PERSPECTIVE BHASKAR’S CRITIQUE OF THE · PDF fileappropriate to speak of axial...

[ JCR 10.4 (2011) 485-510] (print) ISSN 1476-7430doi: 10.1558/jcr.v10i4.485 (online) ISSN 1572-5138

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

PERSPECTIVE

BHASKAR’S CRITIQUE OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY1

by

Mervyn Hartwig2

[email protected]

Abstract. Uniquely among contemporary philosophies, Roy Bhaskar’s sys-tem of critical realism and metaReality attempts to sublate (draw out the real strengths of and surpass) the philosophical discourse of modernity considered as a dialectically developing totality. This paper systematically expounds and comments on Bhaskar’s metacritique of that discourse and situates it briefly in relation to Jürgen Habermas’s earlier critique.

Key words: Bhaskar; critical realism; eudaimonia; geo-historicity; Haber-mas; philosophical discourse of modernity; philosophy of metaReality

Acronyms

CM classical modernismCN critical naturalismCR critical realismDCR dialectical critical realismEC the theory of explanatory critiqueHM high modernismM the theory and practice of modernizationPDM philosophical discourse of modernityPM postmodernismPMR the philosophy of metaRealityTDCR transcendental dialectical critical realismT/F bourgeois triumphalism/ regressive fundamentalismTR transcendental realism

1 This is a revised version of a plenary address to the Symposium on Contemporary Social and Cultural Theories, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, November 2010. 2 37 Stockwell Green, Stockwell, London SW9 9HZ, UK. Mervyn Hartwig is founding editor of Journal of Critical Realism and editor and principal author of Dictionary of Critical Realism.

mailto:[email protected]

486 MERvyN HARTWIG

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

Introduction

The philosophical discourse of modernity (PDM) is the revolutionary philo-sophical discourse, the hallmark of which is the self-defining subject,3 that accompanied the rise and consolidation of the capitalist system from its birth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to its current globalizing phase. It displaced a philosophical discourse in which people defined themselves in relation to a cosmic order viewed as intrinsically meaningful, valuable and sacred, and will in due course in turn be displaced, perhaps by critical realism,4 which aspires to sublate (i.e. synthesize and transcend) it. Except in the contingent matter of its origins, the PDM is not an intrinsically European or Eurocentric phenomenon. It is the philosophical reflection of the global-izing dynamic of the capitalist mode of production which obtains at the level of the real regardless of which particular centrism holds sway in the regions that it invades,5 although its actual effects will be strongly mediated by local conditions: a facet of the first genuinely world order, centre-periphery system6 or (in critical realist terms) global master–slave-type society7 rather than an independent European, thence American, phenomenon. Thus, although the discourse is currently dominated by the European-American philosophi-cal community, who are ‘authorized’ to set the latest fashions, this is likely to change when the epicentre of the world-system changes. The concept of modernity for Bhaskar is closely bound up with the phe-nomenon of geo-historicity. Borrowing from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bhaskar distinguishes the ‘cold’, concrete societies of Indigenous peoples who have no sense of history, i.e. in which the present is experienced as the endur-

3 ‘Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself’ (Haber-mas [1985] 1987, 7, original emphasis). See also Taylor 1992. 4 Unless the context indicates otherwise, ‘critical realism’ is used throughout in its extended sense to include dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality. 5 ‘[T]he real force underpinning [the dichotomies and dualisms of the PDM] was nothing else than the remorseless logic of the nascent capitalist mode of production and exploitation of nature and human beings alike, a dynamic and self-expanding form of exploitation without precedent in human history, in which an unconstrained and uncon-scious conatus or drive to accumulation is hurtling humanity (and with it the planet) into crisis at all four planes of social being’ (Bhaskar 2002b, 172 n. 7; cf. 64: ‘Simply put, I think modernism is a very pure ideology of the capitalist mode of production’). 6 Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989; Dussel [1993] 1995. 7 Bhaskar [1993] 2008; Hartwig 2007f. Master–slave or power2 relations embrace ‘power-over’ relations of every kind, along lines of nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, religious affiliation, age, disability, etc., as well as class. In the epoch of modernity, the concept use-fully calls attention to the exploitative relation intrinsic to the wage-labour/capital contract, which is hidden by commodity fetishism.

BHASKAR’S CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE 487


ing perpetuation of the past (a common view of non-master–slave peoples), from ‘hot’ historicized societies in which the present is seen as radically different from the past, a product of change over time. Geo-historicity is both (1) the quality of having such a self-reflexive consciousness of history, a quality that is caught in the fundamental critical realist concept of epistemic relativity; and (2) that to which the consciousness refers, the quality of spatializing diachronic change that is exhibited by all societies, though at widely varying rates. At a meta-level, (3), geo-historicity is conceptually a derivative of absence, embracing the whole of Being, not just human being. Geo-historicity (3) is thus any process of directional change in the multi-verse, e.g. geological. Geo-historicity (1) – the self-reflexive consciousness of change – is a relatively recent, emergent phenomenon, roughly contem-poraneous with the first ‘axial’ civilizations or the rise of master–slave-type societies. Indeed, it presupposes the other two defining features of axiality: the enhancement of reflexivity and of agentiality.8 However, hunter-foragers ‘certainly had a past (and outside)’9 in the sense that they lived in the full presence of their ancestor-creators and myths, with a keen sense of their own origins and distinct identity within the cosmic order; and hot societies have it in common with them that, according to the ruling ideologies, there

8 The concept of axiality derives from the thematization by Karl Jaspers (who drew on similar notions dating back to the eighteenth century, but especially in the work of Max Weber) of an Achsenzeit or Axial Age c. 800–200 bce that witnessed, relatively independently in a range of regions, a multi-faceted socio-cultural revolution, pivotal for the subsequent course of geo-history, in China, India, ancient Israel, Greece and (more controversially) the Near East and Egypt, a key feature of which was the discovery or enhancement of historic-ity, reflexivity and agentiality (Jaspers [1949] 2010). For recent analysis of the Achsenzeit and its influence in geo-history see Arnason et al., eds, 2005. For an argument that the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andean region experienced their own Axial revolution, see Dussel [1993] 1995. This is congruent with the view of Arnason et al. (2005, 3) that, while from one point of view the Axial Age is ‘a historical period with more or less clearly defined chronological boundaries’, from another ‘the structural aspects sup-posedly common to the cultural breakthroughs of the Axial Age would seem to distinguish one type of civilization from others, and examples of this type might emerge in different historical settings, not only those of the original Axial Age. It might, in other words, be appropriate to speak of axial civilizations as a general category with an open-ended histori-cal field of application, rather than civilizations of the Axial Age.’ Such considerations issue in a concept of ‘multiple axialities’, allowing for interpreting e.g. the rise of Islam ‘as a new axial civilization’ (Arnason et al. 2005, 3–5, 8). Bhaskar’s concept of ‘master–slave-type societies’ is a more abstract and general category that constellationally embraces the axial civilizations as well as their successors on the stage of world history. His principle of ‘axial rationality’, coupled with the axiom of universal solidarity, and grounded together with it in the practical order, provides a metatheoretical basis for the resolution of disputes (Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 80–1, 198). 9 Bhaskar 2002c, 103.

488 MERvyN HARTWIG


is no future, in the sense that qualitative social change is unthinkable: from the perspective of total history, even as historicity (1) emerged in hot societ-ies, it was frozen by endism and ontological monovalence, such that there was a history once, but not any longer (Marx) (see §5, below). Hot societies, including those of our own modernity, are thus only ‘half’ geo-historicized, split between past and future – the dominant outlook lacks a sense of the ‘futuricity of praxis’10 – and rampant eternization of the status quo de-geo-historicizes. A eudaimonian society, by contrast, would be fully historicized, combining an awareness both (a) of radical departure from the past and (b) of future change as necessary and desirable for human flourishing with a (re-)enchanted view of the cosmos as the unfolding of Being and of its own continuity and connectedness with this process – ‘embracing process and change, openness to the future as an essential part of our being’.11 We would live our lives in the moment, but in the full presence both of the past and of the future, such that the distanciated present was present to itself – not absent, as in the ‘fast-twitch’ punctualist here-now of market societies. World geo-historicity (2), whereby all human societies are caught up in the global-izing process of capital, constituting a new ‘rhythmic’, was inaugurated in the dawn of modernity as we know it.12

Habermas on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

The concept of the philosophical discourse of modernity as a unified phe-nomenon first gained widespread currency with the publication of Jürgen Habermas’s book of the same name in 1985. Habermas’s critique of the PDM commences with G. W. F. Hegel, the first European philosopher to develop a clear concept of modernity, and his critique of the subject-centred reason of the European Enlightenment, but is focused largely on the discourse of post-modernity and its radical relativization and reduction of reason, in order to ‘identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centred reason by reason understood as communicative action’ – the replacement of the subjectivist ‘“paradigm of consciousness”’ and postmodernism by an intersubjectivist ‘“paradigm of communicative action”’ in which reason is construed in terms of unforced ‘mutual under-standing and reciprocal recognition’.13 It is a powerful critique that has a good deal in common with Bhaskar’s, and Habermas does of course critique

10 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 251. 11 Bhaskar 2002c, 128; cf. Seo 2008. 12 Hartwig 2007e. 13 McCarthy 1987, vii, x, xvi, original emphasis.



other aspects of the PDM elsewhere in his oeuvre, but from a critical realist point of view these critiques are seriously flawed. Thus, first, Habermas’s critique of positivism and empiricism leaves the positivist account of a causal law and science intact in relation to the natural world, issuing in ‘an instrumentalist-manipulative conception of the interest informing the natural … sciences and the sphere of labour’.14 There is argu-ably much more to science and knowledge-constitutive interests than instru-mental rationality or strategic action. For critical realism, science, including natural science, properly understood and practised, has a vital role to play in ethics and emancipation – in arriving at the understanding to which the ‘par-adigm of mutual understanding’ aspires.15 Second, and relatedly, Habermas’s culturalist reconstruction of Marx, one of the key figures of high modernism, within a linguistic paradigm overlooks that Marx was arguably an implicit sci-entific realist and ethical naturalist,16 whose philosophy of praxis, moreover, cannot be reduced to a ‘production paradigm’ as opposed to a ‘paradigm of communication’.17 Third, Habermas’s problematic reconstruction of Marx is bound up with the grounding of his ethics in a dialectic of discourse or com-municative action to the neglect of the more general category of agency or intentional action as such,18 which indeed he assimilates to the linguistic par-adigm, ‘reformulat[ing] the concept of praxis in the sense of communicative action’.19 Otherwise expressed, whereas for Bhaskar action constellationally contains speech-action, Habermas tends to reduce the former to the latter.

14 Bhaskar [1989] 2010, 188; see also Bhaskar [1986] 2009, 230–31 n. 5; [1991] 2010, 142; 2002b, 38. As a neo-Kantian who, like Weber, seeks to combine positivism with herme-neuticism, Habermas is vulnerable to the main thrust of the critical realist critique of both those traditions. See especially Bhaskar [1979] 1998. 15 There is no counterpart in Habermas of the Bhaskarian theory of explanatory cri-tique, which effects transitions from facts to values and theory to practice and concludes that ‘social theory just is moral philosophy, but as science’ (Bhaskar [1991] 2010, 145). 16 In the 1980s Bhaskar reconstructed the mature Marx as a scientific realist (see espe-cially Bhaskar [1989] 2010, ch. 7, ‘Dialectics, materialism and theory of knowledge’, 115–45). Bhaskar’s Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom ([1993] 2008), as Alan Norrie has suggested to me, provides a way of construing the thought of Marx, both ‘young’ and ‘mature’, and its concern with ethics and political economy, alienation and exploitation, as a developmental unity. 17 Habermas 1976; [1985] 1987, Lecture 3, ‘Excursus on the obsolescence of the produc-tion paradigm’. 18 ‘[I]f there is a sense in which the ideal community, founded on principles of truth, freedom and justice, is already present as a prefiguration in every speech-interaction, might one not be tempted to suppose that equality, liberty and fraternity are present in every transaction or material exchange …? It is an error to suppose that ethics must have a lin-guistic foundation; just as it is an error to suppose that it is autonomous from science or history’ (Bhaskar [1986] 2009, 210). Cf. Norrie 2010, 123–4, 225, 228–30. 19 Habermas [1985] 1987, 335.

490 MERvyN HARTWIG


This leads Habermas to reject a concept of emancipation, a version of which is defended by Bhaskar, as the reappropriation of alienated powers by bring-ing all social relations within the horizon of the lifeworld.20 While Bhaskar agrees with Habermas, against Hegel, who invokes ‘the higher-level subjectiv-ity of the state’, that the appropriate model for the mediation of the universal and the individual (singular) in the ethical sphere is ‘the universality of an uncoerced consensus arrived at among free and equal persons’,21 he grounds this in a more thorough-going way in our embodied intentional practice, including our discursive practice. Finally, Habermas’s account of moder-nity, modernization and enlightenment in general are developmentalist and Eurocentric,22 in the spirit of Weber’s ‘Occidental’ rationalization thesis, in particular because it tends to equate the quickening of critical reflexivity in the European Enlightenment with its entry on to the stage of world history, and does not see or acknowledge adequately that the constitution of modern European subjectivity has as its indispensable pedestal the conquest and enslavement or exploitation of non-European peoples.23 According to Fré-déric vandenberghe, the five-volume student edition of philosophical essays by Habermas published in 2009 to mark his eightieth birthday ‘has not a single word to say about colonization as such’, as distinct from colonization of the lifeworld.24

Underpinning these weaknesses are a number of meta-errors. (1) As a pro-tagonist of the ‘linguistic turn’, Habermas commits a linguistified version of the epistemic fallacy – ‘Habermas’s Kantian project of attempting to render ontological mediations as epistemological divisions’.25 This vitiates his entire critique of postmodernism because he shares with his opponents the same fundamental mistake, enshrined in the slogans ‘postmetaphysics’, ‘postphi-losophy’ and ‘postontology’, which fail to discriminate between traditional metaphysics or first philosophy, on the one hand, which critical realism like-wise renounces, and transcendental or scientific realism and the ontologi-cal realism it vindicates, on the other.26 Habermas has been a scathing critic of ontology, which Bhaskar re-vindicates. For Bhaskar philosophy can reveal relatively necessary truths about the fundamental contours of Being and enjoys a relative autonomy from science; for Habermas, philosophy’s role is

20 See e.g. Dews 1986, 16; Habermas 1986, 177. 21 Habermas [1985] 1987, 40. 22 See e.g. Dussel [1993] 1995, 9–10, 25, 32–5, 129–30 and [1993] 1996, 6, 51. 23 Dussel [1993] 1995, 25. 24 vandenberghe 2010, 3. 25 Bhaskar [1986] 2009, 230–31, n. 5; cf. 2002b, 38. 26 For the difference between traditional and Bhaskarian metaphysics, see Bhaskar [1986] 2009, ch. 1.3, ‘Metaphysics and method’, 10–27.



rather merely to integrate the results of the sciences into a coherent account of human history and prospects, abandoning the philosophy of history in favour of a theory of social evolution. Like all denegators of ontology, Haber-mas and the postmodernists operate with a tacit ontology – of actualism and empirical and/or conceptual realism.27 Habermas’s deduction of a conatus to mutual understanding immanent within discourse can be seen as ‘a partial move into ontology by a philosopher who otherwise denies it’.28 (2) Relatedly, Habermas is ensnared within the antinomy of transcendental pragmatism:

[I]f nature has the transcendental … status of a constituted objectivity, then it cannot yield the historical or empirical ground of the constituting subjec-tivity or knowledge; conversely if nature is the historical ground of subjectiv-ity and/or an empirical ground of knowledge, it cannot be regarded solely as a constituted or posited objectivity: it must be essentially in‑itself (and only, so to speak, contingently a possible object of knowledge for us).29

In short, humanity cannot both be constituted by and constitute the natural world. (3) Habermas’s theory of truth acknowledges only three of the four moments of Bhaskar’s theory (the theory of the truth tetrapolity) – fiduciary, adequating and expressive-referential (intersubjective or consensual) truth; it lacks a concept of truth as most fundamentally ontological and alethic – the truth of things as distinct from propositions, i.e. truth as real, existing objectively, independently of our access to it, as the real reasons for things from the point of view of the possibility of human practice.30 Finally, (4) Habermas’s anti-naturalism marginalizes the extra-communicative or extra-discursive constraints on human agency in his ethical theory only to have them return with a vengeance in the theory of communicative action in the form of the colonization of lifeworld by system (the economy and state apparatuses co-ordinated by the non-linguistic media of money and power), reproducing the Kantian antinomy ‘between phenomenal system and nou-menal lifeworld’ – a ‘return’ that is related to Habermas’s Weberian attempt to marry hermeneuticism with positivism.31 The prospect Habermas’s phi-losophy offers is thus ‘that “the public space of more or less good reasons” cannot be maintained as it is swallowed up by the structural violence’ that he acknowledges permeates modern societies.32 Unlike Bhaskar, Habermas fails

27 See e.g. Habermas [1985] 1987, 313–14; Norrie 2010, 225; Bhaskar 2002b, 82; Outh-waite 1994, 40–41. 28 Norrie 2010, 230. 29 Bhaskar [1986] 2009, 7–8 n. 18, original emphasis, paraphrasing and expanding McCarthy 1978, 111. 30 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 214–21; Hartwig 2007a. 31 Bhaskar [1989] 2010, 189, see also 113–14, 141, 188–9; Norrie 2010, 123–4. 32 Norrie 2010, 229.

492 MERvyN HARTWIG


to draw the conclusion that, for universal free flourishing to be possible, dis-cursively moralized power2 relations must be abolished in their entirety, and to develop an emancipatory axiology that embraces this.

The Elements of the Bhaskarian Critique

Bhaskar’s critique of the PDM had been initiated (though not under that rubric) in 1975 with the publication of his first book, A Realist Theory of Science and, because his philosophical method is one of ‘transcendental critique’,33 in which transcendental arguments for realist positions simultaneously yield immanent critiques of rival discourses, it was ongoing from that time. In the first two years of the new millennium, stimulated by visits to India, where modernity, modernization and globalization were (and are) hot topics in the academy, Bhaskar drew the threads of his ongoing critique together in a lapidary overview in his books articulating the new philosophy of metaReality (PMR),34 the thematization of which indeed the ongoing critique feeds pow-erfully into. Unlike that of Habermas, this critique is explicitly situated within a critique of the entire Western philosophical tradition35 and is posited on the view that modernity as we know it should itself be situated within the broader and deeper context of other possible modernities, both (i) in the sense that geo-history could have happened differently (there have been multiple axialities [axial civilizations] and enlightenments, from the perspec-tive of which Western modernity can be seen to be ‘a particular capitalist and European form of development of civilizational structures that are far older’);36 and (ii) in the sense that there are multiple modernities within the modern world-system offering rich resources for effecting a transition to the eudaimonian society that is entrained metatheoretically by critical realism’s emancipatory axiology as the moral alethia or object/ive of the species. This

33 See Bhaskar [1986] 2009, 10–27; Hartwig 2009a, xx–xxi. 34 Bhaskar 2002a, 2002b, 2002c. The extent to which the philosophy of metaReality is developmentally consistent with the prior phases of Bhaskar’s philosophical system and/or ‘necessary’ for their completion is controversial among critical realists. See e.g. Morgan 2003; Hartwig 2011. In the tradition of critical theory, Walter Benjamin appears to have held, like Bhaskar, that human emancipation presupposes that the world is enchanted and has a metaReal basis; cf. Markus 2009. 35 Bhaskar [1993] 2008 and [1994] 2010. The concept of the West or Occident nicely exemplifies modernity’s penchant for (explicit) exclusion but (tacit) inclusion of the non-modern Other (which I come on to below) in relation to the South of the Western hemi-sphere: Africa and Latin America. For critiques of the correlative concept of the Orient that chime with critical realism, see Said 1993 and Dirlik 1997. 36 Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 198, see also 169–70.



universal concretely singularized human flourishing in nature is an object/ive immanent in human practice, issuing, if realized, in a richly diverse plan-etary civilization of free flourishing that is not dominated by a world-system and discourse of modernity as we know it.37 But, like that of Habermas, as well as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s earlier critique of the phi-losophy of modernity,38 and true to the logic of immanent critique, the fun-damental impetus of Bhaskar’s critique, as of his philosophy generally, is the transcendence and healing of division and split in a reconciliation that sees an end to the blind domination of nature and humans by humans. This, in essence, is ‘the critical realist embrace’.39 However, while the motivating vision of Bhaskar and Habermas is similar, the way they carry it through is very different. Bhaskar explicitly situates the trajectory of critical realism itself within the wider context of the PDM, pointing out that by no means all aspects of the tradition are regressive and that critical realism itself ‘constitutes so many successive critiques’ of its phases,40 the rise of each of which was associated with a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary transition or upheaval. The link with social upheaval is underlined because for Bhaskar the problems of philosophy are closely bound up, or ‘resonate’, with the problems of social life, and are to be explained in terms of them more fundamentally than in terms of philosophy’s intrinsic dynamics; and revolutionary transforma-tions conform to the non-arbitrary criterion for significant social change generated by critical realism’s transformational model of social activity.41 This means (1) that the development of critical realism is characterized by a process of double immanent critique – first of the PDM, and second of its own previous phases – isolating and remedying, or suggesting remedies for,

37 Cf. Enrique Dussel’s concept of ‘transmodernity’, which, however, has the disadvan-tage conceptually, like ‘postmodernism’, of including that which it wants to move beyond – although drawing on modernity, transmodernity seeks to ‘overcome modernity in all its aspects’ in a move to a new planetary pluriverse ‘that is not an age of multiple modernities of the former kind’ (Dussel 2010, Abstract). Dussel’s ‘liberation philosophy’ has much in common with Bhaskar’s philosophy of emancipation, including the grounding of emanci-patory ethics in agency as well as discourse, but is considerably more hermeneutical and phenomenological in orientation, seeking to marry the insights of the linguistic turn with Marx and, relatively to critical realism, lacking in conceptual rigour and a metatheoretically grounded method of argument. See Dussel [1980] 1985, [1993] 1996, and 2003; Alcoff and Mendieta, eds, 2000. 38 Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 1973. 39 Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, ch. 5, ‘The critical realist embrace: critical naturalism (1975–1979)’, 74–90; Hartwig 2009b. 40 Bhaskar 2002b, 166. 41 See Bhaskar [1979] 1998, [1994] 2010.

494 MERvyN HARTWIG


incompletenesses in each case; and (2) that critical realism is not anti-mod-ern in a regressive or undialectical sense. However, it does maintain that the PDM is fundamentally inimical to universal free flourishing, for which we need to move on to a radically different worldview that incorporates its real strengths. Modernity does have its crowning glories, in particular the idea, as fully developed in dialectical critical realism and metaReality, of rich individualism: concretely singularized individual human flourishing in nature; but this is often misrecognized by the PDM as atomistic egocentric individualism.42

The phases of the PDM (together with their associated socio-political revo-lution) are:

1. Classical modernism (CM) (the moment of the birth and consoli-dation of the capitalist world system, involving the global colonial expansion of Europe and the accompanying socio-cultural-political revolutions of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; or, ‘the advent of world history’, when ‘both time and geo-history moved up a gear’).43

2. High modernism (HM) (the revolutions of 1848 and 1917).3. The theory and practice of modernization (M) (the defeat of fascism,

the revolution of 1949 and the onset of the Cold War and of formal decolonization).

4. Postmodernism (PM) (the revolutionary upheavals of 1968 and the early 1970s in Western Europe, and revolution and counter-revolution in the South, beginning with the vietnam War).

5. Bourgeois triumphalism/endism and its regressive simulacrum, reli-gious and other fundamentalism (T/F) (the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the intensification of the second phase of globalization of capital).

While distinct, all these phases are, like those of critical realism itself, moments in a developmental process, the later phases of which partially critique and deepen but also continue (or constellationally contain) what was implicit in the earlier phases, such that, considered synchronically, they can be collapsed like a folding telescope or a Russian nesting doll: T/F > PM > M > HM > CM. They are unified above all by a ‘tremendous’ underly-ing error:44 ontological monovalence leading to triumphalism and endism (already implicit in the first or base phase), and so constitute a dialectical

42 Bhaskar with Hartwig 2011. 43 Bhaskar 2002c, 103. 44 Bhaskar 2002b, 123.



totality. Ontological monovalence is the view, underpinned ultimately by fear of change on the part of ruling elites, that Being is purely positive, devoid of the negativity that is transcendentally necessary for change to occur.45 It puts a stop to history on behalf of the master-classes, and this is the secret social meaning of the very distinction between the modern and the non-modern: ‘once you say we moderns, we have arrived, then you rule out the possibil-ity of change’.46 Alongside but more fundamental than the epistemic fallacy and the collapse of structure and natural necessity in actualism, ontological monovalence is the third great error of Western philosophy. It is refuted by the transcendental deduction of the category of absence or real negation and contrasts with ontological polyvalence, which vindicates the reality of absence and absenting and embraces change.47

The relationship between the phases of the PDM and the developing criti-cal realist non-preservative sublatory critique is indicated schematically in Table 1.

1. Classical Modernism

Classical modernism’s view of the world (the implicit ontology it secretes) is critiqued by the first phase of critical realism, transcendental realism, as atom-istic and actualist. It is structured around (1) ego- and anthropo‑centricity or -cen‑trism coupled on to (2) abstract universality, both of which are false or illusory, ‘manifestation[s] of the logic of commodification (intrinsic to capitalism) and the reification and alienation … it produces’,48 and fundamentally at odds with the moral alethia of the species. The figure of centrism, which is grounded in the epistemic fallacy, here does duty for any view that takes human being or aspects of human being to be the centre or goal of the/its universe (e.g. ego-centrism, Eurocentrism, anthropocentrism). Not just classical modernism but the entire tradition of the PDM, Bhaskar argues, is constituted by this binary structure of ‘an ego, be it an individual or a group, class, gender, nation state (or some complex of these) objectively set against a manifold, described in actualistically universal terms, which is the object of the ego’s action (manipu-lation and exploitation)’.49 This false duality of abstracted ego-identities or centrisms and abstract universality is manifested in the fact that the discourse

45 Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno’s view in Dialectic of Enlightenment, as summarized by Zuidervaart 2007, that what is ‘really mythical in both myth and enlightenment is the thought that fundamental change is impossible’. 46 Bhaskar 2002b, 122. 47 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, especially 38–48. 48 Bhaskar 2002b, 235. 49 Bhaskar 2002b, 168.

496 MERvyN HARTWIG


Table 1. The philosophical discourse of modernity and the critical realist and metaRealist sublatory critique

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity The Critical Realist and MetaRealist Critique

Moment of the PDM

Defining characteristics Corresponding CR/PMR concepts and critique

Moment of CR/PMR

Main stadion and concept(s): understanding being as

classical mod-ernism (CM)

(1) ego-, anthropo-centricity or -centrism, etc. (atomism)(2) abstract universality (actualism, irrealism)(both underpinned by the epistemic fallacy)‘the intrinsic exterior’

the self as social and interrelated at a fun-damental level with the cosmos; dialectical universality

TR 1M non-identitybeing as structured, differen-tiated and changing;holy trinity: judgemental rationality, epistemic relativ-ism, ontological realism

high modern-ism (HM)

(3) incomplete total-ity (critique of CM) (follows from (2))(4) lack of reflexiv-ity (critique of CM) (follows from (3))

open totality, reflexivity; critiques HM’s substitu-tionism, elitism, reductive materialism

CN 2E processincluding absence or negativ-ity and contradiction;emergence;irreducibility of mind

moderniza-tion theory and practice (M)

(5) unilinearity (5') judgementalism (5") disenchantment

multilinearity, open systems;dialogue;(re-)enchantment

EC 3L totalityinternal relationality,holistic causality; explanatory critique

postmodern-ism (PM)

(6) formalism and (6') functionalism (critique of PDM, stressing identity and difference, and rejecting universality) (7) materialism (critique of PDM)

accepts difference but reinstates unity or (dia-lectical) universality (con-nection) and critiques PM’s judgemental irra-tionalism and lack of a concept of emancipation

DCR 4D transformative agency reflexivity; emancipatory axiology;unity-in-diversity

triumphalism and endism/ renascent fundamental-ism (T/F)

(8) ontological monova-lence (a purely positive account of reality, den-egating change)

ontological polyvalence, the reality of absence;accentuated critique of materialism (implicit consciousness pervades being); critique of sub-ject–object duality; false absolute of market and other fundamentalisms

TDCR

PMR

5A spiritualitythe absolute (God);universal self-realization;co-presence; transcendence

6R enchantment – being as intrinsically meaningful, valu-able and sacred

7A/Z non-duality (primacy of unity and identity over differ-ence) orthe absolute (ground-state and cosmic envelope) – infi-nite or unending possibility;generalized co-presence; transcendence

Note. Columns should be read vertically (developmentally), such that (broadly) T/F > PM > M > HM > CM, and PMR > TDCR > DCR > EC > CN > TR.



both explicitly excludes (thereby experiencing difficulty sustaining its own universality – this is the logic of centrism) and tacitly includes (thereby los-ing the category of the modern – this is the logic of abstract universality50) a pre- or non-modern Other. ‘Thus we have the figure of the intrinsic exte‑rior or past, implicitly secreted in the discourse, below the level of conscious-ness, as the necessary condition of that discourse, reflecting the exploitation of the excluded in reality, whether the excluded be other individuals, non-bourgeois classes, women, colonized peoples, etc.’51 – a classic example of a TINA compromise formation.52 A TINA (‘there is no alternative’) formation is basically ‘the suppression by the false of the truth on which it depends and which sustains it’ (recursively committed theory/practice inconsistency), nec-essarily resulting in emergent error and illusion and exemplifying philosophi-cal unseriousness.53 So the falsity of the exclusion of the non-modern Other in theory, in the very concept of modernity (or in classist, patriarchal, racist, etc., discourses), comes up against the truth of the inclusion of the exploited Other in practice – the Other is in the One, the slave in the master, the periph-ery in the centre (etc.) in that the One is crucially dependent on the Other, and both are part of an only tacitly acknowledged totality.54 Classical modern-ism’s totality is therefore (3) detotalized or incomplete and self-refuting (self-contradictory), and (4) lacking in reflexivity.54

50 Abstract universality projects sectional interests as universal (Bhaskar 2002b, 26–7). 51 Bhaskar 2002b, 168–9, original emphasis. 52 ‘[T]he actual constitution of the presumed superior or privileged term … of necessity presupposed in practice and derived its own superiority from the existence and exploita-tion of the inferior or suppressed term’ (Bhaskar 2002b, 170). 53 Bhaskar 2002a, 219; see also [1993] 2008, 116–9. The fundamental thrust of Bhaskar’s metacritique of the entire Western philosophical tradition is that it is a giant philosophical TINA formation in resonance with a social one (master–slave-type society). The critical realist critique operates at the levels both of social forms and of philosophy. See Bhaskar 2002b, 17 and [1994] 2010; Hartwig 2010. 54 As Enrique Dussel has argued in relation to Europe’s colonized Other, the experience of conquest and exploitation of other peoples is ‘essential to the constitution of the modern ego, not only as a subjectivity, but as subjectivity that takes itself to be the center or end of history’ (Dussel [1993] 1995, 25). For Dussel, the conquest and exploitation of the Other – a process involving not one, but three holocausts (Indigenous peoples and enslaved Afri-cans as well as Jews) – has been rationalized by an ‘irrational sacrificial myth’ of modernity, the other side of the coin of its ‘rational emancipatory nucleus’ (Dussel [1993] 1996, 52, original emphasis; cf. Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 1973). This myth makes the conqueror and exploiter the hero, and the victim responsible for their own victimization, and is a persistent theme in the discourse of modernity from the conquest of the Americas to the Gulf Wars. One of its key philosophical sources, as Dussel points out, is Kant’s view that ‘Enlighten-ment is the exit of humanity from its culpable immaturity … Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so large a part of humanity, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity,

498 MERvyN HARTWIG


The atomistic ego of modernity, on the critical realist account of the self, is an illusion: it is real in terms of causal efficacy, of course, but lacks a real object.55 On this account, people are not disconnected egos but embodied personalities with transcendentally real selves or ground-states, profoundly interrelated at the level of the social, human biology and the fundamental states of the universe.56 The absence of an ego is actually tacitly presupposed by many emancipatory discourses. Thus the concept of the eudaimonian society – one in which the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all – presupposes that your flourishing and develop-ment is as important to me as my own. This is very similar to the injunctions of Buddhism against the ego or the privileging of one’s own standpoint, and for that matter to the implications of the Golden Rule or ethic of reciproc-ity, solidarity and understanding in Christianity and other religions and in all systems of universalizing ethics. But such an ethic is in no way restricted to religion or explicit emancipatory discourses: it is a hidden or unrecog-nized feature of everyday life in all societies, necessary for human sociality and social bonding. In critical realism it finds its metatheoretical expres-sion in the principles of dialectical universalizability and universal solidar-ity, grounded in the concrete universal. Abstract universality, the even more fundamental governing principle of modernity, which finds its most strik-ing manifestation in symbolic logic and money,57 is contrasted with dialecti-cal universality: the universal does not exist apart from the singular and is highly mediated and changing; together universality, processuality, particular mediations and their concretely singular outcome constitute the concrete universal↔singular. A human being thus consists in a core universal human nature, particular mediations and the rhythmics of her world-line, ‘uniquely individuating her … as in effect a natural kind sui generis’.58 Critical real-

and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians.’ [Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit … Faulheit und Feigheit sind die Ursachen, warum ein so großer Teil der Menschen, nachdem sie die Natur längst von fremder Leitung frei gesprochen (naturaliter maiorennes), dennoch gerne zeitlebens unmündig bleiben; und warum es anderen so leicht wird, sich zu deren vor-mündern aufzuwerfen’] (Kant 1783; my translation, borrowing from Dussel especially). 55 See esp. Bhaskar 2002b, ch. 2, ‘Who am I?’, 69–116. 56 The transcendentally real or essential or alethic self or ground-state is ultimately an implicitly conscious field of possibility interrelated with all other ground-states as ‘part of a much bigger quantum field’ (Bhaskar 2002b, 92). The basic idea here is that ultimately there is only one kind of stuff – information-energy or fields of implicitly conscious possibil-ity with bits of root matter enfolded within them – which is ingredient in everything in the multiverse, so everything is interrelated at a fundamental level. 57 Bhaskar 2002b, 17. 58 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 395; see also Bhaskar 2010, 18–19; Hartwig 2007c, 2007h; Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 80–1.



ism’s totality in the human sphere, by contrast with that of the PDM, includes everyone on the planet while celebrating the reality and potential of diversity at personal, communal and regional levels.

2. High Modernism

The false egocentricity and abstract universality of classical modernism were the focus of the critique of classical modernism by high modernism, broadly endorsed by critical realism, which reached its apogee philosophically and theoretically in Marx and ideology-critique and Sigmund Freud. Ideology-critique exposes, first, ‘the representation of sectional interests as universal ones’,59 revealing the ‘tacit dependence of the excluding on the excluded’60 captured in the figure of the intrinsic exterior; and this has been built on by feminism, dependency theory and other movements representing the excluded. Second, it shows the necessary dependence of a false theory on a true ground, prefiguring the theory of the TINA formation.61 However, in its proneness to ‘substitutionism’ (which relies on some agent other than your-self to effect desirable social change) and elitism, deriving from the lack of an organic intelligentsia in the Gramscian sense, high modernism is itself vul-nerable to some aspects of its own critique – elitism itself represents sectional interests as universal;62 and to the metaRealist argument for the primacy of self-referentiality or the self-transformation or self-realization of the human subject: emancipatory social change necessarily begins with self-change in this sense, we cannot rely on others (e.g. the working class or elites/experts) to do it for us – we have to do it ourselves.63 Emancipatory high modernism is additionally vulnerable to the criticism that it presupposes a spirituality that it fails to thematize explicitly or ground adequately, where spirituality is most fundamentally acting in awareness of and consistently with the reality of the hidden non-dual substratum of creativity, love, right-action and freedom that systems of social oppression dominate and occlude even as they depend on them.64

Like classical modernism, high modernism is also (with important excep-tions that do not include most Marxism since Marx) typically reductively materialist in outlook. Reductive materialism holds that the world is brutely

59 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 168. 60 Bhaskar 2002b, 27. 61 Bhaskar 2002b, 27–8. 62 Bhaskar 2002c, 309. 63 Bhaskar 2002b, 119. 64 See e.g. Bhaskar 2002b, 115–16, 119.

500 MERvyN HARTWIG


physical, arguing that any seemingly non-physical phenomenon (e.g. con-sciousness) fully reduces to some other identified physical entity (e.g. brain-states or neural processes). Such reductionist reification has the consequence of de-agentifying human agency and downplaying ‘the enormous creative power of thought’.65 The critical realist critique of this position was inaugu-rated by the demonstration of the sui generis reality of mind as an emergent power in Bhaskar’s The Possibility of Naturalism66 and is carried through in the philosophy of metaReality, with its rejection of the notion that Being is exhaustively physical and its espousal of metaphysical realism rather than materialism (or idealism).

3. Modernization

As Habermas has pointed out, the term ‘modernization’ was introduced as a technical concept only in the 1950s, the hey-day of functionalist and evo-lutionary approaches to social theory.67 Modernization theory and practice was characterized by (5) unilinearity, whereby ‘developing’ countries would inevitably pass through the same stages of economic and political growth as the Western world, and history as a whole is a story of unilinear progress, with Western countries in the vanguard; critical realism critiques this as a variant of elitism and (in Popper’s sense) historicism and shows that its determinis-tic cast is closely bound up with actualism.68 There are no laws of historical development inexorably determining a unique sequence; history could have been, just as it could be, very different. Intrinsic to unilinearity was (5') a judgementalism – completely at odds with modernity’s own prevalent view that rational judgements concerning matters of value are impossible – whereby ‘developed’, ‘Western’ and ‘modern’ are not only superior to anything incon-sistent with themselves but present a model that others must follow; and (5") an accentuated disenchantment of the world, which had been present in the PDM from the outset, whereby the world was increasingly drained of intrinsic meaning and value, which were sourced instead to the self-defining modern subject. During this period disenchantment found expression above all in

65 Bhaskar 2002b, 245. 66 Bhaskar [1979] 1998. 67 Habermas [1985] 1987, 2. 68 Dussel (e.g. [1993] 1996, 4) critiques it as the ‘developmentalist fallacy’. Habermas’s view ([1985] 1987, 3) that ‘[t]he theory of modernization … dissociates “modernity” from its modern European origins and stylizes it into a spatio-temporally neutral model for pro-cesses of social development in general’ is correct in regard of stylization but overlooks that Europe was deemed to have shown and to be showing the way.



Weberian ‘rationalization’ and the Nietzschean ‘death of God’,69 entraining a line of thought that issued in the poststructuralist ‘ “end of man” (Foucault), “history” (Lyotard) and (through its heat-death) “meaning” (Derrida)’.70

While rejecting any view of geo-history that sees it as an inexorable process of development towards a pre-ordained goal, viewing it rather as a radically open, contingent, uneven and multiform process punctuated by regression and foldback, critical realism does hold that there is a certain ‘tendential ratio-nal directionality’ in history. This is a latent teleology at the level of the social real inscribed, not just in human speech (cf. Apelian and Habermasian dis-course ethics, demonstrating the immanent rationality of linguistic intersub-jectivity), but more generally in practice as such – a deep yearning and striving for free flourishing immanent in praxis: the pulse of freedom.71 This notion of ‘tendential rational directionality’ has been deemed by some to be tainted with Eurocentrism, but the struggle for freedom comes from people wherever they are – from the colonized, the periphery, the subaltern and so on – and to imagine that this is not so is itself a Eurocentric conceit. As Bhaskar has pointed out, the pulse of freedom could have been thematized equally well ‘in critical engagement with Chinese, or Indian, or Indigenist philosophy’, as with Western.72 Likewise, in arguing for the re-enchantment of the world, Bhaskar is not arguing for the imposition of an arbitrary transcendent view, wrapping the world once more in the mythic. On the contrary, the argument is that the world is always already enchanted,73 i.e. intrinsically meaningful and valuable, and that this is obscured by the disenchanted gaze in the smog of the demi-real – an emergent level of reality characterized by categorial error, ignorance and illusion that obtains in all master–slave-type societies, but reaches its fullest expression to date in capitalist modernity. In order to see the world for what it really is – enchanted – we must shed the demi-real.74

4. Postmodernism

Postmodernism, along with the ‘new’ social movements that accompanied it, is a backlash against the entire tradition of the PDM, aspiring to speak on behalf of all those who were tacitly excluded from it. Above all, perhaps, it is

69 Gauchet [1985] 1997. 70 Bhaskar 2002b, 170. 71 Bhaskar [1993] 2008; Hartwig 2007d. 72 Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 138. 73 See e.g. Bhaskar 2002b, 243, n. 35. 74 The concept of demi-reality is first explicitly elaborated in Bhaskar 2000, 6, 33–9, but had been used in oral presentations from 1994 (Bhaskar, personal communication). It builds on the theory of the TINA formation.

502 MERvyN HARTWIG


a reaction against the abstractly (actualistically) universalizing tendencies of that discourse, obliterative of identity and difference, which came to a peak in modernization theory and practice. This is a very important corrective from a critical realist point of view; it is a reaction, prefigured by the expres-sivist 1960s cultural revolution, ‘against the logic of Western domination in the name of capitalist globalization’.75 Unfortunately, however,

in the very accentuation in this phase of a new politics of identity and dif-ference the interconnectedness and unity of humanity and indeed living forms was lost. What was missing here was any conception of a dialectical totality, with the crucial concepts of dialectical universality and concrete sin‑gularity absent.76

That is to say, postmodernism fails to distinguish between abstract actualist and dialectical universality, ‘jettison[ing] universality rather than actualism!’77 It denegates universality, but is itself a universal modern ideology. The era of postmodernism brought out the (6) formalism and (6') functionalism of the whole tradition, which assumed the non-autonomous plasticity of nature, treated as an object of instrumental reasoning and practice, together with (7) a materialism that was reductionist in theory and mechanical in prac-tice. By formalism Bhaskar means the undialectical ‘glorification of formal, analytical, abstract, quantitative modes of reasoning and modes of being’78 that characterizes the dominant discourses of modernity as a whole; and, relatedly, the prioritization of discursive over intuitive modes of reasoning, which is in part reversed by postmodernism.79 Philosophically, mechanical materialism downplays the role of ideas and intentionality in geo-history; as manifested in Marxism it

never came to terms with the role of consciousness, ideas and intentionality, the defining characteristics of social life, as foundational features of social life. The result was that its own self-understanding and its own practice was acutely limited by a failure to come to terms with the subjective and self-transformative prerequisites of social change.80

75 Bhaskar 2002b, 235. 76 Bhaskar 2002b, 171, original emphasis. 77 Bhaskar 2002b, 236. 78 Bhaskar 2002b, 29. 79 The postmodern critique of ‘logocentrism’, endorsed by Habermas, finds its coun-terpart in the Bhaskarian critique of the discursive intellect, which however encompasses all forms of analytical and dialectical reason, not just ‘the philosophy of consciousness’, and critiques Habermas’s ‘communicative reason’ for its actualism. See especially Bhaskar 2002c, ch. 3, ‘The Zen of creativity and the critique of the discursive intellect’, 99–166. In PMR both the discursive and the intuitive intellect are underpinned by supramental or ground-state consciousness. 80 Bhaskar 2002b, 188 n.15.



Substantively, materialism hinges on a sense of the utter separateness of the ego from the rest of the world, which underwrites manipulative treatment of people as well as the world of objects (‘with which man … [seeks] to fill his own inner emptiness’) and sets up a ‘master–slave relationship between the ego or the modern, and the non-ego, other or non- or pre-modern’.81 Postmodernism rejects and displaces this ego, along with universality, but ‘the bearer of the deconstructive discourse remains mysterious, unsuscep-tible to reflexive situation’.82 Who or what is it that pronounces the disap-pearance of the ego? Critical realism can agree that the atomistic ego is a (causally efficacious) illusion but it upholds the reality of the embodied per-sonality and of the transcendentally real self or ground-state that underpins and sustains both.83 Postmodernism’s inability to sustain a coherent totality is mirrored in poststructuralism (and also evident in structuralism), which detotalizes the observer from the field she observes. Neither is therefore able ‘to sustain any notion of itself’.84 Crucially, the relationship postmod-ernism postulates between the postmodern and the modern duplicates the ideological relationship between the modern and the non-modern in the PDM as a whole, and its denial of ontology and of the possibility of a judge-mentally rational assessment of other positions entails that it cannot sustain a concept of emancipation or indeed its own rationality, causal efficacy or reality. It mistakes a modality of reason – instrumental or strategic rational-ity, grounded in power2 social relations85 and the dominant form of reason in modernity – for reason itself.86 Here Bhaskar’s critique joins forces with that of Habermas: both thinkers position themselves within ‘the conative drive to freedom’ linking Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Marx, on the one hand, and critical theory and dialectical critical realism, on the other,87 against the wholesale poststructuralist attack on the heritage of the Enlightenment that aims to sever the link between freedom and reason. Habermas demonstrates that postmodernism is unserious: ‘the supposedly radical critique of reason remains tied to the presuppositions of the philosophy of the subject from which it wanted to free itself … the other of reason remains the mirror

81 Bhaskar 2002b, 171. 82 Bhaskar 2002b, 70. 83 Bhaskar 2002b, ch. 2, ‘Who am I?’, 69–116; 2002c, xxv–xxvi, 36f. 84 Bhaskar 2002a, 208; 2002b, 172; 2000c, 229; cf. Habermas [1985] 1987, 336f. 85 Morgan 2007. 86 Bhaskar distinguishes seven levels of rationality, which are then grouped into four: (1) instrumental; (2) critical (including explanatory critical); (3) emancipatory; and (4) his-torical reason or geo-historical rational directionality. These are set out in Hartwig 2007g, summarizing Bhaskar [1986] 2009, 181f., [1993] 2008, 261 and [1994] 2010, 147, 153. 87 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 335.

504 MERvyN HARTWIG


image of reason in power’.88 On the other hand, Habermas joins forces with poststructuralism, contra Bhaskar, in asserting the permanence of disen-chantment and the Weberian ‘iron cage’ and the ineliminability of power2 relations. Whereas the animating vision of Habermas is of ‘a reconciliation of modernity which has fallen apart’ on the basis of ‘forms of living together in which autonomy and dependency can truly enter into non-antagonistic relation’,89 that of Bhaskar is of a universal free flourishing that presupposes the abolition of master–slave-type relations in their entirety.

5. Triumphalism/Fundamentalism

Postmodernism’s denial of the possibility of the rational assessment of other positions helped pave the way, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, for the emphatic reassertion of bourgeois triumphalism and endism, with their underpinning philosophical error of (8) ontological monovalence.90 As con-cepts, triumphalism and endism, together with centrism, entail each other as follows: centrism → triumphalism → endism.91 They are implicit in Marx’s critique of Hegel, and central to the Bhaskarian critique of the irrealism of the Western philosophical tradition generally. Hegel exemplified all three of these categorial errors when he said: ‘World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.’92 Triumphalism is the overweening exaggeration of human powers to know, control etc. Cognitive triumphalism in Hegel, for example, identifies the whole of Being with what lies within the scope of human cognitive com-petence. Politically, triumphalism found expression after 1989 in a ‘recru-descence of neo-imperialism, reactionary nationalism and chauvinism’.93 Endism is the view that history, while once real, has come to an end in the present. Thus, according to twentieth-century endism, modernity had a beginning around about 1500, in the light of which its past appears as pre-history, and it has now arrived at an ending, an everlasting posthistory.94 There will of course continue to be a future, according to this view, but there will be no more qualitative social and institutional change or ideologies of

88 Habermas [1985] 1987, 309. 89 Habermas 1986, 125. 90 Bhaskar 2002b, 172. 91 Hartwig 2007b. 92 Hegel [1837] 1975, 197. 93 Bhaskar 2002c, 167. 94 Cf. Habermas [1985] 1987, ch. 1, ‘Modernity’s consciousness of time and its need for self-reassurance’, 1–22.



change: the future will in this sense be constellationally contained within the present. Applied to our contemporary situation, endism proclaims that there are no alternatives to capitalism. Such denial of the ongoing nature of geo-historicity, or de-geo-historicization, is characteristic of master-classes, because the continuation of geo-history must sooner or later spell the end of their rule, and it is a potent motif of the Western philosophical tradition, which assists in legitimating that rule.95 Endism is falsified by the irreducibly transformative nature of human praxis, which absents and creates, even as it reproduces, the given. Endism was nicely exemplified in the work of Francis Fukuyama just as the discourse of bourgeois triumphalism was getting seri-ously under way.96 Fundamentalism (or foundationalism), whether in the form of market or religious and other fundamentalisms or the theory of epistemology, is the view that one’s knowledge is incorrigible or certain because it is based on indubitable principles. It ‘inevitably splits reality into two (viz. that which conforms to its criterion and that which does not)’,97 giving rise to the problem of the One and the Other, whether in phi-losophy or the politics of identity. In contrast to Bhaskar, modernity limits fundamentalism to the attempt to defend the pre-modern or traditional in a traditional way,98 thereby letting market fundamentalism off the hook. In late modernity fundamentalism is a cousin of postmodernism, like it reject-ing universality and unity and accepting the essentiality of difference, but saying ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ to postmodernism’s ‘there is no right and wrong’.99 What fundamentalism ignores is that we can never start from scratch or an indubitable starting point because we are always ‘thrown’ into an already existing epistemological dialectic or learning process, entailing epistemological relativity and the possibility of critique. It thus arrives at the opposite conclusion to that of its dialectical counterpart,100 endism or

95 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 64. Endism and the notion of posthistory contrasts with the Marxian and Bhaskarian view that history proper will begin only after the species moves on from its power2-stricken state. In eudaimonian society, far from historicity having ended, it would be embraced and shift up a gear as implicit and stymied human creative potentiali-ties are unlocked and unfolded in an in principle never-ending open evolutionary process, with an emphasis on being and letting be rather than having and controlling. 96 Fukuyama 1992. 97 Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 300. 98 Cf. Giddens 1994, cit. vandenberghe 2004, 115 n. 70. 99 Bhaskar 2002b, 41, 97. 100 Dialectical counterparts or antagonists are in conflict over relatively superficial matters but necessary to each other in being grounded in (a) common category mistake(s), hence tacitly complicit. So their antagonism or opposition is ultimately phoney, and is revealed as such when overreached by a fuller conceptual formation that makes good the category mistake.

506 MERvyN HARTWIG


absolutism, which assumes that we are, or can be, left with nothing to do. All fundamentalisms – ‘so many symptoms of the alienation and fragmentation of being’101 – thus turn on the provision of a ‘false absolute’ or ‘god’ (the ‘indubitable’ starting point), spurred in the last instance, as in the case of endism, by fear of change. Today, renascent religious and other fundamen-talisms, summoned to account in a dialectic of violence by the false bour-geois god, the Moloch of power and money (an abstract universal), joins it in suppressing creativity, love and freedom.102

In bourgeois triumphalism and endism, the ideology of neoliberalism/neoconservatism proclaims the end of ideology, and market fundamentalism the infallibility of the market as a means of solving multiple and compound-ing social and economic problems and crises. The heyday of triumphalism accompanied the intense phase of globalization, under the dominance of market fundamentalism, that followed the demise of the Soviet bloc after 1989. It may well be, as Bhaskar has suggested, that

this logic of the ‘end’ has itself a clearly identifiable end. For when every-thing is commodified, that is, reified and turned into a thing, then the process of commodification must come to a halt; and since there will be nothing more to commodify, there can be no further basis for commodifi-cation, that is, the expansion, and thus the very survival, of the regime of commodification, reification and alienation. The only question is whether this regime comes to a halt before the process of commodification is abso-lute – for when it does, or if it did, there would be no more nature and nothing more to count as a human being.103

The discourse that accompanied the phase of globalization after 1989 can be thought of as a first sub-phase of triumphalism/fundamentalism. From the time of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ a second sub-phase ensued, character-ized by the clash and proliferation of fundamentalisms:

101 Bhaskar 2002b, 173. 102 Bhaskar 2002b, 242; 2002a, 347. As I write, savage cuts to public expenditure across the globe are being justified as necessary to ‘placate’ the market. Such sacrificial violence, as Dussel [1993] 1995 reminds us, has been a cardinal feature of Western modernity from its inception. 103 Bhaskar 2002b, 173. Bhaskar does not of course believe that the process of commodi-fication could become absolute in practice, because it presupposes and depends on a non-dual realm that presents an unsurpassable real barrier to alienation (see e.g. Bhaskar 2002b, 18; Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 193–4; cf. Suzuki 2005). Habermas agrees with Bhaskar that the process of alienation and reification has limits in a ‘unity of rationality’ that lies ‘beneath the husk’ of everyday practice (cited in Cook 2005, 56) and provides the indis-pensable basis for the social system as a whole, but does not ground this in action as distinct from speech-action, nor view it as an ontologically real tendency (existing intransitively in relation to any particular action), nor source it ultimately to human ground-states.



the clash of market fundamentalism in alliance with Christian and perhaps also Jewish fundamentalism, on the one hand, with Islamic fundamentalism on the other, coupled with, and overlaid by, the breaking out of myriad local and petty fundamentalisms, chauvinisms and absolutisms.104

6. Current Trends

Today there are signs that we are entering a new sub-phase of triumphalism/fundamentalism characterized by ‘a partial return to a multi-polar world (in which the emerging BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] countries provide a partial counter-weight to US hegemony), increasing crises of international law and co-operation and the accentuated urgency of economic and eco-logical challenges’, but under the continued hegemony of market funda-mentalism set more than ever on a course of indefinite growth that can only lead to ecological disaster.105 In such a context of multi-polarity and crisis both externally and within nation-states, there may be greater scope for phi-losophies of universal free flourishing with their projects of eudaimonia or ‘transmodernity’ to flourish, and for a beginning to be made at implement-ing their concrete utopian visions on a planetary scale.106 A key resource for such philosophies is the idea and reality of ‘multiple modernities’ co-present and resurgent within the capitalist world-system. This has already helped to entrain a powerful discourse of post-secularity challenging one of the central tenets of the discourse of modernity: the Weberian notion that moderniza-tion inexorably leads to the dissolution of religious and spiritual worldviews, issuing in a secular global society. We can expect such trends to continue for the foreseeable future.107 If, as the Bhaskarian account has it, the economic crises currently besetting globalized humanity have been ‘created most fun-damentally by a triple disembedding: of money from the real economy; of the real economy from society; and of society from its spiritual infrastructure (or metaReal basis)’108 and the more general crises by a four-fold alienation of people from nature, each other, their social relations and their essential selves, the solution can only be a triple re-embedding and quadruple de-alienation that brings ‘system’, shorn of its heteronomous elements, within

104 Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 196. 105 Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 196. 106 Concrete utopianism ‘consists in the exercise of constructing models of alternative ways of living on the basis of some assumed set of resources, counterbalancing actualism and informing hope’ (Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 395). Cf. the burgeoning field of futures studies, for a critical realist take on which see Patomäki 2006. 107 Hartwig and Morgan, eds, 2011. 108 Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 196.

508 MERvyN HARTWIG


the horizon of the everyday life of people in touch with their real selves – an everyday life in which ‘realism about transcendence enables us to transcend subject–object duality’.109 This is the principle of subject-referentiality or self-reflexivity in social change, which prioritizes self-change and self-realization (the education of the educators) as indispensable to social transformation.110 People do not indeed make history in circumstances of their own choosing, but they do make it.

Bibliography

Alcoff, L. M., and E. Mendieta, eds, 2000. Thinking from the Underside of History: Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Arnason, J. P., S. N. Eisenstadt and B. Wittrock. 2005. ‘General introduction’. In Axial Civi‑lizations and World History, eds J. P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt and B. Wittrock, 1–12. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Arnason, J. P., S. N. Eisenstadt and B. Wittrock, eds, 2005. Axial Civilizations and World His‑tory. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Bhaskar, R. [1975] 2008. A Realist Theory of Science, with an introduction by M. Hartwig. London: Routledge.

Bhaskar, R. [1979] 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. London: Routledge.

Bhaskar, R. [1986] 2009. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Routledge.Bhaskar, R. [1989] 2010. Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy,

with an introduction by M. Hartwig. London: Routledge.Bhaskar, R. [1991] 2010. Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, with an introduction by M. Hartwig.

London: Routledge.Bhaskar, R. [1993] 2008. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, with an introduction by M. Hartwig.

London: Routledge.Bhaskar, R. [1994] 2010. Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution, with an intro-

duction by M. Hartwig. London: Routledge.Bhaskar, R. 2000. From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul. London: Routledge.Bhaskar, R. 2002a. From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the Actuality of Enlightenment.

New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage.Bhaskar, R. 2002b. Reflections on Meta‑Reality: Transcendence, Emancipation and Everyday Life.

New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage.Bhaskar, R. 2002c. The Philosophy of meta‑Reality, Volume I, meta‑Reality: Creativity, Love and Free‑

dom. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage.Bhaskar, R. 2010. ‘Contexts of interdisciplinarity: interdisciplinarity and climate change’. In

Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change, eds R. Bhaskar, C. Frank, K. G. Høyer, P. Næss and J. Parker, 1–24. London: Routledge.

Bhaskar, R., with M. Hartwig 2011. ‘MetaReality (re-)contextualized’. In Critical Realism and Spirituality, eds M. Hartwig and J. Morgan, 206–217. London: Routledge.

Bhaskar, R., with M. Hartwig 2010. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. London: Routledge.

Cook, D. 2005. ‘The sundered totality of system and lifeworld’. Historical Materialism 13(4): 55–78.

109 Bhaskar 2002b, 166. 110 Bhaskar 2002b, 220.



Dews, P. 1986. ‘Editor’s introduction’. In Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews, by J. Habermas. London: verso.

Dirlik, A. 1997. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boul-der, CO: Westview Press.

Dussel, E. [1980] 1985. Philosophy of Liberation. Maryknoll, Ny: Orbis Books.Dussel, E. [1993] 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the Myth of Moder‑

nity, trans. M. D. Barber. New york: Continuum.Dussel, E. [1993] 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the Philoso‑

phy of Liberation, trans. with an introduction by E. Mendieta. Amherst, MA: Humanity Books.

Dussel, E. 2003. Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism and Liberation Theology, ed. E. Mendi-eta. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Dussel, E. 2010. ‘From modernity to transmodernity’. Unpublished paper presented to the International Symposium ‘Research Across Boundaries’, University of Luxembourg, June.

Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin.Gauchet, M. [1985] 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans.

Oscar Burge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Giddens, A. 1994. ‘Living in a post-traditional society’. In U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash,

Reflexive Modernization, 56–109. Cambridge: Polity Press.Habermas 1976. Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp.Habermas, J. [1985] 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence. Cam-

bridge, MA: MIT Press.Habermas, J. 1986. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews, ed. and introduced by P. Dews. London:

verso.Hartwig, M. 2007a. ‘Alethia’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed. M. Hartwig, 24–30. London:

Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2007b. ‘Centrism → triumphalism → endism’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism,

ed. M. Hartwig, 62–4. London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2007c. ‘Concrete universal ↔ singular’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed.

M. Hartwig, 73–4. London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2007d. ‘Emancipatory axiology’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed. M. Hartwig,

157–64. London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2007e. ‘Geo-historicity’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed. M. Hartwig, 221–2.

London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2007f. ‘Master–slave’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed. M. Hartwig, 287–90.

London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2007g. ‘Rationality’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed. M. Hartwig, 397–8.

London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2007h. ‘Universalizability’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed. M. Hartwig, 491–2.

London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2009a. ‘Introduction’. In Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, by

R. Bhaskar. London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2009b. ‘ “Orthodox critical realism” and the critical realist embrace’. Journal of

Critical Realism 8(3): 233–57.Hartwig, M. 2010. ‘Introduction’. In Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution,

by R. Bhaskar, xi–xxvi. London: Routledge.Hartwig, M. 2011. ‘Introduction’. In Reflections on MetaReality: Transcendence, Emancipation

and Everyday Life, by R. Bhaskar, viii–xxvii. London: Routledge.Hartwig, M., and J. Morgan, eds, 2011. Critical Realism and Spirituality. London: Routledge.Hegel, G. W. F. [1837] 1975. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in

History, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

510 MERvyN HARTWIG


Horkheimer, M., and T. W. Adorno [1947] 1973. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane.

Jaspers, K. [1949] 2010. The Origin and Goal of History. London: Routledge.Kant, I. 1783. Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? [An Answer to the Question: What is

Enlightenment?]. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30821Markus, G. 2009. ‘Benjamin’s critique of aesthetic autonomy’. In Walter Benjamin and the

Architecture of Modernity, eds A. Benjamin and C. Rice, 111–28. Melbourne: re.press.McCarthy, T. 1978. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. London: Hutchinson.McCarthy, T. 1987. ‘Introduction’ to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, by J. Habermas,

trans. F. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Morgan, J. 2003. ‘What is meta-Reality? Alternative interpretations of the argument’. Journal

of Critical Realism 1(2): 115–46.Morgan, J. 2007. ‘Power’. In Dictionary of Critical Realism, ed. M. Hartwig, 372–3. London:

Routledge.Norrie, A. 2010. Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice.

London: Routledge.Outhwaite, W. 1994. Habermas: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Polity Press.Patomäki, H. 2006. ‘Realist ontology for futures studies’. Journal of Critical Realism 5(1):

1–31.Said, E. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Routledge.Seo MinGyu 2008. ‘Bhaskar’s philosophy as anti-anthropism: a comparative study of Eastern

and Western thought’. Journal of Critical Realism 7(1): 5–28.Suzuki, H. 2005. ‘Is there something money can’t buy? In defense of the ontology of a market

boundary’. Journal of Critical Realism 4(2): 265–90.Taylor, C. 1992. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.vandenberghe, F. 2004. ‘Posthumanism, or the cultural logic of global neo-capitalism’. Société

24-25: 55–132.vandenberghe, F. 2010. ‘The books that Habermas hasn’t written’. Review of J. Habermas,

Philosophische Texte. Studienausgabe in fünf Bänden. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009. http://frederic.iesp.uerj.br/.

Wallerstein, I. 1974. The Modern World‑System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World‑Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New york: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, I. 1980. The Modern World‑System, vol. II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World‑Economy, 1600–1750. New york: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, I. 1989. The Modern World‑System, vol. III: The Second Great Expansion of the Capital‑ist World‑Economy, 1730–1840s. New york: Academic Press.

Zuidervaart, L. 2007. ‘Adorno’. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#2.

http://frederic.iesp.uerj.br/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#2

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#2

PERSPECTIVE BHASKAR’S CRITIQUE OF THE · PDF fileappropriate to speak of axial...

Documents

Transcript of PERSPECTIVE BHASKAR’S CRITIQUE OF THE · PDF fileappropriate to speak of axial...