Editor's note. Ram Bhaskar, generally known as Roy, died on 19th November 2014, of heart failure. When asked during the interviews for The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Account (2010) whether he felt he had come into his dharma as a philosopher, he replied that
you could say, well, he is a philosopher, he has written so many books and there are people who are discussing his ideas. But that does not necessarily make me feel whole, it depends what people are doing with the ideas.
Roy Bhaskar and the metaphysics of causal powers
It's an honor to have been asked to talk about the impact that Roy's work has had on me. I hope that it will be clear that even though the story below seems to be about me, it is meant to be about Roy.
I first ‘met’ Roy Bhaskar when I was 19. It was spring of my junior year in college, and Hugh Lacey had assigned A Realist Theory of Science (RTS) in his History and Philosophy of Science seminar. As it happens, a friend and I co-wrote the seminar paper that week. My friend understood the reading better than I did; looking back, I don't know that I understood it at all. But it registered, and when I moved from Philadelphia to Toronto to do an MA in political education, I brought the book with me. Two years later I landed in a PhD program in political theory. That first fall I had to write a paper for my minor field core course in comparative politics. On my own, and I don't remember why now, I went back to RTS (augmented by The Possibility of Naturalism) in order to do it. I argued that Roy's approach was better than some analytic Marxist alternative — I don't recall now which one — for telling us which of two first-order empirical explanations we should prefer (explanations of what, I've also since forgotten). Roy's early work has been a cornerstone of my thinking ever since.
I had come to the PhD to do philosophy, though, not comparative politics. I had spent my undergraduate years exploring how logical positivism fails as an epistemology of social science, and my two MA years recoiling from the postmodernism and poststructuralism that, in many corners, had come to take its place. I felt certain that there were such things as disinformation campaigns, and I thought that it was a criterion of any adequate epistemology that it should allow me to say so. I also thought that the Rorty-style relativism about knowledge that was rapidly taking hold in the academic Left was dangerous. For these reasons, I wanted to know what it would take, philosophically, to be able to say that a given claim about the world is false. Not pernicious — though it might also be that, independent of being false — but false.
Roy, of course, had undertaken to deliver just such an epistemology. Ultimately, however, I wrote a dissertation in which I turned to critical realism not for Roy's notions of judgmental rationality, or even alethic truth (which, on the contrary, I criticized), but instead for Roy's realism about causal powers. I argued not that critical realism gives us a satisfactory account of falsehood, but rather that if the metaphysics advanced by Roy (and a few others) was right, i.e. if things do have real causal powers, then the world is such that not all claims about it can be true (not unless everything can do everything). The metaphysics doesn't get us any closer to knowing which empirical beliefs are the true ones, or even how to tell, but we can at least know that relativism itself can't be true. Along the way I fussed with Roy here and there on various points, but my main concern, as I say, was to show that it follows from the existence of real causal powers that Rorty-style relativism is false. I should note that I owed not just the ‘answer’, in a sense, to Roy, but the precise formulation of the question that got me to it, too, which was ‘What would the world have to be like, for relativism as a meta-theory to be true (given a realist, or non-subjectivist account of ‘true’)?’
In the course of writing that first book, I realized that a number of analytic philosophers working in metaphysics (and in some cases the philosophy of science) were beginning to revisit the conventional and deeply entrenched Humean ban on real causal powers. It was a small number of people, then, compared to now, but still; it was a significant development. I thought it worthwhile to try to bring to the attention of all concerned that critical realists, on the one hand, often working at the level of social theory, and analytic thinkers concerned with causal powers in the abstract, on the other, were in fact in the process of articulating a shared anti-passivist research paradigm, albeit with each group largely unaware of the other. This led me to edit a volume called Revitalizing Causality: Realism about Causality in Philosophy and Social Science (2008). My role, I thought (and still do), was to try to act as a bridge between those more applied powers theorists who may have read only Roy's version of realism about causal powers, and those in analytic metaphysics who may not have read Roy's work at all. I am firmly convinced that both parties stand to benefit in crucial ways from ongoing conversation.
In the intervening years I have continued to focus on the kind of real causal powers that Roy defended in RTS, and to try to connect problems in fundamental metaphysics both to social and political philosophy and to philosophy of social science. In 2012 my colleague John Greco and I edited a volume called Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, which we dedicated to Roy. The idea there was to demonstrate, mostly to professional analytic philosophers, that realism about causal powers is relevant to philosophical debates at other levels of abstraction. To do so, John and I asked well-known defenders of causal powers to address the concept in areas of specialty across the discipline of philosophy, and in social theory. The result, as I described it in the Introduction, was a composite portrait of a comprehensive powers-based approach. That year I also published Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy. There I argued that social and political philosophy always has a metaphysical infrastructure, and more specifically that a default passivism has distorted modern discussions of agency and the social, from Hume's Treatise through to contemporary debates in analytic philosophy over free will.
All of my current work is informed by Roy's critique of Humean metaphysics. I am presently writing a book that will be called A Critical Introduction to Causal Powers and Dispositions, which will be part of a series on contemporary metaphysics. That such a book bears Roy's imprint goes without saying. But in the past year or two I have also written on the concept of a causal mechanism in sociology and on Marx's Aristotelianism at the level of metaphysics, and I have had the opportunity to help push powers-based work along in various contexts, and all of it, all of my thinking, is, in one way or another, inseparable from what I learned first from Roy. Substantively, I would say, the point is that realism about causal powers changes everything, conceptually, ranging from what one will think a verb is (let alone what thinking itself is) to what one will think it is to be able to do something (i.e. to be active and/or a source of change of any kind, including but not limited to being an intentional agent), to what it is that explanations have to actually explain.
Others have engaged with and applied Roy's work as a whole in a way that I have not. In that sense, my relationship to the critical realist corpus is tangential. But how it has felt to me is that I took up what was the core metaphysical insight of early critical realism, at least, and that I am still not done thinking about it or trying to get other people to think about it. Last summer I traded email with Roy on some questions about his view of powers in RTS. He said that he would like to talk at greater length in the fall, and I was very much looking forward to it. I felt that I had finally learned enough to be able to have a real conversation. Apart from the host of ways in which his not having lived longer genuinely matters, I am sad that I won't ever get to talk shop with Roy in depth. And I want to echo what so many others have said: Roy made me feel seen. He made me feel that he was interested in my ideas, and that he cared for me. The exceptional kindness, generosity and attention that he showed to people is just one of the reasons why he was, and will continue to be, such a role model. His seriousness of philosophical purpose — including his complete disinterest in clever manoeuvering, equivocation or sophistry — is another.
I hope that I have made it plain that my intellectual life would have been completely different had Roy's thinking not been present in it from the start. The only other thing to say is ‘Thank you, Roy’ and ‘I will try to write things that you would think are good’.
Ruth Porter Groff
Saint Louis University, USA
Email: [email protected]
Breaking intellectual taboos with Roy by my side
I came across critical realism as an undergraduate, having spotted a reference to Margaret Archer's work in a book on critical discourse analysis. I cannot remember what it was exactly in Archer's thought that the book referred to, but it must have been something very ‘unpoststructuralist’. At the time I was studying gender studies at a Swedish university and, as in many gender studies departments the world over, it was characterized by something near poststructuralist orthodoxy and did little to make students aware that there were other ways to think critically. Somehow I had nevertheless succeeded to find a position that was critical of poststructuralism, after a short initial fling with Judith Butler's excitingly demanding work. When I hastened to read Archer's Being Human (2000) I got that kind of exhilarating approval of my own thoughts and intuitions, which is so liberating when you have long struggled in isolation against unquestioned dogmas. I remember almost blushing when reading Archer's formulations about the reality of the human subject — so deeply entrenched in me were the poststructuralist taboos on human subjects, and on reality, that I experienced this as somewhat scandalous.
This was my way into critical realism and Roy's work. I experienced a kind of homecoming, feeling that critical realism was a highly sophisticated and systematic formulation of quite basic and reasonable ideas, in a general context that tended to favour intellectual exercises that were impressive in their complexity — or should I say complicatedness? — but had little to do with reality and common sense, hence producing in many feminists what I experienced as frustrating theory/practice inconsistency.
What in particular captured my attention about critical realism at this first stage was its non-dualistic or non-atomistic way of making distinctions between entities. I was annoyed with the tendency among poststructuralists to collapse distinctions on the basis of the implicit assumption that distinguishing two phenomena means denying their intra-connection. There are so many tacit assumptions like this in the poststructuralist body of work, assumptions that in fact accept the premises of traditional malestream science. I came across Andrew Sayer's idea of the ‘pomo flip’, whereby poststructuralists simply reverse the logic of positivist, malestream science in a way that retains the underlying categorical structure that is really the root problem. Reading Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom I was later thrilled by Roy's notion of ‘dialectical antagonists’, which similarly captures the way in which standpoints that seem to be opposed to one another in fact stand in a relation of tacit complicity in that they implicitly agree on the underlying categorical structure that is the terrain that organizes their very antagonism.
An example of how poststructuralists enter into tacit complicity with their opponents can be seen when, in their efforts to combat the atomist notion of the subject, which denies that subjects are constituted by their internal relations to others and to social relations of power, poststructuralists have difficulty retaining any sense of the subject as real and independent from its constitutive relations. In my work I have sought to highlight that in this move poststructuralists in fact buy into the atomist's notion of what can be seen to constitute a real entity and, relatedly, into his absolutist notion of independence. By means of the theory of emergence, the dialectic of unity-in-difference etc., critical realism instead challenges atomism at its root by questioning the very dualism between independence and dependence — probably the most basic of categorical errors. Hence, critical realism is a much more radical and sustainable critical alternative than poststructuralism in that it transcends the categorical structures of atomism rather than superficially reversing them, as poststructuralists in my view tend to do. Similarly, Roy's definition of the real as that which has causal effects in the world challenges problematic empiricist ideas of the real as only that which is tangible and object-like. By contrast, poststructuralist tendencies to fictionalize the subject on the ground that it lacks absolute autonomy from its ‘outside’, reproduce such problematic ideas of what it means for something to exist, to be real.
If adhering to critical realist claims about reality felt somewhat taboo in gender studies circles, at least a decade ago when I discovered Roy's philosophical system, embracing Roy's philosophy of metaReality felt even more daring in the socialist and feminist circles in which I hung out. For a long time I had felt stuck in between the two polarized camps of antispiritual radicals and apolitical spirituals. For example, I worked for some time at a leftist weekly and remember that I kept my mouth shut about the fact that I had started practising Zen Buddhist meditation, anticipating the ridicule — or silence — that might meet this piece of information. At that time I also felt the politics/spirituality split inside myself. I found it difficult, both practically and intellectually, to reconcile the conflict-orientation, the materialism and the outward-directed energies of radical politics with the spiritual ideas of being as essentially a harmonious whole, of consciousness and love as transformative and of the importance of inwardness and ‘in-action’ as I think Roy called it. At a deeper level I did sense that these different aspects of transformative practice were compatible, though, and coming across Roy's work on metaReality I felt as if this new system of thought fitted just perfectly with my own intuitions, thoughts and half-thoughts, generated in a dialectic between my thinking and my bodily-psychic meditative practices. Of course the dialectic of unity-in-difference is essential here, as everywhere: the spiritual and the political cannot get by without each other, yet they are not the same. And due to their relative autonomy from one another, it is also possible for them to enter into an antagonistic relation, and it is in this disabling state of a dialectical contradiction that they are at present, although it seems there might be a transformation coming.
In my scholarly work I have drawn on metaRealism, besides original critical realism and dialectical critical realism, in order to theorize love, gender and power. A central tension that I seek to theorize in a reconciliatory way in my book The Contradictions of Love is that between love as a resource that can be exploited and thus part of oppressive (gendered) structures and love as a ‘no-lose situation’, as Roy described it. I argue that both these notions of love are valid, but that the latter corresponds to something ontologically more fundamental, more real. It is only when the ultimately unifying power of love is channelled via the kind of atomistic ego selves that are paramount in the current world, but which are unnecessary and ultimately self-defeating, that it is possible to love ‘too much’, to lose something by loving. At the same time, it is of utmost importance not to deny the relative realness of the exploitative order of love and the deprivation of women that men's appropriation of their loving energies does entail. The conditions on which this order rests are ultimately illusions, but causally efficacious illusions, as Roy characterized ‘demi-reality’. Drawing heavily on all the major phases in Roy's philosophy, I seek to make sense of the ontological tensions between different levels and degrees of reality that make up gendered love and show how we might dissolve the demi-real, oppressive aspects of this multidimensional and contradictory whole by drawing on the basic powers that sustain it.
Although Contradictions of Love is primarily about the gendered conditions of what Anna G. Jónasdóttir terms ‘love power’, meta-theoretical themes are woven into these more substantial discussions throughout the book. As so often in my thinking, I start out theorizing a rather concrete theme only to end up finding myself compelled to explore — or preferably solve — some of the most basic and thorny philosophical issues, in order to be able to say something consistent about the substantive issues that prompted my initial interest. Roy has been such a reliable companion in these intellectual voyages, offering solid answers to about everything that relates to the basic philosophical questions. Moreover, given that much in reality and knowledge is characterized by ambiguity — such as the truth at the centre of my work that women's powerlessness vis-à-vis men is both real and illusory — Roy's dialectical embrace of reality and knowledge is an inexhaustible source of support and inspiration in my continuing endeavours to make sense of this world.
Lena Gunnarsson
Örebro University, Sweden
Email: [email protected]
Roy Bhaskar and post-Kantian philosophy
I became interested in philosophical realism about a decade ago, mainly through an interpretation of Schelling's metaphysics that was tacitly influenced by François Laruelle's non-philosophy, alongside a critical view of Kant's idealism and its legacy. I was a postgraduate student at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), which was then at Middlesex University and is now at Kingston University. Noticing my interest in realism, a few of my superiors at the CRMEP encouraged me to consider Bhaskar's work. Vaguely aware of critical realism at that point, I was hesitant to take on something that might lead me deep into the philosophy of science and too far afield of Kant and German idealism (hesitation that now appears ironically unwarranted). So I put it off for a year or so. My interpretation of Schelling quickly proved sterile, and my critiques of Kant needed a firmer philosophical framework to coordinate them, so I decided to read A Realist Theory of Science. I was instantly sympathetic to that book's core positions and promptly made use of Bhaskar's contentions that anti-ontological epistemologies generate ‘implicit ontologies’ (which harmonized well with a critique of Kant I had previously devised) and that the intelligibility of scientific experimentation presupposes transcendentally real tendencies. I then began reading Bhaskar's subsequent work enthusiastically, enjoying especially its dissolution of the false dichotomies that often hamstring philosophical debates, and I found my intellectual home in critical realism.
My doctoral thesis served as the basis of my book, The Problem of Critical Ontology: Bhaskar contra Kant (2013). The main purpose of this book is to show how Bhaskar's transcendental realism and rehabilitation of ontology in the philosophy of science can be reconstructed and developed to directly undermine the anti-ontological facets of Kant's transcendental idealist conception of natural necessity and cognitive experience. Anglo-American Kant scholarship has been flourishing recently, and with so many philosophers sympathetic to orthodox Kantianism on the rise (not to mention the historical influence Kant's idealism continually exercises), I think it is worthwhile to reassess and restate Bhaskar's transcendental realist alternative. For the same reason, though, it is not always possible to reiterate Bhaskar's arguments in their original form. For example, the contention that Kant's epistemology contains an implicit ontology will be met with arguments to the contrary from non-metaphysical interpretations of his transcendental idealism and empirical realism, while the contention that his conception of natural necessity is committed to empirical regularity as a condition of natural lawfulness will need to consider scholarly discussions of the Analogies of Experience. I have tried to meet these challenges in my reconstructions and developments of Bhaskar's arguments on these points. Hence I argue, on the one hand, that non-metaphysical interpretations of Kant's epistemology harbour problematic ontological assumptions concerning the difference between empirical reality and things in themselves. On the other, I argue that Kant's conception of natural necessity is vulnerable to the critique of regularity theories of causal laws that Bhaskar's ‘transcendental analysis of experimental activity’ contains.
These and related lines of argument have allowed me to show how critical realism, as a form of critical and transcendental philosophy, contributes to one of the most central issues in post-Kantian philosophy: the legitimacy of metaphysics, which has been at stake in German idealism, neo-Kantianism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, and deconstruction. Indeed, it is my view that Bhaskar has given us the most defensible, ambitious, and systematic response to the nexus of problems that constitute post-Kantian philosophy. Thus part of my current project consists in situating critical realism within this intellectual lineage, and part of it consists in defending certain critical realist positions in contemporary debates. These two tasks are united by the fact that the problem-nexus of post-Kantian philosophy continues to determine many contemporary debates: the ontological and normative status of the social and transcendental, the relation between the theoretical and the practical, the significance of natural and social science, and the prospects for emancipatory politics, for example, are as relevant as ever.
I think the most adequate demonstration of Bhaskar's philosophical importance in this regard would include a thorough exposition, consolidation and defence of the most fundamental claims and arguments of the system he elaborated through basic critical realism, dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality. I hope to realize this in my future work, as it would provide a unified point of entry into Bhaskar's philosophy and solidify the overarching theoretical structure that organizes it. This would offer another opportunity to supply some of the argumentative detail and extended engagement with rival positions that it would have been impossible for Bhaskar to constantly provide during his lifetime, given the uncommonly wide range of topics and problems he tackled throughout his career. Although Bhaskar already established the core arguments and critiques of rival positions that support his claims, I believe such supplementary work is desirable insofar as it further substantiates his positions, creates more occasions for dialogue with non-critical realist philosophers, and further deprives those who dismiss or ignore critical realism of good reasons for doing so.
The issue with which I am currently occupied is one that again ties critical realism to post-Kantian philosophy as well as recent analytic epistemology: the viability of transcendental argumentation. This is something I touched upon in the first chapter of my book, but only to indicate some common ground between Kant and Bhaskar, which did not satisfactorily deal with the issue itself. First, I want to show how Bhaskar's conception of the transcendental method, which emphasizes fallibility and geo-historical relativity, is a critically informed refinement of Kant's. Second, I want to show that this refined transcendental method can productively contribute to debates involving objections that tacitly assume the more traditionally Kantian conceptions of transcendental argumentation to exhaust the possibilities of this method. Finally, I want to show that transcendental arguments for transcendental realism are not precluded by the connection Kant drew between transcendental idealism and synthetic a priori cognition since his reasoning in support of that connection is insufficient.
Closely related to the issue of transcendental argumentation for Bhaskar is that of dialectical argumentation and dialectic more generally, which in turn are suggestive of the nature of rationality. Bhaskar's association of philosophical method with rationality in this way is additional evidence of his German idealist pedigree. This is something I plan to investigate in the near future, along with the notion of absenting absence, the critique of Hegelian dialectic, and the connection between dialectical rationality and human freedom. With respect to this last point, I should note that, although my project heretofore has focused on the more ‘theoretical’ aspects of critical realism, I have never lost sight of the fact that human emancipation is the ultimate purpose of critical realism. This is obviously what most attracts people to Bhaskar's work, and rightly so, in my view. Like many others, I take critical realism to offer the most viable philosophical assistance to the realization of an eudemonic society. The path I take towards conclusions of this sort in my published work will probably be longer than that taken by others, but it is one I want to tread with care given its superior importance, without forgetting its superior urgency.
The first and only time I met Bhaskar was in July 2014, at the annual IACR/ICCR conference at the Institute of Education in London. It was a genuine pleasure to finally meet the man who had such a strong and positive influence on me, and I feel so lucky to have done so before his death. Although my interaction with him was limited, he seemed to me a model of virtue, beaming with the unflappable yet rigorously rational optimism his writings conveyed, happily devoid of the vanity, pettiness and careerism that academia can unfortunately inculcate, and treating everyone around him as his intellectual and moral equal. It is of course painful to lose such a rare and much-needed personality, but we should be pleased that such character traits have been actual and remain possible, if they are not already actual, for us.
Speaking of such matters, the conference at which I met Bhaskar was immediately followed by a workshop he led on the philosophy of metaReality. Though occupied with his earlier work, I was largely unfamiliar with his later work, so I decided to attend the workshop. I still have too much reading on this topic to conduct to make a confident and informed judgment now, but I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by the continuity with basic and dialectical critical realism that was apparent to me then. Furthermore, the focus on self-realization, and specifically the idea that emancipation at the individual level conditions the most effective form of agency for social change, probably impressed me most at that event. I have been interested in matters of self-realization, existential authenticity, and individual well-being since the beginning of my intellectual life. However, I have previously refrained from pursuing such topics in my research, being unsure of their philosophical (as opposed to personal or psychological) significance, wary of the metaphysics of selfhood, and daunted by the scale of the relevant discussions in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I also lacked a satisfactory philosophical framework in which to contextualize questions of this kind. That, however, seems to be slowly changing, and it is quite possible that Bhaskar's work will be integral to mine here as well.
Dustin McWherter
American University of Beirut, Lebanon
Email: [email protected]
Roy Bhaskar: critical realism meets integral theory (and complex thought)
I first came across critical realism in late 2009, while I was searching for somewhere to do my PhD. I was studying dialectical thinking at the Interdevelopmental Institute with Otto Laske, who combines adult developmental psychology with dialectical thinking, and uses a combination of Michael Basseches's empirical approach to dialectical thinking with Bhaskar's philosophical approach. I had never heard of Roy Bhaskar or critical realism before, but eagerly started reading his work. I was immediately attracted to his robust ontology, his dialectical approach and above all the philosophy of metaReality. Here, I thought, was a sophisticated philosophy that had challenged deeply entrenched intellectual taboos and provided a solid foundation for a new vision of society and human beings that went beyond both modernity and postmodernity. Its vision also felt intuitively compatible with that of another comprehensive philosophy or metatheory I was familiar with, integral theory, which is built around a fundamentally developmental and spiritual framework. I was delighted to discover that Roy was a World Scholar at the Institute of Education in London, got in contact with him, and started my PhD research under his supervision in January 2011.
As the PhD unfolded, it turned into theoretical research on how critical realism and integral theory, and later Edgar Morin's complex thought, might interface and mutually enrich each other. In 2010 Roy had already connected with the leading proponent of integral theory in the US academy, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, and they had organized a four-day symposium in 2011 with some ten scholars from each philosophy. This was the beginning of a series of symposiums over the next years, including the latest that was held in July 2014 at the Institute of Education. These symposiums have been highly constructive, if at times tense, and have led to a number of articles that explore this interface in both Journal of Critical Realism and the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, as well as the two-volume Metatheory in the Twenty-First Century: Critical Realism and Integral Theory in Dialogue, edited by Roy, Mervyn Hartwig, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and Nick Hedlund-de Witt, to be published by Routledge this year. My thesis is also due to be published by Routledge, in 2016, with the title Towards a Complex Integral Realism.
Roy was, of course, the central figure in these dialogues, naturally promoting and defending the core contributions of critical realism while at the same time being open to aspects of integral theory that could enrich and strengthen critical realism. He felt both excited at the prospect of some kind of synthesis, especially between critical realism and integral theory (complex thought is less well known in the English-speaking world), and concerned to ensure that the critical realist depth ontology remained foundational. One core difficulty involved in forming a cogent synthesis between the two philosophies is the epistemological bias and epistemic fallacy that characterizes the ‘post-metaphysical phase’ (the last of five phases) of integral theory. This is where Roy and all the critical realists, and also a fair number of integral theorists, feel that critical realist depth ontology could substantially strengthen integral theory. Other ways that critical realism could arguably enrich integral theory include providing a greater dialectical intricacy and sophistication, its emphasis on the social sciences and social emancipation and its secular spirituality based on transcendental argument. In turn, integral theory could enrich critical realism with its elegant developmental approach, its psychological sophistication and its more ‘reverent’ spirituality based on contemplative phenomenology.
I learnt about complex thought at the first ‘CRIT’ symposium in 2011, saw its deep-structural compatibility with critical realism and integral theory, and proceeded to integrate it in my thesis. Roy was immediately open to this inclusion, and expressed his resonance with much of Morin's thought. Morin has a similar background to Roy, coming from a libertarian Marxist past and concerned above all with human emancipation. They both met in 2013, at the Integral Theory Conference where they featured as keynote speakers, and immediately connected. Complex thought is grounded above all in the physical and biological sciences, and also focuses on a generalized anthropology — which nicely complements critical realism's focus on the social sciences and philosophy, and integral theory's focus on the interior human sciences (psychology and spirituality).
The common deep ground all three philosophies share, together with their different emphases and strengths, is what provides an exciting synergetic potential that Roy encouraged. They are all integrative, maximally inclusive and non-reductionist, with a common post-formal cognitive base that leads naturally to an inter(trans)disciplinarity that aims to capture reality in its full complexity and multidimensionality. They incorporate the best of pre-modernity, modernity and postmodernity, all have a stratified vision of reality, and are all strong defenders of interiority, the subject and agency. All three promote a dialectical universality, are driven by a powerful emancipatory concern, and embrace, to differing degrees, spirituality. And they all provide strong critiques of the western tradition: critical realism powerfully metacritiquing the irrealist bias of western philosophy as a whole; complex thought targeting classical science and formal logic (‘the paradigm of simplicity’); and integral theory honing in on its lack of deep interiority and ‘flatland’ reduction of interiors to exteriors.
The aim of all the scholars involved in this dialogue has been to search for ways in which both, or all three, philosophies might join forces and mutually enrich each other, some focusing on some kind of theoretical synthesis, others on applications to specific areas. At the IOE symposium in July 2014, Roy summarized the four main theoretical positions that symposium participants had adopted: a preservative synthesis of the three philosophies, resulting in a complex integral realism (Sean Esbjörn-Hargens's position); the possibility of synthesis, which would likely negate some elements — also leading to a complex integral realism (my position); a critical realist integral theory, which embeds elements on integral theory within a strong critical realist ontology and involves a non-preservative sublation (Roy's and Nick Hedlund-de Witt's position); and resonance between critical realism and integral theory, where there is cross-fertilization and integration of cognitive resources from both (Mervyn Hartwig's position).
There have already been a number of preliminary applications of these combined philosophies, for example to climate change and education, with the second volume of the book Metatheory in the Twenty-First Century outlining more. One area that I feel is ripe for application is human nature. This is still a very general subject but, given the breadth and depth covered by the combination of strengths of all three philosophies, it might be possible to construct a model of human nature that is sufficiently comprehensive to do justice — at least more justice than current reductionist models — to the complexity and multidimensionality involved.
These dialogues, and the theoretical and practical research that they have already engendered, and will engender, are one way in which the remarkable philosophical legacy left by Roy might continue to bear fruit. I feel very fortunate to be a part of these dialogues and to have known and worked with such a first-class philosopher and wonderful human being. Throughout my four years of supervision Roy challenged me, sometimes a little more than I had anticipated (!), carefully guided my progress and consciously fostered the natural unfolding of my ideas. I am grateful to him in so many ways.
Paul Marshall
UCL Institute of Education, UK
Email: [email protected]
Roy Bhaskar, critical realism and my journey within social science
Studying creativity is problematic as there are significant conceptual hurdles to navigate in order to conduct empirical work or make a theoretical contribution. When I began my journey into creativity studies I was fortunate to be encouraged to explore ideas in a number of philosophical domains, in addition to critical realism, but it was Roy's ideas that enabled me to overcome the philosophical hurdles within creativity theory. The most significant of these were how to study creativity prior to its recognition (as creativity was commonly defined as requiring recognition), where creativity comes from and, how is it possible to explain the emergence of something new. My interest in creative potential and how it was enabled and constrained within the workplace meant that these were fundamental issues.
The ideas developed by Roy proved to be directly relevant to these problems. Understanding how something came into being could be grasped through his work on causal powers and the classification of causal powers into the domains of the real, actual and empirical. This stratification of causal mechanisms helped support the arguments for creativity existing beyond the recognition of others. It also provided the ontological justification for a model of creative potential and how it can emerge into creative performance. The issue of where creativity came from also proved resolvable through drawing on Roy's work. Creativity theory contains within it an ex nihilo problem whereby the origin of the ‘something new’ in creativity needs explaining. I spent almost a year of my PhD studying the ‘nothing’ of the ‘ex nihilo’. Asking, what is nothing? And, how can something emerge from nothing? Apart from being a good conversation starter, studying nothing is problematic because it is impossible to find an empirical or conceptual referent. Once again Roy's work, in dialectical critical realism this time, provided a framework for understanding ‘nothing’ that proved fundamental to my work. Whilst Roy and I disagreed on some of the finer points concerning creativity, his work ultimately enabled me to reach the insight that creativity had been under-defined and had to involve discovery if it was to be consistent with the principles of critical realism.
In using Roy's work it is hard not to admire the precision of his arguments on the nature of philosophical enquiry, ontology and social science. Whilst Roy is accused by opponents of being obscure I found the opposite. The precision and clarity of his work, especially A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, were uncommon in the philosophy of science. Even his dialectical work, which I will not pretend was easy to learn, is an incredibly careful set of arguments that is yet to be fully translated into social-scientific practice. Invariably I find that if there is a wrinkle or niggle in one theory or another I am working with, I can return to Roy's work and find a set of arguments that will help resolve the tensions identified.
This brings me to my memories of Roy as a mentor and friend. I first met Roy during my doctoral studies and we spent some time debating ex nihilo creativity. This first meeting turned out to be the catalyst for a debate about the nature of creativity that would continue for around a decade, with many of those discussions leading to a breakthrough in my thinking. I was fortunate enough to count Roy amongst my friends, as well as an academic mentor. He was endlessly encouraging, supportive, as well as being intellectually challenging. At his funeral I realized that his qualities were experienced by so many who knew him. Some comments I recall from that day were ‘he was a towering intellect, who never made you feel you were looking up at a tower’, and that he would ‘always be more interested in discussing your work than his own’. Such dedication to the work of others, to emancipatory change and to developing critical realism was a privilege to work alongside and witness.
Like many others, I have built my academic career using critical realism as an under-labourer to social science. I have applied his thinking to creativity studies, education, gender studies, entrepreneurship and sustainability. Whilst this may seem a disparate set of contexts they are linked by a theme explicit in all of Roy's work: emancipatory change. And that, for me, was his most important influence. His dedication to bringing about change through applying philosophy to contemporary issues was an inspiration that will always live with me and continues to guide my work.
Lee Martin
University of Nottingham, UK
Email: [email protected]
Roy Bhaskar: a life well lived walking the talk
I would like to talk about Roy, rather than my own work (which has greatly benefited from getting to know both his philosophy and him as a person). What struck me most about Roy was what at first sight seemed a paradox. On the one hand, he was powerfully unique and individualist, to the point of being what may have seemed (to some — but not when you got to know him) arrogant and even selfish. One of the ways that his unique identity was expressed was through his idiosyncratic appearance and his stubborn refusal to alter it. For instance, he wore his hair very long and dyed black. This cannot have been an advantage to him in the academic institutions of the UK, notorious for their conservative attitudes towards appearance. One can imagine stalwart members of the establishment wondering what made him think that he was so special that he could break with social etiquette. Similarly, in his work Roy faced a public backlash against his spiritual turn. He responded to the protestations and pleas against his spiritual views, but only by changing how he referred to God; in his more recent work he used either a small ‘g’ or talked about God as the ‘cosmic envelope’. (He was not himself religious, as distinct from spiritual.) As a consequence, on both these counts, in terms of his appearance and in terms of the spiritual turn, Roy certainly faced prejudice. At each original twist in his life and thought he suffered the rejection of the system.
On the other hand, Roy was selfless. He dedicated, one might even say sacrificed, his life to improving the well-being of humanity. I only knew him for the last five years of his life, but in all of that time he seemed solely focused on his work. I do not recall him taking a holiday and it seemed to me that he hardly noticed the weekends; they were days to get things done, just like any other day. This seeming paradox also played out in how he treated me as a postdoctoral student. On the one hand he was always deeply compassionate and took time to know the details of my life, often giving tailored, personal advice on quite small problems (he once gave me advice on how to better organize my housework — no doubt there is some irony here: I don't think Roy spent much time himself on housework!). On the other hand, if I phoned to say that I was struggling to cope with a deadline and might not make a lecture, he had little sympathy. He considered all the people present at a lecture to be important contributors and I was letting the side down by not showing. He thus wanted me to push beyond my discomfort and inconvenience in order to achieve what was best for our collective good.
In retrospect I realize that this apparent paradox, a movement between concern for the unique singularity of the individual self and a concern for the collective (which might require sacrifice on the part of the individual), was in fact merely the manifestation in Roy's life of certain aspects of his philosophy. One of these aspects was his understanding of each human being as an entirely unique, concretely singularized individual and yet simultaneously also a component of the transfactual concrete universality of human beingness. Thus Roy was deeply committed to freedom which he saw as being motivated by one's own (individual) desire for freedom but nevertheless being dependent on universal freedom (Dialectic). Therefore whilst he felt that it was important, indeed vital for the future of the world, that we encourage people to freely express their individuality or their dharma, nevertheless, the free flourishing of the individual was dependent on the free flourishing of all. Consequently (as he told me on more than one occasion) many people choose to sacrifice their own well-being for the well-being of everyone. It is therefore ironic that what sometimes appeared to be contradictory in Roy's life was in fact evidence of his commitment to theory/practice consistency. Indeed, Roy was so committed to this consistency that he would rather attract social censure than fail in his endeavour to achieve it (in so far as it was possible). The strange circumstance whereby a consistent position should appear to be inconsistent is perhaps only possible because we have become so used to the contradictions of society. It is a contradiction to be either totally selfish, or self-sacrificing perhaps to the point that one loses one's health and cannot contribute significantly to society. I do not pretend that Roy always got this balance right but he certainly did try to achieve it to the best of his ability. It is also a contradiction that people should be so severely judged on their choice of hair style, clothes or spirituality especially when these are linked to cultural or racial differences. Yet how one chooses to wear one's hair will not significantly affect one's work as an academic and just under half of all scientists are religious. These scientists (inconsistently) prefer to hide their religious beliefs. In fact, I would argue that one of Roy's most impressive achievements is how he managed to present an account of science that is not only more consistent with how science actually works, but is also consistent with a concept of God (god or the cosmic envelope), whilst at the same time not necessarily being unpalatable to atheists either. In an interview with Mervyn Hartwig for The Formation of Critical Realism, Roy revealed that ever since he was a boy he had felt that the main thing that made someone a good person was that they walked their talk (demonstrated theory/practice consistency). In this respect, we can say that despite enormous pressures to do otherwise, Roy ultimately succeeded, not only in being one of the most significant philosophers of his time, but also in being a good person.
Leigh Price
Rhodes University, South Africa
Email: [email protected]
Roy Bhaskar as mentor and collaboratorFootnote1
I first encountered Roy at the Critical Realism and Education Conference at the Institute of Education in June 2008. I arrived just before his keynote address and beheld him ‘in state’ on the platform with his mane of black hair looking like an intellectual native American chief flanked by other impressive-looking critical realist thinkers who were, I think, Margaret Archer, David Scott and Alan Norrie. Before this encounter, I had used critical realism as the framework for a social-scientific methodology for my PhD, and I came to the conference armed with an arsenal of probing questions determined to find out whether Bhaskar in the flesh was the ‘real deal’.
Roy's keynote talk in which he outlined the totality of his thought — from his understanding of philosophical seriousness and his critique of Humean actualism by an immanent critique of the intelligibility of experimental activity through absence, dialectic critical realism and the MELDARA schema to the philosophy of metaReality — left me in no doubt that I was in the presence of a commanding and highly original thinker of a calibre that I had not encountered before. Each element of Roy's thought fitted with the rest of his schema with hydraulic smoothness and left the impression of a complete philosophical system that indeed could underlabour greater human flourishing in the world in four-planar social being.
Also, as a Muslim, I was immediately struck how critical realism in all its moments might be applied to underlabour Islamic praxis in multi-faith contexts. I saw that critical realist meta-themes such as ‘seriousness’ and ‘underlabouring’ also characterized an authentic understanding of Islam and that critical realist ideas that Roy had originated — such as four-planar social being, absence and demi-reality — can underlabour for a re-framing of Islamic notions such as Jihad (struggle in the path of God) in a way that is appropriate to a peaceful, transformative life in multi-faith contexts. So I determined to approach this figurehead of critical realism, who was clearly the epicentre of the conference, to put my ideas to him.
So imagine my delight when Roy made a point of approaching me, after he had fielded my arsenal of questions with impressive depth and with intellectual humility, and asked me to come to see him to discuss my ideas. This meeting led to our post-doctoral collaboration and resulted in the development of a completely new branch of systematic Islamic theological-philosophy: Islamic critical realism. This Islamic critical realism is outlined in my book, A Fresh Look at Islam in a Multi-Faith World (Routledge, 2015), which, happily, Roy oversaw to completion before he died.
Both Roy and I are immensely proud of this synthesis which I believe Roy regarded in part as a culmination of his own quest to synthesize the wisdom of the East with the intellectual rigour of the West. It was also so characteristic of Roy to pick up on and then desire to tease out and nurture new ideas in someone who was not an established academic but who, Roy saw, had some interesting ideas to bring into the world. Roy was always on the look-out for good ideas. Indeed, he lived for good ideas and, as such, was a rare breed in the academy.
As a mentor and collaborator, three characteristics marked Roy out, as he would say at the level 1M — being-as-such and as non-identity — from the rest.
First was Roy's complete conviction in the power and necessity for good and original ideas. He believed in the power and necessity of what we were doing together when no one else did and had the sincere belief that good ideas can transform the real world. He also made me believe, as I am sure he did others, that our work together was one of the most important things in the world.
Second, relatedly, Roy believed that good ideas inevitably need to be put to work to increase the sum of human and natural flourishing. This is why his ideas have underlaboured so many disciplines — natural science, social science, environmental studies, gender studies, philosophy of religion to name a few — because for Roy an ‘is’ often entailed an ‘ought’. While he posited the primacy of structure, he also believed deeply in the transformative power of human agency.
In my field, because there clearly exist terrible blocks and hiatuses to Muslim–non-Muslim understanding, it was self-evident to Roy that critical realism should underlabour the resolution of these obstacles to human flourishing. This meta-aim for the full flourishing of human being endowed Roy's thought with genuine transfactuality and universalism. In my case, although Roy was not Muslim, this meta-aim gave him a genuine and deep insight into what the Islamic faith has and can bequeath to humanity's flourishing at a time when this is by no means obvious.
Third, Roy was determined that the same philosophical rigour that he had applied to the natural and social dimensions should be applied to the dimension of spirituality and he pursued and paid a high price for this ideal. In this characteristic, he was perhaps unique among academic thinkers of our age because he realized that this absence (at 2E) of systematic thought in the spiritual domain is doing great damage to humanity and that the whole human being requires a serious philosophical treatment if human flourishing is to be achieved.
Humanly, although Roy was a towering intellectual figure, he never made me (or others) feel that I was looking up at an ivory tower. He was always friendly and approachable and always greeted one with a welcoming, ‘Hi!’, even when under terrible physical and latterly financial constraints. He spoke to me and other pupils and mentees as equal human beings who were exploring our humanity together in order to improve the condition of humanity.
Roy, your work of underlabouring is done. You have bequeathed to us the immense gift of philosophical seriousness and now I can assure you that, God willing, the work of 4D — transformative praxis — to increase human flourishing will go on.
Matthew L. N. Wilkinson
UCL Institute of Education, UK
Email: [email protected]
Roy Bhaskar: living the critical realist embrace
Over and above Roy Bhaskar's towering intellect, his profound grasp of the human condition, his insatiable drive to absent absences and right the wrongs of poverty and injustice in our world through the development of critical realist philosophy, it was his enduring commitment to ‘walk the talk’, his search for wholeness and ‘unity of theory and practice’ that I find truly inspirational. Take, for example, his early political activism, exploratory practice with psychoanalysis, meditation and other spiritual practices, his positivity in the face of physical hardship and disability, or simply his courage in publishing and disseminating ideas that challenged the status quo head-on. To me, at least, critical realism is, or has the potential to be, much more than a set of carefully thought-out ideas; yes — critical realism is about ‘thinking being’, but through all its phases it also offers us an underlabouring guide in ‘being being’ — critical realism as a lived practice.
As I address the question ‘why critical realism?’ for me personally, I realize that I have come a long way since my own hesitant first reading of the philosophy in the early noughties. I happened across critical realism somewhat tangentially, first in the work of John Kitching, one of my PhD supervisors at Kingston University, and then in the writings of the institutional economist Geoffrey Hodgson. My thesis was seeking to explain the emergence of the labour market for early music performers in the UK (I had sung professionally with many of the leading early music groups in the late 1980s and early 1990s). I discovered that orthodox economics really had very little to say about how labour markets were formed — they were just assumed to exist. Probing deeper brought me to the works of Margaret Archer (the morphogenetic approach), Steve Fleetwood (his critical realist treatment of labour markets), and only later to Roy Bhaskar's writings (particularly on emergence and the TMSA). I adopted these ideas as central components of my thesis. I didn't actually meet Roy until the summer of 2004 at the IACR conference in Cambridge — I recall being somewhat star-struck at the time.
Following my PhD, new research directions called. Whilst my doctoral study had explored the domain of early music, I had taken a very conscious decision not to engage directly with the music itself, and its performance. My focus had been restricted to explaining the labour market from a socio-economic perspective. But the elephant in the room could no longer be ignored, and I began to think more about my own experiences of singing, performing and making music. I was particularly struck by what I termed ‘extreme agency’, i.e. feeling more alive, more awake and connected than normal, and ‘real presence’ in the context of performing. Although there were clear connections here with well-known writings on the relational and embodied nature of performance, ‘doing and undergoing’, and the ‘flow’, it seemed to me that there remained (and remains) something important to be understood. I turned to Roy for guidance. With a palpable sense of genuine enthusiasm, imparting the belief in me that my research really mattered and was worth doing (this alone is something I shall always be grateful for), he exhorted me to keep going deeper into it. After a long conversation about possible links with critical realism his parting shot was ‘Go away and read Dialectic and particularly the Philosophy of MetaReality’, suggesting that we meet up again ‘soon’.
Such enthusiasm, to say nothing of faith in others' abilities, was characteristic of what I think of as ‘living the critical realist embrace’. Though this is a turn of phrase Roy originally introduced in The Formation of Critical Realism to refer to the notion that critical realists can entertain the insights of other positions and ‘need not fear anything from them’, I see it also as a reflection of his desire for this philosophical perspective to be applied ‘seriously’ in all manner of contexts, including mine. It has been hugely enriching, for example, contributing to the postgraduate reading group sessions on Monday evenings at the Institute of Education, where Roy was employed as World Scholar; or the IACR annual conference, where one would hear critical realism being discussed in the enormously varied contexts of children's rights, diasporic communities, disability, education, entrepreneurship, global warming, interdisciplinarity, law and criminal justice, religion, and so much more besides. Somehow, my work on art, creativity, performance and aesthetics fitted in here — it was not marginalized, kept separate or ostracized from the interests of either social scientists or philosophers. There was a place for it. Roy even encouraged me to sing (I regret I never managed to get him and others present to reciprocate in an expression of ‘transcendental teamwork or holistic synchronicity’!).
It is very much in Roy Bhaskar's spirit of living the critical realist embrace that I have now embarked on the project of applying critical realism to the domain of art and aesthetics, an ambitious venture that has thus far received only limited attention (notable exceptions include Melanie McDonald, Tobin Nellhaus and Ian Verstegen). It seems to me — and Roy agreed, promising to provide his much-needed support — that there is huge scope for the insights of critical realism as a philosophy of science to be brought to bear in the field of (the) art(s). From Dialectic I have begun to learn about what I see as the importance of absenting the absence of art and ‘being artful’ in everyday life, so too in doing science/philosophy. From metaRealism I now carry with me an increasingly deeply-held commitment to a world that is always already enchanted, but nonetheless in need of re-enchantment such that we become more aware of the inherent meaning and value around and in us. Art can play a vital underlabouring role of its own here, as I try to explain in The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age (2013).
I daresay that my own explorations into critical realism are similar to many others in respect of their being very much the journey of the ‘do-it-yourself’ critical realist. I am not a philosopher ‘proper’; but I count myself hugely fortunate in having received expert guidance and encouragement from one of the very finest when I needed it. I shall miss Roy's counsel, but I am also grateful that he leaves behind a bookshelf of instruction manuals to refer to. In my view, living the critical realist embrace is not something to be practised only ‘at work’, whether this be in the primary context of philosophy, science, art or education; it has its place in every corner of our everyday lives (and that includes enjoying a curry and a drink or two at the Ravi Shankar — a favourite of Roy's). So, returning to the question ‘why critical realism?’, let me conclude by adapting a now-famous advertising slogan for a well-known beverage launched coincidentally just as Bhaskar's re-vindication of ontology, A Realist Theory of Science, was first published: because ‘it reaches the parts other philosophies can't reach’. Cheers, Roy, and thank you.
Nick Wilson
King's College London, UK
Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 This is an edited version of my tribute to Ram Roy Bhaskar at his funeral in London on 5 December 2015.
Related Research Data
