From Science to Emancipation
From Science to Emancipation: alienation and the actuality of enlightenment is the second of three books elaborating Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of metaReality, which first appeared in rapid succession in 2002.
This book contains some of the original transcripts and the questions and answers they provoked, from a variety of lectures and workshops Roy Bhaskar presented for Indian audiences before this book was first published. Because of the spontaneous and informal nature of these talks and discussions, this book continues to provide the most immediate and accessible introduction to Roy Bhaskar's philosophy as it charts his intellectual journey.
The talks recorded here have retained an immediate local but also a deeply universal interest. From Science to Emancipation provides an indispensable resource for all students of philosophy and the human sciences.
A new introduction to this edition by Mervyn Hartwig, founding editor of The Journal of Critical Realism and editor of A Dictionary of Critical Realism (Routledge, 2007), describes the context, significance and impact of From Science to Emancipation, and supplies an expert guide to its content.
Roy Bhaskar is the originator of the philosophy of critical realism, and the author of many acclaimed and influential works including A Realist Theory of Science, The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, Plato Etc., From Science to Emancipation and (with Mervyn Hartwig) The Formation of Critical Realism. He is an editor of Critical Realism: Essential Readings, Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change and Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis, and was the founding chair of the Centre for Critical Realism. He is currently World Scholar at the University of London Institute of Education and Director of the newly founded International Centre for Critical Realism located there.
From Science to Emancipation
Alienation and the actuality of enlightenment
Roy Bhaskar
First Edition published 2002
By Sage Publications
This edition first published 2012
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2012 Roy Bhaskar
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ISBN: 9780415696593 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780203696609 (pbk)
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Contents
P ART O NE
The Development of Critical Realism
P ART T WO
Debates within and about Critical Realism
P ART T HREE
En Route from Transcendental Dialectical Critical Realism to the Philosophy of MetaReality
P ART F OUR
Explorations within the Philosophy of MetaReality
From Science to Emancipation
Manifesto of MetaReality
M etaReality is a new philosophical position devised by Roy Bhaskar, originator of the influential, international and multi-disciplinary philosophy of critical realism. It accepts but goes beyond critical realism, in so far as it pinpoints the reality of non-dual states and phases of being, showing how they underpin and sustain the totality of all forms of human, and indeed all, life. Understanding metaReality is to realise the limitations of the world of duality.
Critical realism already understands reality as structured and differentiated, as in process and changing, as a totality or whole and as containing human, potentially self-conscious, transformative agency. The world that humankind has made and which we currently inhabit is a world of duality: of unhappiness, oppression and strifemore especially, it is a world in which we are alienated from ourselves, each other, the activities in which we engage and the natural world we inhabit, currently hurtling into crisis and self-destruction.
The philosophy of metaReality describes the way in which this very world nevertheless depends upon, that is, is ultimately sustained by and exists only in virtue of the free, loving, creative, intelligent energy and activity of non-dual states of our being and phases of our activity. In becoming aware of this we begin the process of transforming and overthrowing the totality of structures of oppression, alienation, mystification and misery we have produced; and the vision opens up of a balanced world and of a society in which the free development and flourishing of each unique human being is understood to be the condition, as it is also the consequence, of the free development and flourishing of all.
In developing this vision the philosophy of metaReality confirms and re-presents many aspects of the vision of the great philosophical traditions of the past, but does so in a radically new way, apt for contemporary times. We begin this process of becoming free, that is, of expanding the zone of non-duality within our lives, by becoming aware of all the elements that currently constitute them and throwing off all those elements which are inconsistent with our free, creative, loving natures. In this process we come to realise that the very world of misery and destitution we have created itself contains and is sustained by the seeds of a society of abundance, peace and fulfilment, in which we are all free to express and fulfil our essential natures.
Preface
T his book describes my journey from my presentations of critical realism in 1997, when I was already interested in and working on spiritual and transcendental questions, trying at once to relate them to my philosophical explorations and at the same time to the weaknesses and failures of socialist and more generally Left-wing politics in the west; through to the position which I called transcendental dialectical critical realism, which I articulated in my book From East to West, published in April 2000. And then the journey from that position, my first systematic attempt to integrate spirituality into the philosophical framework of critical realism, to the position which I now hold, which I have elaborated as the philosophy of metaReality.
The main difference between the philosophy of metaReality and critical realism, in all its forms, including the transcendental dialectical critical realist system articulated in
