Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 06:05:43 +1000
Subject: BHA: responding to FEW


 From East to West - A book too far?

Introduction

The publication of Roy Bhaskar's latest book From East to West: The Odyssey 
of a Soul (FEW) (Routledge: 2000) has been greeted with fairly widespread 
dismay by many of the followers of Critical Realism, the philosophical 
movement that Bhaskar founded and led. On the Bhaskar list - always at the 
cutting edge of intellectual response to what Critical Realism is up to - 
the book has been variously described as 'evil', 'mad' and 'salacious' 
(There are two fairly oblique references to oral sex.).  Bhaskar himself 
was said to be 'away with the fairies'.

Proposals emerged to split the list.  The true blue Critical Realists were 
to camp off and leave the rest to pore over the 'sacred texts' with their 
'guru'. This proposal almost sparked off a flame war.  The list moderator 
then emerged from a fairly lengthy silence with a 'heavy heart' to announce 
that he thought the list should be renamed. At the time of writing all 
proposals to change the name of the list have suspended until the book has 
become more widely available. However it seems fair to say that for many 
critical realists FEW is a book too far.

Why the depth of reaction - the anger and the despair?  Part of the 
explanation lies in the fact that the Critical Realist movement had started 
to consolidate and get a vision of itself as consisting of four canonical 
moments associated in turn with four of Bhaskar's books.  These were 
-Realist Theory of Science, The Possibility of Naturalism, Philosophy and 
the Idea of Freedom and Dialectic the Pulse of Freedom (DPF)

The early doubts about the turn to the dialectic announced in DPF had begun 
to fade.  A new textbook of key readings was at hand (Essential Readings) 
and the long march through the disciplines was under way. Postmodernism had 
seemingly imploded into the ground zero of its own irrealism. The only 
alternative available, namely neo-positivism, was easy meat to those of us 
reared on RTS. There was a world to win and a movement increasingly 
confident of its ability to win it.

Then the leader did the unthinkable. He found God.  Worst of all it was a 
very down market god, nothing more than your common or garden New Age 
variety, the type readily available at any incense saturated shop 
frequented by a Shirley MacLaine or Nancy Reagan.

Thus theophobia and what amounts to something like Orientalism have 
combined to produce a very strong reaction.  The search for explanations as 
to where 'Roy went wrong' has begun. A consensus seems to be  emerging that 
FEW is an 'idealist' text and that the seeds of Bkaskar's idealism can be 
located in DPF.


FEW & its Critics

FEW consists of two parts.  The first is a defence of the new philosophical 
paradigm.  Bhaskar endeavours to show how his new philosophy of 
Transcendental Dialectical Critical Realism is a logical extension of the 
earlier Critical Realism.  The second section is a novella which details 15 
reincarnations of a soul.  This is obviously a semi-autobiographical and 
indeed Bhaskar explicitly acknowledges that the account of the lives comes 
from Mike Robinson, who is apparently a New Age psychotherapist.

Possibly because of the origin of the material in the novella section of 
FEW there has been very little said about it on the Bhaskar list. Todate 
attention has been concentrated largely on the firs and most explicitly 
philosophical section. Thus at the recent Bhaskar Conference in Lancaster a 
series of what were undoubtedly brilliant and incisive papers by Mervyn 
Hartwig, the editor of Alethia, and others concentrated on dissecting the 
basis of Bhaskar' idealism.

For these critics the key section of FEW would appear to be that on 
categorial realism (pp 33-9) which in turn leads to an attempt to prove the 
existence of God (pp39-50). Bhaskar asserts here contra Kant that 
categories such as causality, substance, process, totality, agency and so 
on are essentially constitutive…features of the world, defining precisely 
its most basic properties or ingredients…(:33-4).

The arguments advanced in this case are quite technical and complex.  I 
believe though it helps to see Bhaskar as advancing a position close to 
classic objective idealism where spirit is held to precede matter.  This of 
course puts him in the company of Plato and Hegel.  Before dismissing this 
position we would do well here to recall Lenin's remarks about how 
intelligent objective idealists were often more interesting than crude 
materialists.

What form does spirit take within the Bhaskarian schema?  As already 
mentioned this is God.  The crucial question though is, 'What sort of 
God?'  Thankfully he is not the often sadistic brute of Judaic-Christian 
tradition. Bhaskar's God would seem to be one of infinite patience.  He or 
She or It has created a species of essentially god-like creatures (you and 
me!)  who one day through the process of reincarnations will learn this 
truth and then shall rejoin the absolute. There is no hell here or ever 
lasting punishment.  It is never too late.

In the mean time we live lives of deep alienations and splits.  We are 
divided from our souls and from the totality that is the universe.  Our 
lives are shrouded in ignorance, and reality is hidden from us by the veil 
of ideology.  To discover the truth and to be free we have only (!) to 
recognise our true natures as partially divine beings.  Freedom then like 
Brecht's version of communism becomes "the simple thing so hard to achieve".



The politics of unconditional love.


There are of course serious political implications for such a 
philosophy.  If we regard everyone as being essentially godlike then 
everyone is capable of redemption.  This it seems to me leads automatically 
to the politics of unconditional love, non-violence and Ghandism.  Indeed 
FEW ends with a ringing call for us to begin the age of unconditional love. 
Such calls are far from new. An early Mesopotamian text for instance urges 
us to love our enemies. In more recent times Kierkegaard has called for 
such love.

Some have argued that calls for unconditional love indicate an 
unwillingness to fight that which should be fought. There are even some on 
the Left who have argued for what might be called the necessity of 
hatred.  The classic expression of this surely was Lenin's own response to 
music in a letter to Gorky:

         But I can’t listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes 
me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a 
filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn’t pat anyone on the 
head or we’ll get our hand bitten off; we’ve got to hit them on the heads, 
hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any 
violence to people (Lenin, 1970: 247).





The truth about many of us on the Left is that while the poor stay poor we 
will like Lenin hug our hatreds a little longer. Moreover those of us who 
long to play the role of "L'ami du peuple' may yet get our chance.   Who is 
to say?   The wheels of the tumbrel may once more sound throughout the 
land. Whatever the case I am inclined to the position that in the present 
conjuncture calls for spiritual renewal, of a healing of a split world and 
a summons to unconditional love are more likely to provide us with the 
antidote to the necrophiliac excesses of late capitalism.





A Defence of FEW on aesthetic grounds

It seems to be that FEW harks back to an earlier time in the history of the 
Left when it formed part of a very broad progressive movement, which 
included socialists like Edward Carpenter and William Morris.  This was a 
deeply liberatory, artistic and spiritual movement that, I would 
argue,  was taken and turned into the sterility of Stalin's Diamat.
It is this genealogy that leads to my fundamental characterisation of this 
as a beautiful book.  I have chosen the word with care with the full 
knowledge that Bhaskar's approach to the aesthetic has at best been 
cursory. In part the influence of Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the 
Aesthetic has been the dominant factor here.  Yet there has always been 
something of an ambivalence to Bhaskar's stance.  The assertion of the 
ideological function of the aesthetic has sat uneasily, it seems to me, 
with the  frequent condemnations of the McDonaldisation of contemporary 
culture.  Implicit within these critiques have been I would argue a 
conceptualisation of the fall from grace of the aesthetic and also an echo 
of the Schillerian notion that the aesthetic, if not actually the primary 
source of, is vital to the development of the rational and moral being.

One must of course say that FEW does appear to repeat the sublation of the 
aesthetic into the ethical as outlined in DPF and Plato Etc.  However 
against this is the fact that the novella section of FEW re-enacts the 
drama of the conflict between philosophy and art. As Adorno pointed out 
philosophy is at a loss when called upon to convey the nature of 
suffering.  Accordingly it is not surprising that faced with the need to 
reconcile and heal the splits that plague humanity Bhaskar has been forced 
to turn to the aesthetic. So there is a sense in which the turn to the 
fiction of the novella asserts that the path to the truth lies through the 
aesthetic.  With FEW we have the return of the repressed aesthetic 
function.  Beauty comes into his own.

Of what else does the beauty of this book, which has been said by very 
bright people to be 'poor', consist? The answer lies most obviously in the 
experiences that the book, especially in the novella section, offers to 
us.  Linking the 15 lives or reincarnations of the wandering soul are the 
phenomena of child abuse and paternal rejection. This most terrible 
experience of the primary denial of love has in turn been aggravated by 
racist reactions to someone who was born between cultures. Yet the 
dialectic never dies and out of the torment of primal rejection has come 
the search for wholeness. FEW is nothing less than the announcement of the 
achievement of oneness.

It would be a mistake however to see this book only in terms of the journey 
to wellbeing of the author, interesting and moving as that is. FEW is also 
a challenge to us to undertake the same task or if you like quest.  The 
soul that has struggled so hard to be one, having been healed would heal 
others.  A mahatma wants to be born.

This is linked to the most fundamental level of beauty in the book.  This 
is the attempt to enunciate a human essence and thereby restore teleology 
or meaning to being. The books argues that despite all the evidence that 
humanity will learn that somehow somewhere the splits and divisions that 
have produced the awful happenings that we see all around us will be 
brought to an end.  Humanity will learn non-attachment and will be 
reconciled with the Divine.

A defence of FEW on religious grounds

With FEW Bhaskar has crossed over the boundary between theology and 
philosophy. It is moreover a theology which owes much to the work of the 
Theosophical Society.  Blavatsky, Olcott, Besant and Leadbetter would find 
much in this book that they could identify with in that it preaches the 
essential unity of all religions and attempts a reconciliation between 
western philosophy and Eastern mysticism.

I want in the remainder of this review to concentrate on just two aspects 
of this attempted synthesis.  In the novella section of the book, which 
outlines 15 reincarnations, life nine deals briefly with the life of a 
Chinese philosopher. Here the emphasis is on the reconciliation of 
opposites or dualities. Bhaskar has often been criticised for the obscurity 
of his writing but in his contemplation of the meaning of enlightenment his 
style reaches and achieves a level of what can only be described as 
sublimity. Thus:

"Enlightenment for L9 (Life Nine) is to see the being of non-being (the 
void, emptiness, absence) and beyond or within it, the creative void or the 
great ultimate, the dynamic being of the most pure non-being which is the 
source of all the forces and energies, the seasons and elements and the 
world of ten thousands things just in that world of the ten thousand 
things, of change, of flux; to see emptiness in the whole of manifest 
creation and to see it immediately as well as everywhere (Bhaskar, 2000: 129).

In DPF the Bhaskarian ontology was broadened to include absence.  Here in 
Few that notion is extended to a definition of God as Nothing or 
Absence.  It is moreover an ontology which seeks through the dialectical 
move of the interpenetration of opposites a view of the world which sees 
flux as the guarantor of unity. There are more than echoes here of the 
Hegelianism which so attracted the young Marx. Interestingly Bhaskar is 
also I believe close to the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism whose founder 
Eli Siegel defined beauty as the reconciliation of opposites. If we 
substitute goodness for beauty in the Siegel formulation then, I would 
argue, we can grasp some of the significance of the synthesis that Bhaskar 
is attempting.

The final point I wish to discuss in this section of my review comes in 
Life Eleven.  Here the soul has been reincarnated as a Hindu philosopher 
and teacher (guru). This teacher begins to sketch out a plan for the 
renewal of Indian philosophy.  This philosophy of renewal will have a 
horizontal and a vertical dimension.   The horizontal takes in an 
orientation to the social and the natural world.  The vertical dimension 
extends towards unity with the soul.

For someone reared in the Christian tradition Bhaskar here is outlining 
what arguably is the meaning of the cross and Christ's sacrifice.  On the 
cross Christ's arms extend to embrace all humanity, while his agonized 
questioning and ultimate acceptance of his destiny asserts the personal or 
vertical dimension.

Conclusions

Any conclusions about the impact of FEW will have to be tentative. I myself 
think that it will be seen as a turning point and that its significance 
will be enhanced by future contributions. Whatever the case I would like to 
close this review with an appeal for an openness of response.  I would like 
to urge Leftists not to pre-read the book as the decline of a philosopher 
into mysticism.  Rather I would maintain strongly that it is a text that 
signals the absolute necessity for the renewal of liberatory thought.  With 
its spirituality and commitment to changing the evils of the world, FEW 
shows us a way beyond the sterility and inflexibility of contemporary 
Marxism.  With its stress on the essential unity of all religions FEW 
attempts to lead us beyond the scandalous sectarianism of established 
religions. I wish both the book and the author well in their quest.

Gary MacLennan
School of Media & Journalism
QUT
Brisbane
19.12.00

References

Bhaskar, R., A Realist Theory of Science, Second Edition, Brighton: 
Harvester Press, 1978
_________, The Possibilities of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the 
Contemporary Human Sciences, London: The Harvester Press, 1979
_________, Scientific Realism & Human Emancipation, London: Verso, 1986
_________, Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary 
Philosophy, London: Verso, 1989
_________, Philosophy And the Idea Of Freedom, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991
_________, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London: Verso, 1993
_________, Plato Etc, London: Verso, 1994
_________, From  East to west: the Odyssey of a Soul, London: Routledge, 2000
Lenin, 



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