Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom

by Roy Bhaskar

This book attacks purely analytical modes of thinking. Bhaskar develops a critical realist philosophy, which isolates the definition of being in terms of knowledge as the characteristic flaw of traditional philosophy. He conceives a “transformational” model of society and sees social science as explanatory, and therefore of assistance to political projects of emancipation. Concerned to bridge the gap between philosophy and politics, Dialectic argues that critical realism provides the basis of a completely new and general methodology for the human sciences. This book also contains an account of the history of Western philosophy, from its pre-Socratic origins to its contemporary post-modernist forms.

Genres: Philosophy

448 pages, Paperback

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

[anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

An obscure great work of philosophy wherein the general & integral evolutionary metatheory of dialectic is laid out, as a Niagara of Neologism, including 69 diagrams, in what turns out to be the second of 3 main phases in Bhaskar's ouevre, from critical realism (phase 1) where ontology is unflattened from it's Humean Ontology & the 'ex-Humation' of the consequenting aporiai that arise from not acknowledging laws obtained through the ceteris paribus clause leave out an ontology of the Open System, of which the world is; dialectical critical realism (phase 2) where the static stratification of the world is dynamized by the logic of absence, integrated from the failed conceptions of absence, the 'Post-Hegelian Götterdämmerung' et al., where is decentralized conceptions of dialectic as necessarily containing argument, change, opposition, antagonism, or strife, though it constellationally contains them, resituated as a special case of absence, itself which is given texture, stratification, stadia, lamination, polyvalence; & finally ascending to meta-Reality (phase 3) where the restless negativity of the dialectic is grounded in & overreached by the non-dual ubiquity of love, creativity & the re-enchanted cosmos. A dictionary itself could be filled (& has been written) on the technical yet precise tools of thought created (largely of this phase & book particularly) by Bhaskar. The expanded vocabulary of recursion, aufhebung, of self-reflexivity, irony, performative contradiction, theory/practice inconsistency is admirably, aspiringly textured & dyed fast in the color of reality, a system which impedes being (because it systematizes the mechanisms of becoming) recuperated, co-opted by a duplicitousness, without obvious infraction. Though polemic, a compassion deeply sits in this work, an elegance of technics, certainly a gong-fu. &, along with Edgar Morin's Method, a load-bearing pillar of the Complex Integral Realist canon, the leading synthesis(-without-blurring) of the world's most all-encompassing 'integrative metatheories'. A 'Transfactually Efficacious Stratified Alethic Realism' ('1M'), dynamized by a 'Synchronic Emergent Powers Materialism' of 'Tensed Spatializing Process' ('2E'), retotalized in a 'Four-Planar Social Being' ('3L') of 'Transformative Emancipatory Agency' ('4D'), within a 'Transcendental Dialectical Critical Realism'. If only we could say such in less, cue the poet. Or, cue Bhaskar, who hence dubs 'MELD'.

now, for some commonbook-notes, on a significant unifying thematic of the system, 'the theory problem-field (solution set)'. 'irrealism' being ontologies/worldviews that don't accept the transfactually existent / intransitive nature of objects, reducing what is real to what is actual[ized], the fallacies thereof, the aporiai-complexes thereof, the flattening whereof only a depth-ontology may solve. recall, the main dictum of critical realism from 'a realist theory of science': 'statements of laws are tendency statements. Tendencies may be possessed unexercised, exercised unrealised, & realised unperceived (or undetected) by men; they may also be transformed.'

the full catalog of the problem-fields of irrealism, where all other problem-fields stem from: the root structure of the unholy trinity: —epistemic fallacy where you define the world by your knowledge of it, collapsing being into knowing (& it's inverse the ontic fallacy); —ontological monovalence where you say only positive things exist (no real account of absence); —the result being 'primal squeeze' where you squeeze out 'natural necessity', the domain of the real, (the way things must work, remember those tendency statements: generative mechanisms/structures allow us to not fall to the Humean Viceregency) & leave only 'knowledge' & 'sense-data' (domain of the actual).

so this has the entire history of philosophy split into two mega-problems:
(a) the analytical stream: the problem of the one & the many, how to group things;
(b) the dialectical stream: the problem of the one & the other, how to handle opposites/change.

(a)'s problem-fields being:

—the transdictive complex that clouds in how we go from 'some' to 'all', 'observed' to 'unobserved', subfields of which are: the problem of induction (Hume played backgammon to ignore this), the problem of universals, Goodman's paradox / grue, the paradoxes of material implication (why does 'false' imply 'true'?)—solved, by: 'alethic' truth, natural necessity, things have real structures (e.g. electron shells) that force them to behave in certain ways, induction as a discovery of structure, of 'generative mechanism', rather than a guess.

—the solipsistic complex (particular knowledge) that clouds in the how of knowing anything except the self, the problem of the external world, the problem of other minds, the problem of what the self is—solved, by transcendental refutation: the very act of doubting presupposes the world, referential detachment, aka separating the act of speaking (transitive) from the thing spoken about (intransitive), & 'primary polyadization': the self is a polyad instead of a monad; individuation is a result instead of a premise; we are only selves through differentiation from an other; & the Primal Scream: a primal scream implies a listener, a scream implies a desire to listen, structure of desire (& merely the infants scream) posits an ontology of lack & alterity.

—the problem of opposites & how they relate, the problems arise from suppressing alterity, not being able to handle true other being, & so kill it via reductionism or exile it via dualism, in illicit fissions & fusions. fissions via detotalizing & splitting into mind/body, reason/cause, subject/object as ontological extensionalism through treating internally related things as if they were just strangers passing in the night. fusions via reductionalism/Hegelianism in either flattening the hierarchy into mind as merely brain, or Hegel where object is just alienated subject, both of which destratify & 'heal' the wound by brute forcing object to be the subject or vice versa, which becomes ideological plasticity where if A is B then i can say whatever i want about A—solved, by: Emergence, Constellationality & the Hiatus: mind emerges/rises from body but posseses sui generis causal powers, 'unilaterally dependent but taxonomically irreducible', terms are constellationally 'distinct but inseparable' where epistemology is contained within ontology but isn't ontology, & the 'hiatus in the duality', a gap/lag/non-identity where reasons cause action but aren't the same as action.

—the problem of change, the subsequent denegation of process, the messiness of transition from thing to thing, so they murder a true processual understanding of time through Platonic analysis of change as mere difference, a 't1 is state A, t2 is state B' type conception of time, yet these are different slides on the same projector, punctualizing through the spatialization of time (time as a collection of points) here means that movement becomes an illusion by the observer. they also murder time through Hegelian analysis of change as logical derivation: 'the seed becomes the plant because the concept of the seed entails the plant', this becomes blockism. if future is just unfolding of the past then there is no account of the new. history becomes tautology.—solved, by: "Tensed Spatializing Process", a tri-unity of space-time-causality, ontologically polyvalent: causality where change = absenting, & to cause is to negate, it is the active removal of a state of affairs, the positive is just a special case of negative. so, in the obvious case of change: to boil water one actively absents the cohesive bonds that kept the water liquid; in the trickier case of change, creation: to create something new you must negate the state of non-x, creation is the absenting of a void; in the hardest case against change, stasis: surely things that stay the same must be positive, yet the universe is entropic where the default state is decay, if something remains stable it is actively absenting the forces of disintegration, being is a 'ripple on the surface of negativity', 'to cause is to change is to absent is to transform & so redetermine'; space & time are no longer punctualist, where space & time are points, or blockism where time or space are block-units, or indexicalism where only 'now' exists, but a multi-tiered conception of the Rhythmic, where ends are congealed processes-in-product & product-in-processes interpenetrated, things are their histories embodied in things but also things acting upon [their] history. this is all sustained by the condition of possibility of Ontological Polyvalence, where reality is multi-valued, the rhythmic plays out on this polyvalence of pasts as determinate efficacies (gone yet push the present through their absences), futures as shaped possibility (hasn't happened but the slots for it are already being dug), voids (the world is not fully positive / packed solid, if it were then nothing could move).

—the problem of the whole (totality) that clouds together the pathologies of how parts relate to wholes, expressivism vs atomism. where atomism (Hume/Popper) merely claims there are no wholes, just heaps of atoms, & synergies/society/meaning cannot be explained; where expressivism (Hegel/Leibniz) claims the part is the whole in microcosm/macrocosm views, 'the truth is in the whole' in how every part reflects the central essence, it becomes mere centrism where it assumes a 'center' spirit-god/idea/begriff that controls the periphery, denying the autonomy of parts.—solved, by: partial totality, where wholes have holes, parts are constituted by their relations but aren't exhausted by them. sometimes things are truly detotalized, split off, alienation not as an illusion to be synthesized, but is a real structural fracture. an asymmetrical, differentially weighted nexus where the whole conditions the parts, but/& the parts codetermine the whole.

surely, an enlightened common sense. now, for quotes:

What are the conditions of possibility of dialectical critical realism? The eclipse of philosophical reason in the post-Hegelian Götterdämmerung and the demise of the Humean Viceregency in the form of orthodox philosophy of science coincided with the end of the post-war boom, more than a whiff of revolt and even revolution and the rebirth of a free Marxist current in the new eclecticism of a still malaised social science. The multi-tiered stratification of the natural sciences was a palpable reality and slogans of the type ‘If you can split/spray it/them, it/they exist/s’ abounded. Relativity theory, quantum mechanics, the liberation of the colonies, the threat of a nuclear holocaust and looming ecological crisis rendered conventional assumptions obsolete. The time was ripe for ontology; and as the seventies made way for the eighties and the events of 1989, for a new account of change, especially in the context of the collapse of communism, the poverty of most materialist dialectical philosophy and the monstrous inequities of the strife-torn, crisis-ridden chaotic new world order that Bush, Benetton and Hayek were in the process of ushering in. It is in this milieu that dialectical critical realism came into being. And it claims not only to build on critical realism, but also to sublate previous dialectics in one that, as far as I know, uniquely sustains an adequate account of negativity, the essence of all dialectics.

Since at least Derrida we know that all philosophies have their priorities. Dialectical critical realism prioritizes difference over identity, negativity over positivity, absence over presence, totality over its aspects, relations over their relata, structure over agency. At the same time it is characteristic for dialectic systems to produce their own paradoxical reversals. DCR is not short of these

The self-referential paradoxes and theory/practice inconsistencies attendant upon the denial of referential attachment=existential transitivity=ontology are so patent that it might seem that the difficult task is not to give a transformed transformative response to the Heideggerian ‘scandal of philosophy’, but how to begin to explain irrealism. For that is the real scandal of philosophy.

Ontologically actualism, presupposing fixism, entails blockism and fetishism. Whether it is atomistic-punctualist (allegedly Heraclitian, certainly Humean), monist (Parmenidean), eidetic (Platonic), kinetic-(quasi-)eidetic (Aristotelian) or expressivist-kinetic-eidetic (Hegelian), conceptual realist (Leibznizian) or empirical realist (Kantian), it tendentially leads to fundamentalism and reductionism (whether empiricist, rationalist or transcendental [or dialectical] idealist) in epistemology.

It will be recalled from the Phenomenology of Mind that the Stoic (be s/he Aurelius or Epictetus) is indifferent to reality, the Sceptic denies its existence in theory but affirms it in practice (and so is guilty of theory/practice inconsistency), while the Unhappy Consciousness makes it explicit in the introjection or projective postulation of another world. After the demise of positivism in the wake of the double blow of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, philosophy found itself in a double bind. In failing to thematize (or at least reproblematize) ontology and so to articulate a new one—which could accommodate transitive and intransitive change and stratification alike—it tended to transmute along the transitive dimension into a variety of forms, which I will treat in logical, not necessarily chronological, order. First came a sociological conventionalism, exemplified by writers such as Bachelard and Kuhn, like Stoicism indifferent to reality yet at the same time aware of the context of master—slave or oppressive power relations at work. Thus the scientific neophyte was pictured as accepting on purely ‘positive’ grounds (in the early Hegelian usage, that is to say, acceptance on the basis of authority) the craft of her trade. Meanwhile there would be sporadic outbursts of internecine warfare as new ways of thinking and probing things were vaunted, which resembles nothing so much as the section of the Phenomenology entitled ‘the spiritual kingdom of the beasts, or the affair itself’. This stoic indifference to reality gave rise to a post-structuralist collapse to scepticism, in which Derrida can write ‘there is nothing outside the text’ and probably neither mean, definitely not believe and certainly not act on it, entailing palpable theory/practice inconsistency. The duplicity implicit in post-structuralism then became explicit in the unhappy consciousness of a pragmatist like Rorty, who considers that there is a reality (even if only in the guise of incoming causal impacts) but forbids us to talk about it. This convoluted introjection gives way to the explicit Dadaist contradiction of Feyerabend who sees no reason for imposing any constraints on the ‘doubles’ of the real world we can make.

But on close inspection all these beautiful souls of 1967 turn out to be still at work in the struggle for symbolic capital, money and power. The history of post-positivist philosophy thus mimics certain famous dialectical topographies.

[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.