Dialectic

The Pulse of Freedom

Roy Bhaskar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781138140691
• eBook ISBN: 9781134050925
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

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

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

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

1
Introduction: Critical Realism, Hegelian Dialectic and the Problems of Philosophy—Preliminary Considerations

§ 1 Objectives of the Book

What is developed in this work is neither Hegelian dialectic nor, to my knowledge, any other pre-existing form of dialectic, but a critical realist dialectic. A major point of reference throughout this book will certainly be Hegelian dialectic, and in the course of it I hope to realize Marx’s unconsummated desire ‘to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence’—though it will take more than two or three printers’ sheets—‘what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered and at the same mystified’,¹ as well as to clarify the exact relation between Marx’s own dialectic and Hegel’s one. But I will be discussing a variety of other dialectical (and anti-dialectical) modes, including Aristotelian dialectic, Kantian dialectic and Derridean deconstruction.

A work of this kind—a dialectical critique of purely analytical reason—can claim no more—or less—than dialectical consistency. For the moment this may be exemplified by what I have elsewhere characterized as developmental consistency²—the kind of consistency shown by connected theories in an ongoing research programme in science; or in nature by the development of a tadpole into a frog or an acorn into an oak—a consistency redeemable only in the course of, and at the end of, the day. Moreover, this book makes no claim to completeness—and that for immanent dialectical reasons too. Indeed it stands in the closest possible connection to the texts that will immediately follow it: Hume, Kant, Hegel Marx will elaborate the central historical argument of the book and provide a more detailed critical hermeneutics of those four thinkers, Plato Etcetera will resume the critical diagnosis and metacritique of the western philosophical tradition sketched in this study, and Dialectical Social Theory will engage at a more concrete level with the implications of the book’s argument for social theory, geography and history.

This book has as its main objectives:

1. the dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism—understood as consisting of transcendental realism as a general theory of science and critical naturalism as a special theory of social science (which includes the emancipatory axiology entailed by the theory of explanatory critique);
2. the development of a general theory of dialectic—or better, a dialectic—of which the Hegelian one can be seen as an important, but limited and highly questionable, special case; and one which will moreover be capable of sustaining the development of a general metatheory for the social sciences, on the basis of which they will be capable of functioning as agencies of human self-emancipation;
3. the outline of the elements of a totalizing critique of western philosophy, in its various (including hitherto dialectical) forms, including a micro sketch of certain nodal moments in the history of dialectical philosophy, capable, inter alia, of casting light on the contemporary crisis of socialism.

I shall contend that these objectives are intimately related, and especially that there are direct and immediate connections between the critical realist development of dialectical motifs and themes and the resolution of the problems, sublation of the problematics and explanation of the problem-fields of contemporary philosophy. To put this in a nutshell, most philosophical aporiai derive from taking an insufficiently non-anthropocentric, differentiated, stratified, dynamic, holistic (concrete) or agentive (practical) view of things. More generally, philosophy’s current anthropomorphizing, actualizing, monovalent and detotalizing ontology acts, I shall argue, as a block on the development of the social sciences and projects of human emancipation—for this ontology currently informs much of their practice. For the transformation of this state of affairs dialectical critical realism—i.e. the development of dialectic in its critical realist form—is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Philosophy, for its part, being out of joint with reality, is necessarily aporetic. We shall see in C3 how dialectical critical realism can begin to remedy this, but I hope the import of these remarks will soon be plain. This book represents an attempt to synthesize what I take to be the most fruitful aspects of the dialectical tradition (or traditions), most of which have come down to us through the mediation of Hegel, with the contemporary critical realist research programme—to, I think, their mutual advantage. But the structure of the resulting dialectic is very different from the Hegelian one. At the beginning, in this new dialectic, there is non-identity—at the end, open unfinished totality. In between, irreducible material structure and heteronomy, deep negativity and emergent spatio-temporality. In this work, I want to show that it is possible to think and act dialectically without necessarily being a Hegelian—or, if you prefer, vice versa.

§ 2 Dialectic: An Initial Orientation

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. Clearly, within these generic categories a vast variety of distinctions can be made, specifying more concrete or roughly parallel (e.g. ethical, aesthetic) dialectics. Equally clearly, dialectical processes may occur in our thinking about our thinking about reality, e.g. in the philosophy of science, so that one may talk of a meta-epistemological dialectic, and so on recursively. For critical realism all dialectics, insofar as they occur, are also ontological dialectics, though with respect to any, for example, epistemic investigation we may and perhaps must think of a distinct ontic field (into which the epistemological investigation may itself be reflexively incorporated). Similarly, all social dialectics are also practical dialectics, even though in the case of, say, structural analysis one may and perhaps must abstract from human agency. In respect of science, ontological, epistemological and the class of meta-epistemological dialectics may be mapped onto what I have called the intransitive, transitive and metacritical dimensions.³ (For critical realism, relational dialectics, however thorough-going, can never abolish the existential intransitivity of the relata.) All these terms have a subject/topic ambiguity. Thus one might hold epistemological dialectics to be engaged with the dialectic of epistemology rather than the dialectic of what it is about, e.g. science. In this book I will be concerned with both kinds of dialectics, the former belonging to what I will style metacritical dialectics, which includes the relations between the two kinds.

Like Hegel, I take dialectic to be a logic of content and not just form. And, like him, I take this to centre on the norms of truth and freedom (mediated in practice by wisdom). That is, I take both to have a certain dynamic to them, a dynamic which I hope to describe. More fully I will show that truth, for example, must be understood as grounded, dynamic, totalizing and context-sensitive, corresponding to the four moments of the critical realist dialectic that I shall shortly outline. But instead of talking immediately of truth and freedom, and respecting the geo-historical specificity of both, I will talk about knowledge as specific kinds of beliefs (of different types) and of emancipation from specific kinds of constraints. To the extent that I abstract from content in the earlier portions of this book, particularly in the exposition of Hegelian dialectic, this is for the sake of didactic clarity alone.

§ 3 Negation

In previous works I have shown how science itself presupposes a critical realist ontology of the world as structured, differentiated and changing. And I have argued that the chief metaphilosophical error in prevailing accounts of science is the analysis, definition or explication of statements about being in terms of statements about our knowledge of being, the reduction of ontology to epistemology which I have termed the ‘epistemic fallacy’.⁴ As ontology is in fact irreducible to epistemology, this functions merely to cover the generation of an implicit ontology, on which the domain of the real is reduced to the domain of the actual (actualism) which is then anthroprocentrically identified with or in terms of sense-experience or some other human attribute. Operating hand-in-hand with this overt collapse, engendered or masked by the epistemic fallacy, is its practical counterpart, the ideology of the compulsive determination of knowledge by being—for instance, in the guise of reified facts or hypostatized ideas—in what I have characterized as the ‘ontic fallacy’.⁵ The epistemic fallacy can be traced back to Parmenides.

But Parmenides also bequeathed another legacy to philosophy: the generation of a purely positive, complementing a purely actual, notion of reality, in what I am going to nominate the doctrine of ontological monovalence. In this study I aim to revindicate negativity. Indeed, by the time we are through, I would like the reader to see the positive as a tiny, but important, ripple on the surface of a sea of negativity. 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. But real negation also connotes a process of mediating, distancing or absenting, i.e. it has a systematic process/ product bivalency or homonymy. In fact, as we shall see in the next chapter, it also signifies both process-in-product and product-in-process, so that it has a fourfold polysemy. How could one argue for the importance of real negation in, for example, science? Writings—books, research papers, experimental records—provide striking examples of it. Consider a book in a library. It typically involves an absent (and possibly dead) author, an absent reception necessary for its presence in the library, and absences—spaces inside and in between sequences of marks—necessary for its intelligibility, its readability. Again experimental activity involves a real demediation of nature, preventing or absenting a state of affairs that would otherwise have occurred, so as to enable us to identify a generative mechanism or complex free from outside influence or with such interference held constant. These may, if one likes, be taken as transcendental deductions of the presence of real negation in science, as conditions of its possibility. Real negation—think of empty spaces and absent x’s where x stands in principle for any entity or feature. Of course what is absent or void at or from one level, region or perspective may be present at another. This is what I shall refer to as the ‘duality of absence’.

Transformative negation refers to the transformation of some thing, property or state of affairs. Such a transformation may be essential or inessential, total or partial, endogenously and/or exogenously effected. Like real negation it has a process/product bipolarity: it can refer to the outcome or the means whereby it is brought about. All cases of transformative negation are also cases of real negation but the converse is not the case. They all involve the cessation or absenting of a pre-existing entity or state. A special, and highly important, case of transformative negation is radical negation, which involves the autosubversion, transformation or overcoming of a being or condition. It is, of course, important in the human domain to distinguish negating processes from self-negating processes and self-negating from self-consciously negating processes. All these species of negation—real, transformative and radical—have a systematic structural/empirical—or better, real/actual—ambiguity which I shall discuss in due course. Transformative negation, especially of the radical kind, is what Hegelians call ‘determinate negation’, but this is a misnomer—for real≥transformative≥radical negation may all be more or less determinate—that is, they may be fully determinate (think of the negation of the raw material in a finished automobile) or indeterminate in various degrees; or they may be ‘fuzzy’, duplicitous or otherwise other than determinate. In Hegelian dialectic real, transformative, radical and determinate negation are all identified, resulting in a linear self-generating process, e.g. of the unfolding of the concept in the Logics, but it is important to keep them distinct and see their identification as an important but limiting case.

If real negation is the most all-encompassing concept—extending from non-existence to metacritique—it is in transformative negation that the key to social dialectics lies. Indeed its schema is given by the transformational model of social activity which I have elaborated elsewhere and which will be suitably dialecticized and generalized in C2. Radical negation, for its part, is obviously the pivotal concept in self-emancipation and this connects with ‘radical’ in a more familiar sense. Moreover, to the extent that we are dealing with a self-contained totality, all transformative negation, that is to say change, will tend to occur as a result of or take the form of radical negation(s), as is arguably the case with global interdependence today.⁶ The orthodox Platonic analysis of negation and change in terms of difference not only conflates substantial with formal relations⁷ (change is paradigmatically substantial) but also overlooks the fact that differentiation typically presupposes change. This is not to deny that there is equally a case for a category of difference, e.g. established by distinct emergent domains or by sheer alterity or otherness (that is, real determinate other-being), not analysable in terms of change, i.e. without recourse to a unitary origin, a case forcibly prosecuted by Derrida. In rather the same way the implicit supposition behind the doctrine of ontological monovalence is that any instance of real negation can be analysed in purely positive terms. But Pierre’s absence from the cafe doesn’t mean the same as his presence at home (although the latter entails the former—which is equally entailed by his death) any more than it means the same as Jean’s occupying his customary place.^*

The chief result of ontological monovalence in mainstream philosophy is to erase the contingency of existential questions and to despatialize and detemporalize (accounts of) being. I shall be concerned with a variety of other modes of negation besides the ones I have already referred to. One may be briefly mentioned here—subject negation. This refers primarily to a subject in the process of formation or dissolution (e.g. in Hegelian logic passing over into its ‘predicate’). As such it is clearly a variant of transformative negation, but I am going to extend its meaning to cover cases of non-transformative and non-trivially transformative real negation (e.g. non-existence and simple space-time distanciation without any other significant change) and counterpose it polemically to the propositional and predicate negations of standard logic. For it will be vital to my vindication of negativity that one can refer to absence, including non-existence; or, if one prefers to put it this way, that reference is not, contrary to the tradition from Plato to Frege, tied to positive existence. This, I will show in C2. Non-being, within zero-level being, exists and is present everywhere.

I shall also be occupied with negativity and negation in many other senses of the verb to ‘negate’, including ‘deny’, ‘reject’, ‘contradict’, ‘oppose’, ‘exclude’, ‘marginalize’, ‘denigrate’, ‘erase’, ‘separate’, ‘split’, ‘sunder’, ‘cancel’, ‘annul’, ‘destroy’, ‘criticize’ and ‘condemn’, and with their interconnections. But my primary emphasis will be on the categories of real, transformative and radical negation of determinate and indeterminate kinds. One other preliminary matter before I pass on. Real determinate negation, absence or non-being, is not equivalent to Hegel’s nothing, which entirely lacks determinacy, and any sort of depth. Negativity, although it is the dynamic of Hegel’s system and is in fact in the guise of contradiction greatly exaggerated by Hegel, is never developed or even simply retained—it is always cancelled and positivity restored. Seeing this is one of the merits of the young Hegelians. One of the few philosophers to pay serious attention to categories of negativity is Sartre, but it should be said straight away that my real negation is not equivalent to Sartrean nothingness but more to his ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction by Mervyn Hartwig
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Critical Realism, Hegelian Dialectic and the Problems of Philosophy—Preliminary Considerations
• 2 Dialectic: The Logic of Absence—Arguments, Themes, Perspectives, Configurations
• 3 Dialectical Critical Realism and the Dialectic of Freedom
• 4 Metacritical Dialectics: Irrealism and Its Consequences
• Notes
• Glossary