Page 7

Mervyn Harwig, Introduction to Roy Bhaskar, Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (London: Routledge 2011). Final draft.

Introduction

Roy Bhaskars Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom was completed on the cusp of the storm of creativity that produced Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, and bears the marks of its rst stirrings. Bhaskar had been working on the dialectical deepening of original critical realism for more than a decade but had not yet found the solution to the problem of saying the not that was to provide the key to elaborating an adequate account of absence, enabling him to reconcile negativity, totality and transformative praxis with non-identity and difference at a fundamental logical level.1 Original critical realism had been developed as part of a tripartite project conceived in the late 1960s to produce a realist philosophy of () science and () social science that could underlabour emancipatory science and simultaneously function as and engender () a metacritique of the philosophical ideologies standing in the way of human freedom. With the publication of A Realist Theory of Science in 1975 and The Possibility of Naturalism in 1979, only the third part of this project as originally conceived was signicantly incomplete. In the 1980s Bhaskars work thus proceeded on two main fronts: the dialecticization of critical realism (the major priority) and the metacritique of philosophical ideologies. Scientic Realism and Human Emancipation (published in 1986 but written in 1983) registered signicant advances on the latter front, both

07:03:23:07:10

Page 7

Page 8

viii

Introduction

elaborating the theory of metacritique and deploying it in some detail in relation to positivism. After completing it, Bhaskar returned to his dialectical work. In 1990, since he did not seem to be making much headway on the problem of negativity, Bhaskar again put his dialectical work aside pro tem to make another advance in the metacritical domain in the form of a book organized around some passing notes (p. vii) critiquing Richard Rortys fashionable neo-Nietzschean philosophy. Much of the material for such a volume lay ready to hand, in print or draft. The main body of the book, Section One, Anti-Rorty (Chapters 18), builds on an essay published in 1990.2 Section Two, For Critical Realism, Chapter 9, Critical realism in context, which presents and situates Bhaskars alternative to Rortys philosophy, is based on a talk given in the same year. Note that this presentational structure corresponds to Bhaskars philosophical method of transcendental critique, whereby immanent critique of irrealist positions goes hand in hand with the transcendental vindication of realist ones, as two aspects of a process of determinate negation.3 In the appendices to Section Two this order is reversed: transcendental argumentation for ethical naturalism (Appendix 1), based on a paper presented in July 1990, is followed by immanent critique of (irrealist tendencies within) the Marxist tradition, with particular emphasis on critical appraisal of the contribution of Louis Althusser (Appendix 2, composed in January 1989 but drawing heavily on a piece written earlier in the decade for A Dictionary of Marxist Thought4). As the inside of the title page announced, the book as a whole was conceived as the rst of three volumes (for which Bhaskar had a contract with Verso) devoted to the metacritique of the western philosophical tradition, thus bringing the original tripartite project near to conclusion.5 Some have thought Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom a misleading title because the main focus of the book is the critical appraisal of Rorty; freedom is only one of many issues discussed and the Appendices contain matters whose relevance to the rest of the book is a matter of speculation.6 This, however, is to take a

07:03:23:07:10

Page 8

Page 9

Introduction

ix

supercial view of the matter. When seen in the context of Bhaskars overall philosophical project the title is perfectly apt, as his overriding concern has always been the idea of freedom, and the present work is no exception. As Bhaskar underlines (p. 70), the book is intended to underlabour for the explanatoryemancipatory social sciences which, although they do not as yet exist, are deemed to be struggling to burst into being and effect a paradigm-shift comparable to the seventeenth-century scientic revolution. Appendix 1 is included, above all because Rorty upholds a version of the traditional dichotomy between facts and values that renders freedom as a rational project of self-realization impossible, and Appendix 2 underlines the special afnity of critical realism with the explanatoryemancipatory impulses of the Marxist tradition. Considered as a whole, Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, like Reclaiming Reality, both recapitulates original critical realism and eshes it out in some respects; but like Scientic Realism and Human Emancipation it is also in some measure a transitional work from original to dialectical critical realism one can see the concepts in motion. In what follows I comment sequentially on the two sections of the book and the appendices, paying particular attention to what is new in the development of Bhaskars thought. For ease of presentation and identication, major new concepts that is, concepts not (to the best of my knowledge) used by Bhaskar in his previous books appear in bold italics when rst mentioned. For a more detailed and contextualized account of the development of the philosophical system of critical realism in the seventies and eighties, readers are referred to my introductions to A Realist Theory of Science, Scientic Realism and Human Emancipation, Reclaiming Reality and to Bhaskars recent book with me on The Formation of Critical Realism.7 (1) Section One, Anti-Rorty, is the most detailed critique (metacritique1 but also in part metacritique2)8 Bhaskar has produced of the work of a single irrealist philosopher.9 No attempt is made here to locate it within the enormous mainstream critical literature on Rorty. My concern is rather to

07:03:23:07:10

Page 9

Page 10

Introduction

show how it relates to Bhaskars own developing concerns and system of philosophy. It has not, in any case, gured very prominently in the mainstream debate, for the obvious reason that scientic or transcendental realism has been very much out of favour in the mainstream, and easier to ignore than engage with, though this is now rapidly changing.10 The main thrust of Bhaskars argument is, on the one hand, to endorse Rortys critique of the epistemological or representational problematic so far as it goes but, on the other, to demonstrate that it is premised on a half-truth in that it subscribes to the implicit ontology of empirical realism secreted by the very same problematic. This ontology is based in the last analysis on what Bhaskar dubs the anthropomorphic fallacy, of which the epistemic fallacy is an instance: the definition or analysis of being in terms of human being. Rorty sees that what Bhaskar calls the ontic fallacy the ontologization (eternalization and divinization) of knowledge dehumanizes the subject, constituting in Bhaskars terms a subjectobject identity or correspondence theory (thematized here in some detail for the rst time in the Bhaskarian oeuvre). But he does not see that it is the epistemic dual or counterpart of the ontic fallacy, namely the humanisation of nature, in an anthropomorphic, epistemological denition of being . . . in the epistemic fallacy that prepares the way for the ontologisation of knowledge (pp. 323, original emphasis). Rorty himself, like the western philosophical tradition generally, is thus held captive by a picture: a picture of ourselves or our insignia in any picture the picture as invariably containing our mirror-image or mark (p. viii). Rortys anthropomorphism aspires to de-divinize the world and our knowledge of it to set aside the realist notion that the world has an intrinsic nature independently of human accounts of it, which for Rorty is tantamount to acknowledging the divine, and to reject all notions of knowledge as representing or expressing such a world. But if he were really serious about de-divinization he would welcome the deanthropomorphization or de-humanisation of nature as a step the crucial step on the road to de-divinisation (p. 33, my

07:03:23:07:10

Page 10

Page 11

Introduction

xi

emphasis). For any anthroporealism necessarily generates a transcendent realism; in illicitly fusing human being and being, it splits us off from a true understanding of being as ontologically stratied, thus generating ssion or dualism, as faith or caprice or poetic redescription are substituted for scientic understanding of the world. The resulting unstable compromise formation will shortly be dubbed by Bhaskar the irrealist ensemble.11 The next big step on the road to de-divinisation, we can see in retrospect, will then be the idea of meta-Reality. As Seo MinGyu has brilliantly demonstrated, only when human beings both see themselves and act as a contingently emergent part of the cosmic totality anthropocosmically and not as in any way split off from it, is de-anthropomorphization carried through to a denitive conclusion; and this is the prospect that the philosophy of meta-Reality holds out.12 While it could be said that this leads to re-divinization (as an aspect of reenchantment and non-duality) in the sense that it accommodates belief in the divine as well as a secular spirituality, it utterly dispenses both with the transcendent realism generated by the Rortian dialectic of de-divinization (p. viii) that splits us off from being and with the externalization and divinization of knowledge generated by the ontic fallacy, and is thoroughly this-wordly in orientation and maximally inclusive. The development of this central anti-anthropic argument involves pursuing an array of subsidiary themes: that Rorty is committed to a positivist account of natural science and the natural world, erecting a Nietzschean superstructure (as a super-idealist epistemology) . . . on a Humean-Hempelian ontological base (p. 38); that this replicates the Kantian resolution of the third antinomy: we are fully determined as material bodies but free as discursive subjects who can redescribe and reinvent the world and our selves at will; that Rortys anthropomorphism cannot sustain an adequate account of human agency or of freedom (as involving inter alia emancipation from real and scientically knowable specic constraints rather than merely the poetic redescription

07:03:23:07:10

Page 11

Page 12

xii

Introduction

of an already-determined world [pp. viiiix]); and that nally, there is an antinomy within the antinomy as Rorty in his later work distinguishes private perfection (irony) from public pragmatism (morality). A late-coming ideologue of the Cold War, he denes morality as we-intentions, where we are the leisured, educated policy-makers of the North Atlantic bourgeoisie (p. 143). In the course of developing these theses Bhaskar registers important metatheoretical advances in the areas of the self, reference and negativity, to which I now turn. In The Possibility of Naturalism, the human person or self had been thematized as a decentred disunity for which psychic unity is an accomplishment . . . not . . . a presupposition of any science of psychology, but whose subjectivity and agency are nonetheless transcendentally real, not ideal.13 Rortys account of the self sets itself against all notions of a centred and transcendental self , arguing that the self is no more than a network of beliefs, desires and emotions with nothing behind it . . . a network that is constantly reweaving itself (pp. 1045). Such a view, Bhaskar is quick to point out, presupposes a self that does the reweaving in addition to the self that is the weaving, thus replicating in the domain of subjectivity the split between anthroporealism and an ineffable, transcendent realism and failing to overcome the antinomies that awed the work of Kant and of Sartre (p. 108). This line of thought leads on to the thematization of a transcendentally real or essential or alethic self or groundstate in the later philosophy, in a tripartite conception of the person as comprising an illusory atomistic ego, a stratied embodied personality and a transcendentally real self. In his account of reference Rorty maintains that there is no philosophically signicant difference between fact and ction, thus reducing science to just another mode of storytelling. Bhaskar shows, in a discussion that is highly germane to a critical realist theory of representation,14 that this (con)fusion results proximately from failure to acknowledge and/or disambiguate distinct forms of reference, and in particular conversational reference (c ref) and practical reference (p ref).

07:03:23:07:10

Page 12

Page 13

Introduction

xiii

Conversational reference is to whatever conversation is about, whether what it is about is present or absent, whether communication is successful or not, and whether its verbal means are accurate or inaccurate, or attributively true or false. Practical reference, which is an aspect of epistemic access to erstwhile representation-transcendent objects (entities that exist and persist whether or not they are known or appear in a linguistic account [p. 124]), is to what humans discover in the intransitive dimension via a theory-led material practice (p. 122). It establishes a physical relationship or link between the discoverers and what is discovered, meeting either a perceptual or a causal criterion, or both, for attributing reality, and thus satisfying the axiom of reality: whatever is p referred to must be real. Conversational reference, for example if it is to hypothetical or ctional entities, need not satisfy the axiom of reality; although they can be referred to within discourse and have a certain reality at that level, cts (Bhaskars term for brute fabrications) clearly do not satisfy it. Moreover, contrary to Rorty, for whom we refer to whatever we think we are referring to, any act of reference may fail. Rortys whole concern is to show that reference is a pointless philosophers notion, but his superidealist or radical constructivist denegation of the intransitive dimension enmeshes him in the very foundationalist problematic he is critiquing. For what could be more fundamentalist, dogmatic and non-fallibilist . . . than a notion on which thinking one is ing and ing amount to one and the same thing, one on which thinking that one is referring to X guarantees that one is? This is the super-idealist mirror image . . . of the positivist ontic fallacy that he himself deplores (pp. 11214). To be is to be described. The discussion includes an astute assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the descriptivist and essentialist or causalist theories of reference, concluding, in the spirit of the critical realist embrace,15 that properly modied, the descriptivist and essentialist theories are better viewed as complementary to each other, stressing different moments of [the] dialectic [of scientic discovery], than as rivals (p. 121).

07:03:23:07:10

Page 13

Page 14

xiv

Introduction

This whole discussion takes Bhaskar very close to distinguishing three different levels of negation that will shortly enable him denitively to break the link between reference and (positive) existence, providing the key to unlocking the problem of the not in Dialectic.16 Most of the elements of the later discussion are already present, and in particular the idea that the real non-being of (say) Hamlet at the level of ctional discourse is different from the real non-being of phlogiston demonstrated in the transitive process of scientic enquiry, which in turn is different from real non-being or absence simpliciter in the intransitive dimension (e.g. the absence of something from its spacetime region [pp. 113, 126]). All that is lacking here is the conceptual apparatus adopted in Dialectic from R. M. Hare (the tropic, the neustic and the phrastic) that was necessary for keeping these levels in view and clearly revealing the reality of absence ontologically.17 The discussion introduces two of the main declensions of absence, real negation and radical negation, but, as a note in Dialectic explains, in a way that their later usage transposes.18 As the same note also explains, the epistemological question of our criteria for the reality of absence is not yet clearly distinguished from the ontological question of whether, for example, a thing is, quite independently of us, absent (distanciated or non-existent), not there although an ontological understanding of absence is emphatically present; nor is it noticed that reality can be ascribed to absence on a perceptual as well as a causal criterion. Most importantly, the discussion also introduces the concept of ontological monovalence to describe the view (itself described as pure dogma) that reality is purely positive. This was to become the centrepiece of the Bhaskarian metacritique of the western philosophical tradition, and Bhaskar immediately puts it to work, in effect, on Rorty, who holds that the problem of the one and the many . . . is the one great problem of philosophy, overlooking the problem of the one and its negation or other that has historically circumscribed it (pp. 1267).19 (2.0) In addition to presenting and contextualizing critical

07:03:23:07:10

Page 14

Page 15

Introduction

xv

realism, Section Two, For Critical Realism, Chapter 9, Critical realism in context, presents a brief critique of Habermas (p. 142) and recapitulates the critique of Rorty (p. 143), taken as emblematic of contemporary critical theory and postmodernism, respectively; and underlines the special afnity of critical realism and Marxism. It registers no signicant new developments in Bhaskars thought but once more demonstrates his gift for distilling the essence of his philosophy in a clear way. (2.1) The rst appendix to Section Two, Social theory and moral philosophy, claries and develops Bhaskars revolutionary thesis, rst outlined in The Possibility of Naturalism and explored in depth in Scientic Realism and Human Emancipation, that the conventional view that facts and values belong to different realms is completely untenable and that social theory just is moral philosophy but as science (p. 145). The account underlines two important points that are frequently overlooked or misunderstood, even by friendly exegetes:20 (i) that, while a transition from explanatory theories to values is a matter of logical entailment if the theories can demonstrate and account for false beliefs, the converse does not hold: no values other than commitment to truth21 necessarily enter into social (or natural) scientic conclusions (practical and evaluative considerations causally predispose but do not entail theoretical and factual ones (p. 151, my emphasis), and it is this asymmetry of logical entailment that makes a rational fact/ value and theory/practice helix possible; and (ii) that the transition from facts to values is buttressed by a transcendental argument: it is a transcendentally necessary condition of every rational practice, which presupposes the removal of deep necessary falsity where it can be shown to exist the false grounds for mistaken beliefs (pp. 1556). Anticipating both the emancipatory axiology of Dialectic and the emphasis on the importance of self-change for energizing transformative agency in the philosophy of meta-Reality, the discussion also introduces the concepts of the anti-naturalistic fallacy; transformed transformative praxis involving the unity of auto- and alloplastic moments; the DET model (of normative

07:03:23:07:10

Page 15

Page 16

xvi

Introduction

change) (description, explanation, transformation); and the DEA model of emancipation (or practical problem resolution) (diagnosis, explanation, action) (pp. 153, 15860).22 All in all, there is no better starting point than this appendix for anyone wishing to come to grips with Bhaskarian ethics. (2.2) The second appendix, Marxist philosophy from Marx to Althusser, builds on Bhaskars earlier reconstruction of Marx as a critical realist to pinpoint, transcend and partially explain the dichotomies within Marxist philosophy (p. 162), and then uses this as a backdrop for a critical assessment of Althussers achievement as a Marxist philosopher. Like the dictionary entry on which it builds (which I have commented on elsewhere23), but in more detail, the essay lays bare the pervasive irrealism of the Marxist philosophical tradition, the very considerable degree to which it has continued to be ensnared within the bourgeois paradigm of enlightenment: its dialectic has remained cast in an essentially idealist mould and its materialism expressed in a fundamentally empiricist form. This is an index of the philosophical lag of Marxism behind Marx (which still obtains today and helps to explain why critical realism has not struck many chords in the renaissance that the Marxist tradition is currently enjoying, though there are signs that this will change) (p. 168). Although, of the western Marxists, Theodor Adorno, with his emphasis on the irreducibility of objectivity to subjectivity (p. 176), has probably been a more important inuence overall on Bhaskar, Althusser is singled out for special tribute here because, although tending to err in the opposite (anti-humanist) direction, purchas[ing] structure at the price of praxis and the possibility of any (non-voluntaristic, non-individualistic) scientic discourse about human emancipation (p. 183), in a critical realist appropriation his work helps to redress the neglect or denegation, within the Marxist tradition, of the intransitive dimension of objectivity in favour of the transitive dimension of practice (p. 165).24 The writing of Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom had the desired effect. Shortly after completing it, the pieces of the

07:03:23:07:10

Page 16

Page 17

Introduction

xvii

puzzle of negativity fell into place, revealing being as a gure in a ground of absence and itself shot though with negativity, and triggering the storm of creativity that produced Dialectic. The second volume of the projected three-volume metacritique of the philosophical tradition, Kant, Hegel and Marx, never saw the light of day, nor is it likely to given Bhaskars current commitments. The fate of the third, Philosophy and the Dialectic of Emancipation, is more complex. While never published under that title, its envisaged subject matter is more than covered in Dialectic and Plato Etc., so there is a sense in which it has after all materialized and in which Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom is the rst of a three-volume study embracing Dialectic and Plato Etc. Certainly, written in the lull before the storm, its mood and tone resemble those of Plato Etc., composed in the ensuing calm; and it points forward to that work in ways I have tried to indicate. What shines through above all is its assured commitment to science and truth in an age in which philosophy had largely turned her back on these. Elegantly recapitulating and developing the philosophy that was about to critically realize dialectic25 and itself be dialecticized, it speaks a lucid and profound philosophical version of the language of depth-strugglers for freedom everywhere.

Mervyn Hartwig May 2010 notes

1 See Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig, The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective (London: Routledge, 2010), 117 19. 2 Roy Bhaskar, Rorty, Realism and the Idea of Freedom, in Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (and Beyond), ed. Alan R. Malachowski, 198232 (London: Blackwell, 1990); reproduced in Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, with an introduction by Mervyn Hartwig (London: Routledge [1989] 2010),

07:03:23:07:10

Page 17

Page 18

xviii

Introduction

3 4 5

6 7

8 9

ch. 8. This essay was commissioned for Reading Rorty and written in 1989. See Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 182. R. Bhaskar, Theory of knowledge, in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. T. Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); reprinted in Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, ch. 7 3. Philosophy and the Eclipse of Reason: Towards a Metacritique of the Philosophical Tradition. Volume One, Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom; Volume Two, Kant, Hegel and Marx; Volume Three, Philosophy and the Dialectic of Emancipation. Gerald Vision, Review of Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom by Roy Bhaskar, Philosophical Books 34(3): 153. Bhaskar with Hartwig, The Formation of Critical Realism, chs 26; Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality; Roy Bhaskar, Scientic Realism and Human Emancipation, with an introduction by Mervyn Hartwig (London: Routledge, [1986] 2009); Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, with an introduction by Mervyn Hartwig (London: Routledge, [1975] 2008). Andrew Colliers Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskars Philosophy (London: Verso, 1994) remains an excellent introduction to the works of this period, notwithstanding that it did not have the advantage of the perspective afforded by the subsequent development of dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of meta-Reality. For a brief account of the Bhaskarian theory of metacritique, see my introduction to Bhaskar, Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution (London: Routledge, [1994] 2010). For a more detailed critique of Rortys philosophy from a critical realist perspective see Gideon Calder, Rortys Politics of Redescription (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). While Calder fails to capitalize fully on Bhaskars critique or indeed assess it or acknowledge it other than in a eeting way, and makes no attempt to justify his critical realist alternative philosophically, he does build a powerful, immanently critical case against Rortys historicised positivism (p. 52). For an interesting critical realist assessment of Calders study, marred however by the quaint notion that critical realism fails to say how scientic knowledge may grasp the intransitive domain (p. 327) a view that entirely overlooks its epistemological dialectic see Justin Cruickshank, Some realistic considerations on the death of philosophy, Journal of Critical Realism 7(2): 2008, 31429.

07:03:23:07:10

Page 18

Page 19

Introduction

xix

10 In Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (Cambridge: Polity, 2005) Patrick Baert, who devotes one of seven chapters to critical realism, asserts that Bhaskars critique of Rorty in Rorty, Realism and the Idea of Freedom is hostile (p. 146, n4), but neglects to engage with its arguments. Baerts supercial understanding of original critical realism commits the error of assimilating critical realism to the spectator theory of knowledge (with its attendant correspondence theory of truth), whereby knowledge is representational rather than active, a picture rather than an action (p. 104) a view that entirely overlooks Bhaskars analysis of the transitive process of science or any learning episode as work or praxis (a social process) and his endorsement in the present work of Rortys critique, so far as it goes, of the epistemological or representational problematic. (It must be said, however, that while there is no warrant for this in Bhaskar, there is some within a certain strand of critical realism: see Mervyn Hartwig, 2009, Orthodox critical realism and the critical realist embrace [Journal of Critical Realism 8(3): 23357]. In Patrick Baert and Peter Manicas, A social theory dialogue, Journal of Critical Realism 7(2): 23575, there is little to disabuse Baert of his error). Equally problematically, Baert asserts that critical realism is the purest expression of a desire to establish unchanging foundations of . . . [a] science of the social (p. 153) and conates Bhaskars view that there is a logic of scientic discovery with espousal of unity of scientic method (see especially pp. 13940). Baert mentions, but does not discuss, the dialectical deepening of critical realism. Where critical realism is concerned, Baert signally fails to follow his own advice to understand other viewpoints in the strongest way (p. 154). 11 Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Routledge, [1993] 2008, with an introduction by Mervyn Hartwig, 233. 12 Seo MinGyu, Bhaskars philosophy as anti-anthropism: a comparative study of Eastern and Western thought, Journal of Critical Realism 7(1) 2008, 528. The standard construal of realism as involving cosmocentrism rather than anthropocosmism, endorsed by Kieran Cashell (Reality, representation and the aesthetic fallacy: critical realism and the philosophy of C. S. Peirce, Journal of Critical Realism 8.2 (2009): 13571, pp. 1412), fails to register the constellational containment of the human transitive dimension within ontology that Cashell himself importantly calls attention to.

07:03:23:07:10

Page 19

Page 20

xx

Introduction

13 Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (London: Routledge, [1979] 1998), p. 113. 14 See Cashell, Reality, representation and the aesthetic fallacy. With the aid of Peircean semiotics, Cashell brilliantly teases out and nesses the realist theory of representation strongly implicit in Bhaskars work and develops an incisive critique of the (post)structuralist alternative. Pace Baert (see note 9, above), this theory does not align Bhaskar with the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational, knowledge as representational and the mental as privileged and even incorrigible critiqued by Rorty and explicitly opposed by Bhaskar (pp. 312). Of course, on Baerts Rortian view, no theory of representation is possible, only redescription. 15 See Bhaskar with Hartwig, The Formation of Critical Realism, ch. 4. 16 See ibid., 11718. 17 Bhaskar, Dialectic, 4041. 18 Bhaskar, Dialectic, 7n. 19 Cashell demonstrates that the (post)structuralist account of representation, more generally, privileges presence over absence and that absence is central to Bhaskars realist theory of representation a theory on which, since the practice of representation constitutionally depends on the absence of the referent for its representational efcacy, this efcacious absence actually becomes a guarantor of its [the referents] transcendence of representation (p. 160, original emphasis). 20 E.g. Alan Norrie, Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice (London: Routledge 2010), 12833. 21 That truth is a good cannot be seized on as a concealed value premise to rescue the autonomy of value from factual discourse, without destroying the distinction between the two, the distinction that it is a point of the objection to uphold (p. 158). 22 The concepts of the anti-naturalist fallacy and transformed transformative praxis are also deployed in Section One. The former is directed against Rorty (pp. 35, 134), the latter draws on Rortys celebration of creative radical self or society redescriptions (p. 76). 23 See my introduction to Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality. 24 Contrary to the assessment of Robert Resch in Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), though signicantly inuenced by Althusser, Bhaskar

07:03:23:07:10

Page 20

Page 21

Introduction

xxi

was never an Althusserian (Bhaskar with Hartwig, The Formation of Critical Realism, p. 39). 25 I am indebted to Alan Norrie for this way of putting the matter.

07:03:23:07:10

Page 21