‘physical reality’ from the outset — the universe is an implicitly conscious developing material system — but it is highly contingent that human consciousness has emerged and whence it will evolve. MetaRealism is thus metaphysically neither idealist nor materialist but realist.

25 Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 11; 2007, 195.

26 Cf. Assiter 2015.

27 Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 358. See also Bhaskar and Hartwig 2011. Bhaskar is agnostic as to what lies beyond the cosmos; the cosmic envelope is immanent to the cosmos but transcendent with respect to the ground-states of concretely singular beings. It has another ‘side’ but this cannot be ‘seen’ by philosophy and science. It is open to faith traditions to claim knowledge of it, however.

28 See especially Bhaskar and Hartwig 2011, 201.

29 I am indebted to Nunez (2014) for her apt gloss on the TINA formation as ‘patched’: patching merely postpones eventual disintegration as the reality principle (alethic truth) asserts itself.

30 Bhaskar 2000, 37, 41 et passim.

31 Bhaskar 2000, 89. Cf. Assiter 2015.

32 Bhaskar 2000, 106.

33 Bhaskar and Hartwig 2010, 201.

34 Bhaskar 2000, 39.

35 Bhaskar 1993/2008, 120, original emphasis.

36 Bhaskar 2000, 68.

37 Bhaskar and Hartwig 2010, 83.

38 See e.g. Archer et al. 2004; Collier 2001, 2003; McDonald 2008; Creaven 2010; Hartwig and Morgan, eds, 2010; Wright 2013 (reviewed by Jamie Morgan in this issue); Agar 2014; Gunnarsson 2014; Wilkinson 2015; Bhaskar et al., eds, 2015, forthcoming.

39 Cf. Assiter 2015.

40 Wilkinson 2015, blurb.

41 There is of course no requirement that a regional philosophy such as ICR mechanically conform to metaRealism, only an invitation to reconsider; more on this below.

42 To avoid confusion here we could dub it AICR (‘A’ for ‘Australian’), but insofar as Indigenous peoples everywhere are a concrete universal, we will have to accommodate two ICRs.

43 Bhaskar and Hartwig 2011, 2010.

44 As indicated above, Bhaskar does suggest that his view that humans are evolving rather than fallen is inconsistent with the doctrine of original sin (Bhaskar and Hartwig 2011, 197–8), but (a) this is hardly a ‘requirement’ that Christianity conform as distinct from an invitation to reconsider; and (b) the forgetting that entrains the rise of the demi-real or ‘structural sin’, is a kind of fall, though not one that permanently corrupts human nature.

45 Wright 2013, Kindle locations 2389–2390.

46 Wright 2013, Kindle location 264.

47 Bhaskar [1975] 2008, Postscript (1978), 260, original emphasis.

48 Wright suggests that metaRealism is committed to judgemental relativism and the notion that all religions are equally valid (religious pluralism), but this does not follow. The respective claims of religions can and should be rationally appraised and developed via intra-, inter- and extra-faith dialogue and assessments, and critical realist philosophy and social science can play a role here too in the critique of ethically problematic doctrines and oppressive institutional forms.

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Mervyn Hartwig

Mervyn Hartwig is general editor/book review editor of JCR.