Dialectic and Difference

Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice

Alan Norrie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135260767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

Dialectic and Difference is the first systematic exploration of Roy Bhaskar's dialectical philosophy and its implications for ethics and justice.

That philosophy has three aims: a dialecticisation of original critical realism, a 'critical realisation' of dialectic, and a metacritique of western philosophy. In the first, real absence or negativity links structured being to dialectical becoming in a dynamic world. The second draws on Marx to locate the critical impulse in Hegel's dialectic in a material, open and changing totality. The third identifies a central problem in western philosophy from the Greeks on, the failure to think real negativity as the essence of change ('ontological monovalence').

Bhaskar's ethics connect basic human ontology with universal principles of freedom and solidarity. He marries ('constellates') these with a grasp of how principles are historically shaped. His account of freedom moves from the infant's 'primal scream' to the eudaimonic society, but thinks the limits to freedom under modern conditions. The morally real in ethics and justice is displaced and reconfigured as relations between 'the ideal' and 'the actual'.

Western philosophy systematically denies the real negativity that drives Bhaskar's dialectic. Metacritique traces this to Parmenides and Plato's account of non-being as difference. It enables a critique of the poststructural radicalisation of difference via Nietzsche and the doctrine of 'Heraclitan flux'. Mobilised as 'the other' of Plato's Forms, this remains a move on Platonic terrain. It too denies real negativity in structured being as the ground of historical change and moral praxis.

This text is essential reading for all serious students of social theory, philosophy, and legal theory.

1 Introduction
Natural necessity, being and becoming

The recent republication of Roy Bhaskar’s works of the early 1990s, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993, 2008b)¹ and Plato Etc. (1994, 2009), provides an appropriate occasion for reflection on what has become known as the dialectical turn in his thought, the philosophical system that he called dialectical critical realism. When these books were published, they seemed destined to have a major impact on critical philosophy, social theory and in the social sciences generally, but this has not happened. Overall, they have tended to be marginalised, and even in critical realist circles it is only a mild overstatement to describe dialectical critical realism as the ‘forgotten turn’ in Bhaskar’s work. Bhaskar himself moved in works published in the late 1990s² to spiritual concerns, and the effect of this later turn, whether the reaction to it was positive or negative, was to overshadow the dialectical works. To use a Bhaskarian metaphor, these works were subject to a ‘squeeze’ between two standpoints, that of original critical realism, by which I mean the philosophy advanced by Bhaskar up to the period of his dialectical work, and the post-dialectical works informed by spiritual themes. Now, with a measure of distance between these three periods of intellectual output, it is time for a reappraisal of Bhaskar’s dialectic.

The aim of this book is to consider the nature and assert the significance of the arguments at the heart of dialectical critical realism, for it seems to me that it represents a novel, radical, coherent and deep philosophical system of potentially far-reaching significance which should be better understood. One major advance in that regard has been made recently with the publication of Mervyn Hartwig’s Dictionary of Critical Realism (Hartwig 2007), which outlines in detail the concepts in Bhaskar’s dialectical system. What it does not do is attempt an accessible monographic encapsulation, exploration or development of Dialectic’s main themes. That is the purpose of the present work.

Three aims and four elements

In this introductory chapter, I begin by reflecting on the reception and perception of Dialectic since its publication. I then introduce its three aims, and sketch how it seeks to achieve them in a dialectical philosophy involving four main elements. This involves reflecting on Bhaskar’s pre-dialectical philosophy of critical realism, for dialectical critical realism represents, as its first aim, a qualitative development of this initial work as well as, its second aim, a renovation of dialectical thinking on critical realist ground. I focus on original critical realism’s development of an ontological sense of natural necessity in both the natural and the social worlds, to which dialecticisation adds an understanding of how negativity lies at necessity’s core. I explain this in the two main sections of this chapter as the move from an account of natural necessity as being to an argument for the intrinsic relationship between being and becoming in dialectical critical realism. Becoming involves, as we shall see, a sense of negation. The third aim, the development of a ‘metacritique’ of the general trajectory of western philosophy, is then briefly sketched in the final section after the four main elements in Bhaskar’s dialectic – non-identity, negativity, totality and ethical agency or practice – have been established.³ My goal in this chapter, then, is to introduce the reader to the three overall aims and the four main elements of Dialectic. In doing so, I focus on the primary move in the dialecticisation of critical realism, from a theory of being to a theory of being in relation to becoming. Before getting to these matters, however, I want to say something about reading Bhaskar’s dialectical work and the reception it has received.

Philosophical difficulty

In considering the reception of Bhaskar’s dialectical work, I will contrast views expressed in the pre- and post-publication periods. The question of philosophical difficulty has to be faced with regard to this work, and I will suggest that, while Dialectic is not easy, this is in large part because Bhaskar’s dialectic cuts across the grain of many philosophical assumptions. When Bhaskar published Dialectic, and its companion Plato Etc. one year later, it was to a fanfare of praise. Prepublication reviews recognised the significance of the argument, and grasped its essence. Peter Manicas wrote that Bhaskar ‘goes back to the beginning of the western philosophical quest and offers a brilliant refashioning of the dialectic’.⁴ He described dialectical critical realism as ‘systematic, ontologically sustained and self-consciously ethical and political’, and ‘able to give stunning readings of key chapters in the history of philosophy’. It was ‘a unique book full of gems’. William Outhwaite also described the book as ‘stunning’, and offered a similar verdict. Bhaskar ‘develops his own programme of critical realism into a radically new and original theory of dialectics and a critique of previous theories from the ancient Greeks to twentieth century neo-marxism’. Comparing Dialectic with Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason for its scope and ambition, Outhwaite went on to say that it is ‘hard to think of any other contemporary philosopher with the powers to bring this off’ and that Dialectic ‘will be one of the major reference points of philosophical and social thinking in the nineties and beyond’.

To declare my own position, I share this assessment of Bhaskar’s dialectical work. Summarising its import, Dialectic takes Bhaskar’s original philosophy of critical realism and radically reworks it through a deep engagement with the dialectical tradition. In the process, he renews dialectical philosophy itself. Dialectical critical realism is developed through a wide range of reference in western philosophy, tracing modern problems in philosophy and social theory to their roots in Greek philosophy (hence the title of Plato Etc.). It advances a novel critique of Hegel’s dialectic on the basis of critical realist protocols and what Marx might have written on dialectic had he found the time. On this basis, it produces a philosophy that both can underlabour for social theory and social science and also, less noticed but a specific focus of this work, develops an understanding of difference, change and relationality, together with the power and the limits of aporetic ethics. These, I will argue, can take dialectical critical realism to a position where it can challenge poststructural philosophy and, through its metacritique of philosophy, trump it. Dialectic is a work with an enormous range of social theoretical relevance, tying problems of agency, structure and causation to the nature of change in a dynamic world, and to the relationship between human being and nature on the one hand and human being and history on the other. In the process, it thinks through the relationship between historical emergence, the nature of human being, and its emancipation. At its philosophical core lies a theory of absence, which Bhaskar combines with his pre-existing arguments from critical realism for the significance of ontology. This is the basis for a realist understanding of human being in society and in nature which, through the account of absence, is aligned to a theory of becoming and change in a spatio-temporal world. The alignment of being and becoming is achieved in a manner that displays both a uniqueness of individual philosophical voice and a boldness of intellectual vision, and these give Bhaskar a fair claim to stand, as Outhwaite suggests, in the first rank of western philosophers today.

Against the ‘Niagara of neologisms’

This is, as it were, the good news. In the light of the pre-publication comments and my own view of the achievements of Bhaskar’s dialectical turn, it is sobering to reflect on the reception these works have since had. Consider the comments of two theorists who endorse what I have called original critical realism on their engagement with its dialectical form. Andrew Sayer describes how ‘like many other readers, including enthusiasts for critical realism, I was largely defeated by [dialectical critical realism’s] Niagara of neologisms, most of them inadequately explained, even in the glossary’ (2000: 170). Of the ethical dimension of dialectical critical realism, Sayer was left with the impression ‘of pulling global salvation out of the critical realist hat’ (ibid.). Similarly, Alex Callinicos, in a book that otherwise acknowledges his debt to Bhaskar, writes that he remains ‘wholly unconvinced by Bhaskar’s claim to have established the truth of many of his metaphysical doctrines’, and that a book ‘as suggestive and full of brilliant flashes of insight as Dialectic’ nonetheless shows signs of Bhaskar’s ‘intellectual decline’, which, linking Dialectic to Bhaskar’s spiritual turn, ‘has, alas, been fully realised with [his] espousal of New Age spiritualism’ (Callinicos 2006: 158). No doubt there is merit in saying what one thinks, even to the point of bluntness, but in an academic work these are unusually harsh words. And words matter. Sayer is a critical realist of long standing, while Callinicos more recently recognises his debt. They are both eminent figures in the field from whom others will take their cue. Outhwaite and Manicas both wrote of the ‘stunning’ quality of Bhaskar’s argument. Sayer and Callinicos appear only to have been stunned by it.

Dialectic is a difficult, sometimes a frustrating, book. While careful reading reveals how what initially seem impenetrable and disconnected passages are in fact coherently linked, it can be hard work. It develops its own concepts, Sayer’s ‘neologisms’, though Bhaskar is hardly the first philosopher to do that. Readers also come to it from their own backgrounds and with their own interests, and Dialectic tends to swirl between topics, showing their interconnection, but not in a way that is easy for readers with different, often non-philosophical, backgrounds to follow. For example, Dialectic has much to say about social theory and social science, but much of what it says on topics in that domain is linked with issues of a more fundamentally philosophical kind. Any social scientist who looks to Dialectic, for example, to illuminate the relationship between structure and agency will end up moving from discussion of ‘four-planar being’, which makes relatively easy sense as an extension of the original terms, to the ‘concrete universal’, which requires some background in Hegelian philosophy. Any theorist interested in the idea of change may fairly readily see the relationship it has with absence, for every ‘becoming’ is also a ‘begoing’ – that is, a negation or a passing away – but how is that linked to Bhaskar’s critique of the general denial of absence and what he calls, somewhat forbiddingly, ‘ontological monovalence’⁵ as the ‘primordial failing of western philosophy’ (DPF: 406)? The point is that they are closely linked, but, in a book that seeks to work at many different levels, it may be hard for readers from different backgrounds to see what the links are. Dialectic is a big book with a big argument at its core, and it is a book in which the argument is plotted and worked out as the book proceeds. It is, as Bhaskar might himself say, a ‘product in process’. That makes it a hard book, in which it is possible to get the wrong end of the stick, or not to see how the arguments ultimately fit together, in the short term at least.

An illustrative problem

In that regard, my own experience may help.⁶ I approached Dialectic from the point of view of understanding the relationship between ethics and history: what was the relationship between the ethical impulse to judge matters normatively, and the observation that all our judgements are historically conditioned? Does the latter undermine the former? One of my initial concerns about Dialectic was how it was possible for Bhaskar to argue for ethical propositions as real, primary, autonomous, normative elements in human life when such life was constituted, as he also argues, in a world which was socially structured and historically evolved, and into which human beings were ‘thrown’. How could Bhaskar write of the autonomy of ethical propositions in such a conditioned context? My initial reaction to Dialectic’s ethics was not unlike Sayer’s. There seemed a sense in which Bhaskar’s ethics were ‘with one bound’ set free from history. Bhaskar’s arguments for the dialectical universalisability of an ethics of freedom, trust and solidarity, leading to what he calls the eudaimonic society, seemed at odds with what he had said about the historicity of human being.

With Nick Hostettler (Hostettler and Norrie 2003), I wrote what I thought a well-argued and persuasive case for the broken-backed and contradictory nature of Bhaskar’s dialectic as between its ethical and historical commitments. Now, however, I think our argument was wrong because it fails to grasp the relationship between Bhaskar’s ethics and his account of totality, and his theorisation of totalising concepts such as the constellation, co-relationality, and the idea of the separation and connectedness of levels in a totality. I did not, in short, grasp the relationship between totality and ethical praxis in Dialectic (though in my defence, I do not think it very well developed there, and I shall seek to bring it out in Chapter 5). A brief reference to the overall structure of Dialectic may help explain my problem. It consists of four long chapters in which the first and second build a critique of Hegelian dialectic on the basis of Bhaskar’s theory of absence and his alignment of dialectic with realist ontological commitments. The third chapter concerns ethics and the fourth sketches a metacritique of the western philosophical tradition on the basis of a challenge to ontological monovalence (the denial of absence) in the name of real, determinate non-being (negativity). In my first reading of the book, I thought the first two chapters were right, the third misconceived, and I was unsure of the nature or implications of the argument of the fourth.

Now my view is that the book presents a coherent argument as a whole, and that one key to grasping its coherence concerns the role Bhaskar’s account of totality (the third term in his dialectic) plays in siting both his ethics and the fourth chapter’s critique of ontological monovalence in the western philosophical tradition. Missing the overall coherence of the argument by not seeing the significance of totality for the ethics and metacritique had misled me. It was in part the experience of getting Bhaskar wrong that convinced me that an attempt to write about Dialectic in a more compact and structured way, exploring some of its implications, could make it available to the wider audience it deserves. In this book, I will ultimately seek to demonstrate this coherence by showing how the arguments concerning natural necessity, materialist diffraction and totality developed in the first four chapters link together with the constellated ethics of Chapter 5 and the ethical conclusions of the metacritique of Chapters 6 and 7 to produce an overall focus on what I call the ‘grounds of justice’ in Chapter 8.

Against the grain

Dialectic is, then, a hard book, and that is no doubt one reason why it has not had the reception it deserves. This is, however, only one reason. A second concerns how dialectical critical realism cuts across the grain of most critical social theory and philosophy. If Dialectic is hard – and Bhaskar has developed something of a reputation as a difficult writer – what is it that turns a hard book into one that is dismissed as downright impossible, or a difficult writer into a Difficult Writer? At one level, it may be the text, as I have acknowledged, but at another it is the commitment of the reader and whether he senses that there is something in the text worth pursuing. If that sense is triggered, then the hardness of the book or the difficulty of the writer become lesser problems, even reasons for admiration. The writer is saying something so deep that it can only be said in a way that is dense and hard to comprehend. She is difficult only because the things she is engaging with are themselves difficult; her difficulty is her achievement. On the other hand, where a reader does not have the patience for an argument, sees it as going nowhere, there comes a point where he is inclined to give up and reject the book as plain impossible. Of course, it may be that Dialectic is impossible, its ‘Niagara of neologisms’ impenetrable – and I am not making an argument for difficulty as a virtue in itself. It may also be the case that Dialectic reveals the beginnings of a ‘sad decline’, as Callinicos avers. But if so, how to account for the praise heaped on it by Manicas and Outhwaite? How to account, politely, for those like myself who agree with them?

There is in truth an underlying problem about ‘hardness’ and ‘difficulty’ that has nothing to do with Bhaskar. His only sin has really been to write some long sentences and invent some new concepts in the pursuit of his philosophical instinct, ambition and conviction. The underlying problem is that Dialectic opposes the assumptions that many potential readers bring to it. Dialectical critical realism merges critical realist ontology with the idea of dialectical negation. It introduces the novel concept of real determinate absence to ontology via a critique of Hegel that is leveraged on Marx. This is a demanding and unusual marriage of traditions. As a result, Dialectic questions the assumptions of different theoretical approaches that might otherwise be engaged by it. First, it challenges original critical realism on the nature of ontology, which had always seemed so solid a foundation but now has to be understood in terms of absence. It requires critical realists, should they wish to follow Bhaskar’s thought, to take Hegel and the dialectical tradition seriously. Many would not have anticipated this when they read his earlier works. Second, it questions the assumptions of Kantians, neo-Kantians and Hegelians, who all, one way or another, endorse Kantian transcendental idealism (even if, in the Hegelian dialectical move, to ‘sublate’ it), and therefore do not see beyond the ‘pre-critical’ word ‘realism’ to the transcendental operation Bhaskar had himself performed in original critical r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Introduction Natural necessity, being and becoming
• 2 Accentuate the negative
• 3 Diffracting dialectic
• 4 Opening totality
• 5 Constellating ethics
• 6 Metacritique I
• 7 Metacritique II Dialectic and Difference
• 8 Conclusion Natural necessity and the grounds of justice
• Notes
• References