Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 19:39:11 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: what is the role of philosophy?


Hi Phil!

I think your two recent posts show you're just about ready for the
'spiritual turn' :-). Congratulations! This means you've covered an
immense amount of ground since your not-so-recent polemic against the
turn in your posts under the title 'Where is CR heading?'.

Bhaskar is no Kantian sceptic or disciple of Locke; if he were to count
himself a disciple of any particular thinker it would be, with Marx, of
'that mighty thinker' Hegel. So the more you praise Hegel, the more you
praise whole swathes of Bhaskar.

If the Absolute can come to know itself only in and through people (as I
believe Hegel maintained), when people come to know themselves (achieve
self-consciousness (Hegel) or self-realisation (Bhaskar)) isn't this the
Absolute coming to know itself, i.e. in Absolute reason? This is
certainly consistent with the later Bhaskar (and for that matter the
earlier too, but only implicitly), and it acknowledges no split between
science and other ways of knowing and certainly doesn't invoke
revelation as something that could override reason, nor set limits on
the knowable.

I've never thought the underlabourer metaphor a very appropriate one to
apply to Bhaskar's conception of philosophy. He's never been mainly on
about clearing away muddles and confusion, rather he's elaborated a
general conceptual schema for thinking being i.e. for science and other
ways of coming to know being. You have to put his deployment of the
metaphor in context: he wanted to dissociate his metaphysics from the
old style metaphysics which departs from allegedly indubitable or
foundational principles, i.e. from the master scientist or master
builder conception of philosophy. Bhaskar's premises by contrast are all
human practices and so relative to history. It would have been truer to
the spirit of his work if he'd invented (as he usually does) a third
metaphor for his position.

I think Bhaskar himself would agree with you that there are problems
with his assessment of Hegel in DPF - he's on record as saying that he
was 'too hard' on Hegel there and of course he's since made a great deal
of the Hegelian doctrine of 'co-presence'. I think he would still insist
that Hegel doesn't sustain an adequate concept of the negative (absence)
and so his system ultimately issues in ontological monovalence, but that
said, he thinks there are enormous riches to be mined and would agree
with you about the hill of beans and the transformation of philosophy
(providing the beans are used to feed people in a post-slave order).

Now as for your own spiritual turning:

>as I read Hegel, what gives meaning to experience is precisely reason.
>By this I mean reason working through history, which is not pure and simply
>human reason, but is a teleology located in nature as a whole.  If I may put
>it like this, Hegel seems to be saying to Adorno "My dear fellow, human
>experience is indeed incredibly varied and important to analyse, but let's
>not imagine that human experience supplies reason.  It is in truth much
>closer to say that reason supplies human experience.".

Your last sentence is the very *essence* of Bhaskar's spiritual turn,
except that when we unpack 'reason' in this sense, Hegel speaks of
logical necessity, Bhaskar of possibility; Hegel's Absolute is the
intrinsic cosmic structure of logical necessity, Bhaskar's is the
intrinsic cosmic structure of open possibility. Both think it's the
ultimate source of all that's true and good.

>"the identity of identity and non-identity"
>(Hegel) versus "the non-identity of identity and non-identity" (Adorno).

Interestingly, Bhaskar's later philosophy can be viewed as attempting to
combine both. His new 'philosophy of meta-reality', which will be
launched in a number of books available from July or August, is a
philosophy of identity, and as such goes beyond critical realism (a
philosophy of non-identity) whilst preserving its insights. This process
had of course already begun in FEW. The next JCR will carry an extended
interview with him about the new philosophy.

Since I detect a residual hostility to the spiritual turn, it might help
if I mention that it proceeds, as always, by immanent critique - the
favoured method of Hegel himself - including critique of CR and the Left
in general. With the demise of historical socialism and the rise of
bourgeois triumphalism in the late eighties and the nineties, the
deficiency, absence or lack Bhaskar pinpointed in the discourse and
practice of CR and the Left generally is that insufficient attention was
being paid to the spiritual dimension of human life, with the
consequence that the Right is hegemonic in that area. So he self-
consciously set out to remedy this lack, embarking on 'the spiritual
exposition of being'. This seems to me entirely in keeping with the
spirit of Hegel, if I can put it that way.

Mervyn








Phil Walden <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk> writes
>Dear listers,
>
>I would be interested in responses to the following:
>
>According to Hegel, the role of philosophy is to develop knowledge towards
>the Absolute.  The concept comes to know itself as the Absolute Idea.  (And
>before Dick tells me that "only people can come to know themselves" I will
>appeal to the dialectics of nature - something which had the stamp of
>approval of not only Hegel but also Marx and Engels).  Thus the point of
>philosophy is to facilitate the coming-to-know itself of the Absolute
>through the exercise of reason.  Nothing is unknowable - there are none of
>Kant's things-in-themselves - since the mere positing of a thing's
>unknowability means that it exists and is therefore knowable.  Scepticism is
>thus refuted by reason.
>
>But what do we find when we look at Critical Realists?  Take Bhaskar and
>Collier for example.  They are Kantian sceptics.  For them the role of
>philosophy is to be an "underlabourer" to science - a conception that
>regresses back to the time of Locke who of course knew nothing of
>dialectical logic or dialectical contradiction but had instead a purely
>formal and mechanical conception of the relation between being and thought.
>This underlabourer conception of philosophy creates an irrational and
>irrealist split between things which are to be known by science on the one
>hand, and things which are to be known by revelation (or by accident) on the
>other.  The role of reason is effectively bifurcated and relegated to that
>of a commentator on the results of science and revelation.  Thus we have a
>massive alienated split in Critical Realism, despite what it has
>contributed.
>
>It does not help to say: "ah but some of us Critical Realists do not rely on
>religion, since we are good Kantians or Aristotelians or Piercians or
>Wittgensteinians" because the alienated split is still there.  Reason is
>bifurcated into "what we can know and what we can't know", and this despite
>the fact that Hegel showed the absurdity of this bifurcation almost 200
>years ago.  This is not playing with words.  If the intellect posits that it
>cannot know something (X), it is at the same time positing that X exists,
>and for Hegel (and for me) if we can posit that X exists then we must be
>able to come to know X.  This is part of the development of reason through
>history.
>
>Now Bhaskar argues in DPF that Hegel is guilty of ontological monovalence
>because Hegel fails to recognise the self-dirempt state of the world and,
>allegedly, Hegel holds out hope to this self-dirempt world.  I accepted, or
>at least didn't criticise, this Bhaskarian depiction of Hegel but not any
>more.  It is surely necessary to separate Hegel's core philosophical
>conclusions and achievements, presented in the two LOGICS, from the
>fallacious opinions he held about the politics of his time.  The fact that
>Hegel held, or at least put forward (for whatever reason), some reactionary
>views about the Prussian bourgeois state, doesn't amount to a hill of beans
>compared to the transformation he wrought on philosophy.  It is imo, despite
>what the myriad anti-philosophers say, with Hegel that humanity becomes
>self-conscious and reason overcomes scepticism.  So if we look beyond the
>now obvious difficulty that Hegel had in comprehending the phenomenal
>political reality around him, which is pointed up by Bhaskar, and we come to
>examine Hegel's method or philosophical principles, it then becomes
>difficult to assent to Bhaskar's verdict on Hegel in terms of monovalence.
>Indeed it seems that Bhaskar's idea of monovalence suffers from some serious
>problems, including positivism (facts above principles), and actualism or
>anachronism (present knowledge projected onto past circumstances).  Imo the
>account that Bhaskar gives of Hegel in DPF is so wide of the mark that
>something will have to give way, and I hope it is that Roy does a thorough
>revision of his views on Hegel.
>
>Phil
>
>
>
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Phil Walden <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk> writes
>Hi Ruth,
>
>Decent of you to reply after I got angry with you some weeks ago.  I guess
>you are just that kind of person.  (Anyway, I was not really angry with
>you - more with myself).  But to come to your question.
>
>Hmmm.  It is a big question.  One standard way of drawing the distinction
>between Hegel and Adorno is that Hegel is said to elaborate a metaphysics of
>"the identity of identity and difference" whereas Adorno is said to
>elaborate a metaphysics of "the non-identity of identity and difference".
>Or Simon Jarvis has it as "the identity of identity and non-identity"
>(Hegel) versus "the non-identity of identity and non-identity" (Adorno).  It
>seems that the idea is that Hegel does not take sufficient account of
>experience and allegedly illicitly compresses all experience into THE
>CONCEPT.  Or, to put it another way, it is argued that Hegel is trying to
>compress all the myriad dialectics of experience into a unitary dialectic.
>
>After a long period of sitting on the fence, (on this issue an untenable
>position for a philosopher), I have now decided that Adorno has misread
>Hegel on this question.  To me it seems to come down to what one understands
>by the diremptness of reality, or the feeling of alienation that we all seem
>to have.  Now to Adorno this alienation derives from the overconfidence and
>complacency of reason which never seems to be adequate to the richness of
>experience.  To Adorno, Hegel is implicated in this problem.
>
>But, as I read Hegel, what gives meaning to experience is precisely reason.
>By this I mean reason working through history, which is not pure and simply
>human reason, but is a teleology located in nature as a whole.  If I may put
>it like this, Hegel seems to be saying to Adorno "My dear fellow, human
>experience is indeed incredibly varied and important to analyse, but let's
>not imagine that human experience supplies reason.  It is in truth much
>closer to say that reason supplies human experience.".
>
>Does this mean that Hegel is proposing a unitary dialectic?  Rather, it
>seems to me that Hegel is (systematically) putting forward a variety of
>principles or philosophical premises that he thinks are well-disposed to
>assist humanity in no longer being so dirempted or alienated from what he
>regards as its true essence - this is what Hegelians call "the journey to
>self-consciousness".  Since human beings are only a part of nature, and have
>arisen from nature, it seems intuitively easy to agree with Hegel that there
>is a "cunning of reason" which we need to get more in touch with, rather
>than take Adorno's line that (supposedly) unique experience must *of itself*
>engender meaning.  Many Hegelians would probably say that Adorno's intense
>focus on "unique experiences" represents a bad abstraction and diversion
>from the struggle to align with "the cunning of reason" - they would
>ultimately put Adorno amongst the postmodernists.
>
>That's the best I can do at the moment.  Any feedback, from any quarter,
>would be very welcome.
>
>Phil

-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, Journal of Critical Realism (incorporating 'Alethia')
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Email: <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>

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There is another world, but it is in this one.
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