Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 22:58:44 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Report on London Seminar, etc.


Hello my darlings!

Howie Chodos <howie-AT-magi.com> writes
>Further thoughts on Mervyn's latest.
>
>1. Like Howard, I found the brief report on the London meeting of great
>interest. Could someone give us a more complete account of the proceedings?
Now look, youse lot. I've written a report for *Alethia* due in April
but we live in a 'modity world, and yus s'posed to pay yer money up
front afore yer get a geek. 
But as a special never to be repeated favour, always providing you rush
out this minute and join IACR (in case of need), here is a preview. (I
should add, re the point Andrew raised, that Roy has now certified it is
as all true and correct. I reserve the right to make minor amendments in
the editing. I append the IACR/Alethia subscription details. I think we
need to find a way of taking your money off you online.)

"Alan Norrie set the stage for the contributions of Ollman and Bhaskar
with an introductory talk on the dialecticization of critical realism.
This followed fairly closely his (with Bhaskar) lucid introduction to
Part IV of Critical Realism: Essential Readings (reviewed in this
issue). Referring to discussions on the Bhaskar List, he suggested that
any negative comparison of Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (DPF) with
the earlier works in terms of style and accessibility should be viewed
in the light of the sense of totality, relationality and dialectic as
process that the book attempts to capture and of its critique of the
analytical tradition, which sees clarity as the beginning and end of
philosophy. Questions had also been raised on the List, and elsewhere,
concerning whether DPF moves away from an underlabourer conception of
philosophy. He considered that this notion, which has its roots in the
analytical tradition and identity thinking, had quite appropriately been
recast somewhat. Dialectical critical realism aims to go in behind the
social sciences and  provide a unifying 'philosophical backbone' for
them. He stressed that dialecticization has led to new accounts of
reason and rationality; an interesting account of practical wisdom or
phronesis; a notion of concretely singular human being as mediating
four-planar social being; and a new ethical theory of alethia or truth
which sees alethia as immanent in history, driven, via the dialectic of
desire to freedom, by a dialectic of universalizability. This last is
powered by emancipatory critique and 'assertorically imperatival
sensitized solidarity' - an imperative to solidarity which is grounded
in what the other ought to do given her concrete singularity. Criticisms
to the effect that this ethics is formal  and abstract (like Kant's
categorical imperative or Habermas' ideal speech-situation) miss the
grounding of alethia both in emancipatory critique and the idea of
concrete singularity.

"Bertell Ollman began by noting Bhaskar's view that Ollman's Dialectical
Investigations - 'otherwise convergent with' DPF - reduces dialectic to
a way of thinking. While not contesting that he gives epistemology a lot
of attention, he stressed that for him it is actually only one of six
moments of the dialectic, which include an important ontological moment.
Schematizing, one can say that his dialectic stands on three legs:
internalization, abstraction, and appropriation. Bhaskar has not given
sufficient attention to any of these. Like Bhaskar, he had originally
set out to go to the philosophical foundations of science, but Marx's
science rather than natural science. In particular, he sought to
discover why Marx's words are 'like bats' (Pareto). This is ultimately,
he discovered, because Marx subscribes to a philosophical ontology of
internal relations - an ontology which in his view is entirely
compatible with critical realism. While in his writings he (Ollman) has
not presented internal relations as ontological, rather as
epistemological, this is for reasons of pedagogical strategy: let's look
at 'X' in terms of internal relations and see how far we get, then go on
to internal relations as part of reality. Precisely because the social
is a complex and constantly changing totality of internally related
elements, to get a fix on the parts it is necessary to abstract and to
include an element of interconnectedness and flexibility in one's terms,
and this is brilliantly exemplified in Marx; a philosophy of internal
relations provides Marx with both the license and the necessity to
abstract. Bhaskar himself is a highly creative abstracter, who does not
want to admit it. Further, there is nothing in Bhaskar's view of the
social world which is not compatible with an ontology of internal
relations: witness his concepts of social totality and emergence and his
emphasis on the relations between social things and nature.
(Appropriation, the third leg of his [Ollman's] dialectic, is the key
category for grasping this last.) He (Ollman) wanted to convince
critical realists of the importance of some version of internal
relations and abstraction. Such an approach would help them think more
dialectically; open another dimension to the critique of ideology; and
help clarify what it is Bhaskar actually does (largely abstracts from
the real world) and what he can't do very well (deal with the problem of
the future). In regards to this last, Ollman stressed that in order for
talk of the coming of the free society to have much purchase, it needs
to be located in an account of real developments and history; what DPF
above all lacks is an account of the concrete social specificity of
capitalism and its immanent possibilities. Marx, in his view, did not
have an ethics - did not need a moral alethia which stands outside
capitalism and history - and neither does critical realism. The new
world exists within the old in the form of an unfolding, untapped
potential.

"The essence of Roy Bhaskar's response was that Ollman's work dwells
largely at the level of 3L or totality, where it does a great job.
However, it lacks an adequate conceptualization of the matters embraced
by dialectical critical realism at 1M, 2E and 4D. Abstractions are
certainly deployed in his own work and are even more indispensable to
the dialectic of scientific explanation. Far from invoking eudaimonia
(the free society) as a substitute for theoretical and practical work,
dialectical critical realism stresses the crucial role of social science
in analyzing immanent possibilities and furthering emancipatory
struggle. In particular, he thought Marx's political economy never so
pertinent as today; it provides an indispensable bedrock of social
thought and action. He stressed that the development of dialectical
critical realism has itself been a dialectical process, moving from a
consideration of how first science, then social science, then objective
morality are possible and finally how absence is necessary and
emancipation both necessary and possible. The context of its development
was a stasis in social thought underpinned by irrealism: denial of
ontology, a purely positive account of reality, analytical
extensionalism and lack of reflexivity. Dialectical critical realism, by
contrast, has a unique capacity to situate itself, and eudaimonia is
implicit, in a sense, in every action. He thought that, if Ollman did
not address ontological questions more directly, he would be sucked back
into the irrealist problematic. The question is never whether we should
do ontology, but what kind of ontology we do. Central to dialectical
critical realist ontology are dispositional realism and conceptual
realism. Dispositional realism, which stresses the priority of the
possible over the actual and of the absent over the present, is vital to
the dialectic of scientific discovery. It is (only) when we discover the
dispositionally real that we know that we are dealing with internal
relations, e.g. the atomic structure of gunpowder (internal relations
are by no means restricted to the social). If we don't accept
dispositional realism, we are hemmed in by what is. Conceptual realism
views categories, not as things imposed on the world, but as constituent
of the social world itself. The social world is always already more or
less inadequately conceptualized, hence constituted by false being. This
is the essence of all radical critique, especially that of Marx. Money,
the wage form, master-slave relations, etc., are real false beings
underpinning the dualism of social thought and issuing in alienation,
splits, reification and so on.  Even the epistemological dialectic of
science - the rational kernel of Hegel's dialectic - is powered by
absence; and if we do not practice science we necessarily end up with
some kind of Tina formation, that is, with an essentially false and
incomplete account of being. Social science, in its critical moment,
exposes such accounts. Action itself, the moment of transcendence, is
powered by absence. Ultimately, the drive to greater totality in virtue
of absence - the absenting of constraints on absenting absences - and
dialectical universalizability just is the dialectic of human history, a
process that leaves the moral and social development of the species open
and that is incompatible with any notion of moral alethia as standing in
some sense outside history."

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>
>2. On Archer and Bhaskar. I was not trying to make an overall assessment of
>the dialectical (or not) nature of Archer’s work, something that I, too, am
>not qualified to undertake. I simply wanted to focus on her discussion of
>the relationship between 'duality' and 'dualism.' As I tried to indicate,
>my feeling is that while Archer is right to criticise Giddens for his
>rejection of emergence and his reduction of structures to their duality as
>instantiated exclusively in present-day human activity, I think she goes
>too far in rejecting duality as an important aspect of the nature of
>structures.
OK (if you've got this far, Howie). *Giddens*' duality. Right. (But I
don't agree 'too far'.)

>
>At the risk of being seen to conciliate with the enemy, I think that if
>there is one point on which postmodernism has raised useful concerns, it is
>precisely its skepticism with regard to grand narratives. And it seems to
>me that any attempt at a GUT for the social sciences falls into this category.
>
Aren't you overlooking postmodernism's own grand narrative - the
grandest narrative of all: 'the triumph of capitalism over rival
systems... [as] the outcome of a process of natural selection that pre-
dated human life itself'? (Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity,
p.33, summarizing Lyotard's argument in Moralites Postmodernes, 1993).

Are you concerned about the existence of GUTs (so-called - I prefer the
less cynical GTS, General Conceptual Scheme) in the natural sciences? I
know those craven cynics the postmodernists are, but surely not you? Why
shouldn't the social sciences have one, and why is it fantastically
ambitious to seek to provide them with one?
-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, 'Alethia'
Newsletter of the International Association for Critical Realism
Flat 7, 23 Grove Park
Camberwell
London SE5 8LH
United Kingdom
Tel: 44 (0)171 274 2601
Email: mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk


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