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Bhaskar’s system came to be called “critical realism,” where the claim to “realism” is that the world exists independently of the meanings we attribute to it. He and Hartwig encounter a world that is differentiated. It is structured, where the different parts of the world are in patterned relations, and where the patterns are stratified across many scales, from small and localized to global or cosmic. The world constantly changes. Its meanings can reveal themselves to us, and more, they can impose themselves on us.⁴⁰

This world is both natural and historical. The natural part is historical, as Darwin’s and other “natural histories” tell. And the historical is natural – human history has its eminently material forms and material effects, “presence of the past in our built environments, constitutions, institutions, problem-fields, practices, languages and ideas.”⁴¹ The natural and the historical are impossible to disentangle.

We would add, this is because humans are a species which emerged in natural history, whose sentience and sociability had already been prefigured in animals, from insects to primates. There is no humanity without animal existence – focusing our attentions, realizing intentions, moving in perceptual space, making sounds, using objects, eating, interacting with others in the species, birth/reproduction/death and a myriad of other natural intra- and inter-actions. These are multimodal meanings.

Nature and history are the ontology part of Bhaskar’s system, where meanings are to be discovered. He complements this with an epistemology part, where meanings are to be made. In different societies with different histories, they are made differently. So, alongside ontological realism, he proposes an epistemological relativism.⁴² Our historically evolved meaning systems affect the ways in which we understand the world. However, to the extent that they are historical – natural historical and human historical – the epistemological is a creature of the ontological; the ideal can be explained in terms of the real.

Bhaskar argues that Wittgenstein^§MS2.1.1a allows the ideal to become disconnected from the real, in abstract figurations of structure which can float away from reference to reality.⁴³ “[T]reat of the network and not what the network describes,”⁴⁴ says the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, unable yet to believe that there might not be a rhinoceros in the room.^§MS2.1.1a This was before he began to agree with G.E. Moore about some material certainties.^§MS2.3.2a

And before Wittgenstein there was Descartes,^§MS3.1.2g who in his cogito prioritizes mind over matter, individual over society, humans over other species and nature, and egocentric agent over acted-upon others and things.⁴⁵ Such are the unfortunate habits of one strand in Western sense-making. However, despite these illusions, Bhaskar says ontology is always present, implicit even.⁴⁶ Pure idealisms are impossible.

For this reason, Bhaskar wants to abolish the dualisms that separate the ideal from the material, and the epistemological from the ontological: structure/agency, individual/collective, meaning/behavior, conceptuality/materiality.⁴⁷ This means that practically, in everyday commonsense experience, war is not just a concept; it is bloody. Homelessness is not just an idea; it is not having a roof over one’s head.⁴⁸ War and homelessness are matters both of structure and agency, lived as individuals and in collectives. Warfare and housing are things to which we can attribute meaning and experience as behavior. They are events we can name conceptuality and experience materiality. The ideal is immanent in the real. This is common sense. And the truths of the real are discoverable in a potentially never-ending reflexive dialogue, a process of learning.⁴⁹

Then Bhaskar brings us to the “critical” part of critical realism. He takes from Kant^§MS3.3e the notion of “transcendental,” or the overarching question of “what must be the case for some feature of our experience to be possible?”⁵⁰ Kant, an idealist, wants an answer not so far removed from Descartes, in the fundamental categories of mind. Bhaskar’s transcendental is grounded in the common sense of material being, its immanent structures that pattern the natural and social world, and where these patterns can be seen at many levels and in many perspectives – immediate and deeper, narrower and broader. With epistemological effort, the patterning in the levels and scales comes into view, coheres, makes sense.

What becomes discoverable in these deeper and broader views is not just the meaning of war and homelessness but the scandals of a “crisis system”:⁵¹ the scandal of inequality, the scandal of human damage to nature, the scandal of existential meaning in the society of the commodity. In these crises, common sense must become critical and enlightened. Reality speaks to ethics, demanding “transformative praxis” and “emancipatory change.”⁵² Humans have the capacity to exceed their historical selves, in a “desire to be free,”⁵³ an ideality that exceeds the actual. The excess of the ideal is rooted in our very natures as meaning-makers, “the transcendence involved in human creativity.” For “Every human act is not only a transformation of what pre-existed but also de novo, a novelty, a new beginning.”⁵⁴

In our transpositional grammar, we call these new beginnings – small and large, incremental or revolutionary – design.^§MS3.2 Bhaskar, quoting Hartwig, quoting Eluard: this is to reach for a transcendental where “there is another world, but it is this one.”⁵⁵

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³⁵ Roy Bhaskar, 1975 [2008], A Realist Theory of Science, London, UK: Routledge.

³⁶ Roy Bhaskar, 1998, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, London, UK: Routledge.

³⁷ Roy Bhaskar, 1989, Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, London, UK: Verso.

³⁸ Roy Bhaskar, 2000, From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul, London, UK: Routledge; Roy Bhaskar and Mervyn Hartwig, 2010, The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective, London, UK: Routledge.

³⁹ Roy Bhaskar, 2016, Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism, London, UK: Routledge, p. xiii.

⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 7, 17, 24, 57, 83–84.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 69.

⁴² Ibid., p. 25.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 23.

⁴⁴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1922 [1933], Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, UK: Routledge, §6.35

⁴⁵ Roy Bhaskar, 2016, Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism, London, UK: Routledge, p. 177.

⁴⁶ Roy Bhaskar, 2000, From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul, London, UK: Routledge, p. 24.

⁴⁷ Roy Bhaskar, 2016, Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 8, 48–49.

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 12, 57, 171.

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 64, 121–24, 167.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 25.

⁵¹ Ibid., pp. 70, 204.

⁵² Ibid., pp. 17, 5.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 71.

⁵⁴ Roy Bhaskar, 2000, From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul, London, UK: Routledge, p. 49.

⁵⁵ Roy Bhaskar and Mervyn Hartwig, 2010, The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective, London, UK: Routledge, p. 66.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 272–275. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Roy Bhaskar and Mervyn Hartwig’s “Enlightened Common Sense” §MS3.1a