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Journal of Critical Realism
ISSN: 1476-7430 (Print) 1572-5138 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjcr20
Enlightened common sense: the philosophy of
critical realism
Harvey Shoolman
To cite this article: Harvey Shoolman (2017): Enlightened common sense: the philosophy of
critical realism, Journal of Critical Realism, DOI: 10.1080/14767430.2017.1340011
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2017.1340011
Published online: 07 Jul 2017.
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REVIEW
Enlightened common sense: the philosophy of critical realism, by Roy Bhaskar and
edited with a preface by Mervyn Hartwig, London, Routledge, 2016, 244 pp., £24.29
(softback), ISBN: 978-0415583794
When we learned of the death of Roy Bhaskar on 14th November 2014, the world appeared to
turn a little more slowly and more darkly. Something rare and precious had been taken from us
and those, like myself, who had never had the fortune to meet him, cleaved ever more tightly
to the books and ideas that he left as his legacy. Bhaskar ’s oeuvre is of a daunting magnitude,
with 15 substantial monographs expounding various aspects and three developmental phases
of his philosophy of critical realism. Although his admirers and philosophical epigones are not
all card-carrying devotees – some being happy to remain in one rather than all of the three
broad conceptual phases of critical realism – no one can question the depth, complexity
and innovatory power of his work. However, Bhaskar’s prose is famously difficult, due to its ten-
dency to fissiparous conceptualization, extensive architectonic divisions and sub-divisions and
a neologistic flair that approaches the status of high art. All of this is crowned by a profligate use
of acronyms that can drive neophytes to distraction and have them reaching for the nearest
available copy of Hartwig’s blessed (2007) Dictionary of Critical Realism.
What is more, many of Bhaskar’s ideas assume a background familiarity with technical
philosophical jargon accumulated over several millennia. His work therefore encompasses
the ideas of the metaphysical Greeks, the medieval scholastics, the continental idealists,
post-Hegelians, post-Heideggerians and Husserlian phenomenologists; eventually culminating
in the latest post-Fregean semantics employed by Anglo-American analytical philosophers. His
range of reference is as broad and deep as the genealogy of philosophy itself and this inevita-
bly runs the risk of alienating those coming to critical realism from other disciplines where the
words ‘epistemic’ and ‘ontological’ might as we ll be written in Sanskrit.
It is therefore, at least from a hermeneutic poin t of view, somewhat fitting that Bhaskar’s last
completed work should be an abbreviated ‘summa’ of all that has gone before. Although it is
predictably demanding, the overwhelming impression is that this is far more an ‘hommage’ to
Bhaskar’s commitment to conceptual holism and systematic reticulation than it is to any desire
to provide pedagogic clarity and simplicity of formulation for the uninitiated. Howe ver, regard-
less of the evident challenges posed by the text, what is of no doubt is that the community of
critical realists, as well the wider reading public, and above all those future students of his ideas
approaching his ideas for the first time, will be forever grateful to Bhaskar for writing this book
in the teeth of progressive heart-failure. They will be similarly grateful to Mervyn Hartwig – a
tireless and brilliant disseminator of Bhaskar’s thought – for editing it so ably.
So, what have we been given? Enlightened Common Sense (henceforth ECS in acronymic def-
erence to the author) is nothing less than a superb synthesis and relatively concise overview of
the main phases of Bhaskar’s work. It is a textual revelation of both the diachronic development
of his ideas and a synchronic conspectus of their inter-relationships. Indeed, if one were to
read this volume with the marvell ous Bhaskar/Hartwig (2010) Formation of Critical Realism:
JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM, 2017
A Personal Perspective by one’s side, one would have the perfect biographical and conceptual
introduction to the critical realist system. Mindful as I am of the journal in which this review is
appearing and the familiarity of its readers with Bhaskar’s ideas, I have no intention to preach to
the converted or to lecture to the already wise and informed. However, it might be worth
making a few points as to what it is the reasonably attentive reader will gain from a close
perusal of this volume.
In just ove r 200 pages, Bhaskar covers every aspect of his critical realist project, taking the
reader through its successive developmental and programmatic phases and culminating in an
invigorating chapter that situates critical realism in relation to the history of philosophy as a
whole. As I have already implied, though the book is very much a summa rationis of Bhaskar’s
philosophical develop ment it is not exactly a cosy vade mecum for the uninitiated. I would not
recommend this book to a neophyte without a health-warning, given the sheer density and
elevated conceptual temperature of the writing. The main advantage of this precious last
work and the reason it should be owned and regularly consulted by critical realists of all
stripes lies simply in its synoptic ambition as a tour ‘d’horizon’ of a vast conceptual landscape
that has been overwhelmingly planted, nutritiously cultivated and give n its current mor-
phology by the author himself.
Now that we have the landscape before us, ECS allows us to see what its author has wrought
and on completing a reading of the book one is left in undoubted admiration for the philoso-
phical fertility and power of Bhaskar’s mind. The reach of the book and the critical realist project
as a whole is of an ambition and conceptual audacity not seen since Hegel, and in some
respects Bhaskar exceeds the reach of Hegel himself. We begin with a new paradigmatic phil-
osophy that re-situates the activity of science within an overwhelmingly naturalistic paradigm
and are propelled forward into the antechamber of a cosmological dialecticism whose ambi-
tion is nothing less than to reify the ontological and epistemic primordiality of a systemic
holism that transcends the dualism of subject and object. We then end our philosophical
roller coaster with the detailed vision of the ‘generalised co-presence’ and psycho-physical
interconnectedness of all things. That is some ride and, I would contend, more than worth
the price of admission entailed by the concentration and dedication required of the reader.
Indeed, progressing through the pages of the book one begins to realize the enormity of the
loss philosophy has sustained by Bhaskar’s death. Beginning in the 1970s, with his attack on
Humean empiricism and the driving of ontology by epistemology, one relishes as well as
admires Bhaskar’s forensic destruction of the ‘epistemic fallacy’ that so domin ated philosophy
of science. This was accompanied by his rejection, root and branch, of the world-view that
came bundled with it; namely that there is a homogeneous, ontologically ‘flat’, unstructured
and essentially static cosmos in which all human life and ambition are conducted. Critical
realism united ‘what’ there is to know and its influence on ‘how’ we come to know and in
so doing restored a primordial human appreciation of the universe as infinitely vast,
complex, multiply stratified and a continual revelation to exp erimental probing and the
quest of the human mind to understand. ‘What does the world need to be like in order for
our experiments to generate the seemingly ambiguous diversity of results that they do?’ By
asking this seemingly innocent question, Bhaskar initiated almost a Copernican revolution
that changed the way that we understand the world. Bhaskar persuasively combined a
Kantian transcend ental argument-form with an immanent critique of scientific method in
order to give birth to the critical realist project. One of the implications of this paradigmatic
change is that scientific experimentation, and explanation, had now to be seen as a socially
and communally ‘transitive’ practise that is itself formally and substantively determined by
the existence of an often recalcitrant, protean, multi-layered and complexly ‘intransitive’ uni-
verse. Such a universe will always be ‘deeper’ and more nuanced in its causal power-generating
2 REVIEW
structure than is capturable by any one scientific or experimental question that any scientist
can ask of it. Consequently, the answers or humanly constructed ‘data’ that Nature gives
back often appear inconsistent, ambiguously diverse and redolent of further questioning
and ever more radical explanatory hypotheses to be framed. Science is progressive because
Nature is dynamically protean and heterogeneously powerful in the vast repertoire of possible
causal responses and effects it is capable of generating. If Bhaskar’s ontology was realistic, his
epistemology was relative and his hermeneutic approach, severely rational. Above all, science
must be seen as a profoundly and essentially ‘human’ activity and necessarily distinct from the
holistically stratified universe it seeks to relate to, epistemically. We simply cannot reduce the
universe to habitually conjugated patterns of anthropomorphically constructed ‘events’. ‘What
is’ cannot be reduced to ‘What I or we think it is’. Rather, science is a creative and ‘human all too
human’ activity that progresses according to the conceptual innovativeness and human artistry
with which we question nature and construct plausible causal hypotheses to explain the
phenomenal diversity that nature reveals to us. For Bhaskar, there is both an explanatory as
well as ontological ‘dialectic’ at work in the ongoing history of scientific explanation as, gradu-
ally, a continuously enriched cosmological structure is revealed to a paradigmatically shifting
human way of coming to psycho-physically understand and interact with that world.
Nature is endlessly generative of causal powers and effects, as is the human mind infinitely
constructive of hypothetical mechanisms and models designed to explain the works of those
causal powers. Nature does not simply reveal the finished bluepr int of an infinitely stratified
structure but it palpably and necessarily behaves dynamically. Our ontological constructs
must therefore embrace the concepts of ‘change’ and ‘process’ as well as those of structure
and complexity. Where you have structured complexity and an ontological dynamic you
then necessarily come face to face with the concept and reality of ‘emergence’. Thi s ontological
dynamic and the concomitant dialectical relationship between knower and known, with the
inevitable dynamic instability that implies, results in the necessary foregrounding of the impor-
tance, for Bhas kar, of the ‘social’. If science is indeed a human and therefore a social and
‘communal’ practice, then any underst anding of phenomena must include both the knower
and the way that knower comes to his or her understanding, seen as part of a viable and
rationally coherent explanatory naturalism.
ECS beautifully and parsimoniously describes and explains the three main ‘ph ases’ of critical
realism in terms of bas ic critical realism, dialectical critical realism and meta-reality, and the sub-
divisions within each phase, such as transcendental realism, critical naturalism and explanatory
critique. It includes the ‘transitional’ relationships between these phases, although emphas is is
given in the book to basic critical realism. The basic credo that Bhaskar is intent on promulgat-
ing, whether in natural philosophy or social science, is that it is the nature of the object that
determines how it should be studied by the subjective mind of the knower. This ontological and
epistemic credo contains within it the essence of the Bhaskarian world-view. As one reads
this book one is continually prodded into thinking that Bhaskar’s relation to Kant is isomorphic
to Marx’s relation to Hegel. Bhaskar’s early work literally inverted Kantian transcendentalism
and repudiates the notion that ‘how’ we are as cognitive beings itself determines and mediates
what experience, and hence knowledge, we have of a reality that must always elude us in terms
of
its ultimat e essence. Bhaskar replaces that subjective epistemic with the philosophical
understanding of a reality, the very dynamic and processual complexity of which, mediates
and determines the parameter-space within which our knowledge of reality is possible. In
other words, reality morphogenetically determines and drives our epistemology, a Copernican
inversion that reminds one inevitably of the way in which Marx found it necessary to materially
ground and concretize the Hegelian dialectic of human mind and universal spirit and so
instantiate that reciprocal dualism within the tectoni c movement of historical events and
JOURNALOFCRITICALREALISM 3
the constructed technologies which necessarily shape human consciousness and ideology. For
readers of this journal, I need not go into details of Bhaskar’s understanding of the ‘transapplic-
ability’ of critical realism from the natural to the social sciences and the ‘transformational’
model of the way in which social activity is both pre-existing and continuously changed by
human agency. The take-home message that Bhaskar’s work continually transmits to the
reader is that societies and social events are as much naturalistic components of the universal
order as are any other structured phenomena. They are equally complex and immanently labile
and are changed ‘by’ as well as transform ative ‘of’ those social scientists, politicians, civil ser-
vants, bureaucrats, technocrats, business people and plain Joes on the Clapham omnibus
that compose such social complexes. Indeed, social phenomena are even more recalcitrant
to the knowing mind than so called natural phenomena, for they are not only generatively
opaque in terms of the causal powers that produce them, but they are also deeply sensitive
contextually and hence far less amenable to the establishing of experimentally closed systema-
tic investigation. What is more, social reality is activity – and concept – sensitive as well as being
far more constrained spatio-temporally than other natural phenomena. This has the effect of
rendering any social hermeneutic as both ontologically (and consequently epistemically)
‘enfolded’ within the phenomenal envelope that hermeneutic purports to study and render
perspicuous to the human mind. For any Bhaskarian realist, verstehen is therefore a far more
delicately nuanced activity than is wissenschaft.
Another message that the reader cannot help absorbing from this book is the importance of
what Bhaskar provocatively termed ‘seriousness’ in philosophical life. Seriousness is, for
Bhaskar, a basic requirement of intellectual virtue and probity. It insists that we unite theory
and practice in a fused praxis that gives appropriate respect to the importance of the philoso-
phical quest for enlightenment. Philosophy is therefore not simply a remote armchair-bound
pursuit removed conveniently from the possibly negative and discomforting consequences
of our theorizing; but it is a practical and ultimately a utilitarian propaedeutic to the achieving
of a transformative and salvific understanding of how things actually ‘are’ between the
knowing human mind and the natural order that generated that mind. This relationship con-
tinuously fructifies the human mind as part of the very same multiply stratified and dynamic
reality that is cause and reason, both of the existence of subject and object, and of the possible
transcending of that, ultimately misplaced, duality. Though one might assume that Kant, Hegel,
Marx and Sankara are the tutelary spirits behind the genealogy of critical realism, I would also
like to suggest that Spinoza be increasing ly studied as an influence on Bhaskar given the cen-
trality of concepts such as structural dynamism, emerg ence, the mereological expressivism of
human and other modal parts to that of Nature itself, the transcending of subject and object
and the virtuousness of adequate and clear knowledge in Spinoza’s mature thinking as
revealed in his magnum opus, the Ethics.
1
In ECS (100– 1) Bhaskar does briefly describe what
he calls the ‘Spinozan Moment’ of transformative understanding in which false dualisms are
superseded and ultimately eliminated in a cognitively enhanced form of agent-praxis.
Many have found the dialectical phase of the Bhaskarian system to be difficult, rebarbatively
obscure or simply confusing and there is no doubt that both Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom
(1993) and chapter 6 of ECS make severe demands on the reader patience and attention.
However, the treatment of dialectic in ECS is definitely the more exegetically and discursively
palatable of the two alternatives. This is because ECS easily, and relatively quickly, establishes
how the dialectical phase of Bhaskar’s thought relates to what went before and what came
after. That very capabil ity brings a degree of clarity and illumination to the task of underst and-
ing this impressively detailed and conceptually innovative phase of Bhaskar’s system, for a
system it very much is; and one becomes aware, on deeper reading of ECS, of the degree to
which Bhaskarian dialectics is of a concep tual and methodological piece with basic critical
4 REVIEW