Reality and Self-Realization

Bhaskar's Metaphilosophical Journey toward Non-dual Emancipation

MinGyu Seo

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415627245
• eBook ISBN: 9781317755593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the publication of Roy Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science in 1975, critical realism has been evolved as one of the new developments in the areas of philosophy of natural and social science which offers an alternatively fresh view to the existing theories including positivism and post-modernism. Bhaskar's intellectual movement, which is now fully international and multi-disciplinary, and continues to influence the philosophies of natural and social science, has transformed into 'Dialectical Critical Realism' (hereafter DCR) and the philosophy of 'meta-Reality.'

MinGyu will conclude that his anti-anthropic Non-duality continues through all the steps of Bhaskar's thought, maintaining the consistency of his scientific, metaphysical, and spiritual journey. The anti-anthropic motif is fully realized in the philosophy of Non-duality - the 'constellational identification of dualism, duality and non-duality' in his meta-Reality. Defending Bhaskar against Collier, Agar, and Morgan, MinGyu tries to show how its anti-anthropic and non-dualistic foundation is sustained through the whole of Bhaskar's journey, involving a transformation of its subject matters from reality, to the dialectic of reality, to the real truth underlying the former stages.

This book provides an indispensible resource for all students of philosophy and the human sciences.

1 Against dualism

Science, philosophy and the real

This chapter will review Bhaskar’s early works on philosophy of science in which he established his own realistic view in natural and social science. His books A Realist Theory of Science, The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, Reclaiming Reality, and Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom are covered here. The aim of philosophy in this period is to investigate an adequate account of science. Influenced by Lockean philosophical motives, he claims that the essential part of philosophy should be about “underlabouring” science.¹ This underlaboring job should explain why and how science is possible. To him, philosophy is vindicated as providing a set of conditionally necessary truths about our ordinary world as investigated by science. Thus Bhaskar sees that philosophers should say that some real things and generative mechanisms must exist according to their underlaboring work. However, the philosophical underlaboring does not show which thing or mechanism actually operates in the specific circumstances. That is the business with which science, not philosophy, is involved. Bhaskar says:

Ontology has been vindicated not as providing a set of necessary truths about a mysterious underlying physical realm, but as providing a set of conditionally necessary truths about our ordinary world as investigated by science … Thus as a piece of philosophy we can say (given that science occurs) that some real things and generative mechanisms must exist (and act). But philosophical argument cannot establish which ones actually do; or to put it the other way round, what the real mechanisms are.²

Bhaskar began his academic career as an economist, and then came to be a philosopher of science because of a need for an adequate method of science. He seeks the fundamental issue regarding the relationship between philosophy and science. If the task of science is to provide the knowledge of its subject, philosophy aims to investigate the necessary conditions for that knowledge. Investigating the necessary condition for science is the underlaboring job of philosophy. Thus, for philosophy to be possible, Bhaskar asserts, “transcendental arguments” are required. Bhaskar defines “transcendental” in the sense of Kant’s idea of the ground of the possibility of something, an independent ground that underlies empirical principles. Bhaskar criticizes Kant for employing the transcendental procedure in an individualist and idealistic mode. I explain this at 1.1.2 in more detail. Bhaskar believes that for investigating the necessary condition for science a transcendental argument and method is needed. He says:

Philosophical ontology asks what the world must be like for science to be possible; and its premises are generally recognized scientific activities. Its method is transcendental; its premises science; its conclusion the object of our present investigation.³

In this sense, Bhaskar regards philosophy as a substantial activity that is able to tell us something we did not already know:

Philosophy does so (surprise us by revealing something we did not know) when it makes explicit what is already presupposed by the activities in which we engage; or when, to put it another way, it shows the conditions of their possibility.⁴

And to him, the conditions are the real upon which science and philosophy are established. Bhaskar extends this task of philosophy from natural science to social science,⁵ and this chapter is divided into two main sections focusing on his philosophy of science (1.1) and philosophy of social science (1.2), respectively, following his terminology of “transcendental realism” and “critical naturalism.”

1.1 Transcendental realism

In this section, I will investigate Bhaskar’s early view of science, philosophy, reality and their relations, articulating what he defines by the concepts “transitive/intransitive” dimension of reality/knowledge, “transfactuality” and the “three dimensions of reality.” I focus on how he criticizes Humean empiricism and Kantian idealism based on his transcendental argument, and show that Bhaskar’s transcendental realism aims to reveal “concealed anthropocentrism” in existing philosophy of science, and this is the way he establishes his “non-anthropocentric” philosophy, which he calls the ontology of the “structured intransitive,” in this stage of transcendental realism.

1.1.1 New categorization: transitive/intransitive dimension of reality and its knowledge

Bhaskar begins his philosophical work by redefining the relation between objects and their knowledge. According to him, there are two sides of knowledge. On one side, knowledge—and its objects—is produced by humans. Thus, it is a social product as such. He terms this side of knowledge the transitive dimension of knowledge. The object of this dimension of knowledge is compared to “Aristotelian material causes which means artificial objects fashioned into items of knowledge by the science of the day.”⁶ The other side of knowledge is its intransitive dimension that is “of” things that are not produced by humans at all. Even if humans do not exist in the world, the objects of intransitive dimension exist. Examples are the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, and the mechanism of light propagation, etc. Knowledge of the specific gravity of mercury is constructed from the objects of that knowledge—transitive dimension of objects—and produces other related knowledges, but it cannot produce the gravity itself—intransitive dimension of objects—that mercury has. According to Bhaskar, this technological neologistic distinction of “transitive/intransitive” is unavoidable to understand the relation between knowledge and its objects.

We can understand the “transitive/intransitive” dimension by comparing it with the phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy of Kant. Kant distinguished nou-menon, which means thing in itself, from phenomenon, which means an observable event or physical manifestation. Kant defines the object of sense (including observation and experience) as phenomenon, and the object beyond sensuous intuition, such as spiritual values, as noumenon. Kant’s criterion of the phenomenon/noumenon distinction is sensitivity. However, Bhaskar does not accept this categorization to understand knowledge and its object. He thinks that this distinction presupposes that the object of knowledge is restricted to sensual things, and moves the non-sensual property of the object beyond the realm of knowledge.⁷ Kant’s categorization reduces the realm of the object of knowledge to the sensible area (experience), and regards the rest (of the object of knowledge) as unintelligible for human knowledge. For Kant, the objects by which knowledge is obtained—intransitive dimension to Bhaskar—cannot exist independently of human activity, and, even though there are things that exist independent of human beings, no scientific knowledge of them can be obtained. In this sense, Kant insists that we human beings cannot know the noumenal world because it is theoretically impossible for sensible beings like us. Although Kant’s transcendental idealism rejects the empiricist account of science, which insists that a priori knowledge is impossible, Bhaskar criticizes Kant for tacitly taking over the empiricist account of being. This consists in Kant’s use of the category of experience to define the world, and it also consists in the view that its being experienced or experiencable is an essential property of the world.⁸

Contrary to this view, Bhaskar insists that, even though the non-sensible property of objects has not been known, we must not say that they are unknowable, “because as a matter of fact quite a bit is known about them, though they are not dependent upon our knowledge. (Remember they were introduced as objects of scientific knowledge.)”⁹ In other words, the idea that “we do not have knowledge about noumena but they must exist not depending upon our knowledge” presupposes only the fact that there exist noumena even though they are not dependent upon our knowledge. Bhaskar says:

If we can imagine a world of intransitive objects [Kant’s noumena] without science, we cannot imagine a science without transitive objects, i.e. without scientific or pre-scientific antecedents.¹⁰

This idea allows him to establish the new categorization “transitive/intransitive” dimension of knowledge and its objects, and he believes that the intransitive dimension of objects of knowledge—noumena or things in themselves to Kant—makes scientific progress possible. Knowledge of objects is a kind of social production because it depends upon knowledge-like antecedents—not noumena but phenomena as the transitive dimension of them, and science, which depends upon knowledge-like antecedents, updates knowledge of objects based upon its exploration toward the intransitive dimension: the unknown noumena, but which is a knowable reality.¹¹

In this respect, updating knowledge of objects based upon the transitive dimension is the job of scientists, but underlaboring the intransitive dimension of reality—analyzing concepts that are “already given” but “as confused”¹²—is the job of philosophers, which is not accomplished by Kant’s transcendental idealism of noumena/phenomena. So, Bhas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Against dualism: science, philosophy and the real
• 2 Exploring duality: dialectical critical realism
• 3 Non-duality: the possibility of meta Reality
• Conclusion
• References
• Index