Slowing Down

The pace of my read-through of _meta-Reality_ has been slow, due to the fact that other things have demanded my attention, such as the launch of The Critical Realism Network, which is intended to be a blogging network for CR. I'm also in somewhat of a conundrum, as my request for an extension of my inter-library loan for this book was denied, and it is already overdue. I found a used copy on Amazon for $10, and it will arrive in a week or so.

I am also debating the value of this project. What I've gathered from my few readers is that even talking about meta-Reality (meta-meta-Reality?), my (and Bhaskar's) language is too "jargonated" -- it causes mental indigestion. My aim through this blog is to take ideas and expose them to the air; if no one gets it or cares, what's the point? I'm considering carrying on, but doing so rather slowly, and wording things in such a way that someone with no exposure to philosophy would be able to follow. What do you think?

I'll start this new mode by exploring Bhaskar's Principle of the Inexorability of Ontology.

What? OK, ontology is typically used to refer to a concept of what actually exists. For instance, if you were a Christian, you might say that your "ontology" includes an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God; and an earth that is unique among the planets of the universe in that it contains human beings for whom Jesus Christ died in order to save from damnation. If you were an atheist, you might say that your ontology is comprised of a universe which, at some point in the distant past, was compressed into a super-heated, super-dense "state" which then exploded and continues to expand; and that life on earth is a beautiful, elaborate result of chance and causality; and that there's no good reason for us to be alone in the universe.





In recent philosophy, it has become out-of-fashion to say anything about what exists, mostly because you can never make an objective statement. Postmodernism concluded that every iota of knowledge in your brain is slanted--filtered through cultural lenses, and oriented around your core beliefs. So the mantra became "I'm OK, you're OK." Since no one really had any ground to stand on for claiming that a particular belief was wrong, we learned to tolerate instead of argue. We all became very humble in our beliefs. We learned to preface everything with "I'm not sure, but..." and "In my opinion..."

What Bhaskar says in the second chapter of meta-Reality is that

we must become self-conscious about how we conceptualise being or the nature of the world and how it is conceptualised in contemporary societies, and consider whether their (and our) conceptualisations, be they explicit or implicit, are in fact right. (41)

But how? If everything we think is slanted, how do we judge our/other's concepts? Bhaskar's breakthrough, his radical claim is that human beings have the capacity to transcend their "slant":

[It] is not true that there is no way of getting at the world independently of our beliefs--thus we can sense, touch, intuit, experience the world in all sorts of ways independently of and without belief or even thought. We have direct, intuitive access to reality.

I have been drawn to Bhaskar specifically because of this claim, and am exploring this book because I'd like to know exactly how we transcend our subjectivity.

What he means by the "inexorability of ontology" is that if you play the postmodern game and just refuse to state what it is you believe (even to yourself), you're still functioning on the assumption that something exists (otherwise you would have long since stopped functioning altogether)--it's just that you've chosen not to evaluate these assumptions, and will continue to stumble through the darkness willy-nilly, hoping you're not wasting your life. Whether you like it or not, you believe something about the world, and you might as well come clean.