Roy Bhaskar & Critical Realism

A brief intro to Roy Bhaskar

Ten years have passed since Roy Bhaskar's (1944 - 2014) last breath. In reflection of his work, I would like to focus key parts of his philosophy found in the dash "-" between his birth and death. Bhaskar created a particular stream of philosophical thought in a time of globalization, the threat of nuclear war, and the emerging exposure of Eastern Philosophy that faced attrition in elite academic institutions. Bhaskar is known to evolve his main tenants of critical realism over the course of decades, from an emergent social science that reified the study of society and its dialectic with individuals, to a more Eastern transcendental view of reality and our inner-subjective dualistic nature.

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His background growing up in a Theosophical household is an interesting point in personalizing his thought, later when we discuss naturalism, but it suggests the same disappointment in how a material and mechanical worldview suffocates our awareness of properly evaluating what we categorize our experiences to be. You see Roy had a problem, he started to see flaws and contradictions in the social sciences that made categorical mistakes about reality as it was taught in the upper echelons of Western academia. To this day the flaws and contradictions exist and are more financially invested across research-based institutions. This mantle of critique was taken up by many others, highlighting Bernardo Kastrup in what will be covered later under Analytical Idealism, but Roy had an approach that to this day has consequential effects on how we view the world and the way science is used to gain knowledge of it.

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I will suggest reviewing Bhaskar's Wikipedia article, but the volume of contributions he made over his body of work. Even if it did change over his career, and we can disagree with claims about reality, he was a trailblazer in academia and should be taken seriously in understanding how we know what we know to make predictions about the contents of reality. As we have learned more about the nature of reality through advancements in Quantum Physics, we have to reconcile Bhaskar's work of realism versus idealism. To start, I will let Roy introduce Critical Realism and we can go from there:

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This video did cover several points of discussion we will tackle further in the module, particularly the transformation model of social activity. Now, there are areas of disagreement that need to be adjudicated in the Critical Sustainability exploration, chief amongst them is mind as an epiphenomenal nature of matter (or matter generates mind). We will deal with that in the Metaphysics module where we cover this commonly held narrative espoused in academia and the scientific community. As mentioned later in this lesson, there is a plausible way to maintain Bhaskar's framework of Critical Realism, which maintains a particular approach to understanding science, while accepting the metaphysical position of Idealism (particularly Objective Idealism viz Kastrup). I make this point because Bhaskar became disillusioned by the "strong materialist" views held by academics and scientists towards the end of the 20th century. Bhaskar's "spiritual turn", where going against the status quo in competing philosophies of science, left him out of many consideration for major thinkers in the 20th and early 21st century. David Graeber (1961 - 2020) recognized that his personal theories evolved over close to a half centuries work of publications, but were foreign to most (academic) intellectuals and disadvantageous in our modern world (however you want to look at 2025 and the background social issues we will live through).

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To connect the dots to Sustainability, towards the end of Bhaskar's life much of his work focused on non-duality, climate change, sustainability, and promoting interdisciplinary methods of science education. Physical and Social sciences, both umbrella terms for the human endeavor of understanding nature and their place in it, comes in many fields of study. The distinctions behind the way we do science, the critiques Bhaskar made in the 1970's (Critical Realism) attempts to bridge the variety of scientific thought that respected the subjectivity and primacy of human experience against the hyper rational, metric oriented positivist/empiricist systems of sciences that gave rise to race sciences to rationalize eugenic policies around the Western scientific community. This philosophical underlabouring helps to dismiss wrong or politically motivated "sciences" that fueled some of the most atrocious behavior throughout human history while also pursuing the truth to the highest approximation possible.

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Critical Realism Holy Trinity

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In describing the figure above, we can start with the concept of philosophical underlaboring, which is of course a play on words of "under-labouring". In the study of philosophy, we shoot for the best theory of reality and learn to filter out wrong theories while trying to make it easy to digest for future study. Bhaskar was concerned with how do we improve our comprehension of reality through science and also recognize the social conditioning involved with knowledge production. These approaches tend to contradict each other without recognizing that much of the work produced in philosophy is "junk" and has not furthered our understanding of reality, but reproduce previous work, often under unexamined assertions from this cycle. This anchors a concern in every curious mind, how do we approach learning about the world when its saturated with socially produced noise? 

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Judgemental Rationality

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One concept of the Critical Realist trinity is Judgemental Rationality, which asserts that science is not arbitrary and that there are rational criteria for judging some theories as better and more explanatory than others. The human mind can account for regularities of how nature works (and try to predict it). It helps us to know more about ourselves when we understand that our knowledge of the world is conditioned on what is called the four planes of existence; material transactions with nature, social interactions between people, social structure sui generis, and the stratification of the embodied personality. We will get into the TMSA model in an upcoming lesson, but it lends itself early in engaging epistemic relativism which suggests that science has universal, objective, and unchanging set of concepts (ontological reduction base). Meaning, we need a robust framework to judge knowledge produced from our observations, whether it is in the lab or in every day activities like boycotting against the genocide of Palestinians.

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Reality is not a headset we can take off as we are in a constant state of observation of the world, despite our lack of awareness of its immediately observable features. Have you ever taken drugs? Any drug (and by extension, anything you consume) alters or impinges on your mental state. As I drink my morning coffee, known and unknown effects happen to my body. Many of us drink coffee for the caffeine, deep robust taste, to make you poop faster, or a social ritual amongst community. This is a fairly rational use of what we know through experimenting long enough with coffee to reasonably plan its consumption within your daily routine. Of course, coffee consumption does have political, economic, cultural, ecological, and ethical concerns in its means of production, these influences delude us over time (a theory I developed called the "Finance Model of Education", an additional module with Paulo Freire's work is in development at the moment of this lesson's publication), in order to regulate our social interactions, material transactions, etc. A way of applying Judgemental Rationality is to evaluate what we consume (read: what we know about the world) in order to engage in its transformation towards a more Sustainable Future. Review the following song by rapper Lowkey and reflect on the current events of our times and the financial investments individuals are forced to transact under and judge whether any of this is a rational approach towards sustainability:

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Transcendental Realism

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Bhaskar goes further in defining faults in the many empiricist worldviews (historic and emerging from Quantum mechanics) throughout his body of work in the 70's to 90's. Science was co-evolving and beginning to identify whom limited themselves to outmoded views of developing knowledge strictly from observation. Bhaskar forwards the notion of transcendental realism, which is the notion that there is a real external world independent of our individual perception. Bhaskar develops a system of knowledge production that constellates around interacting components of social factors. This extends itself beyond social interactions but also to the causal relationship nature has on the mind perceiving reality. By extension, we can account for complex phenomenas explaining simpler phenomenas (reductionism) based on our understanding of the mechanisms that structure observable experience.

Knowledge has transitive and intransitive dimensions that exceed the human being. Transitive because knowledge is socially conditioned and in opposition to solipsism, while it is also intransitive through our shared existence acting independently in the world producing knowledge corresponding to causal structures. I can toast bread and leave it on the counter for anyone to come by and make the enquiry, "who made this toast?". The knowledge produced involves the linked experiences of putting bread in a toaster, toasting it, and placing it on a plate (or just throwing it down like a slob), and leave the vicinity for the observer to ask their question. The toast did not pop out of thin air because the observer came into the room and the toast wanted to make an appearance, but the observer made the inference that it had to of been made by someone in advanced for it to rationally explain its existence alone on the counter. We can recognize regularities in the process of making toast that can rule out explanations that do not align closer to the truth, and notice we do not have to assert that toast can appear out of thin air like the 90's cartoon Ren & Stimpy's "Powdered Toast Man" because we lack an explanation in the moment. This fallacy comes up later in the hard problem of consciousness (definitely not covered in this lesson).

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Critical Naturalism

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We know then that nature emerges because of its own internal laws and causal relationships, whether we know they exist or not, and not due to the influence of deities outside of nature (naturalism). The same can be said of social interactions amongst people and planet, which is the essence of most post-Marxian thought and critical theory. Here we begin to see threads of coming together with the Trinity enabling us to extract and model knowledge between individual agency and the world at large. Critical naturalism does extend into the ethical and moral spheres. It is a given that the last century's resource extraction race (necrocapitalism, a concept we will develop later in CivicNotes) has caused a preventable climate crisis, plastic production to the point most men will have microplastics in their balls, and a global pandemic to name a few agency/dialectic relationships.

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Bhaskar continually developed the Trinity to an ethical and moral framework following the notion of critical naturalism. Due to the extensive nature of his thought process, it may be more conducive to learners to view material organized into tables by Bhaskar himself. Below I will provide materials that will help construct this Critical Realist framework and allow the reader to explore Roy Bhaskar's work in their journey towards a more ethical and moral life.

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Table: Bhaskar's Polysemy

Link: https://airtable.com/app0aSWUuqZXfghOJ/shrMk1CebiJuH88Ex

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Do we need Realism?

Revisiting the major theme