Why we need critical realism

"Humanity faces huge challenges, amounting in many cases to crisis, on all four planes of social being: the plane of material transactions with nature; the plane of social interactions between humans; the plane of social structure sui generis; and the plane of the stratification of the embodied personality. An adequate response to these multiple and interlocking challenges will entail a wholesale rejection of the philosophical discourse of modernity, pivoting as it does on an atomistic egocentricity and an abstract universality, and its legacy. To achieve the rejection of the philosophical discourse of modernity depends upon the full development of an alternative philosophy, such as critical realism or an equivalent."

 

In terms of the philosophy of critical realism, addressing the global crisis depends on the full development of critical realism's earlier stages, namely dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality, alongside the philosophy of science, social science and ethics of basic critical realism; as well as the full development of its later stages, namely the development of the critical realist ontology through its seven levels of successive deepening, so as to embrace, for instance, referential detachment and alethic truth, absence, negativity and change, internal relations and concrete universality = singularity, a dialectic of freedom and solidarity (and of shedding and reconciliation), reflexivity and inwardness, re-enchantment and non-duality. This will require distinguishing critical realism from other forms of realism, including other forms of critical realism, which do not fully reject the discourse of modernity.  Such a philosophy will inform deep research and emancipatory practice; and it will be squarely based upon the principles of universal solidarity and axial rationality. It will be oriented to the abolition of oppressive relations and heteronomies; and it will envisage the re-embedding of the social structure and more generally four planar social being in its deep infrastructure, from which it has become so dislocated."

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Roy Bhaskar, abstract for his keynote address for the 2012 IACR Conference at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Emphasis by Website editor.