Roy Bhasker, Andrew Collier and Alan Norrie (1998) 'Dialectic and Dialectical Critical Realism' section, in, Margaret Archer, Roy Bhasker, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, Alan Norrie, eds., Critical Realism: Essential Readings, London: Routledge, pp. 559-739.


Combining Philosophy and the human sciences, the term 'critical realism' is associated with the work of Roy Bhasker following the publication of his A Realist Theory of Science (1975). Critical realism might be subdivided into four main areas of interest: transcendental realism, critical naturalism, the theory of explanatory critique and the dialectic. I am most interested in his application of the dialectical method but will try to summarise the other categories briefly first (although they require more thorough explanation really as they are based on complex philosophical and scientific principles).

The 'critical realist' partly draws upon the idea of 'transcendental realism' in which a critique is mounted against positivist conceptions of science rife in the early twentieth century (closely associated with 'hermeneutics' in opposition to positivism). Firstly, the critique is based on a number of historical sources including Karl Popper who argued that it was falsification not verification that lay the foundations for scientific method. Secondly, historians and sociologists of science, like Thomas Kuhn, had emphasised the social processes involved in scientific endeavour. Finally, it was influenced by the work of Wittgenstein that emphasised the mutable character of facts in science. Following a vertical or theoretical realism, scientific discovery could be seen to follow a certain dynamic logic that is revealed progressively. In addition, a horizontal or 'transfactual realism' was additionally necessary to sustain the universality of the workings of generative mechanisms or laws. Bhasker explains: 
'Laws, then, and the workings of nature have to be analysed dispositionally as the powers, or more precisely tendencies, of underlying generative mechanisms which may on the one hand - the horizontal aspect - be possessed unexercised, exercised unactualized, and actualized undetected or unperceived; and on the other - the vertical aspect - be discovered in an ongoing irreducibly empirical open-ended process of scientific development.' (1998: xii)
Thus, he argues for the presence of structures and events (because science is stratified like nature) as well as open and closed systems (that differentiate data). 

Whereas western thinking has been dominated by dualisms such as the mind and body (or nature and society), 'critical naturalism' sought to overcome these dichotomies by studying each in the same manner. For instance, mind was simply seen to be an emergent property of matter (and society was considered in the same manner as nature) - not opposite to it. In the dichotomy between positivism and hermeneutics, causal explanation is opposed to interpretive understanding - the realms of physics and history for instance. Bhasker explains how structuralism and functionalism follow a positivist approach, whereas phenomenology follows a hermeneutic tradition. Some commentators, for example Max Weber and Jurgen Habermas, have attempted to combine these positions, and post-structuralism adds further theoretical complications. 

Critical realists, on the other hand, see both positivist and hermeneutic positions as sharing a false perspective on natural science. They propose a 'critical and non-reductionist, naturalism, based upon a transcendental realist account of science and, as such, necessarily respecting (indeed grounded in) the specificity and emergent properties of the social realm' (Bhasker, 1998: xiv). As a result, this view considers society as both the condition and outcome of human agency, and human agency both reproduces and transforms society: 
'Social structure, then, is both the ever-present condition and the continually reproduced outcome of intentional human agency' (Bhasker, 1998: xvi). 
Humans agents are actively able to transform society, and yet are simultaneously constrained by society.

The 'theory of explanatory critique' refutes 'Hume's law' that the causal transition from fact to evaluation is inadmissible given that values are embedded in scientific discourse itself. Put another way: 'the theory of explanatory critique opens up the exciting possibility that we may be able to discover values, where beliefs prove to be incompatible with their own true explanation' (Bhasker, 1998: xviii). It presents parallels between the laws of nature and the social world in place of dichotomies. 

It is the dialectical aspect that is of relevance to this study, first initiated in Dialectic: Pulse of Freedom (1993). The objectives are ambitious to say the least, in enriching critical realism, developing a general theory of dialectics that extends beyond Hegelian thinking, and to form a critique of Western philosophy. It argues that Hegelian thinking is closed rather than open-ended, and that Marx never fully describes scientific realism. The dialectic in Marx is scientific, as it explains the contradictions in society in terms of the contradictory relations generating them as historical (rooted in the changes of the circumstances described), critical (demonstrating historical conditions) and systematic (tracing the historical conditions back to the mode of production) (Bhasker, 1998: xxi). Bhasker explains the Hegelian 'rational kernal' as a process of better knowing or learning through the dialectical process of greater critical depth. It generates what is already implicit but not explicitly articulated and by repairing some inadequacy. The Hegelian 'mystical shell' is the 'absence of the concept of determinate absence, and with it of uncancelled contradiction, open totality and ongoing transformative praxis' (1998: xxii). Dialectics in this way can be seen as the removal of absence towards a more total state of freedom: 'Dialectical contradictions are mutually exclusive internally related oppositions, conveying tendencies to change.' (Bhasker, 1998: xxiii) 

All this begins to come together in describing a transformative praxis. This is causal but requires an absence, is also subject to social structure, and requires a critique of duality with an understanding of emergence. The explanation in the introduction to the Bhasker book is far more complex and convoluted. Take the following quote as an example describing the dialectical approach of the critical realist applied to absence that is manifest in desire:

'Then, by the logic of dialectical universalizability, we are driven to absent all dialectically similar constraints, and then to absent constraints as such in virtue of their being dialectically similar; and finally to engage, on the basis of the progressive generalization of the concept of freedom to incorporate flourishing and potentialities for development, and the negative generalization of constraint to include ills and remediable absences generally, in the totalizing depth praxis that would usher in the eudaemonistic or good society, which in this way can be shown to be already implicit in the most elemental desire.' (Bhasker, 1998: xxiv)

[Oh dear, yet] Interestingly it is desire that holds the potential for emancipation in Bhasker's statement (evoking Deleuze and Guattari). Bhasker sees Marx as lacking methodological rigour and so attempts to supplement his insights on emancipation and praxis. Critical realism thus uses dialectic thinking both in terms of argument and immanent critique (epistemologically) but also to describe the dynamic of conflict and the mechanism of change (ontologically). This explanation is clearly adopted from Hegel who described the dialectic as the logical process of reason and 'the dynamo of this process, the method, practice or experience of determinate negation' (1998: 576).
 
In Bhasker's terms, the concept of 'absence' is crucial to this in a process of absenting constraints or 'absenting absences' in such a way that the negativity is a prerequisite of positivity (1998: 562; he cites Gšdel in thius connection in that absence implies incompleteness that leads to greater completeness, 1998: 589). This is what Hegel calls the 'grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative' (in Bhasker, 1998: 580). The negative does not simply cancel the positive but reveals the logic that 'a genus always contains, explicitly or proleptically, its own differentiae; [...] negation always leads to a new richer determination - this is transformative negation - so imparting to categories and forms of life an immanent dynamic and to their conflict an immanent resolution rather than a mutual nullification' (Bhasker, 1998: 580). Dialectics contributes to the gradual elimination of absences in this way. This is the power of negative thinking. The speculative reasoning of dialectics is necessarily generative.

Without this approach, centrism, endism, and other fundamentalisms will dominate in what Bhasker calls 'irrealist dialectics' (1998: 598). Conversely, dialectics seen in Bhasker's way opens up the fixity of the subject or the 'propositional form' and becomes the 'great loosener' permitting 'empirical "open texture"' and structural fluidity and interconnectedness' (1998: 594; in a Marxian-Bakhtinian fashion). The positive sense of absence or of the negative is characterised in terms of emergence. Emergence, for Bhasker, is the generation of new possibilities, a 'quantum leap: matter as creative or autopoietic' (Bhasker, 1998: 564). It is dialectical contradiction that allows connections to both operate separately and as part of a whole or totality - Bhasker describes these as 'intra-actively changing embedded ensembles' in the domain of totality (1998: 566). In this way the here and now is characterised by the influence of the outside and the past in such a way that social phenomenon can be seen to contain emergent properties.

Emergence describes the creative, autopoietic operation wherein new properties are 'generated out of pre-existing material forms from which they could have been neither induced or deduced'. This is the quantum leap Bhasker described earlier that produces 'irreducible real novelty' and goes beyond Hegelianism that is simply too linear and teleological (1998: 599). Marx, like Hegel, is too concerned with internal and linear negation for Bhasker. Here, and in general description, the materialist dialectical contradictions lead necessarily to a replaced and better society. Instead, Bhasker describes the world as an open system: in his words, as an 'open-systemic entropic totality, in which results [...] are neither autogenetically produced nor even constellationally closed, but the provisional outcome of a heterogeneous multiplicity of changing mechanisms, agencies and circumstances' (1998: 600). Emergence suggests non-causal, non-teleological formations that entails 'the possibilities of overlapping, intersecting, condensing, elongated, divergent, convergent and even contradictory rhythmics (causal processes)' (1998: 604). Bhasker conceptualises agency in similar terms of incompleteness or insufficient totality or absence that drives the dialectic, and it is his concept of 'transformative agency' that characterises his work as 'extra-Hegelian dialectics' (1998: 638).