Post-Secularism, Realism and Utopia

Transcendence and Immanence from Hegel to Bloch

Jolyon Agar

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317950455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the contribution to recent developments in post-secularism, philosophical realism and utopianism made by key thinkers in the Hegelian tradition. It challenges dominant assumptions about what the relationship between religion and our so-called "secular age" should be that have sought to reduce or even eliminate religiosity from the public sphere. It draws upon utopian thinkers within the Hegelian tradition whose work has challenged this narrow secularism. In particular it explores the importance of philosophical transcendence to Hegelian and post-Hegelian religious, social and political theorising. This includes philosophers whose thinking is sympathetic or at least compatible with transcendence (such as Hegel, Taylor, Bhaskar and Bloch) but also those who have a reputation for rejecting transcendence and instead embracing immanence and even atheism (Feuerbach, Marx and Engels). By drawing on the utopian content of these thinkers it seeks to shed new light on the importance religious ideas have played in a range of philosophical positions within the broadly Hegelian tradition from theism, idealism, materialism and atheism to new ideas, especially new research on Hegel's so-called "panentheism".

The book will be of interest to those working in the areas of post-secularism and utopian studies. It should also be of interest to academics and students of the recent turn within Critical Realism to "meta-reality" and its implications for Hegelianism and Marxism.

1 Re-enchanting reality

Depth realism, ethical naturalism and transcendence

In this chapter, I trace the emergence of a depth realist and ethical–naturalist approach to transcendence in the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar – a system of thought that will be of considerable importance to my purposes of tracing the evolution of transcendence and utopia in the Hegelian tradition. First, depth realism involves the identification of rationally defensible levels of being in the world that the sciences and social sciences, in particular, have dismissed as either non-existent or outside the terrain of legitimate rational study. Each stage of development of critical realism (hereafter CR) has unearthed such a dimension to being and has thereby deepened and extended the subject matter of rationality. This process has come to a head in Bhaskar’s most recent writings – the so-called “spiritual turn” – in which he identifies a “deep” stratum of reality that demands that we break the taboo in talking about the link between rationality and transcendence. Second, I argue that this rational defence of transcendence is prefigured in an earlier (and still immanentist) stage of deepening, where Bhaskar utilises CR anti-positivist naturalism to reveal being as fundamentally value-laden and meaningful. Such a process is key to the later development of a non-dualistic ontology that is central to Bhaskar’s defence of transcendence and spirituality in the world. This provides the groundwork for the next chapter, where I discuss immanent and meta-post-secularism. In examining the latter, I consider the case for the defence of religious rationality that is predicated on non-dualistic deep transcendence. I believe it offers a more promising basis for political theories that wish to challenge narrow secularism.

As each of the many phases in the development of Bhaskar’s thinking is a contribution to the deepening process, it will therefore be instructive to present each one in terms of the deepening of reality that it represents. Although each stage in and of itself contributes massively to ontological deepening, two stages in particular are especially important – dialectical critical realism (hereafter DCR) and transcendental dialectical critical realism/metaReality (hereafter TDCR/MR) – because their deepening processes do not simply uncover new dimensions of reality hitherto unseen, but also demand that we rethink earlier stages of Bhaskar’s thought. As we will see, in developing DCR, Bhaskar invites us to reappraise his earlier work in terms of dialectics; in developing the spiritual turn, we are asked to rethink the entire CR enterprise in terms of an ontological monist system, what Bhaskar calls non-duality. In this way, DCR and TDCR/MR undertake processes that do not simply deepen our grasp of reality. Rather, their deepening invites us to revolutionise our conception of reality, which has implications not just for the philosophies and worldviews that CR criticises and competes with (e.g. positivism, hermeneutics and post-modernism), but for CR itself. And in terms of meta-post-secularism, we will be especially interested in the TDCR/MR revolution. But in order to get to that point, we need to contextualise it as the outcome of the earlier deepening processes. It is to this task that we first must turn.

Searching for Depth I: transcendental realism

CR is significant because of its attempt to re-vindicate ontology in the midst of philosophical systems that have either embraced a deficient conception of ontology or shied away from it completely. Much of Bhaskar’s polemic in his early writings (especially A Realist Theory of Science ([1975] 1978), hereafter RTS) is directed against what he saw as empiricism’s and positivism’s tendency to equate what was posited as real with that which is empirically manifest – what is known as empirical realism. This is known as transcendental realism (hereafter TR), whereby a deeper level of reality is identified that is overlooked by empiricism. It is not hard to see how the latter is the classic case of an empirical realist position – that which is deemed to be real, at least tacitly, is that which can be described in terms of constant conjunctions of empirical events. As Bhaskar points out, every philosophy of science presupposes (whether it is prepared to admit it or not) a conception of reality as ordered so as to make knowledge of it possible – a schematic answer to the question of what the world must be like in order that we can know anything about it with any reliability (Bhaskar 1978: 28–29). This is known as the (at least implicit) acceptance of an intransitive dimension to reality that is independent of our knowledge and thoughts about it. The world is not just made up of our experiences of it, but also of events that persist independently of our direct experiences of them. Most empiricists are quite happy to admit this. So we have the level of the empirical, where we directly experience the world, and we have a second, deeper, level, where we acknowledge the independence of events from our experiences, which is known as the actual (Bhaskar 1978: 64–65). The point is that empiricists cannot evade accusations of empirical realism simply by incorporating the concept of intransitivity into their thinking. This is because Bhaskar thinks that the empirical regularities that are said to make up events that can be observed are not, in fact, features of the real world, but rather are an integral part of the scientific process of experimentation. That is, it is not enough to embrace the idea of an intransitive dimension. Whether or not any philosophy of science evades the error of empirical realism depends on what intransitivity is assumed to be made up of. The problem for empiricism is that in accordance with its “surface” view of reality (i.e. that it is made up of empirical regularities), anything that cannot be so described is dismissed as failing to meet the criteria of knowledge. Reality is therefore reduced to being identical to scientific procedure. This is where Bhaskar comes in, because he thinks that the logic of scientific experiment involves a still deeper, third, transfactual level, whereby ‘an ontological distinction between (scientific) causal laws and patterns of events’ (Bhaskar 1978: 12; 1998: 10) is drawn.

If the reality that scientists are primarily interested in is not made up of empirical regularities, then what are they interested in? In short, it is the causal powers that things are said to possess, known as generative mechanisms, which when activated have an input into empirical outcomes. Scientists set up ‘artificial closures’ (experimental conditions) in order to isolate real generative mechanisms from others, with which they interact in Open Systems to bring about events. In this very important sense, scientists are ‘causal agents’ (Bhaskar 1978: 65), because it is they who are responsible for the precipitation of empirical regularities. Empirical regularities themselves cannot be said to carry any natural necessity (i.e. they do not prevail in Open Systems), precisely because they are a product of scientific closure. If scientific activity is to carry any importance in terms of our understanding of the world, scientists (or, rather, philosophers of science) must draw ontological distinctions between the subject matter of science and the events that they generate or, as Bhaskar argues, ‘a sequence of events can only function as a criterion for a law if the latter is ontologically irreducible to the former’ (Bhaskar 1978: 65). This is known as Bhaskar’s transcendental realist ontology, because it posits a depth realism of empirical, actual and real levels to the world (Collier 1994: 42–45).

CR philosopher Andrew Collier has shown that empirical realism involves the error of subjectivism. This occurs when epistemology ‘loses its reference to what ideas are about, and comes to be a matter of coherence between ideas’ (Collier 2003: 144), and, as a consequence, ‘the objects of ideas have dropped out of the picture altogether’ (Collier 2003: 144). Subjectivity is, therefore, the error of losing sight of the things about which truth claims are made. Ideas lose their “aboutness”. Empiricists fail to take sufficient account of the reality that our experience is always of something that is external to our experiencing it. Failure to acknowledge this a priori fact about experience means that we commit ‘the error of believing that experience is an object which we can inspect without reference to its objects – which makes subjectivism or idealism possible’ (Collier 2003: 138). The consequence of empiricistic subjectivism is the view of the world as made up of atomistic events. And so the world is deontologicised. This whole process is what Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy (Bhaskar 1978: 16; 1993: 205). And insofar as we are reducing being to statements about being devised in human thought, the epistemic fallacy also takes the form of an anthropic fallacy (Bhaskar 1993: 205). Conversely, objectivity consists of reference ‘to what is true independently of any subject judging it to be’ (Collier 2003: 134).

Searching for Depth II: critical naturalism

The objectivism that TR defends, in turn, is closely related to another key ontological category known as emergence. Empirical regularity is not a feature of Open Systems, because every event is the outcome of the interaction of various generative mechanisms. Open Systems are much too complicated and layered to give empiricistic prediction sufficient utility. What makes the multiplicity of generative mechanisms a feature of the world is its stratification (Collier 1994: 46). Emergence and stratification herald the further deepening of reality beyond TR in what is known as Bhaskar’s critical naturalism (hereafter CN), which was most fully exposited in The Possibility of Naturalism (hereafter PN) ([1979] (1998)). According to CR, reality is made up of various layers or strata, ranging from the simplest arrangement of matter at the atomic and sub-atomic levels through to more complex arrangements of chemical and biological elements and up to complex social formations. Higher levels are emergent properties from lower levels, each with their own attendant generative mechanisms, which have causal powers to affect empirical outcomes. Bhaskar calls this synchronic emergent powers materialism (hereafter SEPM) (Bhaskar [1979] 1998: 97). And so SEPM is premised on a multilayered or stratified ontology in the natural and social worlds. This stratification is the result of processes of emergence where higher levels are emergent from those lower down (e.g. biological life forms are emergent from chemical processes, sociological from psychological, etc.). At the beginning of time, there were only the sub-atomic particles of the early universe, from which emerged, over billions of years, fairly simple and eventually more complex biological organisms. There then emerged from complex biological organisms even more complex sentient ones. From the biological, there thus emerged the psychological. And from the increasingly sophisticated psychologies of human organisms, there emerged, over a period of several million years, society and history. As Andrew Collier says:

It appears that the material universe existed before there was organic life, and that living organisms can only exist as composed of and surrounded by matter. In this sense, matter may be said to be more ‘basic’ than life; life in turn may be said to be more basic than rationality (in the sense that we are rational animals), and hence than human society and its history. This suggests that the sciences that explain a more basic level may have some explanatory primacy over those explaining a less basic layer. Laws of physics and chemistry may in some sense explain the laws of biology.

(Collier 1994: 46 [emphasis in original])

The “Powers Materialism” component of SEPM comes from Bhaskar’s contention that each emergent stratum contains its own transfactual causal powers to effect empirical outcomes that are irreducible to the lower strata from which it emerged (Bhaskar [1979] 1998: 25). Collier has developed a useful way to make sense of SEPM by identifying two modes of causation at work within it – horizontal and vertical (Collier 1989: 60). In horizontal explanations, the interaction of the different levels of being in the world (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological, etc.) is assumed, each with causal mechanisms powerful enough to dramatically affect empirical outcomes. We can then make the claim that one stratum may be the dominant one in causing an event at a given time. But horizontal explanation by itself is insufficient, because if we were to leave it at that we would have no idea as to how it was possible for such interaction to occur. In vertical explanations, we investigate the conditions of the emergence of these mechanisms in the first place, which are prerequisites to their interaction at the horizontal level. This involves isolating each stratum to discover its generative mechanisms – a process that Bhaskar calls diachronic explanatory reduction (Bhaskar [1979] 1998: 98). SEPM requires this type of investigation, because each stratum has a crucial dependence for its existence on strata at lower ontic levels. A higher order level is based on the lower order level (e.g. cognition is emergent from the physio-chemical functioning of the brain) and acquires its generative mechanisms by virtue of its emergence from a lower order level, as we have just seen. Thus, vertical explanation is central to identifying generative mechanisms that codetermine events in horizontal explanation.

A key implication of CN that I have not discussed (although I summarise it in some detail elsewhere)¹ is the attribution of causal efficacy to agential intentions in CN’s dualistic social world (duality of structural causation and intentionality) (even if these intentions are informed by erroneous ideologies). As irreducible emergent forms (existentially autonomous), a social agent’s intentions and desires, as well as the social structures within which they are pursued, are granted causal efficacy. In this sense, our understanding of social being is deepened, because we see the intentions as epistemically interesting. Intentionality is a key ingredient in understanding how social structures come into existence, are sustained and demise. CN thus rejects the traditional dualities upon which positivism and hermeneutics (the giants of empirical realism in the social sciences) have been based – that of either reducing intentions to the status of epiphenomena of social structure (positivism) or social structure to the culturally determined sets of values and intentions of agents (hermeneutics). An alternative duality is presented, according to which the existential autonomy of strata is acknowledged. From this, Bhaskar produces the transformational model of social activity (TMSA), which asserts the primacy of social practices over intentional actions that reproduce or transform them (Bhaskar [1979] 1998: 34, 107–108). This involves a structural duality – the structure determines the character of the activities of the agents who occupy social roles within it, but is nevertheless subject to these activities for its reproduction and transformation. Social positions occupied by agents endure irrespective of the individuals who occupy them and so are not reducible to, but can only exist by virtue of, the individuals who occupy them (Collier 1994: 150). Conversely, we have the duality of praxis – conscious (desires and intentions) and unconscious (unintended consequences of acting on desires for the social structure) (Bhaskar [1979] 1998: 30).

Searching for Depth III: explanatory critique

Dualities of structure and agency mean that part of the subject matter of the social sciences is the values of the individuals who participate in social life – consciousness has a real effect on the world. These values will often include erroneous ideas, in the sense that they are inconsistent with the function of the (usually oppressive) social structure within which they exist and sustain. Bhaskar does not just say that intentionality, cultural value and meaning, etc. are epistemically interesting in that we need to take them into account before we can understand what is happening in the social world, because this would not take him much beyond hermeneutics. He is also saying that consciousness may be incorrect or based on a delusional understanding of reality. So unlike most hermeneutical theorists, who have a tendency to insufficiently protect their thinking from collapsing into sociocultural relativism, Bhaskar is able to sustain the value-laden nature of the social world, while also embracing a fairly robust universalism and transculturalism. It is perfectly possible to hold to an incorrect/irrealist/delusional view of reality (e.g. fundamentalist Christian or Islamic). We know they are false, because it is possible to rationally identify normative values and needs that seem to exist independently of any particular judgement about them. But this does not mean that false ideas are not real in terms of their impact on the world. Religious fundamentalism, despite its patently false doctrinal content, has (sadly) very real causal outcomes in terms of its ability to produce social structures that frustrate or deny key human interests (Bhaskar 1986: 178; Bhaskar [1979] 1998: 63). An example of this could be the denial of gay or women’s rights in Islamic societies or even the effect on these groups in conservative Christian communities, such as in Northern Ireland or parts of the United States. So we have to make a distinction between ideas that are irrealist, in the sense of failing to come even close to grasping the nature of things, and the very real effects that they can have. And one of the key effects that they can have is to sustain oppressive social structures, mostly because they are, in fact, emergent from them.

CN therefore involves explanatory critique (hereafter EC), whereby false consciousness and its associated social structures can be identified along with the concomitant frustration of essential human needs (known as unfulfilled being) that often result from an agent’s immersion in such conditions. The main text that we are interested in here is Bhaskar’s Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (hereafter SRHM) (1986).

This is precisely why CR generally is a powerful contributor to the wider theoretical tradition known as critical theory – where false consciousness and oppressive social institutions/cultural practices can be rationally evaluated from a non-empiricist/positivist position. A good example of this can be taken not from Bhaskar, but from Marx in his analysis of the wage-form. Here Marx identifies a necessary connection between the facts of a social category’s functioning and the values held by an individual or social group engaged in it, which are necessary to sustain it (Agar 2006: 33). The false consciousness and alienation that are necessary for the existence of social relations required by capitalism are exposed; ideas that are the means of keeping injustice concealed from those being exploited (Collier 1994: 184). This has massive implications for CR, because evaluative concepts such as fulfilment and justice (and their denial) can be seen as very real properties. The world is, therefore, irreducibly value-laden and meaningful.

The emancipative implications of EC are obviously considerable, in that revealing real material relations of false consciousness, exploitation and unfulfilled being should precipitate political action aimed at the transformation of the social structure concerned. Bhaskar accordingly stresses how important it is that emancipatory struggle should be grounded in the realm of practical concrete engagements with unjust social conditions. The centrality of a scientific analysis of such conditions is made clear by Bhaskar in SRHM when he says that ‘an emancipatory politics or practice is necessarily both grounded in scientific theory and revolutionary in objective and intent’ (Bhaskar 1986: 171). What Bhaskar is essentially proposing here is that philosophy must under-labour for the sciences, in the sense that it deduces ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: post-secularism, utopia and reality
• 1 Re-enchanting reality: depth realism, ethical naturalism and transcendence
• 2 Secularism, post-secularism, transcendence and rationality
• 3 Transcendent and immanent approaches to the “self”: Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor
• 4 Freedom, rationality and God: Hegelian dialectical historical panentheism
• 5 From transcendence to immanence: the anthropological and materialist utopia of Ludwig Feuerbach
• 6 Atheistic metaReality? Historical materialism and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of the “not yet”
• Conclusion: post-materialist metaReality
• Bibliography
• Index