Date: 	Sat, 4 Jan 1997 12:13:50 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: BHA: WHITHER CRITICAL REALISM?


As another new participant in these discussions,  I just wanted to say a few
words about Ralph's challenge to the list to define what is new about
critical realism and how it relates to postructuralism/postmodernism. Unlike
Ralph, however, I have a somewhat more ambivalent atttiude towards postism,
and I think it may be related to how I interpret the relationship between CR
and old-fashioned materialism.

I think it is wrong to equate the two, if by materialism one intends to
affirm the necessary (a priori) primacy of the material in conditioning and
determining the course of social evolution. First, I would just note that,
as I understand it from second-hand accounts of Bhaskar's recent positions,
he advocates the primacy of absence. This would seem to me to be the exact
opposite of a primacy of the material, so that at least in terms of the
Bhaskar's own CR there would seem to be grounds for distinguishing it in a
radical fashion from old-fashioned materialism. 

Of course, I could be very wrong about Bhaskar's position, and I know too
little about it to really be able to judge it. Nor do I want to argue
through reference to canonical texts. The real question is, should we argue
for the primacy of the material? The one sense in which there is a kind of
primacy of the material is the obvious one that we are in fact material,
physical, biological beings, and that material sustenance is necessary to
our survival. There can be no thought without the neuro-chemical processes
that sustain it. There can be no such processes unles we can sustain our
biological beings.

But how far does this take us? It is also obvious that there are many other
factors besides material well-being that are necessary to our flourishing.
And, it is also true that our very survival can depend on factors that have
nothing to do with the materiality of our lives. We can choose to kill
ourselves for a variety of reasons. We willingly risk life and limb in the
name of gods that do not exist, and we regularly kill and maim other human
beings on entirely spurious grounds, processes which preclude any easy
identification of the direction of causality. Are there always underlying
material reasons which determine our action? Answering with a necessary
affirmative lands one on the road to reductionism, I fear.

So, while it is true that all thought supervenes on material processes, and
that the reverse is not true (not all material processes depend on mental
ones), the necessary primacy of the material should still be rejected, in my
view, because there is an ineradicable countervailing tendency to it, namely
the ability of the ideal to cause the termination of our very material lives.

Where does CR fit in? For me the link lies with one element of it, the
Transformational Model of Social Action, that Hans D. suggested was original
to Bhaskar (though I would add that there are affinities with other thinkers
as diverse as Anthony Giddens, Karel Kosik, Marshall Sahlins, Evald
Ilyenkov, and Maurice Godelier). The central premise of the TMSA is that
people and social structures are ontologically distinct entities. To me,
this implies that there is an irreducible causal element which resides in
our nature as individual, conscious, intentional beings endowed with a
capacity for understanding. The causal force of individual action can never
be reduced to (i.e. fully determined by) the material (either social or
natural) circumstances in which we find ourselves. The question of what is
primary cannot be decided in advance, in the abstract, but is an historical
and political question to be resolved in the course of actually trying to
transform the world. I think that CR allows for this kind of conclusion
while materialism as traditionally construed resists it.

Howie Chodos



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