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Title: Roy Bhaskar obituary Author: David Graeber Date: 4th December 2014 Language: en Topics: obituary, philosophy Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/04/roy-bhaskar
Roy Bhaskar, who has died aged 70 of heart failure, turned to philosophy
only after becoming an economics lecturer at Oxford University in the
late 1960s. Feeling that economic science had virtually nothing useful
to say about real-world issues of global wealth and poverty, he embarked
on research that led to the foundation of the philosophical school known
as critical realism.
The Oxford curriculum for PPE – philosophy, politics and economics –
provided a training for would-be politicians and civil servants who were
more likely to contain or even reinforce society’s problems than resolve
them. Roy wanted to provide the tools for understanding society’s
problems in a deeper, structural sense that might allow ways to put them
right.
Before long, he concluded that the problem ran deeper: western science
and social theory itself were based on a series of intellectual
mistakes, which created false dichotomies such as those between
individualism and collectivism, and scientific analysis and moral
criticism. The most important of these he called “the epistemic
fallacy”, arising from the conventional study of how we can know things,
or epistemology. Almost invariably, philosophers have treated the
questions “does the world exist?” and “can we prove the world exists?”
as the same. But it is perfectly possible that the world might exist and
we could not prove it, let alone be able to obtain absolute knowledge of
everything in it.
In this way, Roy argued, the two camps into which the left has been
divided – positivists, who assume that since the world does exist, we
must, someday, be able to have exact and predictive knowledge of it, and
postmodernists, who believe that since we cannot have such knowledge, we
cannot speak of “reality” at all – are just rehearsing different
versions of the same fundamental error. In fact, real things are
precisely those whose properties will never be exhausted by any
description we can make of them. We can have comprehensive knowledge
only of things that we have made up.
Roy’s approach adopted a version of Kant’s transcendental method of
argument, which asks “what would have to be the case in order for what
we know to be true?” For science, he argued that two key questions must
be asked simultaneously: first, why are scientific experiments possible,
and second, why are scientific experiments necessary, in order to obtain
verifiable knowledge of what scientists call natural laws. Why is it
possible to contrive a situation where you can predict exactly what will
happen, when, say, water is heated to a certain temperature in a
controlled environment, but also, why is it that one can never make
similar predictions in natural settings – no matter how much scientific
knowledge we acquire, we still cannot dependably predict the weather.
Why, in other words, does it take so much work to create a situation
where one does know precisely what will happen?
His conclusion was that the world must consist of independently existing
structures and mechanisms, which are perfectly real, but they must also
be, as he put it “stratified”. Reality consists of “emergent levels” –
chemistry emerges from physics, in that chemical laws include physical
ones, but cannot be reduced to them; biology emerges from chemistry, and
so forth. At each level, there is something more, a kind of leap to a
new level of complexity, even, as Roy put it, of freedom. A tree, he
argued, is more free than a rock, just as a human is freer than a tree.
What a scientific experiment does, then, is strip away everything but
one mechanism at one emergent level of reality. To do so takes enormous
work. But in real-world situations, like the weather, there are always
all sorts of different mechanisms from different emergent levels
operating at the same, and the way they interact will always be
inherently unpredictable.
The resulting books, A Realist Theory of Science (1975) and The
Possibility of Naturalism (1979), made Roy one of the most influential
voices in the philosophy of science.
He later applied this approach to a critique of the “new realism” of
Tony Blair. Vaunted as a belated adjustment to the facts of political
life, Roy said that it fails to recognise the underlying structures and
generative mechanisms, such as property ownership and the exploitation
of labour, that produce observable phenomena and events such as low pay
and intolerable working conditions. In other words, New Labour was based
on realism of the most superficial sort. He presented these and other
political implications of his work at the Philosophy Working Group of
the Chesterfield Socialist conferences, associated with Tony Benn and
Ralph Miliband, in the late 80s. This work was eventually published as
Reclaiming Reality (2011).
Roy was a political revolutionary. The unifying purpose of his work was
to establish that the pursuit of philosophical knowledge necessarily
implied social transformation; the struggle for freedom and the quest
for knowledge were ultimately the same.
His way of engaging with the world was wide-eyed, playful, impractical,
always evolving and learning. He continually announced new
breakthroughs. In the 90s, he announced that the Hegelian dialectic – an
assertion, its contradiction, and the resolution of the two – was but an
odd and idiosyncratic version of a universal principle that formed the
basis of all human thought and learning. This launched the second phase
of his philosophy, culminating in the ambitiously titled Plato Etc: The
Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (1994), inspired by Alfred
North Whitehead’s famous claim that “all of philosophy is but a footnote
to Plato”.
Roy came to realise that Whitehead was speaking of only western
philosophy; respect for the full range of human thought required
engagement with eastern philosophy too. This had to mean taking
spiritual ideas seriously – a domain of human experience that the left
had abandoned to the fundamentalist right. In a number of books, notably
The Philosophy of MetaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom (2012), he
argued that spiritual experiences should be considered a constant
feature of everyday life; that every successful act of communication is,
in effect, an example of the spiritual principle of nonduality, where
both parties become, momentarily, the same person.
These developments created heated contention among critical realists,
but Roy maintained his cheerful generosity of spirit, playing an active
role in the Centre for Critical Realism and the International Centre for
Critical Realism, always brimming with projects, visions, and ideas.
Born in Teddington, west London, to an Indian father, Raju Nath Bhaskar,
a GP, and an English mother, Kumla (nee Marjorie Skill), an industrial
administrator, Roy was educated at St Paul’s school, London, and gained
a PPE degree at Balliol College, Oxford (1966). Another critic of the
PPE course and student activist was Hilary Wainwright: in 1971 they
married, and they collaborated intellectually and politically for the
rest of Roy’s life.
Roy fought against the grain of conventional academic philosophy
throughout his career. Following his time as an economics lecturer at
Pembroke College, Oxford, he held philosophy posts at Linacre College,
Oxford; Edinburgh University; the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
in the Social Sciences, Uppsala; and the University of Tromsø, Norway.
After losing a foot in 2008 to Charcot’s disease, he made use of a
wheelchair, and survived on only a partial salary as a world scholar at
the Institute of Education in London. Nonetheless, he remained a figure
of unparalleled energy and invention, and of almost preternatural
kindness and good humour.
His recent partner was his carer Rebecca Long. She survives him, as do
Hilary and his brother, Krish.