A Point of Departure

To begin to explore Bhaskar's meta-Reality, it's important to know that this philosophy absorbs/transcends the philosophy Critical Realism (CR). It makes since, then, to start by glossing over some of the main tenets of CR. To help with this, I'm invoking the words of Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier, and Douglas Porpora from their book Transcendence: Critical Realism and God. I've made several words in these quotes bold because they are critical realism watchwords.

CR is characterized by ontological realism:

Ontological realism asserts the ontologically objective existence of reality, independent of our beliefs about it... Since the downfall of positivism, it has become almost universally acknowledged that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, knowledge that is in any sense value-free or theory-neutral. Along with almost everyone else today, we agree that all knowledge is value-laden and theory-laden... It may be that, epistemically, we can only know the world through concepts of our own making, but within our own concepts, we must always make an ontological distinction between what we believe exists independently of us, and what does not. Otherwise, we simply conclude that the universe is coterminous with our knowledge of it. To avoid this conflation, critical realism insists on an epistemological distinction between what it calls the transitive dimension (our beliefs or knowledge claims about the world), and the intransitive dimension (what the world is actually like apart from us). 2

CR is characterized by judgmental rationality:

[A] second premise of critical realism is the ever present possibility for 'judgmental rationality' about the world. Judgmental rationality means that we can publicly discuss our claims about reality, as we think it is, and marshal better or worse arguments on behalf of those claims. By comparatively evaluating the existing arguments, we can arrived at reasoned, though provisional, judgments about what reality is objectively like: about what belongs to that reality and what does not... We often reach a point where the arguments for certain claims are so strong that we are ready to consider the case as being virtually settled. In such cases, we consider ourselves to have arrived at what critical realists call alethia or alethic truth, the truth of reality as such. 2

It is important also to note that critical realism has always been end-oriented. And while other proponents have been less specific, Bhaskar frequently uses the term "eudaimonistic society" which can be defined as "universal human flourishing" where "the free flourishing of each is the condition for the free flourishing of all." The idea is that human beings flourish when they are emancipated from false beliefs promulgated within the transitive dimension of reality. To put this in layman's terms, there are bad things within culture. When we admit that we aren't fully constrained by our culture, that we can see past the "reality" that has been spoonfed to us by mother culture and become aware of the prejudices and irrationalities inherent within our culture, we have the power to not only liberate ourselves from these prejudices, but to bring these insights back into our culture and liberate humanity as a whole.

This has been an inordinately long post, and if you've made it this far, you have my gratitude. But I hope you can see why CR is appealing to me. My next post will be about how specifically meta-Reality departs from CR.