MetaRealism

This special issue completes our series of special issues on the main developmental phases of the philosophy of critical realism: original critical realism,¹ dialectical critical realism² and metaRealism.³ Entirely in keeping with its main developmental thrust, in my view, metaRealism adds an absolute transcendental stratum or spiritual infrastructure to critical realist philosophical ontology. If Bhaskar sometimes refers to his spiritual turn as ‘so-called’ it is because, I think, he deemed his philosophy to be always already at least implicitly spiritual. The fundamental drive of the system as a whole is spiritual in the sense of transcending dualism and oppositionality, that is, achieving union or identity in a total context.⁴ Its main motor is a double process of immanent critique — first of the philosophical discourse of modernity, more generally the Western philosophical tradition; second of its own prior phases — coupled with transcendental argumentation for realist positions that render human transformative praxis more intelligible, leading to more adequate and complete conceptual formations. Original critical realism does, I think, successfully resolve many of the key dualisms of the philosophy of Western modernity (structure/agency, individualism/collectivism, body/mind, causes/reasons, facts/values) but not the most portentous dualism of all for human free flourishing: the antinomy, or paradoxical co-presence, of (essential) freedom and (actual) slavery famously noted by Rousseau: people as such are free but everywhere in chains.⁵ The full resolution of this dualism had to await the dialectical critical realist and metaRealist understanding that the difference prioritized over unity in Western philosophy, including original critical realism, presupposes underlying unity or identity-in-difference. There are a number of milestones along the way to this result.⁶

First, the basic structure of emancipatory critique and the theories of the TINA (‘there is no alternative') compromise formation and demi-reality⁷ that it entrains is already given in the argument of transcendental realism for the inexorability of ontology: not only is ontology necessary, but if your ontology is inadequate you will necessarily presuppose in your practice a more or less adequate one.⁸ Second, this already presupposes ontological and alethic truth — that truth is fundamentally a real feature of the world. Third, implicit within the notion of alethic truth is a concept of truth or reality as absolute.⁹ Fourth, implicit within that in a context of depth-stratification is the notion of an ultimate stratum of identity-in-difference, already mooted in Dialectic,¹⁰ ingredient in and sustaining everything else, analogously to the ingredience, according to some interpretations of quantum physics, of fundamental fields of non-localized potentiae in emergent levels of being.¹¹ Fifth, the experience of union or identity in the moment of absolute transcendence in any process of learning or discovery can be rendered fully intelligible only on the basis that it involves ‘the union between something already enfolded within the discovering agent, brought up to consciousness by a moment of Platonic anamnesis or recall, with the alethic self-revelation of the being known, existing outside him [sic]’;¹² that is, it involves the union of two beings at the level of the implicit, supramental consciousness of their ground-states, entailing the theory of generalized co-presence or interconnectedness — that at the level of fundamental possibility everything is implicitly contained within everything else. From there it is but a short step to link ‘the latent immanent teleology of praxis’¹³ (the pulse of freedom of Dialectic) to the immanent teleology of the real self/ground-state and cosmic absolute or envelope, and to view everything in the universe as enchanted and as ‘in the process of becoming one with its ground-state’.¹⁴ And so you arrive at metaReality, a zone of non-duality, unity and identity, a level at which everything is fundamentally interconnected, in virtue of which the world is always already enchanted and the ultimate source of human powers of creativity, love, right action and so on.¹⁵

This move constitutes an immanent critique of Marx's theory, which ‘does successfully capture a deep, perhaps the deepest dual level, in our social structure’,¹⁶ but

one which presupposes, and depends on the efficacy of a deeper, untheorized level, that of the ground-state qualities of unrecognized (non-commodified) creativity and unconditional love and other ground-state qualities that Marx did not theorize, just as his vision of a communist society actually depends on the process of self-realization or enlightenment and its universalization that the individual process [‘the free development of each’] both implies and presupposes for its completion.¹⁷

It is also an immanent critique of basic and dialectical critical realism which, although they arguably provide ‘the best account of what we have to get rid of’,¹⁸ no more than Marx can satisfactorily resolve the paradox or antinomy of the co-presence of realism and irrealism, freedom and slavery, potential plenty and dire scarcity, good and evil.

If realism is true … why is it that irrealism is so dominant? Well irrealism is so dominant because it reflects the irrealist, reified, heteronomous, oppressive structures of the societies in which we exist. Realism can only be conceived to be true if it reflects a deeper, more basic level [metaReality] which most of us have not fully developed or have so overlaid with structures that are irrealist in character that we find it difficult either to see why most people are irrealist, reified or unfree or to believe that realism, freedom, spontaneity, creativity, love, can actually be alethically true.¹⁹

The antinomy is resolved, then, by the thesis, first articulated in From East to West and the seminar presentations leading up to it, and thereafter given a more secular cast, that

man [sic] is essentially godlike, subsisting and acting in a world of relativity and duality. A difference springs up only as a product of illusion. And it is the essential nature of man to come to see through this illusion and to realize their self-consciousness as free and/or godlike.²⁰

As I have noted elsewhere,²¹ far from being foundational and irremediable, as the conventional wisdom of our age has it, alienation is thus geo-historically relative and reversible, and there are fundamental limits to it in the transcendentally real self or ground-state; in the transcendental principles of universal solidarity and axial rationality that underpin our social practices; in the transcendental identity consciousness that is an irreducible feature of social interaction with others; and in the fact that we are natural beings and, no matter how much we evolve or transform ourselves, can never get away from that.²² What links and grounds these limits is a fundamental human need for non-alienation, that is, unity, union, identity-in-difference or the coherence of love. Love, trust, sharing and solidarity, not — as the dominant liberal metanarrative has it — reciprocity, exchange and recognition, which have a very different, tit-for-tat moral logic, are ‘the ground of all human social life’ — what makes it possible.²³

What Bhaskar is beginning to articulate here is a naturalism that completely recasts the naturalism espoused by the positivistic, and tacitly endorsed by the Kantian tradition.²⁴ The great aporia of the former is its inability to sustain an account of intentional causality, and the great mirroring aporia of the latter is the unknowability of the self that confers intelligibility on the world.²⁵ The partial critical realist resolution of both aporias is carried through in metaRealism. Both self and world are knowable and human consciousness and intentional agency are emergent powers of the deep structure of possibility of the universe understood, in keeping with much modern physics, not as fundamentally chaotic,²⁶ but as an open, exponentially expanding and evolving, implicitly conscious or informational, energetic system. This immediately entrains a critique of those religious traditions that emphasize God's ontological transcendence at the expense of God's immanence, as well as of the doctrine of original sin or fallenness and of emancipation or salvation as coming from without rather than, necessarily, also from within: a transcendent god entails an immanent god, namely, that people have the potential within them to conform to god's will.²⁷

How did essentially free beings come to be enslaved? Basically we forgot or mis-identified who we are²⁸ — creatures who emerged from nature and so are part of its overall unity and creativity. So we became alienated or split-off from our labour and its product, each other, our social structures and, most fundamentally, our real selves and the totality from which we emerged. Initially only some of us forgot, those who became the oppressors or alienators and imposed their will on the rest of us as our masters. Insofar as they act falsely in regard to what people essentially are, masters necessarily develop irrealist categories that occlude alethic truth. However, alethic truth (natural necessity insofar as it has been encountered by humanity) is inexorable and cannot wholly be disregarded in practice. So you get endemic theory-practice contradiction: denial in theory by the false of the truth on which it depends; acknowledgement of it in practice. This is the fundamental basis of alienation, ideology, TINA compromise formations and demi-reality: we keep patching²⁹ our theories to try to hide the contradictions and end up prisoners of a vast meshwork or web of false or inadequate (irrealist) theories and social practices of our own making that act as constraints on our capacities for free flourishing. This is ‘structural sin’:³⁰ evil is categorial error and structural illusion, made possible by free will, that is, the ability to act contrary to our real selves and the consequences of such action. As such, it is not just privation, lack or absence of the good but ‘an emergent power in its own right’.³¹ However, consistently with the theory of emergence, evil is unilaterally dependent for its existence (parasitical) on the more fundamental human capacities for freedom, creativity, love, spontaneous right-action, self-realization, enchantment and awakening to non-duality — ‘an unnecessary necessity’.³² Resolution of the ‘problem’ of evil is thus identical to the resolution of the antinomy of freedom and slavery, wholeness and alienation. Evil is not a cognitive problem but real emergent levels of being of our own making that have to be got rid of.³³

What we above all have to do to effect a transition to sustainable free flourishing is to shed the ‘layers of structural illusion and heteronomous determination’³⁴ that constitute the demi-real and consistently act consistently in and from our real selves. This involves arduous work of transformation at all four planes of social being: our material transactions with nature, interpersonal relations, social structures and our stratified personalities. This work depends on a type of agency that Bhaskar thematized in Dialectic as ‘transformed (autoplastic …), transformative (alloplastic …), totalizing (all-inclusive and auto-reflexive) and transformist (oriented to structural change …) … praxis’.³⁵ In all this, the autoplastic (‘self-forming’) moment is now seen to have analytical and/or temporal priority: ‘one changes society by first (and also) changing oneself’.³⁶ This in no way implies, as has often been suggested, a voluntarist individualism or that the transformation of oppressive social structures is unimportant. As Bhaskar subsequently commented: ‘The primacy of self-referentiality only comes into it when you ask how we are to do that. At the end of the day you can only do it through human action.’³⁷ This emphasis on self-change takes seriously Marx's third thesis on Feuerbach to the effect that the educators must educate themselves.

It is early days in the reception of metaRealism. Although it was greeted with widespread alienated hostility, it is arguably in reality far ahead of its time and will in due course come to be ranked, in terms of its creativity and profundity, with original critical realism — itself only now, with the recent ‘returns’ to metaphysics and ontology, starting to be widely appreciated in philosophy (in contrast to social theory and science, where its influence has been longstanding and is rapidly gathering pace). MetaRealism brilliantly opens up a space within critical realism for critical discussion and debate of matters spiritual and religious, which is now flourishing,³⁸ and provides a basis for rethinking our relationship to the world, not as something alien to be dominated and controlled but as a place from which we are emergent and which is our home.³⁹

The papers in this issue

Our first paper, ‘The metaphysics of a contemporary Islamic Shari'a: a metaRealist perspective’, by Matthew Wilkinson, is part of a larger project to produce an educational philosophy — Islamic critical realism (ICR) — that will help Muslims meet the challenges of our times and promote a better understanding of Islam among non-Muslims. Wilkinson's method is twofold: establishing ‘correlation’ or resonance between metaRealism and the tradition of Islamic theological philosophy, and deploying metaRealism to underlabour for ‘the contemporary interpretation, clarification and conceptual deepening’⁴⁰ of Islamic theory and practice (and thereby also deepening our understanding of metaRealism). Wilkinson has an excellent grasp of one of the main rationales for metaRealism: the articulation of a metatheory at the highest level of abstraction that can serve as a basis for intra-faith, inter-faith and extra-faith dialogue. That basis is what Bhaskar calls ‘the higher truth’: there is only one absolute but many epistemologically relative accounts of it: the absolute both manifests, and is accessed, differently in different regions and epochs of relative reality. As Wilkinson puts it, ‘the fact that God (and other spiritual realities) are known differently in different spiritual traditions does not mean that the God that is known is different’. MetaRealism is thus not in competition with theology and religion, as Wilkinson sees it; on the contrary, it seeks to underlabour for them and help them develop and thrive in a manner conducive to universal free flourishing. Because the legacy of colonialism and the demise of the Ottoman empire has entrained profound distrust of rationality as ‘Western’ among today's Muslim populations, Wilkinson deploys the method of correlation recuperatively in respect of the tradition of theological philosophy that flourished in Islam's axial age or enlightenment, entraining critique of today's demi-real forms of institutionalized Islam as well as of the wider social context, such as class domination, within which they are embedded. He acknowledges that his work throws up as many problems as it solves (how, one wonders, does the ICR ‘hierarchy of transcendence’ correlate with Bhaskar's radical anti-elitism, how does ICR rejection of ‘pagan unbelief’ sit with metaRealist underlabouring for Indigenous religion, and how does the status of the human being as ‘master over creation’ chime with the Bhaskarian critique of the philosophical discourse of modernity?⁴¹), but he has made a brilliant start. In their struggle to understand and shed the demi-real, metaRealists of every ilk will recognize a powerful ally in Shari'a as interpreted here.

‘The crisis in Indigenous school attendance in Australia: towards a metaRealist solution’, by Ian Mackie and Gary MacLennan, is also part of a wider project, in relation to Indigenous schooling in general. It draws on the resources of metaRealism (understood as going beyond but including dialectical critical realism) and Indigenous critical realism (another ICR!⁴²), as exemplified in the brilliant pioneering work of Chris Sarra and Gracelyn Smallwood, to address the problem of low levels of Indigenous school attendance. Distinguishing sharply between the paradigm of truancy and discipline and the paradigm of connectedness and love, they set out to deepen the latter. Though their focus is initially ‘narrow’, it soon becomes apparent, as they deploy key ICR concepts ranging from the triplex model of the self to dialectical universalization, that resolving the crisis in Indigenous school attendance may well involve — as Smallwood has long been arguing in regard of the situation of First Australians generally — nothing short of fundamental transformative social change in Second as well as First Australia. If there is a ground-state level at which we are all interconnected, nobody can indeed be truly free from oppression unless everyone else is.

‘MetaReality and the dynamic calling of the good’, by Michael Schwartz, is to my knowledge the first article by a thinker hailing from the integral theory side of the dialogue between critical realism and integral theory to essay a contribution to metaRealist philosophy. To attempt this, Schwartz combines a critical appropriation of the Levinasian notion of the calling of the good with a version of integral theory perspectivism and what Ken Wilber calls ‘full-spectrum empiricism’, according to which first-, second- and third-person perspectives are ‘elemental’, not just of relative, but of absolute reality. The attempt in my view produces important insights but on the whole more problems and tensions than it resolves. ‘Perspective dynamics’ immediately put Schwarz's whole position in some tension with critical realist anti-anthropism. Schwartz's points are well taken that phenomenological analysis is, if not pivotal, at least an indispensable supplement to transcendental argumentation for the Bhaskarian justification of metaRealism, and that the axiology of freedom of Dialectic presupposes non-duality as the source of the good. As he acknowledges in relation to the former but not the latter, both points are actually well made by Bhaskar himself. What Schwartz overlooks in his attempt to trump the pulse of freedom with a ‘pulse of responsibility’ emanating from the Levinasian call is that the call of the good for metaRealism includes a call for freedom and related qualities of creativity, love, right-action and so on. Far from emanating from a radical Other whose infinite demands for responsibility are impossible to meet fully, this call comes from our own innermost natures. The perspectival enunciation of the call of the good in integral theory in the form of the trio of freedom, responsibility and justice at the level of the actual is a version of the liberal metanarrative that critical realism seeks to overturn, arguing that solidarity, trust and love are logically, epistemologically and ontologically prior to the ‘reciprocity, exchange and mutual recognition’ invoked by Schwartz. (That both levels are important is not in dispute.) Schwartz makes much of the need to practice in order to experience non-duality deeply and attain practical wisdom, and suggests that this is an important difference between integral theory and metaRealism. However, this overlooks the prominent theme in metaRealism of ‘inner work’ and the recursive embedding of new skills and awareness, deriving from being in our ground-state, into the expanding field of the totality of our being. The difference does not in my view lie in the need to practice, but rather in the critical realist emphasis on the ability of everyone to do it as opposed to integral theory emphasis on experts, an elite community of practitioners. All in all, Schwartz's lively and thought-provoking exercise reinforces my view that, while there is a certain resonance between integral theory and metaRealism such that each can learn from the other, no coherent synthesis is possible.

Finally, Jamie Morgan's ‘Realists divided by realism? Wright on Triune Christianity’ is a review article of Andrew Wright's recent book, Christianity and Critical Realism: Ambiguity, Truth and Theological Literacy. Morgan has a reputation in critical realist circles as an exceptionally fair-minded commentator who does meticulous justice to a position before critiquing it, and this piece is no exception. Most of the article is spent reconstructing Wright's argument for the truth of Christianity and then putting it into question from the perspective of a critical realist atheism. Morgan concludes, correctly in my view, that realism itself is divided and limited by realism about God. This will of course be taken by some as a signal to move beyond realism to metaRealism, which argues precisely that ‘the ground and truth of reality’ ‘cannot be adequately thought in a realistic way’.⁴³ Since I am here introducing a special issue on metaRealism, I will confine my further remarks to what Morgan has to say on that topic:

[Wright's] defense of [Christian] exclusivism … partly hinges on the tacit exclusivity of other positions. As Wright notes, metaRealism, though stated as inclusive, plural etc. necessarily excludes all the world's monotheistic religions in so far as they insist on exclusivity and are based on an interventionist God of revelation. MetaRealism requires these religions to conform and reconstruct, and this implies that tolerance is conditional on commitments to truth claims regarding ultimate reality — so tolerance does not exclude non-coercive constructive engagement in order to persuade others — and this option is equally open to Triune Christianity as an underlabourer for humanity. Its exclusivity is thus no more nor less than a claim to adequate understanding of the ultimate order of reality followed by dissemination of that understanding (involving then the requirement of worship and practice since these are aspects of the same). (p. 400, my emphasis)

This passage raises complex issues that cannot be treated fully here. I think the claims it makes rest on at least two problematic assumptions. First, Morgan assumes (like Wright) that metaRealism and Christian theology operate at the same level of abstraction and thus are in competition and ‘exclusive’ in relation to each other. But they are no more in competition than Bhaskar's dialectic is in competition with Marxian dialectic. MetaRealism, like Bhaskar's dialectic, operates at the highest level of abstraction, arguing for an open philosophical ontology of pure dispositionality and ultimate categorial structure (absolute reality) without specifying (per impossibile) what particular things, events and processes will manifest or emerge in relative reality. This is not intended as a general ontology that can be more or less mechanically applied in theological science and religious and spirituality studies. MetaRealism clearly distinguishes philosophical from scientific ontology. As a philosophical ontology it aspires to articulate a metatheory that can play a regulative and facilitating role, only, in theology and so on, so that doing more substantive research oriented by it is rather like using a word processor with an operating system running in the background. The mechanical application of its abstract categories in more substantive studies collapses the distinction between philosophical and scientific ontologies, on the one hand, and the relative autonomy of the various sciences, on the other. Each science has an ontology, epistemology and methodology specific to itself, for which metaRealism intends to underlabour in its specificity rather than provide a ready-made blueprint for all. Thus, although Bhaskar did not personally accept the specific Christian doctrine of the incarnation, metaRealism does not rule it out. It does not ‘require’ anything of Christianity; it is only a set of arguments, after all, and is itself historically relative and revisable.⁴⁴ As I suggested above in connection with Wilkinson's article, far from being in competition with Christianity and other religions, metaRealism aspires to assist them to thrive in a manner conducive to universal free flourishing. Second, Morgan suggests (and Wright argues at some length) that Christian exclusivism is compatible with epistemic relativism. This depends on what is meant by ‘exclusivism’. Wright defines Christian exclusivism as ‘the Christian claim to possess exclusive access to ultimate truth’.⁴⁵ While ‘exclusive’ seems to suggest a monopoly of access, hence epistemological absolutism, Wright makes it clear that this is not what he means, only that the Christian account of the ultimate order of things is ‘the most powerful and comprehensive account’⁴⁶ available to us and as such is fallible and corrigible. This is consistent with epistemic relativism and with Bhaskar's account of his own philosophical position as uniquely consistent with the intelligibility of (a domain of) human practice (P), not in the sense that it is the only possible theory consistent with P, but in the sense that it is ‘the only theory at present known to us’ that is consistent with it.⁴⁷ As Wright argues, metaRealism is itself ‘exclusivist’ in this sense.⁴⁸ However, this term, which contrasts with ‘inclusivism’ in the theological literature, seems very unfortunate in the present context, first because of its apparently absolutist connotations and second because metaRealism (understood as going beyond but including critical realism) aspires to be maximally inclusive. Bhaskar's own term for religious exclusivism in the absolutist sense (and the contexts suggest that that is the sense he means) is uniquism. A way forward here might thus be to drop the term exclusivism and to distinguish between uniquism₁, which is epistemologically relativist, and uniquism₂, which is absolutist. Andrew Wright will reply to Morgan (and perhaps also to me!) in a subsequent issue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mervyn Hartwig

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

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.