The Formation of Critical Realism

A Personal Perspective

Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781134050642
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This series of interviews, conducted in the form of exchanges between Roy Bhaskar and Mervyn Hartwig, tells a riveting story of the formation and development of critical realism.

Three intersecting and interweaving narratives unfold in the course of this unfinished story: the personal narrative of Roy Bhaskar, born of an Indian father and English mother, a child of post-war Britain and Indian partition and independence; the intellectual narrative of the emergence and growth of critical realism; and a world-historical story, itself theorized by critical realism in its discussion of the development of modernity.

This book gives an invaluable account of the development of critical realism, and its consolidation as a leading philosophy of our times. It takes us through the major moments of its formation, the principal objections to and controversies within critical realism, the establishment of its institutions, and considers its limits and future development. Special features of the book include discussion of the genesis of critical realism, and the origins and nature of the so-called dialectical and spiritual turns.

The informal dialogical style of The Formation of Critical Realism makes it compelling reading and an invaluable source for students of critical realism as well as all those interested in the intellectual story of our times.

1
Childhood and adolescence

Dialectic of alienation and wholeness (1944–1963)

MH: In this interview I would like you to delineate and reflect on the processes of formation of your identity and dharma in childhood and adolescence: the story of how, to use the terms of your dialectical philosophy, your core universal human nature came together with the rhythmics of your world-line and complex social mediations to constitute the concretely singular person Ram Roy Bhaskar – the self who is yourself, fundamental to which I take it is your mission in life as a philosopher of emancipation. The concept of personal identity will be familiar enough to most readers, pertaining in your scheme of things to the actual embodied person and their stratified personality as it develops. In its structural aspect it corresponds to 1M in the ontological– axiological chain (MELD), as does the concept of dharma. Can you begin by unpacking the concept of dharma a little, which you formally introduced into your philosophy in I think From East to West?¹

RB: As I understand and use it, the concept of dharma refers to what could be called the unique genius of every person. If you look for synonyms you might think of ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’. What is pretty close to it is the Greek term ergon, which is often translated as ‘function’. It is basically what a person is good at, what comes easily to them. If you want an analogy, you could say the sun’s dharma is to shine; it is what comes easily to it, it is its nature. Of course, people have many other aspects to their identity and personality. In the early Vedic use of the term a banal sense of dharma might have been an identification of the caste system, for instance, the notion that it is your dharma to be a Brahmin. In a lot of Indian philosophy it would often be translated into English as ‘duty’ but, in the sense in which I use it, it is only your duty in the way in which it is natural to do it. And everyone has a dharma, everyone has a set of things that they are best at doing. Of course, what your dharma is you might not know, it might take a long quest to actually discover what it is. And what it is will depend on a whole lot of social conditions and will change. If a person has a dharma to be, say, a mathematician or a musician, in general the fulfilment of that dharma will depend on being born into a family and living in a society that has mathematics and music among its practices and the instruments and other material means for engaging in them. And since a person’s dharma is socially nurtured and developed, it will also be changing in the course of their life.

I think one of the dangers is for people to think that they have to give a description, or complete description, of their dharma or vocational calling. Thus to describe me as a philosopher might be pretty obvious, but in the context of a discussion, say, of globalisation with a group of economists, if one of them describes Roy as a philosopher that can have the connotation that Roy is only a philosopher and cannot therefore contribute in a meaningful way to the discussion. In contemporary Indian philosophy there is a reaction against this tendency always to define dharma. It is like the tendency to define what you might get at in prayer or meditation. Actually, what you can say more easily is what prayer or meditation is not; this is what is called the negative way. And most people perhaps have a greater sense of what they cannot do, or do not want to do, or what does not come easily to them, than of something positive that they can readily do. And when they do have something positive that they feel is their dharma they might not be able to verbalise it.

Finally, one can make a contrast between dharma and karma. Dharma is what comes most naturally to you, what is your element in life, and karma is a set of circumstances that you have to accept, the presence of the past, the nature of the context under which you operate, the conditions you inherit. For the moment that is all I want to say about dharma.

MH: Am I right in thinking that it aligns with your meta-Reality concepts of the transcendentally real self and ground-state?

RB: Absolutely. We will talk about that when we come to meta-Reality.

MH: Could you now indicate a few basic parameters of your childhood and adolescence – when and where you were born, your father, your mother, the schools you went to and so on?

RB: I was born in London in Hampton Court in 1944, towards the end of the Second World War. I was the first child of a family of two boys. My father was a doctor who met my mother in Brighton. My mother had been acting as a nurse, but by the time I was born she was performing all the functions that a GP’s wife at that time characteristically performed, keeping the books, acting as a part-time secretary, and generally making things tick. I was given the name Ram Roy Bhaskar. Until I went up to Oxford in 1963 I was basically living with my parents and a younger brother, Krishan, first in Teddington in south-west London then at Weybridge in Surrey. As for my schooling, I was at what was called a prep school – Gate House, Kingston – until the age of thirteen. Then at St Paul’s public school in Hammersmith, west London.

MH: Not everyone gets to be born in Hampton Court Palace. How did that come about?

RB: It had been commandeered as a hospital during the war.

MH: Tell us a little bit about your mode of being as a child in phenomenological terms. How do you remember those times, what were your leading themes and experiences?

RB: I think, perhaps, I could best put this in the context of a social conflict centring on my father’s desire that I should become a doctor and my own reception, reaction and resistance to it. Calling it my father’s desire is to put it a bit mildly; it was more or less a presumption that I would be a doctor.

MH: He knew your dharma already, right from the outset?

RB: That was it. I was to be made in his own image. He told my brother and me early on that we would have to be self-made men like himself, he was not going to leave us an inheritance. I should explain that my father had come from India just before the Second World War. His family were local Brahmins in the town of Gujranwala² near Lahore. The second son of a family of five, his own father (my grandfather) was an engineer in the Indian Railways, but when the eldest son became family head my father was cut off. My father, who had trained as a doctor, came penniless to England to do his FRCS (Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons) in 1939 – which as it turned out he was unable to do because of the war. However, ably assisted by my mother, he soon built up a thriving medical practice, first in Brighton and then in south-west London. Although he characteristically voted Tory, he had identified with Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Party in the struggle for Indian Independence and became a great supporter of the National Health Service when it was introduced. My mother was English. She lost her father at birth during the First World War and was taken by her mother to South Africa. She returned to England just before World War Two and worked as a nurse in Brighton, where she met and married my father. There was strong opposition to the marriage on both sides of the family; one aunt from my mother’s side attended the wedding and that was about it. After her marriage, my mother assumed an Indian identity; her maiden name was Marjorie and she now took the name Kamla. She and my father became adherents of Theosophy – basically Hinduism for westernised Indians – and remained such for the rest of their lives. The whole family was essentially an Indian family. My mother accepted this very willingly and happily I should say. But there weren’t many Indian families in London at the time, not the number there are now. We were somewhat isolated. We lived in a house where the next Indian family was miles away, but even so there were Indian families that we were in regular contact with; it was almost like a big extended family. Much of my childhood when I wasn’t at school was spent accompanying my parents on visits to these other Indian families or to the various societies and functions my parents attended, especially the Theosophical Society. My father was prominent in all the main societies he joined: at one stage he was president of the Punjabi Society, the Hindu Society, another Indian Society, and the Rotary Club. And my mother was equally prominent in these societies, and in, for instance, the Inner Wheel (the female equivalent of Rotary). My father was also a Freemason; on Saturdays I would see him packing up a little bag and taking it off for his various ceremonies. I think he was a member of several lodges and again he rose to the fore in institutional terms. My parents led quite busy lives.

And then of course my father was a very busy doctor, and he used to like to take me with him in the car on his rounds. So I spent a great deal of my childhood just accompanying my parents, not really doing what I might have wanted to do as a child, but just being with them. And this meant that I had to try to compensate for what I perceived to be the poverty of the activities in which I was forced to engage. I developed quite an active fantasy world, more generally a kind of inner reflectedness, and I found myself very much leading a double life: the life of the imagination and the life I could find in play and in books (which I read avidly), as contrasted with the overt behaviour I had to display in the social world. This was compliant of me. Actually, perhaps it was only that it seemed compliant to me, because my parents told me when I was about eight or nine that from a very early age I was continually questioning them. So they had started calling me Tumoori, which is Punjabi for Bumble-Bee, because I was always busy and running around questioning. Another nickname they had for me was Why-Because. I would be so insistent on getting an answer to my question, an explanation, that as soon as I said ‘why’ I would come out with ‘because’, trying to prompt them, to get them to actually provide an explanation. I think I took up this style of questioning, this outer questioning, because of the disparity I experienced between, on the one hand, who I was in my inner life and what I really wanted to do or would do if unconstrained, and, on the other, the outer compliance I had to show in my overt behaviour. So in an inward way I was questioning, and continually questioning, as it were, both the world and myself.

From quite an early age I felt that I could not understand the presumption that I should be a doctor, and that indeed it was unacceptable to me; I knew I wouldn’t make a good doctor, but there the presumption was, and it would not go away. This was in fact the central conflict of my youth, and I was very aware of it from an early age. Partly because of the amount of time I had to spend with my father, I was very aware of what he was doing as a doctor and so of the fate that awaited me. In this phase of my youth there was thus a split between my inner reflectedness, my inner being, and my outer activity. What I started to do was not just question my parents and other authorities but to fight, in Gramscian terms, a war of position. I tried to out-manoeuvre them gradually, and then to seize an opportunity to have an engagement on favourable terrain. For example, I overheard my father telling some other Indian in London that he was quite wrong to stop his daughter marrying who she wanted to. I put it to him that, just as there are false/forced marriages, particularly strongly imposed on girls, so there are false/forced careers, particularly strongly imposed on boys. I seized the opportunity of my father’s principled defence of free marriages to put in a point about careers.

MH: You caught him out in a theory–practice inconsistency.

RB: Really, the hypocrisy of parental positions was very apparent to me, and it led me at quite an early stage to develop criteria of what it was to be a good person. I thought at the time there were two criteria. The most important was theory and practice consistency. A good person is one who walks their talk. But closely following on from that there was universalisability, and this was something that struck me quite early. For example, when I was in India (my father took us there twice in our childhood) I would see beggars who were clearly not enjoying the privileges or rights that my family and people with whom they associated enjoyed, and I would want to know why. (There were of course beggars in London, but I did not get to see many of them.) Or again my parents were very disapproving of a boy who was my best friend because he was the son of a publican. To them he was a kind of outcaste. The questioning part of me wanted to know, well, what is the difference? When I saw differences all around me I wanted a ground for the difference.

This whole issue was closely connected to two concerns. One was a concern with freedom, and the root of that was a concern for my own freedom. The concept of dharma, I think, goes particularly well with such a conception of freedom, in which freedom is as much about who you are and what you can become as it is about what you do or what you have. The other concern was for social justice, because where there is a difference that cannot be grounded this is a form of injustice. As Thomas Hobbes I think put it, it is a moral absurdity. If the sort of life I was leading, certainly from the age of seven or eight, was a split life, what then was the contrast? Well, it was a life of wholeness or unity. I understood that being aware of possibilities meant that I could play. I could be whole in fantasy. But the notion of being whole in physical actuality was also of course very important. I spent a tremendous amount of time playing games, especially cricket. I felt whole when I played cricket, and I felt whole when I read or when my parents were talking to me (rather than at me) about their experiences, such as my father’s involvement in the struggle of the Congress Party for Indian Independence, or my mother’s experience as a school girl in South Africa. But obviously I had a notion that one could be whole all the time and not just in play and occasional moments of fulfilling activity. So, alongside the criteria for what it is to be a good person, there was a criterion of integrity, of wholeness. This was what I really wanted. I wanted to be not just a good person but to be whole, and that meant that I had to fulfil my dharma, I had to be doing what came naturally to me, what I was best at doing, what I had a bent for.

MH: So what you had going, really – we can see in retrospect – was a dialectic of alienation (split) and wholeness, the interplay of negative and positive conditions, as you struggled to come into your dharma.

RB: That’s right. If one goes back to the period before I was about eleven, if I had been asked what I really wanted to do then, I would probably have said I wanted to be a sportsman. I would do anything to be involved in a game of cricket. I always wanted to be a cricketer with a slight difference though. From about the age of nine I wanted to edit a cricketing annual. I wrote to famous cricketers of the day, such as Len Hutton and Peter May, asking them to contribute to my annual, and a surprising number said they would. I remember Peter May saying, well, you have told me you are meant to be a doctor, but you want to be a cricketer; I can just see you as a captain of England! But by the age of eleven I started getting very bad hay fever and that more or less put paid to my cricketing aspirations. I developed other interests and obsessions. Music was a way of escaping. I could get lost in music, particularly classical music; later I found that possibility also there in pop music, especially in dance. I probably most enjoyed getting lost in books, and this was a recurring pleasure, not a phase-specific one like cricket. It became a symbol or badge of my identity. When I had to accompany my father, say, on his shopping trips to Harrods or something like that, I would always try to secrete a book about my person, even if I knew that there was no possibility of reading it. Whenever my parents took me to the Theosophical Society I used to really enjoy that, not so m...

Table of contents

• Ontological explorations
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Childhood and adolescence
• 2 Oxford days
• 3 Beyond empiricism and transcendental idealism
• 4 The critical realist embrace
• 5 ‘Prolegomenon to a natural history of the human species’
• 6 The axiology of freedom
• 7 The spiritual turn
• 8 The philosophy of unity-in-difference
• 9 Where do we go from here?
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index