Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (Classical Texts in Critical Realism

by Roy Bhaskar

The Pulse of Freedom is now widely regarded as a classic of contemporary philosophy. This book, first published in 1993, sets itself three main the development of a general theory of dialectic, of which Hegelian dialectic can be seen to be a special case; the dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism, viz. into the system of dialectical critical realism; and the outline of the elements of a totalizing critique of Western philosophy.

The first chapter clarifies the rational core of Hegelian dialectic. Chapter 2 then proceeds to develop a general theory of dialectic. Isolating the fallacy of "ontological monovalence", i.e. a purely positive account of being, Roy Bhaskar then shows how absence and other negating concepts such as contradiction have a legitimate and necessary ontological employment. He then goes on to give a synoptic account of key dialectical concepts such as the concrete universal; to sketch the further dialectical development of critical naturalism through an account of what he calls four-planar social being; and following consideration of the dialectical critique of analytical reason, he moves on to the real definition of dialectic as absenting absence and in the human sphere, the axiology of freedom.

Chapter 3 extends and deepens critical realism’s characteristic concerns with ontology, science, social science and emancipation not only into the realms of negativity and totality, but also into the fields of reference and truth, spatio-temporality, tense and process, the logic of dialectical universalizability and on to the plane of ethics, where it articulates a combination of moral realism and ethical naturalism, whereby consideration of elemental desire involves commitment to the eudaimonistic society. This is then followed—in Chapter 4—by a sublime discussion of key moments in the trajectory of Western philosophy, the tradition of which can now be seen to be based on what the author calls the unholy trinity of the epistemic fallacy or the reduction of being to knowledge, primal squeeze or the collapse of structure and alethic truth, and ontological monovalence.

Genres: Philosophy

633 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Roy Bhaskar (born May 15, 1944) is a British philosopher, best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of Critical Realism.

Bhaskar was born in Teddington, London, the elder of two brothers. His Indian father and English mother were Theosophists.[1]

In 1963 Bhaskar began attending Balliol College, Oxford on a scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Having graduated with first class honours in 1966, he began work on a Ph.D. thesis about the relevance of economic theory for under-developed countries. This research led him to the philosophy of social science and then the philosophy of science. In the course of this Rom Harré became his supervisor.

Reviews

[Hans G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is arguably Roy Bhaskar's _magnum opus_. It is an urgently important book. It is a difficult book and may be all but impossible without a firm grasp of Bhaskar's previous work: _A Realist Theory of Science_(A Realist Theory of Science (Classical Texts in Critical Realism)), _The Possibility of Naturalism_(The Possibility of Naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences (Critical Realism: Interventions)), and _Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation_(Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (Classical Texts in Critical Realism)). The essentials of these three books are well-introduced by Andrew Collier in his _Critical Realism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Roy Bhaskar_(Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy). Unfortunately Collier does not discuss Bhaskar's magnum opus. Alan Norrie's book _Dialectic and Difference_ (Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice (Ontological Explorations)) book does directly engage Bhaskar's magnum opus, but functions different than as an introduction.

In Bhaskar's _A Realist Theory of Science_, he defends science and constructs a bold ontology to make sense of the activity of science, scientific experiments, and the historical development of science as a production enterprise of knowledge, theory, and "truth." In The Possibility of Naturalism, Bhaskar argues social sciences are scientific in the same sense (based on the ontology developed in _A Realist theory of Science_) but not necessarily in the "same ways" as natural sciences. In _Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation_, Bhaskar fully develops his idea of "explanatory critique" which essentially argues that the results of social sciences are latent with emancipatory potential.

The "explanatory critique" moves Bhaskar's philosophical project in a radically normative direction. It is this normative project that is unfolded in _Dialectic_.

Hegelian hypochondria refers to the worry that philosophy makes no difference in the political realm and no difference in decisions of individuals and their actual actions. In concert with Hegel, Bhaskar's aim is to overcome this Hegelian hypochondria. In other words, Bhaskar's _Dialectic_ is meant to bridge the hiatus between philosophy and politics, and between politics and ethical action.

In chapter one (the book's most accessible chapter) Bhaskar demonstrates the similarities between the fine structure of the Logic of Hegel's Dialectic and the model(s) of science outlined in critical realism. The question that Bhaskar then sets out to answer is why philosophy so often fails to have an impact in the realm of politics and day-to-day living.

The answer is something like this: (1) reality is complex and difficult to comprehend (the necessity of science and a critical realist ontological orientation), (2) social reality is full of contradictions (warranting the relevance of Hegel's dialectic), and (3) reality is radically incomplete and evolving. The latter two points are based on Bhaskar's theories of "absence" and "open totalities" (both of which are absent in Hegel). But these are just half of the story, indeed the "positive" side of the story.

The normative side of the story is something like this: (1) social reality if full of contradictions, too many philosophies merely reflect and then justify these social contradictions (e.g. Stoicism, Skepticism, Pragmatism, Postmodernism [chapter 4 is an explanatory critique of these traditions and philosophical tendencies]), (2) existential power-relations make truth claims highly continuous, (3) the evolving nature of social reality also is a place of contention and struggle over both interpretation of situations and events and especially institutional forms that determine the direction of social evolution and the constitution of political power.

The heart of the book is really chapter 3. It is here that Bhaskar defends a Habermasian theory of Truth based on a more solid critical realist ontology. He then argues the internal desire for autonomy (the very drive of science itself) moves from a desire for Truth to a desire for Freedom.

There is no simple way to summarize the heart, chapter 3, of this book. This is because Bhaskar's conception of Truth is not a simple matter. The critical realist ontology of: stratification, differentiation, relationality, non-identity, emergence, absence, and open totality, make it a rather difficult matter, but intransitively grounded. Likewise for Freedom. Freedom is not an end state in either the Berlinian positive or negative form. Rather for Bhaskar Freedom is a type of process, a process of "de-alienation." The de-alienation is not necessarily the art of Becoming the "essential" creature evolution (or god) intended (it is not clear in this book that Bhaskar is defending essentialism). Rather for Bhaskar, Freedom is the historical augmentation of autonomy for the existential creature in the process of Becoming (in Space, Time, Tense [i.e. existential social context]).

This is a highly political book. It is arguing that philosophy tends toward being apolitical because of (1) the complexity of reality, (2) the difficulty of comprehending reality, (3) contradictory nature of social being, (4) power-relations that constitute social being, (5) the evolving and changing nature of social being within a social institutional framework of already established relations of political power and social control, and (6) the dominance of impoverished philosophical and scientific conceptions of social being.

The book is a call to action, a demand for greater autonomy and an extension of democratic relations. However, the actual political activity and ethical action to sustain the basic philosophical framework the book provides has yet to be written or identified.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bhaskar was a philosopher and theorist who, since the 1970's, became widely acclaimed for his contributions to the philosophy of science, particularly his development of the approach he started calling critical realism:

The foundational moment of critical realism was a Copernican/Darwinian revolution which stood the world back on its feet again, critiqued the epistemic fallacy and situated epistemology constellationally within ontology. It enabled the critique of anthroporealism, especially in its dominant empirical realist form, and irrealism in philosophy, monism and deductivism in the philosophy of science, positivism and hermeneutics in the philosophy of social science, and anti-realist ideologies masquerading as sciences.

Bhaskar's critical realism has evidently been very influential, used as a theoretical outlook by many scientists in the social field, such as David Graeber.

Bhakar's concern with ontology (or lack thereof in philosophies of science) seems to have spurred his interest in dialectical logic, and while studying its history he became Marx-adjacent. This book is the culmination of his studies and turned them into a quite unique theory. Here is Bhaskar's definition of dialectic:

In its most general sense, dialectic has come to signify any more or less intricate process of conceptual or social (and sometimes even natural) conflict, interconnection and change, in which the generation, interpenetration and clash of oppositions, leading to their transcendence in a fuller or more adequate mode of thought or form of life (or being), plays a key role. But, as we shall see, dialectical processes and configurations are not always sublatory (i.e. supersessive), let alone preservative. Nor are they necessarily characterized by opposition or antagonism, rather than mere connection, separation or juxtaposition. Nor, finally, are they invariably, or even typically, triadic in form. To what may such processes, to the extent that they occur, be applied? Obviously to being, in which case we may talk about ontological dialectics, or dialectical ontologies which may operate at different levels. Then obviously to our thinking about reality – epistemological dialectics; and insofar as knowledge circulates in and/or out of what it is about – relational dialectics. Equally obviously to our practice – practical dialectics.

The heart of his dialectic is absence, which is a generalization into which he subsumes the negative, negation, nothingness, non-being, contradiction, etc:

Real negation is most simply first considered as the presence in some more or less determinate region of space-time (comprising, as a relational property of the system of material things, an objective referential grid) of an absence at some specific level or context of being of some more or less determinate entity, thing, power, event, aspect or relation, etc. Consider as a paradigm a stapler missing from a desk drawer, or a tool from a workbench. I want to focus here for ease of exposition on simple determinate non-being within a determinate locale, which, relative to any possible indexicalized observer on any possible world-line, is existentially intransitive, whether or not the absence is positively identified, or even identifiable.

Or again:

In particular, I want to argue for the importance of the concepts of what I am going to call 'real negation', 'transformative negation' and 'radical negation'. Of these the most basic is real negation. Its primary meaning is real determinate absence or non-being (i.e. including non-existence). It may denote an absence, for example, from consciousness (e.g. the unknown, the tacit, the unconscious), and/or of an entity, property or attribute (e.g. the spaces in a text) in some determinate space-time region, e.g. in virtue of distanciation or mediation, death or demise, or simple non-existence. It connotes, inter alia, the hidden, the empty, the outside; desire, lack and need. It is real negation which, as we shall see, drives the Hegelian dialectic on, and it is our omissive critique of Hegel - his failure to sustain certain crucial distinctions and categories (including in the end that of absence itself) - that must drive the dialectic past and beyond him.

Briefly, his short circuiting of Hegel transforms "negation of the negation" into "absenting of absence." His unique dialectic has four levels:

1M = Prime (first) moment. Characterized by non-identity relations, such as those involved in the critique of the epistemic and anthropic fallacies, of identity theory and actualism. Unified by the concept of alterity, it emphasizes existential intransitivity, referential detachment, the reality principle and ontology which it necessitates.

2E = Second edge. Unified by the category of absence, from which the whole circuit of 1M-4D links and relations can be derived, its critical cutting edge is aimed at the Parmenidean doctrine of ontological monovalance (q.v.), the Platonic analysis of negation and change in terms of difference and the Kantian analysis of negative into positive predicates. It spans the gamut of categories of negativity, contradiction and critique.

3L = Third level. Unified by the category of totality, it pinpoints the error of ontological extensionalism, including the hypostatization of thought. It encompasses such categories and themes as reflexivity, emergence, constellationality, holistic causality, internal relationality and intra-activity, but also detotalization, alienation, split and split-off, illicit fusion and fission.

4D = Fourth dimension. Unified by the category of transformative praxis or agency. In the human sphere it is implicit in the other three. Metacritically, it pinpoints two complementary kinds of ontological de-agentification (dualistic) disembodiment, typical of (e.g. discourse in) the intrinsic aspect (q.v.), and (reductionist) reification, characteristic of the extrinsic aspect. There is a special affinity with 2E, since agency is (intentional) causality, which is absenting.

Bhaskar outlined several more books he was to write about his dialectic, but after writing only one more (Plato, Etc.: Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution), he instead took an Eastern transcendental turn in the last decade of his life, largely abandoning his previous "clarity and rigor" for spiritualism, according to his critics.

Allegedly a winner of the 'Bad Writing Contest' from the defunct online newsletter PHIL-LIT, this book is difficult, often hard to follow, and makes lots of questionable assertions. Bhaskar's style uses an overly complex jargon and shows a bias towards the overuse of acronyms. But overall I think Bhaskar puts forth extremely interesting and valuable insights into dialectical logic, even if his writing is hard to read for a non-specialist like me. In the end, the book is an invaluable resource if you are interested in the dialectic, or otherwise interested in social science and share Bhaskar's political outlook:

Dependent upon the achievement of absolute reason in dialectical praxis and the transformation of dialectical intelligibility (6) and reason (3), this encompasses the absenting of constraints, including ills generally, which comprise lack of freedoms. This includes the Hegelian dialectic of reciprocal recognition and the Marxian dialectic of real de-alienation, but generalizes, extends and radicalizes these dialectics (cf. C4.5) to aspire to the achievement of a naturalistically grounded social humanity in a trans-specific pluralistic global order subject to the material conditioning imposed by natural constraints, oriented to the self-realization of the concrete singularity of all a true democratic socialist humanism.

I will however leave it to to you, dear reader, to determine the extent to which Bhaskar has moved dialectics forward.