Reality and Its Depths: A Conversation Between Savita Singh and Roy Bhaskar [1st ed.] 9789811542138, 9789811542145

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxiii
Childhood and University (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 1-22
Transcendental Realism and Critical Naturalism (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 23-52
The Transitions to Dialectical Critical Realism and the Theory of Everyday Transcendence (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 53-68
How False Theories Work: TINA Formations and the Critique of Irrealism (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 69-82
Recovery of Truth and the Dialectic of Self-realisation (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 83-97
God, the Cosmic Envelope and the Self (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 99-132
The Emotions, Thought and Self-realisation (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 133-152
Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 153-180
The Question of Women (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 181-192
Recognition and Immortality, Failure and Success (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 193-211
Re-enchanting Reality: Practical Ways to Become Freer (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 213-224
Conclusion (Savita Singh, Roy Bhaskar, Mervyn Hartwig)....Pages 225-236
Back Matter ....Pages 237-243

Citation preview

Savita Singh Roy Bhaskar Mervyn Hartwig

Reality and Its Depths A Conversation Between Savita Singh and Roy Bhaskar

Reality and Its Depths

Savita Singh Roy Bhaskar Mervyn Hartwig •

•

Reality and Its Depths A Conversation Between Savita Singh and Roy Bhaskar Edited by Mervyn Hartwig

123

Savita Singh School of Gender and Development Studies Indira Gandhi National Open University New Delhi, India

Roy Bhaskar London, UK

Mervyn Hartwig (Emeritus) Macquarie University Sydney, Australia

ISBN 978-981-15-4213-8 ISBN 978-981-15-4214-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

This is the winter of the world; –and here We die, even as the winds of Autumn fade, Expiring in the frore and foggy air. Behold! Spring comes, though we must pass, who made The promise of its birth, –even as the shade Which from our death, as from a mountain, flings The future, a broad sunrise; thus arrayed As with the plumes of overshadowing wings, From its dark gulf of chains, Earth like an eagle springs. O dearest love! we shall be dead and cold Before this morn may on the world arise; Wouldst thou the glory of its dawn behold? Alas! gaze not on me, but turn thine eyes On thine own heart –it is a paradise Which everlasting Spring has made its own, And while drear Winter fills the naked skies, Sweet streams of sunny thought, and flowers fresh-blown, Are there, and weave their sounds and odours into one. Shelley

Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon’s reflection. Now I am a lion staring up totally lost in love with the thing itself. Rumi

Author’s Preface

I met Roy Bhaskar at the beginning of 2001 in New Delhi. He had been invited to give a series of lectures at Delhi University on critical realism. I was back from studying at McGill then and had joined the Developing Countries Resource Centre, Delhi University, as an associate fellow. In the Centre, there was a group of young scholars deeply engaged with creative critical theory. They wanted to make it contextually meaningful by engaging with philosophy of science and Indian philosophy simultaneously. Roy had the right recipe for this group. Manindra Nath Thakur was in touch with Roy as he (Manindra) was working on the epistemological challenges to Marxism, particularly in the context of understanding religion. In one of the meetings of DCRC, Manoranjan Mohanty spoke about the creative political theory which he was conceptualising at that time. A process of fermentation was going on, and the group was already finding Roy’s work quite relevant to it. It had to depend a lot on critical realism, Manoranjan said. Roy expressed his desire to come to India, and the University was intellectually ready to receive him. Neera Chandhike, the then Chair of the Department of Political Science, facilitated the way, and Manindra was able to organise a vibrant afternoon interaction between Roy and the members of the group. Nath Thakur suggested that we should invite Roy to Delhi University to speak. Roy had formed a small group of critical realists in Kolkata already. This was the beginning of the formation of Creative Critical Theory group and also in a way of the book Reality and Its Depths. This group found Roy’s ideas quite relevant to the project of decolonising mind, which was necessary for any democratic negotiation between East and West, which was a shared concern. This group has grown since then, and now it organises an annual conference in collaboration with the India International Centre. It dedicated its 2015 Colloquium to Roy Bhaskar as one of those who have inspired it. Reality and Its Depths was in part our response to the difficulties some younger scholars have experienced in understanding Roy’s work, even though his A Realist Theory of Science was widely read and admired. One problem was that, except for a very small group of replicative social scientists, positivism was treated with

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understandable scepticism in India from the very beginning. Indian modernity, in my view, began on this note of difference. The close connection between colonialism and positivism was always apparent. That is why the intellectual path of interpretation of major philosophical texts was undertaken as a way to realise modernity. When Roy arrived in the Department of Political Science on the appointed afternoon, his appearance startled some of the older professors. He was wearing a brilliant turquoise blue raw silk shirt and equally colourful trousers, long hair touching his shoulders and a lovely smile on his face. People were expecting a greyish professor; his philosophy had created that expectation, I suppose. But the philosopher Roy Bhaskar was far more celebratory of ordinary life, which he had theorised as multilayered and pregnant with the possibility of emancipation. Ultimately, it had to be achieved effortlessly, he believed, as we continuously live in harmony with our real selves or grounds states. Roy spoke of critical realism’s new phase which he was still theorising. He called it the ‘metaReality layer’ of critical realism. ‘Let us break the last taboo practiced in Western thought’, he said. ‘Let us see how we can theorise or do ethics rationally. Critical realism has come into being by breaking a series of taboos in the Western philosophy. These taboos have constrained the realisation of freedom in thought and in our socio-political lives.’ By beginning in this manner, he had already performed critical realism; the professors who were sceptical of his attire and persona had realised that critical realism was about breaking the confidence one reposes in settled ideas. Interestingly, Roy got himself a number of brilliant coloured silk shirts made up in Delhi. He developed a love for raw silk as well and got some trousers made. Some of his clothes remain with me, for when he left Delhi the last time they had gone for dry cleaning and were not delivered on time. When I visited him in London in 2010, I brought him two of these shirts as he had asked me and kept the rest with me. He had hoped to visit New Delhi again. Manindra and I tried to get him here as visiting professor for three years. It was not to be realised, as he was in no position to return due to his failing health. After Roy finished his lecture that day, the seminar room was a serious place. Everything else had receded into the background. People were amazed at the familiarity of the ideas Roy put forward, except perhaps the philosophical rendering of these ideas, the insistence on ontology and the clarification of the structure of reality, the ‘real’ being the substratum of all that is actual–contradictory, heteronomous, egoistical, generally the realm of duality. Indian scholars knew their Marx very well, and so it was coming close to them. But Roy did not bifurcate the social world between ideology and reality. He was unravelling the nature of totality quite differently. His understanding of reality was multilayered, and what was comprehended as ideology by others was a layer of reality only. The discussion lasted for almost one and half hours. The critical realist group consisting of Manoranjan Mohanty, Manindra Nath Thakur and Savita Singh thus got formed during the discussion itself. We kept supporting Roy, putting forward our own ideas to make them stick with Delhi scholars. Later on, we made arrangements for him to give

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more lectures: one in Zhakir Hussain Delhi College and another in Sahitya Akademi, Delhi. The serious nature of discussions that followed after his talks spoke of the success of his ideas. He even attracted a large number of Marxist scholars including the noted left scholar, activist and a public intellectual Kumaresh Chakravarty, who chaired his Zhakir Husain College lecture; he and Roy planned to work together later on a project titled ‘Reflexivity and the Labour Movement’. But the metaReality part of his critical realism was making people wonder if it was not the Upanishadic articulations of Indian philosophy. There was caution and scepticism and yet a deep desire to understand it. I had read Roy to some extent and had followed his work until Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (Bhaskar 1993), but was quite unfamiliar with the new formulations. After his Sahitya Akademi lecture, I proposed to him that it would be a good idea to edit a reader-friendly volume of his writings. He proposed another model: a meaningful conversation between the two of us. Roy got me all his books within a few days of our deciding to undertake this journey. I had quite a task on my hands. I suggested that the title of these philosophical conversations should be Fathoming the Depths of Reality. Roy agreed instantly. Unfortunately, this title later had to be changed, because it had been advertised for publication by another publisher, together with an ISBN, and all the online information about this could not be removed. So, I suggested Reality and Its Depths, and that was accepted. Our first conversation took place in the lounge of the Imperial hotel, Janpath. I suggested that our future conversations take place in the India International Centre, a more congenial space for such intellectual engagement. I was reading Roy at a speed I had never managed before, not even at McGill while pursuing my Ph.D. Roy took a room at the India International Centre, and we started getting to know each other better. I was writing my thesis at the time (much delayed), The Discourse of Modernity in India: A Hermeneutical Study, and was very much in that space philosophically. I had travelled with Charles Taylor quite a distance in the dense forest of hermeneutics and had understood the ontological positioning of language and understanding within it. Roy once told me half jokingly that he would be waiting for me to travel with him through metaReality once I had managed to come out of this state of duality sustained by my infatuation with hermeneutics. In Reality and Its Depths, we kept trying to work out this movement towards understanding nonduality or the ground state and cosmic envelop. We planned a second book together entitled Living in MetaReality, and a third on New Ways of Being, New Ways of Seeing. Roy drafted a blurb for Reality and Its Depths in which he listed these as our future philosophical endeavours. Neither of them could be realised, however. Roy knew about my serious engagement with poetry. Whenever I saw him, he would ask me if I had written any new poems, and he would read them. He had such an interesting way of reading poetry that it boosted my confidence in my powers as a poet. He kept telling me poetry was more relevant than anything else. ‘You are already in a nondual space. It’s the creativity that actually leads to expanded existence. You are an expanded being.’ I didn’t believe him at first.

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He said it would become apparent during our conversation about understanding the depths of reality. And it did. I kept writing poetry along with teaching and other academic writing that one necessarily has to do. He said similar things about feminism. He knew where I was going. It’s a pity that the chapter on our discussion of feminism and women’s labour is incomplete. The tapes got damaged. To complete the conversation, Roy returned to New Delhi twice, each time more determined to persuade me to journey through metaReality. I owe him another book, a book of poems that will take Roy travelling with me through his own philosophical journey poetically. I was extremely happy when in 2010 I received an invitation from a literary group based in Birmingham, South Asian Arts and Heritage, to give a series of lectures and do workshops on culture, language and poetry. It was an opportunity to see Roy as well. I wrote to him, and we fixed a date to meet. I was stunned to see him, almost speechless at his state of health, one foot amputated, which he had never told me about. He was living in a room at The Holiday Inn, Kings Cross. I never really asked him why. I guessed it was better there for him. But he had company. A lovely friend, Cheryl Frank, was there caring for him. I had taken white carnations for him along with his two shirts, bright yellow and beautiful crimson, his favourite colours. That was the last time I saw him. After he passed away in November 2014, I became very restless about the book we had done together. I had sent him the transcript of our conversation in 2005 or 2006. Roy kept thinking that he would add more to this book. He must have had some ideas. He wasn’t done yet, I think. He often spoke to me about Mervyn Hartwig, and once suggested I write to him, sending him the abstract of a paper I was presenting at an international seminar on critical realism. He valued Mervyn immensely. That is why I got in touch with him about the status of the manuscript for Reality and Its Depths. Mervyn had mentioned this as ‘forthcoming’ in an introduction to one of Roy’s other books. I knew he would be able to do something about bringing Reality and Its Depths to publication, which he did. The book can now see the light of the day thanks to Mervyn. I dedicate this book to him as much as to Roy. I consider it a token of love for Roy on Mervyn’s part, in fact for both of us, brother and sister, for that is what we became as we progressed towards plumbing the depths of reality. Thinking of Roy and this book, I see it keeping company with the white carnations I gave him, which he placed in a flower vase on a table near his bed in the room he lived in to the end. These flowers will never wilt, as Roy himself wrote after I returned to New Delhi. ‘These flowers are as fresh even today as when you gave them to me.’

Author’s Preface

Savita Singh speaking in Paris, June 2016

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Roy Bhaskar at the Golden Gate, Mumbai, 2001

New Delhi, India May 2018

Savita Singh

Editor’s Preface

Having grown up in an Indian household in the UK and visited India several times with his parents as a child, Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) returned to India on several occasions in the early years of the new millennium, both in search of inspiration for his burgeoning philosophy of metaReality, the culminating phase of his philosophical system, and to give lectures and seminars to promote his philosophy. One set of his notes for the first trip is headed ‘Going home’. The conversations contained in this book were recorded in Delhi on several separate occasions during these trips: September 2001 (commencing two days after 9/11), and January and February 2002. On the first of these visits, Roy met Savita at one of his seminars and sought her out as an interlocutor. They decided to do a book of conversations together. A rough transcript of the recordings was made in Delhi over the next few years, but until Savita contacted me about it in October 2015, the project was taken no further. After 2002, Savita and Roy went their separate ways, Savita pursing her main vocation as a poet and Roy his as a philosopher. While Reality and Its Depths, like The Formation of Critical Realism (Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010), tells the story of the development of the philosophy of critical realism and metaReality, many features mark it out as highly distinctive and valuable. First, Roy’s main stated project in these conversations is to expound his philosophy for an Indian audience. This gives the book a distinctly Indian flavour, more so than any other of his works, and also sheds invaluable light on his so-called1 spiritual turn. While it would be a mistake to view the philosophy of metaReality as the result of a simple transapplication of Vedic ideas—it is arrived at most fundamentally by immanent critique of the prior phases of Roy’s thought—the book makes it clearer than his other work that the influence is a powerful one. It brings out a Vedic dimension to Roy’s thought that had always been present, but never so palpably. This is seen most graphically, perhaps, in the sense that Roy had throughout his life, recorded here for the first time, that his original ideas were coming, not from his embodied personality as such, but from his transcendentally Bhaskar often referred to his spiritual and dialectical turns as ‘so-called’ because he held that his philosophy was implicitly spiritual and dialectical in all its phases. 1

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real self; but it is also evident, for example, in his conviction that being is at bottom love (he and Savita planned to do two more books about this called New Ways of Being, New Ways of Seeing and Living MetaReality), and more generally in the concept of a nondual zone of being that underpins the dual world that we humans inhabit. This effect is heightened of course by the Indian setting, by the fact that Savita is Indian and by Roy’s own Indian background. An array of Indian thinkers and politicians and various other ‘local’ topics are discussed. Second, the breakthrough to a concept of everyday transcendence,2 as distinct from transcendence as peak experience, which is fundamental to the philosophy of metaReality, occurs during one of these conversations (Chap. 3); as nowhere else in Roy’s oeuvre, the reader can witness the new concept being born, and share in the mounting excitement of both speakers. Third, there is a recurrent paean to the rich individualism made thinkable, though not in general actual, by capitalist modernity, which has its source ultimately in the diversity and creativity of ground states. The ‘bottom line’ of the book is that ‘you are a unique, concretely singular individual’. ‘There is no authority but yourself. That is true autonomy.’ This philosophy has no truck with elitism and substitutionism of any kind. Fourth, in what he refers to as ‘a Socratic dialogue’, Roy elaborates his views on recognition and immortality, which ‘reverse Hegel’, and this again is unique to this book, and brilliantly done. Integral to this dialogue is, as Roy puts it, ‘a courageous and beautiful colloquy’ on failure, in which Savita recounts and discusses her experience in this regard. Finally, thanks largely to Savita’s skills as an interlocutor, Reality and Its Depths is the most spontaneous, uninhibited and vivid of Roy’s productions. ‘When I’m talking philosophy’, Roy says at one point, ‘I don’t really have to think, I just do it.’ Such ‘just doing’ reverses the priority of thought over being in the West, and it presupposes a listener you can trust; Savita’s practice in this regard elicits from Roy, in the context of a conversation about love, the highest compliment: ‘You show great love for someone by listening to them (just very briefly!).’ There are of course many other valuable things that are specific to this book, including Achilles’ heel critiques of Nietzsche and Derrida, a reprise of Roy’s metacritique of Marx and the Marxist tradition,3 Roy’s views on why philosophers have by and large ignored his work and why in contrast many social scientists have found it very helpful, and an account of his identification with women as oppressed, and of the sphere of domestic labour as prefiguring the eudaimonistic society. As Roy remarks in regard of the various ways in which Marx was inspired by Hegel during the most productive periods of his life, ‘a really great thinker can provide a continual resource’, and he and Savita have team-worked creatively here to provide just that. Zen Buddhism has a concept of everyday transcendence, but to experience it one must first attain satori or enlightenment. Bhaskar generalises transcendence to people everywhere as the most fundamental state of their being and activity. 3 This in my view is broadly compatible with the critique of that tradition at a less metatheoretical level by Moishe Postone (1993), except that Postone’s critique operates with an oversocialised conception of people in capitalist society. 2

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A main reason why the project for the book stalled in 2002 is undoubtedly that both the recordings and the original transcripts are of uneven quality, requiring major investment of effort on the part of a skilled editor familiar with Roy’s work. This I gladly made as soon as the conversations became available, working from both the transcripts and the recordings. Some unavoidable gaps in the conversations are indicated by editorial notes (for larger gaps) or by ellipses (for smaller ones). These do not in my view detract significantly from its readability or value. Indeed, they possibly enhance them—as no-one who is familiar with Roy’s understanding of gaps (absences) as part of the causal fabric of the world will be surprised to learn. The original recordings and transcripts will be lodged in the Bhaskar Archives, UCL Institute of Education, London. The notes and references are mine. For epigraphs, I have chosen stanzas by Shelley and Rumi, Bhaskar’s favourite Western poet, and favourite poet, period, respectively. Homage is paid to both in the conversation. The stanzas by Shelley capture the essence of Bhaskar’s thought in regard of the demi-real and the metaReal, the ‘winter of the world’ and the ‘everlasting Spring’ that lies at a deeper level within people—evidence by synchronisation, licensed by the continuity of deep structures, that Bhaskar’s spirituality is indeed, as this book claims, consistent with ‘no faith’ (Shelley was an atheist) as well as ‘all faiths’. Oppression or master–slavery, for Shelley, as for Bhaskar, ‘is unnatural, so it actually destroys Nature’ (Holmes 1974, 398), and the great passion of both was to absent the causes of human suffering/constraints on free flourishing. In both thinkers, a multiply sundered and alienated world is healed by solidarity and love. Like Bhaskar’s philosophy, Shelley’s poetry was too revolutionary to be widely appreciated in his own day. Rumi’s stanza, like his poetry in general, chimes profoundly with the philosophy of metaReality. When the world of duality is dissolved in identity consciousness, there is only being in love with being as such. London, UK August 2018

Mervyn Hartwig

About This Book

In the conversations contained in this book, which took place in Delhi in 2001–2002 in the midst of his ‘spiritual turn’, Roy Bhaskar and Savita Singh tell the story of the development of the philosophy of critical realism and metaReality for an Indian audience. The most distinctively Indian of Bhaskar’s productions, Reality and Its Depths is also the most spontaneous and vivid—Bhaskar ‘just doing’ philosophy in conversation with an Indian poet and philosopher. The transition to the metaReality phase of Bhaskar’s philosophy takes place before the reader’s eyes; one moment the talk is of transcendence as peak experience, the next it is of transcendence as everyday, the most fundamental state of our being. The diverse topics discussed include some that are given little or no attention elsewhere in Bhaskar’s work, such as recognition and immortality and the prefiguration of the good society in the characteristic labour of women; or that are here given a new inflection, such as the metacritique of Nietzsche and Derrida, and of Marx and Marxism. Readers of Singh’s poetry, for their part, will gain invaluable insight into her intellectual development and world view. Novices in either department who want to learn more will find this book an absorbing read. Those engaged in building transformative social movements based on good sense will find it an inspirational resource. It is indispensable reading for anyone interested in critical realism and its development, and in the general intellectual story of our times.

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Contents

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Childhood and University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 A Natural Philosopher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Solidarising with the Oppressed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Engaging with Marx, Marxism and ‘Third-World’ Revolutionary Movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Critical Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Early Theoretical Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Transcendental Realism and Critical Naturalism . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Breaking the Taboo on Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 A New Understanding of the Natural World: Transcendental Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Rethinking the Problem of Naturalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Critique of Hermeneutics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Transcending the Dualisms of Social Science . . . . . . 2.3.3 The Main Moments of Critical Realism: A Brief Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.4 Why Philosophers Have Tended to Ignore Critical Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.5 The Transition from Transcendental Realism to Critical Naturalism Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.6 The Main Differences Between the Natural and the Social Sciences and Their Objects . . . . . . . . . 2.3.7 Epistemological Dialectic Without End? . . . . . . . . . . The Transitions to Dialectical Critical Realism and the Theory of Everyday Transcendence . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Getting Dialectic Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Existence of Negation in Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Developmental Structure of Dialectical Critical Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 A New Theory: Everyday Transcendence and Creativity .

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Contents

How False Theories Work: TINA Formations and the Critique of Irrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Positivism and Critical Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 TINA Compromise Formations and the Asymmetry of Emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Categories of Negation and the Critique of Irrealism .

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Recovery of Truth and the Dialectic of Self-realisation . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Recovering Truth and Escaping from Mystification . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Question of Self-change and Social Transformation . . . . . .

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God, 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

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the Cosmic Envelope and the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fathoming the Depths of the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Further Transcendental Deepening of Critical Realism The Cosmic Envelope and Its Relation to God and the Universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Tripartite Self and the Goal of Self-realisation . . . . . . Critiques Entrained by the New Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5.1 A Radical Critique of Religious and Spiritual Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5.2 Direct Understanding and the Critique of Hermeneutics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5.3 Critique of Marxism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Radical Hermeticism and the Dialectical Learning Process of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Emotions, Thought and Self-realisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 7.1 The Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 7.2 Mind, Thought, Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

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Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism . . . . . . . . 8.1 Modernism in India and the West . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Postmodernism and Poststructuralism . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.1 Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Rorty . . . . . . . 8.2.2 Endless Repetition of the Same . . . . . . . . . 8.2.3 Insights of Modernism and Postmodernism

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The Question of Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

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10 Recognition and Immortality, Failure and Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 10.1 Recognition and Immortality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 10.2 Failure and Principles of Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 11 Re-enchanting Reality: Practical Ways to Become Freer . . . . . . . . 213 11.1 Overcoming Dualism and Dichotomy in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . 213 11.2 Demystifying Self-realisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

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11.3 The Role of the Spiritual Teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 11.4 Reality as Always Already Enchanted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 12 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Appendix: Metacritique of Marx and Marxism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

About the Authors

Savita Singh is a distinguished feminist poet (writing in both Hindi and English), political theorist and commentator on gender issues. She has received many awards for poetry and her work is translated in several languages including French, German and Spanish. She has worked in the area of Indian modernity, feminist literature and culture and labour. She is the founding director, currently professor, in School of Gender and Development Studies, Indira Gandhi National Open University. Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) was the originator of the philosophy of critical realism and the author of many acclaimed and influential works, including A Realist Theory of Science; The Possibility of Naturalism; Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom; The Philosophy of MetaReality; Enlightened Common Sense and (with Mervyn Hartwig) The Formation of Critical Realism. Mervyn Hartwig is founding editor (retired) of Journal of Critical Realism and editor and principal author of Dictionary of Critical Realism. He has written introductions to all Roy Bhaskar’s single-author books, which were reissued by Routledge 2008-2016, and most recently has edited Bhaskar’s 1971 DPhil thesis, Empiricism and the Metatheory of the Social Sciences for publication (2018).

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Chapter 1

Childhood and University

1.1 A Natural Philosopher Thursday 13 September 2001 Savita: Something very interesting is taking place. We are going on a journey, a conversational journey, and hopefully, we will arrive somewhere. It is such a pleasure to have a conversation with Professor Roy Bhaskar, one of the outstanding philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. People all over the world are interested in his work, and I am one of them. I will begin, Roy, by asking some questions relating to your personal history. When did it first occur to you that you were going to be a philosopher? Roy: I suppose I was always in a sense very interested in philosophical issues. I remember before I was in my teens talking with much older boys in my school about freedom and determinism and the arguments for and against them. And I think already at that age I had a good idea of key basic issues. I can’t say that I was an original thinker at that age, but I seemed to have some knowledge of the issues and how the debate had been going and where it ought to go. It’s a bit extraordinary really, when I was about four I was already reading, mostly the books in my father’s house—my parent’s house (my father was very much the chief parent!)—there were lots of books, but they were mainly medical books. When I was very young, I would go into my father’s surgery, pull out a book and start thumbing through it. I don’t know whether I just thought I was reading, or whether I actually was reading. Savita: But you got along well with books. Roy: Yes, and then by the time I was about nine, my father had filled his house (or houses) with books, partly on philosophy and partly on esoteric religion and spirituality. He was a member of the Theosophical Society. Theosophy was one of the attempts, beginning in the late nineteenth century, to modernise Hinduism, but specifically—unlike say Vivekananda—to present it to a Western audience. I

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_1

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shouldn’t say ‘unlike’, actually: Vivekananda had the same idea, but he was doing it for Indians; the Theosophical Society was aimed primarily at a Western audience. Savita: Did you ever go with your father to any of their meetings? Roy: Yes, from about the age of eight or nine I used to go to meetings, and at this age, I was somehow often put in charge of little children. I was probably a bit too young to go to meetings, but I remember going, and I used to look after all the children. And I used to do this at home as well; I seemed to be the oldest child in a group of children of friends that my father had. But soon—by the age of about nine—I graduated from looking after the kids at meetings of the Theosophical Society. I can well remember their quarters in 52 Gloucester Place, a rather impressive Georgian mansion in central London. I graduated from looking after the kids to popping into the library, and the library there was fascinating. There I would read books by Freud and on American history, subjects that my father didn’t have books on. Then, I graduated from this to actually going into and attending meetings, and frankly many of them were very boring. Once I got into a meeting, I felt I would never get out. I used to do the time-honoured thing of falling asleep. Savita: At that time you probably didn’t have a clear idea of what these people were talking about, I suppose. Roy: I think in a funny way I was pretty clear. It’s just that they were not engaging me as a potential equal in the conversation. When I was a bit older, my father, who wanted me to be a doctor, said: ‘You know, you don’t have to worry about being a philosopher or anything like that, because you are naturally a philosopher.’ That is one of the true things he said to me. The thing is, from when I was about ten his friends and associates would engage with me, because I had a peculiar capacity to make them laugh. I guess I was sort of suppressing in a mask of humour whatever philosophical ingenuity or genius I had at that age. Savita: What were the kinds of books that interested you at that age? You just mentioned Freud. You seem to have found that books took you out of a very boring world into an enchanting one? Roy: That’s right. Actually, after what I’ve been saying about my earlier proclivities, you might be surprised to learn that the books that probably interested me most at that age were books on cricket, because I was a very good cricketer. In fact, a number of classy players predicted that I would have a brilliant future in cricket. But at the age of eleven, I developed very bad hay fever and was sneezing the whole time throughout the English cricket season. So that destroyed my cricketing career. So, then, I turned to my second love, which was philosophy. It was very difficult though to find people to talk to about the issues I was interested in, so I suppose I did a lot of reflecting. I was a very lonely child. I liked to go for long walks, and somehow I liked to project my consciousness all over the place, into blades of grass, into the sea, the wind, up to the stars; especially, up to the stars.

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1.2 Solidarising with the Oppressed Savita: Were you still rather vague about the things you related to, or were you always seeking clarity? Were you just relating to things in a nonchalant manner, and at an emotional level feeling good about looking at green grass and blue sky? Roy: I felt very unhappy about myself and where I was in this world. It didn’t feel very good. And that had to do with my immediate family context and the racism that I experienced at school, which was horrendous. Britain in the early 1950s was an extremely racist society, there’s no doubt about that, and it didn’t matter that I was fair-skinned and spoke English with a perfect English accent. My classmates and teachers immediately knew I was Indian from my name, or if they didn’t guess from that then it soon got around. So I was a target for bullying, and I was also bullied by my father— Savita: You were bullied by your father? What for? Roy: When I was born, my father immediately saw me as his future partner and his successor as the head of his medical practice. So there was no question of choice of career for me. No way was I to have a choice. I was going to be a doctor, and that was decided. I think the only thing they were waiting for was to know what sex I was. If I had been born a girl, my father might have had second thoughts. Savita: Perhaps it would have been far easier to bend a girl to his will. Roy: Well, no, he would not have been thinking of her as a doctor, he would have been thinking of her marrying a suitable husband, probably a medical student. The first son, myself, was destined to be a doctor. The second son was destined to be an accountant. And the accountant, my brother Krishan, would cook the books for the practice, and of course I would do most of the work when I got to the age of twenty-five, or whenever I was qualified fully medically, while my father gradually eased himself out. Savita: So that made you very unhappy, that somebody else was defining your destiny— Roy: Oh, absolutely. It made me very unhappy. I remember when I was four or five my father used to take me around with him on his medical rounds, visiting his patients—he was very proud of me. It was terribly boring—he would have a list of thirty to forty patients. I used to try to smuggle a book with me, but he didn’t like that at all, because it took attention away from him and his activity. Then, when he wasn’t taking me on his medical rounds, he would take me shopping. Imagine how boring this was for a young child. Young children really don’t want to go shopping with their parents. But every Saturday morning we used to drive in from our outer suburb to Harrods, and I used to have to traipse around with him; and, of course, to a young child it is an enormously huge world—even though I was tall for my age—and I felt very dislocated. It is not a normal thing for a child, really. I don’t think in India

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it would be normal. It wouldn’t be normal in any real context for a child to have to walk around with their father almost the whole the time. Savita: I would really like to know about your mother. Did she play a marginal role or a central role; what kind of role did she play in your life? Roy: I should tell you a bit about their marriage and the background first. My father, Raghu Nath Rai Bhaskar, came from Gujranwala, near Lahore, and after his father died he went to England in 1939 to do his FRCS, that is, his postgraduate work to qualify as a surgeon. But he was caught in the Second World War. In fact, all the universities and institutions of further education were shut down, and doctors were put to the war effort. So he, as it were, played his part in the war effort by being a general practioner in England, waiting for the war to end. In the meantime his brother had very meanly cut off funds for him, and so he was leading a very poor life, first as a student and then as a doctor. And I think in a way this disconnection from funding and from the family wealth, which was there, brought about a certain meanness in his own character. He often said to me: ‘You know, you’ve got to be self-made, like me: I’m self-made.’ This was after he had done quite well as a doctor, and as a businessman too. ‘You are never going to have any money from me’, he would say, ‘you are always going to have to work your way through the world.’ And that was absolutely true—in that respect, he was a man of his word. Then, he started dating my mother, Marjorie Skill, and they decided to get married. My mother was English. She had just one living parent, a mother. Her father had died almost as soon as she was born, in the First World War, and she had spent her youth in South Africa, where her white mother had taken her. They had gone back to England when she reached the age of 18 or 19, just before the Second World War. My father was working in Brighton, she was in Brighton, and they met. But both families, my father’s Indian family and my mother’s English family, took tremendous objection to the marriage. So it was a marriage very much against the odds. Actually, my mother became almost an ideal-typical Indian wife. She assumed Hinduism totally, she wore saris, she cooked curries, she called herself Khamla instead of Marjorie. Our household was really as Indian as you could get. She even learnt Hindi and how to write Hindi and Punjabi, and when my father’s relatives eventually accepted the marriage, she was far more popular than he was. She was a very loving person, but she had one tremendous defect: she loved everyone except herself. She did not love herself, so she was very self-sacrificial. And it wasn’t a surprise, in terms of what we are beginning to understand about the aetiology of cancer, that she developed cancer when I was fifteen or sixteen. She had cancer for seven years, and died when I was in my mid twenties. It was a terrible experience for me to see her bear this agony. My father of course got all the best doctors, all the best Western equipment to try and save her. Funnily enough, some India cousins of mine—nieces of his—said: ‘Why don’t you try homeopathy, why don’t you try Ayurvedic recipes?’ But no, he refused to budge. Actually, my mother showed me a lot of physical love, but whenever it came to the crunch, she always took my father’s side. So in all the struggles I had with my father, which were about me becoming an intellectual, and a social revolutionary in the broader sense, my mother showed the

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face of falsity within the family, because she would pretend to be on my side, but she wasn’t really. So in my struggles I had with my father, she always sided with him in the end. And they weren’t just struggles about whether I was to be a doctor. I don’t know whether to include this in the printed book, but I will tell you. The first girl I fell in love with was an au pair girl. We were very restricted, really, in England. In India, you have big extended families; you have lots of close and loving relationships with your cousins, with your sisters. But in England, going to a boys-only school or series of schools, actually to get to know young girls about my age was quite an unusual thing. So we had this au pair girl come over from Norway. An au pair is someone living in the house, but who is— Savita: Not part of the family. Roy: She is supposed to be treated as part of the family, but she does most of the house work, and in exchange for that she gets to spend six months in England in a relatively good home. Anyway, I was more or less seduced by this Norwegian girl when I was about fourteen. My brother was extremely jealous, and immediately told my father—he did exactly the same as my mother, he would only pretend to solidarise with me. And my father immediately gave her the sack, although nothing really had transpired apart from a few kisses and cuddles, and he gave me five pounds to go find a prostitute. This was a very hurtful thing for him to do to me on every score. He was actually identifying my first feelings of love and affection for this girl with the sort of nonfeelings one would have if one went to see a prostitute, equating the two; and of course it was denying me access to someone I thought I was in love with. So for six or nine months, we carried on a secret correspondence. She couldn’t write to me at home, so I set up a postal address; I used to go to the post office and collect her letters. Then clandestinely she came back to England, and we stayed in my father’s cottage. So instead of being something very light and superficial, it became quite serious, and she even followed me to Oxford when I finally went there, and she was hanging around me one way or other for four or five years. So it was a counterproductive strategy on the part of my father, if he really thought that I was going to fall in love or seriously think of getting married to her, because it just increased my affection for her. Savita: In a way it was also developing you as an independent person, wasn’t it? Roy: That’s right. Savita: You were taking decisions. I think independence, freedom or autonomy never come naturally, you have to work on them. Or in certain ways, the world makes you work on them, and it’s a bit hurtful but it starts at home; I think for most of us it starts at home— Roy: Yes— Savita: Our families with their patriarchal structure are replete with hierarchy and power, so we have to fight that. In this process, some people get crushed; and some

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develop an inner sadness that continues all through their lives. Even when they grow up they remain very sad. They don’t find an exit to enter into a zone of happiness. But I was also interested in knowing this because racism also made you sad, right? And in this process you also became very lonely—lonely in the sense that you couldn’t even count on your mother taking your side in a decisive moment for you. Then you found your brother not loving you enough, being rather jealous. So you were finding that in the real world you were alone. Probably you were developing a private self that actually developed into a philosophical one later. Roy: Yes, I think that’s right. From a very early age I was put in a position of really having to fight. And the extraordinary thing about my father is that he was a really ruthless fellow. I think I was the only person who ever won against him. When I was about fifteen or sixteen, his partners plotted against him when he was away on holiday to try and get some degree of equality or democracy within the practice. His partners would say things to me like: ‘You know, he’s not a terribly good man.’ I would say: ‘I don’t know about that’—I wasn’t going to take sides with that. Anyway, he got wind of their plot, and he came back and crushed them. He crushed everyone, everyone he had any kind of struggle with. After my mother died, he married another woman almost immediately. Most people said that she married him for his money—he was quite wealthy by then. She was only a bit older than me and my brother, who were in our twenties. That second marriage went on for the best part of 20 years, but when he died he didn’t leave her a penny.1 So whatever it was, no-one was exempt, really, ruthlessness was very typical of him. He also became the head of any association that he was in, if he wanted to. He manipulated his way into positions of power, often making use of my mother’s charm, sweetness and lovability. So all the local Indian Punjabi associations and Hindu associations were controlled by him. So really there was no one except me who ever got the better of him. But at school there were no other Indians, so there was no question of forming an anti-racist defense. I was the sole Indian, and I was picked on: when I was seven or eight, children who were ten or eleven used to kick my shins. For them it was a game, but for me it was torture. So naturally I didn’t like school. My brother, who was obviously in the same category, came to my defense on one occasion and swung a rugby boot at someone and broke their jaw. Also, because I was spontaneously good not only at work but also at sport, I became very unpopular and had my nose broken by someone; I was always breaking bones, and always being beaten up and pushed around. I had only myself to depend and rely on. Savita: The reason why I’m asking these questions is because your story seems to resemble so much the story of Aurobindo. Aurobindo’s father sent him, when he was very young, to England to study. And not just to study, but to become an Englishman. He wanted Aurobindo to flourish and become a successful person in 1 Raghu

Nath Bhaskar’s will (date of death 20 February 1990, date of probate 23 February 1990) shows that he left shares of unknown value absolutely, and the income for life but not the capital (which went to a charity in India) from the bulk of his estate to his wife Brenda. There was nothing for his sons except a pious wish that his wife (their stepmother) pass on the shares equally to them in her will.

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the colonial world of India, where power had changed hands and where the new colonial masters, the British, had almost imposed their values and way of life on the elite Indians, and in a way had succeeded in projecting a view of the Indian self as inferior. So Aurobindo’s father was very much caught up by this ‘superior’ self, this other, which was not his own, leading him to sacrifice his son’s life so that he could acquire this other self. He brutally cut him off from all connections with India. In fact, Aurobindo’s mother was also in a way like your mother, she completely succumbed to this brutal new regime at home and to that of the colonial state. His father was also a doctor, and Aurobindo was not allowed to come back to India until he completed his studies. He was brilliant, getting ‘A’ grades and all that in his school, a genius no doubt, but when he grew up his father wanted him to become an ICS [Indian Civil Service] officer, which actually was the measure of success in the new world at that time. Aurobindo didn’t want that. If you read his biographies— Ashish Nandy has also written about him in his The Intimate Enemy, and I too have written about him (Nandy 1978; Singh 2003)—you find that Aurobindo’s story is basically a story of Indian modernity with similar struggles, defeats and triumphs. Aurobindo tried throughout his life to recapture what got lost in terms of his cultural self as a consequence of the colonial intrusion—the genius that he was, the natural self that was being denied to him. Aurobindo became a philosopher. He began to reflect, and did acquire a depth of understanding about his own self—that after all he was a crushed man. This offered him a way out of the internalised self of the colonial master. But all through his life Aurobindo had to cope with a certain kind of darkness that remained always within him, a darkness that was produced by his father’s brutality, by the forced life he had to lead, the lie that he had to live. He too had to face racism; he too had to face a lot of negativity. And I believe that loneliness, that sadness, that darkness basically became the springboard for his philosophical journey. And of course, as you know, Aurobindo is an important philosopher of modern India. That’s why I am asking you these questions about your sadness, your loneliness, and those darker things in life that you too encountered and endured. Roy: I think what you say is right. To survive, I had to develop a way of seeing people as structured; people as using a certain mask, a certain face, a certain way of being for ulterior motives. So I had to begin to see people as structured, and to see situations as structured, as complex. I had to be a bit of an artful dodger, I had to know how to get around people, just really to survive. There was no question, really, of me living an authentic existence. The only kind of authentic existence I could have was within myself, or between me and something totally abstract like the stars, or the transcendental; I didn’t have ideas of a personal self or anything like that, but just a dream, I suppose. So really, everything authentic I had to find within myself, and it made me spontaneously revolutionary, it gave me a lot of feeling for the injustice of life. I thought my mother’s situation was very unjust in relation to my father. Why should she have done all this for him? She shouldn’t have, not because he was bad, but because the division of labour was so inequitable and unjust. I actually used to fear for her. Probably a lot of kids when they are young do think that one of their

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parents is going to kill the other; this is probably not exceptional, but it gave me a sense of the position of women as absolutely deplorable. Savita: Also, in normal circumstances what happens when children see their mothers not siding with them is that they resent it. In many cases, boys in fact develop a hatred for women because they see them as weak, and they hate them for their weakness, and as a result, they become very aggressive and begin to value machismo highly. In most boys, I find that, when their mothers are weak and they are crushed by their fathers, instead of developing an empathy for the mother, they take the other tack and become macho and begin to hate women. When they grow up, instead of being able to view women sympathetically, they are filled with doubt and ambiguity. But I guess this didn’t happen with you? Roy: No, and I think one of the reasons it didn’t is because a lot of boys, in such a situation, when they reach the requisite age, repeat the behaviour patterns of their father. But I was so opposed to these patterns, not just in relation to myself but as they were manifest throughout the world, that I understood my own position as that of an underdog or someone who was oppressed—I naturally solidarised with all the oppressed. And spontaneously I wanted to feel one with women, and to identify as a woman. Actually, it’s a peculiar thing, but being an Indian or half-Indian kid in England gave me a tremendous sense of identification with Indians, even though my father, an Indian, was oppressing me. However, when I went to India I felt very critical, and probably only in India did I feel at all English, because I was critical of some things within India that were also oppressive. But I think I immediately universalised, in what I would later call a dialectical way, from my own oppression to the oppression of all others. And there wasn’t just a single axis of oppression; there was a very dominant one in my own personal life, which was my father, but there were others also at school. Actually the two were in league because, at one point just after my O-level results came out—I was in India on a holiday (this is when I was about fifteen) and I flew back to England with my brother (my father and mother stayed on in India for a week or so). I went to my schoolteachers—and this is a very big English public school, St. Paul’s, with the best academic record—and I said: ‘Listen, as you can see, I got very good grades in arts subjects and languages. I don’t want to go on doing biology, physics and chemistry. I want to specialise in economics, sociology, literature and history.’ And they said: ‘Fine, that makes a lot of sense, you are better attuned to that.’ And I thought I had done it, I could now study the subjects I enjoy doing. I hated the way science was taught, and I hated the things we had to do at the practical level in science. There were some other reasons, which it would be very interesting to go into at some stage, why I didn’t want to be a doctor. But at that age I certainly would have had to work very hard to bring myself to do justice to all the practical things you have to do as a medical student, like dissection in biology practicals, which I loathed—and I was not very good at doing practicals anyway. In those subjects, at that age of development, you also have to draw a lot. This is another very interesting thing, I couldn’t draw, and the reason why is itself very interesting.

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At the age of four or five, in my first art lesson, I was picked on by the art teacher. In my very first lesson. I think it was something like an apple I had to draw. So I drew my apple, and like all kids’ drawings it was probably fairly wonky, though not of course to me. The teacher came over, pulled my ear and displayed my drawing to the whole class. So I was made an object of ridicule for that drawing. So I developed an aversion to art classes, and I never went to them. Here is another example of the kind of racism that was so widespread at that time, and the aversion to any kind of self-expression that I truly felt. In my first lesson in divinity, the teacher said to about twenty boys in the class: ‘Hands up everyone who’s Church of England.’ About fourteen boys put up their hand. ‘Hands up everyone who’s Catholic.’ About three put up their hand. ‘Hands up who’s Methodist.’ One. ‘Hands up Baptist.’ One. Or whatever—I think there was one Jew. And then: ‘Hands up anyone who hasn’t put up their hand.’ So I put up my hand, and she said: ‘Well, what are you?’ I said: ‘I believe there is good in all religions, and there is truth in all religions.’2 Savita: What age were you? Roy: I was five. And she said: ‘You mean you’re a pagan!’ So there I was, being defined as a pagan. Similarly, I have a very good talent in music and I later played some musical instruments, and I’m very good at dancing even now. But my first music teacher used to make me do scales over and over again. I don’t know to what extent racism comes into it, but it was just plain boring to me. And at one point he picked me up by my ears—a similar gesture to the art teacher—and practically pulled my ears off. So I just had no more piano lessons. So a lot of the nice things in life that I might have enjoyed, like art lessons or learning an instrument or being interested in divinity, I developed a sort of aversion to. Now I remember at my second school having a big debate with my form teacher in divinity about whether miracles are possible. I can’t remember whether I was arguing pro or con, because I was very good at arguing and could do either. By this time, I was thirteen or fourteen, and I wanted to make fun of the teachers and slightly expose them to the students. About the time when I tried to change subjects—which is really the point of this story—I would actually go into school, probably only to the first lesson, just to clock on and get ticked off, and then I would play truant, because it was so boring and tedious. I had by then become a total rebel, really, and I didn’t get any intellectual stimulation out of normal school work. I loathed the new subjects that I was made to do, and I loathed the way I was being taught them. And what I did in terms of exams was that I always mugged up a few weeks before the exam, and I always did well, so there was no point in sitting around all day listening to a boring schoolteacher. Now when I managed to get this agreement with the schoolteachers that I should do the subjects of my own—not my father’s—choice, somehow or other my father found out about it when he came back from India a week later, and he immediately phoned up the headmaster. This was a very big and distinguished 2 This

idea is prominent in Theosophy. It had its origin in the distinction the Vedantic thinker Adi Shankara drew in the eighth century CE between the higher and the ordinary truth. See e.g. Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 9, 148, 151.

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English public school with seven or eight hundred boys, and he made the headmaster change my status back to doing the first part of the qualifications I would need to become a doctor. And they did it; these very high-up Brits immediately bowed to his will. So really, I was as a kid taught many theoretical and practical lessons about how to survive in the world. Savita: Also, in the process you became quite aware. So before recognition came to you as a philosopher, your world was full of determination, wasn’t it? And the constraints were very real. Roy: Yes. Savita: In your philosophy, the unique thing is—not unique, others have done it—the uniquely singular thing is the way you accept the reality of these constraints as part of the world. And the deep understanding and empathy with which you go about analyzing the structure of these constraints, which actually largely constitute the world, make the world the way it is. And very nicely in fact you use a terminology depicting them as ‘demi-realities’. Roy: Yes— Savita: There is falsity built into these realities, and they help to constitute social reality—reality viewed, not in a completely dichotomous manner, but as reality that has a lot in it other than truth, a lot of falsity, a lot of heteronomous determination. I think the reason why your philosophy makes so much sense to people all over the world is that, besides operating at an intellectual level, which it does tremendously, it also simultaneously operates at the level of people’s everyday experience. Remember in one of the discussions we were having at Delhi University, there was a philosopher who kept saying: ‘How should I imagine, how should I presuppose that I am free, when I am not in fact free?’ There are a lot of people who are in the same boat, they just don’t know how to conceptualise their determination. Roy: Yes. What you have to do is have a full and complete understanding of the particular situation that you are in and then accept it completely—total acceptance. But you must also accept that you are totally free, free to act. But that doesn’t mean that you can do anything. You know that your actions are going to be constrained by your physical or other limitations, but also by the situations in which you are placed. But the first step in freedom is total acceptance of the situation, and the second is total acceptance of your capacity to act in that situation—your capacity to do something other than what is being determined or chosen for you. That particular gentleman you were talking about who kept on denying that he was free, eventually I said to him: ‘Well, what is your denial? You are choosing—choosing to deny.’ Savita: Yes, exactly. Roy: So then you act in the best way—I don’t know if it will have to be a sneaky way, but you can act; suddenly an opening will arise, and you go for it. And then you don’t know what’s going to happen. In a way, you have to take complete faith

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and trust into your own hands. And then you do the best you can, and you leave the rest up to the universe. So I will give you a concrete example of how this works. In my case, it was almost impossible to see a very clear mechanism—an institutional mechanism—whereby I would not become a doctor, because everyone was falling into line, and unless I got no grades at all in the exams, becoming a doctor would be the only alternative. But in my free time, I got hold of some handbooks about how you apply to different colleges and universities to do different subjects; and, in particular, I was attracted by Oxford and Cambridge, which are the most prestigious universities. I think in an earlier age my father probably would have wanted me to go and be a medical student in one of those universities. But he actually applied for me to register as a student in King’s College Medical School in London, going so far as to forge my signature on the application form, and I gained admittance. However, at the same time I had discovered how to sit an open exam for Oxford colleges, and I sat in an open scholarship exam in what was called Modern Studies, which was really just about using your mind and your imagination, being able to write essays fluently and knowing a bit about politics and contemporary events; and I got a scholarship. These two events happened simultaneously. But I didn’t have any pre-programming for the subjects that I sat the papers in. I didn’t know when I went up to Oxford that I would do well, but I got the best scholarship to the best college. Then when I presented this to my father, there was nothing more he could do, because I wouldn’t be a financial burden on him and he really would have had to imprison me physically. So my ploy had paid off. Already I was going away from home—running away, if you like—I knew how to drive, and he had made me start to earn my living, after I did my A-levels at the age of seventeen, as a packer earning six pounds a week. Savita: You worked as a packer! Roy: Yes, I used to pack up parcels for the Automobile Association. I have to say, at some point, that I totally forgive and I love my father, and I don’t bear him personally any ill will; that’s the hard part. However, an oppressor can sometimes sow the seeds of his own downfall. By not being what a normal father of his powers and means should be, by not being generous in any way, but making me earn money, giving me no pocket money, he made me completely self-reliant. So I didn’t depend on him for anything, and as I had a bit of money I got a car, and I could drive when I was seventeen. By creating such horrible conditions in the home, my father ensured that I spent a lot of time outside the home. So there were lots of things in regard of which he couldn’t keep track of me. If he had been a bit more generous— Savita: He would have had more control over you— Roy: Yes, much more control. Savita: Also by that time you had already developed your secret self. You knew how to avoid your father, how to dodge him. Roy: Yes, ‘secret self’ is a very good term. I had to keep my real self secret. My real self is a secret known only to myself. To divulge too much to anyone would be fatal.

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And that is a terrible situation for any human being to be in, but ultimately it is in a way the situation in which we all are, truly. Only we truly know ourselves. There is no one in the world who can know you as well as yourself.3

1.3 Engaging with Marx, Marxism and ‘Third-World’ Revolutionary Movements Savita: Interesting. Did you read Marx with this secret self? Roy: Actually, it’s funny: because I was spontaneously a rebel, I even supported Stalin, and Stalinism and dialectical materialism—but before I understood anything about them, when I was about twelve. When I started to read Marx, then I realised— Savita: You read Marx at age twelve? Roy: No, when I seriously started to read Marx as a university student and when I seriously engaged with Marxist politics and student movements, then I realised that Stalin wasn’t a nice character at all. The two currents that were most fashionable among students of my generation were Maoism and Trotskyism; most of my friends—my political friends—were either Maoists or Trotskyists, and I was sympathetic to elements within both. So I was a Stalinist before that, but spontaneously, because Stalin was being denounced by the powers that be. Savita: Yes, he was the biggest rebel of that time; they say they demonised him. Roy: Yes, so I sided with Russia. Stalin was a hate figure in the West, and I naturally thought that anyone whom all these hateful people can hate must have some good! (Laughter). Savita: Great philosophical presumptions. But when did you actually start reading Marx seriously? Roy: Well, it’s interesting. There are different levels of reading and engaging with Marx. There is this spontaneous identification with the left, really at a very early age in my case—actually, if I was identifying with Stalin while he was alive, then this must have been when I was eight or nine. So that spontaneous identification was there. Then there is the level of listening to the news, reading the newspapers, and so on. This is the level of the sort of essays that I wrote at school when I was around fifteen or sixteen; I got to know a bit about Marx at that stage. There was one school subject that I really loved doing and it was called something like ‘English 3 In

the recordings ‘yourself’ and ‘your self’ and their plural and first- and third-person forms cannot be distinguished. In Bhaskar’s published usage, ‘yourself’ constellationally embraces the transcendentally real self or ground-state, the embodied personality and the illusory atomistic ego, while ‘your self’ refers exclusively to the real self; ‘yourself’ is employed far more frequently than ‘your self’. The point is a fine one: ‘yourself’ is most fundamentally ‘your self’.

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Essay’—I’ve forgotten the exact title—within a strict part of really boring science. We had forty-five minutes to write spontaneously about some topic, and my essays would always be the best. And I actually won a prize called the Lord Chancellor’s English Essay prize, so I knew I had a tremendous flair for the subjects that I was being prevented from doing—and that’s what really fuelled my rebellion. At this second level, I had a kind of love relationship with the Kennedy family—this was about the time John F. Kennedy came to power—who seemed to be trying to bring about change in some way. The Kennedys were popular figures at that time in the West; my heroes included people like Pope John, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I kind of moved away from Marxism a bit at this second level. It wasn’t that I became anti-Soviet, but I became pro-radical-libertarian or radical-liberal, proBobby Kennedy; I was also pro-CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and went on marches and things like that. But much of this was before Fidel Castro and Che Guevara came to power in Cuba, and there weren’t any similarly charismatic figures on the left within the world scene. I mean, no one could say Khrushchev and Bulganin fell into this category. I had also seen Eastern Europe at first hand, and this was very important in my development. One of my father’s friends was someone called Jagannath Khosla, and he was Indian Ambassador in several European countries, including Yugoslavia, but also Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. And in 1957, that’s the summer after the autumn Revolution in Hungary, I went with his family to Budapest. Two of my best friends were his children, Ashok and Ranjit Khosla. Later, after spending some time as Indian Ambassador to the United Nations, Jagannath Khosla went back to India to head up some government administration college in Delhi. We were very close as families. Anyway, I went to Budapest. This was a shocking experience—at the second level. Really, I had never seen a city without men! All the men had been taken out and put in reindoctrination camps. This is true, there were no men in Budapest in the summer of 1957.4 Second, no one was smiling, everyone was glum—all the women were glum. Third, there were bullets everywhere. Savita: Bullets! Roy: Yes, bullets. All the buildings were covered with bullets. So really, I had firsthand experience of Stalinism, I travelled throughout Eastern Europe. I saw what Budapest was like in the spring after the brutal suppression of the Uprising. But I was also taken on another of those boring expeditions that I was taken on as a child. We went right the way through Rumania. There was only one good road in Rumania, and that was the road from the Soviet border to Bucharest. That was for military tanks. We were coming from Hungary, and we could travel only fifteen or twenty miles a day, because my father had a Jaguar and Khosla a Mercedes. And at each town, we used to sit down to a huge reception. These communist bureaucrats, they did nothing else but drink and eat—this was an opportunity to drink and eat. And I saw the actual way in which they behaved, I actually saw face to face what 4 Cf. Bhaskar 1993, 141, where the absence of men of fighting age in Budapest after the suppression

of the revolution of 1956 is used to illustrate the causally efficacious presence of the past.

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bureaucratic Stalinism was like in those countries, and how horrible and oppressive it was. Savita: Did you see all this before you seriously read Marx? Roy: Yes. We’re talking now about when I was eleven, twelve—at level two. I’m talking in terms of three levels. First, the level of spontaneous identification. Second, the level of superficial impressions, which may be quite deep, the level of news and so on. And third, the level of real study and real engagement in political practice. I got to the third level only when I was an undergraduate student. And when I went into it, it was clear that Marxism was far more powerful than its bourgeois alternatives as a social scientific theory. But, of course, I could only go to that third level when I was at university, because you have to have a certain degree of formal training, you have to be allowed to do the relevant subjects; and as soon as I did them, I became a Marxist5 theoretically and, with a slight lag, I started to get involved in serious political activity; and I became one of the student leaders in Oxford during the time of the great revolutionary student uprisings in Europe in the late sixties. So really these three levels corresponded to three levels in my own history. The level of spontaneous identification and solidarity; the level of going slightly behind spontaneous identification, the level to which newspapers and journals and first-hand witnessing takes you, at which charisma and impressions count a lot; and then the level of deep theoretical engagement and deep practical engagement. And practical engagement came very soon. One of the first things we did was to organise a sit-in at a racist hairdressers called Annabelle’s in Oxford—this was before sit-ins became popular—because the hairdresser refused to do the hair of Black and for that matter Asian women— Savita: Oh! Roy: So we occupied it, and we were physically removed by the police. Savita: From this salon? Roy: Yes. And then I got into various struggles, and I saw the way in which the police actually behaved, and I became seriously engaged as a practical revolutionary. Then there was a fourth level—and this is very interesting—when I was a postgraduate student at Nuffield, which is a very prestigious college. At this time, politicians were made Honorary Fellows, and they came to Nuffield for tutorials in economics and subjects that they had never bothered to study and needed to catch up on. There were about sixty students and Fellows altogether. So we used to have politicians like James Callaghan and Enoch Powell coming and having meals with us. Callaghan was Home Secretary around 1967 when the Wilson government introduced a new level 5 The

late sixties was the only time at which Bhaskar identified as a Marxist as distinct from acknowledging an important debt to Marx. He remained convinced that Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production is profound and of continued relevance, but developed a powerful metacritique of other aspects of his work (see the appendix to this work). In doing so he believed, correctly in my view, that he was being truer to the spirit of Marx than the Marxist tradition has by and large been.

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of escalation of racist anti-immigration policy. And, I well remember, I participated in a big demonstration, shouting and actually doing the Sieg Heil, the fascist salute, to Callaghan when he came to Oxford. And after participating in this demonstration I found myself in the unusual situation of sitting right opposite him at lunch, and he was quaking—as a human being he was totally scared—and I felt extremely sorry for him. I can’t say that I thought what I had done was wrong, but then I saw another level at which he was after all only a human being, or a functionary. At about the same time there was a huge demonstration against the chief racist ideologue within the British ruling or political classes, Enoch Powell, who made an infamous speech about how, if we let in more Asian and Caribbean immigrants, Britain would be seething with ‘rivers of blood’. So every leftwing student in Oxford was mobilised against him. I was with a student friend of mine called Caroline New (who is now a critical realist6 ). We were walking down a side street when we happened to see his car coming along— Savita: Powell’s car? Roy: Yes. We were faced with a slight dilemma what to do, so Caroline sort of threw herself on top of the car, and I thought I had better raise my fist or something—and there he was, this miserable, horrible little man, shrinking low, diving beneath the seat! These are quaking and miserable human beings; they are not brave, they don’t even have human courage at any level. But then of course, at the deep human level, I realised that, really, they are just very ordinary human beings who are put into certain structural situations. It isn’t that they are not agents, they are; but underneath them there is a human level which as a human being one can relate to. So you can say I felt spontaneous sympathy for Powell and Callaghan as human beings at the same time as I was demonstrating and fighting in every way against their policies. What I would do if I was asked actually to shoot them, I don’t know; if it was in a war, of course I would shoot them. Savita: But these kinds of deeper understandings of reality, of going beneath and down and then finding something else, different from what appeared to be the case at the surface: the roles they performed as racists and also as human beings; these kinds of inner glimpses that you began to get— Roy: This is a very important point, because I think we have really touched a fourth level of understanding of all forms of oppression.7 What I said a few moments ago about the love and forgiveness I felt for my father was also because I saw him as a vulnerable human being. I saw him cry, I saw him hurt, I saw him feel pain, and at that level I identified with him; I could even love him despite the terrible things, despite his being my arch-enemy number one—the one who was there to block everything I had to do.

6 See

e.g. New 2005. dubbed the level or principle of universal solidarity, the basis for which is the human transcendental capacity to identify with others. See Bhaskar 2007, 201.

7 Later

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Savita: Where did you get this kind of insight from, this deep insight? I’m trying to understand this in the context of your becoming a rebel and active politically, sympathising with the left, reading Marx, and so on. Marx provides this sort of insight, but it probably wasn’t available within the movement. Roy: No, definitely not! Because I had these personal experiences, I could locate them within Marx against the movement, against all the Communist and official left parties. They were completely shallow. Actually, the student movement wasn’t that deep either. But, being a student, you did have access to the original writings of Marx. Because of my early experience of seeing reality in this stratified way, as having these levels of depth and complexity, I could immediately see that what Marx was doing was something different from what the Communist functionaries were doing. Savita: Yes, this is the point I was trying to make. You were already reading Marx differently. You were already reading him not only as a positivist—and it was very much the fashion to read him as a positivist, as someone who was scientific in his analysis of society in the positivist sense; I mean, who had a scientific understanding of society, just as natural scientists have of the natural world. You were reading Marx much more ontologically. It seems you understood that level, which Marx himself did not perhaps articulate very clearly. Roy: Yes— Savita: That level you tapped into. In that sense even Lukács, for example, in his book History and Class Consciousness (Lukács 1923), understood that the concept of reification in Marx was present in a far more implicit or subtle way than in an explicit, clearly articulated manner. So I think the critical realist that Roy Bhaskar was going to become had already begun in a way at the stage when you began to read Marx differently. Roy: Yes, I think that’s absolutely correct. I agree with you. Savita: At what stage did you read Marx’s Capital or his other works? Roy: When I was an undergraduate and in my first year or two as a postgraduate, I read pretty well everything—I don’t mean everything that Marx wrote, but certainly Capital and recently translated works like the Grundrisse (Marx 1973), the Economic and Philosophical and Manuscripts (Marx 1959), Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Marx 1964) which included discussion of the Asiatic mode of production, and so on. Many of Marx’s hitherto unknown works were becoming available in English, and they were very interesting to students like myself. They showed that Marx actually was an intellectual, not a character with tunnel vision. You got the view from Stalinist or neo-Stalinist orthodoxy that what Marx was, basically, was Capital, Volumes I and II and Theories of Surplus Value plus a sort of general philosophy which might quote something from Engels—very little from Marx, actually—but

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with essentially, as you say, a positivist gloss. This supposed tunnel vision of Marx was completely belied, not only by his letters, but by works like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, which weren’t written for publication; where his mind was darting alertly here, there and everywhere. It was clear that he was interested in every aspect of reality. He was a true dialectician. And so you then read Capital, Volume I in a very different way, and you started reading the footnotes, you started seeing the beauty of it—you didn’t look for equations, you didn’t try to memorise the difference between relative and general equivalence. Savita: What other texts did you and your fellow students read at that time that you found significant? Was Hegel read very much? Roy: Hegel was not read—hardly at all—and students in England had very little familiarity even with Kant. The things I and my friends were reading fall into three categories. First, there were the new translations of Marx. In the same category were works by Lukács and Gramsci that were beginning to be translated into English; this was also showing a very different kind of Marxism. Both were active revolutionaries. Lukács held a state position for a time and Gramsci was of course first and foremost the leader of the Italian Communist Party. The second important kind of texts for us were written by people only a few years senior to us. These were the founding editors of New Left Review, for which I soon started writing, and I became friends with people like Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn. They had slightly older supporters in people like Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Bottomore and Victor Kiernan—Randhir Singh was telling me the other day that he was a very old friend of Victor Kiernan)—and I met and got to know some of these people. That generation was fighting very hard to rescue the idea of Marxism as a living research programme. People like the editors of New Left Review were in their late twenties when I encountered them. They were very bright intellectuals. Most of them could read lots of languages. They had read Lukács, Gramsci and Jean-Paul Sartre. They read Louis Althusser as his books were coming out. They weren’t for the most part in formal academic careers—some of them were quite wealthy and didn’t need to have academic careers. Perry Anderson, in particular, the editor of New Left Review, wrote a couple of very penetrating essays with the title ‘The origins of the present crisis’ (Anderson 1964). He was a very brilliant and creative intellectual. He immediately befriended me when I started doing original work, and he supported what I was doing. We were actually quite close, and went to Portugal together. I can say that he and his circle, which I was more or less part of, were the second big influence on me as a revolutionary student. The third big influence was indigenous currents coming from ‘Third-World’ revolutionary movements or revolutionary movements within Africa, Asia and Latin America. One of my first acts of political identification was to join a Fanon study group, after Frantz Fanon, the Algerian revolutionary, who talked about the liberating effects of revolutionary violence. He was very much an existentialist, but he was quite a profound thinker. I might call it rather naïve now—

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Savita: It’s a very influential text, because it shifted the axis of revolutionary activity and the question of its legitimacy from the Western to the non-Western world. Roy: Yes. This third strand was probably the most important, because there was a liberation struggle going on in Vietnam—a war, as you know. The Americans were trying to subjugate a people and were also blockading Cuba. I became very active in movements in solidarity with these campaigns. And when I got married, to Hilary Wainwright, Hilary and I went on our honeymoon as guests of the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola [Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola]) to the Portuguese territories of Mozambique and Angola. We stayed with the liberation movements as their guests. So these were the real impetuses, and within my own group as a student, particularly as a postgraduate student, my best friends were all from the Third World. Probably my very best friend was a guy called Trevor Munroe. He was a very charismatic and brilliant orator. He went back to Jamaica to found the Workers’ Party of Jamaica (1978). I saw him a couple of years ago, and now he’s very much in a mess. But then, these guys coming from the Third World had something that people born in England didn’t have. Some of my other very good friends came from India and Pakistan. So there was a very strong Third-World element to our politics.

Roy Bhaskar at his English wedding, 1971

1.3 Engaging with Marx, Marxism and ‘Third-World’…

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Roy Bhaskar at his Indian wedding, 1971

Savita: So Marx’s original writings and those of contemporary Marxists, whether from the Third World or not, were the main influences on your life as a revolutionary student. Roy: Yes, but I should say that, philosophically, there was nothing like a proto- or incipient critical realism there. Critical realism, when it came, came out of the blue and from a slightly different process, which we will come to later.

1.4 Critical Theory Savita: People who don’t know a lot about critical realism tend to think that it’s an extension of the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer. But it’s different, it seems more closely aligned with Marxism. Roy: Yes. But I think critical theory and the Frankfurt school is extremely interesting. In the first generation the most brilliant thinker was undoubtedly Adorno. There are many things within Adorno that are quite close to some things in critical realism— he was a very sophisticated thinker, a brilliant thinker, without a shadow of doubt. For example, he saw the central mistake of Western philosophy as the identification of subject and object. He said that you cannot reduce subject to object or object to subject; that is, this is a prohibition, you cannot do it. This in a way mirrors my critique of the epistemic fallacy and my drawing a sharp distinction between ontology and epistemology, between knowledge and its subject matter; it’s a similar sort of move. Now, of course, later on critical realism made knowledge and the process of knowledge production part of the world. (This was of course implicit from the beginning; I had to draw the line between epistemology and ontology very sharply for polemical reasons.) So we broke the taboo on ontology, and Adorno had already done

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this; the first critical realist move was very similar to that prohibition of Adorno’s. Later on, in the most recent stage of critical realism, I talk about the breaking down of subject–object duality, but that is in very rare moments of transcendence, which can’t be the norm, certainly not within our world.8 The other thing that I would like to say about Adorno and the first generation of critical theorists, is that they were still engaged in a project, which they saw as a project of emancipation, of revolutionary praxis; they were trying to be engaged in revolutionary praxis. Now the second generation, the most famous of which of course is Habermas, cannot really, whatever their rhetoric, be seen to be making any novel moves either theoretically or— Savita: Who, Habermas? Roy: Yes, we will come onto this. I am being a bit polemical and provocative now; I know you want to talk about hermeneutics—we will do that in its proper place. Just let me say that I think Habermas’s work is a kind of neo-Kantianism and it is not so different from standard hermeneutics. From the very beginning, with the definition of the three knowledge-constitutive interests, although there is a nice illustration of the third, emancipatory interest in relation to Freud, Habermas’s understanding of Marx is very primitive. By the time you get onto his later work, it is just a straight dualism, an enlargement of mind–body dualism. Savita: You think Habermas rejected Marx too quickly? Roy: Much too quickly. And to consolidate this point, the understanding of nature and objectivity as seen from hermeneutics is entirely positivistic. So there is no room for science, there is room only for interpretation, and that is straight hermeneutics. So Habermas’s is not really a revolutionary or emancipatory science. And Habermas also increasingly disengaged himself from any struggle; like a lot of people one can excuse (Adorno made the same sort of gesture), Habermas completely disassociated himself from the revolutionary movements of 1968. And he seems to have disassociated himself from any real vision of a better society other than one which would be produced through communicative interaction. Savita: But he did associate himself closely with new social movements, didn’t he? Roy: Yes, that’s right, and I think the new social movements are a fascinating topic that I would like us to talk about.

8 This

conversation took place just before the philosophy of metaReality crystallised. Central to metaReality is the understanding that moments of transcendence are not rare but everyday. The transition to the new understanding took place during the course of these conversations; see Chapter 3.4. The philosophy of metaReality is articulated in Bhaskar 2002a, b and c. I refer to these works collectively as ‘the metaReality books’.

1.5 Early Theoretical Work

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1.5 Early Theoretical Work Savita: One last question on our autobiographical theme. Your early books, A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, must have built on or consolidated a lot of earlier theoretical work that you did. Tell us about this earlier work. Roy: As a postgraduate student, I wrote a text that was probably about three hundred thousand words long, called Some Problems about Explanation in the Social Sciences. Savita: A lot to do there! Roy: That was just a twee title; part of it was going to be the draft of my PhD, which I couldn’t call Critique of Empiricism, although that is really what it was. That was in six huge folders, all typed up; I’m hoping there are still some copies around somewhere in England. Then I wrote a text of about 150,000 words called Empiricism and the Metatheory of the Social Sciences (Bhaskar 2018). And A Realist Theory of Science (Bhaskar 1975a) was the third sharpening of that. But before all this there were millions and millions of words in notes and manuscripts that I started. I started a book called A Contribution to the Critique of Positivism. So before I actually wrote A Realist Theory of Science, which was in the autumn of 1973 and early 1974, when I was 28 or 29, I had written five or six major texts.9 But I don’t think there is any need to publish them, because I feel they are working their way towards something. Savita: Did you also write poetry? Roy: Yes, but I have to tell you it’s a bit of a tragedy, because when my mother died and my stepmother moved into our house in Weybridge in Surrey, while I was in Oxford she just cleared out all my books and papers. So that, really, I have no record of any writings of mine before the age of about twenty-two or twenty-three. And that’s terrible. Many of these things are, I think, no great loss to humanity, for example the essays I wrote or the poems and other things I might have written, but there were things that I would actually have liked to keep, like autographs of famous sportsmen, and the pictures—there are no pictures, other than what other people have, of me as a kid or even as an undergraduate. She just threw them all out! You know, it’s a funny thing that Freud, as a deliberate gesture when he discovered psychoanalysis, burned all his pre-psychoanalytical stuff. Savita: So there you have the answer, your mother wanted to clear the deck. Roy: No, my stepmother! This wasn’t my mother. This was the woman that my father married after my mother died. She got rid of my things. My mother was a very lovable woman and people loved her, and this was a rather superficially common and vulgar woman that my father had married. So she wanted all trace of the past to be removed. 9 Apart

from Empiricism, none of these appear to have survived.

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Savita: An act of jealousy. Roy: Yes, that’s right. Savita: But even the act of jealousy can lead to some goodness; even if she did it out of meanness, maybe she put you on a different path. Roy (laughing): Well yes, but— Savita: Because I also have a stepmother and she did a similar thing. For example, she destroyed all the letters that we had written to our father. Roy: Oh yes, it’s tragic. I would love, just out of curiosity, to be able to flick through the love letters I got from the Norwegian au pair girl I was telling you about, and things like that, little personal things and letters.

Chapter 2

Transcendental Realism and Critical Naturalism

2.1 Breaking the Taboo on Ontology Savita: So when did you actually write your first book after writing all the shorter manuscripts and Some Problems about Explanation in the Social Sciences? Roy: Those manuscripts were very long and had a very expansive scope; you can say that the origins of the philosophy of critical realism lay definitely in this work that I did prior to the eventual publication of A Realist Theory of Science, which is a relatively short book of about a hundred thousand words. When it was published, it was immediately a success. This was a very good thing, because it had had a very chequered prehistory—the examiners could see nothing original in it and rejected it.1 Within a week or two, it received an outstanding review by Stefan Körner in the Times Literary Supplement (Körner 1975) and then elsewhere by distinguished philosophers and social theorists.2 This was completely different from my previous experience, and I think it is very germane to what we’ve been discussing, because, really, I had been a very good student. I got a very good first, and I was already a lecturer almost before I finished my first degree, and I was actually teaching postgraduates informally. You can say that I was outstanding; I won prizes, and I had no problems at all. But as soon as I started to do really original work, as distinct from just being very bright within an existing theoretical framework, I found that no one wanted to know. My first degree was in PPE (philosophy, politics and economics), and it’s quite interesting that I got alphas in philosophy and economics in my finals (my exams), but I got gammas in politics—and politics was the subject that I most enjoyed, and my answers there were the most original; so that was a sign of things to come. Philosophy and economics had a very well-defined framework, and so for my first degree, I just mastered that framework and then added on a few things of my own at the end.

1 For 2 See

Bhaskar’s account of this, see Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 45–49. especially Harré 1976; Outhwaite 1976; Sundaram 1975.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_2

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So when I started to do postgraduate work, it was in economics, because it seemed to me that economics was the most important subject. And gradually, I was greeted with an absolutely deafening wall of silence and even some bemusement at the work I was doing. I was being supervised by the very best minds, leading experts in development economics, Ian Little and Paul Streeten, both of whom had a certain philosophical background. I was teaching at the same time, and I had a very good academic reputation, and yet no one was interested in anything that I was doing. So, once again, as in my childhood, I retreated into myself. I started doing more and more reading in the philosophy of science. The most stimulating writers for me at this time were Kuhn and Feyerabend. They had both drawn attention to the phenomenon of scientific change. Popper, of course, had done this in his own way, but Kuhn and Feyerabend produced very radical accounts of scientific change. However, Oxford philosophy at the time was dominated by linguistic philosophy, and it was very stifling—it regarded every philosophical problem as resolvable in relation to analysis of the meaning of words. John Austin, who died when he was relatively young, exerted a tremendous influence. It’s said that people could measure his influence by the books that he didn’t write; in other words, he thought philosophy was a completely untheoretical subject. He said that there’s nothing that philosophical problems are about that you or I couldn’t answer in our armchairs over a cup of tea. That was his attitude. You didn’t have to look at the world; you could stay in your study in Oxford, and anything that Plato or Socrates—or for that matter Nagarjuna—thought about, they were all just simple questions that he, or sensible, well-educated Englishmen like himself, could resolve. So there was a frightening complacency about it, and I continued on in economics until I found a suitable supervisor in the philosophy of science. Savita: So you turned to philosophy to get to the bottom of the theoretical inadequacy of economics to the real world, and this led you to a different understanding of the world. Roy: Yes, but before I come to that, I should say that my actual thesis topic was The Relevance of Economic Theory to Underdeveloped Countries. I intuitively felt that economic theory had very little relevance, not only to underdeveloped countries but also to the real world as such. Economics consisted of two kinds of activity, theoretical and applied. Theoretical work was mathematical model building. The most prestigious and highly valued kind of model building was that in which you didn’t even interpret the axioms from which you deduced the theorems. In other words, you didn’t start off by saying something like: ‘Assume a world with commodities of corn and steel and labour or labour power.’ You just said: ‘Assume a three-commodity world.’ You didn’t even say: ‘Assume’; you just said: ‘Take x, y, and z.’ So it was completely uninterpreted. Wherever interpretations were given, they were so counterfactual that you couldn’t see how any possible result of any significance to the real world could be arrived at. That was economic theory. Applied economics was econometrics. Now, econometrics was statistical modelling of what had actually occurred, and it’s very easy to show that, from any finite sequence of events, interpreted under any set of descriptions, you could always build

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an algorithm which would make them consistent. So you can make consistent anything in the world. But the actual results that econometricians got, extrapolated to the future, were always falsified, and there was no reason to believe that they meant anything in the real world. Sometimes, the correlations they got could equally be obtained—and I and a few others made fun of this—from things that are obviously not correlated at all: we showed that you could get the same correlation between housing and income in Great Britain if you took the Swedish birth rate and the import of bananas into Portugal. Savita: It’s abstraction to the point that they actually lost the connection with reality. Roy: Absolutely, but at no point really was there connection with reality. It’s difficult to know how these figures were actually compiled, but at best they were one particular reading or interpretation of the surface structure of the economic world—which, of course, we know is not what science is about. But my thesis topic was the relevance of economic theory for underdeveloped countries, and really, there was nothing I could say. So I secretly went back to philosophy of science, and then into philosophy. And there I found, eventually, that it was actually a formal doctrine of philosophy that you don’t talk about reality as such—at least the reality against which descriptions can be tested or contrasted or compared. So, in a way, my bewilderment in relation to how I could start to do an academically respectable thesis on the relevance of economic theory just reflected a taboo within philosophy: you cannot commit ontology—you cannot do ontology, you cannot talk about the real world. And breaking such taboos is what has been most characteristic of critical realism in its development; at each point, critical realism has broken a taboo. At its first stage, it broke the taboo on ontology. At its second stage, the taboo on transcending dichotomies and splits. Academics can’t do anything without a controversy: there always has to be two sides to the question; academic discourse would get nowhere if someone actually resolved a problem, such as the problem of positivism versus hermeneutics, or structure and agency. So, academics need controversies like animals need food. And the third taboo was against the possibility of rational discourse on ethics or values, because according to the accepted theories of the day, when we expressed a value judgement we were just expressing our subjective preference. A fourth taboo that critical realism broke was the taboo on negativity. More recently, it broke the taboo in the Western academy—outside some theology departments and the like—on any kind of spiritual discourse and on discussions about deep or transcendental presuppositions.

2.2 A New Understanding of the Natural World: Transcendental Realism Savita: What I would like to know at this point is what were the dominant metatheories that A Realist Theory of Science critiqued and how its own theory differed from

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theirs—how it was new, and how it relates to the pervasive irrealism, as you call it, of the postmodern era. Roy: The dominant orthodoxy within the philosophy of science was positivism. Positivism described the world as if it was constituted by constant conjunctions of atomistic events. That was the implicit ontology of positivism, and that underpinned the standard model of scientific explanation—the Popper–Hempel or deductivenomological model—which states that to explain an event is to subsume it deductively under a universal law, interpreted as an empirical regularity or a constant conjunction of events, as perceived in the experience of, presumably, scientists. Now in the sixties—and this carried on into the early seventies—there was a ferment of activity in the philosophy of science. It was by far the most progressive field of philosophy. At the London School of Economics (LSE) there were Popper, Feyerabend and Lakatos, Popper’s most brilliant disciple; they were all quite ancient by the time I was in Oxford, but they generated very exciting debates. Popper was the first person in modern times to say that science consists essentially in a process of falsification—not confirmation, not verification; it was new theories, constructed from goodness knows where, but tested against reality by a process of falsification, not confirmation, that were characteristic of the scientific process. This produced a lot of interest in what I came to call the transitive dimension of scientific work; this is the epistemological dimension, that is, the production of knowledge as a social process. Feyerabend and Kuhn—in particular Kuhn—looked at science as a social institution, without making any kind of value judgement or saying that one theory was better than another. Now Feyerabend, starting from a Popperian standpoint, radicalised it so much that it eventually led him into a kind of postmodern relativism. Lakatos said that Popper was too extreme: Popper had said that there is one new theory, and then it’s falsified, and then you get another new theory, and it’s falsified—so you can’t really say that any theory is true. But if you can’t say that any theory is true—or anything is true—how can you ever say that anything is false? For what is the epistemological status of the repeating instance? How does the replication occur? You have to accept that something is true in order to say that the falsification has occurred. In other words, there has to be something which in some sense is sufficiently strong or sufficiently well tested or sufficiently firm for you to give up a theory. So falsification actually presupposes truth. And as every statement within science can be put in universal form, it is not that falsification can be by a single instance, it is by a repeated instance. In a laboratory, if you had only one instance, it wouldn’t count; it has to be an experiment which is repeatable. So Popper’s asymmetry between truth and falsity broke down. Lakatos radicalised this by talking about theories having ever-greater depth or dynamism to them. And that was very interesting. So this was one strand within the philosophy of science, which stressed scientific change, but really without any clear conception of a real world as such—without a well-founded ontology—and without paying too much attention to the structure of scientific knowledge. But there was another strand within the philosophy of science

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which was also very stimulating to me. And these two strands are the elements from which I drew the radically new theory of transcendental realism. Savita: So the first form of critical realism was transcendental realism? Roy: Yes, that’s what I called it. The term critical realism came into common use because I called the theory which was proposed and defended in A Realist Theory of Science transcendental realism, and the theory which I put forward in my second book, which was about the philosophy of the social sciences, critical naturalism. So people took ‘realism’ from transcendental realism and ‘critical’ from critical naturalism, and conflated them as ‘critical realism’; and that’s not without justification—we can come on to that later. The theorists of the second interesting strand in the philosophy of science were theorists like Norwood Hanson, Mary Hesse, Rom Harré (who was my supervisor) and Stephen Toulmin. They all stressed the structuration of scientific knowledge, the fact that it had a structure; that what the scientist was doing was trying, not just passively to account for reality or, as the Popperians—even the left Popperians— said, to test their theories against some reality more or less unknowable in itself, but to build up in their imagination a picture of some hypothetical deep structures to reality. So this was a fascinating aspect of what they were trying to do. But they didn’t say what these structures were in reality, because that would be breaking the taboo on ontology. What they did was describe the path of the scientific process, which is very valid and gives us a clue into the nature of reality itself. They said that, having described a certain domain of development, scientists picture in their creative imagination a model of a mechanism, which, if it were real and acted in the postulated way, would describe the reality they had perceived or detected. And that’s absolutely what scientists do do. Now, if we combine the emphasis on scientific structure with the emphasis on falsification and scientific change, then you get a very nice view of the transitive or epistemological process of science, which is very similar to what I described in Chap. 3 of A Realist Theory of Science as the logic of scientific discovery, and which is recapitulated in Chap. 1 of Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom under the title of the dialectic of scientific discovery, or the epistemological dialectic. However, there are two things wrong with this approach. First, it doesn’t say anything about reality itself; and the rationale for this continual model building and for falsification is not clearly stated, because you can’t clearly state it unless you have a clear and coherent concept of an object field existing independently of the scientist. And that is what both wings of the very intellectually exciting philosophy of science that was going on didn’t have. The second thing it didn’t have is a strong critique of positivism. It was very weak in its critique of positivism, because philosophers like Harré and Hesse said that the constant conjunction of events can’t be sufficient for a causal law; what you need is a plausible picture, a picture of how reality works to explain the causal law. (I’m putting it slightly in my realist terms.) Therefore, Humean criteria are not sufficient. Kant himself had said this. Kant said that Hume was right, that laws are empirical invariances, but that the imagination has to synthesise them under the categories, with the schemata of the categories, so that you needed

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something more—some active projection of the mind. So the structure you got in the world, the world’s structure, occurred within the scientific mind and on the basis of a manifold which was described in a Humean way. So reality was still just the same. So the breakthrough of A Realist Theory of Science and transcendental realism (the first stage of critical realism)—and I did it in one stroke by investigating the conditions under which experience is significant in science—was first of all to say: No, we can, and must, and inevitably do, say things about reality. And once you take that step, you can see how falsification can be understood to be a rational process, because a theory is replaced as a false or inadequate account of a reality, and the new theory is accepted as a better, or deeper, or more beautiful, imaginative or creative account of the same reality. But, in the second place, transcendental realism also said that laws are not empirical invariances at all, because, actually, if you go into it, empirical invariances or constant conjunctions of events are very rare. They occur only under experimentally produced conditions in the laboratory, or in one or two other contexts in locally closed systems such as you find in the astronomical sphere. For example, we know exactly when Saturn will next be in conjunction with Neptune, because that is a closed system. But if we had a tremendous catastrophe on the Earth—which is always possible given contemporary trends—or if a gigantic meteor went into the solar system, or something happened to Neptune or Saturn, that regularity would be upset. And that regularity is not what allows us to predict what’s going on; it’s the application of Newton’s laws. The illusion that laws are constant conjunctions of events was something which had been rendered plausible temporarily at a certain moment in the history of science by Newton’s unification of celestial and terrestrial mechanics, without going into the special conditions for those mechanics on Earth, in laboratories, and in the heavens, just in those locally closed regions. So constant conjunctions of events couldn’t be thought the same as causal laws, and the only significance, in the experimental work of the sciences, of the empirical invariances which were perceived or detected was that somehow they gave us epistemic access to something that lay behind them. What lay behind them was the causal law, which the empirical ‘invariance’ allowed us to identify, and which the creative scientist was trying to capture in her imagination. To make sense of it all, you needed to distinguish the transitive domain of knowledge from the intransitive domain of its objects. But this presupposes a philosophical account of that intransitive domain; and it could be shown absolutely a priori that, as a condition of the possibility of experimental and applied scientific activity, the world had to be structured and differentiated and changing. It had to be structured, because otherwise there wasn’t anything behind an empirical invariance, and laws would be either universal or false. In fact there are no universal empirical invariances; so it meant that all laws are false, which was actually a conclusion that Nancy Cartwright drew in her book How the Laws of Physics Lie (Cartwright 1983)—which of course is nonsense, because we know that some statements are more law-like, that some accounts of the natural world are better than others. The dilemma is quite easily resolved when we picture universality at a level which lies behind the surface of events. Laws are then referred to the operation of structures; and these structures and mechanisms and forces and fields go on operating whatever human beings do.

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Savita: So what you achieved in A Realist Theory of Science is to give a new account of reality, a new philosophical ontology. All knowledge presupposes an ontology, and you have to ferret this out. You have to stretch yourself a bit more to go behind experience and everyday understandings to give an account of the real structures of reality. Roy: Absolutely. And then you can make sense of a lot of human social history, how we gradually have learnt to touch deeper and deeper levels of reality. So when the first cave people, or whoever, made a fire, they made the discovery of a force which exists at a nonsuperficial level. To us this is very ordinary. But if you think of it, this table, for example, is itself a geo-historical product. Cave people didn’t have tables like this; they probably had a slab or a stone that they used to rest things on, and actually, it was quite a leap to think of building a table. Just as the wheel was an enormous leap, although it seems so simple to us. The windscreen wiper is another very good example of a conceptual leap; it has always struck me in a slightly jokey sort of way as very odd that humanity hasn’t discovered anything to replace the windscreen wiper, because it’s a very primitive level of technology. But it was a genius at a certain level who discovered that, and so our normal everyday world of material objects is actually the product of leaps of the scientific imagination. But when you move from the level of tables and chairs to the level at which chemists operate, the level of transactions between molecules and the atoms that constitute them, you are talking about a far deeper level of reality than we can normally perceive; similarly when you go into atomic structure—a deeper level behind molecular structure—and then subatomic structure, and then quantum structure. The world that we are sitting in now has at least six or seven levels of structure, which are all distinct, and strangely enough they are all seen as smaller and smaller; but there is no reason to believe that there are not levels and structures that are bigger and bigger. Sometimes people have metaphorically characterised us as living in the realm of the middle region; but that’s very anthropocentric, because, of course, it is very tied to where we are, or think we are.

2.3 Rethinking the Problem of Naturalism Savita: In the development of critical realism, as I understand it, your next book, The Possibility of Naturalism, is just as important as A Realist Theory of Science, and is regarded as a classic. So what happened to the findings of A Realist Theory of Science when you turned to the philosophy of social science? Roy: A Realist Theory of Science says that all existing philosophical accounts of natural science are false, which is very radical. The accounts are false for a lot of reasons, but above all because all existing philosophical accounts of reality are false, that is, the reality discovered by natural science. Now if all existing philosophical accounts of reality discovered by natural science are false, which is an extraordinary

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thing, but it’s true—all accounts prior to transcendental realism—then that immediately allows us to resituate the most pressing problem in the history of the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, which is to what extent the social sciences can be sciences like the natural sciences. Social scientists had an enormous chip on their shoulder; they thought they were the poor cousins; they didn’t have their Newton—Freud and Marx didn’t come up with any empirical regularities, there was nothing like the way we can predict what happens in the skies. Moreover, as therapies or techniques for producing change, the social sciences were hopeless compared with the way in which mechanics can produce a nicely constructed car, or engineers can build a bridge. So the social sciences felt tremendously inferior. Now if that inferiority resulted from a false account of natural science or a false account of the world presupposed by natural science, then we could rethink the whole problem of naturalism; because we have a new account of natural science and a new account of natural reality. In a nutshell, what I did was to argue that, contrary to the presuppositions of both positivism and hermeneutics, this problem of naturalism could not be addressed against a background of the positivist ontology of the world known by the natural sciences. Contrary to the claims of positivism, it could not be studied methodologically and epistemologically in the same way as the natural sciences, because it had peculiar emergent properties of its own. But, contrary to the claims of hermeneutics, some of the categories in terms of which we could understand natural science and our appropriation and knowledge of nature, such as causality and law, could be applied in the human sphere. The upshot of my argument is a new critical naturalism, which steers a middle path between positivistic naturalism and hermeneutical anti-naturalism. It is a naturalism because it says that the social sciences can be sciences in the same sense as the natural sciences. But it is a qualified naturalism, because there are important differences between the social and natural sciences. However, it is just in virtue of these differences, I contend, that social science is possible. The social and natural sciences can both be sciences in the same sense, but not in the same way—the theory and methodology of all sciences must respect the differences in their objects. The critical component came, first, because it was derived partly by the method of the transcendental argument and was therefore in the lineage initiated by Kant, who used ‘critical’ as a synonym for ‘transcendental’; and, second, also because it was part of the argument of The Possibility of Naturalism that in virtue of the findings of social science we could generate critiques of the subject matter of social science. So this new naturalism was a very strong naturalism. It showed not only how we could explain what happens in the social world without searching for constant conjunctions of events, by using categories like causes and law, but also how we could use the findings of science for the project of demystification and human emancipation, generally for critiques of the subject matter of the social sciences. When you think about it, most people who go into the social sciences do so because they think that something is profoundly wrong with the social and the human world. There are very few social scientists who don’t have that initial impulse. ‘There’s something wrong, that’s why I want to be a sociologist. There’s something wrong with the

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way human beings treat each other, that’s why I want to be a social psychologist. Why do people get depressed? Why are they paranoid? Why are they obsessive? That’s why I want to be a psychoanalyst. There’s something wrong.’ So the critical impulse was there at the beginning of social science. And A Realist Theory of Science and transcendental realism was very liberatory, because it completely refashioned the background against which the social sciences operated. So, although no philosophers or actual natural scientists ever came up with an account that refuted transcendental realism, philosophers were very slow in taking it up; but quite a few social scientists immediately took it up, because they knew that their field was in crisis, and everyone was telling them that it was. And their field was in crisis because they didn’t have the spontaneous assets that the natural scientists have, whose conditions neither natural scientists, nor philosophers, nor social scientists had ever bothered to explore, namely laboratories. There were no laboratories. Savita: It seems that with these two books you produced an account of reality that actually dissolved the dichotomy between the natural and social sciences. And many people working in the social sciences and the philosophy of social science very much wanted that kind of account. They wanted an account of science that would put them on par with people working in the natural sciences. Roy: Definitely. Moreover, it gave them some additional assets, because natural scientists couldn’t critique nature, or it doesn’t really make sense to critique nature. My account of social science conformed immediately with the intuitions of social scientists: it made sense of the fact that we have no empirical invariances in the social sciences. This wasn’t a cause for shame: it was just that we couldn’t generate artificially controlled procedures. But that didn’t mean that you did not have a brilliant starting point for social science, which was the true value of the hermeneutical position, because we have agents’ conceptions of what they are doing in their activity. And actually from these conceptions you can build up explanatory theories in a way which models transcendental argumentation in philosophy, namely, retroductively. So critical naturalism also explains the feelings of many social theorists that they are doing something more like philosophy. However, contrary to philosophical idealism, these theories can be tested empirically against data; but they can only be tested for their explanatory power, they can’t be tested for their degree of fit, because the data you have about, say, the Russian Revolution will be data extending to a huge variety of phenomena. So you can’t just test, say, Marxism against the Russian Revolution; you have to test it against the totality of the phenomena it attempts to explain, and there will never be simple corroboration or disconfirmation. This explains another feature of social science: the way in which people get stuck in it—it’s very difficult to shift them, because you don’t have a decisive or crucial test situation. The nearest you come to having a test situation in the social world is when there is a social crisis, and then people do shift. And that itself is very interesting.

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2.3.1 Critique of Hermeneutics Savita: In The Possibility of Naturalism, hermeneutics is only one moment in the overall conception of critical naturalism. How did you deal with the view that hermeneutics had in fact already defeated positivism by rejecting positivism as appropriate for the social sciences because it couldn’t account for the role that meaning plays in explanation? But before you answer, let me also say that I now see more clearly what you did, how changing the way in which we understand the natural world served as a basis for critical realism. Roy: Absolutely. You have grasped it beautifully, and your point about the question of meaning is crucial. The single most distinctive feature of social reality is that the agents themselves within the social reality understand it as meaningful. So for hermeneutics any meaning in natural reality is imputed to it from without, but meaning is actually constitutive of social reality. The hermeneutical claim is thus that there is a fundamental gulf between the conceptual world studied by the human sciences and the physical world studied by the natural sciences. The physical world, according to them, is constituted just as it is according to positivism, by constant conjunctions of events, and there’s no question of meaning there. So what were their arguments for this fundamental dichotomy? Basically, that the social sciences are concerned with something which is at a different ‘language stratum’, a different logical level, from what the natural sciences are constituted by. This is the level of meanings, of concepts, of intentions, of language; and language isn’t part of the natural order: it is fundamentally distinct. I agree that it is not reducible to the natural order, but it is not even part of the natural order according to the hermeneutists: it is a different language stratum. The way they put it is interesting, because they were not, again, doing ontology; they talked about a two-language structure, the world of causes and the world of reasons, and these were regarded subjectively—epistemically—not ontologically. Because when we actually look at it ontologically, then of course we can see that everything that we do with our bodies is the product of some kind of intentional—we have to say, for want of a better word—causality. Several times on this lecture tour of India I have asked someone to put up their hand, and this is a very vivid demonstration of how we are the whole time giving other people reasons for doing things. Suppose I say to you: ‘The building is on fire.’ I immediately give a new meaning to the situation of us sitting here, and give you a reason for producing a new set of material changes. Those material changes are real; they are part of the natural order. When we discover a fantastic new fertiliser or a new kind of gas, we change the material world, that is, the natural environment— which may of course be economically fantastic, but ecologically horrendous. These changes are physical or material. When two people fall in love and marry or have a nice Indian arranged marriage—to use a rather simplistic example—and they have a baby, as a result of those social processes they produce a new human being. What

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could be more physical than that? Everything that we do is mediated by the effects of our body on the world. When we get into very high realms of understanding consciousness, then we may want to qualify that a little and talk about phenomena like telepathy. In fact, it is not so odd, because if I say to you something like ‘Would you like a banana?’, and you say ‘No’, my speech action seems to be something you read directly. It is not mediated—it doesn’t seem to be mediated necessarily by any physical presence; it is a direct reading. And this actually suggests that we are relating to each other at an emergent level that is not mediated by ordinary physical causality. But that level still is a level that is causally efficacious in any physical result that occurs—for example, your picking up that banana or the actual physical result of my speaking. Even though the actual dynamics of meaning need not depend on physical causality, it itself constitutes its own level of causality, and is causally explicable and causally efficacious in the selfsame world. This is the only viable position. Any other position does two things. First, it splits the world between mind and body; and, second, depending on which side of the fence you are talking about, it detotalises both the part you are not talking about and yourself. It detotalises yourself because you are one: you are a mind–body organism, you are a unified whole. There is not one bright bit of you that is meaningful, and the rest that is not. When the physical cells in your eyes see something, is that meaningful or not? There are not meaning cells and physical cells in your body; the whole is a holistic whole. The prejudice against this stems, really, from not doing ontology at all. If you don’t do ontology, you can’t enquire into how reality is. But then the simplistic implicit ontology—just one level of uniform, undifferentiated, unchanging, unstructured events—doesn’t allow for emergence: one level on top of the other. But once you reject this view and look at, say, this room, it’s natural to see one level built on another: starting from the level of our bodies, of tables and chairs—which are physically much at the same level—we go right the way down through molecular to quantum structure, and then right the way up to the universe of relativity, and perhaps universal fields up there. And that’s the actual structure of the world, and the world of conscious intentionality—the human world, if you like—is an emergent power of the physical beings that we are. It is emergent, physically emergent: it actually evolved in the course of time. We became more and more complex animals. But it can also be mentioned that Aurobindo and the Vedic tradition are not inconsistent with that in looking at it also in another way, as in some sense related to the descent of consciousness. Then we would see, not emergent strata of matter, but a descending ladder of consciousness to the very lowest level, in which consciousness was almost inert, was only implicit—the consciousness in, say, a stone, or a rock, or a tree. And, actually, you can go into a tree, you know. So that line of thinking is not without its plausibility. But when we’re concerned with the hard sciences, we don’t even enter into that, it’s completely irrelevant. We just take the sciences as they are and the world as they discover it. They have discovered emergent strata, which have historically evolved through time. We don’t need to go into any more complex chain.

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Now, once you have the idea of an emergent human level, it’s easy to see that bands of human beings grouped together into societies and produced structures like languages. Very early Homo sapiens had, perhaps, 150 words as their typical vocabulary, according to the Western way of thinking of time and history—time horizons in the East are usually much longer. So 20,000 years ago, 150 words might have been a very good vocabulary.3 But gradually language became more complex and social organisation more differentiated and complex. So you had emergent strata, which themselves developed and had their own morphogenetic dynamic. Savita: This whole account in itself is meaningful—we don’t look for meaning separately from the account itself, do we? It seems that the analysis of ontological structure itself makes the whole world meaningful; and you want to say that the hermeneutical question is also taken up and more or less resolved in your account. Roy: Yes, definitely. Actually, positivistic accounts can’t give any meaning to any scientific or technical innovation. But the hermeneutical account can’t give any coherence to the discovery of an intelligible connection, even in the social world, because the coherence—the criterion for which is the capacity reflexively to situate something back within the world, to situate it in the context in which it occurs—depends on the operation of physical causality. So it must be a part of the world it explains, otherwise hermeneutists, as we know from our earlier discussion, detotalise themselves. Savita: But hermeneutists see themselves as operating from a position of embeddedness. They would completely deny that they consider themselves individuals, individuals looking for meaning. They very much presuppose structure—social structure and all that. Roy: That’s absolutely true, the hermeneutist need not be an individual in that sense, and today typically is not, and even if you go back to Vico, clearly wasn’t. That’s not my argument at all. The different polarities that critical realism isolates in the philosophy of social science can’t be read onto each other; we will come on to that later. My point is that the genesis and efficacy of meaning take place within a totality, which is also a totality of physical causes and effects. Meaning is effective only in so far as it is, at least in part, materially mediated. That it is materially efficacious is transparently obvious. For example, when the American people, by a few hundred votes in the final count in Florida last year, decided for George Bush, then we had a fantastic change in the physical environment, which is probably going to be ecologically disastrous, and has already been so economically. How many farmers and businesses have been shut down? These are material effects.

3 Today

most evolutionary linguists and archaeologists would add at least another zero to ‘20,000’.

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2.3.2 Transcending the Dualisms of Social Science Savita: We are now in the realm of critical naturalism, and you see your philosophy as developing dialectically, as a developmental process from one stage to the next. When you gave your new account of reality in A Realist Theory of Science, were you aware that it had to be done dialectically, that you were in a dialectical process? Roy: Yes. I think it is true to say that I was aware that I was in a dialectical process, although I had not yet theorised the process of dialectic itself. Inevitably, when you give a radical, critical account of a subject matter, you are trying to remedy some sort of absence which has caused the problem. So we saw how the initial absence of ontology caused all the problems and the aporias of traditional philosophy of science. The backbone of this was the problem of induction, because it didn’t matter how many instances you accumulated, you still couldn’t confirm a law because it was always logically possible that you would discover a swan that was not white; and then, of course, Europeans went to Australia and got a terrible shock when they discovered black swans there. So it was quite clear to me from the start that the first move in remedying the absence of ontology was to say that ontology exists, being exists apart from our knowledge—otherwise it would be swallowed up by epistemology again. But dialectically I also knew that being overreaches knowledge and includes knowledge. So first I had to stress what I later called the first moment (1M), that is, remedy the absence of ontology; then I could see ontology as all-inclusive. Now, once you have remedied the absence of ontology and overcome the contradictions that have polarised existing philosophy of science, you immediately see that you yourself have left something out, dialectically. What I had left out is the problems of the social sciences. So, as you say, it was very dialectical, because it was there that I really started, with the revindication of ontology, even though, in my formal trajectory, it looks as though I started from an interest in natural science. But I should just say, à propos the remarks you made this morning, that I later came to love science, because I realised that school science has nothing to do with real science; real science is a very exciting and brilliant process. Unfortunately, it is the way it is taught in schools that makes it boring, just like lots of potentially brilliant mathematicians are put off by the way maths is taught. So many creative people are in fact put off by bad teaching. I would say that maths is taught so badly that it is normally only the most uncreative minds that go into it; which is a shame, because according to certain epistemologies, at school level it is the most basic subject. So the great absence that I personally had to go on to address was the problems of the social sciences. The social sciences were stricken by absolute polarities or dichotomies of various sorts: between naturalism and anti-naturalism; hermeneutics and positivism; structure and agency; individual and society; mind and body; reason and cause; fact and value; theory and practice—nowhere did these two meet! So what I had to do was look for the absences in all these different polarities and, by introducing a new totalising concept, such as the concept of intentional causality or

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reasons as causally explicable and causally efficacious, in other words, reasons as emergent causes, produce a new account. Or such as the idea of the transformational model of social activity, of social structures as things that we as individuals never create, but in our intentional activity reproduce or transform; or the idea that to be a human being is not to be a private individual, nor is it to be part of a collective, it is to be something relational: a social being is a relational being. At the most simple level, to be a social being is to be a householder, or to be a buyer. When you go into a shop to buy a newspaper, they don’t care whether you are an individual or a crowd. They don’t say: ‘Ah! Ms. Singh. Oh, how wonderful! Come on, let me give you a newspaper.’ They just want your one rupee fifty, and then you can go. That’s all you are: you are a role. You occupy a certain structural position. So these things are all so transparently obvious. And in each case, the new idea effected a synthesis of existing views. Now synthesis and transcendence are not exactly the same thing, and the new concept effected both. First, it redescribed the field in such a way as to bring out the truth of positivism and the truth of hermeneutics: it brought out the truth of those people who thought that meanings were just physical causes, and of those people who thought that meanings were not causes at all. The truth of the people who thought that meanings were not causes at all was that they are at a genuinely emergent level: they are genuinely emergent from human causes and can’t be understood in the same way. The truth of the view that meanings are bare physical causes is that meanings also have physical effects and are part of the physical world. So this was the moment of synthesis: bringing out the best in both. But the really radical moment—the moment of transcendence—was to ditch the worst in both, which was very often what they had in common, such as the unilinear or one-level ontology, the ontology of either/or; and the constant backlog of positivism, the taboo on ontology. The interesting thing about these dualisms within the social field is that they themselves reflected dualisms in social thought that are actually constitutive of social life, which themselves reflected profound dualities in the social world. And you can see that what dualism in philosophy really marked was contradiction and split, and alienation, commodification and fetishism—these are all closely related; and, if you want to go into the contributions of Eastern philosophy, so are conditionality, attachment and maya [illusion]. 4 You can bring in all these concepts here. From the point of view of what pedantic commentators might want to call the architectonic of critical realism, what is interesting here is that critical naturalism said, in a way,5 that these dualisms reflect contradictions in reality. And 4 The great Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, illustrated the concept of maya beautifully when he remarked of the driver of one of the first trams (streetcars) in Madras who was revelling in putting the tram through its paces to the great discomfort of the passengers, including Ramanujan: ‘That man imagines he has the power to go slow or fast at his pleasure. He forgets that he gets the power through the current that flows in the overhead wires … That is the way maya works in this world.’ Cited in Kanigel 1991, 282. 5 When Bhaskar formulated critical naturalism, he had not yet elaborated an explicit theory of contradiction and negation in reality; however, these concepts were implicit, hence the qualifier ‘in a way’. For the explicit theory see Bhaskar 1993, Chap. 2, and Chap. 3.2 of the present work.

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contradictions in reality were something that Western philosophy could not think. So this actually corresponds to the second level, the moment of dialectical critical realism or what I call the second edge (2E), which is the edge of negativity; whereas transcendental realism corresponds to the first moment (1M) of ontology. Actually, the parallels are very neat. The actual structure of dialectical critical realism, and later transcendental dialectical critical realism, mirror the immanent development of critical realism. Now I think it’s very important to understand that, when I’m talking about how critical realism developed, I’m describing its actual historical trajectory, and that was a particular one. But once you’ve reached and remedied such a huge absence within contemporary philosophy, this is bound to reflect an absence within social thought and social being more generally. Therefore, you can subsequently use it to critique a lot of ideologies which weren’t part of the original motivation; for example, ideologies like postmodernism and the critique of local ideologies; or you could talk, in an Indian context, about the ideology of ruling elites, like the ideology of modernisation that we were talking about so nicely over lunch in relation to the development of the so-called modern Indian self. So you can do a lot once you’ve made such a big leap. And this is why critical naturalism, which depended upon transcendental realism, was so liberating for social scientists, students and activists throughout the world, because it freed them from a lot of dualisms. Dualisms split people; they force you to take a side, whereas what you need to do is get to the underlying ground—you don’t want to be debating positivism versus hermeneutics and so on; that’s in the interest of the status quo. The real interest for someone who wants true human emancipation or true human fulfilment is to see what’s making people split. And it’s controversies that make people split. Actually, the extraordinary thing about critical realism throughout the world is that most critical realists are concerned with applying it and that includes, of course, applying it critically. They are interested in critique, which includes sublations or retotalisations of their existing fields. Savita: So one could say, to put it very simply, that critical realism made a deeper level of reality available to people where they could readily see that the dualisms within which they were caught were giving quite a false picture of reality, and in this way it also became liberating. But when did it come to you? I mean, it could never come in a flash as a complete theory, there had to be a process of absenting absences and resolving aporias. At what point did you feel you had a more or less fully formulated version of critical realism? Roy: I think everything we have been talking about was fully formulated—finished— by about 1973–74. Though the publication date of A Realist Theory of Science was given as 1975, it was actually published in 1974—that’s what publishers like to do, they think that the book will look a bit newer next year. In 1974 I was reading a paper at UK universities called ‘On the possibility of social scientific knowledge and the limits of naturalism’, and that was the essence of the theory of The Possibility of Naturalism, though that paper wasn’t published until 1978 (Bhaskar 1978) and the book didn’t come out till 1979. And in 1979, I was also reading a paper on philosophies as ideologies of science, which were very close to the theory in Scientific

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Realism and Human Emancipation. So by the time I was thirty everything up to (but not including) the dialectical level was pretty clearly formulated in my mind. Of course, a creative thinker or dialectician never goes around thinking: ‘Now I am going to look for the absence, now I am going to do a transformative negation.’ It’s bit more informal than that. If you try to follow any formula, it will be misleading. So what you do is, you work with a theory, you follow a hunch: that’s wrong, this doesn’t fit.

2.3.3 The Main Moments of Critical Realism: A Brief Overview Savita: So what were the main moments of critical realism—because after that you moved on to dialectical critical realism and then to transcendental dialectical critical realism? Roy: There are five important moments in the development of my thought overall. The first was transcendental realism, and that pinpointed the absence of ontology and gave a new account of the world in general, as structured, differentiated and changing. The second was critical naturalism, which overcame the dichotomies in the philosophy of social science. The third moment—the theory of explanatory critique—was already present in The Possibility of Naturalism, but I distinguish it as a distinct moment, partly because other people do (as is well known, in social life you have to follow your followers), and partly because it made a rational discourse about ethics and politics possible. The theory of explanatory critique showed how ethics and politics and value judgements are not just subjective preferences, and this was sufficiently important to be called a moment in its own right. It was systematised most thoroughly in my third book, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, which was published in 1986 but written a couple of years earlier. Then I did quite a few articles and two books that sought to popularise these first three stages—Reclaiming Reality (Bhaskar 1989) and Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (Bhaskar 1991). But actually, as early as 1977– 78, I had started working on the fourth moment, dialectic, and I even had a contract for a book with Verso on Dialectics, Materialism and Human Emancipation. In the eighties, I spent three years grappling with the problem of negation and absence. They were very intense years of study, and I more or less locked myself away to work that out. And then I had to take a break and get on with doing other things for a while; the importance of taking a break is well known to creative thinkers: Newton spent twenty years getting his optics right, and Marx spent twenty years getting Capital right. And then I went back to it in 1990–91 and finally cracked it. So transcendental realism took six or seven years from 1966 to be fully developed, whereas dialectical critical realism took twelve to fifteen years from the late seventies before I got it right.

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Savita: So you not only gave a new, ontological account of reality, you also reconceptualised the whole process of understanding things dialectically and even the dialectical process itself. Roy: Definitely. This was really the contribution of the fourth stage, that of dialectical critical realism, which I think we should come on to tomorrow. And then the fifth stage was what I call transcendental dialectical critical realism. This was a deepening of the dialectical moment to incorporate certain presuppositions about human nature and the possibilities of freedom, which were implicit in Marxism and, indeed, I argue, in a sense in liberatory thought in general, in East and West alike, but which also actually constitute the hidden substructure of existing social life. So this level of autonomous human being underpins all the contradictions, all the heteronomies, that is, the false orders of determination, all the forms of imprisonment, all the forces of constraint that block human potentiality; they are actually underpinned or sustained by the very things that they block, which is itself very dialectical. So the spiritual turn within critical realism could not have come before the dialectical stage. Savita: We will be discussing that tomorrow, after going into critical naturalism and dialectical critical realism in more detail. I think we’ve done remarkably well in one day to arrive well and truly at the doorstep of critical naturalism and dialectical critical realism and their various propositions and presuppositions. Roy: I think only you could have drawn it out so nicely from me. Savita: Thank you. Roy: Could I just say one thing finally? The reason why I think critical realism is so liberating is because it enables a redefinition of social life by getting rid of a lot of dualisms. Dualism and duality in general is a splitting: you can’t look at your life as a whole; you can’t look at your subject matter as a whole. If you are a critical thinker, or you just believe in or aspire to greater human freedom, or even if you are only interested in your own research, you need to see everything as a whole, and you need to see yourself in that whole—you need to be a part of the picture, in the picture. And, by overcoming dualism, fragmentation, and split, critical realism overcomes that alienation that people working in social science experience; and indeed that ordinary human beings experience, who after all are doing social science in their everyday lives—they are trying to understand meanings, they are trying to understand structures: they are doing exactly the same as social scientists, it’s a continuous process. And actually the process of ordinary life itself is very dialectical. By overcoming those dichotomies and dualisms, critical realism made everyone feel better about themselves. It even made research establishments feel better to some extent, because they could justify their realist intuitions more adequately.

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2.3.4 Why Philosophers Have Tended to Ignore Critical Realism Savita: I wonder, though, how much better Rorty, for example, would feel? What you show in your work is that reality has depth, but Rorty denies that: for him the surface is everything, and that is to be celebrated. Obviously Rorty would be a classical case of a thinker who is caught in dualism. Roy: Definitely. Savita: It’s quite amazing that critical realism has done as well as it has in the era of Rorty and postmodernism. Roy: Yes. As you may know, in 1989 I wrote a commissioned critique of Rorty’s work for a collection of essays called Reading Rorty (Bhaskar 1990), which I elaborated in my book Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (Bhaskar 1991), and although the editor and the publisher of the book urged Rorty to respond to my critique, he didn’t do so. Similarly, Paul Feyerabend’s publisher told me that Feyerabend read and was ‘absolutely stunned’ by my critique of his ideas in ‘Feyerabend and Bachelard: two philosophies of science’ (Bhaskar 1975), and he urged Feyerabend to respond in Science in a Free Society (Feyerabend 1978) which was supposed to be a reply to all his critics; but Feyerabend didn’t reply to me in that book, nor ever noticed my work in print that I know of. And this is the wall that I ran into. While critical realism is very liberating for social scientists, for philosophers it completely cuts the ground from under them. Really, philosophers are like stupefiers. Apart from the fact that they all know me and read my stuff, and many are quite civil to me when they meet me personally, they hardly ever acknowledge me or refer to my work. When their students occasionally go up to them and challenge them, some will say: ‘Oh, Roy Bhaskar, he’s a very nice guy’; one even said: ‘I’ve got a lot of time for him personally, but he’s not to everyone’s taste.’ This raises a very important point, that there’s a certain truth to Marx’s famous aphorism: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’ That’s right! Philosophers sit there weaving spells of mystification. Here was I, a philosopher, actually changing people’s understanding of social reality and social life through my critique of the dichotomies in social thought and the false picture of natural science. I was liberating their understanding; I was actually changing people’s reality. But the philosophers’ reality is to subsist in that world of categorial confusion. They would have nothing to do if they saw the truth. If Rorty wasn’t stuck in the dichotomy between ‘atoms and the void’ in his conversational hermeneutics, the whole mind–body problem would drop into its normal place and mind would just constitute an emergent stratum of body. But what is so beautiful and so true from a materialist point of view would leave philosophers with nothing to do—nobody would employ them—because it’s so simple! Savita: I find Rorty’s view of philosophy—a conversational hermeneutics, if I may put it that way—very interesting. It has a lightening effect—it lightens you up (as

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distinct from enlightening you). It’s a different kind of philosophy, which puts you in tune with facticity. Rorty creates an academic or intellectual milieu of lightness. Roy: An academic milieu of light-heartedness, I would say, of levity almost: he engages in a rather flippant, cultured way with traditional philosophical discourses. But instead of deconstructing and undermining them, he merely recapitulates them. He cloaks that recapitulation in an ideology of resolution, but he doesn’t resolve them, because that dichotomy between mind and body is still there at the end of Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979). His book of essays, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Rorty 1989) is rife with the dualisms that he sets out to eliminate. But the thing is, you can’t eliminate dualism from a work which understands philosophy as conversational hermeneutics; that’s a very nice concept, but it doesn’t place the conversation within its material context, the rest of being. You especially can’t do it if, like Rorty, you are an eliminative materialist: you chop off the branch on which you sit, and therefore you can’t reflexively situate your own production. You can’t even applaud your own cleverness. So it’s like the Zen clown, it’s the sound of one hand clapping. I’ve had many debates with Rorteans, but Rorty himself has never turned up. It’s indefensible, that’s why they don’t come and challenge me in defence, and they slink away. People have tried to arrange debates between me and Rorty, me and Habermas—which I’m definitely up for—but they never succeeded. Or take your friend and mentor, Charles Taylor. I have a very nice personal relationship with him, and he is a very nice man and an important philosopher, and I think he has a high opinion of me, but he doesn’t actually refer to me in his work, and that’s because he can’t quite come to grips with my work—he understands it, but doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

2.3.5 The Transition from Transcendental Realism to Critical Naturalism Revisited Savita: Could you begin by going in more detail into the question of how transcendental realism provided a launching pad for critical naturalism. Roy: Certainly. What we will see is how the whole nature of the development of critical realism has been a dialectical process. In its first stage, transcendental realism, critical realism rectified a big anomaly, an absence. This was the absence of ontology, and in rectifying this it simultaneously showed both the necessity and irreducibility of ontology. So in fact you couldn’t consistently not have an ontology—the existing theoretical accounts of science tacitly imbibed and secreted an unconsciously reflected ontology of empirical realism. So even empiricists were realists; and sometimes Kant, actually, and Hume and others went so far as to call themselves empirical realists. Subsequent empiricists haven’t in general called themselves realists, but of course they had to be.

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The account of ontology that transcendental realism argued for was radically novel. It saw the world as structured, differentiated and changing. We have seen how this had liberating effects on scientists, in particular the practice of social science. Now, looked at formally, all that A Realist Theory of Science had done was to produce a completely general ontology for science as such and provide an account of the methodology of the natural sciences. But, of course, this left a huge absence: any discussion of the specificity of the social sciences. There were two aspects to this. First, one wouldn’t expect that the epistemology and methodology appropriate to the natural sciences could simply be transposed without further qualification and elaboration to the field of the social sciences. Second, existing disputes in the philosophy of the social sciences tacitly presupposed a positivist ontology—neo-Kantianism does and so indeed does postmodernism. So if positivism is wrong for the natural sciences it would be wrong for the social sciences as well, and the social sciences would immediately have to be retheorised. An overarching question was that of positivism versus hermeneutics, more generally naturalism versus anti-naturalism. The positivists had been total naturalists, that is to say they completely assimilated the appropriate methods for the social sciences to a natural scientific model, whereas the hermeneutists had been total anti-naturalists. And what my second book, The Possibility of Naturalism, argued for was a nuanced critical naturalism. Basically, I argued that, in virtue of this new account of reality that critical realism had generated, the social sciences could still be sciences, but not in precisely the same way as the natural sciences. Savita: So actually, you redefined science. Marx himself had been trying to do that and got some credit for it. So actually it was a Marxist project that you were embarked on? Roy: In part, yes. My particular itinerary was coming in part, certainly historically in terms of my personal development, from an interest in and a desire to justify the scientificity of Marxism. But this was really one of the offshoots. What I always tried to do when addressing a subject matter like the philosophy of science or the philosophy of social science was to justify it by the procedure of immanent critique. That is to say, I didn’t import Marxism into it—and this is a very important point to appreciate. I think the only method of philosophy is the method of immanent critique; in fact, I think that it is the only method of argument; it is the only method of dialogical negation. In order to move someone intellectually or practically, you have to do it on their own terms; otherwise, it is just like one hand clapping—there’s no point of engagement. To say something that will move opponents, you have to touch them, affect them, go into them. You have to actually identify with some element of their system, which you need not believe is absolutely true, but it’s a relative starting point. Had I, for example—this is very important politically and humanly as well—started by dogmatically asserting the importance of ontology, I would have got absolutely nowhere. The argument for ontology started with epistemology, and similarly the argument within the philosophy of the social sciences started from the prevailing dualisms, and nowhere within the ambit of the existing terrain of the philosophy of

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social science was Marxism as such explicitly discussed. Of course, it may have been an unconscious motivation, but then you have to take what people say and do. Now this is very important also because it was a characteristic procedure of Marxists and people who were sympathetic to Marxism just to take some statement of Marx and then to extrapolate it and add to the whole debate. This was characteristic of Althusser and many other Marxists—and they were very influential thinkers from whom we can learn something. It wouldn’t be fair to include Habermas in this, but in general it was felt that it was sufficient, if you were of a Marxist disposition, to argue from Marx into the existing problematic. Marx himself never did this. Savita: Some Marxists like E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams were very critical of how Marxism was being understood in a somewhat blind or, say, orthodox manner. They demonstrated in their writings that engaging with Marxism in this way would not advance the cause of studying society critically. Roy: Absolutely, the people they criticised were not behaving like Marx did: if you want to attack your enemy, you have to attack him on his own terrain. And Marx always went to the strongest, not just the weakest, point; because in general it’s the strongest point of a theory that will reveal the best in it. So there isn’t much point in nitpicking, because then you are engaging in what might be called postgraduate or ordinary academic research, which tries to find faults and inconsistencies in someone else’s theory. What you need to do is go to the essence of a very strong, wellentrenched position and show what that actually reflects. You will often find that in going to its strength you will also be going to its weakness. In the case of empiricism, the strongest thing seems to be experience, but experience was precisely what they had never theorised. The strongest point within positivistic accounts of social science was the idea that you could have laws in social science similar to those of the natural sciences, but they had not actually given any examples of social scientific laws. The strongest point within hermeneutic understanding was the idea that the subject matter of the social sciences was meaningful, but actually they had not taken account of the fact that the materialism they criticised, both of the physicalist and the Marxist kind, had not been properly analysed. Moreover, they never actually showed how you could produce meaning for another without causal mediation. If I produce a meaning for you, then somehow my speech act is having a causal effect on you as a totality, which can be very easily seen if I ask you to do something practical, that is, if we don’t just have a conversation—for example, if I ask you while sitting at dinner to please pass the salt—no, that’s very English: the pickles is more Indian, achaar. But actually it’s no less valid as an immanent critique of hermeneutics, that the hermeneutists, and the positivists too for that matter, can’t really say what accounts for the genesis of one rather than another sequence of meaningful sounds from your mouth in a conversation; even if you don’t do anything else with your body, you are still uttering meaningful sentences. They have no concept of reasons and meaning as causal. Savita: Don’t the hermeneutists get around this problem precisely by presupposing an ontology, though not as explicitly as you have done? There is a strong ontological presupposition there in Heidegger, Gadamer and Charles Taylor, for example, and a

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strong sense of sociality, that individuals are connected to each other and affect each other’s lives. Roy: Definitely. I don’t want to sidetrack us too much in discussion of this, but within this context of community and sociality you have to ask what explains why a conversation goes one way rather than another, and you have to explain creativity. We don’t sit around in a community like a uniform block; we have exciting, stimulating, new conversations. If you’re concerned with analysing empirically, as, say, the ethnomethodologists and others who tried to cash out hermeneutics as an empirical programme were, then you find that only if you take the most banal aspects of social life such as greetings—‘Hello’, ‘How are you?’, ‘Welcome’, ‘Good-bye’, ‘Have a nice day’—is there any element of predictability; and of course, the person who says ‘Have a nice day’ is the person you forget: the greeting is not really part of your community at all, in fact it’s in an external mechanistic relationship to it. So really to give substance to hermeneutics, to flesh it out, you do need the idea of human creativity within the community, and that presupposes the causal efficacy of particular meaningful behaviour. Savita: Interesting. Can we go back, then, to the transition from transcendental realist account of natural science to the critical realist account of social science? Roy: Yes. Transcendental realism had left the social sciences untouched, and that is where my initial interest had actually been. Contemporary philosophy of social science was and is shot through with a series of dualisms. These are dualisms between naturalism and anti-naturalism, specifically between positivism and hermeneutics— between social reality understood as lawful and as meaningful, these two being opposed; between the individual and society, structure and agency; between mind and body; reasons and causes; facts and values; theory and practice. There are at least eight dualisms, and in the case of each dualism what critical realism did in its critical naturalist phase was to show how the dualism could be transcended by resorting to a deeper ground which was the condition of the possibility of the two opposing poles. Take for example the dichotomy or dualism between individual and society. It is really quite absurd: you have the idea that society either consists just of individuals or, as Popper put it, of a mass of individuals. Popper was a methodological individualist, but he did accept what was called mass behaviour or hysteria and crowd behaviour. Actually, the methodological collectivists or holists weren’t much better. The idea was that you could only either study individuals as isolated or as a crowd or—in the totalitarian, fascist variant of holism—as constituting a huge organism, a huge individual, namely, society itself. Now this is a really impoverished conception: the only social thing is modelled on an individual. But actually, individuals are composed relationally. To be an individual is to be related, to be is to be related, and if there is a single thing that characterises the subject matter of sociology or the social sciences, it is the enduring relationships that constitute and bind and connect individuals. So the family, the economy, the school, the factory line—these are all proper objects of sociological analysis. Now the family is a set of relationships between individuals, between husband and wife, between parents and children, between members of a

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couple and their in-laws. Everything is defined relationally. Similarly within the economy, nothing is really defined individually. You’re in the economy as a buyer or a seller, or as a producer and consumer, and so on, and that means that you’re not there as an individual, you’re like a representative of a particular relation: whether as a wage-earner, or a capitalist, or a householder or whatever, you always stand in relationships. In politics you are there as a voter or as a candidate. So actually this was to put forward a radically new view of the reality of the dualism and split; and then the two parts of that reality could be reconstituted and one could see, with a relational view of the subject matter of sociology, that the individuals were what the relations collected and that it was the task of sociology to study the enduring relations. And we can go on progressively through all the dichotomies. In case of structure and agency, these two are opposed, but you don’t have to accept either agency or structure in this way; rather, you need a radically different view, and this was that agents are born into a world that they never create, which pre-exists them. But the structures which pre-exist them—the languages that they learn, the social roles that occupy, the family structure, the economy, the political structure and so on—don’t exist independently of the activity of such individuals. So the relationship between structure and agency is that agents never create the structures, but these structures only exist in virtue of the intentional activity of the agents who reproduce or transform them. So you avoid both reification, which says that structures are things out there that exist independently of human beings; and voluntarism, which is the idea that you could wake up in the morning and invent a new society—in fact it has been said by the ethnomethodologists that when we wake up every morning we recreate society. But if it was that easy, social change would not really be a problem.

2.3.6 The Main Differences Between the Natural and the Social Sciences and Their Objects Savita: Do you maintain that the objects of natural science are different from those of social science? Roy: Definitely. Let’s get back to the arch-polarity between naturalism and antinaturalism, and in particular between positivism and hermeneutics. What I argued is that the social sciences could be sciences in the same sense, but not in the same way, as the natural sciences. In the same sense because the social sciences seek explanatory understanding, but not in the same way because you nowhere get decisive empirical test situations. In the natural sciences, you do have experimentally generated closures, as well as some naturally occurring ones, so you can have decisive test situations. Because you can have decisive test situations, it seems plausible to suppose that there is a symmetry between explanation and prediction—and this led empiricists, instrumentalists and positivists generally to say savoir pour prévoir, that is, to know is to predict, we know in order to predict—and Laplace, modelling himself on the

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imaginary closure of Newton, said that, if only we knew enough, we could predict the future and see the past unrolling before our eyes. But this denies a lot of things: human creativity, free will and complexity, for example, and also the fact that we are seldom in a position to predict anything outside the laboratory in the natural sciences. Sometimes in the open-systemic world, we can explain after the event why something happened, such as the collapse of a bridge or the crash of a rocket, because we can use the same laws, once the event has happened, to retroduce to antecedent causes—if we understand sufficient laws, sufficient structures, we will eventually find out what went wrong. But we could never have predicted it, and obviously, we were not in a position to predict it; otherwise, it would never have gone wrong. And that is really the only case outside the laboratory where prediction comes in, in practical engineering; and this is very important. How do we make things work? We actually have to work out the load this bridge would bear, then we go again to the laboratory and we do tests on it. Then we see that there is a maximum weight, and then we allow for much greater than that, because if there is an extraordinary wind or something like that, then other things won’t be equal. But all our calculations will come to naught if, say, a meteor crashes into the bridge or if there is an earthquake; in that case, no one is going to blame the laboratory scientist who did that bit of technical work. At each stage, prediction in the natural world is not possible outside of experimental closure and a few naturally closed (pro tem) systems. Even when we are doing applied work, if we need to be very precise, then we have to simulate the laboratory. This can never happen in the social world; we can never simulate the laboratory. This is so important to understand. When behaviourists do experiments on people, they have to have the tacit concept of a good subject: a good subject is someone who doesn’t use her free will but actually acts intentionally the way the experimenter wants her to behave—then you won’t have bad subjects. The experimental behaviourist actually stimulates the behaviour the experimenter wants; it has been very well shown that in an experimental laboratory subjects try to please the experimenter. But, actually, it is not a true prediction because it all depends upon the agent’s personality, the agent’s good disposition towards the experimenter. So I can say that I would be a very bad subject, and I think you would be as well (Both laugh). Savita: So what are the main differences between the way social and natural reality are constituted? Roy: Natural reality is generated by the totality of structures which are impinging on a thing. If you take the weather, we know that’s not a closed system at all. Actually, when you see on the television screen some white cloud headed towards the southwest coast of India, then you get the vague idea that it’s going to float over your head the next morning; and what actually happens is really a conjuncture that is brought together by a multiplicity of factors. How social reality is constituted seems a much more pregnant and difficult question, because it seems to contain something that invites a different kind of answer. At a very abstract level, you could say that, again, one is looking at the totality of structures, forces and agencies. Just to focus on agency, social reality is constituted in the first instance—that is, from the epistemic

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point of view—as meaningful by the conceptualisations of the agents who live in it. This is the great truth of hermeneutics; hermeneutics provides the starting point for all investigations into social reality—and also, I should say, for all philosophical investigations, because if what I say about immanent critique is right, then really that presupposes a prior hermeneutics of the field in question. Savita: These conceptions that agents create become social, and as such also govern the agents. The agents not only create them, but are also governed by them. Roy: Yes. When you say ‘governed’, that already means that they are subject to the general movement of the transformational model of social activity. If these conceptions are social structures in some sense, or if they socially pre-exist the individuals, and are the sort of things that can’t exist independently of the individuals’ intentional activity, then they follow that general pattern. It is certainly true that the meanings in the social world affect everything, including things that are not linguistically interpreted. But the concept of meaning is taken from the paradigm of language, and languages are the easiest social structure to understand. If twentieth-century philosophy has made a significant contribution to the understanding of one area of reality, it is language; it has been called the linguistic century. And really, from de Saussure (who pre-dates the twentieth century) to Chomsky, through Heidegger, through the great influence of the hermeneutists, through the backwaters of Oxford linguistic philosophy, into the excesses of what I call the linguistic fallacy and some schools of poststructuralism, even through to the idea of language as the sort of thing that should be politically correct or not, language has been the dominant motif. So the first difference is that we can’t have decisive test situations, but still this is not to say that we are not concerned with explanatory understanding; and that’s a negative difference. And the second is a very positive one, which provides a great clue to the resolution of the problem of the impossibility of a decisive test, and that is that social reality is already pre-interpreted, so we have an obvious starting point. In fact, social life couldn’t go on unless we already knew an awful lot about it. So, far from being the poor cousin of the natural sciences, the social sciences should perhaps have followed the path of Vico in the seventeenth century, who also proclaimed, like Francis Bacon, a new science. But Bacon’s (and Descartes’) new science was mechanistic; this science was obviously eventually going to give the social sciences an inferior place, because there were no analogues in the social world of mechanistic behaviour, except very false ones, or the kinds of living analogies that constitute behaviour in capitalistic society. Vico’s great insight was that, actually, we know far more about the social world because we made it. Savita: This applies also to natural science. Human beings also made natural science, and in fact science is very much a social activity. Roy: This is a very important point. This is why in transcendental realism I distinguished between the transitive and intransitive dimensions. The transitive dimension is really just science as a social process, and this is going to be socio-historically generated and inevitably geo-historically relative, and it is the sort of thing that

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sociologists like Kuhn and philosophers of natural science like Hanson and Wittgensteinians had drawn attention to: the social character of scientific knowledge. They went very far, really, and did isolate the aspect of structure; whereas Kant had put structure in our knowledge of nature, in human minds, they put it in the human social community. Now if you are talking of knowledge of nature, it’s fine to put it in the social community. But there’s another aspect, which is the actual stratification of nature itself; and this is the other dimension of nature as an intransitive reality: understanding the world of the objects of scientific understanding. And here there is a great asymmetry between natural and social science, because the objects of natural scientific understanding exist for the most part quite independently of that understanding, but the objects of social science don’t; they are in fact constituted in part by the understandings of the social agents. Savita: So the laws that operate in the natural world are different from social laws, and this is an important difference between the natural and social sciences. But this is not to say that there are no social causal laws. Roy: Yes. Let’s take this difference very seriously. What hermeneutists have said— and Winch’s book The Idea of Social Science (Winch 1958) is the classic expression of this, though it has been given more sophisticated interpretation by Gadamer and Heidegger, which we can come on to in due course—is that it’s silly to try and compare the social sciences to the natural sciences, because social reality is intelligible or meaningful, it’s constituted as meaningful, and therefore, all social scientists have to do is understand the way in which agents constitute their own reality as meaningful; whereas the natural world, by contrast, is not meaningful at all, it has no intelligible connections and, as Hume had shown (they said), everything is external. This shows a number of important things. You are absolutely right that social reality is constituted as intelligible and meaningful by the agents, in a way in which the natural world is not. There are, of course, intelligible connections within nature too, but they are not actually constituted by the objects under study—not at least from the standpoint of natural science—so we have to go into a completely different realm. Notice that when Winch said that all the social scientist has to do is to understand the intelligible connections as constituted by the agents concerned, this meant, first, that there’s nothing more to social reality than those intelligible connections; and, second, that the agents’ own understanding of their intelligible reality has to be accepted. So there’s nothing more to social reality than those intelligible connections—there’s nothing unseen or hidden—and the conceptualisations of the agents are right. Now both these claims are wrong. Just to accept agents’ conceptualisations as right means that you can’t have either a critical or a realist social science. To have a realist and critical social science, you must be able to show that social reality contains things other than agents’ conceptualisations. Now what would these things be? They would be things that don’t exist independently of agents’ conceptualisations. They would be answers to the quasitranscendental question: What must be the case for those conceptualisations to be possible? So Marx, for example, asked: What must be the case for the conceptions that agents have within capitalism to be possible? What relations must exist? To

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capture those relations, he had to construct the categories of exchange value and use value, breaking through the confusions in the theory of value, and of labour and labour power. And these enabled him to show how the concepts in terms of which agents saw their productive activity reflected only the surface structures of the capitalist economy, the structures of circulation—particularly exchange and to a lesser extent distribution—but not production. Production is completely masked by an ideology, drawn from the level of exchange, that equivalents are exchanged. But in the act of extracting surplus value, the capitalist pays the wage labourer only the value of their labour power, not the value of their labour. The value of their labour exceeds the value of their labour power, and in virtue of that disguise—the collapse of a power to its exercise—you see the actualism inherent in capitalism: the collapse of the level of reality constituted by powers and structures independently of their actualisation. This is exactly the same category confusion that critical realism isolates in our understanding of natural reality, the collapse of the real to the actual. So the highest-order method in philosophy is actually analogous to transcendental argument, and transcendental procedure is a key method in social science as well as philosophy (and science generally). Marx’s argument showed that nothing could happen in the social world without the intentionality, conceptuality and intelligibility of agents’ own behaviour, but that there is a level of reality actually presupposed by their behaviour that they aren’t aware of. This also immediately gave the social sciences an emancipatory project, which is to make those agents aware of what they presuppose in their activities; an emancipatory project in view of their explanatory charter, because it is those imperatives of the hidden realm, which include the actual screening or masking of production, that actually explain why it is that the agents have the conceptions that they do about their activity—why people think that they are engaged in an exchange of equivalents and so getting a fair wage, although in reality they are not. So in this way you can see how, in virtue of the explanatory function of the social sciences, they operate in a different way from the natural sciences. They start from agents’ conceptualisations which, unlike in the natural world, actually constitute the subject matter of the social sciences, and then, as in natural science, they argue to structural preconditions. So the object of explanatory understanding is the same, but it is achieved in a different way, because you don’t have crucial test situations in the social world, the only test that you can have in the social sciences is explanatory power. So the goal of the social sciences is the same as that of the natural sciences: to explain, to arrive at explanatory understanding. The natural sciences are not in fact centrally concerned with prediction; some applied sciences have an interest in prediction, but really, prediction only comes in under the special case of confirmation or falsification, and that’s not really prediction—it’s a different category. So all the sciences are really concerned with explanatory understanding. The social sciences can’t artificially construct decisive test situations, so they rely on explanatory power; and they are uniquely concept- or human activity-dependent in a way that the natural sciences are not. But just in virtue of that, to use a Wittgensteinian metaphor, you

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have a way out of the fly bottle.6 Actually, Marx once said that humankind only sets itself such problems as it can solve; wherever you have a problem, there will be a solution. The very thing that made social science seem so intractable, human conceptualisation, actually makes it possible, as in natural science, and it also makes critique not only possible, but necessary if agents’ conceptualisations are false. The only other important difference between social and natural science is the greater transience of the subject matter of social science, and I think that this is pretty acceptable to everyone. Humanity and their social norms and so on are highly volatile; they do endure for a certain period, and can endure for longer periods if they have deep structures, but they are definitely less transient than most natural structures. And, since human social being is embedded within deeper biological and physical strata, one would expect the higher-order or more emergent strata to be more volatile. Savita: So on this account there’s a clear recognition that there are things like categories and laws that actually exist, not all of which we create; at any point in time, there are some that are already created, and they must be treated as structures that have some causal status or efficacy, and so we say that they are real. This recognition that structures are real is something that has to be achieved. Reality is structured, differentiated and changing in both the natural and the social world; that is to say, at a general level reality exists over and above the distinctions that you’ve made—it’s just that the objects of study are different; in the one place you study nature, in the other you study human action or activity as understood by the agents. Roy: Yes, you’ve put that very nicely. There’s also what that activity presupposes, but we don’t see. It’s very important to understand that this hidden structural level is something that we do, but we don’t see. This level, which Marx describes in terms of the extraction of surplus value, we do; that is the wage contract, when the worker signs on for a ‘decent’ wage. That’s something that’s done, so it is not a reification. This also shows that we do things that we don’t fully understand; and we do things under false consciousness, and that’s very important.

2.3.7 Epistemological Dialectic Without End? Savita: Of course, it is not just transcendental realists who argue that particular accounts of reality should not be mistaken for a complete account, and that they have to be criticised; even empiricists think that. But I guess the superiority of realist philosophy lies in the realisation that there will always be in principle levels of reality that we haven’t included in our current analysis, and that that is in fact our situation at any one time, given your theorisation of ontology; at no point of time can we conclude correctly that our conceptualisation of reality constitutes a complete account. 6 This

alludes to Wittgenstein’s understanding of the task of philosophy: ‘To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.’ Wittgenstein 1953, I, 309.

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Roy: I’m not quite sure which of two things you are saying, both of which are almost correct, or definitely can be developed dialectically. The first is that you can never completely understand any area of reality; and the second is that when you have understood an area, you will naturally want to go on—you will be driven on—by some creativity inherent in the human process itself, which is easy to see in the transformational of model social activity. This model posits two levels of transformation. The first is that human action or praxis is transformational: we are always producing, always absenting something that is already there and presenting something new; so there is an inherent novelty within human praxis. That’s one sense in which we are always going on: we are always creating something new. The other is the sense in which we go ever deeper and deeper into reality; in principle, any domain of reality is always unbounded. And both senses have to be taken into account. Savita: We don’t have an unchanging notion of structure. Roy: OK, but it’s important to distinguish the two aspects, because the way that critical realism developed was very much by going deeper and deeper. First, it absented the absence of an adequate philosophical account of the world as presupposed by natural science, then moved on to the social sciences and looked at their specificity. From there it went on to look at how you could deduce evaluative from factual statements, and here, it absented another absence, the absence within the immanent philosophical discourse of the rational assessability of values. Then it moved on to the dialectical stage, which absented the absence of an adequate concept of absence itself. So it was always a process of continually retotalising the existing philosophical field, and at each point it located and remedied an absence. You might say that there is no reason in principle to suppose that such a dialectic will ever end, that it will not just go on and on. This is clearly the case in natural science, which goes on and on, delving into deeper and deeper structures. You might say that in the social sciences, there should be a point at which we could come to a complete understanding of some domain, but even that is dubious. However, there is one sense in which I would want to defend that possibility. At a philosophical level, what does this mean? Does it mean that transcendental realism will be transcended as an account of science? Well, not necessarily, although transcendental realism has itself retotalised the whole field. When I first elaborated it, people said to me: Well, OK, you’ve provided a good account of science, but show that it’s true. You can’t do that. All you can do is develop an immanent critique of existing theories and provide a more adequate account. It can be shown that for any finite description of a subject matter, there are in principle an infinite number of possible descriptions; so in principle there is an infinite number of descriptions of the subject matter of science besides transcendental realism, which would fit the data that transcendental realism had uniquely fitted up till then.

And I challenged these people: ‘Do please try and show me a better account, please try and falsify me, and then I will refine, revise, and revolutionise my own account.’ And of course, it hasn’t happened, because the possibility of infinite descriptions is only a formal algorithm taken from mathematics; there has been no actual rival

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account that has dealt with the features of science—explanatory depth, experimentation, and something like a logic of scientific discovery—that A Realist Theory of Science dealt with. And similarly, there have been no attempts to resolve the dichotomies within the philosophy of social science in a more adequate way than critical naturalism does. I love challenges and arguments and would have been only too happy if someone had provided them.7 Instead, what we got is sneaky little books like Nancy Cartwright’s How the Laws of Physics Lie (Cartwright 1985), which made use (without mentioning me) of a fact that I had pointed out a decade earlier, that if the laws of physics are interpreted as empirical generalisations they would all be false, and there would be no laws. Of course, the moral of this is not that there are no laws of physics—as implied by the title of that book; but, rather, that laws are not empirical generalisations, that they specify a deeper level of structures and mechanisms that exist and operate independently of human activity.

7A

challenge to Bhaskar’s transcendental realism, from mainstream scientific realist philosophers, finally began to emerge towards the end of Bhaskar’s life, alas too late for him to respond. For details, references, and a pro-Bhaskar view, see McWherter 2015, 2017.

Chapter 3

The Transitions to Dialectical Critical Realism and the Theory of Everyday Transcendence

Savita: From critical realism (transcendental realism and critical naturalism), you moved on to dialectical critical realism. However, there seems to be some significant differences between critical realism and dialectical critical realism. Can one say that this transition was a dialectical or developmentally consistent one? Roy: Definitely. Critical realism, as I explained earlier, was fully formulated when I was in my twenties, and I didn’t want to be like Popper, who wrote a book on the philosophy of science and another on the philosophy of social science, and then spent the rest of his life reiterating that. I did not want to rest; it is not in my nature to rest. Actually, before I got onto dialectic, the stage of explanatory critique had shown how you could generate evaluative from factual statements, and this was itself extremely radical. Existing theories of ethics were all subjectivist; there was no way, according to them, that you could actually convince or show someone who held an ethical, moral or a political position that they were wrong, because there was nothing in the nature of the world that you could use to convince them. It was just a subjective view, and it didn’t matter how you glossed that; there was no fact that you could show. Hume had even said that it is not less rational to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of his finger. He thereby detotalised himself, because, of course, if you are going to lose the whole world, then you are going to lose your finger anyway. So those were some of the absurdities. And actually, rigorously demonstrating that you can derive values from facts did take me some pains: some three or four weeks of writing; I was really quite agonised in getting it all right.1

3.1 Getting Dialectic Right At quite an early stage I had made up my mind to work on dialectic, and I really started this in about 1977–78; and then from 1980 to 1983 I worked solidly on 1 See

Bhaskar 1986, esp. Ch. 3.5–3.7, 169–211. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_3

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it. In this period, I published some dictionary entries on dialectic in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Bhaskar 1983) which are still regarded as canonical, and I’m really quite proud of them. But they don’t involve centrally the category of negation. So from 1980 to 1983, I was working on the problem of negation, and during this period, I didn’t publish any new books or write any major new articles—I was totally obsessed by the problem. In the end, in 1983 or 1984, it got the better of me and I just had to give it up; I was sometimes working sixteen hours around the clock. Probably, most of those manuscripts I threw away; they were mainly on negation, but also on dialectical categories in general. So I could really sympathise with Marx when he said in a letter to Engels (Marx 1858) that Hegel had discovered the rational kernel in dialectic which, he said in another place (Marx 1878, 103), is the general form of all science or all learning—which I totally agree with—but which he (Hegel) had unfortunately shrouded within a mystical shell; and that some day, he (Marx) would like, if he had time, to show in two or three printer’s sheets what the rational kernel was. Well, if he had anything like my experience, he certainly would not have found it the easiest thing to do. My first sustained attempt to get at the rational kernel had ended in failure. Of course, I could have published something in addition to my dictionary entries, which remained at the level of pure critical realism, but which were good enough to justify Marxism as a science and also to critique the views of key Marxists as a political practice. But I had not really dealt with negativity. So I did various other things in the second half of the eighties, and then in the early nineties I came back to it and had another go, and this time I got it right. I finished my book Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom in 1993, and it just shows that you have to follow the paradigm of Robert Bruce, the fourteenth-century Scottish nationalist leader who, after being defeated by the English in battle, saw a spider trying to weave a web again and again and finally succeeding—you know the story—and then he went on to defeat the English in the Battle of Bannockburn. If it can’t be done, then of course you should give it up; but it’s worth having a second or a third go. And this involved a very radical break, and a lot of pain on my part.

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Roy Bhaskar at about the Ɵme he ‘got dialecƟc right’

Savita: May I just read from your book, where you talk about the goal that you set yourself, how indeed it was very difficult, not attempted even by Marx, but actually urgently needing to be done? You say: ‘I hope to realise Marx’s unconsummated desire “to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence”—though it will take more than two or three printers’ sheets—“what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered and at the same time mystified”’.2 This is the task that Marx had left, and that you have accomplished. Roy: Yes. The time was not right for Marx to do it. No individual, no matter how great, can do things if the time is not right. As I’m producing this conversation for an Indian audience, I may just mention that there is some evidence that some of the ancient Vedic scholars had some knowledge of the outer planets. They knew about Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, and even mentioned this, but said that, because they can’t be proved, they had no effects. There’s also evidence that they knew something about atomic structure. But this could not be communicated or socialised at that time, because it would not have been ratified as knowledge. You can be a perfect dialectician—you are a perfect dialectician—without understanding dialectics, but you have to wait for a certain point in time when your dialectics can be explained rationally. Similarly, Marx’s own unique achievement—isolating the central structures of the capitalist mode of production—could not have been accomplished by a thinker who 2 Bhaskar

1993, 1, quoting Marx, Letter to Engels, 14 January 1858; Marx’s emphasis.

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was probably equally mighty, namely Hegel. Despite all his idealism (or perhaps because of it), Hegel couldn’t do it, but there are some parts of his social philosophy where he comes very close to understanding what capitalism is all about. He was a pretty thorough observer of the social scene, and in his practice, he did try to explain the world. He saw in a very nice way how the existing mode of production would inevitably lead to war and to colonialism and also to the impoverishment of the poor. So many of his empirical insights into the tendencies of capitalism were are as great as Marx’s. But the time wasn’t yet quite right for him to understand the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production.

3.2 The Existence of Negation in Reality Savita: But of course Marx made important criticisms of Hegel, and you in turn have made important criticisms of both Hegel and Marx and some radical departures in dialectical critical realism. Unlike Hegel’s, for example, your dialectic is a four-term, not a three-term one, and you begin with non-identity, not identity. I would like you to tell me about the process whereby you effected your immanent critique of Hegel and Marx and elaborated your dialectic, thereby immensely enhancing our resources for understanding the world. We have your printed books, but I want to know about the process that produced them. Roy: Let’s go through a few stages of this. First, I could quite see how Marx had been inspired by Hegel at definite points of his career. For example, in 1844, the alienation of spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology gave Marx a clue to understanding human history in terms of the alienation of labour. So he substituted labour for spirit, and suddenly a new research field had opened up. And then, in 1857 he re-read Hegel’s Science of Logic—and this is really interesting, because you can map his reading of Hegel onto the really productive periods in Marx’s life. It shows how a really great thinker can provide a continual resource. This is why people read poetry over and over again. I’ve just come back from Kolkata, and obviously the people there read Tagore again and again; I was reading some of his conversations with Einstein, and they are very pregnant. You can read a great thinker again and again, and always learn. And, similarly, you can always read Marx and find something new. And so in 1857, Marx wrote the Grundrisse. Capital, Volume I is undoubtedly Marx’s crowning glory, but the Grundrisse is his most stimulating and creative work; however, it wasn’t meant for publication, and that was often the way of Marx. It was written immediately under the influence of the Logic, and in it Marx views everything in capitalism as a process in motion under the category of totality. And then, by the time of Capital, Volume I his theme is taken from the second book of Hegel’s Science of Logic, ‘The Doctrine of Essence’. This book juxtaposes pairs; it’s all about polarity. Some would say it’s really about negativity, but it’s much truer to say that Hegel’s second moment is really polarity; negativity is nowhere, it really disappears as soon as it begins (we’ll come on to negativity in a moment). The book of Essence is full of understanding

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pairs like part and whole, cause and effect, and so on; and the one that struck Marx as the most vivid was the polarity or duality—the pairing or coupling—of essence and appearance. And it was this conceptualisation that he used to think capital in a scientific, or what would later be called, anachronistically, a critical realist way. He said that structures are not immediately manifest in the phenomena, their discovery is the distinctive work of science, which depends on retroductive, analogical and creative thinking by the scientist, and then on detailed empirical corroboration; and that these structures are not manifested in one way only in the world of events, and in fact it’s possible that they can be manifested in a distorted form. These sorts of themes are very familiar in Marx, because he says that in every science it’s well known that the outward appearance and the inner essence of things never correspond; science would be superfluous if the inner essence was immediately manifest in the outer appearance; the outer appearance shows the inverted form of the inner essence. So the inner essence is the causal structure that Marx succeeded in isolating; for example, the mechanism of extraction of surplus value; the outer appearance—the crucial transaction—in this realm appears to be an exchange of equivalents, but it actually is not. It is not an exchange; it’s an appropriation: that’s the critical point. It is not an exchange at all, let alone an equal one. This scientific realist approach informs Marx’s understanding not only of that crucial mechanism, but his entire appropriation of the empirical and received world. Marx’s own development was—and had to be—lopsided, given the times and where he was. First, he set his life’s project as understanding capitalism, and not doing philosophy. Actually, for our own time, doing philosophy is the most essential thing that we can do as an intellectual. But for Marx’s time, for him, definitely the most important thing was to understand capitalism, and so philosophy had to be put on the back burner. Savita: Marx thought that philosophy defined traditionally was all about ideas and idealism, and he was not very interested in that. Roy: Yes, he did not have a well thought out conception of philosophy, that’s definitely true. First, he thought that philosophical ideas were part of the ideational superstructure, which could only cloud the material realm. But in his actual practice, he was very concerned with methodological and scientific realist-type issues and had you asked him: ‘Is the methodology of science important?’, he would definitely have said: ‘Yes, crucially important.’ And then if you asked him where you could find that expounded, he would have had to say: ‘In Hegel.’ So there’s a bit of an inconsistency there. Hegel showed the same disrespect for philosophy but, actually, Marx was Hegel’s greatest fan—although he didn’t do a very profound reading of Hegel. So the second point is really that for Marx philosophy was Hegel. He concentrated on the critique of Hegelian idealism, from the point of view particularly of its logical mysticism, which was clouding the issue as he understood it, and he did not undertake a critique of empiricism. Third, empiricism and positivism became dominant by the 1870s, and that’s when a critique of empiricism was really needed; Engels, unfortunately, absorbed the positivism of that time, and so we never really had a dialectical account of the nature of reality or of the nature of science. Marx

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was a realist in the sense that he understood the objectivity of nature, but he never theorised it; his concern was always with the labour process, and just as he undertook only a critique of idealism, not a critique of empiricism, he didn’t theorise what I call the intransitive dimension—the world. And so he didn’t really theorise how the conceptual work that he was doing reflected or related to anything in the nature of reality itself. Instead, he used a very crude contrast (though I’m not saying that it doesn’t have its own domain of correctness) between, for example, the method of discovery, which can be higgledy-piggledy (but actually is dialectical), and the method of exposition, which is deductive, and which actually is only a method of proof. So he underestimated the dialectical nature of his own work, but also did not do justice to the dialectical nature of the subject matter. As a result of all these imbalances, subsequent Marxism was either a very sophisticated idealism—people concentrated on the higgledy-piggledy, which was the transitive process of science, or would go in great detail into the labour process somehow abstracted from natural reality; or it was a very crude materialism. So all the great Marxist epistemologists were really idealists—the ones who said anything new. You can say that Lenin was actually not a bad philosopher, but he stopped his philosophy reading at Berkeley; so he never went in deeply, he never got as far as Hume or Kant. Then he made a few comments in the margins of Hegel’s Science of Logic. These are very insightful, but to claim that he was a great philosopher is absolutely absurd. Extraordinary thinker and extraordinary human being, undoubtedly he was, but not a great philosopher. And there’s no exception to this rule. Della Volpe was really an empiricist and a Kantian, and Colletti as well; and they brought enormous sophistication to Marxist philosophy. Let us just go through the names. After Engels, philosophically we have Lukács. He reconstituted the concept of reification in a very nice way, and understood Marx’s theory of alienation better than any other Marxist, but his own philosophy was very idealist. Gramsci was likewise an idealist. He even said that the whole history of evolution is a fraud—and he was one of the greatest Marxist thinkers that have ever been: his theory of hegemony and concepts like the organic intellectual are very important. But given his idea that the theory of biological evolution or of cosmic evolution is just a human invention, we really have to say that there must have been something profoundly wrong with the state of Marxist philosophy. Then you have the critical theorists, Horkheimer and Adorno—Adorno made many interesting points, as I’ve already indicated; and then there was Habermas, and the Praxis School, which was somewhat important. We also have of course Sartre, whose philosophy is an extraordinary construction, but a very idealist one; and the Della Volpean school in Italy, which was really empiricist and Kantian: Della Volpe and Colletti and, as an off-shoot of that school, Timpanaro. And then we have Althusser. We can go into him in some detail, but really anyone who takes science and ideology as different moments out of the social totality, who gives the impression that the social totality is some kind of structural construct, and who anyway takes history out of it—after all, Marx’s great insight is to see the essentially moving character of the labour process as the driving force of history—is headed in an idealist direction. I think the totality of Althusser’s intervention forms part of poststructuralism, and

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poststructuralists are basically idealist. And, of course, according to critical realism, empiricism is a form of subjective idealism. So we can say that, really, Marxist philosophy was either idealism or the most dogmatic crude materialism. Savita: And here comes critical realism. Roy: Yes. Let me just say that all this higgledy-piggledy that Marx put in the method of exposition—trying to make Capital seem to be a deductive structure (those are the terms in which he actually put it)—was actually a bow in front of the shibboleth of analytical reason. It was very, very wrong; and that is the legacy of his failure to work out the dialectic, because if you just stick to the transitive dimension, then you can find the contradictions: no one denies that there are contradictions and category mistakes within our understanding of reality. But what about reality itself? Critical realism had stressed that you must be a categorical realist about reality, and therefore, you must accept that categories like causality, law, process, contradiction pertain to the world, and not just to our understanding it.3 These are not categories in the Kantian sense: all post-Kantian understandings are not realist categories, but categories regarded just as ways of classifying reality; so there is no reason why I should accept their list of categories. Take what we normally call categories—space, time causality, law, process, agency; then go into the social world: obviously, we will find categories like capital, labour, money, labour power, exchange value, use value, housing, education, religious worship—these are all categories. These are very general features of reality. Now transcendental realism accepts that, in nature, there are not just causal laws—there are not just ten thousand or ten million causal laws in nature—there is causal law. And to stop at any one level of reality and say that alone is reality is quite wrong. But many people, including critical realists, don’t understand categorial realism, and they still think that categories are in some sense things that we impose on reality. Now a category, considered subjectively, may be wrong; so in that case it’s like an illusion. An illusion exists; it is just that its object does not exist. So similarly a category can be mistaken—its object doesn’t exist—but still it exists in reality. So we are talking about categories that exist in reality and are true or false to reality. Now Marx and Marxists, since contradictions played such a big part in their analysis of capitalism, obviously accepted in some way that contradictions exist in reality, but they didn’t really understand the implications of this because, in terms of analytical formal logic, once you have a contradiction then everything is in a mess; a single contradiction vitiates the system. And for this reason, Kant had prohibited negation in reality. Let’s go into the history of this in a bit of detail. Parmenides had pronounced that you could not say the ‘not’. Now in Greek philosophy that meant that ‘not’ did not exist in reality; it was like the ancient Vedic philosophy: there was no gap 3 Categorical

properties are qualities whose values an object may possess intrinsically and independently of human investigation. Though it did not use the concept categorical realism, critical realism had argued for the categorical independence of, inter alia, causal laws, patterns of events and experiences, on the one hand, and of the transitive and intransitive dimensions, on the other (see especially Bhaskar 1975, 5–6, 21–2, and passim). Bhaskar later (1996, 140; 2000, 59–65) referred to this position as categorial realism.

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between ontology and epistemology; epistemology was just a reflection of ontology. But by Kant’s time—Kant having tabooed ontology—it was important to take over Parmenides and make his law prevail at the level of epistemology. And so Kant said that you cannot have ‘not’ in a coherent discourse; though you can use ‘not’ as a criterion, ‘not’ cannot signify anything in reality. So whatever thing you wanted to talk about in reality, it couldn’t contain ‘not’. Even though he had already said: ‘Don’t talk about reality’—and therefore, there shouldn’t have been any question of reality having a ‘not’ in it or not—he underlined that point by saying: ‘OK, you can’t have a coherent discourse with “not”, we all agree about that: “not” can’t be coherent within discourse’—but this wouldn’t come out as incoherent, of course!—and—just to underline the point—‘there is no “not” in reality.’4 And the result of this was that no one had thought through the category of real negation. And it was very, very difficult to do this. And this was the real breakthrough of Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom: it thought through the category of real negation, that is, the existence of negation in reality. It thus broke with the tradition in Western philosophy which went back to Parmenides. And how did it do this? It did it by schematising determinate absence—determinate, not indeterminate, absence. Savita: Can you explain this? Roy: Both Hegel and Sartre think indeterminate absence or nothingness. Hegel, in his dialectical logic, starts with being, moves through nothing and then to becoming, and after that all the categories are positive. He says that contradiction is not the end of the matter, but it always cancels itself; no sooner is becoming established than it finds itself at a new positive level; and in fact, you never dwell on the moment of becoming, the moment of the operation of contradictions, you immediately move to a positive resolution of the contradictions. In Hegel you cannot live, you do not live, you do not understand the lived reality of the world of negation. And so no one had really theorised the existence of contradictions in reality; no one had theorised determinate absence in reality; no one had theorised negativity. And that meant that no one had theorised process or change in reality. So these are gigantic claims I made for a dialectical worldview.

3.3 The Developmental Structure of Dialectical Critical Realism Savita: The emphasis in critical realism is very much on the vindication of ontology and ontological depth. But actually, you were already overcoming some sort of negativity, some sort of absence—the absence of an adequate concept of ontology. You could say that the dialectical moment was already there in critical realism, though you had not yet thought it out in a thoroughgoing way. 4 The

sentences within quote marks are a gloss on Kant, not a quotation.

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Roy: Yes, that’s right. There was, if you like, an absence of the concept of absence, and this had to be rectified. In fact, the general structure of any dialectical process is where you have some kind of incompleteness, that is, some determinate absence, that generates a contradiction—an anomaly, a problem, an obstacle. This is a completely general pattern—this is the rational kernel of dialectic: that determinate absence generates a contradiction, and that determinate contradiction necessitates transcendence to a new totality that was not implicit in the pre-existing one. Savita: And this novel understanding of negation allowed you to modify Hegel’s dialectic, but how did it develop out of the non-identity phase? How is it different? I mean, it has to be different. Roy: Yes. You see, my dialectic, or dialectical critical realism, doesn’t work in a crude axiomatic way; it is not like Hegel’s dialectic, where you first have ontology, and that is something else, and that leads to something else, and then you have something else. That is too crude; you could put it in such a way, but I wouldn’t like to. But if you wanted to, you could say that the absence that set off my dialectic was an example of non-identity between an account of a subject matter and the subject matter; and that would be strictly true, and it would reflect a non-identity between subject and object. But really I prefer to put it in terms of what I called the 1M to 4D structure of dialectical critical realism, which I later refined to 1M to 5A. The stages of this can be put in a very simple way, which I will now do. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom was vitally concerned to theorise negative and totalising concepts and relate them to transformative agency within the context of ontology. In setting this out in a systematic way, I did so in terms of four domains of increasing specificity. So the first domain of ontology (which I called 1M for ‘first moment’) is concerned with thinking being as such. The second domain, dialectical negativity (2E or ‘second edge’), is concerned with thinking being as including negativity and negation or the ineffable Parmenidean ‘not’. The third domain (3L or ‘third level’) is that of thinking being as internally related, as a whole, as a totality. The fourth (4D or ‘fourth dimension’) is concerned with thinking being, not only as containing negativity and as a whole, but specifically as incorporating transformative agency, which presupposes all the other aspects, and reflexivity; that is, thinking being as containing the possibility of the unity of theory and practice and of reflexive critique. So these are areas of increasing depth. They are not meant to be a mechanical dialectic—though you just nicely pointed out a way in which you could have something like a mechanical dialectic or schemata for a dialectic if you regarded dialectic as always being generated by an absence, and if you saw that in terms of categories of subject–object non-identity generating a contradiction, which always, in the second edge, leads to a new totality, finally informing transformative agency, which would then reflexively situate itself; so that is actually a very nice way in which you could represent the rational kernel of Hegelian dialectic. But more, for me, these work solely as categories in terms of which we have to understand being in a dialectical way. Some people have found the terms that I use to identify these domains, neologistically, difficult to comprehend, but it is not so difficult. At 1M I wanted a term to

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describe the whole subject matter of ontology without bringing in the other levels; so this was the ‘first moment’. The 2E of dialectic or negativity was the ‘second edge’. The 3L of totality was the ‘third level’; and the ‘fourth dimension’ was 4D, transformative agency. This was nicknamed the MELD scheme—that is the acronym you get when you leave the numerals out—and it helps people understand it at a very simple level. Then, when I brought in a ‘fifth aspect’ or 5A, of spirituality, this was nicknamed MELDA. What MELDA is concerned with is thinking being successively: thinking being as such, thinking being negatively, thinking being as a totality, thinking being as incorporating transformative agency and reflexivity, and thinking being as having a spiritual presupposition, a ground state or envelope which sustains it. These are all aspects of thinking being as well as aspects of being; in other words, they are not there for the thinking of being alone, they are actually in being—or so I argue. Now the following may or may not work for some people, but some have found it useful; it has not been published anywhere,5 so I will just say it to you. Imagine the ‘M’ in 1M as standing for more; so there is more to being than knowledge; that is the central claim of critical realism within ontology. Then at 2E the ‘E’ stands for edgy. What makes life move, at least within the relative domain of existence? It is the contradictions. Contradictions are a motor of change, a source of dynamism; so we have this edginess. Then at 3L in its spiritual inflection the ‘L’ stands for the great totalising feature of the human world which is love. At 4D, transformative agency, the ‘D’ stands for do, so we have More Edgy Love Do, and at 5A the ‘A’ stands for Aaah!, which is just the moment of transcendence. That Aaah! also corresponds to the eureka moment, Aha! I’ve got it! And when you are in a transcendental state, in which subject–object duality breaks down, you are lost for words. And then: Ah! It’s gone! Aaah is also the first sound of a baby, and it is the pulse of the universe—on that interpretation. And in transcendence the discursive intellect comes to its limit. So that’s a possible way of understanding, or a mnemonic for, MELDA; but really you don’t have to remember anything other than that it stands for thinking being in successively—‘deeper’ categories would be wrong—more nuanced or refined categories. Savita: At each stage, there has to be a very conscious understanding of ontological presuppositions, because these provide dialectical critical realism with a depth that was missing, say, from Hegel or even from Marx and the various Marxist schools— that is why they kept moving from one extreme position to another, from crass materialism to idealism: they couldn’t find the mediating principle which in fact was authoritative. This required a person who was engaged in a process of knowledge production to be simultaneously aware that the basis of knowledge is being itself. This allows a continuity that is present at all stages. I think in dialectical critical realism, the moments at 2E and 3L are very important.

5 It

was published subsequently in Bhaskar 2002b, 182.

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Roy: Definitely, because 3L totality was implicit in 1M ontology, and 4D transformative agency was implicit in 2E negativity. 2E and 3L were equal within the dialectic. Savita: So the crucial part of dialectical critical realism is these two levels in the middle. Here you dwell for most of the time; mostly we are in this range of ontologically deepened reality where most of the work has to be done. Roy: Definitely. These were the truly dialectical moments, the most dialectical—the middle ones. That’s absolutely right. Savita: There seems to be a deeper notion of practice involved in this difficult work. These two moments of dialectical critical realism push the whole process along towards transcendental dialectical critical realism. Roy: Yes. What I would like to say to you is that they also can be conceived as elaborating successively the deep structure of the first moment, transcendental realism. In other words—this follows on from your two senses of incompleteness—dialectic was actually presupposed within the account of the logic of scientific discovery as presented in A Realist Theory of Science. But it could not be articulated—nor did it need to be articulated for the purposes in hand. Let’s just see how this happens. Once scientists thoroughly describe a certain level of structure, then what they have to do is discover a level of structure that lies behind it, which, in terms of my concept of absence, was absent from their account and which eventually would lead to some sort of crisis, of the sort that Kuhn and others have described. So in this rational process, the logic of scientific discovery, how do scientists actively proceed? As I described it in A Realist Theory of Science, they do it in the creative imagination by building up a picture of a model of a mechanism which, if it existed and acted in the postulated way, would describe the structure or level of reality they had already described. They build up several such models in their imagination, test them empirically, detecting them through their causal effects, until they eventually arrive at one, which is the structure that explains the existing level of reality; and so a new structure is discovered. Now this process relies on the creative imagination of the scientist. What the scientist is doing in her creative imagination is testing, teasing, using all sorts of metaphors, analogies and metonymies. She’s even inventing new concepts. So she’s not conforming to the rules of logic, not to deduction and certainly not to induction. She’s thinking dialectically, being dialectical, as most scientists are most of the time. But at the actual moment of break-through, she’s doing something more, because coming to her is a new concept. But, before I get to that, let me say that she’s not only conceptually twisting and teasing, creatively constructing a product but also she’s using her tacit, intuitive skills; she’s thinking holistically, sitting around with experiments; she’s doing lots of things that are not even discursively formulatable, let alone conforming to the rules of logic. She’s actually messing around a lot of the time; she’s following her hunches and intuitions. Some thinkers have gone into this a bit; Michael Polanyi has a concept of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966), but he doesn’t really apply this systematically to science in anything like the dialectic of scientific discovery.

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What happens when a breakthrough is made—really positively, when we really discover the higher conceptual structure—is that someone like Newton has stopped thinking. He has thoroughly immersed himself in a field: you could say that he is at one with the field; he is a total master of his field. And then out of the blue comes the concept he has been searching for. This is epistemically transcendent; it comes in a moment, in a flash. This is the eureka moment: ‘Aha! I’ve got it!’. Everyone who has experienced creative discovery knows that it happens in a moment. You may have a technique for trying to make a scientific discovery: you may go into a deep state of meditation, you may go for a walk, you may play music, you may do anything; but it won’t work like that: it will come in the space between thoughts, when you are not expecting it. But it comes only to a well-prepared mind. So a general definition of creativity could be given from this. Creativity is the imposition or irruption of a transcendent cause, which comes epistemically from nowhere—this doesn’t mean that it actually comes from nowhere; we will see the reason for this in a moment—onto immanently well-prepared ground.

3.4 A New Theory: Everyday Transcendence and Creativity I’d just like to say something about this for a moment, and then we’ll get back to those two key moments of dialectic. This in a way is a new bit of theory, but it’s a synchronisation.6 Now people in the East and in most traditions think of transcendence in terms of a paradigm of going deeper and deeper into yourself. What happens in transcendence is that duality breaks down; in transcendence, there is no subject–object duality. And what I want to do in the next two or three minutes is make transcendence a totally non-mysterious concept. Our normal discursive thinking operates in terms of categories of subject and object, such as ‘me’ and ‘this pear’. There are two ways in which this subject–object duality can break down. First, I can go into the pear, I can become one with something other than myself and totally be absorbed by the pear. Second, I can withdraw my consciousness totally into myself and lose any notion or consciousness of the pear. We find both paradigms at work in our intuitive pre-reflective understanding of transcendence. Thus, one transcends when one goes for a walk looking at the lovely Himalayas or the beautiful fountains; or when one listens to a beautiful poem or beautiful music. You lose yourself, you identify with the music or the poem, you become one with them, you are totally absorbed. In the techniques of meditation or watchfulness, on the other hand, you withdraw totally into yourself. And this is, if 6 Considered

diachronically, the moments of Bhaskar’s dialectic are less than fully preservative sublations of their predecessors because they enrich and deepen them; formally, they are essentially preservative sublations. Considered synchronically, they are fully or totally preservative, because 1M is ‘already’ enriched and deepened by 7A or nonduality (and likewise 2E and the other moments); hence, Bhaskar speaks of a ‘synchronisation’ here, at the moment of crystallisation of the concept of everyday transcendence, fundamental to the philosophy of metaReality and so to his entire system.

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you like, the religious paradigm, and that can be put also in a second way. You can successively withdraw your state of consciousness. Say you are in a state of angry conscious, then you can become conscious of that anger-consciousness, and in doing so, you are not angry. You can withdraw further, and further, and further into yourself until you are not conscious of anything. And in principle, it may be easier to do it with something inspiring, which is what the technique of meditation or of prayer or of communing with or accessing the deeper self does, by following a mantra or something like that; but you can also do it just by retreating, a sort of phenomenological retreating, step by step, until you are left with nothing—total absorption in your own subjectivity, and there is nothing. Similarly, it is easiest to lose the sense of duality when you go totally into an inspiring object, but in principle we do it all the time: we feel sympathy for a fellow human being when we go into their pain if people come out with their pain for a moment. This is unity without identity. But in that moment of transcendental identification, there is a loss of duality; once you reflect on it, then you are back in duality. So what I think is so important about transcendence is that when we are acting spontaneously, we are acting without thinking, without the discursive intellect; and this is ultimately the only way we can act. So this is acting from a nondual standpoint. And I would argue that our most fundamental state of being is actually a nondual state we just are. This is the thesis I would like to explore from time to time; I think we will find it keeps on coming up in our conversation. In this nondual state of being that we just are, we normally are not conscious of it; but, just by a moment of perception, if we step back when we are acting spontaneously and creatively, we can be conscious of the fact that we were behaving spontaneously. In that consciousness, we are then in a dual state. This is why it is very difficult to grasp, because we can’t be in it and be conscious of it at the same time—we are just in it. But it is not only in being, it is in activity. Therefore, to access or be one with your higher or essential self, you don’t have to be in a state of a subject apart; you are in it spontaneously in everyday life. Therefore, the realm of meditation, religious practice, and highly aesthetic practice, on the one hand, and, on the other, the sphere of everyday life are not a pair: there is just the nondual state and nondual activity, spontaneous activity. When I talk about our ground state or alethic being and transcendence, these are features of everyday life, these are reflected in everyday life; and therefore I don’t want anyone to think that this is anything—I don’t want to say ‘mystical’—well let’s say mystical, or mysterious. Actually, whenever we act spontaneously, then it’s coming from the ground state. Savita: Now you have kind of transcended the two moments of dialectical critical realism that we were talking about. I really want to grasp those middle moments. Roy: Yes, we will go into them in detail, but can I just say that, in the full picture, the concept of transcendence is reached through a deepening of our understanding of the dialectic; but what I was saying earlier was that dialectic is implicit in the very first moment of critical realism, even though it wasn’t theorised. So the deepening brings out successive presuppositions. Now what I would just like to table for our understanding of dialectical thought and creativity is that we have successive

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deepenings of our critique of analytical reason. Analytical thought, which mimics the capitalist mode of production, is repetitive, uniform thought in which meaning and truth values remain fixed. It is actually not at all common for them to remain fixed or stable; but thought is not just higgledy-piggledy either. And by the way, the first thing that critical realism did should have made anyone who is interested in materialism or Marx’s dialectic very thoughtful that something may have been wrong with their practice up till now, because it said that being is actually in reality. It is not just that, contrary to the taboo, you can speak about reality (there is a reality so-called ‘out there’—yes, it is out there); but that being is in that reality. And so if being is dialectical, so must reality be. Even if you want to stop with being (at 1M in terms of MELD), you still have to understand being as reality, and therefore reality as dialectical. So, in terms of the development of my understanding of creativity, first you have the idea of creative model building in science, and that this is an intuitive and nonalgorithmic process. Then you have the fully fledged dialectical critique of analytical reasoning, which I worked out in Dialectic and Plato Etc., which we’re going to discuss in more detail under the rubric of 2E. Then you have the radical transcendentalisation of the dialectical critique of analytical reasoning, which understands the moment of transcendence as itself a necessary feature of creative activity and which places the intuitive alongside the discursive intellect, and grounds both in a level of consciousness (which I am going to go on to justify) which can only be called supramental,7 but which is intrinsic to us; it is our inmost essence, which transcends the opposition between the discursive and the intuitive intellect—physiologically speaking, between the left brain, which is supposedly characteristic of men, and the right brain, supposedly characteristic of women; the right brain being intuitive and holistic, and the left being more sort of—backward! Anyway, at this level, this ground-state level of supramental consciousness, we just are and we just do; and this is our nondual state, and this is the state from which all creativity springs. And this state is manifest in day-to-day practice by everyone and need not be accessed only by the deep techniques of meditation, prayer and so on, or by aesthetic practice (though it is good to try and access it independently of everyday activity): you can be a completely full human being without ever doing anything special. And without accessing that level, we can’t do anything. This is a very important point. It is well known that you can’t make someone accept a logical proof. I can write a theorem up on the board, and say at the end of it ‘QED’, but what actually proves that? The person has to see it, to understand anything one has to see it. Wittgenstein actually had an intuition on this point when he said that logic doesn’t force you to do anything, it doesn’t get up and grasp you by the throat—it’s actually the seeing that enables you to understand. You see? That’s the seeing, the creativity—the ‘Ah! Now I see it!’. Logic can’t work without that, 7 The

concept of ‘supramental consciousness’ is Bhaskar’s term of art, but the term itself may have been borrowed from Aurobindo 2005. This was in turn indebted to the Vedic concept of ‘superconsciousness’. For brief discussion of Bhaskar’s concept of supramental consciousness in relation to Vedic thought, see Marshall 2016.

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mathematics can’t work without it. You may go on trying to explain to a thick student (or someone who’s playing thick), but it won’t work—there’s no way of explaining; only the person herself can see. And this is the very deep truth within Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis that all truth is recollection. And so in an extraordinary way, we come back to a re-evaluation of a historic doctrine in a new form; just as, if what I say about agency is correct, that ultimately all agency is mediated by spontaneity, then Aristotle was correct that the conclusion of a practical syllogism is not a proposition but an action, because if it is practical, it must be through an action. This is a very salutary thing for everyone to realise, salutary in every way. It’s very salutary for a creative thinker like myself to realise that, actually, my creativity depends ultimately on other people seeing what I see. And Newton, when he was in his space with the ‘Aha!’ of ‘Eureka!’—and this was still at the very primitive level of transcendental realism, which is my excuse for saying this now8 —he then had to go out and make that intelligible to everyone else, to scientists who hadn’t had that experience. Now how could he have an experience of transcendence within a field that was not he himself? Only by being totally absorbed in that field. So creativity always comes from total absorption; and you cannot be absorbed in a field unless you master it heteronomously, as an other. So this is not a mysticism; it is an attempt to work towards a theory of creativity. This will sound a bit strange to you because I haven’t been published on this yet, but I think it’s very simple. What Newton did was go into the field more deeply than anyone else. He was one with the field in that moment, in that state of being; in a moment when he wasn’t thinking, then the alethic truth of the field could spring to him. Similarly, people perhaps go deeply into themselves—and it’s much easier than going into a field—well, they don’t go deeply into, they just are themselves, and they act spontaneously, lovingly, kindly or creatively in more humdrum ways. And that inner creativity always requires that you are thoroughly absorbed and immersed in the subject matter, which is what the schoolroom at its best is about. So this could be called the principle of inbuilding or ingrowing or in-forming knowledge. When you are told something, it is something outside yourself; you have to learn it, you have to revise. But when you thoroughly understand or master a subject, like driving a car, you don’t have to revise. OK, I may have composed myself for this session, but I don’t have to revise anything; it is coming to me because I am totally absorbed in it, and your questions are stimulating. And so, this is how we can be creative: we can be creative because we build in a knowledge of our field into our innermost being; and that is where creativity at the social level operates. But it also depends on the willing creativity, the going-alongness of everyone else; so then it is also a creativity of everyone. Savita: We have to stop there. Tomorrow, we will go into dialectical critical realism again and discuss in more detail the novelty of your notion of negation, and so on.

8 To

understand what Bhaskar is saying here it is helpful to recall that he is engaged in a synchronisation. While transcendental realism and the scientific creativity it addresses, when considered diachronically, are at a ‘very primitive level’, considered synchronically they are very advanced.

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Roy: Definitely. Can I just say one more thing. There are three morals that need to come out of this. One is (picking up on what you just said) that what is being intended here is a newness, a total newness; but this newness will rediscover some truths in the old ones, so it will recast everything. Savita: It will have this feature also because we are not writing it. We are in a different, conversational mode. Roy: Definitely. And, second, that this is the true process of creativity. When we see something the duality between us breaks down. Savita: Yes, when you’re saying things I’m actually seeing them, I’m actually following the processes. So I know what you mean. Roy: And, therefore, third, the feeling which has actually been expressed by practitioners of Zen, that ‘I see it’ is the most basic thing, the most basic state, and that ultimately you can’t really go beyond that, is correct. That’s the only way: ‘I see it’ is more basic, really than ‘I know’. ‘I know’ is just ‘You proved it to me’; it stays at that level. And also this kind of continual creativity which involves lots of ‘I see its’, this is the basic state, this is the ground state, this is the ideal state for human beings—I want to put this on record, so it shouldn’t be in parenthesis. Human beings should be able to be like this the whole time; they should never be subject to heteronomy, external forces of oppression and so on. They should just be able to be their creative, loving, spontaneous selves. And I think that the most rigorous and politically radical thinkers such as Marx actually presupposed such a vision, just as many more obviously spiritual thinkers have. And this is where we are all trying to get to, where we can just be like this. And we would be like this practically as well. (Laughs with delight). Savita (delighted): I hope that tomorrow also we can get into the same kind of flow, where I can see what you are saying—not only hear—and actually follow the direction of your sensible flow; and that we can flow in a direction that others too can follow—that’s the whole point of our conversations. Roy: Definitely. And you will be main mediator between our conversation and the seeing of others. Savita: It needs to be structured of course. Roy: Yes, we will follow a very detailed structure tomorrow.

Chapter 4

How False Theories Work: TINA Formations and the Critique of Irrealism

4.1 Positivism and Critical Realism Savita: We are at India International Centre; it is half-past nine on Friday, 14 September 2001. I hope you had a good night’s sleep, as I did. Yesterday we had rather a creative session, I think; we allowed ourselves to follow our creative urges to the main areas of discussion. Today, we are going back again to the basic structures of your thought. This is the third day of these recordings. Today, I want you to illuminate the world in which we live. I want you to begin by telling us what the world you inherited looked like, and what it looks like now on the realist account of society and science. Roy: That’s a very nice way to start today. In the simplest terms, as a philosopher I inherited a world constituted by positivism, a positivist ontology, which had been tacitly presupposed by all the critiques of positivism. It was a world which was flat, undifferentiated and unchanging, and which consisted, in so far as it involved human action, of the mechanical, repetitive reproduction of the same. So, really, this was a world unlike anything that we know; and the picture of human beings was unlike any human beings that we know. Nevertheless, we had all tacitly inherited this, thinking that in some way it had been proved by philosophical discourse and also by the practice of science itself. Many scientists did not reflect on their practice in a critical or novel way; and when they did, they just adopted empiricism. And empiricists for the most part just took an already interpreted view of the world, which was a misreading of Newtonian mechanics: Newtonian celestial closure in the astronomical context and his experimental closures down here on Earth. Newton kind of conflated the two to produce this world that was like a giant piece of clockwork. One way we can look at this is in terms of the category mistakes that constituted this world, which were tacitly presupposed for the most part. This world was allowed to stand only on the assumption of the epistemic fallacy; that is, that really you cannot speak about the world, only about epistemology.

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But before I get to the other category mistakes, let me answer your question about critical realism directly. How does critical realism view the world? It views it as a world which contains great depth (as the title of our book emphasises), structures embedded within structures; everywhere you have the stratification of being. This is probably the most fundamental theme. Now we know that entities which describe relatively higher-order levels within being are themselves endowed with their own causal efficacies and their own irreducible properties. So being can’t be reduced to any one level; it may all ultimately depend on an absolute level, which we will go on to talk about, but it is actually constituted by several different emergent orders. These emergent orders are prescribed laws which govern a large variety of beings at any one level—stones of different shapes and sizes, flowers of endless variety, animals— you have a multiplicity of species within any species, and every animal is different. Someone was telling me in Bengal that no two tigers have the same stripes; so you don’t have to tag them in any way because they all have completely novel stripes. Then of course we all know—but it is worth reflecting on it—about the individuality of human beings, their irreducible uniqueness. If you took my palm print, it would be different from the palm print of anyone else. But that is true also of my personality. We will come on to talk about that under the aspect of concrete singularity. So, really, at any one level, or looking at any one theme, being is constituted by a vast variety of different structures and agencies, and any of these structures or agencies can be penetrated to an in principle unbounded, limitless degree of depth; or they can be penetrated right up to the point where you touch the boundaries of the universe, because insofar as we are all part of the universe (which means ‘turned or combined into one’) it makes sense to suppose that there is an ultimate essential ingredient which bounds us all—that’s the theory of ultimata. And then, typically, within the specification of being, the higher-order or more emergent strata are more variable, less enduring than the deeper ones. So we have these three characteristic properties of stratification: openness or mishy-mashiness, multiplicity, and complexity—so much so that people have regarded the world as chaos. It’s true that it is a world of chaos, but it is not completely chaotic and can be grasped at a certain level. If you look at the streets of India from a Westerner’s point of view, it would seem to be chaotic irregularity; but there are certain laws and principles which actually govern that chaos. Each level will have principles and laws specific to it. But to find the order that explains any one being or any one structure at a superficial level, you have go to a deeper structure; and the characteristic movement of science is from a pattern of events at any one level to the mechanism or structure which explains it, which can then be described and so revealed as an actuality; and then science goes iteratively to an even deeper structure. So the process of science, which is continuous with the process of philosophy and includes the process of social science, fathoms deeper and deeper depths of reality. That is explanatory or pure science. And then applied science is understanding how different aspects of different structures mesh together to form, at the level of events, conjunctures that come together to form the whole and, at the level of being, to form

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compounds. We humans are compounds: our embodied personalities are constituted by many different principles of organisation. We will come on to this compound or complex nature of our being at some point during our discussions. Now, that’s just thinking being in terms of transcendental realism. But we said yesterday that transcendental realism itself was developed in the first moment of dialectical critical realism, in which we think being in a very comprehensive way. At this level, we think being as including everything, including contradictions, category mistakes and knowledge; so knowledge is part of being. Then we think being as including the categories, its categorial structure. We think being as including dispositions; that is, as including powers and potentials as well as what is actualised. And laws are typically only transfactually efficacious tendencies or mechanisms, that is, tendencies at work irrespective of the patterns of events, which may be exercised without being realised, and realised without being possessed—all that is dispositional realism. But there is also a level of what I call alethic realism; that is, there is an element of realism to the conception of truth, which we may go into.

4.2 TINA Compromise Formations and the Asymmetry of Emancipation This brings us to the very interesting question of how false theories work. How they have a degree of plausibility, how they can exercise a hold on— Savita: I find this aspect of your thought very interesting. How the false basically functions as real. Not real—you would call it actual. Roy: Actually, it is causally efficacious and therefore real; the illusions that we have are things that we act under. Now if action was only under an illusion, then it wouldn’t last very long. Take an example of a false belief: Hume’s saying that we have no better grounds for going out of a building by the ground floor door than by a first floor window. Now statistically, if we really have no better grounds, and if Hume had no better grounds, then after two departures from the building, we should fall; that is, about 50% of the time. And that of course provides the real ground why Hume didn’t do it, why he never acted on that belief. Implicitly he acted on the belief that gravity existed, was well corroborated and was actually the mechanism which explains the empirical regularity: we see that heavy objects fall to the ground unless prevented. So we have an empirical regularity, though not an invariance. Hume knows that no number of merely positive instances can confirm that empirical regularity, because it always remains the case that it may be defeated, but he sticks, in his explicit utterances, to his theory. However, his practice betrays his theory. And in his practice, he actually believes that there is a good ground, a real reason, for that empirical regularity, which is what we know as gravity. So what is happening when

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Hume doesn’t just statistically toss a coin or leave it in the lap of the gods or up to whim which way he goes, but always goes out by the ground floor? He’s tacitly presupposing a real or alethic truth about reality; in this case, one that science had discovered and that Hume actually knew and in his practice acted on: as an intelligent layman he probably knew it, but as a philosopher, he pretended not to know it. Now what’s happening in this case is that you have a false belief tacitly presupposing through its very continuity and for its causal efficacy a truth which it denies. So if in this case Hume knew it, how much more must this apply to the typical wage contract, which is a paradigm we’ve used in this discussion before, and which remains in place—it still exists in reality as the mechanism of extraction of unpaid labour, that being the source of the production of surplus value, which makes capitalism tick. So in this case, the agents live completely in a world of illusion; they don’t know the truth about the mechanism of exploitation, but nevertheless they reproduce that mechanism and that truth tacitly in working under the wage contract. If capitalism paid workers according to the labour that they actually do, not according to their labour power—that is, their capacity to work—then, if Marx’s theory is right, there would be no profit and capitalism would collapse. Just like Hume would have fallen out of the window, capitalism would collapse. So to keep going for any amount of time, an illusion requires the tacit presupposition of the truth. Now this means that a person who, or a social complex or system which operates under a false theory is in fact a complex which tacitly presupposes the truth. And that is what I call a TINA formation. ‘TINA’ just means ‘there is no alternative’; and there is no alternative to the tacit presupposition of what is true, even if it is not consciously known by anyone.1 Now what I have argued2 is that we and everything else in the social world are complex or compound, but in particular we are TINA formations: a mixture of autonomous, true, self-determining elements and heteronomous ones—that is, externally imposed, not chosen, unfree, and false elements. The task of liberation then becomes a very simple one to specify, that is, the throwing off of the false, and just a releasing and liberating of the true; because when we understand what the false theory is doing, we see that it is actually sitting as a parasite on the true and that it is in some ways blocking all the potential of the true. The assumption that Marx made was that, if the workers themselves controlled the immediate process of production, they would themselves be the best authority on harnessing their immense creativity. And capitalism couldn’t for a moment continue and survive without that creativity. Savita: This would mean that the dialectical critical realist world is still very much a Marxist world, a world of appearance and reality. Empiricists, positivists and others 1 ‘There

is no alternative’ (acronym TINA) was a slogan often used by the Conservative British Prime Minister (1979–1990) Margaret Thatcher. Bhaskar’s point in naming the concept of TINA formation after this slogan is that Thatcher’s neoliberalism, like every other false theory, actually ‘had no alternative but to presuppose in its practice the existence of that which in its theory it denied’, that is, the domination and exploitation of human creativity, love and freedom (Bhaskar 2002b, 28). 2 See especially Bhaskar 1993.

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have tried to say that we could actually have a world without illusions, that we could have scientific theories that get closer and closer to truth; a truer account of the world is possible in which there would be no illusions. But you are saying: No, even that particular theory is basically illusory in the sense that it is forgetful of what it presupposes, and this makes that theory an illusion. Roy: Yes, it does make that theory an illusion. But as to the actual idea of enlightenment and illumination that may have fuelled the discourse of these empiricists and positivists, there is nothing wrong with that as a goal. However, there are two things permanently wrong with what they do with that goal. Savita: I just want to know if all these theories are completely incorrect, or do you give them the status of illusions? Roy: They are illusions; living, causally efficacious illusions. But the way you posed the question, you were putting these theories forward as sometimes engaging in the rhetoric of emancipation. I think that this is so only in a very scientistic or ahistorical and feeble way. And I don’t really believe that for the most part they had ideals of emancipation very close to their hearts. It may be that isolated figures like John Stuart Mill, who themselves were noble beings, had them close to their heart—and David Hume too was a noble being, and he had many splendid characteristics. But we are talking really about the effects of their theories; and in general they did not very much talk about the emancipatory projects. They regarded science as a sort of mechanism which would in itself bring about a better society, which was only an extension of what we already had—and necessarily so, on empiricist assumptions: if the world is constituted by empirical invariances, then there is a great problem about how we can have anything better than we already have. So what they had to do was to assume that somehow what was outside or in the past was not an exception to this but a kind of movement towards it—and that, really, is incoherent. And so they denied history, and as Marx himself said of Proudhon, for him the past—history— doesn’t exist anywhere. This holds for positivism generally. So empiricists have a great problem explaining not only change, but any difference—anything other than the structure they presuppose of their own society, and that has to be the surface order. And, really, you can see the tremendous complacency about the social world in a writer like Hume. Not only does he make women and the working class an exception to this rule, at one stage he even talks about the Incas being an exception. So he’s explicitly racist, sexist and classist—really, it’s all there in black and white. But you can say well, in this he was a man of his times, let’s forgive him all that. So let’s forgive him for all that, let’s not hold it against him. But the idea that the world can be described—adequately captured—in terms of surface correlations or empirical invariances is an idea which must always function as an ideology of whatever the presumed invariance is: it can never function as a critical tool, because you can never say: ‘This invariance or regularity holds in my society and it’s wrong.’ Or conversely: ‘This is an empirical invariance but it doesn’t hold in my society.’ You can’t say that without contradicting yourself. As an empiricist, you always start from your own society and assume that there is some aberration—it’s like a laboratory experiment

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which has gone wrong. But you can’t even theorise the conditions of possibility of that. So empiricism really is very incoherent. It’s even only worth discussing, first, to show that it’s wrong; second, to demonstrate how it actually operates in practice; and, third, to reveal its ideological meaning. There’s just one other thing I should get out of the way on empiricism and the positivist worldview. This was (and is) very scientistic. It assumed that science was the only organon, the only vehicle of change and of any liberation that came. But really, we know that science is not neutral and that science as a socio-historical process is always embedded within the structures of a particular society, and that science has given rise to the atomic bomb. You might say that that’s not true, it was science that gave rise to the ideas and displayed the nature of the atomic structure, but it was the politicians and industrialists who decided to develop the bomb. OK, that’s fine. Now pure science has given rise to genetically modified food. And with the emergence of humans, for the first time we have a society in which animals eat their own kind: for the first time, they are given their own species to eat; before humans, cannibalism was unknown in nature—human beings are the only species that has ever had the audacity in the form of cannibalism to eat itself.3 And today we have the proliferation of diseases in the world, like mad cow disease, which, if you like, are the karma of the scientific process, a karma which is exacted on ordinary human beings, not the scientists. But scientists have said that now there is a possibility of cloning human beings. What does this mean? Bad science thinks that it knows better than millions of years of evolution; in its arrogance it abuses its knowledge and thinks that we can change everything without adverse affects. This is extraordinarily anthropocentric and, in the sense of the agents who are doing it, egocentric, as you can see. So critical realism and transcendental realism consist of a critique of actually existing scientific practices, and the supreme values remain those of emancipation. And we can see that in our actual society scientific technical progress has occurred, but it has been distorted or skewed in a particular direction, and moral, ethical and what you could call spiritual progress has lagged far behind. And it is not catching up; it lags so far behind that, really, the results of science are not to be trusted to anyone—either the scientist or the politician or the industrialist—until morality and human goodness, which is there in our ground states, has caught up in the actual world. But catching up will involve once more engaging with the project of emancipation. Emancipation is just simply the throwing off of unnecessary and unwanted determinations, in the first place, and then total liberation is just the release from all unnecessary determination. I now want to show how this fits into the worldview of greater and greater depth that I have been suggesting. So if a false theory, to be applied in practice, presupposes 3 Bhaskar’s

train of thought in this passage seems to be that some form of science or proto-science is intrinsic to the practice of self-conscious beings who must navigate their way in the world, that is, of humans at all stages of the geo-historical process; and that all forms of science make mistakes that may and do sometimes become embedded in hideous social practices, that is, in oppression of various kinds. Cf. Bhaskar 2016, Chap. 2.8, ‘The immanent context and transcendental necessity of transcendental realism’, 37–38.

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a true level of reality, there is no reason to suppose that, behind this true level of reality, there is not an even greater truth and a deeper truth, and that level of reality which was the truth of the false reality, may be a rather superficial or less than a fully adequate account of reality: truer, no doubt, than the level that we initially had, but which may itself presuppose another even deeper level of being. Eventually we would come to a level of being within a domain like the human world, which would be a necessary condition for all higher-order strata and which would be the ground on which all the other strata repose. So if you take the tacit presupposition of emancipatory projects to be that we have within ourselves the possibility of being free and creative, and if that is correct, then the workers, the immediate producers, could organise society themselves. ‘Man is born free but everywhere is in chains’, as Rousseau said. Or go to the Vedic literature and all the great emancipatory traditions: anything which holds out a better future either for an individual person or the totality of human beings presupposes a deep level at which we are free. Chomsky says that we have at birth the innate capacity to generate an infinite number of sentences. Many of us don’t use any more than a few thousand words in our everyday activities, but certainly the capacity to generate truly novel sentences is something we all have. And all the great emancipatory theories have thought that this is something that is intrinsic to us. And not only that, but a lot else besides. So we have in the economic world, just to take the Marxian paradigm for a moment—and we can go into what’s problematic about Marxism at a later stage in this conversation—not only the creativity of the workers, the immediate producers, but also the structure of master–slave relationships within the capitalist mode of production and all the other modes of production which exist alongside it, and within these structures we have layers and layers of intricate bureaucracy, chains of master– slave relationships, instrumental reasoning, systematic networks of buyers and sellers working instrumentally. But it all reposes on the spontaneous and free creativity of the immediate producers. Now, how can I say that? The workers, you might say, are doing things instrumentally. Of course they are. They go to work, and they do it for a reason; they don’t go to work out of their own good nature. The people who work out of their own good nature are the women who are left at home—all those people in systems of production where their good nature is immediately exploited. But as Marx pointed out, the workers have a choice, they are free: they have a choice to work or not to work. If they don’t work, then, according to Marx, the paradigm is that they will die (leave aside alternative modes of production for the moment). So, resentfully perhaps, they take a conscious decision to go to work. Now they go to work, and you say they are working for a reason, instrumentally, and of course they aren’t working to generate a profit or to please their capitalist ‘master’; but actually, in their work activity, without their spontaneous creativity the assembly line could not be kept going, and without the spontaneous acts of creativity that workers show everywhere, which is neither paid nor unpaid—which may be part of the job, but which the worker doesn’t even think about—the whole thing would collapse. Take builders erecting scaffolding: what immense trust they have in each

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other, their human good will and faith that they are not going to let the scaffolding collapse. It’s the same on the assembly line, you have that trust in relation to all your colleagues and you spontaneously manifest it in your creative activity. It is that level of spontaneous creative activity which underpins all systems of production. So if you are looking at any sphere of social life, you see how the stratification works. If you go to the root level, you will see, in the human sphere at least, something which is the free, innate property of human beings which they spontaneously manifest and which is the necessary condition for anything else. Now that root level can be shown without all the other structures, all the other heteronomous orders of determination, even if there is no reason why the workers should think instrumentally about waking up and going to work: those people who, in Indian terms, are in their dharma and who are lucky enough to be in an occupation where they enjoy what they do, will spontaneously wake up and look forward to going to work. And so this is a radicalisation of the vision of putting systems of production in the hands of the immediate producers. The important thing is this: from the point of view of the stratification of nature or being, there is an asymmetry; this could be called the asymmetry of emancipation. The most basic level, the lower-order one, doesn’t depend on the higher-order level, the emergent one, but the emergent one depends on it. So the workers could get on without the wage–capital relationship, they could do what they need to do and what they do do—they could creatively produce without the totality of oppressive structures of production. Similarly instrumental reasoning in general, I argue, presupposes spontaneous, unconditional, unattached behaviours— really loving, creative behaviours; and they could exist without everything that feeds off them.

4.3 Categories of Negation and the Critique of Irrealism Savita: Today our main topic is the middle moments of your dialectic, and in particular, the tremendous creative development of your theory of negation. I’m hoping that it will provide a clue to solving a problem we’ve encountered in discussing the creative moment in social change, and that is that people might get the impression that the whole thing is becoming very individualistic and that you are putting too much burden on individuals to shed heteronomous determinations. In reality, as we’ve mentioned, the society that we are living in is a society where there are social causal laws, and we are determined by them to a very large extent, not only because they are processes that in a very impersonal way impose themselves upon us, but also because we ourselves are sources of their imposition: we are the ones who (re)create them. So most of the time we are caught up in a kind of real situation where we are doing two contradictory things: we are being creative in our daily lives but at the same time we are creating things that come to dominate us. This is of course

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basically the same as the classical Marxist position about the workers producing commodities, and the commodities coming to dominate them, becoming the source of their own enslavement and exploitation. This situation, more or less, still remains with us, until the world is liberated. Our situation is basically structured along the lines of the Marxian understanding of reality and ideology. What is taken as real is an illusion, but a real illusion, an ideology. Actually we are in a classic situation still of appearances and reality. I am very interested in your contribution to solving this problem in your theory of negation.4 Roy: What you say about workers producing not only commodities, but the world of commodities that comes back to haunt them, is very true. Workers actually produce goods and services used by others—use value—but they also produce surplus value. So the level at which they produce surplus value is parasitic on the level at which they produce use value. In terms of the axiology of liberation, they could produce use values and then the communist society would flourish without producing surplus value to be used by capitalists. Now, to take this in a very general sense, what we do in our productive activity is that we produce things, but in doing so we reproduce the conditions of our production. This is the really cruel thing. The especially cruel bit is that this reproduction of the conditions of production, that is, of the social structure, cannot be understood as though it was a reproduction of something external to us, because the actual reproduction process goes through us; so the social structure is not something ‘out there’, it is something ‘in here’, in the moment of reproduction—it inheres within us, it is reproduced in virtue of our activity. This is not individualistic at all: in virtue of our collective activity—everyone in any particular role—it is something in here that is reproduced in the habits of daily life, in our daily activity. And this means that in reproducing the social structure we internalise things within ourselves, including appetites like greed and the need for more commodities which drive the capitalist system on; this inherence means that there is always a psychological aspect or element to the reproduction of any social structure. So to have a good society, we not only have to clear and free ourselves, we have to throw off the social structure. We will come on to how we could do that; but it will not occur until and unless we also throw off the heteronomous determinations inside ourselves, which are internally related to the social structure itself. Look at what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989. The main reason why the commandist system collapsed is that it stifled people’s creativity. Savita: I’m not against creativity; I’m not against the idea that individuals are creative, and will forever be creative. What I want to understand is the negation process, how we get rid of the oppressive structures that we ourselves reproduce. Roy: Our main topic this morning is to explore negativity and categories of negation. The first moment of critical realism sees the world as structured, differentiated and changing; this is the moment at which we think being, and we think it in this way. The important thing here was the revindication of ontology and critique of the epistemic 4 The

next four paragraphs rely on the transcript only; the recording has been lost.

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fallacy, that is, the reduction or analysis of being to or in terms of our knowledge of being. Then the great breakthrough at the second edge of negativity was to critique ontological monovalence; this is the idea that you can’t think negativity as part of being; that is, that there is no negativity, no negation within being. In fact, however, anything new, anything that changes is a negation. This is where creativity comes in. In one sense all human action is creative, but let’s leave that on one side for the moment. In a human act, we are transforming the given in some way, to some extent we are changing the world; otherwise, it wouldn’t be an act. Can you imagine an act that doesn’t change anything from what it would have been otherwise? Even the most routine acts within highly regimented systems are still properly called acts if they are intentional, because without them the world would have been different. If you don’t keep the assembly line going there will be a breakdown of production, so even reproduction of the same is a creative intentional act; it is still making the world different from what it would otherwise be. So changing the world is essential to human agency. But the world itself is changing, and change itself presupposes and consists in removing something that was already there, or presenting for the first time something different, emergent, new. Negation is, in the first instance, then, something presupposed by change. In the second instance, I argue, it has to be understood in its own right, because the world is not just constituted by positive being. The world consists also in nonbeing or absence, and also absence of a determinate kind. Any familiar object, like this table or a person—it is almost a truism to say this—is mostly empty space. If everything was jam-packed together with no spaces, there wouldn’t be any being. If you pack or squash human beings together—a horrible thought-experiment—they are not human beings anymore, they just merge into an undifferentiated mass. Even material objects of any kind would lose their determinacy without any space around them, and the motion within, say, an atom depends on the space within it and also the elasticity of it is ‘walls’. Savita: In fact, you give a very good example, in your book From East to West (Bhaskar 2000, 98), that of a pot, which is a determinate object in the world that could not be what it is without the empty space within it. Roy: The hole that makes the whole; once the pot is shattered, it is no longer a whole, no longer a pot. This brings in nicely how totality relates to negation. If you think about it, you couldn’t understand the articulation of a word without looking at its spaces. A letter in my handwriting is often very small and not very neat; in its smallness it is difficult to see the spaces, and to actually see or make out a letter; to tell an ‘e’ from an ‘a’, you have to be able to see the way the space or absence is formed within it. So, everything we do in life is constituted in its determinacy as much by absence as by presence, and even more so. Take any one kind of presence and it is what you do, how you work around it, that gives it determinacy. Absence is the determinate moment in the social totality. The model here would be one of a potter or sculptor working on a block of marble or a lump of clay or any other material object. The potter creates a hole within the clay. The sculptor has a block of marble, and to give it determinacy, to create something from the block, she absents certain

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elements of it, and then you have a determinate figure. The first thing designers of buildings have to have is a conception of spaces, or rooms with boundaries that are given structure by what is not there. Wherever you look, it is a negation that is the determining moment. So acting, changing, producing, all involve negation in a determinate way. What characterises my concept of negation, in contradistinction to almost all others, is the fact that I focus on determinate absence or negation. Some will say that absence and presence are on a par: that without presence, you can’t have an absence. It is certainly true that without a presence you couldn’t know an absence, because it has to be a positive being for it to be registered by humans; but that’s like saying that without knowledge you couldn’t know the world. This is not to say that the world could not exist without knowledge. The world could exist as absence, as nonbeing without any positive presence. Ontological monovalence, that is, the elimination of absence and of other concepts of negation, eliminates necessary features for the constitution of any determinate reality; even the groundstate moments of transcendence are above all constituted by absence, by a kind of kenosis or emptying. A purely positive conception of being is not possible; but the attempt to construct one has an ideological function that is transparently clear. Within irrealist thought, that is, thought that is not transcendentally realist (Bhaskar 1986, 9), the absence of ontology at the first moment of dialectical critical realism says that you can’t test knowledge against the world, so your knowledge is inviolable. At the second moment, irrealism reinforces this ideological underwriting of the status quo by saying that, if you think there is a world, you can’t find any negativity or negation within it—and of course there is no negation within me, the irrealist, either—so leave my social reality, my human reality, my world just as it is. Nothing is to change, nothing is to end; this is what I call fixism and endism. The world has come to an end—if it ever had a beginning. Most ideologists of ontological monovalence think that the world has now come to the point where it has stopped; that this is the end of history (Fukuyama 1992; Luhmann 1976). So the ideological meaning is very clear. So at the first two levels of dialectical critical realism we think being as structured, differentiated, and changing, and not only as punctuated by absence and contingently by contradictions, but as necessarily punctuated by absences of more or less determinate kinds, as driven in the human world by dialectical learning processes. Then, moving on to the third level, we think being as constituted by internal as well as external relations. The key categorial sin at the first moment is the epistemic fallacy, and then actualism, which is just describing the world in terms of the prevailing pattern of events; that of the second level is ontological monovalence or a purely positive conception of reality; and here, at the third level, it is detotalisation, or what can be called ontological extensionalism. What not having a category of totality means is that things are not intrinsically bound up with each other: something could exist, just as it is, without other things being there—in principle you could have a monadic or solipsistic atomism. Essentially the world is constructed around me; this is an egocentric moment, everything else is only contingently related to that me. But if everything in the world is like that, if everything is independent of everything else, nothing depends on anything else; we are not bound up as wholes, and we are ourselves completely self-contained. But then you ask: How in that case are we

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constituted? Unless we are a whole, unless our internality is itself constituted by parts that function holistically, is itself a whole, all we are is an atom. So actually, this egocentricity, or this atomism, must reduce to a point—a view which I call punctualism; we can only be a point, because, if we regard our own being (myself) as the centre of the world, and everything else doesn’t depend on anything else outside me, then ultimately we have to ask: What about what’s inside me? If we take out the categories of internal relationality, holistic causality and totality, then I’m not a whole in myself; I must just be a point. So if we do without concepts of totality, there could only be one being, which is a monolithic block or a point; and these two concepts can’t be differentiated. So it’s either a Parmenidean block universe (blockism) or a Heraclitan instance (punctualism); blockism and punctualism constitute a sort of dialectical unity of extreme opposites. In reality, nothing could exist unless it was in relation to something else, and nothing is except in relation to its own internal constitution. I’m trying to explain in a very simple way what’s wrong with the pre-existing worldview. We can see at this third level of totality that detotalisation—that is, removing internal relationality, not looking at things as wholes—is ultimately incoherent, because whatever you focus on must immediately have an internal structure, otherwise it becomes a point or just a blob without differentiation, a block; and actually there’s no difference between the two, because you can’t differentiate within this block in any way. What is the ideological meaning of this? According to Plato and the tradition that stems from him—and this is Plato as bad guy—any change within a being must be understood in terms of difference; change is something that is not essential to the being. So you have the idea that the subject, in the subject–predicate form, is something that doesn’t change—for example, if the mother has a baby, the baby is accidental; the predicate, having the baby, doesn’t affect the mother. Now the very example shows the absurdity of this view, because you know that it’s essentially wrong in the life of the mother. It may be true that, if you think of me as the baby, giving me another spoonful of food or another biscuit will not affect me essentially, assuming I’m already well-fed; but having the baby essentially changes the mother. The critical realist worldview, which includes the categories of holistic causality and totality, which depend on there being internal as well as external relations, doesn’t make the mistake of denying that external relations exist, and that some things are accidents or contingencies—at least, superficially, this appears to be the case—but it rather insists that there are some things that are essential to the being of other things, and some processes that things undergo that are truly changes within their own self-identity or essential nature—their innermost being, however that’s defined. Moving on to the fourth domain, of agency, to deny the reality of agency is mechanistic. Unless you allow for the irreducibility of intentional agency, that a change in the world can be produced as a result of the mediation of consciousness, then one of two things happens: you either have dualistic disembodiment—you say that the mind operates at a level completely cut off from material bodies, material causality; or you have reification—the view that actually we don’t really do anything, we are really just glorified machines, and everything that appears to be agency is a result of mechanistic processes. So you have either dualistic disembodiment, which

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tends to be idealistic; or reification, which tends to be materialistic. By contrast, the category of intentional causality allows you to understand that body and material things do have effects on the level of consciousness and ideas, on the meaningful and conceptual aspects of our being; but that, likewise, those aspects of our being affect the level of materiality. These ideational aspects are also social, so we’re not just talking about individuals. So again we have a unified, and what you could call a sensible worldview. It really just beggars belief that all these things had to be said to give an account of the world that is at all plausible, and I think that is what dialectical critical realism has done. Also at the fourth dimension we have, applied to the level of agency, something taken over from the third round of totality, and that is that we have to see theory as part of the social world it describes. So we have the criterion of reflexivity, of the unity of theory and practice. One challenge that critical realism puts out to the world, adopting a standpoint of immanent critique, is to say: ‘I will show you where your totality falls down. Now you try and show me where I’m theorypractice inconsistent, and then I will try and remedy it.’ The remedy may be in the practice, not in the theory. Savita: So the picture that has emerged is of a world that is not of complete positivity, negation of the positivity is always possible; things at any point of time can’t be stabilised as the real truth, because there are always far more layers of truth that have to be taken into account and that come to play a role in our knowledge, and when they do the world changes. And so we are actually within a scenario where we cannot really stabilise the world ideologically; we have to be open to further recovery of truth, as they say in hermeneutics. At this stage of human development, which capitalism is dominating, most of our theories stop at the level of the actual; that is the kind of situation in which we are at the moment. And obviously, as in the case of Marx, it is the responsibility of the intellectual to give us a clue as to how to get out of it—in spite of, and over and above the fact that through a dialectical process changes are going to come anyhow, because the levels of truth and reality have to be reclaimed continually. Now your dialectic is very sophisticated, but at a very mundane level let me ask this question. You tend to put a lot of the burden of changing the world—changing our illusory situation, exiting from demi-reality—on individuals, on their real praxis. But in the last forty or fifty years the praxis—or rather, the world in which the praxis is—has somehow got more muddled. The illusory element of the comprehension of reality, the actualism, has been heightened or made far more sophisticated; we could say that the consumerism, the reification, the alienation has become far more sophisticated. Now, on the critical realist account, this sophistication of the world understood as actual has been effected and perpetuated by some of the best minds. So how do people cut through this in their praxis? Roy: There are four things I would like to take up in response, including the recovery of truth, the priority of self-change and the sophistication and complexification of our regimes of mystification. Before I do that, let me say that it’s very important, when I’m talking about negativity, and the necessity of negativity, to distinguish two very simple senses in which we use the concept of negativity. The first is the sense in which negativity specifies in a very simple, descriptive way that something

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is not, or is, changing; and the second is when it means that something is bad. So when I talk about ontological monovalence and the necessity to think being as incorporating negativity, I’m only talking about negation in the descriptive sense; I’m not immediately saying that you have to understand the world in a negative, in the sense of bad, way. I say this only because some people who are not familiar with dialectical concepts may have the idea that, in talking so much about negativity, I’m talking about what is bad or praising what is bad, because when they say that something is negative, they mean that it’s bad. I’m not talking about this at all. Of course, there is, as usual, a dialectical connection, in that ills and lacks of things which are necessary to human beings or which constitute the human essence are absences, and that will be bad. And then what we are trying to do is recognise that badness is in reality, and that is only part of accepting the truth. That’s the beginning of explanatory critique. Before going through your crucial points with you, I think I should just complete the ideological scenario stemming from my metacritique of Western philosophy. The key categorial error at the first moment (the epistemic fallacy) says: ‘Don’t challenge me—what I am and my beliefs—by showing me a world or telling me there is a world against which I can test my views.’ The second (ontological monovalence) says: ‘In any case, don’t challenge me by seeing that my beliefs could be changed in some way.’ The third (ontological extensionalism) says: ‘There is nothing out there in the world that can affect me—I’m a sacrosanct unit.’ Taking these together, we have an ideological worldview of atomistic individuals, all self-contained, and what I call analytical or abstract universality; the world outside these atomistic individuals is a world of the endless repetition of the same. So this is a very impoverished worldview, but that is the worldview of positivism, and it underlies, as we may see this afternoon, modernism. The meaning of the fourth error (dualistic disembodiment/reductionist reification) is that there is no action; there is nothing I can do to change the world. The second aspect of the fourth domain of dialectical critical realism, understanding the reflexivity of theory and practice, supposes that you can change the world; so the irrealist says: ’OK, I will retreat with my theories—my theories don’t have to be incorporated into the world that I can change.’ So it’s pretty clear that all these errors are multiple levels of reinforcement of the status quo. This is their real social meaning.

Chapter 5

Recovery of Truth and the Dialectic of Self-realisation

5.1 Recovering Truth and Escaping from Mystification Roy: Now to come on to your most insightful remarks, first of all about the recovery of truth. The possibility of emancipation depends at each stage on this recovery, this revealing of truth, which we tacitly presuppose and which is there as the backdrop to any system of oppression—we tacitly presuppose it, we live it, we are it in our daily reality. I have already remarked that the truth of exploitation is human creativity: the truth of master–slave relationships is that creativity. The truth of war and violence, of all oppression of humans, is human love, unconditional love: it sustains spontaneously. These are very radical claims. The truth of ugliness, you could say, is beauty. The truth of systems of domination, which force people to do things, is human freedom. To recover these truths is vital at this moment in human being, because we are at a point of global crisis. Our world, the planet, which is the habitat of the human species, is in ecological crisis and chronic economic imbalance and is afflicted by alienation and anomie, and many other things that profoundly threaten its survival, including the ever-continuing possibility of a holocaust, set off by one individual act, by a group act of terrorism, by war between different so-called ‘legitimate’ nuclear powers, or even by mass killing and genocide. No century before the twentieth has known more killing, certainly in absolute terms, and more killing as a result of conscious intentional decisions at the level of military chiefs of staff and governments. No century has seen more killing of civilians by both armies and other people. Earlier, killing and fighting were restricted to soldiers—they just fought with each other, which was their job; people never got involved in it. There may have been occasional riots, or someone may have been hit by a stray bullet, but this is mass violence, and also violence conducted by the masses, which is also a new development.

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So it’s like going back to the stage of cannibalism.1 Let’s not get into that, but when you think about it, not only does no other species eat their own kind, but very few other species kill their own kind. Tigers never kill tigers. You might say that male deer will challenge each other for dominance or possession of female deer, and then they might accidentally kill each other, but it is not an essential part of the process. So this recovery of truth is essential because—just to focus on the most dramatic and certain thing—we are in ecological crisis. On current trends, the planet, our species habitat, will be destroyed itself within a few centuries. We know that within twenty-five years, at existing rates, great chunks of the world will go under water. Bangladesh is four feet above sea level; its very existence, its very survival is under threat. Many islands of the world will definitely go under within fifty years. Cataclysmic changes will occur to the eastern seaboard of the USA, and the geography of Britain will look very different; there will be no South East, no London, within fifty years. So the world will be very different, and actually it will soon cease to be habitable. So we are in what has been called the endgame.2 Never has the recovery of truth become so essential, just for our survival as a species. It’s now or never. Savita: Our societies in all parts of the world have not been able to realise the conditions of freedom, and ruling elites have no intention or interest in recovering the deeper levels of our being. A few days ago, I saw a programme on television in which I learnt that Steven Spielberg has made a film (Spielberg 2001) dedicated to his friend Stanley Kubrick in which he creates a robot-child who is programmed to love its parents unconditionally. I thought that this was very sad, because society has not been able to produce individuals who love each other unconditionally. So it is basically a social failure, a social inadequacy or lack that is pushing us all in the wrong direction. Roy: This is a very important point. When Marx said that his vision of a communist society was one in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all, he was supposing that we could have a society which would allow the development of individuals as conforming to that formula, in which the possibilities of development of each individual would be truly recognised and truly regarded as the condition of the freedom of all. So everyone would feel for everyone else, they would respect, they would understand their concrete singularity. They would have respect, tolerance and love for each other. No society has even begun to approximate that. But that is the only kind of society which is sustainable. I will try to show and explain how human freedom is indivisible. Savita: I would very much like you to answer my question about escaping from mystification. Capitalism is such a unique mode of production, but not because it’s based on exploitation and domination—so were all other modes of production, 1A

return to cannibalism is among the consequences of ‘the winter of the world’ thematised by Shelley (The Revolt of Islam (1818), canto 10, stanza 19) and alluded to in the stanzas I have chosen as an epigraph for this book. 2 The allusion is to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957), which is set inside a human skull on an ecologically devastated planet.

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except perhaps primitive communist society in its own specific mode. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it has been able to obfuscate the mechanism of exploitation, so it reproduces and extends itself far more readily and more enduringly than other modes. Roy: Absolutely—as your earlier remarks brought out very nicely too. What capitalism has done is systematically produce level upon level of mystification, and this latest fantasy of an unconditionally loving robot is part of the process. Given that capitalism is a master–slave-type system, this process is necessary because every human being has an element of spontaneous, unconditional love within them, which may be totally masked by everything else around them. But it’s actually unconditional, spontaneous love that keeps any social organisation going; and that is human love, and it is a natural or innate property of human beings. Spontaneously the mother will look after and love the child, and spontaneously the child will reciprocate. Spontaneously the child loves another child, it looks for a child to love; it cries when another child hurts itself—spontaneously it feels love and identifies with that other. We will come on to talk about the moments of the Hegelian dialectic in relation to this some time, but this capacity to be another, to feel for another, is such a natural human quality that we all cry when we see or hear of a terrible tragedy. Savita: Do you think that it’s possible for capitalism to actualise this quality of love that it presupposes? Would it not affect its ideology of profit making and domination? Spielberg’s genetically improved robot-like human being who loves unconditionally can be interpreted as capitalist society tacitly realising that the unconditionally loving kind of person is absolutely necessary, otherwise capitalism really has brought the world to its endgame. However, unconditional love doesn’t accept that egotism and rampant individualism are necessary for the production of profit and the perpetuation of the system. In spite of the fact that capitalism tacitly accepts unconditional love, it doesn’t want to change itself; it wants an exit, a way out, at the level of fantasy and mystification. Roy: Definitely. And this fantasy and mystification reflect what would be very convenient for capitalism. If a robot just were to do everything without wanting anything for itself, without even wanting its freedom—because as a robot it couldn’t be free, it couldn’t be realised—if it just gave without getting, this would be very convenient for capitalism. Actually, doing is giving; when we do, we transform the world, but doing is also a giving, we give to another. Within capitalist society, we demand something in return for the giving. If you could have workers or immediate producers or citizens who just gave without expecting anything back, like their own freedom, their own humanity, their own dignity and self-esteem, their self-realisation, this would be a capitalist dream. So, this is a very symptomatic fantasy that you are telling me about.3 3 Cf.

Bertolt Brecht’s poem of 1939: General, your tank is a powerful vehicle/It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men./But it has one defect:/ It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful./It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant./But it has one defect:/It needs a mechanic.

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Savita: You produce a being that would not demand freedom—just as workers should not be demanding freedom within capitalism, according to the logic of its relations of production. But then you would not also have something that is vitally necessary for capitalism to be born and sustain itself, and that is unconditional love. Roy: Yes. But you see, this is a fantasy, because a machine can never manifest the spontaneity that human beings manifest. Everyone knows this from their experience of relating to machines, be it a computer or a car, and so on—at a certain point you just have to kick them to get them going. That’s a jokey way of saying that machines always depend on human ingenuity. A robot depends on someone switching it on. Just watch crowds of people hurrying along city footpaths—it’s a miracle how we avoid crashing into each other. You watch robots and machines, they would be crashing all over the place; they could never manage it, no matter how beautifully programmed they were. You might say there are machines that can play lovely chess, but chess has a finite set of rules. The world is infinite and open; chess is a closed system. It may be a closed system within which there are infinite possibilities of expanding, but it’s still radically closed or finite: there are only a small number of pieces and rules governing their operation—probably twelve propositions completely describe chess. How many propositions would it take even to begin to describe ten feet of a typical Indian city pavement? You wouldn’t know where to begin. The weather would be one element, but you know how tremendously open that is. A stretch of pavement is always changing. No two human beings are the same, everyone is carrying a different burden—and how do we steer ourselves around? Now this is very interesting. No one knows how we do things so tacitly and spontaneously and intuitively, how we avoid crashes. Nine out of ten people know when they are being stared at from behind. How do I know this? When I was at Edinburgh, in my first job outside Oxford (which I left because of its complacency), they set up the first Chair of paranormal psychology, and a large number of students in that department were also doing philosophy, and so a lot of my students were doing PhD theses on things like telepathy or abilities that science can’t make sense of, but which are absolutely essential to human lives. How does a mother know intuitively when her child is coming home? But take the case of people knowing they are being stared at from behind—there is absolutely no physical mechanism, or it’s very obscure. Even to begin to make sense of it, you have to have a much enlarged conception of seeing, and regard the body as in some way functioning as a whole, beyond the bounds of normal biological science—which obviously it must do. If you think about how you actually drive a car, the cues that you follow, it’s utterly amazing. And if you think how routinely a mother can be feeding a child, talking to her other children, peeling the potatoes, or telling someone else what to do—nine or ten different things, all at once, beautifully and holistically organised, that’s even more amazing. In an open-systemic world, we have the creativity and ingenuity to do this, operating from what I call our ground state, our true inner being, ‘General, man is very useful./He can fly and he can kill./But he has one defect:/He can think. Brecht 2006, 58–9. Today, ‘surveillance capitalism’ aspires to by-pass the autonomous person completely, manipulatively making ‘good’ robots of us all. See Zuboff 2019.

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once we’ve totally assimilated a practice like driving a car or walking through a street—and obviously, young children would crash into each other, like the robots. Once we master this capacity, then we can perform miracles—and those are the miracles that science doesn’t understand, or says are unnecessary for everything, including science itself. Savita: Everything you’re saying is really great. I think the real challenge for dialectical critical realism would be to show the way to reclaim that part of reality or become conscious ontologically to the extent that you recognise the levels of mystification that the system is building up all the time. To see past or through these layers of mystification is very important. How do we do it? Roy: The first thing is to look at theories of mystification. These are theories— explanatory critiques—which attempt to explain the world as constituted by illusions. You can become conscious of this and then become conscious of the falsity of the beliefs that you’re acting under. You may, however, if you’re not an intellectual, just spontaneously want greater freedom, and then you’re into what I call in Dialectic the dialectic of desire to freedom; this dialectic shows how, starting from desire, if you keep going you reach a point eventually where you must desire something like the good society. So it can be shown that there are certain learning processes inexorably going on at different levels within daily life whereby agents can become conscious of the illusory character of the social world and their own internally constituted human world in which they live. But ultimately the only way is by getting people to see, by talking to them, that this is how we really are; and that how we really are we could be in actuality—what we really are sustains everything else. We could—we would— flourish without the totality of the sources of heteronomous determination—all those structures of oppression; we don’t need them, but they need us. So this is where the asymmetry of liberation or emancipation comes in. People can spontaneously understand this, but generally they have to be in a situation where it comes to them, and normally it comes to them mediated by some or other form of discourse. As I said earlier, we are in a critical situation now, and what seems to be necessitated is a global revolution, as there is a global crisis everywhere. My recipe is for everyone to be most truly themselves, in their ground state, as the best response to this, and one that could be successful. It may take us two days to fully understand this intuition. This brings me very close to another question you raised.

5.2 The Question of Self-change and Social Transformation You challenged me that often it is thought that my recent transcendental inflexion or development within dialectical critical realism seems to be in some way individualist by placing a great premium on self-change. Let me just explain this very simply and clearly. What I did in the development of the fourth domain of dialectical critical realism, which expands the transformational model of social activity, is to show how any

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social act has to be understood in terms of four dimensions of social being. These are, as I’ve already mentioned, our material transactions with nature, our social interactions with others, our reproduction or transformation of the social structure and the stratification of our own personalities. In the transcendentalisation of the fourth domain in the latest stage of my work I argue that, not only are agency and intentionality irreducible, but agency must ultimately be mediated by spontaneous agency, by a moment or aspect of basic action; that is, by a level of action at which we just do, which we do not do by doing something else.4 We can’t have any effects on the world unless at some point we just do something. We can go through a very elaborate process of thinking, of intentional planning, of instrumental reasoning, but it always gets to the point where we just have to do something. Where that point is will depend on the individual, how elaborate and complex they want to make the chain of reasoning, and also how much spontaneous mastery they have in the subject matter. So when I’m talking philosophy, I don’t really have to think, I just do it; but most people when they talk philosophy have to think before they do it. Most of us don’t have to think before we say something— once we’ve worked out what we want to say, we just speak; we don’t decide how we are going to say the proposition we want expressed once we’ve worked out the proposition, we just say it. Most of us when we eat a biscuit don’t even think about it, we normally just pick it up, if we think that is the correct thing to do. Someone who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease has to work and try very hard to pick up a biscuit, like a very young child has to. These abilities are slowly mastered in a learning process in which we become one with the capacity, and they can also be lost as a result of disease, which we call disability. Now, it follows from the necessity for a spontaneous moment within action that anything we do must be mediated by our own action. If I want to join a political party to participate in their programme, then this is an act of me. So I’m taking myself into the social world, and the only way I can operate on the social world is mediated by an action which is spontaneously a part of me, or is something that is coming from me. But what has happened up till now, say in the practice of left-wing political parties, is that, to invoke Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, the educators have not educated themselves. We have gone into political parties and tried to transform society without first transforming ourselves. What happens if we haven’t transformed ourselves is, first, we will probably assume the same fundamental structure of instrumentalist reasoning, conditionality and master–slave relationships when we are in power. We may even operate within the same categorial form: so in the Soviet bloc the socialist parties and governments, really, substituted the master–slave relationship within the capital–wage-labour relationship with the master–slave relationship of the communist party manager to the immediate producer. The immediate producers, no less than

4 This point is already made, and basic action thematised, in critical naturalism and dialectical critical

realism. See Bhaskar 1979, 82–3 and 1993, 147n. In the latter, ‘basis actions’ should read ‘basic actions’.

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in capitalism, were not in control of production. Their creativity was stifled, denied and suppressed just as much as under capitalism. I’m not arguing that nothing was gained—a lot was gained; the existence of the Soviet bloc for the best part of the century certainly helped to speed up decolonisation, increase the rights of women worldwide, but especially in the West, and give rise to the welfare state. All these gains are being taken back now; the welfare state is being dismantled, women are again being told to stay in the family, and there’s recolonisation in one form or another, at least arguably. So that was an important thing; capitalism was under threat—under threat from a different set of would-be masters: the bureaucrats who had taken power in the Soviet bloc. But, of course, it was also realised that, partly because of the rhetoric of the Soviet bloc, capitalism was under threat from its own people. The aspiration to transform it was still there. Around 1945–1947, the French Communist Party was really in a position to take power, and nearly did, and so did the Italian Communist Party. They were very close to it, and they might well have done so but for some very rapid reforms plus Keynesian pump-priming, that is, giving people money to do nothing—to dig a hole and then fill it in—as a way of keeping up demand for consumer products and commodities and avoiding a slump. It was an absurd parody—think of the wonderful things that could have been done. But Keynes said, what you do is pay people to do nothing. Now Keynes was a highly intelligent person, he wasn’t sympathising with capitalism, he was just telling them that this was the only way to do it, and he was right. After the First World War, he predicted the economic collapse of Germany and the rise of fascism, and at the end of the Second World War, he was around to theorise the pump-priming that saved capitalism. When you think about it, this technique of paying people just to keep the capitalist economy going is reflected today in further absurdities in the irrationalism of capitalism. More food is produced than can be consumed in the world, so there is no reason why there should be a food shortage anywhere. Farmers in America and other parts of the world are paid to keep production down; they are given subsidies to control production, and the surplus gets thrown away. And this is done in the interests of keeping the farm base. There are good reasons why politicians do it, in their own interests. But really there is no reason at all why our planet couldn’t be self-sufficient in food, why the people couldn’t be free. Now I’ve got a bit distracted from the question of self-change. We’ve seen that everything that you do in society is mediated by your own action, so if you don’t get yourself right, you will project your own problems onto society. Because society passes through you, you have to, as part of your social work, effect an internal revolution of self. Let’s go through this step by step. First, if you change yourself for the better, since you are part of society you immediately make society better. Second, if you become more of your real self, which is spontaneously loving and creative, and have less heteronomy in yourself, spontaneously you will act in a better way—you will immediately be a better social agent. Third, when you act in society, you will be acting more spontaneously rightly and in a freer way, so your social activity and social interactions with other people will be better. Spontaneously, we’re loving, we’re kind, we’re generous, we’re compassionate; realising these qualities within yourself will

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make you even more cooperative with the people all around you. And when you go into a political party you will not assume that you have to behave differently, you will behave in the same friendly way to the people in your party committed to social change. And then when you gain power, you won’t stop behaving in the same friendly, loving, compassionate way, because you will carry your essence, you will be prefiguring in your own being part of the new social structure you are creating. So, really, whenever you are trying to produce social change or working within the social collectivity, ultimately it is you who is working; there is no way that you could work with others without you working. So you can invert the old rule of Western philosophy that change is only in the predicate: here I’m saying that change is only in the subject. Really, logically, any change is always coming from you. The point of action, even in the collectivity, is always your action. Savita: Perhaps at this point the same principle would still be at work. The self-change must be necessitated by or prefigure understanding of a certain kind of lack—the perception or realisation that the situation at the moment, within capitalist society, is one of inadequacy, of less freedom. It is this lack that is being mystified, that is what I’m trying to say; the very point from which self-change must start has been overlaid by complex layers of mystification. Roy: You can see the reason for this, because people have certainly cottoned onto capitalism. So a new ideology has to be unveiled, the notion that we are moving into a new phase—a phase of post-capitalism. There is a certain truth in this, but postcapitalism is not just an ideology of capitalism; rather, capitalism itself is intrinsically developing in a certain way so as to encourage—in its complex elaboration, in its search for profits—greater mystification. Let’s look at the traditional stage of Taylorism. There you had large groups of workers in large factories, producing more and more, placed in close physical proximity to each other. It was these factors that created the great revolutionary working class initiatives from 1917 through to 1968. This was the heyday of Taylorism—physical proximity gave rise to close solidarity. Nowadays Taylorism—Taylor’s models of production—are no longer economically successful. There is an economic motive, not just a political one, and so we have the development of institutions of new information technologies, flexible specialisation, and the artificial creation of new consumer markets. You can argue that this is part of the logic of capitalism, part of the process of ideological reproduction of capitalism, but this would be to commit a sort of categorial mistake that Marx never committed. It is not really correct to say what is the ideology of capitalism, on the one hand, and what is capitalism, on the other; capitalism is intrinsically also its ideology. So these things are happening in the interests of profit, in the interests of capitalist motivation; but you can’t say that mystification is not part of that process. It is not that capitalism has an economic mechanism, which results in certain initiatives independently of the realisation of surplus value as profit; the realisation of surplus value as profit is something that depends on a total accounting of the situation. So you can’t really ask to what extent these new techniques of flexible specialisation are economic and to what extent

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political and ideological. Today they are even taking work back into the home. One of my publishers had lots of workers when I started publishing with them, now they have just two—everyone else is at home. Obviously this workforce is easier to control, but they would also say that it’s more profitable. Actually, these are two sides of the same coin. After the very first stage of Fordism, we had the need for increasing state regulation to keep the economy pump primed. Today, with the removal of the threats of Soviet rivalry and of a takeover by the masses, conceived in the traditional sense historically by the socialist political parties; that is, with the collapse of actually existing socialism as a feasible political programme (not of socialism as a laudable ideal—we will go into this later) and the rise of Fabianism, which removed the threat of revolution from below, the state is being deregulated. This is liberalisation. So both of the two planks of the old regime of capital accumulation have been dismantled. You can see that both deregulation and flexible specialisation function in the interests of profit and at the same time entrain increasing commodification of all areas of social life and the co-presence of commodified and non-commodified areas, even within a single person, or a single person’s role. There is a gap of indeterminable duration in the recordings here. Roy: … the moment when the creative energies of the masses are truly freed because a structure of oppression has been thrown off. So Lenin approved the revolutionary festival of the oppressed, and he was absolutely right. Tremendous things were done in 1917. I truly think that the self-kenosis, the total destruction of the Soviet system, happened in the 1980s. Now the extraordinary thing is that no one really foresaw it; never was the acceptance of the actuality of actually existing socialism greater on the part of the West. The Berlin Wall was still there, but it was a metaphor. In the days when Communism was a real threat to the West, people used to be shot by East German border guards if they tried to cross the frontier. In the 1980s, people increasingly freely crossed the frontier. And it was something completely unexpected, spontaneous and ubiquitous that happened in Eastern Europe, which can be made sense of only in the blackbird sort of way,5 realy, except that everyone went into a little bit of their ground state in their heteronomous formation and said: ‘Hey! Visas, travel, consumption. These are things that I want.’ Savita: Here’s a sceptical question again. How come people in the capitalist world are not getting in touch with their ground states? Roy: They are! 5 In

the UK, beginning in the 1920s, blackbirds and ten other species of bird have been observed widely to open cardboard and silver foil tops of milk bottles and feed on the cream that settles at the top. It seems that, once one bird made the discovery, knowledge both that milk bottles are a source of food and of techniques for accessing it spread rapidly throughout the species via a social learning process. See, for example, Fisher and Hinde n.d.

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Savita: Just ask a woman on the television who is trying to sell you something whether she’s free or not. She will certainly say that she is free, she has got more power, more money to move around, to have a holiday, to buy a good house. It doesn’t matter to her if her body is being used, I mean commodified. Roy: Yes, that is certainly the case. In some aspects of her being she may be expanded, because what she was doing before may have been very servile for her, and now she is a star on television and she is feeling loved and adored and everything. But actually, before she moves into the television studio and says her well-rehearsed lines, she puts some makeup on her face just spontaneously and says goodbye to the kinds, giving them a peck on the cheek, spontaneously. And the cameramen taking pictures of her do their thing spontaneously. And that she gets paid at the end of the month, this is taken on trust. This is a most extraordinary thing. People will do things— everything—on trust. Take a one pound note. It says: ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of one pound.’ The promissory aspect—the making of a promise— is essential to the stability of money, because if everyone went to their bank and tried to claim their money, the system would collapse. It’s all sustained on trust. Savita: But doesn’t that woman need to get in touch with her ground state? Roy: The thing is, she is in touch; she is already in touch with her ground state, but she doesn’t realise it. She is actually spontaneously trusting her employer—probably quite wrongly—but that is a spontaneous attitude. Supposing someone is slapped on the cheek; if they turn the other cheek, this is a very unusual or unspontaneous attitude. Lots of people allow themselves to be exploited, to be ripped off: they are allowing this, it is sustained by their own innate goodness and their trust in other people. This may be quite wrong; they may be being used by a system. But in the case of the system, once a person becomes conscious of this, there are various things that they can do about it. In the case of the person, there are again various things that they can do. What you can do always depends on the situation. Supposing you suddenly become aware that someone in your own family in a position of power is oppressing you—you may be a dependent wife or a dependent child, and your husband or father is oppressing you—then you wait for the strategic moment (you know that you are never going to win in an overt struggle) and, if it’s just a mild oppression, you affirm yourself, you assert yourself. You say: ‘Listen, stop pushing me around.’ You stand up for yourself. Try saying that to a capitalist, and you will be fired. You explain that to people gradually, and they come to see how everything they do is actually sustained by properties of the ground state, because the whole show would collapse immediately if people didn’t trust each other. Behind the market, behind the actual buying and selling of the market, its ‘hidden hand’ is actually what development economists have called ‘the invisible handshake’ (Okun 1981), because market deals are fixed by persons in social interaction. Now how come that someone trusts another in such situations? These are what economists call ‘incomplete’ contracts. Someone comes into India and says: ‘You give me a license, and I will make sure your firm does all right.’ This is trust, and this happens everywhere.

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Savita: But does that woman have a need to realise that she should not to be reduced to a commodity herself? Roy: Yes. She’s on a dialectic of self-realisation. When she’s made aware that the whole system and everything she is depend upon mobilising the beautiful properties of her ground state; when she realises this, then she’s on a dialectic of self-realisation, she’s moving to a point where she will begin to see that it’s wrong to treat human beings or their powers as commodities. Now she may say that it’s wrong to treat human beings as commodities, and still stay in that job strategically; just like the person who is being bullied by her husband, because the children haven’t grown up or for some other reason, doesn’t get out and have a divorce. So you can move strategically only sometimes. When you make the move at a social level depends on when the time is ripe. But when you make the move to greater self-realisation, the time is now, and the place is here. There’s never not now and not here; there’s never another place, and it can always be done. It doesn’t entail immediately anything for action against major enemies. You have to be strategic and careful; even if you have a terrible addiction, say smoking, and you want to give it up, you choose the right time: you build on enhanced self-esteem, and then you use that, you probably go on a holiday and you don’t take any cigarettes with you, or you take some and smoke only five, then four and three, and finally you don’t smoke anymore. Savita: But how is it possible to get someone to choose that now and here, that’s the point; so that the person whose body is being used to sell us things on the television would be able to say, if you asked her, that she seems like a commodity. Roy: But you don’t put it that way. You say: ‘Listen, Radha, do you realise that everything you do in life is actually sustained by all this loving and spontaneous free creative activity that you do spontaneously and unconditionally for everyone else?’ You talk to her like this for a bit, and then you say: ‘But actually, you’re trusting that you will get paid, and without that trust the show couldn’t go on.’ After she has worked at understanding this point—and this is a conceptual revolution we are talking about, because understanding these things is not a question of accepting external knowledge; you have to see it, you have build it in, you have to learn it, you have to live it. You can’t tell her: ‘You understand, you are being treated just like a commodity?’ She will have to work on understanding these truths and live them for a bit. If she has a degree in economics, she probably knows that anyway. If she doesn’t know anything about economics, you elicit these truths, and then you ask: ‘Do you think that this role you’re performing, in this society, is consistent with your self-realisation and the self-realisation of everyone you’re connected to; that is, in the first instance, everyone you can identify with—love—or feel for?’ Suppose she says: ‘Yes.’ Then you say: ‘Can you imagine what would happen if everything you did in your life was commodified in that way—which is the way our society is going—and if everything that everyone else did in that life was commodified?’ You take her back to the Spielberg scenario, what would happen then. She may then begin to think, and you take her into her job situation, and she will totally realise, much sooner than you think; once she has understood the truth of this conceptual revolution—lived it, built

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it in—she will realise that she is being treated as a commodity, and then she will have to think strategically about what to do. This is on a different level of being. I believe in the possibility of a society without money. I don’t like money. Nevertheless, for me to function, money has to come; I have to have money in my pocket. When will I give up money? I give up the desire for money; hopefully, I don’t have that desire anymore. And when I actually give up money is when I no longer need to use it. Now Radha will be a freer person immediately for realising that that’s just a role that she slips into; and then she can choose to slip into that role or not to slip into it. Now, can someone not act a role in a capitalist economy? No, it is virtually impossible. Everyone is forced to do things which are untrue to their ideal. But if everyone is in the ground state and realises this, then—in a way which won’t be planned or premeditated—there’s some possibility of saving the human race. And it’s just that possibility that we’re working on, and there’s no other way to work on it. Remember, the deeper you are, the more you fathom the depths of reality, the more you can see and move, the wider the embrace of any thought or feeling you have: remember the tenth—or second—blackbird effect. And therefore don’t lose hope, and don’t be discouraged. And also realise that this means that even the most enlightened beings have to work within the capitalist world, because they are just being obstructed, so don’t expect them to go without money or to go without clothes; this wouldn’t be a sensible or enlightened thing to do in the contemporary world. Savita: But it isn’t about not needing money, it’s about not understanding. Roy: It is not Radha’s fault that she has a cushy job. Where her failing would be is if she didn’t realise herself, whatever her job. Now, if I was a very rich capitalist, I would try to use my capital, I’m pretty sure, for good purposes, like Engels helped Marx; so I would probably set up fifty kinds of co-operative farm—whatever, it’s a hypothetical question. I’m not sure that I would actually renounce the role of being a capitalist, because it would be strategically quite useful. Suppose it’s said that there’s an inconsistency there between my theory and my practice. Savita: You do have a theory, now, which you’ve been elaborating. Getting enlightenment, that’s the thing—getting from unenlightenment to enlightenment. How can Radha see and grab that moment of the way that you have been showing as to how a person who has actually become a commodity in the market can come to think otherwise? She thinks that she has become a free person, far more expanded, with more capacities, because the capitalist system pays her to be a commodity, and that she can enjoy the fruits of the capitalist world. She lives in this world, acts according to its logic and, on the same logic, she is never out of it—that’s the point. Within the logic of the capitalist system, she thinks that she’s a flourishing person. She has flourished by reducing herself to a commodity. She doesn’t realise that this is what she has done, she just thinks that she has a job and that she’s selling something; she thinks that she’s just a saleswoman, and being a saleswoman is not so bad, because in this society, we are always in a relationship of exchange, so you’re always exchanging something or the other, you’re in that kind of activity all the time. But the specificity

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of the capitalist mode of production is commodification, and commodification is something that that woman could never have escaped; she couldn’t possibly have escaped it—even though she thinks that she has a good job, that thing happened to her. And it becomes even more outrageous if you ask her if she has become a commodity. She denies it; she says: ‘No. In fact, I have gained freedom. And all the people who have been telling me that I’m a commodity actually have a false notion.’ She turns the issue around and says: ‘Actually, it’s you who have a false notion.’ So she’s suffering from a kind of double illusion: the illusion that she has escaped commodification and the illusion that she is free. What is the way out is the question transcendental dialectical critical realism needs to answer. Roy: Yes. But she reduces herself to a commodity only in the role she plays on the television; her ground state is always there, and she is in touch with it in her everyday activities. All you can do is to understand that society couldn’t function unless by courtesy of your ground state, by courtesy of your loving, creative kindness, your energy, your beauty—all your little touches—your intuition, your tacit holistic thinking, your fluency—all the difficult practices you have mastered. You show that to everyone. You discuss with them, you dialogue with them. You show them how, by eliminating one by one all the sources of heteronomy within them, they are actually— through the theorem of the inherence of social structure within people—cutting off the supply lines of the social structure, and gradually they will become more and more free, that is to say, they will become more and more just and only what they essentially are; and in the end they will be only something that is consistent with what they are already doing to sustain everything. The question of whether a person strategically decides to move from one job to another is really up to them, and it will depend on their own dialectic—their personal situation and social circumstances— and what is the sensible thing to do in that context. You see, this view is not a fanatical view. It is not telling everyone to stop being commodities or something like that. You can’t—the only thing you can be is be your self. Now, realising that you are your self, that you sustain the world of commodities, and that you are engaged willy-nilly in acts which at the moment sustain the system; but understanding that at this deeper level you are acting and being from a standpoint which is cutting the supply lines of the system, which feed into desire and greed, you will be telling everyone that we don’t need greed, you will be telling them about the global crisis, about the chronic imbalances that capitalism and the totality of systems of oppression are facing, and the dialectic of self-realisation and freedom could snowball; you will be discussing with them, nicely, showing them that in their worst situations, in their worst moments, in the most horrendous structures they operate within, there is love, there is creative energy—getting them to realise that that’s all there is, that that is all the energy of the world. Once all the energy of the world is in the ground state, there is no space for any system of oppression. It will all be withdrawn. This is the food that is what those systems feed on. Bring this back to the ground state, have no conditions, no attachment, no instrumental reasoning, nothing but the ground state; be totally loving, creative, inventive, be focused in the here and now, and you are cutting off the supply lines. You will have to go to work,

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perhaps you have a family to feed, and that work will be capitalist. But gradually, slowly, there will come a point where the supply lines are too thin, and then the system will collapse. And if the system collapses before the planet does, then we’re free! There’s no betting on it, but this is the only way. Savita: (laughing appreciatively): This kind of scenario or position, does it have to be politicised, do we need a political party? Roy: No—well, anything is possible, but I would be worried because, in a context of master–slavery, politics unfortunately is concerned, not with empowering the powerless, but with manipulating power, to be very frank. It’s concerned with telling people what to do, and not doing it yourself; or you may do something yourself and that becomes a mask or a sound bite. Politics has very little credibility in the present world, and I don’t really see a political party as the correct forum for this. You could think more of a movement, but one which is not organised—though there may be points of organisation and mobilisation—and there may be books or talks or poems in the idiom of the social movement, things that have been discredited in politics as we know it. The things is, the relationship between a political party and the masses of ordinary people is a master–slave relationship, an instrumental relationship and a relationship of conditionality. It’s also a relationship that makes the people dependent on politicians. But we want to make the people independent, autonomous and free. Savita: To politicise the movement would be to fall back on those institutions we want to get rid of. Roy: Absolutely. I think we want to do away with all authority, all sources of authority other than our selves, be they religious, political or economic. But I should sum up now. The goal of universal self-realisation can only be achieved one person by one person. But achieving it for yourself, in yourself, is not only the best way of changing society, it is actually the only way you can change society. Because, really, you can’t do anything except through yourself. Yesterday, when we were discussing creativity, I argued that a tool like logic can’t force anyone to see anything; they just have to see it. In the same way, you can’t force someone to be free. Freedom to, and freedom to be an effective agent of social change, can only come from within; and when it comes from within, you immediately change society. And, other things being equal, you will immediately be a better agent of social change; because you are more in your ground state, your actions will be more spontaneously correct, more loving, more creative. So whatever you put your mind to will be better, other things being equal. When you’re in this state, you will be more in tune with everyone else, you will be better able to communicate with them; but also, whatever it is that you feel in this ground state, you will find that you will be communicating out of empathy. You see, perception—our interaction with world— is two-way: on the one hand, we perceive the world, and secondly we act on the knowledge. Similarly with the ground state, it can go from us ourselves to the rest, and from the rest to ourselves. Now, I have looked at action from this ground state from the point of view of our being responsive to the rest of the totality, but there is no reason to suppose that

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the rest of the totality won’t be responsive to our actions, because we are acting at a very deep level; if a strategy were in place here, we would be acting from a very deep strategic level. This is the level at which Krishna told Arjuna he should act from when shooting the arrow; really, it’s just action without any attachment, just total absorption, total concentration, single-pointed clarity: then you will hit the target. When you’re worrying and thinking about what you’re doing to your kin, whether this is the right time for the battle, or something like that, your attention and energy will be dissipated. Here, in the ground state, when you are totally undivided, focused, concentrated, absorbed by what you are doing, whatever intentional action you perform will be very focused, very clear and, because you are operating from a very deep level of reality, it will have tremendous ripples. And just a few ripples, through what I’m nicknaming the blackbird effect, may themselves produce lots of ripples. Now, we can’t say what the end result will be, because we don’t know. All we can say is that this is the most rational thing to do, and it’s also the only thing to do: it’s the only way that you can change society, and it’s a way that stands a chance of working. Then we stand a chance of saving the planet, rescuing humanity as a species. Now if you believe in an immortal human soul which will survive the destruction of the planet, you may not be very concerned about that. But most of us are secularists, though we don’t have to be; that is to say, we don’t want to invoke the notion of an immortal self, but we just concentrate on how we can maximise universal self-realisation, or save the planet—something we can all get a handle on.

Chapter 6

God, the Cosmic Envelope and the Self

6.1 Fathoming the Depths of the Self Savita: (slightly apprehensively, drawing out the word ‘God’). Now we are going to get into a very thick, and very interesting subject, the subject of God— Roy: I thought you were going to say ‘a very thick minefield’. Savita: (fondly) You’re a minefield—very complex, very deep, very interesting. But you have to tell us how you got to the point of writing about God, in From East to West (2000). Why was it an important thing to do theoretically? Roy: There are two aspects to it. At a personal level, after I finished Plato Etc., which I wrote in not long after I finished Dialectic, I faltered because for one thing I fractured my shoulder and had it in a sling. I was writing another book called Philosophical Ideologies,1 I was completing it in the Lake District in the autumn of 1994 and I caught a very severe cold, just when I had nearly completed it, and I had to be flown back to London to recover. And then I had a series of colds and other illnesses, so I went on holiday to Cypress, on Boxing Day. And then I got another cold, and the doctor forbade me to swim; there was nothing I could do in this lovely hotel and this lovely environment. Finally, with three or four days left I saw a sign for aroma therapy, and I thought: Well, at least I can do that. So I went to the aroma therapist, and she said: ‘You need Reiki.’ As you probably know, Reiki is a Japanese technique of hands-on healing. So she gave me a mixture of aroma therapy and Reiki. After an hour, I felt much better, and I booked her for sessions on the four remaining days. We became very friendly. She was a Cypriot woman of English extraction. Her name was Maggie, and her husband had been a teacher of meditation, and so she said: ‘When you go back you must learn how to meditate.’ So when I went back, I immediately started writing, trying to finish Philosophical Ideologies. I told you how much pain I had had working through to a clear 1 No

manuscript of Philosophical Ideologies appears to have survived.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_6

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understanding of the concept of transformative negation, so even now the book on Philosophical Ideologies hadn’t been finished. For a while I now found that it was very easy for me, but then I caught another cold, so I went and got some Reiki from a woman friend of Maggie and then I went and learnt meditation, which I had practised in my youth. My parents and several other people had taught me, so it wasn’t as if it was strange. I should also say, and make very clear at this stage, that actually I never attributed any new concept that I had, anything creative or great that I had done, to me. I always thought naturally in terms of transcendence, and also how lucky I am to be the vehicle or the channel for the discovery of this truth.2 I was very conscious of this, really. Life continually humbled me, because I was continually in a state of being oppressed or not recognised or being abused because of my creativity. I eventually went on to become a master of Reiki; that means that technically I can initiate other people in the practice of Reiki. And I attained very high levels in the techniques and practice of meditation, but I don’t practice anything or belong to any school. I should say that nothing that I talk about, really, is something that I have not experienced in some way in myself. For three years in the eighties, I did psychoanalysis, not because there was anything wrong with me, but because I wanted to understand it. By the end of three years of psychoanalysis, I was not well. I had learnt a lot about the techniques of transference, but then I needed to look after myself in coming out of it. A very brilliant friend of mine, David Will, who was a practising psychoanalyst and a writer of critical and revolutionary texts within psychoanalysis applying critical realism in official journals, told me: ‘You must never be psychoanalysed, because psychoanalysis is all about understanding yourself so that you can become normal; if you were to become normal, you would lose everything that made you you.’ So this friend warned me, but in my vanity I thought I knew better, and that I couldn’t be beaten by a system. But then I just fell out of control for a bit. So in the early nineties for about two years I engaged in intense experience of different modes of accessing more subtle planes of being, which is what Reiki does; and the inner depths of consciousness, which may be quite relevant in meditation. It may be quite relevant for our book too, because I had quite a lot of money at the time—about two million pounds—and the person who initiated me into meditation found out about this. 2 This

statement is clarified below: ‘Now when I said that I have been conscious of the fact that I really owed everything to a transcendent source, this only meant that I was tapping my ground state, which transcended my embodied personality’ (p. 121). Bhaskar underlined the general point in 2003 in an email to his partner Cheryl Frank: ‘[I]n no way do I reject or abandon any of my scholarly intellectual works—indeed when I say “my” and “mine” I have never believed them to be “mine” but always, even in those days when I could not consciously embrace a concept of the divine, believed them to come from a source, which I always understood to be transcendental, far greater and higher than myself. So everything I have written I maintain, and now, from the vantage point of where I stand now, I can hold our mad mind-driven society and attempt to becalm it in a loving embrace.’ Email to Cheryl Frank 16 January 2003, Bhaskar Archives, UCL Institute of Education, London. The madness of our society (demi-reality) is ‘mind-driven’ because its fundamental source is category mistakes such as the epistemic fallacy.

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When they heard that I was rich, they were very keen to have me. Then when I went through meditation very, very far and they realised that I was famous and a philosopher, they thought I was going to take them over, and they wanted to get rid of me. There’s a little story for you; I’m going to put it in as a personal touch. Now I haven’t got two million. I’m completely poor. I’ve just got what I have, that’s all. It’s my fault. It’s all gone. People have taken it. Some of it I’ve given away, the rest the same people have taken.3 We could go into that at some stage from a philosophical point of view, but not now and not in a personal way. Also very relevant is the fact that, when I reached adulthood, they did a puja (a Hindu ritual)4 for me, and I experienced the first ‘stage’ of what you could call plumbing the depths—or touching the heights—of reality. A friend of the person who did the puja asked me: ‘What was it like?’ And I’m saying: ‘My God! There’s a huge world in there. If you really go into your self, it’s enormous. It’s absolutely enormous, what you can discover and access there, what you can fathom there. It’s quite equivalent to the stars outside.’5 Kant actually talked about the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Forget the moral law,6 but there are great depths of consciousness which most people in our civilisation are barely aware of. At the same time as I was engaging in these nonstandard practices—practices not certified by Western life—I was only too aware of the bankruptcy of thought on the left. No serious socialist political party engaging in creative thinking or practice existed within Western Europe. All the people tried to do was to repeat some of the slogans, just concentrating on getting into power, thinking that you might be able 3 Starting in Cypress in December 1994, and culminating in 2001–2, Bhaskar was systematically set

up and robbed of most of his money by a gang of criminals posing as ‘New Age’, who provided a temporary retinue of ‘followers’ at Brahmes Hall, his home in Suffolk at the turn of the millennium. The leader of the gang, who gave him lessons in meditation, Bhaskar once told me, was from San Francisco. The account Bhaskar gives here indicates that he was aware before the event that the people concerned were very interested in his money, and indeed I and others had warned him in the late nineties of probable disaster. Yet he did nothing effective to extricate himself from the situation, walking with apparent readiness into the traps that were set for him. From a philosophical and spiritual point of view, as he goes on to point out here, he wanted to absent any desire for money and was trying to help bring about a world in which there will be no need for money, and in particular no need for anyone to sell their capacity to work; but retaining possession of his small fortune might have prevented great personal hardship in the demi-real future. At heart Bhaskar was a bohemian who wanted heaven now, knowing that it is immanent in human practice. A brief account of this episode is given also in Bhaskar with Hartwig (2010, 170). 4 At the funeral of his partner, Cheryl Frank, in January 2010 Bhaskar chanted the Gayatri mantra with great aplomb and exquisite lilt. When I commented to him later that I was surprised that he possessed such a skill, he replied: ‘There are many things you don’t know about me.’ This of course was, and remains, true. 5 In The Philosophy of MetaReality (Bhaskar 2002c, 351), this becomes: ‘It is not that there are the starry heavens above and the moral law within, as Kant would have it; rather, the true basis of your virtuous existence is the fact that the starry heavens are within you, and you are within them.’ I chose this as Bhaskar’s epitaph when announcing his death to the critical realist community in November 2014. 6 That is, ‘forget the moral law’ in the sense of Kant’s abstractly universal moral laws; Bhaskar is not saying here that the transcendentally real self is not the fundamental source of moral truth.

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to do better than the existing capitalism. It was really tragic. But we don’t want to spend too long talking about that. So that’s the backdrop. I was already also writing a book on The Philosophy of Money,7 going very deeply into economics and looking at how money arose. So I was looking at the philosophy of money and looking at philosophical ideologies, and it was natural also to turn my attention to religion and, in particular because I was genetically half Indian, to go back and look again at what I already knew quite deeply about the structure and themes of Eastern philosophy. Particularly, naturally, I went into Hinduism and Buddhism, but I also became very interested in Chinese religion, particularly Taoism and Zen, which is really a Chinese merger, a fusion, between Mahayana Buddhism and Chinese Taoism; and then I also went into Sufism and into Islam. I had never really been particularly interested in Christianity, although it was studied at school, so I went into that too; 8 and then I went to Israel and I went into Judaism. So there are many overlaps.

6.2 The Further Transcendental Deepening of Critical Realism Savita: So you began to explore the inner as well as the outer realms, going into the practices of the self, which would lead to transcendental dialectical critical realism. But what would be very interesting to know at this point is whether by that time you had already developed your dialectical critical realism— Roy: Yes. Dialectical critical realism was fully formed. This all happened after Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom and Plato Etc. were finished and published in the early nineties. Savita: Did you realise subjectively that there was some sort of lack, some inadequacy in dialectical critical realism? Roy: I think that I did not realise it, but my totality did. If you regard yourself as constituted by a transcendentally real self and you regard all beings as TINA formations, as complexes of autonomous and heteronomous elements, then I might have got stuck in the paradigm of producing more and more books. But, actually, there was nothing more for me to say about critical realism at the level of theoretical philosphy, and that is why I was working on money and on Philosophical Ideologies, 7 Bhaskar

aspired to complete this book until the day he died. No manuscript has as yet come to light. 8 Beginning in 1998, Bhaskar had extensive discussions over several years at his home in Suffolk with three Christian critical realists, colleagues and friends: Margaret (Maggie) Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas (Doug) Porpora. The four planned to write a book together, but Bhaskar eventually withdrew (amicably) because he felt that the book was taking on too uniquely Christian a slant, so his three friends went ahead without him. See Archer et al. (2004). For Bhaskar’s account, see Bhaskar with Hartwig (2010, 147, 150–51).

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which was almost done, but wouldn’t quite get done. So I was going really in depth into economics and then into religion; these were two things which were close to philosophy. Part of the project also was to go deeper into political theory. The philosophical innovation that inaugurated the new approach was as follows. Everything I had done—the whole process of self-development of critical realism— had really been powered by the norm of truth. And you can say that I had so internalised this norm by the mid-nineties that I had sort of lost sight of, or rather tended to downplay a little, the fact that, actually, truth always has to be made subservient to the interests of freedom; 9 and really, as I said, I don’t think that there was anything more to say at the level of theoretical philosophy. All that could have been done was very detailed applications and developments of dialectical concepts, and I have always left that sort of work to others. So there was something within me that drove me, contrary to the operations of my conscious mind, into a new realm to remedy an absence and incompleteness, but not something that I consciously thought. You see, you can’t consciously think the absence you’re trying to remedy. When I went to develop or initiate transcendental realism, I didn’t think: ‘My God! There’s an absence of ontology.’ The identification of the generative absence that produced the contradictions was a result of a whole process of thought, and you can only see it retrospectively. Once you’ve produced the new concept you can see what was missing, and what was missing was ontology; just as Newton saw that what was absent was gravity; or just as what is absent in mechanistic accounts in general is the concept of a field, the concept of action as a system—a concept that really carries Newton’s own critique much further, because then can you argue that ‘things’ don’t really exist, all you have is ‘fields’. So you are not conscious that you’re driven. Only at the point of freedom, when you can see your way through to a new totality are you clear about what you have done. And what transcendental dialectical critical realism, which is only really there in a very small (for me) booklet, From East to West—I’ve been talking on it for a couple of years now, and there are lots of books and manuscripts, including this conversation, in the pipeline—what it did was to effect a real deepening of existing critical realism at all its moments. At the first moment (1M), the big new concept or entity (one was already there, the alethic concept of truth—that was in Dialectic) that From East to West proclaimed was God. Now, actually, I want to develop the idea of God slowly. At the second edge (2E) the important new concept was the moment of transcendence within the transcendence to a greater totality. This moment is a shot out of the blue; for example, when Newton makes the discovery that the apple is not falling but being pulled to the ground, it is a moment of novelty, of creativity; or when we lose our sense of self, in awe, in identification with an object, or when we go deep inside ourselves in meditation or in prayer or some other practice. Prayer and meditation are not so different; they both involve, classically, the repetition of a sentence or a chord until, in the act of repetition, you lose the thought and you 9 Cf.: ‘It may be necessary for morality to correct bad science, but it corrects it in the name of a higher

norm, true freedom. And that is guided by the highest norm of all—fundamental truth.’ Bhaskar (1999, 188). In the philosophy of MetaReality, which crystallised during these conversations, freedom becomes the highest norm of all.

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lose the consciousness of anything separate from yourself, and then you just become your self. In the case of prayer you just offer yourself up to God; the true meaning of prayer is to give yourself, to surrender to God, not to ask a favour from God—that is a very distorted reflection of the practice of prayer. At the third level (3L), the crucial new concept was love; and I thought love as the totalising force in the universe. At the fourth domain, the level of 4D, we moved from practice to the idea of spontaneous right action and the properties of spontaneous right action, and from reflexivity or the unity of theory and practice to the goal of enlightenment. So there was a deepening involving the development of new concepts, and the project was to bring out the spiritual presuppositions of emancipation, and to show how there was no incompatibility between individual and universal self-realisation. Now the way we are discussing transcendental dialectical critical realism this morning is much more radical than the way I discussed it in From East to West. I just want to say one thing about this: transcendental dialectical critical realism characteristically is not just a critique of the dichotomies and dualisms in thought, it is a critique of duality as such, of the dual existence; and it grounds or founds all these alienations of these four moments of social being in terms of our own self-alienation. Now we get this critique of duality when we experience transcendence: in transcendence the subject-object distinction vanishes. We no longer have a duality; we have nonduality, a nondual state. Within this new nondual state, nothing can be said; but it can be experienced, and then it can be described when you come out it of it. For example, if we stop talking and let ourselves listen to, totally focus, on that fan or air conditioner, we become one with that fan—we can’t think, we’re in a nondual state; then the moment we stop listening, the moment we want to say something, we are no longer in a nondual state. And this is why the mystics and the great lovers of the ecstatic or the great lovers of nature find it so difficult to describe, to put their experience into words. That’s why we need poetry, because poetry in fact attempts to capture deep experience in words—metaphorically and metonymically in some ways, and magically, just through sound, in other ways; however, magically, the poetry works, the experience itself is caught, and that is as close as you can come. So this new understanding is reached by realism about transcendence. Now the starting point of critical realism was subject-object duality—or just, on the one hand, the subject there (the transitive process of knowledge production), and, on the other, the object there (the subject matter or the intransitive domain); that is, just the division between knowledge and its object, or subject-object nonidentity. If from that starting point critical realism reaches the point where that gap is closed, that is only as a result of realism about that gap. So it is very, very nice. In that moment, realism is itself transcended. One uses the basic defining characteristics of realism to move beyond realism. And someone has said to me: ‘Well, you must be very frightened: everything you have done is being undermined.’ But no! Oh no! I am very pleased that it has taken me to this point of complete freedom—and ultimately we must have freedom from any fixed structures of thought. Savita: Yes, we pass on.

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Roy: Yes, it’s just like a ladder. When you reach that point you throw the ladder away, because then you don’t need it. But each step of the ladder is valid. And when I talk about demi-reality, the world of illusion that’s embedded within relative reality, and how in understanding demi-reality and relative reality we have to understand causal structures as in the world, and the world as punctuated by absence, as a totality and so on, and we then move to the absolute level, I am not saying that we cease to exist within the relative world. We remain embodied human beings; we have an intellect, which functions to discriminate—and we have to discriminate in life. So everything within critical realism retains its own validity within the context of an understanding that the whole of reality is grounded in an absolute. The propositions articulated in From East to West can themselves be further transcended, but as a categorial structure, as far as I am concerned, they will remain valid. But things can be done with them, which I’m doing in my new book, which I’m calling Re-enchanting Reality,10 and in discussions with you.

6.3 The Cosmic Envelope and Its Relation to God and the Universe Savita: You give a very structural kind of account of God, doubtless for a number of reasons. One would be, as you’ve just explained, that you can’t describe a situation of nonduality without slipping into a dual state. Naturally, once you begin to describe something that you’ve experienced, you describe from opposition, from observation, not from oneness; and so descriptions have to be rational. So I guess your account of God tries to meet this criterion of rationality. But this criterion is a very tricky one, because when you come out of a nondual state most of the people you meet operate with demi-real or irrational criteria. And as you know, in academia, especially in the West, after the naturalist period of the Enlightenment, speaking of God in any attempt to explain and understand the world became very suspect. Pascal was perhaps the last major philosopher who tried to show the necessity of actually accepting the reality of God, giving rational grounds, like you, and ones that were largely accepted by his contemporaries. Thereafter, things became much more fraught in modernity. Roy: Yes. The categorical structure of transcendental dialectical critical realism and the propositions within From East to West have their own limited validity but, as you say, it was an attempt to open up to modern discourse a great new subject, God. But that has its own limits, and now I’m trying to break free of those limits. So I wouldn’t write another book like that with a section that is headed ‘Twelve Steps to 10 Bhaskar did not publish a book with the title Re-enchanting Reality. The manuscript he speaks of

here, which he was working on in 2001, morphed into the magnum opus of his so-called spiritual turn, The Philosophy of MetaReality (Bhaskar 2002c). It was completed in the first four months of 2002, ‘on trains, aeroplanes, in hotel rooms’, he later told me. Bhaskar felt that one should be able to ‘write anywhere’, and put this into practice.

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Heaven’,11 which lists twelve features of God. They are probably all correct, but this is not really the important thing about God; therefore, I am also moving on. If I may say something about god12 from where I stand now. I think what you have to do is really understand the ubiquity of transcendence, that is, of a nondual state in life. Just to repeat what I said earlier, from your consciousness where you are, you can go into a nondual state when you lose your sense of subjectivity. When we are wrapped up in awe contemplating a mountain or listening to music or looking at a television screen, we completely lose our sense of self. It is so common that we forget this. When you’re really wrapped in a film or a book, there is no other, there is no self: there is just the other, you are in the other. Similarly, when we experience transcendence in relation to our fellow human beings, we feel for the loved one, or whoever. So this is loss of a sense of self or of subjectivity. Then there is the loss of a sense of objectivity, which is the classical realm of techniques of meditation within the Vedic tradition. By focusing on a mantra or something like that, you go deeper and deeper into yourself until you become empty of any thought; and similarly, when you go into an object you become empty, you are totally absorbed. So it is kenosis, inner emptiness. The thing which is above all characteristic of the nondual state in the traditional sense is this inner emptiness. What you have in this inner emptiness is just consciousness, pure consciousness. This raises an intriguing question, because what you are going to is a ground state which seems to be consciousness, not matter; we will come back to this: how can you reconcile this with science? I will show how it is easily reconcilable with science. Now, the nondual state is also experienced spontaneously in activity which would not normally be called transcendent; that is, just when you focus, concentrate, and are spontaneously, unconditionally, lovingly, creatively engaged. You’re not thinking about anything, you’re one with your activity. This is unattached activity. If your mind is split from what you’re doing, or partly focused on the consequences or results of what you intend to achieve in what you’re doing, then you’re not really able to do it. If you’re standing in front of a soccer goal, or if you’re a golfer and you’re just about to putt a ball into the hole, if you’re not totally engaged on the ball, then you’re going to miss the goal, miss the putt. You become one with the activity; the superb cricketer or footballer becomes one with her stroke; there isn’t a duality there. But this is true of all our concentrated, absorbed, engaged activities. When we really focus, then we are one: there is not a split within the self between the ‘I’ and what is being done. The ‘I’ is doing it, and there is just one continuous nondual stream. So this means that transcendence can be accessed, and is accessed spontaneously in everyday life. Let me say a few things about meditation and prayer in this context; this is really quite important. Because we do it spontaneously in everyday life, we don’t have to 11 See

Bhaskar (2000, 50–60) (65–76 in the second edition). the metaReality books, Bhaskar usually uses the concept of ‘god’ with a small ‘g’ to refer exclusively to the cosmic envelope, which is immanent within the universe, and ‘God’ with a capital ‘G’ to refer to the being who may be outwith or transcendent to the universe, whilst also immanent. The difference is explained below. I follow this usage here. ‘Outwith’ is a Scots word which Bhaskar deployed in Dialectic (1993, 47) in the sense of ‘on the far side of, yet immanent within’. It performs a perspectival switch on ‘without’ in the sense of ‘outside’. 12 In

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access the nondual state, we don’t have to do a practice of meditation or prayer; even if we want to find ourselves, we can do it in other ways just by withdrawing from an object. Nevertheless, first, there are many who do find these practices of access rewarding. The test of the validity of that practice is when the practitioners go into everyday life: have they really empowered themselves, or are they just half lost in a sleepy-sleepy neither-here-nor-there state? To seriously meditate is a very difficult activity in itself. Probably for many people it’s very, very useful; I’d just like to say that. Second, meditation, even within the traditional sense of Vedic Hinduism which gave rise to Gautama Buddha (c. 563–483 BCE or c. 480–400 BCE), is also practised in the other mode in the Zen school, where you go into objects. The goal of Zen is really to lose the mind, lose your own separate sense of self-identity. You go into any object, a caterpillar, an acorn, for example, and in one school of Japanese art, you go into the ugly, the profane. This is one of the values of Zen. It is not a very beautiful and empowering intellectual structure, like Vedic philosophy; it’s very simple and down to earth. But it has very rigorous techniques, and the techniques are all designed, not to fathom the depths of the mind, but to subvert the mind and to find the Buddha nature everywhere, to see Buddha in everything. So really, to be in touch with your ground state, you don’t need to meditate, but meditation may be useful. You don’t need to do any specific practice; if you are just engaged in concentrated, absorbed, loving, creative activity, which is what sustains the whole of the social world, you will be in your ground state. Nevertheless, a period of rest from that activity is good, and then again you should be in a nondual state. When you’re resting though, when you’re not engaged in activity, it’s easy for something else to come in—it may be a fear, or a thought, or anything. But when you’re engaged in an activity and you’re really concentrating on it, nothing else can come in. Spontaneous activity is the purest way of being at one with yourself. But we can do it the whole time. Savita: Actually, accessing our ground states could not be done the whole time, surely? Are you saying that we can be in it all the time, or that we could get into it only sometimes? Roy: My point is that we can and do access it any time we engage in spontaneous creative, loving activity. You can’t be totally in your ground state, because you can’t be a spontaneous master of all disciplines and survive in the world. Even if you were the most enlightened yogi or rishi (Hindu sage or poet), and you had a whole retinue of followers—which I would not approve of for a moment, it is very heteronomous (but I don’t want to be understood as criticising people in the past)—and you never had to do anything in the world, you would still have to give instructions, give commands, say things. The single enlightened being, the Beautiful Soul,13 sitting in the monastery or meditating in the forest has to go round with a begging bowl; he has to beg, he has to come out of that state. Whenever we need to talk, to think, whenever we need to learn something new, we have to be in a dual state. Whenever we need 13 The Beautiful Soul is Hegel’s archetypal figure for alienation. The Beautiful Soul vainly attempts to resolve its problems by withdrawing from the world.

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to choose any new situation, and it is not spontaneous, we need thought. Whenever we need to plan, we need thought. So you can’t possibly be in a nondual state all the time. To communicate the truth of the nondual state, you have to go into the world of duality. No system of thought which believes in or teaches a technique for practising or realising enlightenment believes that you can be enlightened except as an embodied being, that is, in the relative phase of existence; it is only in that world that you can be enlightened. So at some point one might ask what enlightenment actually means; but whatever it means, it means being in some way infused with this nondual state. You carry it in the totality of your activities, but you can’t be in it all the time. Even if you were totally enlightened—the most enlightened human being that there could be—there would still be things to do, and there would still be things you would want to learn in a communist society. Someone might say: ‘Well. OK, I’ve totally mastered philosophy now, I’ve read all the great philosophers, now what shall I do?’ They should learn, say, book-binding; they will become an apprentice, and gradually they will inbuild the skills and they will develop mastery. They will become a master at book-binding, that is, when they do it spontaneously, manifest the ground state. You can’t be enlightened unless you strip from your embodied personality all heteronomous elements. Savita: Do you feel that work would be more like play for such people, instead of being instrumentally driven drudgery and struggle in a dual state? I can imagine this, following from your line of thought. When one has got into the nondual state, then perhaps our whole attitude towards the world would also change; and most of the things which are taken very seriously would be taken, not nonseriously, but in a very playful manner, as the activities themselves would have very different rationales. Roy: Yes, definitely. There are three things that we need to differentiate here. One is just being in a nondual state, which is not uncommon and sustains everything we do. The second is being free of heteronomous elements of formation so that you can express your ground state in your personality, which will experience duality and live in a world of duality as embodied and relative. Even if the world was free of demireality, it would still be subject to all the limitations of physical laws; it would still be a relative reality, and we would still need a dualistic consciousness for functioning in that world; but we could be enlightened in the sense of being free of heteronomous orders of determination. And, finally, there is what we should essentially do—what our dharma, our real state of being, is. When we are in that state of being, when we are engaged in the activities that are dharmic for us, then what we do is effortless. It may take us a long time to acquire and master our dharma, but when we are in it, what we do will flow as effortlessly as the sunshine. The sun doesn’t try to shine, it just shines. The flower doesn’t try to bloom, it just blooms. And everyone should be in their dharma, everyone should be. I suppose the logic behind the caste system initially was that certain categories of people are best suited for some tasks; whereas for me, our dharma is always concretely singular. There is just something which uniquely expresses what you can do; that is your dharma, and that is your intrinsic nature, which is concretely singular. When you’re in your ground state, you spontaneously express your dharma. When you have to live in a world of duality, and a world of duality which at the moment is also a land of mists and channels of illusion, then

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you should be in an occupation, be pursuing a life which allows you to be in your dharma. Someone being a shoemaker who really ought to be a pianist is not in their dharma. So these three things are all connected but distinct. Savita: Is this also connected with the whole notion of playful activity and with the concept of freedom? Can we think of this in terms of actually attaining that level of freedom that we always want to in demi-reality? Roy: Definitely, because everyone is trying to be in their intrinsic nature; everyone is trying to be themselves. How you get people to see this is by showing them that, really, when they do something, even when it’s horrible, they’re trying to do something joyous, or they’re presupposing something joyous, or there’s something joyous in what they’re doing. A gang of robbers can’t carry out a theft without showing great loyalty to each other; it’s impossible, they have to show solidarity. Solidarity is a bond, a cement that binds the gang together: if it doesn’t hold, it is not a gang, and they can’t do the robbery. The robbery also shows great creativity. So the robbers actually display in their activity love and creativity, but their activity is dominated by all the negative things in the normative sense: their lawlessness, their greed, their desire, their lust, their carelessness of the norms of society. Savita: Do you think transcendent consciousness—the ground-state reality with which we get in touch—would also have some corrective effect? For example, obviously some rationalist would ask you—I would also ask you—whether the dharma of a dacoit (an armed robber) is to commit theft? Roy: No, it is impossible. It is not in the ground state of anyone to commit theft. What you should do is go with a counsellor to see them when they’re serving time in prison, and show them: ‘Look what ingenuity you showed in that robbery, why don’t you become an engineer?’ It is impossible. Let’s go into this. Savita: In itself, it is not corrective? Roy: No. Every human being—almost every human being—is a TINA formation, a compromised formation, that is, a mixture of autonomous or free and heteronomous elements. Those heteronomous elements obscure, occlude, mask and dominate the autonomous level that they presuppose. In a functioning human being, that autonomous level is always there, and you can try to get them to see the role that that autonomous level plays in their life—how they actually utilise that, and how that expresses what they could be in their totality—by engaging in dialogue with them. But that doesn’t mean to say that you just rely on dialogue. If you see someone about to commit a murder after being freed, you don’t say: ‘How bold you are! Let me shake your hand, because you’re so bold’—unless, of course, you have a cunning strategy to be complicit in killing someone and risk imprisonment. Rather, you immediately knock them down and stop them committing that murder. So it doesn’t stop you acting in the correct way. It just means that, to understand anything in the world, you have to see the negative that is done, the heteronomy, as being parasitic on the autonomous level. And this autonomous level is very, very thin. But now let me say how strong it is: this ground state of our being, which we can access in

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transcendence—and we access it in our activity, not just in our being—is one which allows us to become one with anything. This is what is so important about the Zen or going-into-an-object paradigm, because this shows us that we can go into anything, we can transcendentally identify with anything. Savita: I think I got it wrong. What I should be saying is that the robber, though following his dharma, is not actually in touch with his ground state. Roy: I wouldn’t say that his dharma is robbery. Savita: You gave the example and my mind got caught on it. Roy: I think this is an example we should get rid of, because there is not much difference between a robber and a capitalist, you know: one is legal and the other is illegal. And both are driven by heteronomous motives, or function in the system of heteronomous motives. But within both you will find that they have a ground state, and there are autonomous as well as heteronomous elements. So I was just giving an example to show that nothing in social life could happen without tacitly tapping or utilising the energy from the ground state. But let’s not go into dharma now; let’s first of all get the idea of the ground state. Because we can reach our own ground state, that is our own inner essential self or being, we connect with dharma that comes when you are totally in that ground state, or when you are just in that ground state and not doing the heteronomous things that you do; then what you are doing comes effortlessly. Now, because we’re living in one universe, we can transcendentally identify with other beings; so we’re all connected: we’re all connected by what I call a cosmic envelope. This is the bounds of our universe, the ultimate level of being, the level which is essential to and ingredient in everything. When we go into our ground state, we can transcendentally identify with any other being in virtue of being in that ground state. Then, if we’ve exercised and trained ourselves in these capacities, we can become one with anything. It may be very, very difficult but, as I was arguing this morning, you actually have to become one with evil in order to understand it and root it out. Now everything, therefore, is constituted by this ultimate essential ingredient level of being. This is one concept of god. This is the cosmic envelope, which binds everything. Just before I go into the other properties of god, let me use the example of Newton discovering gravity to illustrate what I’ve been saying. Newton went into the ground state of another part of being; he became so at one with it that he lost himself and could reach down (conditionally and relatively, given the level of development of knowledge at that time) to the ground state of that being. So the ground states of all beings are connected by this cosmic envelope. Savita: What was the end result that Newton got? Roy: The result that Newton got was that he touched the alethic truth of motion, the essential truth of motion. It came in an act in which he lost himself, he slipped into the transcendent mode—or rather, the transcendent mode slipped into him—and he became one with the subject matter. And then he saw it: ‘Aha, eureka!’ This is the moment of discovery. ‘Gravity! This is what happens: it is not that objects fall

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to the ground, the ground pulls them!’ So it was a complete revolution, a complete topsy-turvy. And really, when you’re in this ground state—and there’s no reason to suppose that it is not indefinite in its absoluteness; we know from mathematics that infinities of infinities are possible—you will find that everything else in the universe is reflected in you and you are reflected in everything else in the universe. So this is the technique that the Zens were trying to practice, discovering the Buddha nature in everything. Now this cosmic envelope is a level of consciousness. So how can we say that consciousness is the ultimate essential ingredient in being? Well, if I can transcendentally identify with a stone, this means that the stone is implicitly conscious; it is brought together in my consciousness, it becomes an object of my consciousness, I become one with it. It’s easy to become one with a human being, more difficult to become one with an animal—but lots of people do it—or a flower. Perhaps the best definition of the ground state that you can give, of the sort of bliss that you can experience, is just to point to a flower, and say: ‘Look at that!’14 So everything, then, is implicitly consciousness. So how is this consistent with the evolution of matter? Well, what we can say is that, diachronically, through time, matter evolves to the point where it gradually gives rise to, first life, and then consciousness. But this consciousness was implicit or enfolded within it to begin. And so there is no irreconcilability between having (1) a view of matter as evolving, as ascending to consciousness, and the highest consciousness possible, generating huge qualitative leaps like the evolution of organic life, and the evolution of consciousness itself—which is a materialist view; and (2) a view of consciousness as being at the root of everything and being the essential ingredient of the universe. Now, this essential ingredient of the universe transcends the dichotomy between the left and right brain, between the discursive and intuitive intellect. It binds everything in a whole. This is an immanent god. So this is not a god that we have to believe in as a matter of some faith. This is god as totally secular; this cosmic envelope doesn’t transcend the bounds of science in any way, it’s just pure consciousness. I read from the Persian poet, Jelaluddin Rumi: Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, I am not an entity in this world or the next, do not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two 14 As I edit these lines, a red amaryllis is slowly unfurling its glory in my living room, and I quite agree.

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worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.15

So this is all it is. It is just a cosmic envelope, and everyone can touch it, whatever their faith—everyone does touch it, the whole time. All that they have to become aware of—and you can’t do it for them, they have to see it for themselves—is that they are, in essence, just this ground state, and lots of other things as well, which the ground state sustains. Savita: Most of the Vedantic philosophers have been telling us that there is basically not much difference between the smaller self and the bigger self. There is only one self, and duality cannot be maintained. Vedantic philosophers are nondualist, and they have been telling us this for a long time. So this whole formulation is not so unfamiliar to us. Roy: True. But as Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita says: ‘I’, in other words, ‘the truth’, has to come again and again. He says that he will come again and again for his devotees to say the same thing in new words. So the same truths have to be rediscovered in each generation. It is very exciting for me to realise that this has been said before, but I am saying it in a new way, for a new constituency, and with new arguments. Savita: In India, this view had emerged from the ninth century CE onwards; there have been very clear statements and debates about the exact nature of God and so on. The Vedantic philosophers really revolutionised the whole thing; from the Vedic to the Vedantic period, a turn to inwardness took place in Indian philosophy, and God became a formless all pervading presence. Deities are worshipped by people who cannot fathom this. Even Shankara (Adi Shankara, eighth century CE) allows people to worship deities precisely for this reason, a concession on practical grounds for those with lower-level consciousness. Roy: Definitely. And also in total absorption in worship of a God, you can reach the nondual state. If you really love Ganesh or Hanuman, if you’re totally devoted to them, then they can function to pull you into a nondual state; you will do anything for them. Savita: The thing is that it was established that in fact there is no single form of God, the divine is basically a consciousness, and the consciousness doesn’t come from outside, it is very much within you, and that is what the self is—that is where you have to look for it. Plus there were also various other practices of meditation, inwardness, and all that. Roy: Yes, but I’m also saying that my account is quite consistent with this. You can reach this nondual state through normal kosher practices of prayer; you can be spontaneously a devotee of some particular God within a polytheistic system such 15 Bhaskar

used this poem as one of the epigraphs to his Reflections on MetaReality (2002b), and also included it at p. 145 of that volume.

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as popular Hinduism; or of the transcendent God, such as Islam or Judaism most explicitly postulate; and you can find in the writings of Sufis the most ecstatic total immersion, total loss of their own separate identity, and infusion of God: God stands in place of what they were. I could read you some beautiful poems which show how the Sufi mystics totally understood that the object was to reach a place where you lose your sense of self and become one with God. Now the Koran prohibited a simple statement of that as blasphemy. But it’s there in everything but the name; and it’s even there in name, because they say: ‘I go and God comes.’ What I’m saying is that every practice or tradition of worship, even the most mundane of practices, or some kind of a caricature of Zen, tells people that you can find God anywhere. If you really go into pain, for example, lose yourself in it, there you will still find God. Savita: But then, finding God, what does it do? I really want to understand this. Look at the practices of Hindu society, look at the practices of Islamic society. Roy: But then they haven’t found God, none of these practices have. Let’s go into this. Savita: But the implications of conceptualising God must be dealt with at the level of society; we have to understand the implication of such transcendental ideas for society. Roy: This is a very important point. Now, science is an institution, and it is a paradigm and a paragon. Does this mean that every scientist is correctly practising science? Of course not. There are lots of scientists who are doing pseudo-science, and I was arguing this morning that most science in our society is being skewed, and is not true science; it is not concerned with achieving explanatory understanding, but is either concerned with generating research points—value points—for the scientist’s career and/or with that career articulated into a social structure generating things of use to capitalism and the nation state. But good science as it is practised today doesn’t deviate from the logic of scientific discovery, the alethic truth of science as represented in transcendental realism. Transcendental realism describes the test by which a scientist can measure his own adequacy. Similar considerations apply in the domain of religion and spirituality. So the route that I am positing is from the ground state to unity with the cosmic envelope, and that cosmic envelope will always overreach you. So you will be one with god, but you won’t be the same as god. God will always be greater than you. So the act of grace and the act of reverence are always there. You realise that the divinity within you is only a part of the far greater divinity which bounds everything. Also, in respect of Shankara, you have to understand that you’re a localised point in (to use a different metaphor) the quantum field. As a localised point, you express yourself always in a singular and unique way to uniquely singularise; and this completely uniquely singularised manifestation or aspect of the divinity is not the same as every other aspect. Each shares, partakes of the same essential self, spirit, consciousness, and each is always uniquely singularised in a special way. Look at the avatars. Each one is different from the other; each one is a perfect manifestation of god, and each is different. Look at the many Buddhist schools that Mahayana Buddhism has, each one

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is different. Every holy being, like every creative genius, is different; just like every loving mother is different. The more you express the facets of the ground state, the more you gain your individuality. This is something which that religious tradition has not fully grasped: the concrete singularity of manifestations, as particular expressions of the cosmic envelope. So the divine is one and indivisible; we are within this, one with everything else, but we retain our own uniqueness, our own location, and our own trajectory—if you like, our souls. So, just as we criticise the practices of science in the name of transcendental realist science, so we criticise the practices which are supposed to take us from the little to the big self—from the little self with the little acts, which is either the ego or the embodied personality with the ego, to the transcendentally real Self (with a capital ‘S’16 ) manifest in the embodied personality, and the embodied personality manifesting only that which is the transcendentally real Self, or that which is consistent with it, and fully realising it; that is, take from the little to the transcendentally real Self, manifest and fully realised, and nothing else in the embodied personality, so that the embodied self is a pure channel or expression of the transcendentally real Self. That is the unbounded Self, that is the true Prometheus unchained. That is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to transform ourselves from our little, limited, petty selves bound up with heteronomous motives and determinations to become vast, unbounded Selves. Such Selves can’t do everything in the relative world, but they have the capacity to do what they can do, what they want to do, and then we can freely utilise the energy of the ground state—and nothing but the ground state—having shed ourselves of everything heteronomous, and fully realised all layers of our being. This involves total purity and clarity—emotionally, physically, mentally—at all levels of our being, so that we are nothing but a pure manifestation of the ground state. If you do that, then you are huge and boundless, and you are also unique. So the idea is that everyone should be their unique selves, and then you have the end of hell and the end of history as we know it. Savita: I’m just trying to be a sceptic here so that we understand more of what you have to say. Suppose those little selves just love to dwell in the realm of demi-reality; if they didn’t, just think— I’ll give you a very short story of Indian modernity. In the West, Christianity was rationalised; the spiritual part of rationality was very much lost among people who believed in God. Christ almost became a rational figure, otherwise Christianity perhaps wouldn’t have survived—because of materialism, the development of science as a rationalist discourse, and so on. Here also in India—many people have argued that Indian modernity is a derivative form of Western modernity. I have argued (in my Ph.D. thesis, The Discourse of Modernity in India17 ) that it is not a derivative form directly; it may be derivative in the sense that the universal aspect of rationality was far more appreciated in this discourse, mostly in the nationalist 16 In

his metaReality books, Bhaskar rarely uses a capital ‘S’ for the transcendentally real self. I have followed this usage throughout the present work, except in the present chapter, where Bhaskar explicitly calls for a capital ‘S’. 17 Singh (n.d.). Savita began her thesis at McGill University but submitted it later to Delhi University. For her recent views on the discourse of modernity in India, see Singh (2018).

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language of this discourse, but reason was not the central principle (represented by or seated in the mind), as in the West, it was arrived at through an interpretation of Vedanta, much in the sense of venerating the nature of Brahman as rational, and that is why Ram Mohan Roy is considered father of modern India and its discourse of modernity. He conducted the entire discourse of Indian modernity in terms of the reinterpretation of Vedanta, and he is a big modernist. Here rationality and Brahman (God in the weaker sense of the term) is validated simultaneously, philosophically and culturally. Later on you find Aurobindo. He talked about the modern world most sensibly, while at the same time talking about the depths of spiritual life, and was himself a practising Hindu. There was also Ramakrishna Paramhans, who was also a practising Hindu ascetic, a sanyasi; he is also considered a contributor to the specific discourse of modernity in India. His disciple, Vivekananda is another thinker who was continually talking about religion and God, and this particular kind of God that you are talking about. Yet what they were doing was modernising India. But after all of this has been said, the same story that you are telling me has been told over and over again as a story of Indian modernity. And look at what we have as modern India today: I don’t have a very flattering picture of it. We are a caste-ridden society and live with many, many layers of inequality, including that of class and gender. Roy: But, first, this is not exactly the same story. And second, even if it was the same story—a story about the expansion of the self from a limited, bounded, miserable heteronomous formation to an unbounded one—the only test is whether that occurs; the only valid test is whether the practices of modern India conform to that expansion. So far, I haven’t said anything about modernism—we’ll talk about modernism and modernisation in India tomorrow. If there is such a thing as true spirituality, we have to ask whether any one religious practice or any one religious practitioner has actually got it right; just as we have to ask in the case of science, whether any scientist has actually come near to conforming to the ideal. To go back to my first point, my position differs in lots of ways from those schools you mentioned. I have not identified God. I know in From East to West I talk about God; that was actually from the point of view of breaking the taboo put on discussing God by very important people in the West, which we can go into some other time. But I’ve talked mainly only about the cosmic envelope, and how we can become one with everything. And this is the ultimate, essential ingredient. It can be maintained entirely within a secular framework. If you take the elements within the cosmic envelope, in the first instance concretely singularised human beings, the freedom here is the freedom that Marx talked about when he said that the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all; that freedom is the love and solidarity in which, in order for us all to develop, we have to respect the rights of everyone freely to develop themselves. That is the goal of enlightenment. It is entirely secular; it is consistent with any faith; and it remains an empirical question whether a practice conforms to it. Some practices may be right only for some people. If we are all concrete singulars—and my conception is very different from the abstract, analytical conception that has dominated Western thought up to now—then it can’t be the case that the

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same religious practice is right for everyone, or that believing in the same God, or any God, is right for everyone. What does concrete singularity, and its counterpart, which is dialectical universality, actually mean? How do we understand the self that is to realise itself? First—and everyone would agree about this—it instantiates the universal in some way. Second, it is not just a simple instantiation of the universal: all human beings are the same, but they’re also different. So the element of difference is brought in. You are an embodied woman, I am an embodied man. You have an Indian passport, I have an English passport. Then there’s the geo-historical trajectory: as it happens, you’ve lived in England; I’ve spent some time in India. Then, after you’ve built all these things in—the element of universality, the element of mediation, the element of the geo-historical trajectory—then you have the irreducible uniqueness: that special thing which, once you’ve done these differentiations and universals over and over again, is uniquely you, and is uniquely me. I don’t think anyone, really, has said this quite so clearly as dialectical critical realism; the concepts of uniqueness or singularity and universality haven’t been formulated so clearly before. So we are all going to be different. There is no single formula or algorithm for making the expansion from the little self to the big Self, which means losing your ego, your sense of separate identity and shedding the heteronomous elements— everything which is not essentially you. And this means that there’s no place, really, in that essential you for anything that’s inconsistent with you; there’s no place for a religious leader or an orthodoxy or a party telling you what to do (I’ve argued that before). Though we have to be careful what we say, because we don’t want to offend people, in that real you there is no place and there can’t be a place for a guru, for a politician, for any external authority. There is no authority but yourself. That is true autonomy. So exactly what path is right for you cannot be prescribed, there is no one single formula. So the practice of the experience of Vedantic bliss may be fine for some—they may be able to lose themselves in sat-chit-ananda, true bliss-consciousness. Someone else may be a devotee of Hanuman, lose themselves doing puja, and be thinking always of Hanuman. I know such a person. Savita: Oh, there are plenty of them in Delhi. In their practices they can be very mean, they can be very greedy and all that. Roy: Of course. Someone who does a great number of rakats or practices of collective worship in Islam—that may be absolutely right for him. Someone who loses himself in a Dervish dance or a Sufi mystic, someone who prays in a Christian church or has communion—that may be right for them. It’s what they do outside their particular practice that is the test—what they do when they’re not one with Hanuman, when they’re not doing their rakats, when they’re not doing communion, when they’re not in meditation. How are they then? And then you can say: ‘Try another one.’ And then some guru will say: ‘Don’t follow the advice of that guru; you come to my ashram, then you’ll be alright. I’ll tell you the correct way, only I know the correct way.’ You see, that’s the system of iniquity. The heteronomous elements of Eastern society have seeped into what you could call the guru or priestly caste. Actually, the critique of Brahmanism is well entrenched, but it needs to be done again and again. We also need another sort of critique, which is a critique of all elements of

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heteronomy, including any self-avowed spiritual interest. You find out who is useful for you, then you follow them, but you don’t allow them into your inner self—that’s you and only you. This is following the advice of the Delphi Oracle: ‘Know thyself.’ And then you will know the universe and the gods. Savita: So what actually is the structure of the love of god—Roy Bhaskar’s god—that we get? Roy: The structure you get is an immensely pliable ground state, which underpins all our activities, which is united—as use of metaphor goes—as pearls on a string with all the other beings in the universe. We can transcendentally identify with anything, reflect into it, make use of co-presence. In this ground state, we are spontaneously knowledgeable, and we spontaneously perform right action, we spontaneously attune to everything else in the universe, because we are one with everything else in the universe. Just as we feel an immediate compassion for a bird when we see that it has lost its wing and can’t fly, we spontaneously know what is the right thing to do and we do it, and the universe spontaneously acts so as to facilitate what we’re doing, if what we’re doing is right. Then, when we’ve achieved a mastery in a particular area we can penetrate its alethic depths. So through our own depth, we can penetrate other depths, and we can, in principle, know everything.18 So we are all little selves with infinite possibilities.

6.4 The Tripartite Self and the Goal of Self-realisation Savita: So on your account the self is very much connected to the deepest ontological level, and the best self will be the one that daily gets in touch with the ground state. So what is the self like? Does it dwell at the deepest level all the time, and what is it like at that level? Or does it come back, and if it does, what is it like then? Roy: The self has a tripartite structure. So we have the ego, which is the sense of separateness, a separate me. But, as Hume pointed out, but in a paradoxical way, when you look for this, for what you are, then you find that everything disappears until it appears to be a property, and there is nothing which is essentially you. Postmodernists also deconstruct the concept of the self, and espouse explicitly the concept of no ego, no sense of a separate self. But this ego is actually the prop and function of our civilisation, because everything that happens is attributed to a subject. So you marry, you own a house, you love, you fight, you have an occupation, you have moods, you do something wrong, you are blamed, you are punished—even religion will tell you that you sin and will go to hell. So this thing, this you, this ‘I’, is everything in our 18 This

does not, of course, mean that a human being can be omniscient (level of the actual), only that there is nothing in the universe that is intrinsically unintelligible (level of the real) to humans, any more than the fact that there is no human language that a human could not learn means that a human actually can be omni-lingual.

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society. Yet no one can say what it is; no one can define the ‘I’; it is undefinable in our terms. But when Hume announces that he can’t find the ‘I’ anywhere, who is it that makes that announcement? What is it? It’s an ‘I’, isn’t it? So there is an ‘I’ there somewhere, but it is not the ‘I’ which is the subject of legal economics or political rights; it’s something else, so we must search for that. Now the ego, as separate from other egos and the world of objects to which it stands in instrumental, attached, conditional relationships, is the reality of demi-reality. It is the reality of an illusion—a lived world of illusion; it’s the reality of the mist in which we live, the veil through which we see everything. This is truly myopic—both maya in the sense of illusory and myopic in the sense of shortsighted. If I’m right, the ego doesn’t exist. But what undoubtedly does exist is belief in the ego—belief in an illusion that is parasitic on truth. So this belief in an ego will have causal efficacy, and that is the major feature at the level of the demi-real in my understanding of the self—the illusion of the ego, the illusion of egotism, and action informed by this illusion. And egotism is the counterpart of analytical universalisability, which we’ve seen is just the endless repetition of the same: everything can be drawn under the same formula; everything is either right or wrong; nothing is right for me, but not for her; nothing is right for me to say to you, and not for her to say to you. There are no nuances, no subtleties. It’s a mockery. But there it is, that’s what we have. So that is the self in demi-reality—the ego. Then, in relative reality, which is not illusion, we have the embodied personality. Now, it’s undeniable that embodied personalities exist. But where exactly does your embodied personality start and where does it end? If you think about it, what you are as an embodied personality is a relative matter—which you would expect of a self in the relative field of existence, because you’re related to other beings by cause and effect, by composition (of parts and wholes), and definitionally by constitution. So you’re related to your parents, to the circumstances of which you’re a product, you are part of a family, part of a class, part of India—so where exactly do you begin and end? Definitionally, as I said earlier, in these conversations to be is to be related. So what relations really constitute you? Now from some points of view, your essence is to be creative. Creative mental being that you are, you are also mentally loving and kind, considerate, compassionate, showing great solidarity with human suffering, and also very beautiful, with a tremendous sense of the aesthetic, and you also have a good sense of fun. So these are some of the things that you essentially are. But for other purposes being part of your family constitutes part of you. So the Buddhist critique says that this is all relative, so that the self doesn’t even exist there at the level of the embodied personality. So far, what I have said is straight Buddhism (we will come back to Hinduism, which is very important)— Savita: Are we not to understand that there are notions of the self in the West? Roy: I will come to that; these you can also put in a Western way. Now, although it has been influenced by Buddhism, my account is not the Buddhist account, as you will see. There are other relations that make things even more complex. There is what

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is essential and what is inessential or only apparent; what is the surface structure and what is the more real or deeper part of the embodied personality; what is enduring and what is not enduring, and so on. So everything is relativised in this way by bringing in more polarities, or what is more you or less you. So is there a conception which could correspond to this conception of the embodied personality as real in the relative field of existence? There is: the concept of something like a magnetic field, which is not a single fixed point, which fades gradually. So your possession of things like a handbag is not really part of you (but you of course can change it), and your great-great-grandfather exists on the penumbra of you (this is the co-presence of the past in the present (Bhaskar 1993, 140 f.)). You are like a magnetic field. So, if you think of people as fields, the concept of the embodied personality obviously refers to something real.19 Obviously we’re embodied, obviously we’re personalities; so it’s absurd to deny that there’s something in that sense that’s real. Now the ground state, the transcendentally real self, actually underlies everything that we do. And when Buddhists say ‘no self’, meaning ‘no ego’, they shouldn’t mean ‘no transcendentally real self’ and they shouldn’t mean ‘no embodied personality’. All they mean when they are critical of the embodied-personality conception of the self is that it’s a relative thing; exactly where you draw the line varies from context to context. So let me say some basic things about the concept of ‘I’. ‘I’ (which is used universally) varies, it designates different things according to the speaker who utters it; the ‘I’, where it’s used to designate a single being, changes from time to time, from context to context. In one case, it will not include the emotions I feel in regard of my partner, in another they are part of me. Then this ‘I’ is also something which is counter-posed to ‘me’. So what is the ‘me’? The ‘me’ is something which is socially formed, socially determined. The ‘I’ is something which is given, but lacks clear stable reference when used by the person whom it designates. And to make some such contrastive distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ is about as far as Western analytical philosophy will take you. And then you come back to the basic conception that, when you’re talking about ‘I’ versus ‘me’, ‘I’ versus the determined or the socially constructed self, you are talking about something which consumes, something which is the obverse point of reference, the ultimate presupposition in a discourse. And so, really, that is the Western take on the trinity of ego, embodied personality and transcendentally real self. The embodied personality is a heteronomous complex; a site which is limited, plastic and relative. What we want to do in our life is to expand ourselves, and the way we do this is by accessing the ground state, freeing the energy which is fixated or blocked in heteronomous formations. When we’re attached to the past, we build the past into us; if you’ve been wounded or hurt, that past is still a living present. So freeing ourselves from the past in the sense of regrets, remorsefulnesses, sadnesses, complex anxieties—whatever you take from the past—is an important part of liberating energy. Heteronomy generally can be seen as a way of dissipating 19 Cf. ‘Now human beings, like any other empirically given object, are fields of effects (though of course none the less real for that).’ Bhaskar (1979, 111).

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energy which would otherwise be freely spent on expansion, and the most expanding force in the universe that we know is love. When you love or fall in love with someone or something—with a person, with poetry or music or philosophy or particular genres or examples of them—then you expand, you feel tremendously expanded. Mystics have felt tremendously energised by God, when they were one with God: when God came to them, they begged for God to come to them. And the experience of love— being loved, loving—is itself a tremendously expanding one. Love really helps us block negative emotions, which are parasitical on love. Let me summarise what I’ve said on the self. The ego is the king of the world of demi-reality. It is an illusion, but it’s causally efficacious, it’s real: a real illusion. There’s nothing in the world that corresponds to it, but people—embodied personalities—act as if they have an ego, and the whole of the social world is structured around a concept of an ‘I’, which resembles or is modelled on the ego. Underlying the ego is the embodied personality. The embodied personality also includes such things as the intellect, including the discursive and intuitive intellect, the emotions and, as embodied, the physical plane of being. This embodied personality is the reality in the relative field of existence, which, as physically embodied, we must inhabit. The object here is to purify and clarify one’s embodied personality, so that everything which is not what you essentially are or which is inconsistent with it, or a less than full realisation of what you essentially are, is eliminated. The first is positive elimination, and the second is negative, in that you’re just making yourself more full, embodying your real self at all levels of your being. The reason for this is that, if you leave an opening, a gap, then something can jump in; unless you are clear and fully realised in your embodied personality, something heteronomous can came in, so you shut the gate—as well as throwing all the enemy out, shut the gate, bolt the door. Then you’re just a clear, pure channel or expression of your potential: the essential you, the essential Savita. So underpinning the embodied personality, at the level of the absolute, is the ground state, the nondual you, the transcendentally real self, which is the self of causal agency. I argue that causal agency is always mediated by this spontaneous level; and that it is this self which taps the energy of the unbounded cosmic envelope which bounds the whole of the universe, and supplies the energy and the inclination to love and creativity that is actually used by your embodied personality. When it’s pure, it is a pure expression of that energy, that love, that creativity; when it’s impure and heteronomous, then it is a dissipated, deflected, limited expression of your ground state, and even an expression of things contrary to your ground state. So that defines the goal of self-realisation.

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6.5 Critiques Entrained by the New Philosophy 6.5.1 A Radical Critique of Religious and Spiritual Practices Now how can this goal of self-realisation be used to measure practices? Well, the practices will be right or wrong for an individual. They may be embodied in a particular institution that is totally deformed and corrupt. They may have very little value and very little connection with their founders, or their founders’ thought; and the institutions that they set up may have been appropriate for their time and community but inappropriate for our time and community. So fundamentalism in the sense of a regressive return to the past, re-invoking some great names—Shankara, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Aurobindo— Savita: Or even Gandhi. He kept on talking about his spiritual practices, even while he was practising politics. He loved to speak about the spiritual nature of his work and struggle, and at one point he even said that people were mistaken to think that practising politics was all that he was doing, or that the struggle that he was leading against the British Empire was his own work. He himself was absolutely zero, he said, it was someone else who was doing it, it was the god who was doing it, it was the truth that was unleashing itself. Roy: Indeed, yes. Now when I said that I’ve been conscious of the fact that I really owed everything to a transcendent source, this only meant that I was tapping my ground state, which transcended my embodied personality—actually, I wasn’t just tapping my ground state, I was tapping the cosmic envelope—and that allowed me to penetrate, to fathom the depths of reality, because I was uniquely lucky in being placed in circumstances and a situation which allowed me to do this; by tapping the cosmic envelope I could be creative and make discoveries within the philosophical field.20 But anyway, this is why now, even to the West where ‘God’ is a touchy subject, I am not retracting: God can still stay there, but God is not part of the scheme; what you want to call God, if it transcends the cosmic envelope, then it really lies outside the bounds of the system that I’m describing. Similarly, though there is evidence about afterlife and some things can be said about it, really we don’t have to go into the question of the immortality of souls and their possible pre-existence, i.e. reincarnation or anything like that—though that could also be done within a secular framework. This is a spirituality within the bounds of secularism, as such depending 20 The great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan attributed his astonishing discoveries likewise to a transcendental source. See Kanigel (1991, esp. Chap. 7.9, ‘Ramanujan, mathematics and God’, 280–89). As Kanigel points out, if one considers the longue durée it is atheists and sceptics who represent ‘the extreme position’ and Ramanujan (and Bhaskar) who are ‘more in line with the large body of belief and conviction, within the Western tradition as well as that of the East, that perceived links between creativity and intuition on the one hand and spiritual forces on the other’ (286–7). Like Bhaskar, Ramanujan had great confidence in his insights but remained largely unknown in his field during his lifetime, and indeed for a generation after his death, despite being championed by the eminent Oxbridge mathematician G. H. Hardy.

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on no faith, and acceptable to all faiths and people of no faith. But it delineates an expansion which can be used as a radical critique of religious practices as being unsuitable for me, unsuitable for any me, that is, for you, and unsuitable for any collective me, that is, the community; and of the abuse of those practices as taking obscurantist and fear-based political forms. This is the way we engage an immanent critique of religion, whether fundamentalist or communalist. We don’t say to them: ‘We don’t believe in God, we don’t need God.’ We say: ‘Look! Look what your God is. You tell me that your God is a God of love. But look at what you are doing: is that the action of a loving God?’ Savita: Yes, in fact, even in the West it is always about whether the practices run counter to the path of secularisation; most of them don’t realise or even understand the radical ethical implications of the axial religions, because if they did we would not have the kind of practices that we have within the politics of society generally. If we ask at what level the self is generally conceptualised to sustain the kind of world we live in, I think this is at the level of the embodied personality. And in the West, I feel that most people, while reading Kierkegaard, for example, would have a lot of darkness in their thoughts. I quite enjoy reading Kierkegaard, I must say; but instead of being spiritual the whole experience becomes aestheticised. Whenever the whole notion of God seems about to be discussed freely and openly, what they tend to do is shroud it in an immense darkness, which is a curtain that is supposed to symbolise the humility of the people who are thinking about God; because, if God is rationalised, then in that form God is not such an enchanting God, and various institutions, even capitalist institutions, might be seen as far more enchanting than the religious institutions of a rationalised God. This whole emphasis on the darkness, the hiddenness of God, of which even Heidegger writes—concealment and unconcealment—is far less open than your approach. But that experience, as I said, is not a spiritual experience, it is still a very secular experience, and the most you can say is that in the Western world it stretches too far. In the Eastern world, say within Hinduism, you don’t even have that; the real creative reinterpretation of Vedanta which takes place, through these people that I have already mentioned and up until Gandhi, is told as a story of Indian modernity. Society generally, in the name of religion, has known just darkness. You can’t see the point of talking about God in society. Roy: That’s right. The fundamental theorem of the first stage of critical realism, transcendental realism, is that ontological realism is consistent with epistemological relativism, and that both are consistent with, and indeed inclined to, judgemental rationalism; and here I’m espousing ontological realism about the goal of spirituality. If the goal of life is to become unbounded, unlimited selves, this means that the goal is to free the transcendentally real self, which is your unique, loving, compassionate, creative you. And everyone is unique, so everyone has different qualities. We are attempting to describe the fundamental properties of people, which are powers, in their nondual state in a world that belongs to relativity. They are manifest in the relative world, so it is not wrong to use these terms, but everyone will have their unique bundle or essence of noble properties of love, creativity and so on. A part of them, their real self, will be striving and actually trying to guide their embodied personality,

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if I can use a metaphor, to become only and completely what they essentially are (cf. Bhaskar 2000, ix). Now this ontological realism about the goal of spirituality as a presupposition of emancipatory projects and practices within a secular framework can be used to test the adequacy of religious practices that claim to make the same sort of transition from a little, limited self to a big, unbounded Self. This is consistent with judgemental rationalism and with the critique of those practices as degenerate or perhaps as suitable for particular people, but as limited. Take meditation, for example. Because meditation is practised in everyday life, you can have growth in meditation yet become a worse person in everyday life—there is no automatic correlation or anything like that. So the criterion is: Does this expansion occur? Do you become a better human being? And that is something which is a matter of empirical scrutiny; and it is consistent with epistemological relativism and pluralism—with the fact that some practice may have been inappropriate for some time in some communities. In a way, it may be easier initially for you to tap the transcendent by following the practices that you found in your own tradition. If you’re coming out of a very traditional society like India, then rejecting them may be the best way. Then you will be accessing a new ground state. You will be showing forms of compassion and love to your colleagues and fellow revolutionaries that are actually reacting against those institutionalised forms. So ontological realism, epistemological relativism and pluralism, and judgemental rationalism all go hand in hand. Taken together with an idea of the concrete singularity of human beings, and the fact that what is universalisable is only dialectically universalisable (so that, instead of ‘What is right for me, is right for you’, we have ‘What is right for me may not be right for you’), by transcendentally identifying—utilising my capacity for transcendence—I will become you, and I will show sensitised solidarity to that you whom I’ve understood. I will not be judgemental, and if you choose another path, that’s fine; because no one knows you better than you do. No one. And no one, when you are free, is to stand in you.

6.5.2 Direct Understanding and the Critique of Hermeneutics Savita: I would like you to comment on other accounts of the self, say the existential one. For example, Sartre considers the self as an interpreting one, a self that aspires to complete itself by realising meaning; and so understanding becomes a very necessary feature of the self. The self is happiest when it understands its own intuitions, and understanding the self becomes a big thing, and one of the projects of the hermeneutical tradition more generally. I find the whole approach quite fulfilling. Roy: The thing is in the ground state—we’re talking now about understanding— you ‘just see’ something (you don’t ‘see’ something); and this just seeing—the identity of being and seeing for you—is also the identity of being and meaning. There is no duality in the ground state; and therefore, in the ground state, when

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you go into another being, or into a feature of some situation, then you’re doing hermeneutics: being is meaning. Normally being is or may be conceptualised as containing meaning, though it is not only meaning; but in the ground state there is the immediate identity of being and meaning. So understanding features of a situation from the point of view of transcendental identification is understanding their meaning. So transcendental identification is a very refined form of, if you like, nondual hermeneutics which is similar to the direct seeing that we talked about yesterday, which is the direct seeing of meaning. And when you think about it, you are really not interpreting my sound: you are immediately reading me, immediately understanding me. Our conventional conception of understanding is really horrible, because we think that what is happening is that I’m producing a sequence of sounds, you’re hearing the sequence of sounds, and then there’s something going on in your head which is interpreting the sequence of sounds, reconstructing it as a sentence which you then read as a meaningful one. That is the standard view. But actually, no, you directly read or understand me as meaningful and, like a book which you’re directly reading, it is not three things—the hearing of the sound, the interpretive reconstruction of it as sentence and the reading of it as meaning inside your head— it’s just a straight reading.21 This means that hermeneutic contact is in a way very immediate. Yesterday I argued that nothing could happen in the human domain unless meanings and reasons, when intended, are causally efficacious in the world; and that’s true: I give myself a reason for doing things, I give you a reason for doing things. But the actual understanding of meaning is direct and intuitive or immediate: it is not mediated. It’s a bit like the spontaneity of action: you directly understand me, not just in the sense that we are two distinct physical beings in a nonclosed system in which holistic causality operates, but in the sense that there’s not even a space between us: it’s a direct reading, in the moment of understanding there is identity.22 A conversation is like the reading of a book. There’s nothing mediate; it’s an immediate understanding. If you understand what I say, you understand—and that’s it. Savita: But on the hermeneutical understanding of reading, it is not possible for you to get it right in the first place, so in that sense you may not directly get it. So what happens is that you actually dwell most of the time in the realm of interpretation. Roy: Yes, I do understand that. It’s a bit like a lot of intentional agency. We’re messing around with something, we’re trying to see how we can operate instrumentally on the world; but at some point we just do it. Now in the case of interpretation, the interpretation can’t start unless you have this direct intuition, direct reading—which

21 This was brought home to me often as I listened to the recordings of these conversations. After repeatedly listening to and trying to decipher an apparently obscure word, phrase or sentence without success, I would suddenly ‘just hear’ it clearly when I replayed it while attending to something else, and marvel that I had not heard it in the first place. I would understand it only when I stopped trying to figure out its meaning consciously. 22 This does not of course mean ‘that identical thoughts (or the “same” thoughts in some sense) are in two different minds’ at the level of the embodied personality (Bhaskar 2016, 160); rather, identity is achieved at the level of the supramental consciousness of ground states.

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is a property of the ground state. In the context of a situation you’re trying to understand, and you interpret, interpret, interpret—OK, what is the easiest route? You go straight into it, you become one with it. This is not difficult. Savita: In fact it generates a different kind of ethics, that’s the point I want to make to you. These ways of understanding and interpreting have their own ethical implications, they make you a certain kind of a person. Roy: Yes, that’s true. It’s very important, when in a society like India, to table multiplicity and pluralism of interpretation under the theorem of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgemental rationality; and that allows you to critique and understand and situate your path. But there is something which is even more basic and that is directly intuiting, directly knowing. The so-called clairvoyant is someone who can see through things and see things directly; if she directly understands something, then there’s no need to mess around in the world of interpretation. Savita: The goal of the hermeneutist would be exactly what you’re saying. Roy: No. If you read the Sufi poet, Rumi, he talks about friends. Now actually he had a friend who was his teacher, but this friend was just God, his ingredient divine self—so directly known and directly intuited. Other people come and say: Did Rumi’s friend die? Did he do this with his friend? Did he do that?—They asked all sorts of questions. Did he sleep with his friend? (Laughs). That sort of thing. But it is not his friend in our everyday sense, his friend is God or his inner divine self. Once you know that, then whenever he talks of the friend coming at night, you know what he means. Tagore also talks about things coming at night, and you know he means God. But people think someone other than his wife is coming and he must be having a secret love affair! So if you’re stuck as an embodied personality and you don’t believe in either the ego or the essential self, understanding is something that can go on forever, like the problem of induction. This is the way the discursive intellect is stuck. We are stuck in aporias. The discursive intellect is a necessary discriminator in all situations, but it can function as a block. Now the problem of induction goes like this. It doesn’t matter how many instances we have of copper conducting electricity, it’s always possible that you will find an instance of copper which doesn’t conduct electricity; and there induction is stuck. The insolubility of the problem of induction led Kant to say—and we will come on to Kant, because he is a key figure here—that ultimately the only thing that keeps the world ticking is God, but God can’t be proved. So God was actually underpinning the uniformity of nature that Kant believed in. However, we see that nature is not really uniform, not at the level that Kant described it—but let that pass. Duhem and other philosophers made this the basis for a compromise, a peaceful coexistence, between science and religion: science was shown to presuppose God and therefore the object of religion, though that God couldn’t be proved. At the same time religion, particularly in the form of the Catholic Church, allowed science to flourish, because science had its own domain and it paid due obeisance to the fact that nothing could happen without God. So science and God peacefully coexisted. This actually did a disservice to science and a disservice to God. It was a compromise formation that

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blocked both understanding of the real resolution of the problem of induction and scientific and philosophical inquiry into the question of God.23 Savita: It was a rational project. Roy: Yes, it was a rational project, and it had a certain ideological function: it allowed the Catholic Church to survive in a world of science, and it seemed to solve the problem of induction. Now what is the real resolution of the problem of induction? It is that once you know the electronic structure of copper—once you see it—then you know why it is that copper conducts electricity, and then anything which doesn’t have that electronic structure can’t conduct electricity, because that electronic structure necessitates its conducting electricity. So it is actually the direct discovery or revelation of the alethic grounding of our empirical truths or our laws governing science (which are not simple empirical truths, because they refer to the real and as well as the empirical) that resolves the problem of induction. Once you know that, you don’t mess around with the discursive intellect, you just know it—you get on, there’s no longer a problem. These empiricist philosophers of science are stuck in problems like that; there’s no resolution, it’s impossible to resolve them. This is the substance of our textbooks of philosophy of science: a discipline can’t keep going without problems; once you solve them, there’s nothing more to do, you move on. This is what science actually does. Once it has discovered the reason why copper conducts electricity, it goes on to describe mechanisms accounting for that electronic structure; so it tries to grasp the alethia or the ground state of that level of being. Similarly with understanding and the hermeneutists. You know, this world is terribly complex and confused: my daughter doesn’t want to marry the husband allocated to her; I dabbled around in Canadian politics; God exists and He doesn’t exist; the Dalai Lama is my friend. All these things blend together in a terribly complex situation; obviously you’re going to be stuck, you’re not going to see anything. Someone like Charles Taylor has not got beyond—really transcended—the problem-field that is hermeneutics. Hermeneutics depends on certain hermeneutical circles; so the circle of interpretation is that I always have to understand your understanding and my own understanding. But in my ground state, it is not a circle, it is a direct intuition: I directly see that you’re a poet. And I don’t mess around—I don’t even qualify this: I don’t say that you are a poet who is trying to abstain from something, or put a tremendously complex interpretation on it. This is your poem, and that’s the end of it. And it is not a circle. Savita: In fact hermeneutists themselves say that the whole process of understanding is circular. But it always happens, the clearing of meaning happens; it takes place within a circle, of course, they themselves accept this.

23 The notion that religion and science have their own completely separate domains is enshrined in the widely accepted contemporary dogma of NOMA (the acronym for ‘non-overlapping magisteria’) articulated by Stephen Jay Gould (1999).

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Roy: Yes, absolutely. And this clearing within the circle, if it occurs, is just the moment of transcendence which they have to have initially to get the whole conversation going; they have to speak and understand each other directly to form the conclusion that the world is known. It is that direct intuition which sustains the muddiness, the cloudiness, the obscurity of hermeneutic investigation, the never ending, interminable going round and round and round, just like the empiricist scientists who try to find some samples of copper that don’t conduct electricity. They should just know it—and they do know it, really, they do know what’s right and what’s wrong, and we do know how to act. When we’re not in a situation, we have to ease ourselves into it, and then we learn; but it is not very complicated, we go into it and we are one with it and then we directly know it, and that direct knowledge allows us to function within it. So hermeneutics functions in many ways. The element of truth is definitely there, absolutely, because our communication, as we’ve said, is a direct hermeneutic one—it is not actually mediated by physical causality: my mind is talking to your mind, and directly you are understanding me. Now this itself is an interesting proposition—a mind talking to another mind. This is what is really happening, but we don’t have a framework for showing or understanding this because, according to our normal view of things, minds don’t interact in that way. A final point on hermeneutics. Academics love to keep games going, because they thrive on problems. The hermeneutic game is also kept going by theologians in the West, and they want to say that God is like a language-game for making our practices intelligible. You see, From East to West in a way was written for a Western audience, and it was shocking because it said that whether God exists or not is a real question, and in addition here are arguments for God’s existence. And Western theology says (and it’s sophisticated—it’s like a problem-field, it’s like an industry for the discursive intellect): ‘Actually, let’s forget all about God existing; God functions as a metaphor glossing certain social practices, and it has to be understood for whatever it does in a person’s social life.’ So try telling that to a practioner, try telling someone going to church that God is just your way of making friends with your wife—or whatever it is that English theologians would say. I’m not really all that familiar with them, but this is not a fabrication. There are very few real theological realists in the West, not even in Catholicism—some Jesuit theologians perhaps are realists—and certainly not within the Protestant tradition. It’s just a metaphor. Don’t ask whether God exists or not, and you won’t quarrel with science. Try telling that to religious believers, trying telling them that God is just a metaphor for what they’re doing, and they will get pretty annoyed; they are probably giving a lot of money to the church to buy themselves a seat in heaven, they believe in an eternal afterlife.

6.5.3 Critique of Marxism Savita: That’s very nice. It gives us a clear picture of how God can be conceptualised differently. I find received conceptions very muddled, and I also think it’s very

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courageous on your part to write about God in the present context. Obviously you’ve moved from the position from where you started in Hegel and Marx, which you’ve included in your thought, in dialectical critical realism in particular. In Hegel, of course, the idea of God is there; in Marx it is secularised, but he also imagines utopia as a very godly kind of place in which people love each other and unconditionally give to each other, and these ideas have inspired liberation theology in Latin America, but have had less impact in the West. How do you read Marxism now after this new understanding of god and spirituality that you have arrived at? I mean, I don’t think you’ve negated Marxism; it’s very much included as a moment within your thought, but what are the implications of your new understanding for Marxism? Roy: Marxism certainly describes the fundamental mode of oppression and block on human potentiality acting in the world today: it describes capitalism. And, as I was arguing this morning, capitalism is, if you like, public enemy number one. But capitalism is internalised, and the best way of freeing the social world is by clearly bringing out the spiritual elements within Marxism and seeing that the only way we can actually act on them is by our action, and that that presupposes something within ourselves operating from the ground state. I have a feeling that we should come back to Marxism tomorrow, because we need to say something more about what went wrong with Marxism. We need to go into that more systematically, using the moments of dialectical critical realism, to flesh out exactly what is wrong with it.24 So far I have just shown that something is very right with it, namely, that it pinpoints the essential structure of capitalism—and capitalism is the dominant force operating today; and that the spiritual presuppositions of Marxism presuppose an ideal which is still valid. It’s surprising that people who have criticised Marxism haven’t brought this out—and we could go into practices like liberation theology and consider to what extent they actually conform to my recipe, and into all the deformations of Eastern emancipatory projects.

6.6 Radical Hermeticism and the Dialectical Learning Process of Life What my discourse about God did is break the taboo about talking about God and spirituality in general in the Western academy. And some people came up to me and said: ‘You know, for fifteen or twenty years I’ve been taking communion in church, and I’ve never before been able to tell you, although I’ve known you all that time.’ Other people denounced me for betraying the cause; that was some people on the Bhaskar List on the internet.25 Anyone can subscribe to the Bhaskar List, it’s for 24 They did go into what went wrong with Marxism more systematically, but unfortunately, with the exception of Bhaskar’s overview of his metacritique (see Appendix), the tape recordings have been lost. 25 Now the Critical Realism List: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/listinfo/critical-realism.

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people who want to talk about my work; I don’t read it and I don’t interfere in it: it’s a discourse for them. And this is very, very important: there is no correct interpretation of critical realism. This is a hermeneutic point, and of course critical realism is there for whatever creatively and constructively you can get out of it. So someone will come up and apologise to me, saying: ‘You know, unfortunately I’m stuck on the second stage of critical realism, and I can’t get into dialectic.’ And I say: ‘That’s absolutely fine, that is where you live, and that is where you must be.’ Other people have said: ‘We have two books here: a book by Andrew Collier, Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy and another by William Outhwaite, also on your work, and they give completely different interpretations. Which is right, and which is wrong?’ It is not for me to say: it is what’s right for them that’s important. Really, this is a tremendously radical and empowering position, which is at one with the ancient hermetic tradition from Egypt, in which the ultimate criterion was self-knowledge: what struck you as being correct. This tradition informed the Greek school of Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BCE) and Plato; some elements of the tradition were preserved in Greek thought, but generally it has been lost. So really, my philosophy is radically hermetic, but it is also totally practically engaged. Nowhere has there been a philosophy which has talked about individual selfrealisation as implying universal self-realisation, which has found the transcendent in the most mundane and everyday act that we do. So you don’t have to search for it. It’s there. It is there in your practical daily life. You are immediately and automatically a spontaneously loving and creative being, and that sustains everything else; just dig deep enough in your reflection and you will find it in your spontaneous activities—it’s there everywhere. So, if I may use a parable or metaphor, what I’m saying is that we have had, and we have paradise, but on top of it and occluding it is hell. All we have to do to be free is to get rid of that hell. When you realise that that hell is sustained by heaven, and that this is an immanent heaven here on Earth, not up in the clouds or somewhere else, the task of human liberation becomes something that is very practical, very much a matter of here and now. I don’t think that this has been said before; if it has been, that’s fine, but this is putting it in a new idiom. Actually to see the transcendent at work everywhere, so that you don’t have to have a guru—fine if you do—and you don’t have to engage in a specific religious discipline or practice, let alone one that you think is going to be applicable for all human beings; to say that you can find the transcendent everywhere is to say that you only have to dig down into your self and ultimately you will know what is best for you: this is a very radical thing. Now, where I would like to end this discussion on god, before we move on to the emotions and the other items we have on the agenda for today, is by considering the spontaneous features of action when we are in the ground state: what we would do immediately if we were acting in the ground state. Well, first, this spontaneous right action in the ground state would be naturally coherent. Second, it would be always in the now, always in the present, always focused on the moment—it would never be half in the present and half in the future, and never projected into the future, or backwards into the past. It would always be focused on the here, it would always be from where we are. Third, it would always be integrated. Mind and body and emotion

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would not be three different forces tugging in different directions; there would be just one force, you would be in a nondual state. Fourth, it would be holistic because, although you were in a nondual state, you would immediately see how the whole fits together; and you can see examples of this in, for example, women’s critical work, and also in the work of men. Fifth, it would be beyond duality, by definition, but, because you were in the ground state, which is connected to the ground states of all other beings by the cosmic envelope—the ground state, to put it another way, is only a ripple in the cosmic envelope—it would be oriented to the abolition of all injustices, all dualities, and it would feel each injustice, each duality, each oppression as its own. Sixth, it would be totally responsible: it would assume responsibility for everything, it would not try to shift the blame. It would not say: ‘Well, I’m doing this because I was given a certain upbringing.’ No; you accept total responsibility for everything that happens to you: you adopt, supremely, the standpoint of subject-referentiality, because in this way you empower yourself. You say: ‘Everything is up to me.’ You don’t shift responsibility onto someone else, because that’s disempowering, that’s letting someone else into your space. It’s your responsibility; it’s your life, and you decide how to lead it. Finally, it is a life which is very simple in the sense of shed: it has got rid of a lot of the past; it is a life in which we really travel free, without baggage. The Christian theologian of the Middle Ages, Meister Eckhart, put this very nicely when he said that the goal is to ‘have nothing, want nothing and know nothing’. ‘Have nothing’ means you have no possessions; there may be things that formally belong to you, but really you have no possessions, there is nothing you have: if you have something, then you can lose it—and if it belongs to your essence, losing it would be very dangerous, though in fact this is impossible; what you have at this level, you have forever—that’s your freedom. And if you have nothing, you want nothing; there are no desires, you want nothing that you don’t have, you have no attachments. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have responsibilities, of course you do. Nor does it mean that you don’t have preferences, that you are indifferent between spinach and spaghetti or whatever, of course you’re not. And then there’s ‘know nothing’. Now this is shocking; what does this mean? ‘Know nothing’ means that, actually, you’re not carrying items of information around in your head, that they are all inside you; and then you can access them, tap them, freely. You’re not like a batsman or a batter who has made up her mind before she begins her stroke what she’s going to do. That’s wrong. You’re completely free, completely focused, and then intuitively, spontaneously, you respond to the situation. Your mind is empty; you have that inner emptiness. As the Chinese Taoist Lao-Tze (605–531 BCE) said, the ideal is to roam free through life. But ‘know nothing’ should be understood also in another sense. Just think of it: if your mind was full, how could you learn anything? It’s actually the emptiness which allows you to take things in. Getting rid of preconceptions, opinions, judgements, little fixations, is absolutely vital to learning dialectically, quickly, responding to situations, and acting dialectically. Then there’s something else, which is that there should be no space within yourself for anything like the conception of an external authority, like the conception of a God apart from yourself, so that you are sufficient unto yourself. If you have something heteronomous inside

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you, as part of you—like most people carry an ideology or a conception of God as existing apart from themselves—then you can’t be completely divine, you can’t be real, you can’t be free. So you have nothing. You know nothing in the sense that there’s nothing there in your mind. You have mastered the art of simplicity. Savita: So on your account, a very simple, happy, unloaded life. Roy: Definitely. This unloaded life can engage with every complexity that the world has to offer in the best possible way, because when you have a complex situation it actually requires you to be more decisive, to act in a more holistic way, to act freer of preconceptions and encumbrances. When most people have a great opportunity, they freeze in the face of it. In 1968, the President of France, de Gaulle, was paralysed. The students had seized the universities, they had brought society to a halt; the workers were occupying the factories and de Gaulle was ready to resign—he was resigned to resigning. But, unfortunately, the Communist Party didn’t take power. So after a month, heavy on sedation and other things, de Gaulle went on television and announced that he was restoring authority. (Laughs scornfully). So as late as 1968, the Communist Party in Europe had an opportunity to seize power. De Gaulle was waiting for it; he had planned his escape route! The workers everywhere were in control, and the students occupied the streets. They were just waiting for the Communist Party to come in and take over the reins. But the Communist Party were honouring a pact that Stalin had signed with Roosevelt in Yalta, which was the invisible force behind their paralysis. This divided Europe between the West and the East; because of that the Communists could take over countries in the East which may otherwise have chosen a Western way of life. Because of that also—it was not the only reason of course—the Italian and French Communist Parties gave up the chance to seize power. They were themselves destroyed by their own incapacity to act. So travel light, free of attachment, free of the conditionality of instrumental reasoning: just be in your spontaneous ground state, filling it, not keeping it empty. When you’re not wholly at ease, fill yourself with love or with music; don’t try and just be alone, fill yourself. One of the problems with meditation is that in meditation you empty yourself and you can leave your body, and then something can come into your body in a metaphorical way: if you leave a space there, something will come in. So people who meditate, like me, can have all kinds of horrible thoughts come up, and then their meditation instructor will tell them: ‘Don’t worry, that’s natural; just go with it.’ And then when they go back into daily life, they are full of horrible thoughts and carry them into their practice, and are not able to be their natural nondual self in their practice. So if it is not right for you, it is not a good idea to do too much meditation, too much self-emptying. It’s better to have your mind totally full with something beautiful and edifying, something which resonates with what you essentially are. Of course, when you go into yourself, if you touch a level of deep bliss, that’s fine, that’s great; but many people who meditate can’t find that. They leave themselves empty, and then a strange thought comes up and dominates them. So make sure there is not a space for the enemy to intrude into your ground state, because that is your territory, that is your home. The idea of being realised is so that you can be at home wherever you are, at any place in the world, in any situation.

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Buddha was the first to say, astutely, that it is not your situation which makes you unhappy, it is your response to it; this is still true. It is true because, if you’re in your ground state, then you’re naturally fully happy, loving, kind and creative, and you recognise the situation as being there to transcend: it’s just another challenge, and life is full of challenges that are thrown to you. Life is like an individually encountered obstacle course. At each point, we have a contradiction, an obstacle or challenge; at each point we have to transcend it dialectically. The challenge is how to turn that obstacle into a golden opportunity, not in the sense that in itself it is good, but a golden opportunity for you to become even greater than you already are. The old Indian astrologists had a very crude but effective model: you are born and if your Mangal is there, your Rahu is here.26 They explained what happened in New York in terms of astrology; and the same could happen in Delhi and Kolkata, but not in Mumbai, which was under a different cycle. Savita: Is this how you sum up the whole approach? Roy: Yes, I’m giving the bottom line. So what you have in life is challenges. We all have circumstances, a situation which is there to be transcended. The astrologers said that your situation is fixed by the stars. It doesn’t matter if you believe in astrology or not: one could say that your situation is fixed by your job, you family, etc.—whatever it is, it’s there to be transcended, and you transcend it best when you operate from this nondual ground state, because that’s the deepest state you can be in and which has the maximum leverage for tackling everything. And when you transcend it, then your embodied personality is more realised, and so you’re able to take on an even huger challenge. So people sometimes find that their life goes from one challenge to an even greater challenge. Sometimes their life becomes easy, then it is not easy. There’s no norm in the sense of a typical pattern. Just as science doesn’t have an algorithm, there’s no norm for the dialectical learning process of life. All we can say is some very general things.

26 Mangal

or Mangala and Rahu are planets in Vedic astrology.

Chapter 7

The Emotions, Thought and Self-realisation

7.1 The Emotions I will now lead into a discussion of the emotions.1 When you do something, then you have an effect on the world. Now what is the best form of doing? It is a doing which is without conditions, just simply a giving. So in the ground state, your doing is a giving unconditionally; the doing is a transformation—a giving to the world, a giving to others—without a thought of getting. Well, everything in our world is conditional: we give in order to get. Kant said that you cannot think the unconditional—or rather, you can think the unconditional, but it is outside the bounds of reason: the absolute is something that you cannot prove, cannot say anything about, but which must in some ways be presupposed, or it’s an ideal which is there in the background, faith in which keeps us all going. But I am saying that the absolute is here and now: the absolute is ingredient, the absolute underpins and girds our everyday life; it’s an immanent absolute, about which we can say a lot. Now everything in our society is based on contractual relations: we do something for something else, we have an exchange, we do in order to get. This is conditionality; everything has a condition, everything is attached. You have a contract, you have a clause that specifies what you must get. But actually, that whole system of contracts, of market exchanges, is underpinned by unconditionality—unconditional trust that the other party will honour the exchange. What makes them honour the exchange? The exchange can’t make them. If it was a policeman, then behind every person, there would have to be a policeman. It is unconditional trust that the exchange will be honoured. What makes the person selling the newspaper give you the newspaper? It’s her unconditional acceptance that you will give her 1.50 rupees.

1 In

the recording, this sentence and the ensuing discussion run directly on from the end of the previous chapter. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_7

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This brings me to love, of which trust is a species. I want to state some theses about love, and then we will discuss the other emotions. This is very, very important. The only love worthy of the name is unconditional love. All other love is conditional, love mixed up with some other emotion: desire for reciprocity, possessiveness, greed, jealousy. You can see this in so-called love relationships in ordinary life: very few of us have pure love. Negative emotions like anger, greed, jealousy, apathy, possessiveness, lack of self-esteem—because you must love yourself—these exist only in virtue of the absence or incompleteness of love. Savita: We have now actually gone into the realm of ethics, the ethics that is entrained by a certain kind of conceptualisation of the self, where people have realised this nondual state and they are practicing this different notion of love; they are transformed beings in a way. Roy: Yes. What you say is correct when we are talking about the features of right action. Now I am just talking about one level of our being. Really, the objective is to get rid of heteronomy at all levels of our being—in our minds, in our bodies, in our emotions. So it is only one facet of this that I’m talking about now, the emotions. The reason for starting on the emotions is simply that this is another suppressed term in the philosophical discourse, another taboo subject. Not even From East to West says anything much about the emotions. But the emotions are not only a suppressed term in philosophy, they are also essential mediators between ourselves and the world, because we can’t do anything in the world without its mediation by emotions. To say that you act intentionally is to say that you act from an idea with a certain aim or end in view that you want: we act on a belief and a want—the belief-want couple. Even if the act is spontaneous, there is an implicit belief and an implicit want; if the implicit want is love, that’s still true; and if the implicit belief is absolutely true belief about the situation, that’s spiritual, and it’s still an implicit belief. So you can’t act without e-motivation—without the emotions. Similarly, you can’t—you don’t—respond to the world except through the filter of the emotions. When we see a table stacked high with food, we see it as food, we don’t see it as a material object. If an architect looked into the room and wanted to plan where the table should be, then she would see it from the point of view of the distribution of objects in space. Or we might consider the table or the food from the point of view of its chemical composition, or whatever. We may be a dietician, and if we look at the food see it as healthy or unhealthy. But spontaneously, if we’re hungry, we see the food as something good to eat. So our perception of the world is mediated by emotions. Both our action—the way we act actively on the world—and our perception—the way we respond passively to the world—are mediated by the emotions. So really we can’t say anything about our engagement with life without dealing with the emotions. And very little philosophical work has been done on the emotions. Now from my understanding and analysis of the ground state, we see that naturally we are loving. What I argue is that it is negative emotions like anger, jealousy and greed which actually block the energy of this ground state: anything heteronomous will dissipate energy, will disperse energy, will stop ourselves achieving any objective we have. If you have two thoughts in your mind, you won’t know which one to follow;

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you will be like a horse trying to pull a carriage two ways. So to be focused, to be clear about yourself, to know what you want is very important. Most of us are mish-mashes of different competing impulses and thoughts at all these levels. We can go into the mind when we discuss the intellectual process in more detail; now we are dealing briefly with the self and the much neglected emotions. What I’m claiming is, first, that the negative emotions exist only in virtue of the absence or incompleteness of love. If you feel jealousy, that’s because there’s insufficient love—insufficient realisation of a love which you have. Second, I claim that these negative emotions are parasitic on love; that is, they depend on love. And third, that when love is full, then they will go—the other emotions will go. The negative emotions are all internally connected to each other and to the system in which we live. So capitalism will generate, when someone has a job, pride in the job, but also fear that they are going to lose their job: once they want to remain in the job, they have a desire to keep accumulating more commodities—more money, better cars, more television sets, better holidays and so on. So these emotions run into each other. If you have been really battered in your last job, you will feel tremendous apathy. This apathy will result in lack of self-esteem. Lack of self-esteem will result in meanness, lack of generosity; you will feel jealous of people who have more. So these emotions form an interlocking circle in which one negative emotion goes dialectically into another, and in which all can be seen in terms of the social structure which these negative emotions serve to reproduce or transform. So that’s my position on the emotions in a nutshell. Savita: The thing is that, in the Western world at least, there was a clear formulation that the emotions had to be driven by rationality, which went hand in hand with individualism; because people focused on rationality generated a lot of wealth, they developed techniques for creating wealth and techniques for governing the self. Plato is very articulate on this whole theme. Roy: ‘Governing the self’ seems to imply an instrumental attitude to the self. ‘Instrumental attitude’ means that you manipulate the self in a certain way for a certain end. Savita: No. The point is that if emotions are to compete with rationality—compete in the sense of acquiring the same kind of importance— Roy: No. They are different, but the assumptions about rationality don’t control the emotions, it’s the other way around. This rationalisation, the so-called Western rationality, is totally parasitic on emotions and desires: greed, lust, anger, jealousy— the whole thing. The notion that rationality governed the emotions is an absolute mockery. Actually, it’s the negative emotions which fuel the rationality—the desire to manipulate and control. Who is doing the manipulating and controlling, in what interest? Savita: Nietzsche talks about this in a rather stark way. Of course he doesn’t say that the will to power is an emotion, but it can be considered a form of emotion, can’t it?

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RR: Yes. The will to power is an extreme form of assertiveness. Now, to be assertive is absolutely proper and right. It’s something very important for Indians, who traditionally have learnt to accept their social role or socialisation—wrongly called their dharma; and they learnt not to assert themselves, not to assert their own singularity, their own interest, what they want. You can never become realised until you assert yourself. You can’t go from a stage of abject servitude to self-realisation without going through the mediation of building your self-esteem, building your embodied personality, making itself something, making it account for something in the world. So assertiveness is very important. However, assertiveness may take an extreme form. Now the Greeks had a conception, which is very nice, that for every virtue, there are two vices; one is the vice of deficiency and the other the vice of excess. Take the case of self-esteem or assertiveness as a virtue and its corresponding vices: you can have lack of self-esteem or assertiveness and then you can have excess of self-esteem, which is selfishness or excessive assertiveness, which is the drive to dominate and subject everything to yourself. Nietzsche’s superman was a being who glorified in his uniqueness as superior to the mystified masses. He was not an enlightened being, he was not in his ground state, otherwise he would have been one with the masses. It was a kind of elitism and arrogance which reflected the West’s position at the time in relation to the rest of the world. It was a very late nineteenth century, very colonial ideology. This was the time when they were carving up Africa: the white man had a ‘special mission’; the white man behaved in a very Nietzschean way. It is very elitist. Like Rorty’s ironist, they tried to pride themselves on their specialness; but their contrast is always those who don’t share their point of view, which is the only correct one. But actually, if everyone shared their point of view, then (laughs) they would lose their uniqueness, their specialness; whereas if everyone was enlightened or realised, then we would have something like Marx’s communist society, and we would have the possibility of real freedom; because as long as you are not free, as long as some institution is blocked, we cannot be free. As we saw earlier today, within the constraints of capitalism we can’t get rid of commodification: I will always have to sell myself in a commodified market, or see my nearest and dearest sell themselves, and I will feel the pain of that. So it is the real freedom of the individual that is at stake. Savita: While we’re talking about the emotions, the Stoics, for example, seemed to have an almost appropriate understanding when they say that happiness could be attained by finding some sort of balance, some sort of mean, then perhaps people wouldn’t be aggressive, wouldn’t go and colonise, would live peacefully with others. On a Platonic model, then, emotions are seen as dark forces and illusions, they are very chaotic, they get you into trouble, they fill you with passion. A more measured society would be one where rationality— Roy: No, I don’t think that’s quite correct. For Plato, love was a supreme value, and this kind of supremeness of unconditional love is not the glorification of any one form of love. The love you express unconditionally will always be concretely singularised

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and specific to it is object. The way I express my love to one person will not be the same as the way I express my love to another, because every relation is a relation which is concretely singularised and unique. And to say that everything can be unconditionally loved doesn’t mean that I have to behave the same way to everyone; the way I behave to you will be very different to the way I behave to, say, your bank manager. Or the way I behave to your husband or children would be different from the way I’d behave to the husband or children of your friend the manager if I met them. Each would be concretely singularised. And then, when I see your children, I won’t behave to them as children, I will behave to them as who they are; and then I will know exactly how to behave to them. So love is an emotion, a positive one, and so is joy, so is bliss, happiness and assertiveness or self-esteem: they are good emotions, they don’t block anything. The negative emotions dissipate and block energy. When you’re jealous of someone, that eats into you. Now what does jealousy do? Jealousy means that implicitly you’re comparing yourself with someone else. This means that you don’t respect your concrete singularity and their concrete singularity. You are actually committing the error of analytically universalising. You are not the same, and therefore there are no grounds to be jealous. If you love someone, then you love someone; you shouldn’t necessarily expect anything back in return. Savita: If I’m getting this right, we should get rid of as many negative emotions as possible. Roy: Absolutely. Savita: Is there a role for rational activity here? Roy: Yes, because this is the only rational thing to do. You can show this by rational argument.2 This is the thing to do, because when you have a negative emotion, that negative emotion has to be sustained by a positive emotion—something coming from the ground state; but it’s blocking and dissipating the energy which would otherwise freely flow. Everyone knows that when you’re angry, you can’t do anything much— you really can’t fight effectively when you’re angry: the anger takes over. You can’t fight or do anything rational when you’re jealous, or in a state of great depression, or remorse, or regret; you can’t be focused on what you’re doing. So the only way to maximise the efficacy of what you’re doing, which is one criterion of rationality—a pretty basic one—is to eliminate all the forces of interference and dissipation on the free flow of the realisation of your intentions in the world. And that means that you clear everything which would block it at a mental level—fixated beliefs, preconceptions, prejudices. You clear everything emotionally, and in principle you clear everything physically. So working on the emotions becomes very important to leading a rational life, leading a good life. What the Nietzscheans and implicitly the Weberians were doing in their different but related ideologies—rationalisation and disenchantment—was as follows. They were actually being fuelled, or allowing their systems to be fuelled, by the negative emotions, which were necessary for 2 Cf.

Bhaskar 2016, Ch. 5.1, ‘The explanatory critique of values’, 95-102, and the references given there.

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rationalisation to occur and maintain itself. These were things like pride—pride in your being a judge, being a rational cog in a wheel; pride in your very mechanistic behaviour, your double-entry book-keeping, your lack of spontaneity. You became stuck. You became a stuck ego. You were all puffed up; you were part of the new world, the modern world. Savita: In capitalist modernity, the command of instrumental rationality over the irrational is required to sustain the relations of production and the mode of production itself. Capitalist technology becomes a very clear case of production of this kind of instrumental rationality. The point is that instrumental control over the emotions was always there because, on a capitalistic liberal account, individuals are egotistic. Egotism is also an emotion as it requires an individual to be self-interested, given to avarice; and a great deal of discussion went on in the eighteenth century to justify the proposition that self-interest was a good emotion to have; because without justifying self-interest, you couldn’t really have capitalist relations of production. The whole debate from Hume on was arguing from the need of individuals. When all this is brought out and critiqued, it is radical in its implications: it demands the reassessment of the relationships that we have, which are quite distorted. Roy: I think we’re really in total agreement here—or, as we’re talking about emotions, let’s just say in total solidarity—because love has many forms of manifestation: compassion, solidarity, trust, dedication, devotion. The so-called command of rationality over the emotions, as you show, was not a command at all, because instrumental reason was actually governed by the emotions—by self-interest, greed, avarice and rampant desire, above all for— Savita: Domination. Without domination, there wouldn’t have been any colonisation. Roy: Absolutely. There’s no argument at all, that could be sustained, which says that the emotions have ever played a subordinate role, in the relative field of existence, to the products of mind. It is the emotions that determine what products of mind are used, what ideational structures are in place; and the idea that something like the rationality of the system exists disembodied or disconnected or uncoupled from the emotions is absolute nonsense. All social systems are driven by human beings, and human beings are emotive creatures: nothing will move without a want, a desire, a volition, an intention. Even if the intention comes from the pure ground state of being, if it is an expression of people’s own inner essence, and not something heteronomous or imposed, nothing will move in the human world without emotions. Nothing will move without intentional agency, and there is no intentional agency without an emotion; and the emotion will gear the thought to one or other purpose. So the emotions are what points thoughts and systems in a particular direction; and they supply the moving principle. Thomas Hobbes, at the beginning of modern political theory, in his characterisation of human life as nasty, brutish and short, saw the dominant human emotion or motive as fear. And as he himself nicely said and was the first to certify, when the Civil War in England was looming in 1641 the thing to do was immediately to fly—and he fled to France. (Both laugh). By the time of Hume things had become

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a bit more settled, so the dominant emotion was now deemed to be desire: we were desiring creatures. Actually, emotivism is the dominant theory of moral philosophy in the whole period from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-1950s. This is the view that value judgements are just expressions of our emotions or desires or preferences. The more intellectualised forms of this were elaborated by philosophers like A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson and R. M. Hare during this period. But moral philosophy is still basically an emotivist space. When a philosopher says that what you do or how you express a value is just a subjective preference, he—it’s usually a he—is really avoiding the whole question of the emotional basis of the values that we have and the emotional constitution of those subjective preferences. He’s talking in a male-dominated disinfected discourse of suppressed emotions: the emotions are still there in men, but they don’t like to acknowledge them. Men are very good at acknowledging—they always want to acknowledge—the power of mind and the power of body, because they think of themselves as strong in body: they can jump higher and run faster than women; and then they have minds which are ‘better’ than women’s, because all the great philosophers and musicians, or whatever, of the past were supposedly men. But of course the reason for that was that only the men were allowed to have the education and the training to develop their minds. Those who think that human excellence in sport is exemplified by men should look at the beauty of the performance of women gymnasts, which is far more subtle. Most women dance much better, sing much better than men, but in gymnastics, women are absolutely supreme. In tennis, an ex-Wimbledon men’s champion challenged Billie Jean King, the then women’s Wimbledon champion, claiming that she couldn’t beat a real man; they had a match, and she beat him soundly. So actually, women are not physically inferior to men in any way—only from a male point of view. To go through all the traumas of giving birth to a child is just like fighting a war all on your own; it’s a huge thing— women have tremendous stamina and tremendous endurance. They have far greater communicative skills from an early age than men. But in the domain of the emotions, because this was the role tacitly assigned to women, who were ‘emotional creatures’, ‘always crying’, ‘always frightened’, in need of ‘male protection’, men bottled up their emotions. Savita: I think that the argument was not so much that women were ‘creatures of emotion’, but that they were ‘not rational’. Roy: Yes, that’s right. So emotions were devalued. When anything is swept under the carpet, then it’s an unreflected source of determination. Something which is below the threshold of consciousness or intuition is something which we cannot control. And everyone was subject to emotions, which were never theorised. Just as the taboo on ontology prevented empiricists from self-consciously seeing that they actually have an account of the world, a special account of the world, so the taboo on talking of the emotions—emotions having been assigned to the feminine gender or role— meant that men couldn’t see that emotions actually propelled them. Greed, desire, pride, fear, lust.

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Savita: It’s very nice to hear this. I think the dialectical process of your thinking is leading you to see all the lacks and inadequacies present in our theorising; so the applicability of dialectical critical realism seems to be quite creative and encouraging. Roy: Yes. This is a process which is only just beginning. As long as there is a single person in the world who is unfree, critical realism will have a role, because there may be something there which we haven’t theorised— Savita: In fact, it’s quite heartening to hear you speak about women, and the way you have included them in this unlike other philosophers, who never even bothered to understand them, their specific gender position, and even if they did, it was at cost of distortion in the understanding, leading to various forms of suppression and coercion of women. So it’s very interesting. Roy: Absolutely. And I would say that, in the tacit, intuitive, spontaneous, unconditional, noninstrumental, holistic way in which women must act and feel and think in their characteristic labour, very much in touch with their bodies and also with all aspects of their minds—they are much more integrated than most men, in whom these things are disconnected—women provide a much better model or template for living well, which will actually lead men to the way out of their own self-oppression. Savita: So while we are theorising these emotions, we are also discovering that women, who are supposed to exemplify them in an unbalanced way, actually provide a better model of a good life than men. And the people living in many different cultures have of course been seen as creatures of instinct and the emotions, and like women not rational enough. Roy: Yes, definitely. Then we can take something like the absence of commodification and the noncontractual, that is, the nonconditional, nature of women’s work, which in capitalism reproduces the commodity labour power, and women reproduce themselves when they work in the capitalist labour process; so for capitalism women function, quite simply, to reproduce labour power. This noncommodification of the reproduction of labour power is something that has been mentioned, but not really fully theorised within Marxist political economy. Actually, this is a two-edged thing. On the one hand, it means that women are less than full people, less than full citizens, because their work is not acknowledged in the way in which work is supposed to be acknowledged in our society, that is, by payment. Only if you pay someone are they deemed to be doing something— what they do is supposed to be measured by monetary values. So this woman we were talking about earlier, who has a job and is selling herself on television—and she may be doing it in a particularly hideous or objectionable way—has put herself into a totality from which she had been excluded; now she has been included in that totality. Capitalism, in this way, has what I’ve called an intrinsic outside;3 that is, it always functions in virtue of an outside, which is formally outside it, but which is intrinsically internally related to it as a part of the totality: so it actually depends on 3 See

Bhaskar 1993, esp. 139 f. and 2002b, esp. 168 f.

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what it excludes. And you can see the function of the exclusion when you realise that there is a hidden element of creative energy which is not paid for: courtesy of women’s unpaid labour in the domestic sphere, capital is getting labour power as a commodity on the market for nothing. So how much greater is its ripping off of the expenditure of human labour—‘labour’ is formally defined within Marxism as the expenditure of labour power, which is the capacity to work or the creative energy that is given for nothing. The positive side of what women actually do is that it provides a template of the actuality of unconditional spontaneous behaviour and its dominance within a particular realm, namely the family; and that spontaneous behaviour, I argue, is also a tacit presupposition of work in the commodified realm— the factory line can’t keep going without solidarity and support, without creativity, etc. So inside men, there are little women—who I think are there for a realist to think about, if they are a man. Savita: Also, rationality can’t do without emotions, because it too is driven by certain emotions. Roy: Absolutely. And in the women’s domain, emotion is central. And really, the mind can be a great obstacle too, if you go into it—this could be a separate topic during these conversations. But the emotions present huge blocks. Most of the things that really block us have some emotional element; even when we become fixated on a particular ideology or system of beliefs, there’s usually an emotional charge attached to it, which holds it in place. So, of these three levels—physical, mental and emotional—I would say that the emotional one is the most vital, in the sense that it is most vital to clear that plane. The mental plane is also very important. The situation at the physical plane is interesting: a lot of so-called systems of purification concentrate a lot on that. This is actually quite in vogue, but I don’t see it as representing huge solutions—except in the case of really toxic addictions such as drug abuse, alcoholism and so on. Most people understand the notion of purifying the body—it’s part of the current scene, it’s socially acceptable. But if you talk about clearing the emotions, working on your negative emotions, people look at you as if you’re mad. Now work on your emotions is probably the last point we need to discuss on this topic. After all, it’s no good telling people that they must clear or get rid of negative emotions unless you first show them that they do have negative emotions. And therefore, it may be a useful exercise for people who may be reading this book to write down what negative emotions they think they have. Most will have one or another—it may be anxiety, or fear, or pride—which they know they have. There’s a stratification of emotions, like anything else in life, more generally in being: in critical realism, everything is stratified, and this is captured in the title of our book. The first level at which emotions display themselves is as a state—an occurrent state—like anger. So you can be in a state of anger. The second level is as a disposition to behave in a certain way. For example, if you have a recurrent tendency to become jealous, that is part of your being, really, it is not just a state that you’re in. And then the third level is when it is so much a part of your being, that it is actually intrinsic to your nature; you are a jealous person, or a proud person, for example. So there are three levels: the occurrent state, which may be prolonged and become a mood; a

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disposition or tendency to behave; and then the state of the embodied personality which produces that tendency. So how do you act or work on an emotion as an occurrent state? If it is just a fleeting occurrent state—for example, you’re in a state of angry consciousness—you just shift your consciousness and you observe that state of angry consciousness. You observe without judgement, and you will find that the angry consciousness goes: you are no longer in that angry consciousness, you are the observer of that angry consciousness. So whenever you see anything about yourself that you don’t like, or if it’s just a perception, then just observe. Then you will find that judgement falls out of the picture, but also that, insofar as the object is within yourself, the state of consciousness has changed; if it was an angry state of consciousness, it’s now no longer so, but just a state of simple observing. Retreat to simple observing, and then you will become one with yourself, and then you will be in a good state, a nice state, a whole state. So that’s quite easy. Now to work on an emotion that is a disposition, what you have to do is set up counter-routines, counter-conduct. So if you have a disposition to, say, drink alcohol and you feel that you are in danger of becoming an alcoholic, you should go into the situations under which you drink alcohol and then you should deliberately set up counter-dispositions, transiting to something more emotional without ending up with something very physical. Savita: It doesn’t work, it’s so complex. Roy: OK, there’s a new gadget in town, and you have a disposition to possess it. So what you do is consciously train, cultivate in yourself, a counter-disposition. Think: ‘How nice it is, how free I am, not to have a television set. I have so much more time to read and write.’ Or: ‘Look at all the things I have that I haven’t used!’ This is how you work on countering that disposition. If you have a compulsive disposition, say you are a shopaholic, then look at yourself in the mirror in your existing clothes, see how lovely they are, and ask yourself why you need to buy any more. Now probably, if you have such a disposition, then something in your personality is forcing you, and just cultivating a counter-tendency won’t be very easy. So you have to work on what it is within your own being that makes you behave that way. These negative emotions can be compulsive, and of course there are many things within the system that reinforces them. So how do you know what it is that produces the disposition? Supposing you find yourself again and again being fearful, what you do is write down the sentence ‘I am courageous’: you affirm the contrary in a positive way. You write that sentence down, and then you spontaneously write down whatever you think. Then you will get a response from within yourself. When you write that down, say twenty-two times in one day, you will get a variety of spontaneous responses; some will be nonsense, some will affirm the affirmation, but some of them will say: ‘No! I am not courageous; I’m shit scared!’. And then you can go into that, your mind can go into it—there’s no end to what you can write then: ‘I’m shit scared because…’. You are actually fathoming the depths of your unconscious. And you do that for eleven days, and then you will have so much material that the psychoanalysts would love

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it! What you’re doing is a system of transference within yourself. You’re playing the transcendental, really. Ego (in Freud’s terms) is asserting what it wants to be, and it is asking the unconscious strata of the embodied personality to tell it where it’s stuck. And then your unconscious self will come and say: ‘I’m actually scared because my father used to beat me’, or ‘I’m actually scared because I was left in a room when I was two, all in the dark, alone, and I was crying, and I didn’t know where I was.’ Something like this will come out. These are the unconscious roots of the personality in childhood. Or: ‘The whole of my life, my father prevented me from doing what I wanted to do. I was forced into a situation, and that’s why I’m so apathetic. I’ve always done what he said, and he’s never said anything that I actually wanted to do. That’s why I’m apathetic; that’s why I never assert myself.’ That would come from writing out: ‘I am an assertive human being’ or ‘I am a proud woman who accepts that negative emotions all have a positive aspect.’ So it is sometimes right to be angry: it is not right to be a pushover. It’s right to be proud of what you’ve achieved, or to write: ‘I’m a proud woman who does not simply do what she’s told.’ Write that out. If you see that you have been pushed around by your son, write that out twenty-two times. Each time, spontaneously, you will write down something that you think. Most of the time it will be nonsense, that’s true of most therapeutic or transfer situations. Here you’re working on yourself. You are not going to have someone else’s heteronomous formation forcing you to tell them what they want to hear. You—your transcendentally real self—are asking your unconscious self to tell the embodied personality why they’re crying. And then you—your real self—are standing like a parent to the emotional strata of your embodied personality, treating it like a child, parenting it, nourishing it, saying: ‘Look, why are you afraid, why are you sad, why do you keep on wanting a certain thing? I’m not scolding you. It’s only me who’s doing it.’4 So this process of self-realisation is not an immediate thing: it’s something that has to be done slowly and carefully and patiently. This whole process of the transformation of a little bound self into an expanded self which is realised, in which the transcendentally real element is fully manifest, is a dialectical process, with qualitative leaps, and working on anything also has its strategic and tactical elements. You can’t do certain things because you are in a certain situation. You can’t assert yourself because you are living in your father’s house or your in-laws’ house, or because your husband is in a certain state. But you know it, and you have to express it. So what is holding you back? So you work out fully what’s holding you back, and what’s causing that. And when you’ve understood what’s sustaining your negative emotion, you ask: ‘Where am I in my life? What do I want from my life?’ Most people are living a life in which they feel hopeless victims; they have not clearly formulated for themselves what they want, and so they have no one else but themselves to blame if they’re unhappy. So look where you are in your life, and see where you can be; and then, strategically, understand the enemy, go into the enemy, and 4 The

transcendentally real self is ‘doing it’ in the sense that it is making you aware that you are not in your ground state—that the heteronomous formation within you needs to be cleared for self-realisation to proceed.

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see when you can act to change the situation. Then try and change as much of the context in which you’re stuck as possible. You may change jobs, move house, get out of your marriage, or whatever; it may mean something as radical as that. You have clearly defined your life’s objective. Suppose you want to be a chemist, be a chemist; if you want to be a musician, be a musician—that’s what you have to do. So how do you initiate such change? You wait till you feel good, and then you do all the changing. You build on a plateau of self-esteem, and that’s when you make the move. You don’t make your move when you’re down and out; you make it when you’re feeling high, when you’re feeling good and have lots of energy. So clearing the emotions, examining your life and initiating and sustaining change are all dialectically interrelated processes. Because your goals in life will be changed as you become more the expression of your ground state, you will want different things. You will stop wanting more and more material possessions, and you will want to be freer and freer. You will want to do more poetry, more music, more sublime things and have fewer material accoutrements; you will find yourself more adaptable, more flexible, ready to change more, because you will have less attachment to things in life. So all these things are bound up, they’re all part of making ourselves more ourselves; because if the phase of transcendental dialectical critical realism has a theme, it is just becoming only and completely what you really are (cf. Bhaskar 2000, ix). Ok, that’s where we’re ending today. Savita: Very nice. The last part was a bit technical. It was giving people certain clues and techniques for self-realisation. Ultimately, however, it would also depend on how you just might invent new ways of doing it. Roy: Of course. And I could have suggested many others. For example, when you’re fearful of going into a certain context, use your creative power of visualisation, imagine yourself protected by a layer of armour. It will work, because the fear is in your mind, so put a layer of armour around yourself when you’re going into the hostile territory. Or if you’re afraid of someone, put them in a little balloon in your mind, cut the string and let them fly off. They will actually move in your mind, and the battle is half won when it’s won in the mind. Then you no longer will feel fear, and you will go and fight. Savita: The fact that transcendental dialectical critical realism applies to the fields which were suppressed is itself very interesting. Just to shed some light on the dark, marginalised areas (to sound a bit hackneyed) that dominated the binary oppositions that Derrida also talks about; even just to show that they don’t have to be that way, that they can very easily be arrested through personal motivation and understanding, is important. Roy: Yes, using techniques like creative visualisation or the technique of affirming the contrary is very empowering. I know I’m not the first person to have thought of this, but no one has really done it in a very systematic and thorough way. It is a huge field, and one where there are no rules, no absolute laws that apply to everyone. So

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people will work out the best techniques for themselves. They will know the best techniques. This is all about self-empowerment. Roy continues as follows: Tomorrow we will be discussing some of the things that we might have discussed before this, including critical applications of transcendental dialectical critical realism, to three areas in particular. One is the whole issue of modernity, postmodernism and, in this context, the global crisis. The second is further consideration of dialectic, including clearing up everything that is right and wrong with Marxism, because that’s something that many people interested in my work in India want to know about— they are coming from the left. And third, we need to look at the area of the mind, the creative power of the mind and how this can be applied to self-realisation. And then in the afternoon, we will talk about success and failure in life. In the event, on the next day (Saturday 15th September) they briefly resumed discussion of the emotions before discussing what is right and wrong with Marxism. No recording of the conversation about Marxism has survived. There is a rough transcript but it cannot reliably be rendered intelligible and coherent. Roy returned to Delhi in January 2002 and again in February 2002 to complete the conversations on the other topics he mentions.

Savita: Last night, until 9:30 in fact, we discussed questions of emotions and how one has to work on them, and how emotions must be recovered to lead a fuller and freer life. We also discussed some very intriguing problems relating to domination of emotions by rationality, and we established that emotions are always presupposed by reason, even in the case of philosophers who thought they were assigning a commanding position to rationality. In fact rationality was always informed or run by emotions. This is a Humean argument, is it not? Hume was sceptical of the idea that reason would always fulfil ends of emotions. Roy: Yes, but actually, for all his great feats, reason for Hume was in the end what was natural for rather complacent bourgeois men of Hume’s time to do, and that was all. Savita: I think the way we’ve recovered emotions from the dominance of rationality in our discussion, and as you have done in your book, was something that Hume himself envisioned and conceptualised, although not of course in a precisely similar way. Roy: Yes. The thing is that, if great philosophers come out with a false theory, there must be a TINA formation involved. The way to greatness in philosophy is shown by how we can find, in our own work, the truth: seeking truth for falsehood, that is, truth that will displace the falsehood in our position. In the case of Hume, his Treatise of Human Nature (Hume 1740)—which was his first book, his biggest and most influential work, which elaborates the theories for which he is really famous, including the Humean theory of causal laws—actually contains an appendix on method. There he says very sensible realist things—almost transcendental critical realist things— about the practice of scientists, but he never observes the contradiction between the methodological appendix and the philosophical treatise. And that’s extraordinary.

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Similarly, sometimes a great philosopher is really not quite sure of the truth of what he’s saying; it’s as if he’s putting the contrary view forward as a challenge. So in relation to the impossibility of deriving evaluative statements from factual positions, Hume says that it seems as if people everywhere move from facts to values: they do this the whole time in their discourse, yet no grounds are given, and he says that he himself can find no grounds. And then he comes out with saying that his whole sense is that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of his finger. So he can explicate the killing of the heathen, and those are the grounds for that transition from facts to values, and the fact that everyone does it the whole time he feels he has to mention. He actually does this in the same text. A really second-rate thinker will just say the falsehood and will then allow his practice to tacitly contradict his theory, but he won’t be aware of it and he won’t state the truth anywhere; whereas a great thinker will state the truth. And if you read people like Durkheim and Weber, even though they commit methodological ‘deviations’ from the correct critical realist path—Durkheim moving in the direction of reification, Weber in the direction of voluntarism—nevertheless, they do say very sensible realist things, and they do very good social science that can be reconstructed in a realist way. They couldn’t have had those insights unless they had been tacitly practising critical realism, so on many points, they are actually methodologically acute. Three days of further conversation took place in January 2002. No recording or transcript of the first two days has survived. What survives of the third is presented in Sect. 7.2 and also in Chap. 10.

7.2 Mind, Thought, Consciousness Roy:… This is all very important for emancipation, because the whole point of emancipation is that we are essentially free, and could far more fully be free than we allow ourselves to be in our society. So just think how we could mobilise the creative power of thought, which distinguishes us, to promote freedom. To be really alert, concentrated, focused, single pointed in our thought would not do away with transcendence, because there would still be the moment when we stopped thinking, the space between thoughts, when we just were one with something else. But actually, we would be using our mind for what it is intended to be used for, which is for working things out, learning new things, exploring the world, cultivating the virtues, for enjoyment, making the world a more beautiful and happy place, even for expanding our own mental powers and abilities—whatever we want to use the mind for. There’s no single proper use, apart from the fact that it is the discriminant. So that’s the first thing. Second, how can we increase the clarity of our thinking, the range of our thinking? We can make use of the universality and the motility of consciousness; we can actually expand it and put our consciousness into things. For example, if you’re

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eating something, I can put my consciousness into your eating. I try and put my consciousness into something which is a very difficult, like a blade of grass. All things are bound up in the totality. We can put our consciousness into music, into a beautiful film, into the Himalayas. We put it into fellow human beings the whole time. To project your consciousness, to put it somewhere other than it is, is not that difficult, because what is distraction, what is the scattering? That is the putting; that is your consciousness going anywhere. All right, I’m saying let’s concentrate and focus on what we’re talking about, so let’s practise scattering: let’s do it properly. Put your consciousness anywhere in the cosmic envelope, your home; be there in your home, it is not difficult. We have to understand the mighty powers of consciousness in order to be free human beings. So, if consciousness is universal, if it is a fundamental ingredient in the universe, we as one form of the fundamental ingredient can do all these things. Third, how do we get beyond the feeling that the mind, which has enormous creative powers, is the bottom, the root of everything? Well, we tease it, we say to it: ‘Mind, just do something.’ And we will find that it can’t get anywhere without the creative energy which is coming from somewhere other than mind, from the ground state. Or we can set it puzzles; this is where the practices of Zen and particularly the koan are very interesting. For instance, we can ask the teaser: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ The problem is that, if it occurs, there’s something wrong about it. The question is based on a category mistake, which says that one hand could exist on its own; but actually, one hand can’t exist on its own. Just by focusing on the problem—this is what they did in the Zen monasteries for hours, and days, and sometimes months, and probably years—they would come to the crucial understanding that to be a hand is to be related to other things. Once you have other things, then you can clap. So you don’t look at things as standing by themselves. That’s a critique of atomism. A koan might be something that’s really completely meaningless, like: ‘What is me?’ This is just a question you have to ask and reflect on, meditate on. Or you’re told to reflect on the statement: ‘The wild geese cast their reflections upon the water, but the water has no mind to receive them.’ So the Zen master would say: ‘Go and meditate on that, work it out, and come back and tell me the answer.’ Two or three years later, you come back with an answer. There is no right answer, but if it doesn’t show a certain deepening—we’re talking about plumbing the depths of reality—and that you’re reaching the outer limits of the mind, then you’ve missed the main point. I’ve argued that the absolute deepest level of reality is the cosmic envelope and ground state, in which everything inheres—you can’t make sense of anything without this. At an emotional level, the ground state is most adequately characterised by love. But actually, this is a dualistic description of it, and you might want to illustrate the ground state without discourse. You might want to say: ‘Well, once you’ve been in the ground state, or just are in it, nothing remains to be its characteristics.’ You might want to just point—to a rose, for example—and say: ‘There you go. That’s what it is, nothing more.’ So at an emotional level, the ultimate or fundamental property is love. But it is also joy, it is also bliss, and all the other positive emotions, or positive

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uses of emotion. So now we’re looking at the very deepest depths of the mind or consciousness that informs the universe. So what does the koan about the wild geese mean? It means that there are other sources prior to you—that is one meaning, at any rate. It means that you should actually be like the water. What the mind does is capture—hold—a picture of the wild geese, and that gets in the way of everything else. The mind is then no longer a free instrument to reflect whatever is given to it, and to respond adequately. We clutter our minds up with fixated systems of thought, and we hold onto them. There are so many people who have a theory and they want to hold onto it at all costs— they are frightened of change. Our critical realism has been around for twenty-five years now, and there are still people who think we are empiricists—this is still the dominant view. If someone is a postmodernist, a little bit of critical realism has probably seeped into their thought—there are few philosophers for whom it hasn’t, and much more so in the case of social scientists. But meanwhile they just carry on, they’re fixated, they’re stuck. And most of our political beliefs and other beliefs about the world are similarly stuck. We were talking recently about the obscurantism of religious practices: people go back and think that the great Shankara—and I’m not denying his greatness—will tell them what they should do now. Actually, the same old Shankara fixed in their mind is not something which is in keeping with the spirit of Shankara. For them, the old Shankara is simply right, and that’s that. But the spirit of Shankara is about growing and developing, which is the spirit of something like self-realisation, the same track as I am on. There should be nothing, there should be no thoughts in your mind: not the system of Shankara, not what Vivekananda said, not what Ramakrishna did, not what Ram Mohan Roy said—even though I have two of his names!5 (Laughs). Your mind should be free, empty. You’re not the only person who has told me about that Spielberg film about the robot-child; it has somehow caught hold of the imagination. You said it very creatively, and we analysed, dissected it and kind of deconstructed it. But actually, I’ve been told dogmatically by Indian Marxists—I’m not sure how my view was popularised—that what I say about creativity is nonsense, it feels like a third-hand clever robot. So they are all cluttered up with fixated systems of thought. Now a dialectical system, which I know is what you’re most interested in, is one which is continually transcending itself. That’s the first thing: it is always on the move. The dialectical thinker is one who never clutters up his mind. The fact that I know all my theories—probably because I produced them!—is not really to the point. If you understand a theory so that it’s fully part of you, it doesn’t have to be in your mind: it’s there, it’s available to you. It doesn’t clutter your mind, it’s just part of what you know. How do I know the Zen koans I was telling you about? I don’t know: I just picked them up spontaneously, so they’re there somehow. So we build knowledge in as quickly as we can, it becomes spontaneous, and we let that go; it’s then something 5 At birth, Bhaskar was given the names Rama Roy, but as a child was usually known as Ram or Ram

Roy. He stopped calling himself Ram at primary school when he was the victim of racist bullying, but in the last decade or so of his life called himself Ram Roy again in the company of people who were close to him.

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that we can produce if we want to. That’s why we also have libraries and telephone directories. We don’t want to clutter our heads with telephone numbers. If you have a great facility for remembering telephone numbers—I’m generally quite good at it—that’s fine, it won’t clutter your mind; but most people are very bad at it, that’s why we have telephone books. Now the mind holds images, right? So we have to have a device for continually clearing the mind, getting rid of those fixated systems of thought, and that device is dialectics. The dialectical process itself will drive you on to another topic by identifying an absence in what’s currently occupying your thought. But you should also master what you’ve learnt, make it part of yourself, in two ways. You clear out the rubbish, but you retain the jewels. Life will be giving you things to think about the whole time. Treat it like a stream, be like a stream. And if there’s a piece or nugget of gold, put it in a jewel box, learn it, put it in your self, as one of your jewels. Don’t carry it in your mind: keep your mind as free as possible. This is what that koan about the wild geese means, or one meaning of it. Be like the flowing water. But you’re lucky, because unlike the flowing water, you are immediately self-conscious. Savita: It’s such a different image of the mind compared to a Western one, isn’t it? In the West, even in Plato, the mind sees structures. In the modern sense, mind is the site of rationality, and it apprehends rational structures. But for you, mind becomes an infinite source of natural consciousnesses, which keeps on expanding; it’s like a stream, as you just described it. Roy: Yes, absolutely. So we go on this afternoon to look at modernism and postmodernism very dialectically, thus coming back to what is your favourite intellectual topic, and quite correctly so; and then, later, we’ll look at developments beyond transcendental dialectical critical realism, which will leave dialectical critical realism and transcendental dialectical critical realism, as a categorial structure, in its place with its own domain of adequacy, and underneath it an even deeper level of reality.6 In one way the pre-existing categorial structure will be in its place as it was, and in another way, it will be partly redescribed in the context of a greater totality. You can transcend it and let go of it, as long as you realise and remember what’s true in it…. Because all the moments in the development of critical realism break new paths and new territories, it is important to learn and understand them,… and not just think that the mind will be free. You can’t by-pass the mind—you go through the mind if you’re an intellectual. If you’re not an intellectual—if you’re an artist, for example—there’s no pressing reason to busy yourself with that; but if you pride yourself on being an intellectual, or developing your mind, then you must do it properly. Savita: This is very interesting, because most Western philosophers have stressed the power of rationality and its role in deciding the story of modern human subjects. You wouldn’t find any Western philosopher saying: ‘Well, I’ve developed an important theory that’s part of my identity, and now I’m going to transcend it or give it up; I’m 6 Here

Bhaskar is foreshadowing the philosophy of metaReality.

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going to clear myself of what I have done.’ This is quite novel. This is not in the Western tradition; your whole thought is not in the Western tradition; it transcends. Roy: One last thing. The point of the koan was to teach you about the nature and the limitations of the mind. The Japanese Zen (which is really a Chinese school, which has come to be known as Japanese) was important for two reasons. First, as I was saying yesterday, using co-presence and the capacity to transcendentally identify, they sought the Buddha nature in everything—they sought transcendence in anything and everything. So, the divine, the cosmic envelope, was present everywhere. That’s a wonderful thought and a wonderful practice that they have. In a way, the Zen Buddhists represent an opposite pole to traditional Vedic meditation. This is why I am focusing on that because, although the end result may be the same, the Vedic techniques are very much techniques of going within, deeper and deeper, and the Zen techniques are techniques of going without. In yoga, traditionally, you go into deeper and deeper levels of consciousness, and you don’t struggle or truck with your mind; you do everything effortlessly, and you go within. In Zen, you go without; you find the Buddha nature and become one with the Buddha nature in everything—you become one with everything—and you struggle with the mind, until you break it. You break its independence, just as you break the ego. Whereas the ego nicely dissolves within the practise of yoga, in Zen, it’s much more violent. So that’s an interesting thing to give to Westerners, because they are living in a more violent society, and also a more objectifying society. But it’s also interesting, when we’re talking to Indians who are becoming Westernised, to show how their own traditions have also given rise to techniques for countering Western obsessions, specifically the obsession with the mind. The violent breakdown of the ego is achieved by gently going into other things, and then you find the Buddha nature everywhere; and you understand completely the limitations of the discursive intellect. So let’s consider this. You might be asked to meditate or reflect on your original face. This is the most important part. You have to see it; and until you see your original face, you haven’t solved the koan. When you’ve solved the koan, if the abbot or instructor agrees that your solution is the solution for you (it has to be an individual thing), then he will pronounce that you have attained satori or enlightenment. Then he will hug you, before he cracks your head with a stick, or something like that. Then you go away, and you will have the level of transcendental wisdom. And that’s fine, but then you have a very humble position and you realise that there’s still a lot to be learnt. OK, so what is your original face, do you know? What you have to do is really go into this and think what it could be. Start somewhere—shut your eyes, and then look at your face; and if you’re seeing a rose, then that’s what you see, that’s your original face. What does that mean? Well, actually, because this is a book to be read, it’s something for people to think about. If they see a bull with horns, what does that mean? Well, what is your original face? Your original face is something which has no mask, something which doesn’t disguise itself, something which is transparent and clear to itself. That’s your original face. Whatever it is, most of the faces we put on for the world are masks. Your original face is being authentic, being truthful to

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yourself, and this is a wonderful idea. You may have to have a mask, like that woman on the television, if you have to sell your labour power; you may have to have a mask for society because it’s silly to go naked, to bare your soul, in hostile territory. The only person you can safely trust to bare your soul to is yourself. But what are you really without masks, without faces that you’re presenting to the world, in your innermost being who you are? You have to see what you have to see. If you see a seat, then you see something which may be pure and delightful, something completely unpretentious. But you will only see that when you are it. What you are, is what you will see, and you have to become one with your face. Your original face is a face without masks. And it just so happened that I saw a rose,7 so I’m not getting into that! (Laughs). So that’s the end of this little digression on the mind. But there’s one more thing I should say. If it’s true that I can read your mind, then this explains a lot of things. It begins to explain that we are all connected by the cosmic envelope; it begins to make sense of the way in which telepathy is actually not an infrequent phenomenon at all. If mind can directly affect mind without the mediation of physical embodiment, if this is possible, and if this is actual in face-to-face communication, then we can make sense of the action of mind at a distance. And we can make sense of other phenomena like synchronicity; it begins to make sense. So if you’re on the cosmic envelope, you can be one with another whom you’re very close to, and you will carry them in certain ways within you; so it’s possible for you to feel, then, what they feel. That may be only for an instant, and this is the classic stance of synchronicity, but there are lots of powers and lots of things that happen in the world which transgress the normal rules of physical science. Take the example I gave yesterday: everyone—or nine out of ten people—know if they are being stared at from behind. The other day, someone said to me at lunch: ‘Mind the chili’. I don’t mind chilies, and I don’t mind chilies on my plate, but they must have thought that it was particularly hot. Then suddenly, without looking, I stopped; I was just about to pick up a particularly hot chili. Now there’s no mechanism known to science that would explain that. How often do we have this experience? Just in time, something has happened. This suggests the possibility of the communication of thought directly, thought to thought, thinker to thinker, mind to mind, and without the mediation of physical agency; but not without the mediation of some connector, like the cosmic envelope, like consciousness. And so it is not unscientific;8 it is from a very deep level of reality, the level of the essential ultimate ingredient, which is also, remember, something which informs the historical development of biological and material forms. So it is not immaterialist in that sense; it accepts material reality fully. In fact, you can only attain these very deep levels of being and be able to use them if you are so completely at one with everything in the universe that you are not going to abuse them. So when you listen 7 In

From East to West, the rose symbolises enlightenment or union with one’s higher self and is explicitly linked with various incarnations of Bhaskar’s soul (Bhaskar 2000, 15, 75 n.6, 126, 128-9). In the first edition, a rose is depicted on the cover. 8 In quantum physics, today, action at a distance and fundamental interconnectedness are beyond dispute. Bhaskar’s concept of the ground state is adapted from quantum physics.

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to your inner voice, when you try and follow the dictates of your pure, loving heart, when you finally see something you’ve been trying to understand and you say ‘I see it’ in the great impulse of discovery, this will never be a situation in which you can do something fundamentally wrong, because it will be impossible to do so in this act of loving, creative spontaneity. When you’re in that ground state, you should trust your intuitions, and you should be sceptical of the claims of anyone to know better than your intuition of what you should do, because you are unique and concretely singular. The more you are just only and completely that concrete singular, which is your transcendentally real self, the more you will know what is exactly right for your embodied personality, which is the only vehicle in which you can become realised within this world—and we are confining our project to the only world that we all know, because what we’re about is universal self-realisation, or saving the planet, or saving the species in its habitat, which is Earth. Savita: So the mind is the crucial site for all that happens, because it’s the root of everything that we conceive, the place where consciousness lies, ultimately an infinite consciousness. Great. So that’s an important correction to the way of life and thinking we have become used to. In a way it falls within the tradition of thinking which could loosely be termed as the life of mind, if it is taken to include, in your terms, the supramental consciousness of the ground state and the cosmic envelope. Roy: Yes. You see, most of the people who have thought of the life of the mind have not thought about the life of emotions or of the life of the body. Now is the time to do the life of the body—let’s go and eat. Savita: Far more holistic. (Both laugh). Roy: Yes, it doesn’t prioritise any of these things. It treats them as a whole. At some point, the most important thing to do will be to eat. Savita: All right! We are going to eat.

Chapter 8

Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism

8.1 Modernism in India and the West Savita: This is the afternoon of the third day of the dialogical exercise that we are engaged in. Now we are going to discuss the perspectives that dialectical critical realism can offer to modernism and postmodernism. Roy: First I would like to make a few introductory remarks on the concept of modernism. When I came to India this time, I found that, while modernism has a pretty universal meaning, it meant something special in India—as if it were a singular ideology or system of thought. What I realised was that modernism in India is an ensemble or mix or medley of three different positions or phases of the philosophical discourse of modernity: 1 classical modernism; what I call high modernism, which is what modernism really means in the West in the context of the postmodernist critique of modernism; and modernisation theory. In India, these three things are pushed together, in a way quite correctly, because this does reflect something specific about the Indian scene. So let me just delineate these three positions. The philosophical discourse of modernity really arose in its dominant or classical form in the seventeenth, and was crystallised in the eighteenth century. It was a way of solidifying the bourgeois revolution in England and Scotland, which was accomplished politically when William of Orange took over at the end of the Restoration. It was given its classical definition, funnily enough, by the Scottish Enlightenment, but similar things were going on throughout. So it was a consolidation of the bourgeois revolution and the rise of the bourgeois system, and its main themes were egocentricity and abstract universality; this was, in a sense, the undercurrent. And Hume, as in the case of many other things, 1 In

the recording, Bhaskar uses the concept of the philosophical discourse of modernity to refer either to the discourse in all its phases or to its foundational phase, classical modernism. To forestall confusion, when ‘the philosophical discourse of modernity’ has the latter meaning, I have substituted ‘classical modernism’. On Bhaskar’s account, key elements of classical modernism are present throughout the discourse as a whole. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_8

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articulated it very well. We were the centre of the world, that is, of Earth, the universe and being as a totality. And we were there by the will of God too. We had certain properties, and these were represented as somehow universal, and so should be found everywhere else in the world; where they weren’t, then there was something wrong with the world, not with our theory. So this is a very complacent rationalisation of the bourgeoisie. High modernism arose between the time of the failed revolution of 1848 and the successful revolution of 1917 as an, in part, aesthetic revolt against classical modernism, which was challenged as being abstractly and falsely universalist. In other words, classical modernism was unmasked as an ideology which rationalised particular sectional interests. High modernism was very good at this demystification, but it itself spoke in the name of all: instead of the false universalism, it spoke in the name of a true universalism; but those who spoke it2 were spoken for: it was an elite, vanguard movement, which spoke in the name of all humanity, and even substituted itself, a sectional interest, for all humanity. It was this movement that gave rise to the great modernist writers—Marx, Freud, Joyce, Proust and others—and found its place in the architecture of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus School in West Germany. And this was the first thing that postmodernism reacted against; postmodernism arose as a reaction against the style of urban planning and architecture that was very characteristic of high modernism: everything was to be rationalised, formalised, functionalised or serialised. Now it is important to note that the position of the high modernists was no more grounded in anything real and universal than the position of the classical modernists, in that they substituted themselves for all humanity. Instead of transparently expressing the sectional, sectarian, partial, particular interests associated with the English bourgeoisie, they did so in a veiled way. Classical modernism was repeated over and over again in loco-periodised,3 that is, spatio-temporally specific, guises: when the French came to the fore, it was the French discourse; when the Americans came to the fore (to ‘the centre’), it was the American discourse: it always justifies a particular nationalism, a particular imperialism, a particular local national bourgeoisie, a particular elite. There was nothing so very distinctive about high modernism, really. Classical modernism says: ‘The world is essentially like we are.’ High modernism says: ‘No, it is not. You may say that you are how the world essentially is, but you are not. We will tell you how the world is, or ought to be.’ And so we had elitism, vanguardism and substitutionism. Substitutionism is speaking for someone else. And so high modernism lends itself to an ideology of an elite, some self-appointed elite, which included, unfortunately I have to say, the Bolsheviks when they made the revolution: they were definitely an elite stratum; even if they were an organic unity with, and reflected or represented, the working class, the working class was only a miniscule 2 I.e.

those who spoke true universalism. This alludes to the pulse of freedom and dialectical universality, which people everywhere ‘speak’ because it is inscribed in their practice, including their speech, and ultimately in their ground states, as a robust tendency at the level of the real. 3 Bhaskar’s concept of loco-periodisation is introduced in Bhaskar 1993, esp. 141.

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fraction of the Soviet population. Substitutionism is, classically, when the party leader speaks for the central committee; the central committee speaks for the party membership; the party membership speaks for the working class; the working class speaks for the masses; and the masses of your nation speak for the people of the rest of the world. And what happens is that a single individual comes to represent the totality. This actually happened, to say it in the nicest way, with Stalin and the Soviet Union. Nearly everyone in the world for some time looked up to the Soviet Union, and looked up to Stalin, and he, representing the Soviet Union through this substitutionist chain, spoke for the rest of the world. This deepening pull of elitism is, of course, vehemently opposed to my own position, which is that of what I characterise as the hermetic tradition. This tradition, which arose in ancient Egypt and was passed on to Greece, says that you can speak ultimately only for yourself; but that, speaking from your ground state, you should try to speak and act in sensitised solidarity with everyone else. So obviously substitutionism/elitism is not something that finds much favour with me. What the elitist party reflected, of course, was the absence, in Marxist terms, of organic intellectuals, the absence of organic leadership. What could have justified it all was if the leaders had actually come from and represented and reflected in some way the needs, and whims and interests of the masses, which is the goal of participatory democracy. But they patently soon ceased to do that—as happens also of course in social and more generally parliamentary democracy as we know. But the elitism of high modernism has taken the extreme abstract universal claims of classical modernism into India in the context of modernisation. Modernisation theory says that there is a path, which is unilinear, from less to greater development, from underdevelopment to development, childhood to maturity. And this path is one which has certain definite stages. The modernisers or modernists in India were determined that they were an elite who were going to take India on a path which would follow, to a great degree, Western routes, or be in some way harmonised with them; that’s what their understanding was. Modernisation theory, classically formulated by writers like W. W. Rostow (1960), defines many paths, but it always has this central unilinear path, which is marked out by the leading national bourgeoisie. So these three theories were all put together in India, and you had a global universalism preached by an elite in the name of the modernisation of India. So that’s what I understand by modernism in India; it’s a coherent, unitary ideology. Postmodernism in India is really pretty much the same as postmodernism everywhere else, although it has some interesting inflections and mediations. But modernism in India, as I understand it, is a specific ideology. I don’t want to exaggerate its unity, but I found people talking about modernism and not really talking about Joyce, or Proust, or the French Impressionists, or the Abstract Expressionists—really, they were talking about modernisation without much reference back to the other phases of the philosophical discourse of modernity. Even that discourse of modernity, which I characterise as centred around the idea that we are modern, as distinct from the premodern, depends on the contrast between what we are and something outside or before us. This is a very old contrast. You see it in the Renaissance I was talking about this morning. …

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What does this contrast of the modern with the pre-modern remind you of? It is of course nothing other than ontological monovalence and endism, which is a form of monovalence. Endism is the idea that history has at last come to its terminus: we the moderns, history ends with us. So modernism freezes history, and as an abstractly universalistic ideology, it must do so. And this links it up very nicely with dialectical critical realism and what I call Marx’s practical critique of Hegelian dialectic for its endism, for its modernist themes. This endism has been repeated again and again in history—endism, and what I call centrism. Centrism is the notion that we are the true civilised people, outside are the barbarians; this is found in China, in Greece, in Rome. The basic division is always the same: the insiders and the outsiders, the civilised and the barbarians; and the main idea is always that, with us, history has arrived—history has arrived at its terminus. Savita: It’s certainly true, as you say, that in India, the theory of modernity has in practice been the theory of modernisation. But of course Indian thinkers and social theorists did strive to understand it, and this goes back to the nineteenth century. Raja Ram Mohan Roy was perhaps the first thinker to try and articulate a theory of it. But we Indians had a very complex relationship with it. We wanted it, but it was not Indian, it was Western, and we were very suspicious of its Western origin, and also its British origin, since the British were our colonisers. So our response was contradictory; our whole discourse of modernity is fraught with this uneven acceptance and this nonacceptance. That’s where nationalism comes in. Nationalism is a kind of insertion between the two attitudes of acceptance and nonacceptance. Where there was inhibited acceptance, this clearly fostered nationalism, and it became a real force. But even at the level of nationalism, you had a split kind of relationship with modernity, because nationalism was itself a modern movement. So actually, what we aspired to through nationalism was an improvement in society, we wanted to be selfgoverning. But to be self-governing, we wanted institutions that were designated universally as self-governing: we wanted democratic institutions. So universalism was taken on board in the name of an enlightenment version of what the good life was. A good life was a rational one, and a rational life gives you good democratic institutions. So you could not really dispense with the notion of that life; but you also had a very sceptical attitude towards it: you didn’t want your spirituality to be lost, and you didn’t want your culture to be invaded. That’s why there isn’t much discussion of modernism in India, of the entire discourse of modernism. You won’t find people reading Joyce and Proust as part of the discourse of Indian modernity; it is seen as the constituting moment of Western modernity, part of their self-understanding. Whom did we read? You will be very surprised: we read Bacon. Roy: I must say a few things about Bacon, but not now. Savita: Bacon was read. The classical utilitarians were read. Both the Mills were read—James Mill and John Stuart Mill; Jeremy Bentham was read. All these thinkers were theorists of modern institutions. Roy: Yes. So let me also try and explain this. I will come to Bacon in a moment, but utilitarianism was the ideology of Fabian socialism, and this was the wing within

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the Western socialist tradition which was closest to Indian nationalism. People in the Indian Independence Movement—let me put this very broadly—the first thing they would buy was the English New Statesman, which was the Fabians’ house journal. So they took Fabianism, and they wanted to give it a local tinge, but actually this utilitarian socialism, Fabianism, was always elitist. So the discourse of the great ideologues of Fabian socialism, who were not figures of the stature of Bentham and the Mills, was about ‘what the average sensual man’ wants; 4 not ‘let the average sensual man speak for himself!’—they were speaking for people the whole time. Fabian socialism was a form of technocratic engineering in which an educated elite purported to know what the masses of the working classes wanted.5 Sometimes they hailed from within the meritocratic culture. Subsequently, by the time Fabian socialism had passed its heyday, they actually came from the working class. The first British Prime Minister of working class origin was Harold Wilson. He came to power in 1964, and by then Fabian socialism had collapsed. Savita: But the only Indian Fabian socialist I can think of is Nehru himself. Roy: Yes, definitely. Nehru came from a high aristocratic family—Did you say, ‘The only Indian Fabian socialist’? Savita: The only one in a position of power. Roy: No, there were the Nehruites; Nehru was definitely the leader, but there were, and are, Nehruites. There were many different factions of course. There were extreme Nehruites such as Krishna Menon, who was the representative of the Congress Party in London. He was actually an extremely brilliant man. I knew him a bit, in the sense that, when I was a small boy, he was a friend of my father—rather, my father was a friend of his, he was my father’s best friend. He became the first Indian Ambassador in London, then went on to be Indian Ambassador in the United Nations, and ultimately the defence minister who presided over the Indian debacle at the hands of the Chinese troops in 1962. He represented an extreme left-wing form of Nehruism, and then there was also an extreme right-wing. There was a whole swathe of Congress Party Nehruites. Savita: It didn’t last very long—perhaps a decade. After that the scene got very complicated. Roy: I agree absolutely. But the idea of a centrally planned economy didn’t go away— the idea of taking the best from Fabian socialism, even though the planning models owed quite a bit to Soviet planning models; there weren’t many examples of Fabian planning models at all. The best Western socialist planning model was the French indicative planning, which Indians didn’t cotton onto. But they actually borrowed 4 Spoken

in an exaggeratedly posh accent. The allusion is to Beatrice Webb’s diary entry 12 March 1894: ‘We have little faith in the “average sensual man”. We do not believe that he can do much more than describe his grievances, we do not think he can prescribe his remedies … We wish to introduce the professional expert.’ See Webb 1948, p. 120. 5 Hence the admiration of leading Fabians for Stalinism. See especially Webb and Webb 1935.

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more for the organisation of their economy, and even the rhetoric in terms of five-year plans and seven-year plans. Savita: But planning and all that was not there in socialism. The 1917 revolution didn’t— Roy: Of course, but this would be Marxism’s influence. Savita: Yes, I see what you mean. Roy: They borrowed more from Stalinist planning models. The person who was earmarked to be India’s first Health Minister was earlier a doctor in the British National Health Service, and he was an ‘uncle’ of mine—Uncle Bhai, I called him.6 As a small boy, I actually knew many of these guys in the first decade of Indian independence, when the tram lines were put down in New Delhi—my parents took me on trips to India. The ideology of a centrally planned economy was one that the Congress Party never itself abjured, and the reason is that it was itself part of the process—they were following a mixture of models in which the political party played a central modernising role. In practice, modernisation borrowed as much from the Soviet Union—there were a lot of crypto-Communists within Congress ranks in those days—as from Fabian socialism. That’s absolutely true. There was a general suspicion of the profit motive of America, and with Britain there was a love–hate relationship, I would say. Generally, foreign and domestic policy steered a very uneasy course between the Soviet and American paradigms, but the ideology, the rhetoric was the Fabian socialist ideology, which again was an elitist one. Savita: We are trying to understand modernism in terms of critical realism, so what do we have to date? Critical realism is very sceptical of abstract universalism, that’s very clear. Roy: Abstract universalism and individualism or egocentricity, in the sense that there is always a centre. The centre can be the individual and their ego—and it is in the last instance—but it can also be a class or a nation state. This ego is atomistic, and around it, you have various battlements, various defence mechanisms for protecting it. It is not incorrect to describe the pre-critical realist view of the world as constituted by an underlying model of man as an individual, more or less atomistic, cut off from the world understood as a world of objects governed by Humean causality. And this being—this man, because he was tacitly gendered—stood in relationships of instrumental reasoning and judgement, and attachment and conditionality, to the world around him; this included his personal relationships and what he did in his activities. This is a radical critique, because when you see what the existing Western philosophy is protecting, then you must question whether that is really adequate. Both abstract universalism and egocentrism are false, illusory constructions of the mind. 6 The first Indian Health Minister was Amrit Kaur (1889–1964), a woman. It could be that Bhaskar’s

‘Uncle Bhai’ (whose real name is unknown to me) was earmarked for the position but did not attain it.

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Now let’s look at some other characteristic themes of modernism as a whole. Modernism purports to be universal, but it tacitly depends on what it excludes; the ideology of modernism, and modernism as a system of thought, which becomes a way of acting and so of behaving, always depends upon a tacit exclusion. And the critique of modernism will thus show how it is an incomplete totality. So this is the third characteristic. Fourth, it lacks reflexivity. Characteristically, it is very deficient in reflexivity; but as modernism develops into postmodernism, it is characterised by an enhanced reflexivity—so when you get planning models, everything becomes more reflexive. But, in its crudest form, it is lacking in reflexivity, and it lacks the unity of theory and practice, which would be complete reflexivity. Fifth, it is characterised by unilinearity and judgementalism; there’s a single path, more or less, and you could tell how developed and modern you are by how far up this path you had gone. Sixth, it is characterised by its formalism. It is not really concerned very much at all with content. The ideologue of the philosophical discourse of modernity was above all Hume. Of the high modernists, you couldn’t really say that they were ideologues, but they were Kantians, they were formalists—Kantianism is very formalist. With the classical modernists, what mattered was that everything had the right form, the right function. They didn’t look into the content; they didn’t look into the use value. Even when nationalism and Gandhism were there, it mattered only that you spun your cloth. It didn’t matter what the quality of that cloth was. That’s right, isn’t it? It was formalist. Savita: Gandhi thought that the quality of hand spun cloth was far better than what the machines made. Roy: Oh, I know. I’m not arguing about that. But, within this ideology, it was formalist. Savita: Why? Roy: I’m sure it was—absolutely sure. Savita: Gandhi has a brilliant piece on this, where he says how khadi is suitable for the Indian climate, in that sense far better. Roy: I believe that. But what I mean is that what is really important is the formal aspect—what is done, not the quality of what is done. So everything must proceed—it became very bureaucratic—by proper, formal procedure. And India is still characterised by formalism: you have to have the right number of rubber stamps, or whatever; there is an absence of emphasis on the content. It doesn’t matter what the content of the knowledge is, as long as you go to school. Really, that’s more or less right. You’re regarded as more or less literate if you’ve passed a certain level, it doesn’t matter how literate. Am I caricaturing? Savita: In India, the formalism is a very different thing: it’s much more procedural. Roy: That’s what I’m saying—this is bureaucratic stamping.

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Savita: In the sense that you fix certain rules and you follow them, then you get it right. But the content has already been determined. It is not without any content, or that you’re careless about it. In school, you will have a Saraswati Vandana, a prayer for a higher knowledge or wisdom. Or you have a certain kind of text. Roy: Yes, but this is the result of style, it is not what I mean by content. Prayer doesn’t as such convey anything about the content, does it? I mean, why do you pray? It is a ritual; it is something you go through. If you’re actually concerned with engaging someone at school, then you don’t bother about whether they observe a certain ritual. What is important for formalism is that you go through the motions. You go into a classroom; you pass or don’t pass an exam—as you say, it’s procedural. That’s what I mean by formal. Savita: There’s a perception that this procedurality is the real content. Roy: Yes. That’s what Kant himself thought. Whatever we see under the empirical manifold, that content is there, given. And then the important thing about knowledge is the procedures that the mind operates on the content, which is given. So as long as everything goes through the procedures, then it’s right. There should be no form– content distinction. The form should be generated out of the content, or if there’s any value in the form, then it should generate its own content. But these various polarities, like means–ends, theory–practice, sense–intellect, form–content, are there to be opposed to each other. So anyway, I’m just going through what I understand, though I think it’s true in India as well. In formalism there was an assumption that everything to do with the content would be more or less OK. In classical modernism— we can ask how this was modified in India—nature was taken as given as an object of human manipulation, as plastic, as manipulable. The very important thing that you mentioned about Bacon, why he is so important as an ideologue, is as the founder of a new science, of a new scientific age, which is very interesting. Before Bacon and the early seventeenth-century Newtonian revolution, there was a ladder of being. Everything had its place in unitary steps. So you had the stones, leading to the vegetables, then to the animals, and each animal rose, rose. The animals existed as part of a unity with the humans, and above the humans were, in this medieval period, the angels, and then God. Now animals and human beings slept in the same place: the animals slept downstairs, the human beings upstairs. There was a unity between them: an organic unity. Bacon and Descartes broke that. They said human beings are different from the rest of nature. The rest of nature is mechanical. Human beings operate in a way which is different from the rest of nature, though how this was so we will have to go into at some other stage. Nature is there to be understood mechanically. So animals cease to be living, and it’s said that Bacon actually died because he went out in the middle of the English winter to do some experiments on freezing chickens! (Laughs). Even great minds and wonderful human beings like Bacon and Spinoza did the most horrible experiments on animals. Descartes also was into dissection. They really treated animals as if they had no life. So the organic continuity was broken; now man—the discourse was tacitly gendered—was set against nature. So we have the rise of the human subject

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as overlord of nature; and everything is to be treated instrumentally. Then you ask what man himself is and what is in his world, and it turns out, first with Hume and then with Kant, it is very obvious, that the same procedures operate in the human world. Kant’s transcendental ego somehow stands outside this and supervises it all, but everything that is observable operates mechanistically. So, actually, the division between humanity and nature cannot itself be sustained; but this is true of all ideologies: when you push them far enough, they break down into incoherence. People studied Bacon because he was the great ideologue of a new mechanistic worldview, which obviously the modernisers in India wanted you to be familiar with, in opposition perhaps to more organic indigenous views. Or perhaps you could put them together in some way. Savita: The development of this disengaged self was studied with a great interest in philosophy departments in India, but I can’t be very sure that it was internalised by the Indian modernists. Roy: Yes. The interesting thing about Descartes is his proof of existence: ‘I think therefore I am.’ Actually, as has often been remarked, once you say ‘I’, then you’ve already lost ‘me’: you think it’s quite unnecessary. This is very interesting, because Descartes puts thought before being—he commits the epistemic fallacy. But, not only does ‘I think therefore I am’ in some ways unnecessarily privilege thought over being, what I’ve been arguing completely reverses the situation. The ground state of thought and everything else is being, pure being; the ground state, when you’re in it, is nondual, so there’s just being: just emptiness, that impossibility of saying anything, but from which everything spontaneously arises, and which sustains everything else. So, really, the experience of enlightenment is ‘I am!’ or ‘Ah!’— something inexpressible. And that inexpressibility actually grounds thought. We saw how it grounds creativity. We saw how it grounds the demonstration of a proof: you have to see it, you have to read me, you have to see what I’m saying. Like all ideological constructions, Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ must be deconstructed. So what did Descartes really mean? Descartes really meant that the most important thing about me is that I am a thinker. The thinker is the most important being. The scientist, the thinker: the male thinker as distinct from the women doer. This is already a division of labour, the intellectual versus the manual labourer. Then there’s the person who can reason, who is educated as distinct from the person who can’t reason, or who is not educated. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if you were poor or uneducated, you would receive, for the same petty crime, a horrendously more severe sentence: you could be hanged in a very horrible way for stealing an apple; if you were educated, you would have to steal a flock of sheep, or even more. So in crimes, people were judged according to the social circumstances in which they found themselves. Can one think of anything more unjust? The seventh characteristic feature of modernism is its mechanistic materialism. (We have just been talking about the sixth feature, its formalism, in which the quantitative means of expression moved completely to the fore, so this is the beginning of the fetishisation of formal logic. Its eighth and final feature is its ontological monovalence, which I have already mentioned and will not discuss further here.) So its

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seventh feature is its materialism—in every sense of that word. Not only were the properties in terms of which you explained nature mechanical, but the properties in terms of which you explained mind were too. So then mind could never really have any autonomy of its own. Mind itself wasn’t investigated by the modernists as something unique and creative. It was rather regarded just as a hugely complex material organism, a piece of clockwork which God had set spinning when he wound up the universe, putting it in motion; or—if God was in some way presiding over the universe—which God either synchronised miraculously or allowed to go on spinning on its own. This was the issue in the famous dispute between Newton and Leibniz as to the role of God in the universe. Whatever it was, God either necessarily or contingently left the machines which were called men to operate in an instrumentalist way. So everything, the whole structure of relationships within modernism, became instrumental. Instrumental rationality rose to the fore. And modernism was materialist in another way too, in that people were greedy, they wanted more and more material objects. So in its individualism, its abstract universalism, its incomplete totality, its lack of reflexivity, its unilinearity and judgementalism, its formalism, its materialism and its ontological monovalence, modernism chimed in beautifully with capitalism. So modernism, en bloc, is the ideology of the rise of capitalism; most particularly, the ideology of the dominant capitalist power.

8.2 Postmodernism and Poststructuralism 8.2.1 Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Rorty Savita: But postmodernism, if you don’t read it from a critical realist perspective, actually sounds very radical. First, it calls attention to a hideous hidden agenda of domination in modernity. As a result of the ideas that were supposed to have liberated them, our lives have become far more dominated. The self that was supposed to have produced a liberated existence actually carried out the surveillance that Foucault writes about. When you read Foucault, you feel as if you are being smothered; the whole process of modernity seems to be a smothering of individuals. So from individualism to smothered individuals, this is starkly captured by postmodernism. Plays a very important role also as a social scientist in bringing in this thought. But postmodernism is not just about that. There is Derrida’s notion, secondly, which parallels your notion of exclusion and the intrinsic outside, that modernity and modernism is based on—is feeding on—something that it’s denying, and that this is really unjust. So it feeds on the labour of the working class without giving them any position of power or having any plan for them to flourish. Third, Levinas is very interesting to read on the self that modernity theorises and its other. The position of women, the position of immigrants, the position of Jews, the position of others would be very different without this relation of domination.

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Roy: Yes. I think what you’re doing is taking the thought of three very original thinkers—Foucault, Derrida and Levinas—who were really poststructuralists, and treating it as postmodernist. Derrida, in fact, has soundly criticised the notion that he is postmodernist in any way, and you can’t bracket them all together. If you say that postmodernism contains within itself some of the things that these thinkers produce, then I would agree with you. But let’s discuss these thinkers. Postmodernism is both more nebulous and more cohesive than the thought of those particular thinkers. Foucault, for example, looks at techniques of surveillance. He’s obviously someone whose heart is entirely in the right place in the sense that he’s on the side of the oppressed, and he wants to show how modern societies have given rise to horrendous techniques for the subjugation and surveillance of people who don’t fit into the sort of paradigms of control that you have. People who are slightly crazy, or thought to be mentally ill, or who’ve committed minor thefts would previously have been treated in a certain way, but now they’re put into total or closed institutions and subjected to surveillance. Every part of them was suspect; indeed, every part of the human being was suspect. Savita: In fact, in the eighties, the one book that really changed me was Madness and Civilisation (Foucault 1967). That book is so powerful: when I read it, I didn’t want to read anything else. It gives us an inner picture of Western society and its mechanisms of control, and it is really very important for people who are living in this part of the world to be aware of what the Western world is like. To read Foucault is absolutely necessary, just as at some point, it’s necessary for us to read Marx. Roy: Definitely. Without a shadow of doubt Foucault is a very great thinker, comparable for his time to Durkheim or Weber. Savita: Postmodernism— Roy: No, no. I want to go into their thought. We are not discussing in an academic way modernism versus postmodernism. This is something critical realism doesn’t do. It doesn’t take sides, and it doesn’t nitpick. It wants to examine the grounds for anything, and if there’s an opposition, that’s fine; and if there’s another opposition, that’s absolutely fine. So now we are talking about poststructuralism, and that’s fine; so let’s go into it. Now, Foucault identified in a very insightful and well-documented way the rigid frameworks that modernity—capitalism, the bourgeoisie—had generated for solidifying their rule: gathering data, classifying, taxonomising, mechanistically cutting out individuals and pulling aside those that couldn’t be trusted into certain total institutions. What contrasts poststructuralism with postmodernism—I’m sounding out the differences here—is that postmodernists characteristically emphasise the looseness, the variability, the fuzziness of social life. Which is right and which is wrong? To understand total institutions, to understand bureaucracy, you go and read Foucault. If you want to understand how couples got on in California in the 1990s, you read the postmodernists. You have a sort of looseness, everyone drops in and drops out. Nothing is clear in definition in California today: who’s gay, who’s not gay; what this restaurant is—is it Indo-Japanese, French or Italian? Everything is loose, everything is fuzzy. This is a fuzzy world!

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What’s wrong in all this is that they extrapolate—they are making exactly the same mistake as the modernists: they are trying to produce from a local particularity a universal generalisation. Even postmodernism is into universalising, it’s just everywhere: everywhere we have no universals. We have the local, our particular communities, which are transient, which people float in and out of; no community is better than another, and judgementalism is quite wrong. Foucault says that our societies are structured in this rigid way, and that it’s all a terrible track. If you’re a Turkish immigrant in Germany, then the world corresponds to Foucault. But if you’re a student in Oxford or Cambridge in the 1990s, then it corresponds to postmodernism. If you’re an illegal immigrant in England, the police will hound you out; if you’re a trade union activist, they’ll hound you: the world will correspond to Foucault. What these thinkers are doing is not understanding reality dialectically, not understanding it as complex and as a totality. Certainly, there are enormous bureaucracies, and there are instruments of torture; but everything that Foucault looks at is actually sustained—you have to remember this—by a stratum of love and creativity. It took great ingenuity to develop the panopticon—to develop it was a marvellous thing. And actually, Foucault’s quite right, because it also provided a sort of model for the Fabian socialists, who thought that, if only they knew everything about society, they could plan it all. And of course, though Foucault never really got around to this, it had its worst exemplification in the way in which American corporations provided the Nazis with the technological tools required for organising the Holocaust (see Black 2001). There’s a famous nineteenth-century painting of Cromwellites interrogating a little Royalist boy during the English Civil War: ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’7 Everyone was encouraged under both Fascism and Stalinism to surrender their parents, to identify political errors or real racial origins and hand people over to the authorities as potential collaborators. So postmodernists and poststructuralists all make the mistake of not understanding that social reality is constituted by a number of different overlapping modes of reproduction of social life. Some Marxists think that only capitalism exists! And actually all those systems of modernity that you were describing are parasitic on the others, they all feed on others, as you so nicely said, taking on exactly the standpoint that I’m trying to argue for and get everyone to see for themselves: how all these terrible systems, chaotic systems or just bizarre systems like contemporary postmodernist life, actually subsist on the creative, spontaneous, loving energy of human beings. This energy is quite deflected in some cases, very chaotic in others. The postmodernist world is very chaotic, so love , for example, has a specific meaning there. If you went into a neighbourhood in central California, say Sacramento, in the early 1990s, and you were not into wife-swapping—bye-bye! In that context loving means wife-swapping; so loving is reduced to a form of behaviour. In the suburban world, loving means just that you turn the key, or you trust her to turn the key, to lock the labours in. That’s how you should lock your prisoners in, and how you show your solidarity. These are extraordinary, distorted, deflected, deformations of an energy. 7 Painted

UK.

in 1878 by William Frederick Yeames and located in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool,

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But without that energy, without those acts, things couldn’t keep going; so the postmodernist world would collapse if they ever accepted, for a moment, clear norms or rules. Actually, there are clear norms: those are the norms that underlie postmodernist behaviour. Perhaps I’ve caricatured postmodernism a bit, but it is like that: everything is fuzzy. There are no standards, and there are no structures. Everything is floating and shifting into one another. So the really great postmodernist theorists are actually theorists of social life: people like Erving Goffman, who was truly a genius, probably of the same calibre as Foucault and Derrida; or the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel. Of course, Garfinkel doesn’t have the same insights into the horrors, but he has insights into the maintenance of everyday life, and he shows how people do everyday life. The doing of everyday life is what most Americans do, and that’s all they do. ‘Hello’ ‘Bye-bye’ ‘Nice to meet you’ ‘Welcome’ ‘Have a nice day’. The American vocabulary is very limited. Very few Americans say anything more than that. Savita: There’s a very interesting book on this kind of theme—the surface life that most Americans live. It’s called Travels in Hyper Reality, by Umberto Eco (1986). Roy: Umberto Eco is a considerable theorist as well as a very good novelist. He’s a great semiologist. We’ll come on to semiology and hermeneutics a bit more when we discuss the latest developments of critical realism, because then I employ them to deepen it; so you will be very interested when I come to that. Books like The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1959) do make a contribution to our understanding of one aspect of reality, but to gloss that aspect as the whole of reality is absurd. And similarly with Foucault. Now Derrida. Of all the structuralist and poststructuralist writers, Derrida is probably the most brilliant textually; he’s very good at reading a text. But is he hermeneutically correct, is his hermeneutics correct? He always reads a text to prove a certain point. And the point he wants to prove is to invert a polarity; so it is really a very simple game. Thus everyone had said that speaking is prior to writing, including the ancient Vedic tradition, which said that, really, you don’t need writing until society reaches a certain stage of degeneration: otherwise everything is remembered. This is how most people think, because writing is after all something which came later than speaking; and so Derrida inverts this. When you consider that what Derrida is doing in all his writings is trying to deconstruct some polarity, trying to invert it, then you have to ask if reality is as simple as that. You have to ask, if one sign always refers to another sign, where exactly does the referent come in? It’s no good Derrida just saying that ‘there’s nothing outside the text’ is not to be taken literally, because the theory of metaphor is not worked out in his thinking. If nothing is to be taken literally, then you can’t take Derrida’s discourse in any way, because it always presupposes a level of literality, a level at which you see, you understand; and that presupposes a referent. So one sign refers to another, and one sign makes use of a semous length or unit of meaning and generates another semous length.8 Now it is not well understood that, from the classical semiotic triangle, you have a relationship between sign or 8 In

this sentence, it is not entirely clear to me that ‘length’ is the sound on the recording.

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signifier, signified or meaning, and referent or that to which the sign refers; and that already the referent was dropped by de Saussure when he talked about the relationship between the sign or signifier and the signified: for him, this relationship held in a particular language, and the referent to account for it was nowhere. But without that referent, no discourse can get off the ground. And that’s the fundamental Achilles heel of the whole Derridean construction. At some point, you must tackle the question of the nature of the implicit ontology he is presupposing. And at some level, there has to be literality, literalness: some reasons, at some point, why you don’t ‘defer’. What is this game of deferring? It is a very clever academic game. What academics do, typically, when they give a presentation is defer to the first person who originated this thought, and then they show how he deferred to someone else, and they demonstrate a nice functional mastery of two or three writers, or two or three books; and then they come to a nice conclusion, which neatly paves the way for the next paper, which will be the next chapter of their next book, which they haven’t got around to thinking about holistically or even working out. Derrida reflects the textuality of academic life, and he reflects the textuality of our very clever intellectual—but an intellectual who cannot refer to anything outside himself; and because he cannot refer to anything outside himself, who cannot situate or understand or reflexively sustain himself in the very totality he describes. If the Derridean utterance is to be referred to, it must be self-sustaining at one moment of time. If meaning is always deferred, then you’re lost in a fairytale of words which you have no reason for following. What you actually get out of this fairytale is a sensation that you’ve been taken on a very fascinating trip. But what does it do for your practice? Now it’s true that some of the terms like ‘difference’ and ‘margins’ can be put to very good critical theoretic use, and they are part of the critique of modernity and capitalism: people are marginalised, and people are mistreated, and there are hierarchies. But these are all living social realities. Savita: But if you read poststructuralism and postmodernism in this way, through a critical realist understanding, it is very clear that postmodernism itself is actually completing the picture of reality provided by modernism, by showing the lack, by showing the problems present in modernist theories. So already there is a certain kind of light that postmodernism is shedding on the nature of reality. But then it wouldn’t be very extraordinary on your part to think that they base their theories on the denial of ontology: they themselves very explicitly, consciously, deny ontology, deny the depths, consciously reject metaphysics and try to get along without the metaphysical comfort, as Rorty would put it, on a journey that is very risky and strenuous. Roy: It’s absolutely impossible to get along without ontology, and the result of their trying to do so is that they implicitly imbibe an empiricist ontology of one sort or another. I’m afraid that’s all there is to it. One of the few very good things about postmodernists is that they call attention to missing moments in the universality of modernism. The missing moments are differentiation, geo-historical variety and even trajectory, and human uniqueness. Their stress is upon picking out identity and difference. They show that the analytical universal must be completed. It’s absolutely empty without the dialectical kernel. But unfortunately, they throw the baby out with

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the bathwater: they get rid of universality altogether. What could be more horrendous and terrible in the society in which we live, in which we are all so globally interconnected, in which we have seen just recently how a few human beings can bring civilisation apparently close to a standstill or into a state of sheer panic,9 than to throw away the concept of unity? Unity does not mean identity. On the classical analytical universal, all instances of a generalisation were the same—except for spatio-temporal difference, which may be allowed. One atom of copper was as good as another. One table was as good as another. One human being was the same as another; we all have the same interests, we are all the same flesh and blood. The fact that we were not treated the same didn’t come into it: we would all have done the same thing if we were in the same position. So, if you had money, you would be as cool and calm as any wealthy person; that’s human nature: it’s unchanging. The postmodernist is saying: ‘No. We men, we all have secretaries.’ ‘We chemists…’ ‘We cosmetics salesmen…’ ‘We women who sell our bodies on TV…’ Or whatever. So people have interests that they share in common with only some other people, and these are part of their identity. And they have their particular geo-historical trajectories: you come from Bihar, you come from Patna, you come from a certain family, a certain caste, a certain circle: that’s all part of your trajectory. Even if you reject it, that’s your rejection—it’s defined in relation to your trajectory. Savita: I would never reject it. I would affirm it, I would never reject it. (Surprised laughter from Roy). Whether I’m from Bihar, or whether I’m from Ara. Or that I’m a woman. Roy (laughing): No, no, we’re giving you as an example. Savita: That affirmation, in fact, is very liberating. Roy: Of course. This is you, exactly, explaining what is liberating in the politics of identity and difference. You should know I couldn’t reject that. Savita: Of course. It’s as firm as a rock (Both laugh). Roy: Granite, a granite rock. Now when you’re a dialectical universalist, then you’re a critical realist. And then you see that your particularity—any particular—is also a universal. Form–content, end–need, speech–action, theory–practice—all these things are one: speech is also action, action is also a way of saying things; form generates content, content gives rise to form. Similarly, every particular is also a universal; and every universal is particularised in the world in some way. Now you could argue that there is a universal outside the world that is not manifest as particulars: some sort of spirit, or a transcendental self, that’s just a pure universal, independently of its manifestation. But here we’re just taking everything within the cosmic envelope, and we’re not engaging in speculation about what lies outside it. Within the cosmic envelope, every particular is a manifestation of a universal—is a universal—and every universal is also particularised; and it is always particularised in a specific way. 9 This

is a reference to 9/11, which occurred a few months prior to this conversation, and two days before the conversations began in 2001.

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Now just as I don’t know of many theorists who correctly worked out—I believe I’m the first to do it—what is the rational kernel of the Hegelian dialectic, so I don’t know anyone who has specifically formulated concepts of concrete singularity and dialectical universality and universalisability which capture part of the nature of being—this is all ontological work. While Derrida and Foucault and the other thinkers we talked about captured partial aspects of reality, critical realism sees these structures as all meshing together and sees all these theorists’ accounts as abstractions from a local context or as obsessive concerns (which may be very penetrating). Freud was obsessional, and so was Foucault; they would not be particularly nice people to sit with for long, not at all, but they had great insights into reality. But only partial insights: their totalities left gaping holes, and insofar as you abstract from them—universalise—then your account is going to be false. Now if you put the modernists and the postmodernists together and develop it, you get something like critical realism. Recall what I said earlier about critical realism not taking sides: we should search for common underlying grounds. So on this question of universality and particularity, is there something that both modernists and postmodernists share in virtue of which we can’t take sides? Yes. The only concept of individuality that they both have is one in which every individual or community is separate from every other individual or community, and in which, if there is a universal, it must be an analytical one. So we undercut the grounds from them by seeing that every individual or particular or community is always differentiated, geohistorically trajectorised, and more or less unique, as well as embodying elements of universality. Every universal is always concretely singular. This means that when you are actually doing something like applying the criterion of universalisability, if you want to apply it as an ethical criterion, you can’t say that what is right in this context is right for everyone. What is right for me is not necessarily right for you; and what is right for me to say to you is not necessarily right for anyone to say to you; and so on. Thus every relationship has to be sensitised: so we have sensitised solidarity. What we share with each other is not solidarity in general, it is always specifically sensitised. As soon as I act in solidarity with you, someone else may think that that’s quite gratuitous and wrong and could be really offended. This is why expressing an emotion like love, when I feel an abundance of love, or if I express my creativity, is always in relation to something specific. We express as individuals our creative genius: we are all geniuses underneath, it’s the ways we are geniuses that are different. When we unleash the genius of our geniuses, it will always manifest itself in a particular way. So if someone was to come to me with their six- or eight-year-old daughter and ask me to tell her about the depth of critical realism, it would be quite wrong for me to tell her, an abuse of my genius. Or if I was harshly to tell your daughter some truth about her—that she has no manners, for example—that would be quite wrong, it would be a horrible thing to do. So everything we do from the ground state is different for different people: we never do the same act twice. This is the virtue of inner emptiness. Savita: This kind of openness that you’re talking about, the real diversity of openness, would be a different kind of openness from the openness that the postmodernists

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are trying to attain. They actually are very much concerned with the things you’re concerned about; but if they want a society which is open, with the infinite possibility of openness, their stance of no metaphysics, no ends, no purposes, no essences must foreclose the possibility of new manifestations, of new creative emergences. Roy: Yes, but the thing is, the ground of openness is actually given by the unbounded potential of human nature and by the fact that we all share something in common in virtue of our being human beings: grounded as human beings, singularised as human beings, but as human beings; and within the context of the cosmic envelope, I should say ‘something in common with all beings’. Now what is wrong with the concept of essence? The essence is what makes things possible. It is just in virtue of your inner essence that you are open to everything, that you have infinite possibilities of development, of expansion, of self-realisation or—to use the term of Maslow (1943)—self-actualisation. Sometimes postmodernist ideologues talk as if we can go on developing ourselves in a very nice way if we read more and more texts. They never talk about much else besides reading or writing texts; but anyway, they go on reading more and more texts, and they develop their own powers of self-making. They say that they actually recreate themselves through what they read and what they write and what they say: they redo their analysis. Savita: But with this notion of self-creation— Roy: This is only possible in virtue of that essence; and there’s nothing fixed about it.

8.2.2 Endless Repetition of the Same Savita: Yes, I get that point. But just to ask this question on self-creation. I should probably ask a postmodernist, not a critical realist like you, how this self-creation, this ever new creation of the self, applies to the real production of things that human beings need? How does it apply to the labour process? Roy: Well, of course, postmodernists are not concerned with the labour process; they’re not concerned with anything as ‘crude’ as what could be called material production. Savita: But every time I produce something new, I can imagine it to be irrational for capitalism, because capitalism has to produce repetitively, not one television set, but hundreds and thousands: whereas for one billion people, one could easily produce one billion television sets, capitalism produces two billion because it has to make profits. So the scenario for capitalism would also be very complicated by postmodernism. Roy: Yes, but you have to ask: What is been recreated? What sort of recreation are Rorty and the Rorteans doing? They’re recreating themselves as ironists. And what does this end up saying? It ends up saying that we create ourselves. And what do

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we create ourselves as? Well, it’s always the same story: there’s no such thing as the truth, there’s no essence, no meaning to history, no goal in life, no point in anything; all we should do is sit back, write another paper, have a bigger meal, increase our salaries by telling intellectuals lovely things they want to know. They don’t have to bother with anything outside their own navels or their own heads. Savita: But Rorty at least is very honest in saying that he is basically talking about the liberal world, the postliberal world. Roy: No, he’s not talking about the postliberal world. You can’t basically talk about the postliberal world of the West, because to talk about it is basically also to talk about all the worlds on which Westerners are parasitic, all the worlds on which they feed; that is, the interior, the very hidden interior, which is the world of women’s work, which is the world of immigrant labour, of the Blacks, of the Chicanos and Latinos and the American Indians within the American continent; which is all the worlds that they’ve subjugated; which is also the genocide that they’ve perpetrated on the original inhabitants of their continent; and which is everything else in the world that they feed off. That’s their buried interior, their extrinsic interior. They are parasites, they are vultures, and Rorty is an ideologue of the vultures. He is telling people—he is supposed to be an educator!—that they don’t have to worry about anything else, because there is no truth, there is no history. There’s just a narrative that he can tell. But the narrative is boring, tremendously boring, because it’s always the same. Nietzsche told the same narrative. He was at least a creative genius, and he actually understood it in a slightly ironic way. He said that, really, everything you do—every act of will—and everything that happens to you, you should take infinite delight in, because you should realise—there are two interpretations—either that your acts will eternally recur or that you should treat them as if they will eternally recur. So you should want them to eternally recur, you should take joy in them. This is amor fati, you have a love for your fate. Now the standpoint of critical realism is that you have a fate and you have circumstances; you try to transcend your fate, you don’t love it! If you happen to be ‘lucky’ enough to impose your will, then you’re making a lot of other people’s fates for them: you’re stamping on them and you’re saying that it’s your fate to stamp on other people. This is an internal critique of Nietzsche. If you’re living in a world of the Nietzschean story, and you’re fated to tell people now that God is dead—Rorty says, at the beginning of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), that we really have to wake up now, we guys, we have to realise that God is dead; there’s no truth out there: truth is just something we make up for our own convenience—then you’re fated to be tremendously boring. This story is as old as the hills. This is Nietzsche in the new jargon. Rorty is telling the same story over and over again. Savita: Rorty is of course very contradictory. But he also says that in the postliberal world, a lot of the values we have are not valuable anymore, and we should be concerned about that. The value that is really central to his thinking, which he thinks is very inventive, is that people living in the West, particularly in America, should avoid being cruel. Cruelty is what they should avoid. Society must not be cruel. And

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he thinks that, with the end of religion—I guess he gets this from Nietzsche—cruelty itself can now finally come to an end. Roy: I wasn’t accusing him of being consciously cruel, but I was accusing him, in virtue of his repeating the same story in the name of philosophy, of unconsciously underwriting or refusing to critique or show the way out of the perpetuation of cruelty in the world. It’s all very well to say that you are not doing anything wrong. If you produce a huge smoke screen or cloud, or, to change the metaphor, a light which dazzles people so that they can’t see what’s going on, you can say: ‘Well, I’m not stopping them from looking, I’m not telling them to be cruel.’ But if you divert their gaze or fix their eyes in such a way that they can’t see what’s happening behind their backs—which is the perpetuation of the reproduction of the cruelty off which you as an intellectual parasite are feeding—then you are indirectly being cruel. You are preventing the liberation of others, as well as not doing anything about the performance of the cruelty off which you yourself are living. Savita: He also says that Rawls’s theory of justice (Rawls 1971) is an impressive theory and one that America could greatly benefit from. Roy: This is something truly novel. This is something you can’t find in Nietzsche, that Rawls’s theory of justice is impressive. I must revise my opinion of Rorty. He is truly an original thinker! (Laughs). Savita: The point is— Roy: No, I’m not making fun of you—I’m making fun of Rorty. Savita: No, but you must listen to this, because there are a lot of tendrils of Rawls’s theory of justice even in India. Roy: Well, Indians have been telling me that they can’t afford the rupee prices of my books, so how come they can afford the rupee prices of Rawls’s book? Savita: Well, Rawls’s theory of justice, particularly the second principle, has been brought by birds which fly from America to India from the various universities. I am actually one of the birds that have come from studying in one of those institutions, McGill University. And I must say that, when I read Rawls for the first time, I found the second principle of justice—the difference principle—very interesting, and I immediately began to think about it. Roy: So what is the difference principle as you understand it? Savita: The difference principle is that justice will prevail in a society only when the least advantaged is advantaged by any distribution of welfare that takes place. That is to say, every economic distribution is justified only when it benefits the least advantaged. The least advantaged is taken into the safety net of the distribution system, even though complete equality is not possible, at least on Rawls’s account. Even on the Marxist account, there would be many people who would detest a mechanical, calibrated equality, because differences have to be maintained, and freedom has to be maintained.

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Roy: Yes, but let me tell you something. Pareto formulated a criterion according to which something was justified if it generated a surplus over and above what would have been produced under an alternative system of arrangements, in which case, in principle, his criterion would have been satisfied; if the political will was there to redistribute the surplus to the least advantaged, that would be covered by the criterion that Pareto formulated in the early years of the twentieth century. So I really fail to see why people get so excited about Rawls’s book. It is really only worth getting excited about because it is the first systematic book about political philosophy to have been written in the twentieth century. The twentieth century has seen the dominance of linguistic philosophy and the dominance of epistemology; there were no books written, really, on ethics or particularly political philosophy: it was a nonsubject, you couldn’t say anything about it. Rawls was at least writing in the same sort of tradition, with the same sort of scope in mind, as political theorists like Locke and Hume. He tried to get a different idiom. Savita: He borrowed a large chunk of political philosophy from Hobbes and from Locke, and the philosophical presuppositions of his project are very Kantian or neoKantian. He doesn’t revise in any radical manner. He does retain the dignity of individuals and considers individuals to be the bearers of rights. On that account he thinks that each and every individual must be accounted for whenever an economic distribution takes place in society. So it’s good for the conscience of the liberals. Roy: No. I asked you what you understood by the principle of difference just to put the question back to you; the fact that each and every individual is taken account of is something to be said in Rawls’s favour. I wasn’t disparaging this. Savita: That’s why I wanted to sort out what Rorty takes from this. Rorty does have an originality problem, and I more or less agree with you about the banishing of ontology, the thinning down of the self, and so on—I think it’s ultimately an impoverishment rather than any kind of real understanding of freedom. Also, Rorty is going too far when he says: ‘All right, I am not universalising this. We have attained a certain kind of civilisation in the Western world, and it’s good for these societies only.’ He also has a problem assimilating Rawls’s account of the dignified individual who is accorded extra dignity in liberal society by being accounted for in every distribution. The problem is that the Rortean individual has a very thin self. This self is prior to the goods which it chooses. The principle of justice chosen by this individual is chosen by virtue of the self within, which is prior to those goods. So the individual decides if their dignity and freedom are retained only by virtue of the fact that they have a thin self, and no ends determine it; the ends are completely out of the picture in this thin conception of the self. Rorty is saying that we Westerners have a kind of justice in our society, which can generate principles of justice like Rawls’s, so we are a very great civilisation, we are just, and we don’t want to be cruel to people. It’s a very good society. You dwell in society in the freest possible manner. You enjoy maximum freedom because you are not determined at all by any of the ends that are there. You are not drifting towards any particularly determined purpose. This is Rorty’s theory of a postliberal society.

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Roy: The fundamental claim that you’re making for this is that it’s radically new. So, for the self, first we have the idea of dignity, that the individual bears rights. The only bearer of rights within liberal political theory and within bourgeois political theory from Hobbes on has been the individual. So there’s nothing new there. Then one of the things about this self is that it is prior to its ends—it chooses its own ends. This is exactly in the line of neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. There has to be a chooser, and the chooser has subjective preferences. This is the whole framework, which is very nicely articulated from the time of Marshall to the Austrian economists of the 1920s into the Friedmanite theories of the 1940s and 1950s. This is the orthodox paradigm in social science. What is social science today? It’s either positivistic behaviourism, which takes its most extremely crude form in econometrics, which just tries to describe finance systems in a consistent way, and then pretends that it is in some way describing the laws of the economy; or it’s rational choice theory, where the main idea is that the world is a world in which individuals are the ultimate choosers. This is the world that has structured the dominant problematic of contemporary social science, in which the individual is a subject set over against an object world. So we have the ego, separate from other egos, defined in relation to an objectively given manifold of data. And what the ego does is make preferences—subjective values about what it wants in life, what it desires in the market place—in relation to the manifold of data. The manifold of data is provided, in principle, by price signals which show what resources the individual has, and he exchanges some of his resources for what he wants; and everything is put in terms of buying and selling. So the structure is given by a rational individual who possesses resources choosing in relation to an objectively given manifold. And then what determines what happens in the world—what you can do, how far you can go—is decided by the preferences: you only consider the preferences. So you don’t say: ‘You have only got a thousand rupees and I have got ten million dollars, so I can go a lot further than you.’ But that of course is what determines what happens in the market place. What happens in actuality is that it is not the individual who is the bearer of the rights, it’s the dollar or the rupee. That is what bears the rights in the market place. Savita: Let’s look at what’s happening here. It is not that postmodernists are not thinking ontologically. Rorty explicitly accepts that he is thinking ontologically. But he also rejects that he is thinking in the older mode of metaphysical thinking. Roy: That’s quite true, but where is the older mode of metaphysical thinking? There has been no older mode of metaphysical thinking in Rorty’s tradition. He comes from a tradition, partly of American pragmatism, but mainly through Anglo-Saxon linguistic analytical philosophy—that is, ordinary language philosophy and logical positivism—, which goes back through Russell, Mill and Comte to the positivism of Hume. For that tradition, metaphysics has been banned. Savita: Rorty himself has played a role in this. Ontology for him is that which he chooses; if in any doubt, choose another one.

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Roy: This is exactly what Hume said: at any moment of time, I can choose the world in which I want to live. I could choose, if I wanted to, to leave the building by the second-floor window instead of the ground-floor door. There’s nothing new there under the sun. To say that you can choose an ontology or choose the world in which to live is absolute nonsense, because Rorty is actually a parasite on the real world, which is structured, differentiated and changing. If he wants to deny that he has even an implicit ontology, one can point it out to him: it is what is reproduced in his practice, which is the ontology of abstract universality of an elite. He is telling again and again the same story as Hume and Nietzsche, who were great thinkers in their own way. It’s really monstrous in every way, because in the first instance, you can’t just deny ontology. You can say that he’s not denying ontology, he’s choosing an ontology; but what is the status of that act of choice of ontology? Is it real or not? So the choice is real. That tacitly presupposes an ontology of choice. So what is this ontology of choice? That takes you immediately to a world in which an individual subject is defined only by its choices, its preferences: the thinnest possible self is the self that’s just a set of preferences, as economics students learn from the textbooks. Something real seems to be making these preferences, but actually the preferences are all that count. And that’s all that must count for Rorty, because if he says that he is himself real in a way which is not chosen, then he has to give an account of that; and that actually presupposes the subjective element within an objectively constituted world which must be defined in a certain way whenever we are in keeping with it. So what is the world for Rorty? It is a world which really, for him, exists only in virtue of the stories he is telling us about it. That is the world. So if the world is just whatever you decide, whatever story you write, what accounts for the fact that you write one story rather than another? Nothing other than your own free choice. So why does he have a choice to write a story and not other people? And why does he always write the same story? That story is the story of a soul that would be beautiful, were it not so ugly because it is completely parasitic on the rest of the world. And whenever he does anything in the world he is presupposing some much more substantive ontology, like a Humean ontology, or a Humean ontology coupled onto a transcendental realist ontology. Then he’s like the man in blinkers who denies what he everywhere has to presuppose, namely that the world has a certain structure, has a certain form. His whole being depends on the fact that he is paid a huge academic salary as a guest professor at a prestigious West Coast University, and he must presuppose that this will continue. He’s part of a system in which he functions as an ideologue, and his function is completely the opposite of Plato’s function in the allegory of the cave: he doesn’t take the people out of the cave into the sunlight and slowly remove their blindfolds, rather he dazzles them with a false sun so that they can see nothing. In the meantime, he draws his salary, he writes the same old story again and again, and he denies that anything else exists. This is nothing other than intellectual parasitism. Savita: Do you think that Rorty is creative only in a crude sense? I think what happened is that Rorty and the postmodernists got very tired of living in the liberal world, which made a mockery of liberty and justice and stifled genuinely creative living, and capitalism was very heavily involved; but the system wasn’t changing,

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capitalism definitely wasn’t coming to an end. Politically they were getting tired of this, but they were not revolutionaries, they were not interested in changing the system, just in leading life another way: self-creation, loving the beautiful and so on. Roy: Yes. There’s nothing wrong with aestheticism as such. The greatest poets—in the West, Shelley, for example—are very creative and liberating. But you can see the political and real-world engagement in Shelley’s poetry; he doesn’t believe in the orthodox conventions of his society. You can see that he is radical, you can see in his writings something very new and striking. To call Rorty a poet because he thinks there’s nothing in the world other than writing is to abuse the term, in all honesty. The great poets have always written with and in the interests of people, and are always highly creative. Rorty is always rewriting the same story, he’s not an original thinker in any way. He’s a marketing salesman, he’s good at selling himself. He knows his constituency, and he knows that he’s telling them what they want to hear. Why? Because the alienation is so deep that American students and American intellectuals—there are a few still there—can’t do anything about the disaster of the society that they are living in, and the disaster that society has created intrinsically and extrinsically, inside and outside: inside and outside America, and inside themselves as well as outside themselves. This vast alienation and anomie affects everyone.10 And they need to be distracted. Rorty is like Nero fiddling while Rome burns. He is the fiddler of early twenty-first century capitalism. He will fiddle while the world overheats and disappears. Savita: Would you say the same of Derrida? Roy: Not necessarily. If he carries on in the old vein, then he will be fiddling; but his more recent work suggests that he might not be. For example, he has attempted some sort of resuscitation of Marx—after the fall of actually existing socialism, he wrote a work in defence of Marx (Derrida 1994); and he has recently written a book on religion which is quite interesting.11 This suggests that he’s becoming interested in some real concerns. I mean, he is doing it in a textualist and roundabout way, but actually through the gaps, through the spaces between words, in the textuality, some insights take place. But, really, in Rorty I can’t see anything insightful. Unfortunately, his work is a systematic mystification which is only reproducing the alienation of the world of duality in which he lives, which is hurtling towards oblivion, and is 10 Cf. ‘On thinking about Hell’, a poem composed by Bertolt Brecht in exile in America during World War II: On thinking about hell, I gather My brother Shelley found it was a place Much like the city of London. I Who live in Los Angeles and not in London Find, on thinking about hell, that it must be Still more like Los Angeles (Brecht 2006, 101–3). 11 Possibly a reference to Derrida 2002, which was forthcoming at the time of this conversation. This is a selection of Derrida’s writings on religion (some previously unpublished) from the eighties and nineties.

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taking the rest of the world in its wake. This world, and his own writing, is parasitic on a level that he denies. He would certainly deny a human essence, and he would certainly deny my ground state, so he can’t explain scientific creativity, he can’t explain anything new. He really doesn’t have to do it for his own activity, because he never creates anything new, he just repeats the same. It really is an eternal recurrence of the same, an endless repetition, an endless refrain. No one in India should be taken up or be bothered by Rorty’s popularity. We can go in much greater depths at all the different levels of the postmodern ideologue, and in particular the whole idea that you create ontology. First, you can’t deny ontology. The denial of ontology itself presupposes a reality. To say, you create ontology presupposes an ontology of creation. And that’s self-evident, you are saying I have an ontology of creation … There is a gap in the recording of about 11 minutes at this point. The best way Rorty finds to make sense of his own situation is by believing that you can continually recreate yourself by voluntarist or volitional acts, or acts of will. But his definition of his situation is wrong, because it detotalises everything about his writing activity. He cannot reflexively situate himself within academia, within the history of philosophy. He doesn’t see that the same thing has been said before, that it is being repeated. He doesn’t see that he presupposes in his writings, if interpreted literally, that people are going to refer to what he said: ‘Look, on page 152 of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, he says such and such.’ That’s an act of reference. He himself cites Proust and Peirce and his other heroes. How can you make sense of these citations? The recreation of a self: how can a self recreate itself, unless it does so from something? You start from a base self, then you recreate, and you have another self. That presupposes the possibility of going back to the original base self. Then what is it that accounts for the creative, living self? There must be something that endures, which is the source of creativity, which you’re mobilising, which you’re tapping. Re-enacting their story or narrative is an important moment in people’s lives. When they choose a different identity for themselves, whether in the West or in India, this is an important moment, but it is always given a grounding; it always has some clear, determinate background. You can make sense of that choice of identity; it’s a determinate identity, for which there is a background that has to be struggled against. But actually, Rorty’s identity is just a repetition of the same. If it’s taken as being the creation of a new identity, then there would be no Rorty to be talking about it. There is a certain continuity within his own development that can be made sense of. Savita: Great. So critical realism makes these practitioners of postmodernism aware of the implicit ontology of their own theories. I suppose even Charles Taylor has done this. He wrote a brilliant piece on Foucault’s notion of truth, in which he showed how it was flawed just because it didn’t make explicit what was implicit in his whole notion of truth (Taylor 1984). This is a kind of immanent critique, which I take is of some interest to us. Whenever I read these theorists, I never forget that they are the theorists and philosophers of the capitalist liberal world, and I always want to know

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the implications of such thinking, because this thinking is done at a strange level of abstraction from the existing institutional and economic causal effects. Roy: Yes. The most important criterion in philosophy is reflexivity; that is, the capacity to reflexively situate your own view within its context of production and to sustain it. And irrealist theorists and philosophers are reflexively incoherent. Every move that they make is performatively contradictory. They detotalise themselves immediately; they take themselves out of the world in which they are produced. The story is written, the book is written; what does that presuppose? The great philosophers show how their own story fits into the evolution of society and of philosophy (or of whatever topic they take); they situate themselves within the context of that evolution: they try and make sense of it. Now, philosophy has an endemic error—the academy, actually, has an endemic error—and that is to extrude itself from the rest of society. So Rorty is not even doing anything new. I really can’t see anything in this other than a form of distraction from the real problems, which are to give an account of the world, which would include creative re-description, including the creative rewriting of your own personal trajectory. This is something that everyone wants to do; everyone has to tell their own story, but their story has to be coherent; their story, for a philosopher, must be true. And what is the truth? The truth? So palpably in Rorty’s case, in no way can it be truth; at each moment, it is a performative contradiction.

8.2.3 Insights of Modernism and Postmodernism Savita: I have two questions I would like you to reflect on, and that will be the end of our discussion on postmodernism and modernism. First, why is it that people still think about causality in a very crude way, that is, positivistically? In ‘Third World’ countries, they haven’t really dropped the habit of thinking that way. Let’s say that it’s a very old mode of thinking, even though it can be very futuristic, and dialectical critical realism is a philosophy of the future, is it not? Certainly on the postmodernist account, we are still in the older mode. Would it be too crude to say that these postmodernist philosophers have appeared in virtue of a development within capitalism towards new forms of reification? Roy: That’s a very good question. Savita: Second, if you actually internalise postmodernism and the spirit of liberation that they’ve generated—if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be so influential; if you go to the inner realm of postmodernism, and try to read it for the way they’re trying to create postmodernist thinking, it could just be that they’re asking people to develop different habits of thinking. A new habit of thinking would probably, as a fallout, cause some of the reifications of the existing capitalist mode of production themselves to fall away. I keep getting the sense, when I read Foucault, for example, that the power of Foucault’s writing lies not in what he’s saying, but in what’s implicit in it. He’s making you so aware of the dominating structures, that you can develop no affection

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for them: he’s creating disaffection. Similarly, postmodernism probably will create, if we read it and internalise it, disaffection from commodification. This also could be very destabilising for capitalism. Postmodernism could be read in both these ways. I want to know which approach you think would be more effective. Roy: The first thing is that postmodernism definitely expresses a reaction to the globalisation, particularly the form of globalisation, of capitalism, and the development of capitalism in terms of eating up or commodifying more and more aspects, levels and domains of reality. Capitalism does this in a way which is parasitic, which dominates the domains—the modes of production and social formations—on which it feeds; and it does this in a combined and uneven way. People who see this happening, who see their own internal space being swallowed up; who see how they are being sold all over the world under a superficial variety of a hundred different brands basically the same toothbrush which does basically the same job; who are told that they have great variety when they are sold a hundred different varieties of the same car, which does the same job, namely goes from A to B; who are being encouraged to put all their values into this, and are being flashed the same pictures all over the world by television, which is owned by the same moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch; who share the same culture; whose own identity is being swallowed up, whose internal space is being colonised: naturally they will react. Postmodernism expresses a reaction to this globalisation of logical, analytical universality. It is a powerful protest of identity, of difference. This protest can take reactionary and obscurantist forms. Reactionary forms include fundamentalism and communalism, which are fear-based reactions to globalisation. So I agree entirely with you that, in so far as it reasserts identity in difference, it is genuinely liberating, genuinely a protest. But where the ideology can never take us very far is that it can never unite us. And as I was arguing this morning, we have a rapacious system of capitalism, which is spoiling the whole planet, which is ruining the habitat of our species and which is feeding off and draining our own creativity. The only way out is for all the people—wherever they stand within the system of production—to understand that they are being drained, disenergised and used and abused by this rapacious monster. So postmodernism registers a protest against the enemy, but it can’t provide the ground for the counter-attack. That can only be provided by a philosophy or a practice which is informed by some concept of a unity in difference, specifically dialectical universalisability. Now, as to the second question, whether it’s creating new habits of thinking: Yes. I think that respecting differences, respecting the creative powers and originality of a person’s story—this is creating new habits. Postmodernist emphasis on things like political correctness or clean speech shows a respect for orders and dimensions of reality which are regarded as free from oppression. Language was regarded by the modernists as a neutral vehicle for looking at the world; you may have noticed this in Hume. Similarly, men and women were regarded as identical; the immigrants and exiles were regarded as the same as the indigenous person. So drawing attention to the specificities of everyone’s story, and every community’s story, and every group’s story, that is, to an account of where they have got to, and where they are, is really important, because you have to respect that everyone is their own best storyteller.

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Storytelling, putting yourself in a narrative (from the Latin narrare, to tell a story), is important and liberating; and respecting everyone else’s narrative, as postmodernism at its best does, is encouraging something very good. Just having the first idea of genuine human universality, of all human beings across the planet sharing something in common, actually was a great breakthrough when it was made; it wasn’t there in the old world, in the Greek world.12 At the dawn of what we call modernity, people said that all human beings everywhere have something in common, which differentiates them from animals. Unfortunately, the accounts merely glossed particular sectional interests, but that was a great insight within modernism, and we have to pay tribute to them for it. They were universalisers, and capitalism was and is the first mode of production which is truly universalising. It brought us all into a global interconnection, and it is now bringing us into global crisis. To understand and respect our unity and universality is something we have to hang on to. But to get the right account of universality, you have to build in also the postmodernist emphasis on uniqueness and difference and community. Postmodernists do move in the direction of community and seeing human life as being something we share with others at the local level. But above all they pay attention to our particularities, our differences; and to the prima facie right of everyone to tell their own story, to give their own account of themselves. And that is a genuinely liberatory move. Within any great system of thought, you will see something positive. However, I come in the role of denouncer: I critique systems of thought. I do always try to show in my more specific writings where they’ve done something good; but in general, if you’re trying to make the river flow, you can’t just dwell on the surface in which the wild geese cast their reflections, you want the whole thing to move along. You don’t spend a lot of time paying homage to the works of living ideologies which are mystifying people, so I don’t bend over backwards to say how great they are when I’m trying to topple them over; enough people will be doing that anyway. But it is worth paying attention to the great moment within modernism, which was to say that this is true for humanity as a whole: we are not different tribes. To break away from that tribal point of view was actually something inherent in the logic of capitalism, but inherent also in lots of other human activities. In a way, probably some national traditions or ideological traditions had that logic in them anyway. So when we’re talking of Ram Mohan Roy, the first moderniser in contemporary India, we’re talking of someone who said that we can do better justice to this ideal of the unity of all human beings. Vivekananda said the same in Boston, that any of you lot, we all have Brahman [the creative principle that informs the cosmos], we all have Atman [soul or self] within us. Every human being has that.

12 There

is widespread agreement among scholars of the Axial Age (c. 800–200 BCE) (see e.g. Arnason et al., eds, 2005) that the idea of human universality was strongly present in axial societies, including the Greek (and the Indian—as Savita and Roy shortly point out). Bhaskar probably should be read to mean here that the modern idea is the first that is truly planetary in scope, reflecting the globalising dynamic of capitalism, ‘the first mode of production’, as he goes on to say, ‘which is truly universalising’.

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Savita: It was also a kind of intervention to show the false universality of Western modernity, because they felt excluded. Roy: Yes. And some Indian Christians have said that you can only have Atman in you if you have the Holy Ghost in you—if you’ve been baptised, if you’re a member of my faith. So those Christians left the problem of what happens if you’re not a Christian. Now Hinduism never said that you have to subscribe to any belief, or even to practise Hinduism, or be born in the Indus Valley, or anywhere else, to have spirit, to have self in you. Savita: So that was a first. In fact, in the way they reinterpreted Hinduism, it was the most rational interpretation of God that they picked up, which was present in Vedanta. And that is why Vedanta is crucial for understanding Indian modernity, because the entire discourse of Indian modernity, according to me—this is what I discussed in my thesis—was conducted in a sustained way on the basis of reinterpretation of Vedanta. And in Vedanta, what you have is a nondual conception of a rational Brahman. That matched with the sophisticated rationality of the time that was developed. Its features included universalism, unity and commitment to objectivity. Roy: Yes. And what we have to do now is to understand that human beings are not just manifestations of some essence which is present everywhere in the universe. They are particular local disturbances, fields within huge fields; and they’re differentiated fields. So every individual manifests the properties of the vacuum state, of the ground state, of the quantum state—whatever you want to say—in a field-like way, in a different way, in a particular way. And so we have to go further than saying that Vedantic philosophy as reinterpreted by these figures brought out something inherent in the logic of modernity that was there in pre-existing tradition, whereas capitalism and the philosophical discourse of modernity have only just discovered it—that it was new for the West but not new for India; in addition we have to say, to put it in very concrete terms, that every individual human being, wherever they are, has their own special dharma; everyone has something which they uniquely are that differentiates them from anyone else. And that is an extraordinary and wonderful thing to say. But still, they’re bound in group interests of different kinds. My MELD schema is not, as is sometimes thought, a four-part formula: it is not that individuals are made of four parts—there is a multiplicity of aspects; we have to understand the four domains of my schema as reflecting different aspects of reality at the highest level of abstraction. So we can sustain within the context of the framework that I’m trying to articulate an account which will do justice to the multiple dimensions of the human beings that we have in our time. Yes, we are all human beings, but our intrinsic nature, our concrete singularity—if you wanted to put it in the Hindu or Vedantic way, you would say our Jivatman—is unique; that is, to put it in my secular way, we concretely singularise—are unique manifestations of—our ground state, our inner essence, the cosmic envelope, the ultimate ingredient. This is manifested and embodied in the human form, but always in some specific way. Never will you find two tigers which have the same stripes, I was told, and even more so with human beings.

Chapter 9

The Question of Women

Savita: As you know, there are many women who feel very inspired by postmodernist theory, and many feminists today are basically postmodernists. There were some realist socialist feminists, but they lost plausibility as Marxism of the older kind began to lose its power actually to explain the world because of its failure to develop adequate theories accounting for late twentieth-century capitalism. But you have developed a systematic theory of human emancipation, and I think you also spoke in Mumbai on the question of women’s emancipation under the rubric of critical realism. Could you please rehearse your position on the question of women for me? Roy: I’ll just make some general comments, and we’ll contextualise them later. I’ll definitely take up the question of the contributions that postmodernists have made to the question of women. First I would like to say something about women from the standpoint of the transcendental dialectical critical realism I have been articulating during these conversations. Women’s role in domestic labour, and in particular in the reproduction of labour power, is a contradictory one from the point of view of the general thrust of what I’ve been saying in terms of the emancipatory project. From the point of view of the arch-enemy, or what seems to be the dominant system of oppression, namely capitalism, women are excluded. Their labour is not recognised, they are detotalised. What does it mean to say that women’s labour is not recognised? Unless they are in a job, their labour power is not commodified, the work they do in the domestic sphere is unpaid labour; and actually, they are underpinning, in virtually everything they do, capitalism as a mode of production, because if they were to demand to be paid, and succeeded, capitalism could not survive. The profit rates are very low anyway, and the cost of paying for every woman’s labour would be enormous. From this point of view, feminists rightly want to assert their rights to be recognised in the job market, to go in and sell their labour power like anyone else. Even in the West, some so-called extreme feminists—why not?—want to argue that their domestic labour, even within the context of the family, should be paid. So just as children in the West demand pocket money, wives would demand a salary; not just the husband giving them money to spend, but actually being paid for their services. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_9

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They can argue that what they do is comparable to the totality, and more, of a nurse, maid, waitress, cook and everything. That’s the negative side—women’s labour in the domestic sphere is not paid. The positive side is this. The characteristic feature of women’s labour exemplifies all the properties of the ground state that actually also sustains the male domains: women in their role of a binding force within the family have to act in a nondual way, spontaneously and unconditionally manifesting holistic, intuitive, tacit, totalising, noninstrumental, loving, creative activity. This is the only way that a family, or any unit such as a family, can keep going. You can’t get your child into a contractual relationship until it is at quite an advanced stage—and then it is part, really, of a process of parenting. The contractual aspect is when you say: ‘If you’re a good boy (or girl), I will give you this.’; It’s part of the unconditional love, the unconditional commitment you have to your child. I should say that, when I talk about women’s labour, everything I say applies in principle to the male parent. It’s just that there’s a gender division of labour, I think even more so in India than in the West, where it’s beginning to break down and you have the phenomenon of the house husband, who stays at home and looks after the kids, and it’s the wife who goes out to work. I’m talking about roles here; later we’ll discuss things that are specific to women in their capacity as embodied females, and not just having a feminine role. Really, women are a living template. What women do in the domestic sphere, they do spontaneously, unconditionally, noninstrumentally, holistically, with one eye on the kids they have to understand—they unconditionally give to the kids spontaneously. They are always coping with a new situation. This illustrates all the properties that I want to see, and that I think with time will bring an emancipated society which functions by love, by respect, by compassion, utilising the creative ingenuity of the immediate producers, who are all in, or close to, their ground states, spontaneously caring for each other in a nonpossessive, nonmanipulative, noninstrumental way. Also very important in parenting is not to be too attached, to allow your child to have its own desires, to want to grow up to be a train driver rather than a medical scientist. That’s fine. You mustn’t have ambitions for your children: they must come from within the children. So everything about parenting, about looking after a family, actually manifests, is a template for, the emancipated society of the future. And therefore, when we go into this from the standpoint of transcendental dialectical critical realism, we can see how the mother has to grasp the alethic truth of what the child wants. She has to see the child as a process in motion, of development, of growing, of never standing still. Everything about transcendental dialectical critical realism will illustrate that she has to think holistically. She is part of the child. The mother–child couple, or the parent–child couple, is a dyad; they are a single unit until the child is at quite an advanced age; she is the child, and the child is she. This co-presence, and this transcendental identification, this feeling for or becoming the other while remaining yourself—everything that I’ve articulated as transcendental dialectical critical realism—is beautifully manifested here. Let’s just go through the various moments of the system to make this point very strong, because women’s

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work brilliantly satisfies all the moments of both the development of critical realism and the articulation of the structure of transcendental dialectical critical realism. First, transcendental realism stresses ontology, the autonomy of nature. Now, women, far more than men, are in their body. Women have to be in their body generally. They are subject to bodily processes and are very conscious of cycles, flows, menstruation, menopause—everything about their body. Women are much more in touch with their bodies than men, who are often completely out of their bodies; or, if they are in their bodies, this is in a very crude way. This is an empirical observation, not a conceptual truth. Actually, women have to care for their bodies. They have to have a loving relationship with their bodies; they have to love their bodies; they have to pamper themselves—and that’s lovely. And men really don’t look after their bodies. When women don’t pay attention to their bodies, this is usually fleeting; for example, they wear something that’s wrong. Whereas men—no; men will carry an illness for a long time, and they are not sensitive, they are not listening, to what their body is saying. So in transcendental realism, we are immediately in touch with that aspect of human beings which is the truth of the body. Second, within a transcendental realist sort of framework, feminists have generated a critique of the institution of science as skewed in the interests of male domination. It is skewed, in particular, to engineering, manipulative instrumentalist projects; and it is actually distorted in the interests of a chauvinist view of the world. Here we have the lining up of polarities, where ‘left brain’ aligns with ‘masculine’ and ‘right brain’ with ‘feminine’; it is really quite neat. Instrumental reasoning—left brain; holistic, unconditional and intuitive thought and action—right brain. In the left brain, you see everything successively; in the right brain, simultaneously. Analogic reasoning in the left brain; metaphoric and creative reasoning in the right brain. Intuitive and holistic thinking in the right brain; linear thinking, sequential thinking in the left brain. Left brain, instrumental reasoning; right brain, unconditional reasoning—that is, not aimed at an end. In the right brain, you have the immediate unity of theory and practice, the far greater frequency of being in a nondual state, and the capacity and necessity to transcendentally identify with the other; in the left brain, male reasoning and male psychology are very geared into conditionality, contractuality, instrumental reasoning and manipulative treatment of other beings. Men stand at the head of a household or the head of a family, classically, and they are the manipulators: the family may be an integrated organic unit, but they are the ones who manipulate the outside world. This is their role; it is also their tragedy, because the modes of creative being that I’m thinking are very alien to most men. Women, in informal discussions or seminars, find it much easier to accept what I’m saying about the ground state, transcendental identification and holistic thinking, when I make it clear to them that they’re not inferior intellectuals; that, whatever we are born with, we are all born with our own unique bundle of capacities, and women have every right to be great poets or philosophers, or to be deemed important politicians, as they are in India: every country in the Indian subcontinent has had a woman Prime Minister or leader who was a pathbreaker. I should say, about India, that Hinduism has always recognised the existence of females as spiritual teachers; the goddess plays a role. The goddess in Hindu art is

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not an object of male manipulation; she is there, she is proud in her femininity and her female form. You even see goddesses in explicitly sexual positions; they have equal rights to enjoyment of the sexual act. This is very uncommon in the West. Writers like John Berger, art critics, have shown that the woman in Western art is portrayed as there for the gaze of the man. This is not true of Hindu sculpture and art in general. Even if you read explicitly sexual texts like the Kama Sutra, it’s clear that the woman has just as much right to sexual exploits as the man. Now, what about Islam? Islam, as you know, has some terrible practices performed on Islamic women. But Islam actually worships the woman. The gateway to the soul (anima) is regarded as specifically feminine; and the justification given for why women are put in purdah—covered up—is because the woman actually stands for the divine. She represents the soul. So it is not a one-sided story. There were also periods in the history of Islam where women were treated far better. I’m thinking of what could be called the Golden Age of Islam in the Middle Ages, when Sufi poetry thrived, when Avicenna and the other great Western Islamic philosophers discovered Aristotle. But, you know, the Sufi poets and the dervishes and the philosophers were familiar with Hindu practices. They learnt how to meditate from the Hindus, and there was no intolerance then. Anyway, the feminist critique of science is completely well taken. It is wholly consistent with transcendental realism because, as I argued earlier, transcendental realism discerns the true essence of science; just like we are trying to get to our true essence as human beings, our alethic essence, transcendental realism claims to capture the essence of science. This is that science is about explanation and human flourishing; it is not about manipulation and control, which is the positivistic misunderstanding of science according to the logic of instrumental reasoning. Lining up these polarities, the male thinks instrumentally, has a dominant, attached view of the world, and is typically implicated in systems of oppression—as is the logic of instrumental reasoning. Attachment and conditionality are everywhere: desire and pride are the dominant motives. In the contemporary world, these are much more caught up in a network of negative emotions in the case of a man than in the case of a woman. Third, moving onto critical naturalism, we can say that immediately, spontaneously, the woman is aware of what I call the transformational model of social activity. She knows that every day she reproduces, in a very real sense, the conditions of family life. This is her work: reproduction and transformation; these are what I define as the central attributes in terms of which human activity stands in the social structure. The woman consciously knows this: she knows that she is responsible for the reproduction of everything in the family and its transformation. To men in the workforce, this is a hidden secret. When you tell them of critical naturalism, they say: ‘Gosh! Do I really do that? Do I really reproduce and transform the social structure? By golly, I must be clever!’ The woman knows that the social structure that she’s reproducing is not something out there, it’s in here. It only comes through her: the family or household is not reproduced if she does nothing. The male is called the householder, but who reproduces and transforms the household? Who holds it

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together? It’s the binding power of the woman, her love, her nonalienated state of being. This is not an idealisation of the woman, or anything like that. I’m not saying that women are not constituted by heteronomous sources of determination, that they don’t have to clear their emotions, that they don’t have to assert themselves, that they don’t have to learn different things from men. Of course they do. It only seems to be an idealisation because we philosophers and social scientists, we intellectuals, when we talk about human beings, are really only talking about men. So the old joke that, when you say ‘men’, you really mean ‘human beings’, is not a joke at all: actually, in traditional philosophy, when you say ‘men’, you mean ‘men’. And then you can say that, because the woman’s activity is greater and more totalising than the man’s, and the man’s actually presupposes it, the woman’s also substantiates the man’s activity. There’s another joke, which is that ‘woman’, as a word, physically embraces ‘man’; ‘woman’ actually contains ‘man’. So you should write ‘woman’, because then you have both men and women. So why do you not write ‘woman’? ‘She’ contains, embraces, includes ‘he’. So no excuses here: ‘she’, ‘woman’.1 Now, in the fourth place, moving on to explanatory critique and the domain of ethics and values: according to male-dominated philosophy, you can never derive a value position from a factual position. But women everywhere show, from the fact of seeing their baby cry, that they immediately know what to do—they immediately make a transition from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. Feminists also theorise this in terms of a different ethic: an ethic of care and concern, not an ethic of subjective preferences. This monstrous discourse that you were talking about, this Rorteanism, this neoclassical theory, this revamping of Pareto, is completely alien to women. And to someone who consciously reflects on women’s role, what is the ethics of care— Savita: In fact, Gilligan (1982) has done this very well. She has developed a whole, explicitly feminist theory of the ethics of care, and she has criticised her teacher Lawrence Kohlberg and his theory of moral stages of development. Roy: The most influential twentieth-century philosophical theorist of ethics, and the analogue of rules for ethics, was R. M. Hare, who wrote a book in the early 1950s called The Language of Morals (Hare 1952), in which he was really trying to put ethics on a rational basis. Working in a context in which ethics was widely regarded as a matter of subjective preferences, about which philosophy could not say anything, he didn’t break with Hume’s law, but he did say that in ethics, we can have a rational discourse: we can try to universalise our position. So he was a neo-Kantian, and he said that if you can’t universalise your position, then you will be seen to be a fanatic. If you say that all Jews are bigots or something like that, which is a paradoxical statement— 1 In

light of this clear statement of intent not to deploy patriarchal language, I have removed such language throughout whenever Bhaskar inadvertently slips into it, except occasionally where the context is negative.

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Savita: You can’t actually generate that kind of abstract universal. Roy: That’s right. This is how you detect a false ethical position. So Hitler might have said: ‘All Jews are bigoted.’ The first level of critique is to ask whether it’s empirically the case that all Jews are bigoted. Then, according to Hare, if you find a counter-example, the statement is wrong. Universals, for Hare, are space–time bound: according to the Humean theory of causality, a law can’t be anything which pertains only to a space–time region, so you would have to say that all human beings who are Jews wherever they are in space–time are bigoted for that to qualify; and, clearly, you couldn’t consistently maintain that as a proper position. So that’s how Hare used the criterion of analytical universalisability. Now I’ve criticised analytical universalisability enough.2 Just take the statement that all Jews are bigoted: it doesn’t refer to any localised space–time region. And of course that’s not what we mean when we make an ethical judgement. We don’t say that all lying is wrong in any situation. It is not. Some lying is right. No one can lead a life without telling a lie. If you go up to your enemy, and your enemy asks you what you’re going to do—if you tell him the truth, you’re a fool, and you would deserve your fate. To tell the truth in this situation is not to act in a spirit of emancipation or in a divinely inspired way; it’s just to be stupid. Actually, no ethics should rest on rules. All ethics must be an ethics based on virtues; what we do is cultivate the virtues. The virtues will flow spontaneously when you’re in the ground state. But I must cultivate, for myself and my child, the virtue of courage, the virtue of intelligence and so on. This virtue of courage or intelligence will allow me to act flexibly and fluidly in any situation. I must encourage in my child the virtue of sensitivity, to know when to say what to whom. These are the virtues. Alasdair MacIntyre is absolutely right when he says that ethics must be grounded in virtue theory (MacIntyre 1981). Utilitarianism—consequentialism—goes out of the window, and so does Kantianism and formalism. Something like virtue theory has to be accepted. The feminist ethical theorists argue for the primacy of the virtue of care and concern. It’s true that we don’t think differently at a fundamental level: our first concern is for our loved ones. We like to radiate in circles, we are like a magnetic field. Critical realism breaks everywhere with the paradigms we have. Human beings are not atomistic points. They are like magnetic fields, they radiate in circles. We are at the centre of a radiating circle of love; we will manifest love, not a mathematical magnetic field. It won’t just depend on the distance, it will also depend on the object. Place a different object in the same field, and you will have a different effect. So what you do will depend in part on something which you could call ‘ethical distance’ from a person. How you behave with your husband or your wife, or your brother, or your sister will be different from how you behave with your child, or your parents, and with all those people who are your colleagues at work; when you show unconditional love to your colleagues at work, that will take the form of solidarity. So love is the base virtue. Sometimes it will take a very passionate and intense form; sometimes it 2 See,

further, Bhaskar (1993), especially Chaps. 2.4, 72–85 and 2.9, 169–73.

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will take the form of compassion for another human being where you can’t do very much, just feel, because you’re limited, you have to be sensible. Really, one of the virtues is common sense: everything that we do in our lives must be consistent with common sense and an acknowledgement of what energies and powers and capacities we actually have. So there’s a radiating circle around you, and you behave differently to different people according to where they are—where you stand in relationship to them. And you can’t break free, in an individualistic way, of the society in which you are— unless you want to be a beautiful soul or a parasite like Rorty; and then you wouldn’t be breaking free, you would just be feeding off it. So, actually, the exact form the expression of love takes is contingent upon the circumstances of a person. You could show the greatest love for someone by euthanasia, by putting them out of their pain. You could show the greatest love for someone by telling them the truth as you see it; perhaps you’re the only person who can do that. You show great love for someone by listening to them (just very briefly!) (Savita laughs appreciatively). So this is the rational insight. Savita: I would like you to develop your points. And then the criticisms will come; because I do think that your view of Hindu women is very flabby and lofty: it isn’t like that, even in Islam. If you think that women are very much in touch with their ground state— Roy: I’m putting forward a very provocative thesis, which needs to be qualified. Women may, of course, be very torn as selves. This is one of the things we didn’t discuss about postmodernism: it does very much reflect the alienated and sundered selves—that is, embodied personalities—of our present existence, which critical naturalism seeks to heal, as we’ve discussed. In all sorts of ways, women may well be torn, but when they’re performing their role as a woman, then—and this is the fifth point—they have to find a way of transcending the dichotomies and dualisms. It’s no good telling a woman that reasons are not causes, when the only way she can relate to her child is by trying to understand why it’s howling: What is the reason? It’s no good just accepting crying as a physical form of behaviour and trying to treat it physically, she has to go and look for the reason for it. So she has to think spontaneously in the critical naturalist way, she has to sublate in her practice the dualisms which may split and sunder her personality. We’ve already seen and defined women’s role as split; it’s horrendously split, right there at the beginning. But I’m articulating the nonsplit part now. In the sixth place, moving on to dialectical critical realism, first the dialectical moment, women are spontaneously aware, in their real life as the woman, of absence, of lack, that the practice of humankind is not what it’s supposed to be. And the woman here is only something that society has made to be the bearer of these roles that are necessary, actually, for the production and reproduction of human beings; reproduction physically—the production of new human beings—and the reproduction of labour power, that is, the reproduction of their husband, themselves, and their kids to go into their roles in the outside world. So they’re immediately aware of absence.

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They’re immediately aware if some household item is not where it should be. Everything that ever happens around them is growing. The food they prepare changes. Transformation is part of their life. The cycle of change happens most quickly in women’s domain. They buy a chicken, it becomes— Savita: The overall situation is not changing, is it? How many thousands of years? Roy: No, no—I’m just focusing on one aspect, right? They’re changing the whole time. The children are growing. Everything is changing. They are experiencing more change in their environment than anyone else: they have to be sensitive to change. That their position has been fixed for generations and millennia is not in doubt. We’re looking at the dialectical underside of this, not to fix them in that role, but to see how understanding what they do can be used as a template for a transformation in their own situation and as a model of how an emancipated society would flourish: a society which would enable women to flourish in a way that they can’t flourish in our existing society, given their stuckness in performing basic-level duties—groundstate-level duties—which all the systems of oppression, including the systems of oppression that they have internalised, feed off. My argument throughout is that, really, it’s love, it’s creativity, it’s spontaneity, it’s unconditionality in their everyday life as women that provides that model. And that’s the seventh point: women are more in their ground state than men.3 There is a gap in the recording of several thousand words at this point. Roy: … what she really wants to do is to conform to a role which has already been set by an occupational structure that is oppressive in itself, but also because it has been tailored to men. This means that women who go into such a position are multiply split, multiply alienated. First, they still have their woman’s role in the family—I think very few women in India relinquish that altogether, and for that matter very few in the world; in the West, alike in the fabricated West in which postmodernists sometimes imagine they live, women carry out their role in the family. And so a woman has to wear two hats, in a literal sense. And, second, within the jobs sector, she is tremendously split, in several different ways. … In the job, there’s no love for the specificity of women’s being, and a woman may lose her femininity, where her femininity is a part of her. Even if you argue that her identity as a woman is formed socially, and nothing is biologically determined, she still has to accept herself as a gendered subjectivity; and that is going to be distorted and suppressed. And then she’s going to be split from other workers in that workplace; and then women will compete with each other within the male-dominated universe of men. And so women themselves will be split, and once you have an alienational split, it generates inevitably another split. And the logic of postmodernism unfortunately— and I don’t want feminism to go down that road—is of an ideology that beautifully expresses split and difference.

3 This

is doubtless one of the social reasons why women live longer on average than men.

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Savita: Yes. In fact one of the main things about feminism itself currently is postmodernism, but I don’t think in an ideological sense. The big thing that happened with feminism was that the world began to see the importance of difference. This is a point well made in the book, The Whole Woman, by Germaine Greer (Greer 1999). It’s a beautiful point that she has raised. She says we should not complicate the meaning of liberation, because women should not seek liberation from their sexuality—that is wrong, it has produced a distorted understanding of how feminism must operate. We value this radical position, we value the radical power, because if you drop differences, you accept equality. The modern Western nation state is now in a position to offer battling women a measure of equality, the illusion of genuine equality, to enable women to get allowances, crèches, jobs in some of the sectors and so on. Some of the aspirations of radical feminist women have been met by the modern nation states of the West. But then to turn around and say that there’s nothing more to the feminist movement, the problem of sexuality is now dead, the relationship of the genders is not a problem, difference is not a problem: that’s a bad position, it’s a defeatist position at a time when women still have to fight and resist how their sexuality is being conceptualised by capitalism and the multinational corporations. The corporations who are in the business of producing cosmetics keep telling women that there is something wrong with their bodies, that they need to repair them, enhance them, perfect them with the help of cosmetics. So they are not only selling you lipsticks, they are selling you notions of the inadequacy of your body. Roy: What you say is very true and very important. Actually, many women in England and, indeed, in the West feel extremely guilty because they regard themselves as too fat. Why? Because the models are all very thin. You cannot be attractive and young and not conform to that ideal. So women torture and starve themselves, like our Princess Diana, when they shouldn’t really have to bother about these things at all. Savita: Women will have to be forthright, this is the quality they need. They should understand that these models are models for the fashion houses of multinational corporations. These are very stark facts that need to be realised. Roy: Yes. The same point can be applied to faces. Many women undergo torture if they don’t have the right face. If you turn the pages of Western fashion magazines, you will see just one or two faces that you can be. Everyone will try to look like that face, and everyone will get quite close to being that face, but if they don’t, they will feel terrible. But actually beauty lies in difference, in uniqueness. If you see two people who have exactly the same face, then it’s difficult to regard one as beautiful. It’s uniqueness, it’s special characteristics and the quality of the person that shines through a face that makes it beautiful. All these things have resulted, in places like California, in horrendous acts of mutilation that women allow to be practised on their bodies. When I was in Los Angeles for a couple of months some years ago, everyone was having a breast implant, or new buttocks, or something like that. The techniques involve the use of silicon, which can be very dangerous. The implants collapse after some years and release toxins into the body. So they are very dangerous

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and are of course completely unnecessary and cost women a lot of money, torture and anxiety. And then of course the practices migrate to men. In LA, I had my hair done by a young man who, when he learnt that I was a philosopher, wanted me to write him a reference saying that he needed a nose transplant on psychological grounds. I was flabbergasted. He had an absolutely perfect nose, but the idea had got into him that it was deformed. Actually, the fact that he wanted this above all meant that he really was a nutcase, so perhaps I should have written him a letter saying that on psychological grounds, he needed a nose transplant! And then suddenly people started to have operations to change their biological sex. I’m not saying that that’s not alright or that we should put obstacles in their way. Fine, if they make that choice. But, actually, why can’t they accept themselves? And if they are a man who likes to dress in woman’s clothes, or a woman who likes to dress in man’s clothes, or if they’re homosexual, this should be something that is accepted. But the need to engage in acts of what can only be regarded as bodily mutilation is a horrendous practice which obsesses so many people in the West. This is an extension of your point about cosmetics. Savita: There is a related important point that Greer brings out. In the West, feminism is modelled on what can be called the practice of aping. Women are equal to men, so you want to be like men; you don’t respect their difference. So what happens? You land up in professions like the army, the police and other macho institutions. Whereas what should feminism be doing? It should be arguing the case for dismantling all of this, for a society in which there is no need for war, a society which is far more peaceful, which doesn’t need to maintain a huge army. But what in fact happens? Women go into these macho institutions and they get horribly harassed and raped there. And when you join a male-dominated army and go to Iraq, what happens? You kill Iraqi women soldiers, and the war you joined has led to sanctions that are killing Iraqi children. Clearly there’s something wrong with this whole set-up. Roy: That’s absolutely right. And, actually, by working to change it, you can probably express your true nature, whatever specific human individual you are as a woman, better than you can by joining some male-dominated outfit. It really is the case that, if you don’t accept, or try to find and work with, what you essentially are—and this includes a quality that women, and Indian women in particular (although I may be wrong on this) traditionally lack, namely assertiveness; that is, if you don’t assert what your inner essence is and what your real needs are, and what you really feel, rather than slot into a role that you feel excluded from and which has not been open to you, then you’re exchanging a certain way of being for a another way of being which is a form of imprisonment and which is reproducing the very structures of the society that you’re a part of. And you will have lost many qualities that you had before, many things that could be developed: it’s much more difficult to be a free person, that is, a realised human being, if you’re a woman soldier than if you’re a housewife. Women experience tremendous agony in adopting these male roles; and, actually, sooner or later they either have to get out or they lose a large part of their sense of being, which might be called their femininity were it not an ideological

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term, were femininity not confused with a particular way of looking, with cosmetics and everything like that. Savita: Actually, this could be redefined, because we have the instrument to do it, which is ourselves. Roy: Yes, absolutely. Savita: We don’t have to stick to the definitions provided by men, fostered by multinational corporations or capitalism in general, or imposed on us by nation states. We don’t have to. Greer’s point is very well taken that what we do as feminists is actually to buy into the hatred that men have for the female sex, which has actually dominated women. Hatred has dominated, as a result of which they developed a very inferior view of themselves. If women buy this hatred, if we interiorise the contempt, if we put on lipstick and all those things, Greer says, we’re finished. If you want to look beautiful, if you want to do it on your own, if you have some great idea about looking beautiful, there’s no problem about that. But you must not be the slave of an image that’s imprisoning you and will ultimately kill you. That’s the kind of feminism we need. Second, if you generally stick to the path of difference, this enlarges the possibilities for you to redefine yourself. And you don’t do it in separation from the society; after all, nothing is done as individuals, you do it in the society. And it may be at some point of time that your understanding of yourself will be so good, so generous, so altruistic, so huge that it would even create sympathy, and maybe enlightenment, in the minds of men. All this possibility is there, but we shouldn’t be in a hurry to elaborate theories of emancipation. Foucault has shown that all these theories of liberation have become in fact theories that have basically turned in upon themselves. Actually what I like about your theory is the infinite openness to develop, to experiment; any sort of hurried closure is, I think, against the interest of the feminist movement. It’s a very male way of thinking that we can move quickly from an empirical position to a theory of emancipation. Critical theory in this sense is a theory which will win over other theories, because it is built also on the emotions and on infinite openness and totality. Roy: Yes. In a way, what I’m saying is that to be productive agents of your own emancipation and your own change, of individual self-realisation, is not something that depends on a global or macroscopic theory of emancipation. Critical realism in its latest stage can empower the attempt of individuals to become free, and that entails shedding all the elements of heteronomy and oppression within themselves. And when they do that they will automatically be helping to produce the best agents of social change. They don’t actually need, as such, a specific theory which tells them how to behave as women. They just need to access their ground state and then they will spontaneously know what the best thing to do is, for which there’s no algorithm or mechanical formula. This is very important. By being only in your ground state, or states that are consistent with it, you cut off the supply lines of systems of oppression, so you don’t need a theory. And then the discursive intellect, being a feature of men, the intuitive intellect is actually necessary for the discursive intellect to function. So actually to make an opposition between having a theory and not having a theory is

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completely wrong; we need to transcend that dichotomy. Implicitly, not having a theory is also acting on a theory, the theory being that it’s OK not to have a theory if you realise that social emancipation doesn’t wait on your having a theory, and that saving yourself and ourselves from this social crisis that we all are in won’t wait until you develop the theory. Rather, you need to work on, pare yourself down and do what you feel is correct, operating from your ground state in as pure and clear a way as you can. And therefore you will always have a theory as soon as you act in a nonspontaneous way—you can’t avoid a theory. But at the same time, in the way you act you don’t need a theory if you act spontaneously from your ground state: you will be acting without something in your mind. And so I think this whole question of waiting for the right time for a theory is a red herring both ways. I don’t agree with it. Savita: I’m simply saying that openness is very good. Roy: That’s right. But the openness is saying that if theory is interpreted in the way that empirical realism and dominant ideologies interpret it, then all theory is going to be abused. Now, when a postmodernist says that we don’t need theory, what she probably means is that you don’t need an analytical universal theory, and of course we don’t need that. But to say that we don’t need beliefs and general statements is quite false. Savita: I wouldn’t say that. Roy: No, you wouldn’t. So it is not a question of waiting for a theory, I don’t think we need a theory; and I think we have as much a theoretical framework as we need for understanding.

Chapter 10

Recognition and Immortality, Failure and Success

10.1 Recognition and Immortality Roy: Suppose you want to be, and in fact are, a writer, a poet, a philosopher, but you’re not a success in society, that is to say you’re not recognised. Does that matter? Savita: Yes. Roy: Why? Savita: Because I think I also have to seek some sort of immortality. Roy: Very good, you seek immortality. But you realise that the world we have is transitory, so you also must realise that fame or recognition in society is very transitory. Suppose you achieve acclaim. The next 20 minutes of the recording is scrambled. There is a transcript for this from an earlier version of the recording, but it is too defective to be rendered reliably coherent and intelligible. Three key points that Roy makes stand out clearly, however. First, that there is a contradiction between wanting recognition from a society and holding the view that that society is rotten, stymies your creativity and is in need of transformation. Second, that ‘what is immortal and what is not is not governed by any criterion of recognition’; immortality is achieved in the moment of transcendence. And third, that you should always, and can only, do the best you can.

Roy: You tell me that you wrote some good poems, and that your knowing this depended on other people telling you that they’re good. And I showed that that’s not worth anything. If you tell me that you value those people, and you tell me how wonderful they are, that’s fine. But however wonderful they are, unless you know that what you’ve done is the best you can do, and you can say, ‘Ah! That’s a new level of consciousness for me, that’s a new plane!’, it doesn’t matter how many people whom you respect and believe tell you that the poems are good. If some truly wonderful 3rd January 2002. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_10

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people tell you that you’ve moved to a new level, it doesn’t matter. They’re telling you that you’ve moved onto a new level, but what you need to know is that you have moved onto a new level, not that they’re telling you that. After all, how many people are telling Rorty that he has moved onto a new level? This happens time and again. So ultimately, you take great pleasure in their ‘Ahs!’, you feel happiness, you go into them, you become one with them, but you can’t go into them if you haven’t already gone into your self. You can’t identify with their recognition of your beautiful poetry unless you already accept it as beautiful. You cannot, because you are going from a lower level of consciousness to a higher level: you have to be at the higher level of consciousness already to accept their appreciation. At this point, Savita says something that is unclear, and Roy responds genially: ‘Don’t stop me being a philosopher, don’t stop me being a philosopher.’

Savita: I accept the appreciation because they are responding to what I’ve created. Roy: No. You see, the poem has created an ‘Ah!’ moment for you and a ‘Eureka!’ or ‘Ah!’ for them; and, because it has created this ‘Ah!’ for you, it has taken you to a new level of consciousness, and you are able to identify with their recognition of it. This completely reverses Hegel: 1 you recognise them as responding to what you created, but you could not go into them and take pleasure in the fact that you have given them pleasure, unless you had already been to that level of consciousness. But actually you are also talking about something else, which isn’t just whether you have taken poetry as such (or Hindi poetry or Hindi poetry in Delhi) to a new level of consciousness. What you’re really talking about is whether this is going to last forever, and that is what people usually mean by immortality. So let’s not beat around the bush anymore. I have talked about this stratification that we have everywhere in nature, and in many of my books I have diagrams that illustrate the stratification of being. Now, your mind and its products—your art and the words you find, the marks, the signs you’ve put on paper—are emergent strata. The poetry you’ve written is on a higher level of being—or on a deeper one. You can put it either way: from the point of view of the evolution of matter, it’s emergent from it or higher; but from the point of view, as we’ve understood it, of our emergence from the essential ultimate ingredient, which constitutes everything in the world, which binds the cosmic envelope, your poetry is deeper. We’re calling this book Fathoming the Depths of Reality; you could also call it Ascending the Heights of Reality—it doesn’t matter, it’s deeper, wider, more basic than the physical level: it’s closer to the ground state of the universe, closer to the cosmic envelope. What you produce at this level will have a greater life than things on the physical level. But if you produce something at the cosmic level, then it will have the greatest life possible. You could say that the only being who could produce the whole cosmic level is God, but we are ruling God out of the discourse. So you’re not in competition with God! 1 This builds on

the critique of Hegel in Bhaskar (1993); see esp. 243, 327, where the mature Hegel is criticised for glossing the desire to be desired as a desire for recognition rather than for love. For Bhaskar, love, as a ground-state property of human action, is ontologically prior to social recognition, which (as he shortly indicates) is always at the level of the physically embodied community.

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Savita: No, not at all! (Both laugh). Roy: Just testing. OK, so the poetry you produce is at a higher level than purely physical being. This means that you and your products are at a deeper level of being than the level at which you’re embodied at the moment. But your body will die. So if you have that ‘Ah!’ of consciousness, and if you have good reason to suppose that it’s a true ‘Ah!’, and you are only doing the best ‘Ah!’ that you can, then it will survive your body. Savita: Thank you for telling me this! (Laughs). Roy (with good humour): Let me carry on—and therefore, you are already longerlasting than your body. And moreover, not just what you produced but what produced it. Tell me what produced it. Savita: I think my mind produced it. Roy: So not only its product, but your mind is at this deeper level. So we agree that your poem is longer lasting than your body. So what people want in immortality is the idea that there is something inner which is going to last longer. This is what we are arriving at. So your mind and its products are more basic, as closer to the ground state—as we’ve seen, everything is emergent from this ingredient level. And you’ve already told me that art is the very highest thing that you’ve reached, and we accept that; and you find pleasure in the fact that other people have recognised that you’ve reached it. From this much more basic and longer-lasting level, you are achieving a higher degree of longevity than your physical body and a higher degree of longevity than what we call social fame or recognition in our contemporary society, which is always restricted to a physically embodied community. Now, the confusion, namely, the equation of postbody longevity with social recognition, could only arise if you thought, tacitly or otherwise, that mind was reducible to matter. Savita: No. Roy: No, no, stay with it. If mind is not reducible to body, then you are already achieving greater longevity. So your mind and, you may say, your emotions that come into your poetry exist longer; they are on a wider swathe of space–time than your physical embodiment. And therefore is it not reasonable to accept that your mind (because, after all, what is your mind other than a collection or ensemble of thoughts or moments of consciousness?)— that this particular ensemble which is your mind— has an efficacy, and an explicability at a level which is longer lasting and more basic than your physical embodiment? Mortality is to be used to understand the mind at this level; immortality is another thing. Now, that a poem has causal efficacy—the capacity to affect generations in the future—is something we would clearly want to say, wouldn’t we? It is not the physical marks of the poem that we’re interested in—let’s make this very clear. Even if the planet were to collapse within fifty years, it would be the meaning—which can’t be identified with those physical marks—that people would be interested in, if people were still around. So at this deeper level,

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you already are achieving a greater degree of longevity. When you say that you want your poem to be immortal, you want it to exist at this level forever. Now what is the criterion for something to exist or to be? I think you answered this in an earlier conversation. To be is to have an effect—an actual or potential effect. This is not to invoke a simple causal criterion, though actually these two (causes and meanings) may not be so different. But we’re moving out of the empiricist discourse now, so we think in terms of causality: to be is to have an effect on others. And what is this level of you which has an effect on others? This level of you is an emergence. Now if you’re trying to come to grips with causality at this level, then it is absolutely true—and this is part of my critique of Humean determinism—that every cause has an effect; this is the only truth in regularity determinism. Now most things that happen have a multiplicity of causes. So you in the creation of your poems, you in your state have been determined or are determined by a multiplicity of causes. Of course, as an evolving being, here, you have generated many of these causes yourself. So at this emergent level, what explains the fact that you have the particular aspirations that you have as a poet, as a philosopher, as a thinker, as a writer, as a creative individual? What explains that? What explains it, just exactly to apply the logic of your accepting total responsibility for your life? You’re totally responsible: you as a physical being who was born only, er, less than thirty-five years ago?—Thirty-two probably, something like that? I don’t know. We’re going to have to erase this! (Laughs). Probably, thirty-three or something like that? Savita: Go on. (Laughs). It doesn’t matter! Roy: Anyway tell me: how many years ago? Savita: Thirty-nine. Roy: There you are; how youthful you are for thirty-nine. You look thirty-two. OK, so what actually led you to be a poet? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Savita (laughing): So you are examining me today? Roy: Yes, definitely. Savita: What led me? Roy: You chose it? Savita: No, I didn’t choose it. A number of social realities were pushing me. Roy: No, I don’t really want you to go into all that. But some of these things that have happened to you, you didn’t choose. Savita: That’s right. Roy: But you accept total responsibility for everything? Savita: Of course. Roy: But you agree that this level in your life and your poetry is emergent. Do you accept total responsibility for your birth?

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Savita: Yes. Roy: Right. Then where does the causal efficacy go? Every effect, you agreed with me, has a cause; and part of what you are was determined by what you’re taking full responsibility for, by your birth; by what most people would call an accident but which you’re taking responsibility for. Now your birth endowed you with particular circumstances which you have to transcend, which you have to overcome. Your life and every one’s life is a challenge, a continual series of challenges. Once you’ve got over one obstacle, the nature of life presents you with another one. In this process you grow, and you transcend. Accepting total responsibility for everything, you transcend everything. Now, you accept total responsibility for your birth, and correctly so. But where is the causality? Action, you’ve told me, always has some consequences or potential consequences; that’s its causal efficacy. So where is the causal explicability? What is it, of which your birth was the consequence, for which you’re taking full responsibility? Savita: I don’t know. Only at a later stage do we actually think about it. Roy: No, no. I agree, you couldn’t think about it at your birth, but now you can think about it—thirty-two years on! Savita: (laughs). Well, why were you born? My answer would be very specialised. Roy: Well! You’re telling me there’s a social ancestry to your being born? That would be very interesting then. Savita: I just thought, because no society is made by parents, society did it. Roy: Yes, but you’re not that. You, who accept total responsibility for the whole situation when you were born. Savita: No one is talking about the whole situation—I said that I just take responsibility for my merits. Roy: No, no, don’t let’s deviate! Whatever part of that, you accept responsibility for your birth. Now you’re dodging the question. Savita: I’m not dodging the question. Hear me. When I told you that I take responsibility, I had a reason for it. The reason is that our society, Hindu society, is a very— Roy: Yes, but I don’t want to go into this at the moment, because we’re abstracting from this—we’re going into that later. We’re concerned now with immortality. So what is the cause of which your birth was the effect—at this emergent level? What is it? (Pause). Well, what you do—if I intentionally pick up this bottle of water and throw it at you, you would get very cross with me, wouldn’t you? You would get cross with me? Or would you laugh? Would you throw it back at me? Savita: I would try to understand why you did it.

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Roy: All right, a little dialectical response and that would be the consequence. That you would try and understand why I was doing it suggests that that’s the model of all our action: we always ask why. You show me something that happens, for which you take responsibility, which is at the level of emergent causality that we’re talking about, but concerning which you don’t ask: Why did you do it? Why did this happen? Why did you throw that bottle of water at me?—Why were you born? The most basic question you can ask. Savita: I just have to explore. I don’t know, I’m just exploring. I will grow more in society. Roy: No, we’re exploring now in this conversation. Wouldn’t it be an extraordinary thing if everything that happens on this emergent level, which is far longer lasting than anything physical, but nevertheless has physical spread, didn’t have a cause? You take responsibility for your birth, and this doesn’t have a cause? Wouldn’t it be absolutely extraordinary if this didn’t have a cause? Savita: Well, do you want to discuss God? Roy: No, not at all! Merely the irreducibility of causal agencies at a mental and emotional level. I’m not saying that God made you. Savita: I’m saying that I really don’t know. Roy: And I’m saying that you do know. I’m saying that, really, the answer to that question is given by your very acceptance of full responsibility for your birth. You caused your own birth. You brought about your own birth. This is not God at all— God is out of the picture; the cosmic envelope is the bounds of our discussion. But it is at a level deeper than the physical level, because it is more significant and longer lasting than the physical, because there we can achieve transcendent things that you told me are higher and finer in life for everyone who would want to do that, like write philosophy and write poems; these are at very high levels of mentation. And your birth, for which you accept total responsibility, you must have done it. No one else could have done it. You must have existed as a mind to do it before. Savita: Aha, my real birth! Roy: Yes, your real birth. You birthed yourself, you produced your birth in the situation you were, and you produced the potential of a poem to be heard and heard again—whether it is or not.2 Savita: This is very novel, a very exciting idea.

2 This

contradicts Descartes, for whom the unity of soul and body is an accident; and reverses Kierkegaard, for whom choosing ourselves means ‘placing ourselves in the infinite’ (Taylor 1989, 450); for Bhaskar, we little bits of the infinite place ourselves in the finite, thereby choosing our destiny and circumstances. Cf. the Sanskrit concept svayambhu, meaning ‘self-manifested’ or ‘selfcreated’. It was invoked by an unknown Indian author in the 1920s to explain Ramanujan’s genius. See Kanigel (1991), 358 f.

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Roy: So you produced your birth. And you as a mind chose your birth; you chose your fate, you chose to be born at that time—you accept total responsibility for it. What does this mean? You tell me that it’s a very exciting and novel idea. It means that you accept full responsibility for everything you do, you are not going to blame it on anyone else. This is a wonderful position that you’ve accepted. Very few people, really, would accept it. Brilliant! Brilliant! Everyone else, whatever situation they’re in, they try and shift the responsibility. The Buddha—to keep it spiritual for the moment, and it’s nice to be here—said that what’s really wrong in a situation is always our refusal to accept responsibility for it; our refusal to refer it back to ourselves. Your mind chose for you to be born in that way so that you could develop these powers, so that you could have these active challenges, so that you could have this picture of support and rejection which allows you to become the poet, philosopher, conversationalist and interviewer on Hindi radio and television that you are. And you chose it, you chose it all. So your mind—to use our conceptions of longevity and time—must have existed before you were born, to choose that you should do that. And then what brought it about that your mind was in that state? It must have had some feeling of incompleteness, wouldn’t you say? Savita: Yes. Roy: So you must have had a desire, really, that had not been realised: a desire to be a poet and philosopher, to fulfil yourself in this way. And presumably, you had a desire to be a poet because you felt that you didn’t need fulfilment or completion as, say, a warrior or even as an artist. So you must already have done that. Otherwise, you would desire that also. Savita: Perhaps if I had lived in the days of the Roman Republic, who knows, I would have been a warrior. Roy: Yes. And if you had, you would have achieved it; you wouldn’t want to do it again, because you’re not really like Rorty, you don’t want to do the same thing over and over again! (Savita laughs). Now if you get a bit stuck in life, you often find yourself in the same situation—if you’re really, stuck you always do—and what you do is try and transcend it. But if you chose this destiny now, it’s because you have transcended other circumstances before—so you already have that. Now what is this destiny for? Realising fulfilment. So this is what your dharma is, this is what you’re here to do and what you yourself chose to do. No responsibility shifted onto anyone else, accepting the irreducibility, the emergence of everything. And so, at some point, you’ve done all these other things, and there’s one thing more that you have to do or that you haven’t quite done to your satisfaction, and that’s to become an immortal poet; a poet who would write poems that live forever. So you see that you yourself must have pre-existed that decision, and that there is no reason to assume that you won’t live forever, and that you haven’t already lived forever, by any conception of eternity; or at least that you’ve lived for a very long time, sufficiently long to have done all these other things, to have channelled your desires, to have narrowed them down, so that you don’t really care: when we analysed it, you didn’t really care; all you needed was sufficient love and encouragement and teaching, which can come

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from anyone in your society, to allow you to reach the level that you’ve reached and then to go even further, until you reach the most sublime heights—which just means the best that you can do. Savita: Exactly. Roy: And really what you’ve told us is a beautiful story. You told us that you chose it, that you existed and you’ve done all those other things before; there remained this for you to do. And this is your choice in this life, and everything you do in this life is something that in some way you’ve chosen or brought about. And nothing is to be blamed or shifted onto someone else. Savita: Well, I don’t do this. Roy: No, you don’t. Savita: I’ve gone through some bad times, but I haven’t shifted the blame for my suffering onto anybody else. Roy: And you’re complete, because you’ve done all these other things, you’ve satisfied all these other desires—the warrior in the Roman Republic and so on. And now, are there any more desires you have? Savita: My only problem in all these discussions is—I love the story that you’re telling of me. But I know very little; I know the concrete situatedness—I know only this. Roy: Yes. We’ll discuss that concrete situatedness this afternoon. Savita: I know very little. I can give an analytical or dialectical account of some of the things that I’ve done. I have some knowledge. I’ve displayed the knowledge that I have of myself. I could give you an analytical and a dialectical account of what I’ve done. Roy: You are! You are! Savita: But nothing more than that. I admit I find great difficulty in claiming knowledge of things that I don’t really know. Roy: But you do know. Savita: I will not speculate. Roy: It is not really speculating.3 For you told me that you would know when I said something true because I would smile, and you would be my toughest critic and most sceptical challenger. But you knew that everything I was saying was true, because you were smiling. And you knew that you had chosen your birth and its circumstances. You knew you had chosen them. 3 When I was working on Dictionary of Critical Realism (Hartwig 2007) in the noughties, it occurred

to me that to devise empirical tests for the reality of the transcendentally real self is not beyond the wit of humans. Bhaskar entirely agreed.

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Savita: I loved the story. Roy: And I’m asking you now: Have you any other desires in your life? Savita: In this life? (Laughs). Roy: Yes, which other life are we talking about? Savita: Well, I have only desires to write more and more. Roy: Yes. You should, therefore, really, realise these desires, because all the other desires that most people have, like to be wealthy or a famous warrior, you no longer have. We could go into fame or glory later, but I think that glory is really only eternity, which we’ve seen you already have, and it’s in your products as a writer and interviewer. And because you’ve achieved this level of transcendence, and you’re getting immortality in your poems, then you shouldn’t desire anything more. Your social conscience or motivation may be there, but actually, in doing these sublime things and in freeing yourself—but you’ve already freed yourself, having no other desire but to write. So really, there’s only one thing to which I can say that you’re attached, and that is to write, to think and to talk also—to be a part of the production of these transcendently beautiful significant or deep things, which you’re very much in the process of achieving. Everything else is instrumental. Savita: I am also very pleased to write about the society in which I’m living. Roy: Yes. We’re going to talk about that this afternoon. That will satisfy your one and only remaining desire! (Both laugh) Savita: Thank you! Roy: And, therefore, I see no earthly reason, really, why you shouldn’t be a completely realised and enlightened being, free of any element of attachment. Once you’ve reached a certain level of achievement, you won’t even bother to achieve more. It will just flow effortlessly from your being. You might feel insecure up to a point— everyone feels insecure, everyone who has ever lived. Even Newton and Einstein probably doubted their genius at times; I don’t know whether Mozart ever did. But then, a bit of insecurity is part of that social world, and, as we were discussing earlier, we can become progressively more free only in virtue of it. So that insecurity which you might feel is like heredity. It would be nice to eliminate it, but really, you don’t have any strong or pressing desires, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be in a state which is completely free of heteronomy, a completely realised being—once you achieve this last desire which you’re in the process of achieving. Savita: And only then will I be happy, yes? (Laughs) Roy: But you are, you are achieving it! You’re actually doing what you want to do, and therefore, you’re already in the process of moving into a state where you will be effortlessly what you are. Savita: That’s where you are already, aren’t you? I’m sure you’re a very happy person.

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Roy: Well, that’s an assumption. (Laughs). Savita: Because, do you think that you are successful? On my account, you are terribly successful. What about your account? Roy: Everyone can do more, as I was saying earlier; everyone can do more. The curtain must be drawn across, the curtain must be drawn across. But let me say: Yes, I’m happy, I’m empty. I have nothing, I want nothing, and I don’t know very much. And yet I have a lot, I get a lot and I— Savita: ‘Hang on!’ a lot.4 (Both laugh). Roy: You can make whatever inference you want, but, as I told you, this is a neverending path. And I’m telling you that you are almost in the state of having no heteronomous source of determination, because you have, really, only one nest of desires there to be fulfilled. And they are in the process of being fulfilled, and when you have fulfilled them, you won’t stop being, and you won’t stop acting and working, because that is in your essence; but then, it will be effortless. You will have insecurities and problems, because they’re part of the society in which we live; but they won’t cling to you, you will throw them off. Savita: Very nice, very nice. And I did very well in your story. I’m going to dream about my life, what I was like when I was a Roman warrior, what kinds of weapons I carried, what kind of glory I won. But this heteronomy thing, failure and the role that falsity plays— Roy: OK, I suggest that we don’t close this discussion now, but we just temporarily say that we’ve finished on ‘success and immortality’ on that last note, that nice story, that ‘Ah!’. And then, we’ll go on to talk about problems of heteronomy in general, which needn’t be restricted to the topic of success and failure in life. Other things to talk about: as you know, I’ve finished writing a book, which just needs editing and reworking. Savita: Is this the book on re-enchanting reality?5 Roy: Yes.

10.2 Failure and Principles of Success Savita: I think there are two ways of approaching failure. First, failure can be instrumental. Just as people can succeed in instrumental terms, so they can fail as well. Success would mean that they’ve got their means very well lined up instrumentally to achieve their goals. In the case of failure, it would be just the opposite, that they don’t 4 In

the recordings, Roy often asks Savita to ‘Hang on! Hang on!’. Chap. 6, Note 10.

5 See

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have the means and ends well matched. Failure can be corrected on the instrumental route by refining the skills of instrumental rationality, and if you fail once or twice, you could succeed a third time if you get that relationship right. But there’s another kind of failure I want to draw attention to, namely, failure from some sort of inner malaise that comes from pursuing falsity, false beliefs or ideas. Roy: Even if you just learnt to accept responsibility for one moment, one instant, one situation, and you understand that the problem of living is the problem of transcending that situation so that you get out of it, failing is a natural thing to do; it’s part of a dialectic of learning. Savita: But it can take a long time. Roy: Of course. And if you don’t do it now, then you’ll have to do it later. If the situation just goes away, and you haven’t transcended it, it will come back; it will be like a boomerang. Sure as night follows day, until you reach a state—which you’re very close to being in, on the lovely story you were telling me where you just have one desire—it will come back. But this is also a lovely thing you’re telling me about falsity. So let’s go into this. Tell me about falsity. Savita: Falsity is a kind of a desire to move forward without much substance. It’s a desire to create illusions about yourself. It’s a desire to dazzle in illusion. You put on the most beautiful attire of illusion and dazzle yourself in it. Deep down, perhaps not very clearly, you know that you are responsible for creating this illusion, the falsity, and you don’t know how to get out of it. A lot of people may be enthusiastic about your brilliance and you’re aware of it, but at the deepest level, even though slightly occluded, you would know a different truth. Roy: I don’t really know what you mean by ‘brilliance’, because we’ve seen that you can only do the best you can; and, actually, the more in touch with your potential you are, the more you will realise your own unique brilliance. But everyone really is potentially brilliant, so to put it in terms of your brilliance versus someone else’s nonbrilliance is actually wrong. But we let that go, because in a way that’s also central to what you’re saying, because you’re talking about being in a position in which you knew something. You weren’t really self-deceived; you said you were partially occluded, but you really knew it, and yet you allowed illusions to be generated. Savita: Maybe it was a misjudgement, as you’re saying. Maybe one is just thinking that one day that brilliance will shine, which others can see. So I would make claims and make promises; I would claim to write this and write that. But that would never be achieved. One brilliant flash might come. But only to torture me, I was not in a position to substantiate it. I didn’t have the skills, knowledge or training. There would be many others in the same position, between the desire to achieve an idea and inevitably failing to do so. I was in this kind of situation for quite some time. Technically, I may have had a successful life, a beautiful academic career and all that. But I knew deep down that I was failing at a more meaningful level. There is a question of bad faith here. And in spite of the fact that I knew how difficult it was to retain ideas that would come to me in a rather tantalising manner, I did not stop

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trying to get those illusions (as I have been calling them) actualised. That’s where the falsity comes in: I didn’t accept that they were not within my grasp. What I did was I kept on going after them, believing that some day I would be able to get them, and not acknowledging and allowing others to see this struggle. This was falsifying my position, ultimately a falsity was defeating me, and that’s why I— (Pause). And the struggle was hard. Roy: I don’t want to misconstrue you; we can go at great length into falsity and illusion. What I’m saying is that, even after accepting everything, you’re now in a position where you’re no longer blinded, so whatever you have to do, you are not deceiving yourself now. You were never deceiving yourself, really, but there was a little cloud. You’re not creating illusions now, are you? Savita: No. It is a therapy that I am engaged in, a self-therapy these days. Roy: So that you have thrown off: you have thrown off that huge element of heteronomy. But you can tell me, and discuss, how you displayed that illusoriness, how you produced it to get you to the situation that you’re now in, where, first, you’re free of illusions about yourself and, second, you’re not going to do that again, and you don’t have any reason to do that again. And if you do it again you will quickly— Savita: No, I just acquired a sense, a level of reflection, maturity perhaps. I don’t see things that I have to do now until I’ve done them. I just didn’t see this. Earlier, it wasn’t that I was consciously saying that I would do something that I could not do; I willed myself to do it, but I wasn’t able to do it. I wanted to write poetry of the kind that I would do now. In fact, ten years ago I wrote poetry, which I sent to publishers only to be sent back with comments that depicted my state of being encircled by illusions. Roy: Yes, but what were these illusions that were obsessing you? Savita: Illusions that I would do something that I couldn’t. Presumed adequacy. It’s a kind of a failure. Roy: I think you’re being a little bit unfair on yourself. We can break this down into two parts. Savita: I was leading a false life. Roy: All right. But you had knowledge of what you essentially were. You were essentially what you are, which you’re very close to becoming now, which is the desire that you had, before you were born, when you created yourself, to realise yourself in the form of a traveller—of a poet and of a philosopher—who could think and write and talk in this transcendental, magical, eternal way. And you knew this, you knew this. Your transcendentally real self knew this. Your transcendentally real self was there from the moment you were born. Your mother, which is your ‘I’, was there while your ‘me’, your little embodied personality, was born, so don’t be unkind to yourself. Your mother was so strong within you that she spoke for the child before the child could do it. This is something that all children do, and therefore,

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forgive yourself. A child never says: ‘Actually, I know I’m only a child, but when I’m twenty-five, I would like to be a famous cricketer.’ A child never says that. He says: ‘I’m brilliant at cricket, you know. I’m going to be an international.’ And you put them in a cricket match with internationals and of course they’d be dismissed for no score; your poetry as a ten year old would have been laughed out of court. But you had the aspiration, and that’s fine, that’s part of a growing process; and while you’re growing up, you always think you’re more grown up than you actually are and that feeling of being more grown up actually pulls you in the direction of being more grown up, because you have to act your rhetoric, you have to learn to walk your talk, to act the way you speak. It’s actually quite a pulling force. What was happening to you is that your transcendentally real self was putting something in front of you, which was pulling your embodied personality. It was also nurturing, gently pushing you from behind, in the same way as it gave rise to your aspirations which were pulling you forward. I can tell you something now. When I was eight or nine, I fell in love with cricket— and I had a certain talent. And because I was also interested in books, I decided that I would edit a cricket annual. So I wrote letters to famous cricketers saying that I, Ram Roy Bhaskar, am going to edit a cricket annual. I told them all the right things: my age that my father was a doctor and I was going to be a doctor, and I wanted to be the cricket captain of England. And they wrote back to me.6 So somehow I fooled them—or perhaps they just indulged me. But did I fool myself? Yes and no. I didn’t think I wasn’t going to do it, but it was a pretty absurd idea for a nine year old to think, given that I had no money to produce a book. But would I blame myself for it? No. Probably I knew I was going to write books, be involved with books, and I had chosen that part of my destiny. Savita: I would define that phase as one of inadequacy and failure. Roy: But would I say, in my case, that I failed because I didn’t produce that cricket annual? Would you say that you failed in 1990 because you didn’t write the poems in 1990 that you could write in 1999, when you were still growing? Savita: I didn’t have the skills to overcome the situation. Roy: The practical skills. There are two sources of illusion, and we must be very clear. There is the source of illusion, which you first claimed, that you were making both about the self and your own brilliance, when in fact you were only growing. And from what you tell me you were actually a very brilliant child. Perhaps you may have exaggerated your brilliance as a child, but certainly as a child, you couldn’t be as brilliant as you would be when you were fully mature, given that we’re talking about non-childish things. You wouldn’t think that you’re actually less brilliant now than you were as a child? Savita: No. It only happened, this illusion came suddenly into my life, because of the desire to become something; the desire developed and matured, and then, I found 6 Len

Hutton to Ram Bhaskar, 22 August 1953; Alec Bedser to Ram Bhaskar, 28 August 1953 (Bhaskar Archives).

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myself in circumstances where I could have realised my desire. I was studying with a full grant in the best political theory centre in the world but wasn’t able to define my desires. Five pages of transcript (2-3000 words) on success in life follow for which there is no extant recording, without which a reliable editor version cannot be produced. The discussants agree that success is the feeling of contentment and satisfaction that comes from realising one’s inner nature, and that it does not consist in the achievement of material wealth, celebrity or power. Roy refers to their whole discussion of recognition and immortality, success and failure as ‘a Socratic dialogue’.

Roy: You had then some desires for things that you don’t have now. You had a desire, not only to write transcendentally deep and significant things, which we analysed and saw that you chose and are achieving, but also a desire to be recognised and acclaimed in society, and you now know that society is very false, and you yourself have told me—and we’ve seen—that this is a very ephemeral thing that you would have achieved then. Your transcendentally real self knew that this was a silly thing for you, but you were being pulled ahead by different desires. Savita: The desire was to know, to understand. Roy: Hang on. One of the most important things in life is to actually be clear about what you want. The desire you had then, which was false, was the desire to produce pseudo-knowledge, actually to dissimulate—you were false to the world, false about the world—so this was that world of demi-reality that you were living in, and it was all part of the realisation of the desire to know in one sense, in that you had to go through that stage in order to realise how false the social world is, and to give up the desire for social recognition. The desire to know is very complex. If you desire to know too much, you will never know anything. Most people who just desire to know don’t ask what it is that they desire to know; once they tell themselves clearly what it is that they desire to know, then they will almost immediately get the answer. If you said, with indifference: ‘Well, I desire to write my Ph.D., I don’t care how, I just want to get my Ph.D.’ that would be one thing. And if you said: ‘I desire social recognition at home and abroad’ that would be different. If you said: ‘I desire only to please myself’ that would be different again. And if you said: ‘I desire to find out about my society what is true or false, including in the academic world’, then again it would be different. But somehow you got through all the confusion and you found out truths about many things; and you found out the great truth that the reason why most people go wrong in life is because they don’t have single-pointed clarity. Their lives are yin and yang; they’re not single-pointed; they don’t have clarity in what they’re trying to do. Now if you find in your life that, actually, you want to do a lot of things, then just simplify it, list them, prioritise them. And if you find that you can’t do them, then look at the blocks, what’s stopping you doing them; then work on one block at a time, don’t take on everything at once, be single-pointed in everything you do. Even if you lead a complex and multiple life, then do one thing at a time; that doesn’t mean don’t do it holistically, but when you’re doing philosophy, concentrate

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on philosophy. Of course, it’s difficult, because you’re also being a mother, you have a lot of other things you have to do. But try as much as you can to be single-pointed in everything you do. And in your life you actually now are single-pointed. And all these little illusions that you had, you had to face them, you had to go through them; and now you’re without any of them. Savita: I don’t know. Roy: Well, you’re getting rid of them. Savita: Trying to get rid of them, true. But I can tell you one thing I know for sure: that it is entertaining illusory individualistic desires that creates unhappiness and can very easily lead you to failure— Roy: So cut out these illusions. Savita: Because one deeply knows about illusions. Illusions are known. Roy: Yes, that’s right! So you really know when you are living in an illusory world. Savita: Yes. Roy: You are telling me that the most important thing you have, like your self, is your self-knowledge. You know that, really, just as you said you accept total responsibility, so you have total knowledge at least about your self. You know when you’re creating an illusion. You know what is actually the right and the wrong thing to do. And, if you create an illusion, you actually know, if you think about it long enough and if you’re single-pointed and clear, what it is that is maintaining that illusion, and what you have to do to get out of that illusion. So the first rule for success in life is that you accept your self, and you accept totally responsibility for your situation. Accept then also that, if only you’re clear enough—so clarity or coherence must also be a rule—then you will find out, you will know the truth; or if you don’t for a moment, if you didn’t dig deep enough within your self, then you, your self, will tell yourself the truth, and if it requires a stimulus from outside, that stimulus will be there to help you. And then the bravest thing to do—and this is where your being a Roman warrior is very important—is that you actually face that truth, and you’re honest, totally honest. This is another rule. You don’t try and pretend. There are a number of steps in this. First, you accept that you’re pretending; then, in accepting that you’re pretending, you start accepting that you’re not pretending; and when you’re totally accepting, then you’re not pretending at all. Isn’t that lovely? Savita: Very lovely. How to lead a life— Roy: The practical skills that you need to acquire, do you feel that you have all these now? Savita: No. I feel that leading a life informed by the need for recognition in society is a hard thing, full of struggles, conflicts and negotiations, and leading a secret life of desires and happiness is not easy either. You could be in danger of misrecognition. Roy: Yes, but you don’t really want recognition.

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Savita: It doesn’t matter—I’m just telling you some other things. Many people adopt an instrumentally rational approach to life and think that they are very successful in seeking and fulfilling the goals of material aspirations. I think they are basically deep down unhappy. Roy: Yes, of course they are. You have other desires in life; let’s discuss them. These practical skills that we’re talking about are really very important at certain levels because, if you are not fully clear and coherent in all aspects of your being, if in some way you have imbalances, then an aspect of your being will catch you and trip you up. So not having a skill which you need to realise your dreams, your desires, your ambitions, is something that you do need to work on. Actually, in India, because of the very caste-riven structure of society, very few people are complete at any moment of time. The whole is there in their unity, but people get others to think for them. So, very few people can actually lead a balanced, integrated life in India today. And there are people, as you know, who never think or can’t think, or who even can’t read and write; but there are also people who only think and never do anything practical. Now actually doing practical things is very important for an intellectual, because it keeps them in touch with a certain level of being. It’s like Newton having to struggle to tell the scientists around him what he saw: if you don’t have that experience, but you have knowledge or cognition or intuition about something that’s difficult and practical, you won’t be able to access it, you won’t be able to intuit it, you won’t be able to see its meaning or significance; and the best way to come to see is by actually doing it, because really to come into touch with the ground state of that aspect of your being, you have to be in that aspect of your being. So you have to take seriously the idea that if you have something heteronomously done for you or to know something theoretically, it still needs to be embodied practically for you to be in touch with that state. So when it comes to organising things in the practical world, and when you have to act in the world of duality strategically or tactically, if you’re not fully in that state of just being, then they may trip you up, because you may not get the intuitions and the brilliance that you should be getting there. And so you have to realise yourself as fully as you can at all levels of your being and every aspect of your embodied personality, taking your embodied personality as being literally stratified. And this is a goal that is very difficult to achieve in Indian society today. I’m not saying that it’s anything on the same scale as getting into your dharma, but while you’re achieving this goal, which you are, you can’t just let the other aspects of your being go, so you have to be a bit of an all-rounder in life. You can’t just say: ‘Well, I’m a physical scientist, so I’m not going to know how to drive or to wash up or to brush my teeth: this is someone else’s job.’ You have to know it, for reasons of authenticity, as being yourself, because you have to be in touch with that aspect of yourself, otherwise there’s a bit of self that you’re not in touch with. And, if you’re not in touch with all aspects of your being, there are things which can happen in this world, which is very interconnected, that you will not be able to intuit or cognise, and you can be trapped, you can be pulled down. Sometimes you have to disconnect: when you focus, you disconnect; but to concentrate, you also have to

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be a specialist. You’ve done all those other things before; you just remember them, you find them very easy, whatever little things they are, it won’t be a big problem for you. The only problem would be if you had a certain pride at being an intellectual, being a philosopher, being a poet. Savita: I’m happier now. Roy: Yes, definitely! Savita: I’m less in the clouds now. I know the suffering to be real. Roy: So being in the clouds means two things. First, it means being in a veil of illusion, in a mist, and we have seen how you have become free of your illusions. Second, it means having your head in the air, not being grounded, not being in touch with all aspects of your being. That means being a theorist or an intellectual, say, and not being a practical person. Now what you have to realise is that as an intellectual you are a practical person: It is not something which is against your nature, it’s something which is in your nature; but you’re practical in a particular way. You’re also practical as a mother. Savita: I’m learning to be. Roy: Yes, that’s right! Dialectic is a learning process! So don’t be hard on yourself. Don’t be hard on yourself. Savita: One can’t really discuss questions of success, failure, desire, immortality, illusions in an abstract sense. Roy: Of course not. Savita: And it would be invidious if we examined somebody else’s life without that person’s involvement. So what we’re doing here is getting insight into some of these really common constitutive conditions of a person’s life and the place of recognition in it. Roy: Yes, definitely. We’re discussing the principles of success, and how people don’t achieve the goals they set themselves. And why people set themselves a particular goal, and how you must accept responsibility for your situation, and how the best thing you can do is to be totally focused and single-pointed on everything you’re doing in life, and how you must be balanced in your life. That you can’t neglect any aspect of it doesn’t mean that you have to desire every aspect of it. You have to be conscious of your goal, that’s very clear; and I’m impressed by the fact that you’ve really got rid of all these other desires. But we saw that, while in any life a person needs to be grounded, to a degree they have to be also at all levels of their being. They have to be conscious of their physical desires and needs, their emotional states, the practical things around the house—what jams there are, what buns there are—they have to be conscious of their neighbours.

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Savita: Yes, you have a husband who is ill, a daughter who has fever—all these things; you have to learn through this whole process, how to deal with a person who is ill, suffering—to meet all these challenges! Roy: These have been given to you to ground you, to make sure that you fully develop. That is to say, you’re not supposed to be like you could have been in olden India, though you might get away with it today if you wanted to do: you’re not supposed to be just a partial human being, you’re supposed to be a full human being. As a full human being, you’re supposed to be realised in this way that you defined: you chose for yourself, and in that way, you’re becoming real. That’s one reason why the challenges are there. The second reason is to give you inspiration. You will find in these situations, pathos; you will find in them, frustrations; you will find in them that all the elements of human life are given to you so that you can have understanding and inspiration from them: they will be teaching you so that you can reflect, and better write and speak and poeticise and philosophise, about all these aspects of your being. They will also be teaching or showing you that everything in life is part of a totality in which all you can do in any activity is try and be as focused as you can in that activity, and clear up unfinished business. Clear it all up, don’t leave anything undone. Be balanced. You’ve let go of the other desires, and you’ve let go of your illusions. Now, you’re trying to become a coherent being. What does ‘coherent being’ mean? It means someone who is null-pointed, clear, they have their self, they know their self, they know that their self knows what they’re doing. But they’re living in a world which is multifaceted. They have to know how they’re going to write their poetry, how they’re going to dazzle in that world—perhaps ‘dazzle’ is wrong, the word to use is ‘shine’: be the star you are, be the sun you are! The sun doesn’t depend on other things, the sun shines; it doesn’t look to see whether the leaves are enjoying it, whether the birds are chirping, whether the cattle are waking up, it just shines. That’s you, that star around the sun. Around the sun there are also murky black comets going, you have to watch them, and you have to know how to deal with them. So you have to be fully in your being. In a way, you can put it like this: you wouldn’t be given teeth unless they were there to use; whatever you have, is there to be of some use. So we’re coming to a very nice conclusion. Let me sum up. All these little frustrations are there to totalise you, to make sure that there’s nothing in this world which will stop you being what you want to be. In this way, you will be fulfilled. You will only have fulfilment if you watch your rear, if you’re like a driver in a car; you can’t be fulfilled by just driving brilliantly, and you have to have total vision. This doesn’t mean that you don’t focus on where you want to go. You don’t want to go into the ditch, but you have to be aware of the ditch. You’re driving along the road, you know where you want to go, but you’re totally aware of the whole situation. Once you were driving along the road in illusion of where you wanted to go. Now you’re very clear, you chose that, and you sort of knew it all along; but you’re still driving, and you still have to have twenty-twenty vision, and you’re going into your ground state in all aspects of your being. And that only requires that you master the requisite skills, and when you master the skills, you look

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at the delight and the joy. You see, you can’t be an analytical universal. You have to have a little bit of everything in you. That’s why we break off for food now, because we are not just thinkers. Savita: With illusions and failures dealt with, or perhaps lingering still … ∗ ∗ ∗ Roy: This is a very nice note on which to return, except that the last thing you said wasn’t quite correct. No one actually fails. All they succeed in doing is giving themselves more time to learn the lesson that they are here to learn. So you can’t fail; all you can do is procrastinate. So what you really need to do in life is not to procrastinate, but to transcend, and make sure you transcend in a way which is consistent with your continuity and all-rounded totality in life. So no one fails, people procrastinate; and this is important. The choice is not whether to succeed or not: everyone succeeds eventually, but you want to succeed as quickly as you can. To succeed as quickly as you can, you will be focused, you will be honest, you will accept total responsibility, you won’t shirk anything—like my conversations. And that’s the most efficient way of being in life. When you have a desire, when you want something, do it—do it in the moment, don’t procrastinate. So everyone who is reading this book has a challenge, everyone has a task, everyone has a situation. Sometimes, it will be impossible to move immediately, to transcend immediately; but you will know when the time is right. My conversationalist has told us that you already know when the time is right. You know that you can be hasty as well as procrastinate—that’s a tactical decision. In your mind, take that decision, and do it when the time is right. You don’t run from the jail when the jailor is strolling outside the door; when you know he’s going for a tea break, then you make your move. So don’t stop being strategic, don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can live entirely in the ground state. You have to come out of the ground state, you have to look above the turret, and you have to see when you can make your escape from the world of duality which is preventing you from being in your dharma. And everyone should be in a position to have their dream come true. And everyone is only in the situation they are in because they can realise their dream. And they will do it. The only question is whether they will do it now, or will the situation have to be repeated.

Chapter 11

Re-enchanting Reality: Practical Ways to Become Freer

11.1 Overcoming Dualism and Dichotomy in Practice Savita: Our next topic is moving beyond transcendental dialectical critical realism. You are in the process of writing a new book entitled Re-enchanting Reality,1 which aims to do just that. Can you tell us about it please? Roy: Yes. We’ve seen that the whole process of critical realism is a dialectical one in which each stage transcends the previous one. It moves by remedying an absence that the previous stage left. And the latest stage of critical realism, transcendental dialectical critical realism, presented in my book From East to West, tries to sketch out the categorial structure of demi-reality, relative reality and absolute reality; demi-reality lies within relative reality, and relative reality lies within and is grounded by absolute reality. So these are different stratification layers. My new book is concerned really with moving beyond understanding how you overcome dualisms and dichotomies in theory, reflecting the dualisms and dichotomies in social thought and social practice, to understanding how you overcome them in practice. So it sketches some of the practical ways in which we can become freer. The book is divided into four parts, and at the moment, it has ten chapters. The first part is about overcoming dualism and duality in practice. Now the first thing to note, and this is the key theme of the book, is that we actually are in a nondual state for a lot of the time; to be in a nondual state is not an unusual thing at all but is the very mechanism which keeps all the structures of heteronomy, of dualism, of alienation, of split, of oppression going. We’re in a nondual state when we go right into ourselves and lose ourselves in ourselves, or when we lose ourselves in something else: a beautiful picture, a lovely mountain, listening to music—in principle, as I argued the other day, you can go into any object. Actually, one of the things I didn’t say about women the other day is that men’s hatred of femininity is partly based on hatred of their own femininity, because everything on this view that I’m arguing is reflected 1 See

Chapter 6, Note 10.

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in everything else; in the ground state, we are all connected by the cosmic envelope, so there would be a little bit of the rest of the totality actually reflected in some way in me. And in virtue of this, I must recognise whatever it is, even though it may be something terrible, that I’m trying to root out, as part of myself; or if it is not in me at all, I must go into it and make it a part of me. So men do not like women, that’s absolutely true, because they do not like a large part of themselves; they are internally split, and they project that internal split onto a split between men and women. How many men in any part of the world, actually freely, spontaneously like to spend time talking to, sharing things, with women? Very few. And, really, this hatred of women by men is a hatred of an essential part of themselves. Actually, I’m not sure this should go in here, and I don’t want to say anything too risky or shocking. Savita: No, leave it in. It illustrates beautifully what you’re saying about the different levels. Roy: So everything in this book, really, is application; in a certain way, we’re moving beyond categorial structures into actual practices. So we are actually in this nondual state, we are in the absolute mode of existence, for a large part of our lives: we don’t have to go away to retreats for that, it’s already in our practice. Retreats may of course help you do something like write a book, but if we go away to a retreat for three months to access our deepest self or alethic true being, and then go back home and leave everything as it was, we will actually be a worse person all round because of the retreat, if it hasn’t done anything very deep to us. The test of techniques of self-discovery is whether they make you a better person in practice. All right, you might feel a better person in yourself, but that’s a very narcissistic enterprise and then you’re just a beautiful soul contemplating your own beautiful soul, looking at your navel. But actually we all have to live in this very complex and interconnected world; we all are deeply dependent on others, and others are deeply dependent on us. And the test of meditation, whether it’s absorption in oneself or in another object, is whether it makes you a better person in practice; and that means that you act more spontaneously, more creatively, more holistically, you think better at work, you feel better in yourself, you’re nicer to the people you love, you show your love in a more appropriate way, and you are more ruthless in dealing with your enemies. You can see a lot of this in Gandhi. You have to go through a lot of understanding to see the difference between an emotion like love and the form of manifestation of love; that depends on a categorial distinction that realism makes between the real and metaReal,2 on the one hand, and the actual, on the other. Anyway, all of us in our agency have to be in nondual state for anything to happen. For you to understand a point, for you to read me, to listen to my sentence, you have to be in a nondual state; you are in a nondual state now, you’re just listening: the duality of subject and object has disappeared. So one of the really extraordinary things that I’m saying is that we’re all in a nondual state most of the time, but there are a lot of other things as well. Just to act on the world requires spontaneity. Just to 2 This

is the first (and only) use of the concept of the metaReal in these conversations. Bhaskar is now not just foreshadowing the philosophy of metaReality but expounding it.

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understand a theorem or a point requires the ‘I see it!’, the ‘Ah!’. There’s no way you can go from thought to action without an element of basic action. There’s no way you can read or apprehend the world without basic perception, what could be called direct perception: the direct perception of ‘I seeing’. If in a way I almost said in From East or West that the kingdom of heaven is here on Earth, and what we have to get rid of is the hell that feeds off it; here I’m saying even more that, actually, it’s our nonduality—our very nonduality in ordinary life—that’s propping up hell. We don’t have to go to heaven: here on Earth it’s our nonduality which sustains everything. So to actually realise this is very liberating. When you have a nondual experience, you can’t describe it, you just go ‘Ah!’. As soon as you start to describe it, you move out of nonduality into the dual world. Most teachings about spirituality assume that to be in a nondual state is a very rare thing, that there are a few people who are enlightened who then are going into spirituality. But any person who is thinking, who is talking, who is looking at someone is in a nondual state. So all of us, enlightened or unenlightened, are in both a dual and a nondual state in our lives. The nondual state sustains everything, whether we are enlightened or not. So you can see, just from the point of view of the understanding and reception of spirituality, that this is a very radical position.

11.2 Demystifying Self-realisation What then does enlightenment or self-realisation mean? Enlightenment means that you have shaken off the heteronomous elements in your embodied personality. That’s simply what it means. Now we’ve seen that there must be duality after enlightenment; but if there’s no heteronomy, if you haven’t internalised it, if there’s no system of oppression, if there’s nothing but your pure, true inner self in you, then you are as enlightened as you can be in that society, and you function in the world of duality to the maximum that you can: you bring the nondual state into that world of duality. But to say, for example, that the transcendent is stabilised in your life is quite wrong, because for that to be the case you would have to be living in a nondual world. What enlightenment means is that heteronomy is not inside you. Now what happens after enlightenment or self-realisation? (This is not really what the book is about, but it’s what we’ve got onto here because I’m doing a sort of critique of traditional spirituality, which is very different from the completely secular spirituality I proclaim; I’m not saying that there is nothing to traditional spirituality, just that this secular spirituality is new and bold.) Enlightenment, I’ve argued, which we should all aspire to, is just the shedding of heteronomy within yourself. So after enlightenment, is there love, is there progress? Of course there is. What happens after enlightenment is that you’re practically engaged in the world and you help to shed its heteronomous structures spontaneously: you feel at one with the rest of the world, and you help to shed the structures of oppression in the world outside your own being. And this will make you freer. You can see this very easily. An enlightened being today will depend on money, and she will help to get rid of it, spontaneously,

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operating as much as she can from the ground state, doing it in a pure and maximal way. She will help to bring about a society in which we get rid of the systematic sources of oppression one by one. If we don’t have commodified sales of labour power, we don’t then even bother to think in terms of the category of labour power, and we just think of human beings. If we get rid of that, then no one has to sell themselves, do they? No one then actually needs to use money, and their freedom is much more expanded. Their freedom, as the freedom of enlightened beings, is expanded. That’s the first aspect. The second aspect—I’m trying to demystify self-realisation—is that the enlightened being can spontaneously manifest being in a nondual state in the world when she has complete mastery of a particular subject. But there are masses and masses of subjects which, as an empirically growing human being, she will not have mastered; so even as an individual being, there are lots of ways in which she can more fully realise, embody, actualise the nondual state. So the nondual element in her embodied personality expands as she needs to rely less and less on books and knows more and more, and she can act more and more spontaneously in every situation: having this knowledge built in, she can then be maximally free and fluent. So the zone of nonduality, which her embodied personality occupies, expands; and her embodied personality will expand as she goes into, and at first heteronomously acquires, new areas of expertise and competence, and then in-builds them so that they become spontaneous. Like anyone else, she has to learn how to bind books, for example, if that is her project. Now, third, this continual expansion of the zone of nonduality within the embodied personality is the way to change society. Because she’s expanding as a personality, that agent is learning more and more, she’s growing, she’s developing, her freedoms are developing because society is changing, not only because of her but because of itself, because of all the other acts moving in the direction of self-realisation that we do. Remember I argued earlier that to change ourselves—and just to be attentive maximally for a moment immediately takes you closer to the ground state— is immediately to change society. And then I made the argument that this is the only way we can change society. And when we’ve thrown off all the elements of heteronomy within ourselves, we’ll be maximally efficacious agents of social change. So anyone moving in that direction will be helping to be an agent of social liberation. So her freedom, her capacity to do things will be expanded by social changes, and by the way, her own learning and growth are developing. And this in a material, or almost material sense: what Marxists would call real material growth and change. But then, why do they assume that the zone of the absolute, the cosmic envelope in its infinite depths, is somehow not within? She will be accessing deeper and deeper levels of this inner reality, this cosmic envelope; and wider and wider reaches. She will learn to be one with the butterflies, one with the stars; and she will want to root out all the evil in the world. In all these ways, she is growing. So the enlightenment experience is something we can all have a bit of; and, not only that, we all do have a bit of it in states of nonduality. So it is not such an enormous thing. There is a clear demarcation line: the difference between the realised and non-realised being is that the realised being has got rid of the essential

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elements of heteronomy within herself, or she knows those elements which perhaps are genetically part of her personality and she’s coping with them and dealing with them. There probably isn’t a single human being who has been realised who, in all honesty, has not had an issue that they had to work on. Maybe food, for example. Vivekananda, who was a pretty pure figure in the Indian spiritual tradition, was also very fat, and he continually had to work on the issue of food; he didn’t bother too much, it didn’t affect his purity as a spiritual teacher, and when he died, his body was actually in immaculate condition. I have actually seen bodies of people in immaculate condition which have not corrupted. So if it could happen to Vivekananda as his surprise trump, surely it can happen to others, though we shouldn’t, really, idealise any realised being.3 So in these three ways, there is after enlightenment. Now I’ve deviated a bit from my main concern, so I’m just going to state barely a few other themes of the book. There is no simple or algorithmic path to self-realisation. The objective is very clear: to eliminate sources of heteronomy so that everything you are in your embodied personality is a realisation of, or is consistent with, what you essentially are in your inner being. That doesn’t mean that you are not unique and special and different: every human being is, and every individual will have their own unique path. But certain general things can be said about paths, and if you look at the teachings of various theorists and practitioners of self-realisation, you will find that there are points on which they agree and points on which they disagree. Anyway, I’ve attempted in this new book to sketch out a path which is a very simple one, which relies on some mode of accessing your inner self and just being and becoming as pure in your being and in your action, that is, as clear, as one-pointed, as you can. Purity mustn’t be misunderstood. I’m not talking about anything that you live through. I’m talking above all about purity of intention. Everyone must decide on their own path.

11.3 The Role of the Spiritual Teacher Now, what is the role of spiritual traditions and spiritual teachers and messengers? How do I reflect and situate them in this work? If I say that individual self-realisation is the best and most effective method of social change, and there’s no single or unique path which will suit everyone, because we are all concretely singularised; 3 This

passage possibly sheds a little light on why Bhaskar let his body go after his lecture tours to India. His obesity undoubtedly contributed to his relatively early death. As in the case of Vivekananda (who died in his fortieth year), this prospect did not seem to bother him too much or adversely affect his geniality as a philosopher, spiritual teacher and friend. Although Vivekananda, like Bhaskar, suffered from serious physical ailments partly because of his obesity, many Hindus believe that he left his body voluntarily at the point at which he attained full self-realisation, as it could no longer contain his consciousness, which had expanded to the domain of universal superconsciousness (God), achieving liberation from the evolutionary cycle of birth and death. At a certain point in the general expansion of consciousness, which underlies biological evolution, any body becomes inadequate. See, e.g. http://www.spiritualbee.com/posts/reason-for-death-of-swami-vivekananda/. Accessed 16 December 2016.

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that I do this all within the bounds of secularism, so that the emancipation that I’m arguing for is one for people of no faith and people of all faiths; that this is also the maximally effective agency of social change; that it’s the only way to move in the direction of Marx’s formula, towards a society in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all; and that it’s the only way to save the planet—if I’m saying all these things, then I’m a messenger of some sort, aren’t I? So what is my role, then, given that I place such great reliance on the principle of the hermetic tradition, that everyone listens to and follows their own advice? This principle for me is the supreme criterion for being a philosopher: we accept nothing on authority, but test everything for ourselves in our everyday practices; our source of authority is our concretely singularised transcendentally real self, that’s what we’re in touch with when we’re in a nondual state. How do I situate myself within this? The only possible role for a spiritual messenger or teacher is then to act as a stimulus to awaken the autonomous transcendentally real self to its own activity, which is buried in us within layers of heteronomy. To put it in an Indian way in terms of the theory of the three gunas, I am the rajasic stimulus which awakens the sattvic being and encourages it to throw off the tamasic mess. I dreamt this up this morning for an Indian audience, and it has never been used before. Savita: Actually what you’re saying sounds familiar to us in India. Roy: That’s fine. But there are lots of things I’m saying that they are not familiar with; and if they are, it’s put in a very new way. Savita: It would be very interesting to know if you have ever actually conversed with any of the spiritual practitioners, say, sadhus here. They practically live in the way you describe the notion of an expanded being. Roy: Not at all. I do not see any sadhus living as expanded beings. Savita: They don’t generally live immersed in society. Roy (in a rare moment of anger): How can you read that into what I’m saying? I immediately assert that you cannot possibly be an expanded or realised being and abstain from society. It’s quite impossible. I don’t see any expanded beings who are sadhus in India; I’m not saying that there aren’t any, I’m saying that I haven’t encountered any. Savita: If you read Aurobindo Ghosh, for example, you will very clearly see the point you’re making. If you read Vivekananda, you will find it very much present too, though not in exactly the same way. Roy: You will not. I haven’t finished making my points, that’s the first thing. Second, what I’m trying to do is something very different. I’m trying to say that the nondual state—the state of transcendence—is there outside practices of meditation, outside practices which are regarded as spiritual: that we all have in our daily lives the enlightenment experience; and we all naturally seek to shake off elements of heteronomy. I merely teased you by invoking the theory of the three gunas, just to show that I’m familiar with it.

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Savita: You haven’t misled me at all. Roy: No, no. If the goal is to shake off heteronomy, then we are all on the road; and what I’m showing you is that anyone who says: ‘There’s no further for me to go, and I’m sitting here in my ashram or as a sadhu completely self-realised’ is completely unexpanded, completely non-realised, because he does not see the three ways that he has to go: he has to expand himself—he must: expansion doesn’t come to a halt, that’s ontological monovalence. Now the expansion occurs in three directions: socially or with others; individually and personally, as the expansion of one’s own nondual state; and intensively into the absolute. I’m not describing the whole book, I’m taking one or two themes, just to intrigue you. So there is an element of discontinuity which would allow you to say that some being was realised and another being was not realised; but each being is like a point in a process, on a continuing cycle. OK, I’ll end that point there, and just summarise very briefly a few other themes I discuss in the new book. These are themes that I thought would fit in well with the context of our discussions, because they don’t depart too far from what I have already talked about in From East to West. There’s a lot of completely new stuff in the book that I’m not going to tantalise you with. So there are these stark contrasts between realised and non-realised beings, and your own self-realisation is just what you want to do. All I was saying, then, is that there’s a problem if anyone else gives you the goal or tells you what to do. So you have to test and answer for yourself. And then my role in this would be to act as an external stimulus, to give a push, be a provocateur; but I would do it in an immanently critical way. And that’s why I raise some themes which will have some resonance in India, but point out that this is entirely secular.

11.4 Reality as Always Already Enchanted Another thing I want to say is this. If the object is to become as mentally and emotionally, and for that matter as physically, clear or free of heteronomous determination as possible, then we have to pay some attention to the mind and the emotions—which we’ve already done. I’ve already argued that mind is an irreducible power of matter—this is a familiar theme from critical naturalism—and that you cannot explain human agency without taking account of the intentional level of our behaviour. But I’ve also argued that the emotions are central to human activities. Now I’ve already argued that there is the equivalence, or consistency, of (1) the way in which historically—diachronically—mind has developed out of life, which has developed out of matter: so there has been an emergence, an unfolding within the evolution of these powers; and (2) the implicitness of these powers in matter from the beginning—this must have been the case—so that pure matter is like sleeping consciousness. So you can also imagine that evolution will carry on far beyond our level, but for the present occasion, I will just stick with our current physical, emotional and mental constitution—this is something we all are very clear on. Now there is a supramental level

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of consciousness which is nondual, which is transcendental, which is beyond us and our acts of discursive intellect, and the process of intuitive intellect as well, which manifests itself in spontaneous acts of unconditional love, which is unattached, and which doesn’t operate instrumentally. That is the ground state. We all have a ground state which is situated on the cosmic envelope. So where are these levels of being in relation to one another? Where is our physical being—corresponding to the principle of matter; where is our emotional being— corresponding to the principle of life; and where is our mental being? Our ground state is the deepest level, very wide and very deep—it’s part of the cosmic envelope. Our mind is even deeper than our emotions. Our emotions are even deeper than our body. And our body is something, really, from this point of view that we share with stones. So when we regard human beings as embodied personalities and we split them up into the mind, the emotions and the physical being, then we see that there’s a distinct gradation. What we can do, then, is begin to explore the properties of these emergent levels in a much more precise and acute way. We can make a sense of the idea of a science of mind: the study of mind in a way which is very different from what is being done today, certainly in the Western natural sciences. I’ve suggested that you can use Eastern techniques here and there, but always with some qualification and some distinctions. And then there are the levels of the emotions and the physical being. Now when I’m talking to you, you’re just immediately hearing me, immediately understanding me: there is an identity of being and meaning, that is, direct intuition, direct reading of signs; and this direct hermeneutic reading is something which is essential for any conversation to get going. So we can actually begin to explore the properties of this emergent level of being, its internal topography. And we can use this beautiful instrument that we’ve been given, which is so creative, which we’re using for such forces of disruption in the world. We can learn, we can mobilise it, we can be one with it. And similarly with the emotions, which is a stratum which is less deep than the mental level—animals have emotions but they don’t have minds—and less close to the ultimate essential ingredient. We can use positive emotions to dissolve negative ones. For example, if you have the emotion of anxiety, I tell you—or you tell yourself—that you are loved. You will feel immediately, spontaneously, without forcing it, a little bit loved. Everyone will tend to respond in this way, and you can try it out for yourself. And then, feeling loved, the love will replace anxiety, and you will be in an emotion which corresponds to your ground state. So love and the positive emotions have tremendous healing powers. Actually, just attending to something, just focusing on something, you will immediately heal it. A lot of people cry or complain because no one attends to them; so they just want a little bit of attention. As a mother, as a parent, as a teacher, you know this. Someone sitting miserably at a party, he just needs a bit of attention. So actually we all know about the creative power of emotions and thought. And actually we can now begin to utilise our powers from the ground state to directly read everything without the mediation of physical interaction. If you want, we can consider this, because this is what we do anyway: your hearing me, or when you’re reading a book. And similarly we can begin to intuit a person’s state immediately.

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So being in our ground state on the cosmic envelope gives us enhanced perception and enhanced agency in the world. This requires an expanded ontology, and this makes what I’m saying in this new book very continuous with the whole project of critical realism. We begin to explore the possibility of a vastly generalised hermeneutics; we begin to see meaning and significance and value as really rich ingredients in the world; we begin to see more in a picture, we begin to see more beauty, we begin to see beauty where there’s only ashes4 —we can actually see that beauty where there’s only ashes, and we enhance the beauty: we’re not just seers of the world, we’re agents in the world. We’re all this. And we’re all moving in the direction of enlightenment. You as a transcendentally real self are responsible: you are the parent of the child of your embodied personality, which is taking you into greater capacity for social agency, taking you into your dharma. When you’re in this ground state, apart from the expanded powers you have, you’re much more responsive to everything that’s happening in nature and in the social world around you, you’re a much more efficacious agent because you’re operating from a deeper level. And when we’ve learnt the skills and can operate effectively as mental and emotional beings without the mediation of the physical world, if that’s possible, then we’ll be able to operate at other, deeper levels than the physical; levels which we have already within us, which are emergent from us. So this is a beautiful re-enchanting of reality; we find reality completely reenchanted. We can find love, we can find joy, we can find great intelligence everywhere, if we look hard enough, if we only know how to see. So I’ve only given you a few tantalising themes to say that the project of generalised hermeneutics, generalised semiotics is a very exciting one. The emancipatory part of it is the expanded powers that we have in those three directions, the physical, the emotional and the mental. Enlightenment may be a ruptural point, but as self-realising beings, we are all moving spontaneously in those three directions, towards our self-realisation. And then, when you’re in your ground state, you will find your capacity to suddenly understand where someone else is very well, suddenly in a flash you will know. And in a flash, you will be able to see something: you will see a point or sum up a situation very quickly, very correctly; and you will be able to see what Rorty’s game is very quickly—even before you and I talked about it! So this process is an infinite one, but it has very clearly demarcated levels. And what you can say is that we as agents in the world have every type of most superficial understanding of these levels. Critical realism, it is true, says that we should think being as structured, differentiated and changing; think being under the category of negation; think being as a totality; think being as incorporating transformative agency and reflexivity: but all that is in a world in which the operations of thinking, and being a thinking, feeling and acting being, are mediated physically. From the space of the ground state, you can think mind as mind; you can think feeling as feeling; and then you have an ontology of feeling and an ontology of mind which doesn’t proscribe an emergent stratum in our physical experience, but which actually understands that, looked at from the point of view of the cosmic envelope, our physical manifestation is 4 In

the recording, ‘ashes’ is unclear.

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just an emergent stratum of supramental consciousness, which successively unfolds itself through to mind. How many layers are there behind mind? We don’t know. This is beyond the scope of our investigation; and, if we did know, it would be useless for human beings. Everything I say in this book is of immediate and practical relevance to human beings, is entirely oriented to the cause of sustaining the path, for which, really, our just being ourselves and being what we want to be is all that is needed. When we are what we want to be and truly ourselves, then we will be expanding and expanding and expanding, we will be acting more effectively in the world, and we will find new territories for our intelligence to explore—which philosophers, stuck in the physical world, not understanding emergence, haven’t even begun to discover. But, of course, people have been doing it all the time: people have been feeling feelings, minds have been reading minds. So actually, when the ontology of this world is etched out, then reality is re-enchanted. Now what happens with disenchantment? Disenchantment is a process by means of which meaning and value are taken out of the world. So where did value and meaning lie as a result of this process? It lay in the ego, the illusory ego, the homunculus around which the whole of Western philosophy and social science has revolved. This is the ego of demi-reality. That must be shed from the embodied personality, which exists and survives whether enlightened or realised or not; and we’re all moving on this path, and after enlightenment, this path must continue. We will still exist in relative reality. Relative reality survives after the world of illusion goes. We’re constrained by physical laws. We still need to learn to act in the world; we still will even after full communism is established. That’s the beginning of history, the beginning of history on Earth. Heaven on Earth would be a lovely thing, lovely, lovely! Earthly experience is lovely! Any mystic, any sadhu who tells you that it’s horrible is not telling you the truth. Savita: No, sadhus are not telling us this. Roy: Let’s not get into the sadhus. I’m just saying that if anyone has the feeling that Earth is not here to be enjoyed, then that’s wrong. We will start to enjoy Earth more as we move in this direction. After we fully establish universal self-realisation here on Earth, when we have a realised society on Earth or it is continually growing towards self-realisation, having shed the fundamental structures of demi-reality from ourselves and from our world, we can really enjoy Earth. Ours will still be a relative existence. We may be unlimited selves, unbound personalities, but that unboundedness can still grow by these stages that I have defined; we can still find new territory. But we’ll be much more in touch with everything on the cosmic envelope, and things like me going into you, or me going into that wall, will not appear to be a slight to poetry, they’ll be understood to be real. Savita: By all of us? Roy: Not all. It’s always a challenge for me, that ‘all’; because the ‘all’ can only come when we are all free. But go into that wall, imagine it, see what you can see, see what you can find: you will find maths in that wall. And if you say to me, ‘It doesn’t exist’, I say that if it exists to be seen, then it still exists on a plane, doesn’t

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it? If you look at a picture, and you ask me what’s in the picture, and I tell you that the picture is a picture of a horse, and you tell me, ‘You know, that horse doesn’t exist.’ Well, I can tell you that the horse has a white mane, and it looks about sixteen hands high, it has been well fed and well trained, and I would love to go for a ride on it; then in my imagination, I am riding on it. You tell me that that’s not real. I tell you that, just as delusions are real, what is happening in my mind is real. Savita: It’s very interesting, very creative thinking. My problem is what to do. This new book shows us a future, and we might be able to get into it. But I think I am a creature of your demi-reality, and I’m stuck. Roy: No. You’re not. Savita: So I’m going to think about it. Roy: You have to read it first! Savita: Yes. Hearing about it is also very interesting. When this book comes out, I will beg you to give me a copy, and I will put it next to Aurobindo’s Life Divine. I think he has made some inroads in this. Roy: Definitely. Savita: and in fact he ended up very much saying that we are all divine beings, and that the level of consciousness that we know at this stage of history is very much at a lower level and that there are layers and layers of levels consciousness, and they have to be accepted. And he himself led a life of great learning, of great work—you should learn about his life. Roy: I know about his life. Savita: He was very courageous, just like you, and extraordinarily productive. From learning about his life and yours, I can imagine that the immediate effect of this kind of thinking would be that your capacity to think creatively increases. So I see the point. It is not that I’m not seeing it, it’s wonderful. Roy: I know you see it. You see, everything has to be said in a new way for a new audience, a new constituency, and very respectfully of those who have gone before. If I ever make a slurring remark on some teacher within the Indian tradition, or any other tradition, I don’t want it to be misunderstood. Savita: I’m not offended. Roy: No, but I’m actually very conscious of the life and work of Aurobindo and probably most of the people whom you’ve mentioned to me. I actually think that what he says, as far as it goes, is correct. What I’m saying is— Savita: I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m very interested in Aurobindo’s work and have actually written an article on his ideas (Singh 2003). I criticised a particular kind of reading of Aurobindo’s life by an accomplished psychologist, Ashis Nandy. He reads Aurobindo’s life as ultimately an inauthentic one and analyses it as a

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paradigm of inauthenticity of Indian modernity. He’s saying that Aurobindo’s life is quintessentially a modern life, and it instantiates the inbuilt inauthenticity of Indian modernity. But the only life of Aurobindo that he knows is the one that Aurobindo called the afterlife. Someone went to interview Aurobindo, wanting to write his biography; and Aurobindo told him that one could not possibly write his biography: biographies of lives such as his would be exceedingly difficult to write, because the inner life of a spiritual person is not open or accessible to others; if one wants to know about that life one would have to lead that life—and in fact, no one can objectively read the inner life of anyone. You can write an autobiography, but any biography writing is an inauthentic exercise. Yes? Roy: Definitely. Savita: So there are these two different ways to view Aurobindo’s life. I do realise that there’s a possibility for consciousness to expand, and that expanded consciousness can take place within embodied beings; I do realise this, absolutely. But there are problems with it, it can be jeopardised by fake people. There are those who would tell you false stories about the expanded consciousness and feign to have realised it. But these would not be the most fake or numerous: there are far more fake people who would say that they are modern. This society is full of fake modernists. Roy: Yes, definitely. Savita: So you see the point: the suspicion, the doubts remain. Roy: Yes! The only thing you can do is see how you’re moving in the direction of expanded consciousness and shedding false heteronomous sources of determination yourself. This is the only thing you can do, and you can explore, you can trust yourself. This inner life—you’re absolutely right, what we see is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. We have only barely scratched the surface of reality. Still, from the point of view of critical realism, transcendental realism applied more specifically to the social realm in critical naturalism took us to a deeper level, and the theory of explanatory critique began the process of re-enchanting the world by showing that at least you can have rational discourses about values; dialectical critical realism went very systematically into all the structures along the four dimensions of social being that were necessary to make sense of emancipatory projects; and a deepening of that showed the necessity The recording ends abruptly at this point.

Chapter 12

Conclusion

Savita: We have come to the last chapter of this book. Now we are going to try and summarise our entire discussion and assess where we’ve got to. Roy: I won’t attempt an exhaustive summary or anything like that, just recapitulate some of the main points. Critical realism is characterised above all by the fact that it thinks being. In its first moment (1M), it thinks being as structured, differentiated and changing. In its second (2E), it thinks being as containing negativity, which is first and foremost a descriptive, ontological concept, and it thinks it around the concept of determinate absence, and determinate absence as the motor of change. Then in its third moment (3L), it thinks being in terms of categories of totality, including internal relationality and holistic causality. In its fourth (4D), it thinks being in terms of transformative praxis, and particularly transformed transformative praxis and reflexivity for the unity theory of practice. The fifth move within critical realism (5A) adds a spiritual inflection to all these levels. So we think truth as alethic (1M); we think the concept of transcendence (2E) as necessary for transcendence to a greater totality—and transcendence here just means something which comes epistemically from the epistemically transcendent, something that comes out of the blue, from nowhere; this transcendence is actually the source of the creativity that we have inside and is central to the process of scientific discovery. Holistic causality we think in terms of the category of love (3L), which is the big binding force in social life, and which was even thought by the Greek thinkers to be the binding force cosmologically. Our transformative practice now takes the form of spontaneous right action (4D), and reflexivity takes the form of self-realisation (5A). OK, so that sets the context for a very brief resume of some key points, first in regard of knowledge. Knowledge, I’ve argued, is really not propositional at all. When it’s true, it’s a new way of being. When you tell someone something—You’ve got a nice position now! (Laughs). 3rd February 2002. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5_12

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Savita (reclining on a couch): My job is over. Roy: (laughing) OK! —We regard knowledge as something that comes to us from outside. Even though knowledge certainly does come to us from outside, at the end of the day it always requires an internal criterion, and it is always a question of something that you just see. And when it’s a complicated knowledge, then it’s something you have to make part of your being; as long as it remains contingent, accidental to your being, then you don’t know that field spontaneously, and then you have to use thought. When you know something as part of your being, then in the right circumstances, you will produce the knowledge spontaneously. So, really, these new spiritual concepts play an important role at every stage of scientific discovery and inform the processes which we glorify as epistemic. I cannot teach someone, show someone a proof of a theorem, until they tell me: ‘I see it.’ This means that something close to the old Platonic doctrine of knowledge as anamnesis is approximated; this is very close to it. Really, in most processes of learning, there’s an external teacher, and then, there’s the internal teacher, the internal mentor, who in some way, already being in the ground state, already knows it; so you’re just bringing it out. And to the extent that you’re not in your ground state, or your ground state is not developed to have a close affinity with the field of the objects of your knowledge—if your knowledge is not immediately about yourself but is about something like the laws of motion of matter, and if you’re not thoroughly immersed or familiar with that field— then you will have to acquire it heteronomously from some other source, and it’s something which you just learn by rote. But when you’ve really mastered it, through some technique of excellence—which is hard work—then you will produce the knowledge spontaneously. And it was Newton’s familiarity and total affinity with the field that he was investigating which allowed him to have that moment of eureka, which was to intuit from the transcendent the concept of gravity which enabled him to retotalise the field. So, really, thinking is secondary to something else, which is spontaneous knowledgeability. It is sometimes known as intuition, and we can contrast the discursive intellect with the intuitive intellect, as we did yesterday when we talked about the properties of the left- and right-hand spheres of the brain. But underneath both is a nondual state of consciousness. Underneath all knowledge there’s a nondual state that’s just immediate seeing of something which is already known to other people. Then you see how they do it; then you learn how to do it yourself; and then, as you grow into being a scientist of some sort, you become totally absorbed, you become a master of the subject matter, and so a possible vehicle of a new discovery. And the new discovery appears out of the blue, but in a field that you’re very close to; you’re almost one with that field—you are one with it—and you’re ready to raise yourself by a new leap of consciousness into a cognition of the deep alethic truth in that field—which is as yet unknown, but which is there waiting to be known. And it just pops or slips into your consciousness, in the space between or beyond thoughts; it comes ex nihilo, from nowhere, but onto an immanently well-prepared ground.

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So there’s a place for disciplines of excellence, for education, for training, for learning, even learning by rote. But now this place is always—and this is to invert the conventional relationship between knowledge and being—to make knowledge itself a new and richer way of your being: knowledge becomes part of your being. Only when it is part of your being, do you truly know it. And actually to have even then acceptance of anything as a knowledge, your being has to see it. So this led us on the first day into very exciting explorations of creativity.1 We saw that what we call creative always comes spontaneously, without thought, from the nondual state; and that underlying all structures of thought and behaviour are nondual states of consciousness manifest in some or other form of action, whether physical action, mental action, emotional feelings or whatever. So that really summarises some of the main points about knowledge. I should say something here about our ground state. Our ground state is our alethic, inner essential being. It is located on what I call the cosmic envelope. Whatever you are, you must be constituted at least in part by what is ultimate and ingredient in the universe as a whole. What binds this universe as a whole? That’s what I call the cosmic envelope. In virtue of our capacity to identify transcendentally with objects other than ourselves, this cosmic envelope must be characterised implicitly by consciousness. In virtue of the fact that everything within the cosmic envelope is in some process of evolution, it is also characterised by creativity. So consciousness and creativity can be said to be implicit in the cosmic envelope. All of this structure that I’m articulating is entirely within the bounds of secularism. We are not calling cosmic consciousness ‘God’. We could believe that it is just something characterised by certain properties, which doesn’t have a cause external to it. Anyway, whatever it is, we can’t get beyond the cosmic envelope; so that if God appears to us, God appears to us somewhere on or in or perhaps just as the totality of the cosmic envelope. So this is a structure which is for people of no faith and all faiths. But what we can do in virtue of our location on the cosmic envelope is transcendentally identify with other objects on the cosmic envelope. If we regard ourselves as divine, we can see other objects as equally divine. We can see the divine as present everywhere. Whatever it is, this ingredient which binds everything together is something that we can know, and something that we can know by becoming it: in a real sense, in transcendental identification, we become the other thing. The moment when we feel great sympathy for other things, we are them. Our consciousness is not stuck and fixed; it’s motile, it moves, it’s truly universal, and we can move anywhere we know. And this is the certain sort of truth in the Buddhist idea that there’s a Buddha nature everywhere; and when you thoroughly know it, to go back to a Vedic intuition, then you become one with it. And we have seen that you have to become one with the bad as well as the good; in becoming one with the bad, you know your enemy, and then you can root him out. To know the bad, you observe it, and you don’t judge it. If you judge it, then the judgement is actually an interference in your cognition.

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And, actually, learning to observe and not judge is a very important thing, because most of the time we go around judging: we judge ourselves, we judge other people— we judge them as not the same as ourselves, we judge ourselves as not being as good as we want to be, not brilliant or whatever. What we should do, really, is observe without judgement. Supposing you’re anxious, observe your anxiety: push it out of the way, and in its place will come nothing. Or observe someone else. What you do is just observe. You retreat, you go into your ground state, and then you will experience the sensation of love; and love, and even attention generally, is a great healer. But it’s only a healer if you can suspend the judgemental faculty of the intellect. The intellect is a discriminator: it has to choose. Whenever we feel easily, well, then we choose spontaneously: the intuitive intellect responds. Sometimes we have to work things out, and then we use the discursive intellect. We have to discuss career strategy; we have to plan how to root out our enemy, even if the enemy is within ourselves; if we want to give up smoking, we have to figure out a strategy to quit. There is a gap of indeterminable duration in the recording at this point. … Critical realism in its development, then, is a process of self-transcendence. It’s a dialectical process in which absence is remedied, and deeper, wider, fuller, richer conceptual totalities are formed. Historically, it actually has just been powered by the norm of truth, but it is taken out by immanent critique from concern with science, to concern with issues of freedom and political emancipation, to the goal of universal self-realisation. I’m not going to rehearse again the components of the internal structure of the most advanced systems of critical realism—dialectical and transcendental dialectical critical realism—or the critical applications of it to fields within Marxism and modernism and postmodernism. Rather, I’ll just look at how and where it has moved to. Logically, taking realism about transcendence seriously leads to the self-transcendence of critical realism, because subject–object duality breaks down and we move into a nondual world of existence for which the characteristic properties of realism, that is, the duality of subject and object, no longer hold. And so it’s a beautiful process of continuing self-transcendence, the moral of which is that each step is valid for its own proper domain of objects. And then you see that there are spiritual presuppositions implicit in the emancipatory projects of Western libertarians like Rousseau and Marx, just as much as in Vedic or Taoist or Zen sages, and that actually they are there also in the practices of Christians and Muslims, most obviously in their mystical forms such as Sufism. Then you begin to realise that it’s silly to hold on to any single item of thought, just as you shouldn’t reify or hold static any system of thought—we shouldn’t have any system of thought. Actually, the saying of Eckhart, ‘Have nothing, know nothing, want nothing’, is really ideal, because it corresponds very nicely to the old Taoist maxim that we should strive to have complete emptiness, complete levity. Really be light, carry with you as little as possible. In this way you won’t dissipate your energy, and what you want to do in life will be achieved maximally successfully.

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Now I have been arguing against fixation, or stuck, blocked energy. These blocks are heteronomous leeches, they suck, they bleed our energy, which should freely flow in the creative attitude into whatever goal is required by our innermost being or essential nature, our ground state. Probably the most important thing to realise is that this state of nonduality, which marks what I’ve called the absolute level of reality, underpins everything that happens in the relative field of reality, corresponding to which you have, on the one side, physical laws and, on the other side, dualistic modes of thought which are proper for thinking in this form in this world. We need to communicate with others, and when we can’t communicate with them directly by intuition, or when we can’t know something spontaneously, then we have to use language. Language is characterised by reference, and a characteristic feature of language is its referential detachment. This is the act by means by which we detach the referent from the act of reference or, to put it the other way round, detach the act of reference from the referent; this is the act by which we make ourselves a dualistic world. This world of relative being, of physical embodiment, includes that part of it which I call demi-reality, which is a world of illusion, but which is no less real for being illusion. An illusion is still real. Everything is real according to critical realism. Contradictions and gross categorial errors and illusions are equally real. An illusion results from the denial in theory or practice of what is necessarily presupposed in practice. It doesn’t reflect anything real in the world, but it is itself real and causally efficacious (e.g. the atomistic ego). Now all the structures of relative reality, including demi-real relative reality, are sustained by the absolute mode of reality, that is, by nondual states. A nondual state is just the state in which you’re totally absorbed or concentrated, totally focused, in which your consciousness is zoomed on whatever it is doing. It doesn’t even have an object; it is just what it is doing. So a nondual state is first of all a state of being. A state of transcendence can be exemplified very simply by two paradigms. According to the first, we retreat successively from an object into ourselves as subjects, and we lose potentially all sense of a separate objectivity, and this is what classically happens in techniques of meditation, and also to some extent in prayer. Then the other paradigm is when we go into, we are engulfed by an object; we may be engulfed by music, by a discovery, by empathy, by anything. And we can consciously train our consciousness in transcending. We can do this quite simply by exercises of successive detachment from some object of our awareness, where we are aware that we’re distinct from that object; we can withdraw ourselves from that object; we can move from a state to consciousness of that state, with the consciousness slowly, slowly, slowly retreating. Or we can go into the object and lose all sense of consciousness distinct from it. It is a very fine line between these two paradigms, with the most difficult techniques stemming from the Vedas—well, strictly, yoga meditation—on the one hand; and, on the other, the characteristic practices of Zen. Now what’s very important to see is that the nondual state is not just found in a state of being, it is also found in practically engaged activity. When we are totally absorbed in something, when we are doing anything spontaneously and without force—unconditionally, spontaneously, non-instrumentally, creatively, lovingly,

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beautifully, correctly, knowingly, tacitly, intuitively, holistically—we are in a nondual state. However you want to characterise these acts, the characterisations can never be made within the acts themselves but are components of nonduality. That’s why our normal paradigm of perception, the paradigm of looking at an object and saying, ‘Ah! That must be love!’, does not apply in the field we’re talking about. What I’m saying is that, when you’re in a nondual state and you’re looking at something, you just ‘Ah!’. Whatever you’re doing, you just get on, you just talk, you just are creative, you just are loving spontaneously. You can’t at the same time speak about that nondual state without slipping out of it. Now this nondual state of being as activity is something that we all experience the whole time. We in our experience could not do anything unless we were in a nondual state. All action depends on basic action, that is, spontaneous action, that is nondual action, that is action which is not done by doing anything else, but is just done. There is no gap, no split, no consciousness, no object, there’s just doing. In the same way, we can’t perceive anything without ultimately just perceiving; and you can’t understand me without ultimately just understanding. That’s basic perception, basic understanding, basic reason, basic ideas, basic creativity. And then there’s love. Typically love is characterised by unity and the drive to unity. Love is the great expanding, healing, unifying, totalising, binding force. When you fall in love—or when you just love—you immediately put yourself in touch with your higher self, and in touch with the one you love: your beloved, god, another human being, human beings in general, the whole of creation, or some particular material object, or a pipe, or an eagle. Whatever it is you love, you love. You don’t just ‘fancy’ it. So love is a very good thing to have. If you go into any activity, you will find your alethic self. If you want to get in touch more with your alethic self, to ex-Hume your alethic self, we could say, then learn to love. We tend to think of love as something that just happens, but you can learn to love. Learn to feel alethic love. When you love someone, you immediately go back into a higher state of consciousness in which the separation between yourself and the loved one breaks down. This must not be misunderstood. Love recognises the autonomy of the loved one, the beloved object. As a poem by Khalil Gibran2 basically says, in love you stand to the loved object like a cypress to an oak tree: they don’t stand in each other’s shade. The desire for union is the desire for the loved one to be whole. Really, any love which is conditional or demands something in return is not truly love. What I’ve been arguing is that all the negative emotions are parasitic on love; this is in virtue only of the absence or incompleteness of love. Savita: Are you going to relate this to your critique of Marx’s critique of Hegelian dialectic? Roy: I’ll come to that at the end. I’m now highlighting certain themes only. I think this is a better way to do it. If we do it spontaneously, it will come out very nicely. The important thing to understand is that the nondual state doesn’t have to be accessed through a special technique: it’s here, and it sustains the totality of the 2 This

poem is quoted in Bhaskar 2002c, 174.

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structures of oppression. These structures of oppression don’t exist independently of our activities, for they embody categorial mistakes—that’s categorial realism. They exist only in virtue of our activities. They are always reflected or manifested in our activities in some way, and they are inherent in our activities. And what we have to do is rid ourselves and the social totality of sources of heteronomy. The only freedom, the only form of emancipation, worthy of the name is selfemancipation. Freedom to do or become something, unlike freedom from constraints, can’t be imposed from without. And the best thing we can do to change the world is actually to go into our ground state. In that way, we’ll be touching a very deep level of being, the deepest level we can touch, the level which sustains everything else and which we already fathom and transform in our daily lives, in the sense that those activities are activities which we’ve mastered; and because we really are in our alethic unbounded selves, we can spontaneously do them. Now when we are in this ground state, inner submissiveness will be immediately manifested in outer responsiveness; our actions will be perfect or maximally coherent. We will know—we do know—what to do when we go into it. What then is the problem of agency? The self is not a simple thing, and it has to be analysed. We have, on the one hand, the perception of the self in demi-reality. This is the ego, which regards the self as separate from all other selves, set over against an object world to which it stands in merely external and mechanical relation, and which it treats according to the canons of instrumental reasoning as means to its ends, manipulating, controlling and dominating it. And this object world is governed by analytical universality. Now this is the paradigm for our Western philosophical model, and it’s exactly what has been critiqued by many systems of thought which have come from a tradition of, or invoke, spirituality. So when Christianity says treat human beings as ends, not just means, that’s a critique of instrumental rationality. When the Vedic philosophers critique the passions, that’s a critique of instrumental rationality: let go, surrender, embrace inner submissiveness—surrender to your essential being— and you will gain the world. The best way of getting something is to give. To get, give. To get something, become what you are. You will find that nature responds very well to your desires. You will be happy only when you actually are in your inner essence; and then you will have no desire, there will be no heteronomous forces. Or rather, the only desires that you have will be those, as we saw in Chap. 10, that you yourself have chosen. That’s your true dharma. Definitely, that’s your destiny. You have heteronomous forces, that’s fine, but you try your best to clear them and to unblock them. So we will go into the layers of the self. First, there’s the illusory ego, which actually governs—or is represented as governing—the world of demi-reality. Then there’s the embodied personality, which is the inhabitant of relative reality; this is real, not illusory. Then at the level of absolute reality, we have our transcendentally real self. The correct model is to see the transcendentally real self as parenting the child which is your embodied personality. The more your embodied personality reflects your transcendentally real self, the more it will aspire and grow; the more your powers and substantiality will grow; the freer of heteronomous sources of determination you will be; the happier you will feel; the more yourself you will be. And so being

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realised—being in your dharma or going towards your dharma—is the most natural goal that any human being can have. It is something we humans strive for; and, actually, it is the only way in which we can become free. Self-change is often opposed to social change, but as soon as you change yourself or change anything in yourself, because you are yourself a constituent of society, you immediately change society. So by changing yourself, by moving more into your ground state, by shedding some heteronomous elements of determination, you will act better than you would have done otherwise, so your activities will be changing society. But if you think about it, the only way you can ever affect society is by virtue of some basic or spontaneous action; so the only way you can ultimately change society is by transforming the transformer, that is, by transforming your transformative practice. And when you transform it and make it free of heteronomous determination, then you will be grounded, caught, rooted, anchored in your ground state, and you will be maximally sensitised to and efficacious in respect of everything that is happening in society. You will be the best possible agent of social change. This doesn’t mean, contrary to what might be thought, that you will never act in a certain way. You may have to kill, for example. But all your actions will be governed by the properties of the ground state, including love. It is actually incoherent to be a pacifist, because if war is going on and you’re in a position to affect it; or if someone is killing someone else, and you’re in a position to stop it; by not being involved you’re actually being a party to the perpetration of the crime. So fetishisation of the form of manifestation of love, such as (several people have suggested to me) occurs in Gandhism, is absolutely wrong. Being in your ground state, and only by being in your ground state, you will know how to express your love. And how you express your love to others will differ in each case. How you express your love to your partner will be different from how you express your love to your friends, will be different from how you express your love to your mother, will be different from how you express your love to your colleagues, will be different from how you express your love to your sister, and so on. And how you express your love to a tree or a flower will be different from how you express your love to your dog. And how you express appreciation of an argument will be will be different again.3 So the ideal, really, is the cultivation of inner emptiness: the absence of heteronomous forms of determination and the state in which knowledge is a way of being. Then you will form spontaneous right actions. You will always be in the here, acting from where you are; assuming total responsibility for everything that’s happening to you, accepting the situation as it is; acting always in the now, in a focused way; being maximally integrated. Your action will then be oriented spontaneously to the abolition of all dualism. When you act from this ground state, you mustn’t become attached to what happens—you mustn’t even think about it. If you think about what happens when you’re in this ground state, then you’re no longer in that ground state; 3 On

my allotment in south London, a raspberry bush has made its home near the compost heap. In autumn, it greets me on my regular pilgrimages with a continually renewed radiance of red berries. I love that raspberry bush and indulge it with water and humus. It loves me back with its bright sustenance and beauty and never fails to give me pure joy. (An allotment is a small piece of land in a communal gardening area, for the use of which one pays a small annual rental).

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if you think about what you want in life, then you can’t be in a ground state. Being in a ground state, just zipping out of it for a moment, perhaps, and expressing a wish or a desire, and then zipping back into it, may be fine. But at the end of the day, it’s true, yes, you have your objectives, your wants, your wishes, your desires in life, which flow from your inner nature; and if you just achieve them as best you can, just be yourself as best you can, you will be in touch and in tune with the rest of nature and that inner submissiveness will be shown in outer responsiveness. Therefore, we really can say that all you have to do is cultivate a way of being in which you are at home everywhere and anywhere in the world, in which you are maximally flexible and fluid to any situation, in which ethics is grounded in virtues which are inbuilt, which are part of your being. This doesn’t mean that they’re not gradually acquired and learnt, arguably, through practices of excellences in which you have acquired virtue. But from this point of view, that of spontaneous right action, the best way to achieve what you want in life is to be focused on what you’re doing, and to ground yourself in your inner envelope, or real self, and the cosmic envelope. Then, living in what can be called the wisdom of uncertainty, what you really want will happen; you will achieve your objectives because you won’t be attached to them, they will flow spontaneously from your nature, and your nature is continuous with the nature of every other thing on your ground state. And it’s completely wrong to suppose that any other human being knows better than you how to achieve the objectives that you want; spontaneously, you will get what you want, when the time is right, if you are grounded in the way you ought to be in nonduality. Clearly we sometimes spend a lot of time thinking about emotions. Negative emotions are blocks on our energy, they are parasitic on love: they actually presuppose what they are opposed to. We saw that emotions have to be understood in a stratified way. First, as an occurrent state, an emotion is something that you can withdraw from: because you can, in virtue of our reflective powers, move your consciousness away from it, at some stage, the state of consciousness can be an object of your consciousness, and then you won’t be in that occurrent state. Then, second, dispositionally, you can engage in scenes of visualisation. Consider fear. Remember, the state of fear is your mind. If you’re afraid of something, put some armour in your mind around the object you are afraid of. If you’re still afraid in your mental state, it won’t make any difference what your physical constitution is. Fear is a state in your mind, it is not a state in your body. So don’t neglect the great power of thought. Train your thought, train your consciousness, train your mind, train yourself to concentrate, to focus, it’s very difficult. And then train it to know its own limitations. And then the third level is where the negative emotion is so much a part of you that in a very real sense you have to become a new human being. Now, in a way this whole process of becoming a new human being is helped by seeing that your transcendentally real self is sitting in a field of possibility which is open and fluid, and that, really, it can develop anything it puts its mind to. Then, understanding that your transcendentally real self is really your best friend—you being the embodied personality—you allow it to develop, you make use of it to develop for yourself a power or skill that you thought you never had. You can build courage into yourself,

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it’s a power. You can do virtually anything with your new power, and it can become part of your being. You can build love into yourself by just realising that you’re not alone in the world; that, actually, you have an inner mentor. You must be prepared to learn from anything in life, but your ultimate source of authority should always be your self. Being your self, then you know what to do. So this whole standpoint allows, or underpins, a huge critique of every form of contemporary society. You can start with organisations of it. How much free flow of creativity does capital actually depend on? All businesses, all organisations, can’t function without that spontaneous creativity, without that love, without that compassion, that solidarity. And yet our organisations stifle initiative and creativity; the more initiative you have, the more you’re hampered. My standpoint is completely the opposite: what we need is a social structure and organisation and collectivity which maximise our individual and collective creativity and ingenuity, which tap the love that already sustains all those structures of oppression and heteronomy. In our current organisations, how many people have a job which expresses their dharma, which expresses what they really want to be? It’s very easy if you do have: if you’re in your dharma and you’re doing something, it’s effortless; you’re like a flower in bloom: you don’t try to bloom, you just bloom. How many of us are blooming? You know, a little bit of blooming actually keeps the whole show going. And so we come to the great empowering critical realist view which appreciates that all those systems of heteronomy, all those structures of oppression, all those modalities of instrumental rationality, all those systems of cultural hell and exploitational manipulation couldn’t exist without the loving creativity of all the human beings who sustain them; but we, the human beings, would not only survive, we would flourish without those structures of oppression. Now we find ourselves in the parlous state where, unless we actually throw off heteronomy, we face oblivion. And the only way we can throw it off is by, in and through our own freedom, which is indivisible from the freedom of other people—and I’ve shown in my Dialectic that these are dialectically connected, and that the struggle for freedom is the point, we can say, the dialectic of the species homo so-called sapiens. That or oblivion. The time for disillusionment has come—real disillusionment, that is, not the false disillusionment that the theory of disenchantment proclaims. What would such a society be like? In this society, we would have the reality of each human being as realised. This actually chimes with Marx’s formula for communist society: the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all. Think about it: each person freely developed stands as the condition of the free development of all. If you read Marx literally, he is saying no other than what I’m saying; but of course, as we’ve shown, Marxists haven’t understood that. It is doubtful whether Marx would have accepted the arguments I’m using in this latest, spiritual turn, but it is implied by the logic of his position. Of course, if Marx were here today, he would be agreeing with everything I’ve said; but he lived one and a half centuries ago. (I mean that jokingly, actually—to aid our concentration with mild light relief after that courageous and beautiful colloquy this morning.4 ) 4 This

is in praise of Savita’s discussion of her experience of failure in Chap. 10.

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What is the role of philosophy in all this? We can see that existing reality is punctuated with category mistakes. These category mistakes come through thinking. If we free ourselves from these category mistakes, we are doing the best thing we can do to change society. And really, it is not only the best, but the only thing we can realistically do; because we cannot get inside someone else’s skin and free them; we cannot get inside someone else’s head and tell them what to think. Of course, this gives a role to philosophy and to the philosophy of this latest turn in the development of transcendental dialectical critical realism. But you don’t have to be a philosopher to be a good person; you can be a good person, you can be an enlightened human being without philosophy—you can still have knowledge. If you’re an enlightened human being, you will spontaneously act in a way which avoids category mistakes, if you’re a lay person. But if you’re a scientist, you mightn’t be able to dig deep enough without philosophy, and know what is the correct thing to say in a certain discourse. But if you can train to be a good person, you also cannot help being a thinking person: so you have to think: we are thinking beings. And then you have to think about the way you act, and think about the way you think. And when you need to think—and even enlightened beings need to think about how to deal with the system—then you need to counter falsehood; and then There is a gap in the recording of indeterminable duration at this point. So, what we are trying to do in the later stage of this project is to liberate the essential ingredient within each and every human being and each and every being in the universe. And that’s it. That’s it. We are liberating what we essentially are, that is, shedding everything else. Savita: Wonderful. So, finally we have come to the end of this book. Hopefully it will lead a robust life promoting freedom. We hope that the creative energy we have expressed in it will find expression in other people. Roy: One thing that’s worth reiterating is that each person will find some particular stage in the development of the whole process of thought that this book describes to be fitting for them, and that’s absolutely fine. For there is no path that applies to everyone; we are all unique singular individuals. Some people will not be able to understand all of dialectical critical realism—and that’s absolutely fine. If someone comes up to me and says, ‘Critical naturalism is good enough for me’, I tell them, ‘That’s great!’ Or if someone comes up apologetically and says, ‘I’m very backward in philosophy, really, because I can’t get around your second book’, I tell them, ‘That’s fine. You don’t need any of my books really. But, if you are reading my books, then you choose what you get out of them, and use it creatively and lovingly.’ And if you’re reading Reality and Its Depths and understand its bottom line, then you can understand any part of it. The bottom line of this book is that you are a unique, concretely singular individual. You are a very special being. You have an essential self. You are here for specific reasons and purposes in life. Only you will know them, and only you will know the path that you must tread. If you’re an economist, you will find some things in the book useful; if you’re a Marxist, you will find other things useful; if you’re interested in debates around postmodernism and you’re a feminist, you will find other things useful; and if you’re interested in rapprochement between

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East and West, you will find yet other aspects useful. As an individual when you read this book, you will find that in it there will be messages, something special there, for you. You will know exactly how to interpret it; you will know exactly what it means. If you read through the whole book and you find nothing meaningful for you, that’s fine again. If you read only this, that’s fine too: then it’s meaning something to you. But if it means a little bit to you, just think: it may well be worth reading again.

Appendix

Metacritique of Marx and Marxism

Abstract. This briefly reprises, and develops in the light of the philosophy of metaReality, Bhaskar’s metacritique of Marx and Marxism. Savita: The book has come to an end, but we’re adding a postscript reprising Roy’s metacritique of Marx and Marxism.1 Roy: I’ll just run through my metacritique of Marx’s critique of Hegelian dialectic very briefly, but in a systematic way, going through the different moments of development of critical realism, particularly as structured by dialectical critical realism. So, first, with the transcendental realism of the first moment of ontology (1M), we have within Marxism all the problems of actualism that we discussed, although Marx himself was in important ways implicitly a critical realist avant la lettre. Taking transcendental realism and critical naturalism through to dialectical critical naturalism and its conception of four-planar social being, we have the systematic neglect within Marxism of the four planes as equally necessary to an understanding of any social thing. Moving on to the second edge of negativity (2E), we have the critique of ontological monovalence, and here, from an emancipatory perspective, we have the inadequate conceptualisation of Marxism as an ongoing research programme coupled to ongoing practices putatively of emancipation. Marx’s failure to theorise the rational kernel of Hegelian dialectic meant that he never really came to terms fully with the fundamental role of transcendence in science, but also that of human creativity, which of course plays a fundamental role in transcendence, in which we break down subject-object duality. This also meant that he failed to theorise creativity as 1 In

addition to this appendix and the brief critique of Marx and Marxism in Chapter 3.2, there are some thirty pages of transcript of three missing tapes in which Bhaskar systematically sets out his views on what went wrong in Marx and Marxism. Unfortunately, however, without the tapes, these pages cannot be put into reliable, coherently intelligible form.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Singh et al., Reality and Its Depths, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4214-5

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more than a macroscopic performance. So Marxism became fixated on the capitalist mode of production, and anything that was given to capital from outside its circuit was downplayed or ignored: the gratuitous reproduction of labour power; the way in which workers’ own creative ingenuity—which is outside the bounds of their job description—sustains the labour process; and the sectors and modes of production that capitalism was always co-present with and fed on. When we go into this, we have a picture of capitalism as a monster, feeding in the first instance off lesser monsters, then feeding off and essentially draining one by one human creative energies which could well survive without it, as we see in the axiology of emancipation, that is, the process of absenting constraints on freedom and unwanted and unneeded sources of determination generally. And we come to see that really, at the end of the day, we can pull the plug on the whole show by cutting off its supply lines. And that’s what the axiology implicit in this kind of development of the theory and practice of universal self-realisation through individual self-realisation concerns. We can see that Marx also didn’t develop sufficiently his intuitions of what I call the platinum plate within Hegelian dialectic, which is where dialectic can function as a diagnostic clue to the structures of extra-ideational or extra-theoretical being because it accurately reflects the superficial, false categorial structures of society. Marx should have seen, really, that, if capitalism had thrown up a superficial account of specifically capitalist reality, as he showed, then that same system might have thrown up a false account of reality as such and in general. Because he never felt the need to go into the theorisation of that deeper reality, we have in his work the co-presence of the new scientific or critical realism with a positivistic method. The new scientific realism was trying to force its way out from the actual method that he used to make his scientific discoveries, which derived from an older philosophy, which of course reflected the very structure he was criticising. In other words, he was himself guilty of insufficient or incomplete totality. Everything we’re doing here is really an immanent critique of Marxism. So if developed Marxism doesn’t go sufficiently into totality, then it must be criticised on that ground. One other feature, relating to the theory of explanatory critique, which we discussed at some length, was the neglect of explicitly normative and evaluative questions. We saw how absurd it is to regard society as being value free. Society itself is constituted by values; the way we describe society must therefore be value-laden if it is to be adequate to its object. Concrete utopianism and prefiguration—that is, embodying the end in your means—are not idealistic, but absolutely essential. If you say, as Lenin did, that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, well, that’s true; but if you carry on the breaking after you have made the omelette, then you are overdoing it—and of course, that’s what Stalin and Stalinism did; they not only broke the eggs but the chicken, the plate, the table, the whole kitchen. Of course, this suggests that ethics relates critically to instrumental and manipulative modes of thought and being. Moving to the domain of 3L, totality, we have here an insufficiently complete or worked out dialectical, as distinct from analytical, universality and concrete singularity. It’s quite understandable, therefore, that feminists and others interested in

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so-called minority struggles (which include the ‘Third-World’!) have taken the view that Marxism versus postmodernism is a natural encounter. And of course what we need are the dialectical concepts which will respect all these modes of differentiation and place at the centre of it all the autonomy of the concrete agent. This is not individualism; rather, what I’m attacking is the very ground of the individualism— and how much individualism is actually embodied in all these ideologies it would be extraordinary to think. Sartre, in the second volume of The Critique of Dialectical Reason, which was published incomplete posthumously (Sartre 1991), made an elaborate attempt both to defend his individualism and to show how you could explain everything that happened in the Soviet Union in terms of an acute dilemma for Stalinism—that is, which Sartre turned into an acute dilemma that wasn’t there. And, of course, this is an absurd exercise. What happened in the Soviet Union is really understandable only on the basis that the process of liberation will have to take into account all levels of our being and follow the path of Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, that the educators must themselves be educated; if they are not, the least that will happen is that you will have their problems projected onto society; the worst and the likeliest thing that will happen is that they will take the existing structures of master–slave relationships and just displace the terms—just rearrange the disguise. Then, we have the detotalisation that Marxism had always made itself prey to. It regarded itself as in some way a body of ideas which could at once reflect history and yet in the same way affect it. But, if it affects history, then it is surely a massively important constituent within the historical process. Characteristically what happens is that Marxism as a discourse detotalises and disempowers itself by paying insufficient attention to the role of ideas. Similarly, ideas which have actually historically been very important and have caused divisions have been naïvely dismissed—and I’m thinking of Marxist understanding of religious and spiritual ideas as the opium of the masses. Why do the masses go on smoking the opium? Really, true spirituality is neglected. True spirituality would be superb; true spirituality within, by, those in power in society—those who ‘represent’ society, let’s put it that way—would be fine: being themselves paragons of those that they would represent, they would be, if you like, organic intellectuals. The neglect of spiritual presuppositions of emancipation meant that Marxism couldn’t really be thoroughly true to its own critique of reification, the essential insights of which are that there is a difference between labour and labour power, and that capital is not productive: a machine can’t be productive, that is, create anything new. Why then do we stop at purely instrumental, conditioned behaviour? Why do we understand human beings as if they were machines? It’s all part of that Baconian– Cartesian paradigm, of the mechanistic view of the world, of instrumental reasoning, of ends-means thinking. We are not free immediate producers directly in control of our own means of production. We are not creative human beings in charge of our own energy. We are not living in a society—and we’re talking about the future in the minds of the present doing a critique of the past—in which the expenditure of human energy has become an end in itself, or in which labour has become life’s prime want. This is only to say what some Vedic philosophers said already 2500 years ago. They

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told us that labour should be our chief want, and that there’s nothing more important than our energy. So, we move on to the form of the actions sustained in class struggle, of socialist society when it is established. These societies will be precisely one in solidarity and compassion. But, really, do we have any encouragement of love within socialist groupings, any understanding of what love means, or even what it is for one human being to kiss another? No, such things are simply repressed. In a false world, a macho world, you don’t talk about such things and how you’re going to treat people in communist society. If you don’t treat people as emotional beings, as basically creatures, then you’re going to pay, that is, reward and reinforce existing structures of oppression. Finally, moving on to the fourth domain of transformative praxis, 4D, we have had here a glimpse of self-change or self-emancipation. Typically, change is seen as coming from outside, emancipation is ‘on behalf of’, teaching is ‘on behalf of’; this is substitutionism. One of the features that I’ve elaborated in terms of spontaneous right action is that there is a dread of uncertainty, a dread of creativity. But uncertainty— one of those key words—is something that won’t go away. Why? Because we can’t deal with it. Foucault wrote a nice parody of this; we put our trust in certain ways of manipulating and controlling everything. But we can’t know everything, we can’t dominate the mind. However, we can be everything by becoming one with everything. So, we have reviewed, then, the spiritual presuppositions of eudaimonistic society, of the unity of theory and practice, of the creation of organic intellectuals. We have noted the theory-practice inconsistency of actually existing socialism, with a ‘socialist’ master–slave relationship superimposed onto a new set of labour processes. And we glanced at the whole problem of agency. The problem of agency within critical realism is relocated in terms of the problem of the self. What self is that actually? Marxists still think of it as the ego effect. Really, they do. At the level of the embodied personality, it is the ego that’s commanding and destroying everything. They neglect the embodied personality, let alone the transcendentally real self. So the question of what is to be done can only be relocated in the context of an answer to the question: Who am I? And who are you?

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