Critical realism (CR) attempts to link facts and values, so disastrously split from each other by David Hume in the 18th century and affirmed via reification of Kantian dualism with it's own suggestion of deep incompatibility between an account of action that recognises a type of moral imperative and causal explanation. Working an edge of Aristotlelian teleology, and following Marx, CR accept a distinction between man-as-s/he-happens-to-be and man-as-s/he-could-be-if-s/he-realised-an-essential-nature and begins to articulate a substrate of social interaction in which we are all involved, although we perhaps less than half realise it.
Emancipation comes through awakening ever more deeply into knowledge of the social ties that bind, and bind. Aligning facts and values, redeeming elements of social process in accordance with object domains without attempting to reduce them to an ontological truth, claiming a purpose to life in the ever deepening awakening of the sheer value of life, with an appreciation for social life, itself.
Society is proposed by Roy Bhaskar to have a form with specific modes of operation that are distinct from those that are present right now in this moment, and too society is continually reproduced in activity as an outcome of human agency. All social practices have aspects that both liberate and restrain. Bhaskar proposes four planes within which social activity takes place:
- Material transactions with nature - nature for Bhaskar includes man-made artifacts - weapons for example have a social meaning and play a role in structuring social life. CR rejects a divide between the material and the social, and insists that all human activity takes place within a material reality that must be encountered and that may be changed as a result of human action.
- Intra/intersubjective activity - this is the realm of our shared norms, our shared symbols in language.
- Social roles - for CR, we each play multiple roles in society that may be enacted in one point in time. What governs the dynamic of the role is intersubjective understanding, although intersubjective understanding in no way completely determines the role.
- Personal intersubjectivity - specific individuals will align themselves in different ways within intersubjective understandings and thus will self-determine, in the practice of roles.
As the dynamic of social life unfolds, the interplay between these four planes, in a lattice-work, changes.
Bringing Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus to this planar model of Bhaskar's gives the ground through which we come to understand the liberative potential of CR. The habitus per Bourdieu has an objective nature in social structures that shape behaviour in a social field. In personal to social relation, the power of the habitus as subjective and socio-cultural relative derives in it's thoughtlessness and habituatedness. Per Bourdieu, the habitus is 'the internalisation of reality and the externalisation of internality' (Bourdieu, 1977).
Thus there are agents, functioning in a habitus, engaged via relations, all of which produce social practices. Roles, relations structure and perhaps even understanding may function in ways that are opaque to consciousness.
Social sciences, and CR in particular, thus become essential in reclaiming the ground not only of the hermeneutic, but also of ourselves as beings. Emancipation in this model refers not to freedom from all constraints, but rather it can be understood as the transition from unwanted, unnecessary and repressive states.
We're no longer reduced to the postmodern Foucauldian notion that all knowledge is power, and knowledge is oppressive. With CR, we become born again into a loving, creative and mutually influential play, with one another, consciously forming and re-forming social connection that might heal, social connection that ultimately, liberates.
Ref:
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bhaskar, R.A., 2002, Reflections On Meta-Reality: A Philosophy for the Present, New Delhi: Sage.
No comments:
Post a Comment