1: Dialectical Critical Realism – Moving on from Hegel
I have in earlier blogs introduced Bhaskar’s basic critical realism, going on to suggest it offers a way of coming to terms with interdisciplinarity. There are any number of commentators who find basic critical realism helpful. Some of these retain their enthusiasm for Bhaskar’s original philosophical excursions through to his dialectical critical realism. Others fall by the wayside well before finishing his Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, published in 1993. Most, it has to be said, give up on encountering his programme of meta-philosophy.
This is the first of a few blogs – who knows how many – on dialectical critical realism. My project is to render it accessible, or sufficiently so for readers to decide whether or not to get stuck into it on their own account. Apart from Bhaskar himself, I draw mostly on Creaven and Norrie (see refs).
Bhaskar positions his analysis within the dialectical tradition of Hegel and Marx. His aim was to ‘deepen’ his basic critical realism by developing a general theory of dialectic sufficiently robust to underwrite a meta-theory of the social sciences that would release them to function as agencies of human emancipation. He aspired to provide, in his own words, ‘a philosophical basis for Marxian social theory consistent with Marx’s own undeveloped methodological insights’. This would require ‘philosophically under-labouring a genuinely emancipatory socialist political project’ (Creaven).
Bhaskar started by critiquing Hegel’s notion of the dialectic. The problem with Hegel’s logic is that it eradicates the dualisms of thought and reality and of subject and object en route to ‘a complete and self-consistent idealism’. Dialectic for Hegel is ‘a logical process … of reunification of opposites, transcendence of limitations and reconciliation of differences’ (Bhaskar). Bhaskar is worth quoting here:
‘From the vantage point of (positive) reason the mutual exclusivity of opposites passes over into the recognition of their reciprocal interdependence (mutual inclusion): they remain inseparable yet distinct moments in a richer, more total conceptual formation (which will in turn generate a new contradiction of its own). It is the constellational identity of understanding and reason within reason which fashions the continually recursively expanding kaleidoscopic tableaux of absolute idealism … Dialectic … is … the process by which the various categories, notions or forms of consciousness arise out of each other to inform ever more inclusive totalities until the system of categories, notions or forms as a whole is completed.’
Enlightenment amounts therefore to a process of negating negation. It culminates in the ‘achieved constellational identity’ of subject and object in consciousness ‘as thought finally grasps the world as a rational totality, as part of itself, which exists as rational totality in order to enable philosophical self-consciousness to be achieved.’ The unification of subject and object, then, is the process by which reason (or better, Reason) becomes self-conscious. This is the telos of the Hegelian system, the historical moment when totality becomes ‘constellationally’ closed or completed (Creaven).
So, setting aside its removal from Anglo-Saxon thinking, (at least since the early decades of the last century), what is wrong with Hegel’s ambitious, all-encompassing or absolute idealism? For Bhaskar, it is clearly at odds with his ‘first wave’ of critical realist philosophy: most obviously, it bulldozes over the ontological reality of stratification and emergence (see blogs on basic critical realism). Bhaskar seeks to show that the realist notions of stratification and emergence cannot lend themselves to Hegel’s idea of a closed totality, thus undermining Hegel’s ‘identity’ of subjective and objective dialectics. For Bhaskar, good totalities are open, bad totalities are closed.
The non-identity of subject and object, Bhaskar argues, ensures that there is no reason why all being must be ‘conceivable’ being, let alone why all being must be conceived of already. The fact that the cosmos is an ‘open totality’ ensures that there is always the possibility, or likelihood, of newly emergent strata – crucially for us, the possibility of new social structures brought about by human agency – so that reality is forever incomplete and ‘inherently impossible to grasp fully’ (Creaven).
This interpretation by Bhaskar supports the unity-in-difference of being and consciousness that is at the core of materialistic dialectics. Creaven again:
‘For Bhaskar, because strata are ‘equal members of the same hierarchy, (they have) an aspect of unity (dualism or pluralism is rejected)’; at the same time, because ‘the strata are not the same as, nor reducible to, one another … they have an aspect of difference (reductionism is rejected).’
What Bhaskar calls Hegel’s ‘cognitive triumphalism’ reduces the world to a non-hierarchical flat space with fixed boundaries and dimensions, arresting the ongoing process of determinate negation in physical and social systems alike. This denies the existence of ‘multiple totalities’ and of the openness and incompleteness of each of these. This can of course lead to the ’epistemic fallacy’: questions about the world collapse into questions about what we can/do know about the world (ontology is reduced to epistemology).
So Hegel’s dialectic fails to meet Bhaskar’s criteria. It is also, he maintains, internally flawed. If, as Hegel insists, truth consists in totality and the conformity of an object to its notion, then he ought to accept that the idea of an open totality is more true – that is, complete and adequate – than the idea of a closed totality’; after all, it is more comprehensive and encompassing and ‘contains the latter as a special case’ (Bhaskar). Creaven summarizes:
‘Logically, the structures of reality have to be grasped as ‘open-ended’, if Hegel’s ‘progressivist’ conceptualization of dialectic as the movement towards a richer, fuller, more universal consciousness is to be upheld.’
So Bhaskar’s skirmishing with Hegel sets the scene. A great deal more might and perhaps should be said. But this is enough for one blog and, I trust, sufficient to give those unfamiliar with Hegelian dialectic a sense of Bhaskar’s critique.
References:
Bhaskar,R (1993) Dialectic; The Pulse of Freedom. London; Verso.
Creaven,S (2007) Emergentist Marxism: Dialectical Philosophy and Social Theory. London; Routledge.
Norrie,A (2010) Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice. London; Routledge.
2: Dialectical Critical Realism – Bhaskar’s Materialist Dialectics
This second blog on dialectical realism offers a summary of Bhaskar’s materialist dialectics. This, he claims, supercedes Hegel’s earlier idealist efforts. I draw here on Bhaskar, Creaven and Norrie, as in the previous post.
First some guidelines, following Creaven. Bhaskar will have no truck with the triadic process of negation generally associated with Hegel (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). Dialectics for him is not simply about a putative law of the interpenetration of opposites in a given structure or system, leading to their ‘preservative sublation’ in a new structure of system (a higher totality). Dialectical processes, Bhaskar insists, are not always sublatory (or supersessive), let alone preservative; nor are they always characterized by opposition or antagonism. On the contrary, many are characterized by ‘mere connection, separation or juxtaposition’.
In the most general of terms Bhaskar defines dialectic as ‘any kind of interplay between differentiated but related elements’. More specifically, he sees dialectic ‘as structure-in-process and process-in-structure by virtue of the interconnections and oppositions which bring about the elaboration or transformation of a given system or totality or of some or more of its elements’ (Creaven). In his own words, dialectical thinking is ‘the art of thinking the coincidence of distinctions and connections.’
Hegel came to privilege unity over difference. Bhaskar reverses this. Time to recall a tenet or two of basic critical realism. Each (ontological) stratum can be conceptualized in isolation from any concept in the stratum from which it is emergent or in which it is rooted (the champion is necessarily emergent from/rooted in them, but cells don’t win Wimbledon). It follows that ‘in reality there is nothing present in the emergent stratum connecting it to the root stratum. Because of this … it is the aspect of difference that requires emphasis within the critical realist ontology’ (Bhaskar).
If for Hegel the dialectical process denotes the logic of negation, Bhaskar emphasizes ‘negative dialectics’ as (generally) the absenting of absence and (specifically) ‘the absenting of constraints on absenting absences or ills’ (hang in there, and hopefully this will become a little clear later on). Although he distinguishes between conceptual, social and natural dialectical processes, he regards all of these are ‘energized by the logic of absence or negation’. Creaven again:
‘Ontologically, the process is synonymous with social and natural geo-history. Epistemologically, the process is synonymous with progress in philosophical and theoretical thought, particularly the logic of scientific discovery. Normatively-practically, the process is precisely ‘the axiology of freedom’.’
In a bid to ‘radicalize’ Hegel, Bhaskar defines the core dialectical category as ‘real determinate absence or non-being’. Negativity here becomes ‘the lynchpin of all dialectics’. This negativity or absence is not simply a property of (the incompleteness of) conceptual thought, but of the ontological status of reality itself. This is crucial. Bhaskar argues against what he terms ‘ontological monovalence’, or a ‘purely positive, complementing a purely actual, notion of reality’. He insists rather on the necessity of absence or non-being – that is, on ‘negative dialectics’ – given the open-ended nature of reality.
‘If negativity or absence were entirely cancelled out by positive being, the dialectic would cease, and with it change, development, evolution, emergence, leaving us with Hegel’s ‘constellationally’ closed totality (‘endism’)’ (Creaven).
Hegel’s ‘absenting of the notion of absence’ betrays the positivity of absolute idealism. Creaven:
‘For Hegel there was history, but in capitalist modernity there is no longer. Positive being reigns supreme. Argues Bhaskar, ‘the chief result of ontological monovalence in mainstream philosophy is to erase the contingency of existential questions and to despatialise and detemporalise being’.’
Negativity, for Bhaskar, is a condition of positive being; and so absence or non-being is ontologically prior to presence or being. Absence or non-being is an ocean, presence or being merely a ripple on its surface. ‘Real determinate absence or negativity energizes the struggle for presence or positivity. This is the essence of dialectic’ (Creaven).
Bhaskar distinguishes between three types of negation: real negation, transformative negation and radical negation.
Real negation is the most basic and wide-ranging, denoting absence from consciousness (e.g. the unknown, the tacit and the unconscious); or an entity, property or attribute (e.g. the spaces in a text) in some determinate space-time region; or a process of mediating, distancing or absenting (Creaven’s paraphrase of Bhaskar). Real negation is the motor of dialectic; transformative and radical negation are subsets of real negation.
Transformative negation refers to the transformation of some thing, property or state of affairs. Such processes involve the cessation or absenting of a pre-existing thing, property of state of affairs.
Radical negation is a special case of transformative negation. It refers to the auto-subversion, transformation or overcoming of a being or condition; this is negation as self-transformation.
Bhaskar’s explication of negativity provides the basis for his analysis of contradiction. His definition of contradiction is a broad one: it can be taken, he suggests, as a kind of metaphor to cover ‘any kind of dissonance, strain or tension’. But there are discernible types of contradiction. At root, contradiction ‘specifies a situation which permits the satisfaction of one end or more generally result only at the expense of another; that is, a bind or constraint’ (Bhaskar). An internal contradiction occurs when there is a double bind or self-constraint (which may be multiplied to form a knot):
‘In this case a system, agent or structure, S, is blocked from performing with one system, rule or principle, R, because it is performing with another, R1; or, a course of action, T, generates a countervailing, inhibiting, T1. R1 and T1 are radically negating of R and T respectively’ (Bhaskar).
Internal contradictions are essential to the possibility of emergent entities and of change as a self-implementing process.
The notion of external contradiction refers to laws and constraints of nature – like the speed of light – to be established by the mere fact of determinate spatio-temporal being. The notion embraces the limiting conditions or binds imposed on humans and societies by force of natural necessity. Creaven extrapolates:
‘In terms of society, the concept may perhaps also usefully refer to the inter-relations that exist between structures of a given system or social formation, insofar as these are not relations of mutual presupposition (i.e. internal and necessary connections between elements of an institutional whole), but insofar as these entail mutual incompatibilities or strains between elements of the total system. But, in fact, these can be said to be simultaneously external and intrinsic contradictions: ‘intrinsic’ insofar as these are strains or incompatibilities between the constitutive structures of a unitary social system (e.g. those between capitalism and liberalism’s own legal and political norms of ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’); ‘external’ insofar as each constituent structure of a social system (economic, political, religious, educational etc) is constituted and defined by a specific configuration of roles, rules, norms and positions, which are mutually antagonistic.’
Formal logical contradiction is a form of internal contradiction ‘whose consequences for the subject, unless the terms of redescribed and/or the discursive domain is expanded … is axiological indeterminacy’ (i.e. the lack of rational grounds for action).
The notion of dialectical contradiction is another form of internal contradiction. They can be radical or transformative depending on whether they negate ‘the source of the existential incompatibility between elements of the totality or the common ground of the totality itself’, or whether they inform ‘processes of dynamic restructuring which can be contained within a given totality or which do not sublate its common ground’.
Gradually, via this synopsis of Bhaskar on contradiction in particular, a link with Marx and a potential salience for substantive sociology is revealed. Bhaskar has gone beyond (his reading of) Hegel and given ontological anchorage to the concept of dialectic. In the next blog in this series I will discuss Bhaskar’s stance on Marx. After that, we shall have to return to Bhaskar to go a little deeper.
3: Dialectical Critical Realism – Re-grounding Marx
In this third blog on dialectical critical realism I return to Bhaskar’s writings on Marx, once more drawing liberally on Creaven and to a lesser extent Norrie. Bhaskar agrees with much of what Marx has to say about Hegel. Crucially, Marx’s materialist dialectics, unlike Hegel’s idealistic dialectics, does not dissolve objective dialectical contradictions into subjective logical contradictions. Materialistic dialectical contradictions such as those identified by Marx describe (dialectical), but do not suffer from (logical) contradictions. Creaven summarizes:
‘the practical resolution of the contradiction here is the non-preservative transformative negation of the ground of the internally relational but ‘tendentially mutually exclusive’ totality of which they are a part, this requiring the intervention of practical human agency in the social and material worlds.’
In Bhaskar’s view Marx’s critique of Hegel opens up the possibility of a ‘materialist diffraction of dialectic’: that is, ‘the articulation of a pluriform dialectic, infolding at various levels of conceptual thought and objective reality’ (Creaven). According to Bhaskar, what he terms the ‘four levels’ of dialectical critical realism are ‘perhaps best seen as four dimensions of this diffracted dialectic, each with its own distinctive concepts, scientific applications, and philosophical problems’ (Bhaskar). Bhaskar’s four levels of dialectical critical realism are outlined and discussed later in this blog..
Unsurprisingly, Bhaskar’s ‘pluriform’ dialectic is more complex than anything to be found in Marx or in other of his disciples and interpreters. Creaven usefully offers an example of (unreconstructed) Marxian dialectics at work. Consider, he says, Marx and Engels’ ‘dialectic of labour’. There is more than an echo of Hegel here. On the one hand, Marx contends that the relationship between humans and their environment must be seen as a contradictory totality , a unity of opposites:
‘The unity is derived from the fact that nature is the ‘inorganic body’ of human thought and action, with which human beings ‘must remain in continual interchange’ if they ‘are not to die’, humanity being ‘a part of nature.’ The opposition is derived from the fact that, although human consciousness is a product of nature, it is nonetheless a qualitatively distinct part of nature, by virtue of its power to reflect upon and transform nature in the service of human needs, and because it must still encounter the world as an objective power, as a set of circumstances which confront and constrain thought and action from without’.
On the other hand, this contradictory totality, which constitutes the relationship between human subjects and objective conditions, is a dynamic and developing one. Creaven again:
‘This is because collaborative labour on the material world, in the service of human needs and interests, mediates the two poles, bringing thought into closer correspondence with its objects, combining materiality and consciousness as conscious ‘practice’, thereby transcending, without harmonizing, the abstract polarities represented by both sides of this existential contradiction’.
So what does Bhaskar add (and does it warrant all this arduous mental labour)? In his Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom, Bhaskar claims that his philosophical under-labouring is indispensable to Marxian social theory and emancipatory socialist politics. So, now we return to his four levels of dialectical critical realism.
We recounted in the previous blog Bhaskar’s reworking of Hegel’s dialectic via the concepts of non-identity, negativity, totality and transformative agency. These four concepts are mapped onto Bhaskar’s four levels of dialectical critical realism. What he dubs the first comment (1M) can be seen as corresponding to the core notions of basic critical realism (e.g. stratification, emergence, the non-identity of thought and being, system openness etc).
The second edge (2E) ‘is the abode of absence – and, most generally, negativity’ (Bhaskar). This involves a ‘remodelling’ of the core notions of 1M ‘in the light of dialectical categories such as negativity, negation, becoming, contradiction, process, development and decline, mediation and reciprocity’ (Bhaskar). 2E imparts dynamism to basic critical realism, allowing for processes of change to be situated spatially and temporally.
The third level (3L) corresponds to totality (and ‘totalising motifs’). Bhaskar maintains that the ‘internal and intrinsic connectedness of phenomena’ deducible from the ‘dialecticisation’ of 1M at 2E reveals the need for totalising motifs that can theorize totality … and constellationality.
This gives rise to the fourth dimension (4D): this is ‘the zone of transformative agency’, ‘the unity of theory and practice in practice’ (Bhaskar). This is ‘the process of human practical engagement with the world, in society and nature, which also mediates the poles of consciousness and being, bringing thought into a ‘lived relation’ with the world, thereby transcending (though without harmonizing) the abstract polarities represented by subject and object’ (Creaven). Bhaskar counters extant ‘erroneous’ interpretations of this ‘zone’ (e.g. physicalism, idealism, dualism, reification, fetishism, commodification). He also offers the conceptual means of their resolution, ‘which hinges on synchronous emergent powers materialism at the level of subject and the dialectic of structure and agency at the level of society’ (Creaven).
The interface of 3L and 4D can also be presented as the ‘moment’ of ‘dialectical critical naturalism’. or the theorization of society as unity-in-difference, and maps on to Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action. This is, or at least ought to be in my view, of special interest to sociologists. Creaven writes:
‘According to Bhaskar’s transformational model of social action, social forms (institutions, roles, positions, belief-systems, etc) are legitimate objects of scientific knowledge, because they are autonomous of the human agents that reproduce them through their activity, and because they possess their own causal efficacy. These properties (autonomy and causality) secure the objects of the social sciences as ‘real’. This autonomy of social forms does not consist of activity-independence, but rather of their ‘anteriority’ or pre-existence to any specific passage of human interaction across time and space.’
It will be remembered that for Bhaskar human agents do not create society, but always find it ready-made: they reproduce or transform it through their interaction. This is important enough to warrant an extensive quotation from Bhaskar:
‘Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency … Society … provides necessary conditions for intentional human action, and intentional human action is a necessary condition for it. Society is only present in human action, but human action always expresses and utilizes some or other social form … People do not create society. For it always pre-exists them and is a necessary condition fort their activity. Rather, society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so. Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But it is not the product of it (the error of voluntarism).
Social structures are conceived here as ‘enabling’, not just constraining or coercive. They are not reducible to their effects, but they only present through them. For Bhaskar, the transformational model of social action outperforms, sees off, the individualism of Weber, the collectivism of Durkheim and the phenomenology of Berger. The transformational model of social action goes hand in hand with a relational – rather than individualist, collectivist or interactionist – conception of society. So sociologists are charged with investigating social order as a ‘position-practice system’.
4: Dialectical Critical Realism – The Four Planar Theory
I have come to the fourth of an indefinite series of blogs on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism. You could open a book on how many more might follow. This effort dips deeper into Bhaskar’s attempts to resolve or, in his words, to ‘generalize, dialecticise and substantialise the transformational model of social action’. He wants to incorporate the complexities of power and conflict. He is in pursuit, in short, of dialectical critical realism as sociology, politics and ethics. As in previous blogs I draw variously on Bhaskar’s own texts and the exegeses of Creaven and Norrie (see refs in blog one).
Bhaskar’s offers a what he describes as a ‘naturalistically-grounded four planar’ theory of the possibilities of social being:
‘Social life, qua totality, is constituted by four dialectically interdependent planes: of material transactions with nature, inter-personal action, social relations, and intra-subjectivity’ (Bhaskar).
This four planar theory leads him to write of ‘the social cube’, a complex multi-dimensional articulation of ensembles of structure-practice-subject in process. How does this complement and add to his transformational model of social action? It will be recalled that the original version emphasized that ‘social structure is a necessary condition for, and medium of, intentional agency, which is in turn a necessary condition for the reproduction or transformation of social forms’ (Bhaskar). Creaven summarizes its limitations as follows:
‘The difficulty with this model is that it is rather too abstract or generalizing to offer much theoretical purchase on the complexity of structural conditioning and the problem of the construction of human material as subjects, actors and agents of social reproduction/transformation.’
What the four planar model recognizes, and allows for, is that these processes occur on a number of interlinked levels of terrains. To clarify:
‘For Bhaskar, it is the dialectical interaction of agents with structural properties and/or practices on these analytically distinct planes (material transactions with nature, i.e. co-operative labour to produce subsistence; social relations between agents, i.e. as incumbents of structured ‘positions’ and ‘practices’ of the social system; interpersonal relations, i.e. interactions between individuals as subjects rather than as agents of positions or institutional roles; and intra-subjective relations, i.e. internal relations of the subject, such as the self-construction of personal and cultural identities), which constitute the social cube.’
Bhaskar again: ‘we have dialectics of unity and diversity, of intrinsic and extrinsic, of part and whole, of centrification and peripheralisation, within partial totalities in complex and dislocated open process, substantively under the configuration of global commodification’ (Bhaskar).’
As with society, individuals are in this revised transformational model of social action presented as stratified and relational entities, ‘as existentially constituted by their rhythmics or geo-histories and the totality of their relations with other things’ (Bhaskar).
At this point a distinction between ‘power1’ and ‘power2’ becomes relevant. Power1 relations refer straightforwardly to ‘the transformative capacity intrinsic to the concept of agency as such’. Power2 encompasses a more sociological notion of power. Power2 denotes social relations that govern the distribution of material goods, political and military authority and social and cultural stratification via class, gender, ethnicity and age. Power2 relations are those that enable agents to defend their sectoral advantages by prevailing against either the covert wishes and/or the real interests of others. Bhaskar wants to emphasize here that power is enabling/empowering as well as repressive.
‘The significance of power2 relations, argues Bhaskar, is not that they grant agents the capacity to exercise control over the social and natural environments, the capacity to intervene causally in the world, which is an unqualified good, but that they organize or structure an uneven distribution of the capacity of human agents to exercise transformative power over their conditions of existence, and so restrict the autonomy an free-flourishing of people subject to their governance’ (Creaven).
Also salient here is Bhaskar’s political-moral theory, in which ‘concrete singularity’ (or the free-flourishing of each) is the relational condition of ‘concrete universality’ (or the free-flourishing of all). He sees this as ‘an imminent and tendential possibility … necessitated by structural conditions … (though) held in check by global discursively moralized power2 relations’. He announces a (contingent) progressive tendential movement of humanity towards ‘eudaimonia’, or universal emancipation.
How to make this clearer? We must return to Bhaskar’s definition of dialectic as the process of ‘absenting absence’. Dialectic entails ‘absenting most notably of constraints on desires, wants, needs and interests’. In a sentence, the dialectic of freedom is powered by the interface of absence and desire, since ‘absence is paradigmatically a condition for desire’ (since desire presupposes lack) (Creaven).
Humanity, Bhaskar maintains, is bestowed with the ‘inner urge’ to struggle against lack ‘that flows universally from the logic of elemental … need, want’; and this is manifested ‘wherever power2 relations hold sway’. Creaven writes:
‘This is because power2 relations function to negate the needs of most human beings (whether basic survival needs or those defined by wider cultural horizons), giving rise to a desire for freedom from ‘absenting ills’.
He continues:
This marks a welcome departure from the ‘mutual constitution’ model of structure-agency linkages of the original transformational model of social action, whereby structures govern all intentional acts of human beings. This is because it is clear here that Bhaskar wishes to invoke the enduring needs and interests of human nature to naturalistically ground resistance to those social relations that would deny or curtail or limit those needs or interests. It is this process of struggle against absence or lack that offers the tendential possibility or even geo-political impulse of moving ‘from primal scream to universal human emancipation’. Since ‘every absence can be seen as a constraint, this goal of human autonomy can be regarded as implicit in the infant’s primal scream’’.
The unfolding dialectic of absenting absence on freedom – as agents struggle against successive forms of power2 relations – ‘in tandem with expanding cultural definitions of needs and wants constructed in part through this struggle’, nurtures a logic of more inclusive and encompassing definitions of and aspirations towards freedom (Creaven).
Although he characterizes the dialectic of freedom as a process of acting to absent constraining ills, Bhaskar does not draw the line at what Creaven calls ‘practical agency energized by material interests’. Rather he extends the analysis to embrace communicative action more generally, including moral or ethical judgements:
‘Insofar as an ill is unwanted, unneeded and remedial, the spatio-temperal-causal-absenting or real transformative negation of the ill presupposes universalizability to absenting agency in all dialectically similar circumstances. This presupposes in turn the absenting of all similar constraints. And by the inexorable logic of dialectical universalizability, insofar as all constraints are similar in virtue of ‘their being constraints’, i.e. qua constraints, this presupposes the absenting of all constraints as such … And this presupposes in its wake a society oriented to the free development and flourishing of each and all, and of each as a condition for all, that is to say, universal autonomy as flourishing … So the goal of universal human autonomy is implicit in every moral judgement’.
So, for Bhaskar, ‘to act is to absent is to presuppose universal human emancipation’. This adds up to a dialectic of universalization in practical and ethical interests. In recognizing and acting to negate the constraining ills that threaten their own ‘concrete singularity’, actors are committed to recognizing and acting to negate the constraining ills that threaten others who share common situations and a common human-social-being-in-nature (‘concrete universality’). In this way Bhaskar ‘naturalistically grounds his moral realism and ethical naturalism ‘in a four-planar theory of changing and changeable human nature-in-nature’, by virtue of which human interactions objectively presuppose trust, solidarity and mutual aid. (Creaven).
Not that this makes the future predictable. At the beginning of Bhaskar’s dialectic is non-identity, at the end open, unfinished totality, along with the unity-in-difference of consciousness and being. But that is enough for now.