What is developed in this work is neither Hegelian dialectic nor, to my knowledge, any other pre-existing form of dialectic, but a critical realist dialectic. A major point of reference throughout this book will certainly be Hegelian dialectic, and in the course of it I hope to realize Marx's unconsummated desire 'to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence' — though it will take more than two or three printers' sheets — 'what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered and at the same mystified',1 as well as to clarify the exact relation between Marx's own dialectic and Hegel's one. But I will be discussing a variety of other dialectical (and anti-dialectical) modes, including Aristotelian dialectic, Kantian dialectic and Derridean deconstruction.
A work of this kind — a dialectical critique of purely analytical reason — can claim no more — or less — than dialectical consistency. For the moment this may be exemplified by what I have elsewhere characterized as developmental consistency2 — the kind of consistency shown by connected theories in an ongoing research programme in science; or in nature by the development of a tadpole into a frog or an acorn into an oak — a consistency redeemable only in the course of, and at the end of, the day. Moreover, this book makes no claim to completeness — and that for immanent dialectical reasons too. Indeed it stands in the closest possible connection to the texts that will immediately follow it: Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx will elaborate the central historical argument of the book and provide a more detailed critical hermeneutics of those four thinkers, Plato Etcetera will resume the critical diagnosis and metacritique of the western philosophical tradition sketched in this study, and Dialectical Social Theory will engage at a more concrete level with the implications of the book's argument for social theory, geography and history.
{DPF:2} This book has as its main objectives:
I shall contend that these objectives are intimately related, and especially that there are direct and immediate connections between the critical realist development of dialectical motifs and themes and the resolution of the problems, sublation of the problematics and explanation of the problem-fields of contemporary philosophy. To put this in a nutshell, most philosophical aporiai derive from taking an insufficiently non-anthropocentric, differentiated, stratified, dynamic, holistic (concrete) or agentive (practical) view of things. More generally, philosophy's current anthropomorphizing, actualizing, monovalent and detotalizing ontology acts, I shall argue, as a block on the development of the social sciences and projects of human emancipation — for this ontology currently informs much of their practice. For the transformation of this state of affairs dialectical critical realism — i.e. the development of dialectic in its critical realist form — is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Philosophy, for its part, being out of joint with reality, is necessarily aporetic. We shall see in C3 how dialectical critical realism can begin to remedy this, but I hope the import of these remarks will soon be plain. This book represents an attempt to synthesize what I take to be the most fruitful aspects of the dialectical tradition (or traditions), most of which have come down to us through the mediation of Hegel, with the contemporary critical realist research programme — to, I think, their mutual advantage. But the structure of the resulting dialectic is {DPF:3} very different from the Hegelian one. At the beginning, in this new dialectic, there is non-identity — at the end, open unfinished totality. In between, irreducible material structure and heteronomy, deep negativity and emergent spatio-temporality. In this work, I want to show that it is possible to think and act dialectically without necessarily being a Hegelian — or, if you prefer, vice versa.
In its most general sense, dialectic has come to signify any more or less intricate process of conceptual or social (and sometimes even natural) conflict, interconnection and change, in which the generation, interpenetration and clash of oppositions, leading to their transcendence in a fuller or more adequate mode of thought or form of life (or being), plays a key role. But, as we shall see, dialectical processes and configurations are not always sublatory (i.e. supersessive), let alone preservative. Nor are they necessarily characterized by opposition or antagonism, rather than mere connection, separation or juxtaposition. Nor, finally, are they invariably, or even typically, triadic in form. To what may such processes, to the extent that they occur, be applied? Obviously to being, in which case we may talk about ontological dialectics, or dialectical ontologies which may operate at different levels. Then obviously to our thinking about reality — epistemological dialectics; and insofar as knowledge circulates in and/or out of what it is about — relational dialectics. Equally obviously to our practice — practical dialectics. Clearly, within these generic categories a vast variety of distinctions can be made, specifying more concrete or roughly parallel (e.g. ethical, aesthetic) dialectics. Equally clearly, dialectical processes may occur in our thinking about our thinking about reality, e.g. in the philosophy of science, so that one may talk of a meta-epistemological dialectic, and so on recursively. For critical realism all dialectics, insofar as they occur, are also ontological dialectics, though with respect to any, for example, epistemic investigation we may and perhaps must think of a distinct ontic field (into which the epistemological investigation may itself be reflexively incorporated). Similarly, all social dialectics are also practical dialectics, even though in the case of, say, structural analysis one may and perhaps must abstract from human agency. In respect of science, ontological, epistemological and the class of meta-epistemological dialectics may be mapped onto what I have called the intransitive, transitive and metacritical dimensions.3 (For critical realism, relational dialectics, however thorough-going, can never abolish the existential {DPF:4} intransitivity of the relata.) All these terms have a subject/topic ambiguity. Thus one might hold epistemological dialectics to be engaged with the dialectic of epistemology rather than the dialectic of what it is about, e.g. science. In this book I will be concerned with both kinds of dialectics, the former belonging to what I will style meta-critical dialectics, which includes the relations between the two kinds. Like Hegel, I take dialectic to be a logic of content and not just form. And, like him, I take this to centre on the norms of truth and freedom (mediated in practice by wisdom). That is, I take both to have a certain dynamic to them, a dynamic which I hope to describe. More fully I will show that truth, for example, must be understood as grounded, dynamic, totalizing and context-sensitive, corresponding to the four moments of the critical realist dialectic that I shall shortly outline. But instead of talking immediately of truth and freedom, and respecting the geo-historical specificity of both, I will talk about knowledge as specific kinds of beliefs (of different types) and of emancipation from specific kinds of constraints. To the extent that I abstract from content in the earlier portions of this book, particularly in the exposition of Hegelian dialectic, this is for the sake of didactic clarity alone.
In previous works I have shown how science itself presupposes a critical realist ontology of the world as structured, differentiated and changing. And I have argued that the chief metaphilosophical error in prevailing accounts of science is the analysis, definition or explication of statements about being in terms of statements about our knowledge of being, the reduction of ontology to epistemology which I have termed the 'epistemic fallacy'.4 As ontology is in fact irreducible to epistemology, this functions merely to cover the generation of an implicit ontology, on which the domain of the real is reduced to the domain of the actual (actualism) which is then anthropr{<}ocentrically identified with or in terms of sense-experience or some other human attribute. Operating hand-in-hand with this overt collapse, engendered or masked by the epistemic fallacy, is its practical counterpart, the ideology of the compulsive determination of knowledge by being — for instance, in the guise of reified facts or hypostatized ideas — in what I have characterized as the 'ontic fallacy'.5 The epistemic fallacy can be traced back to Parmenides.
But Parmenides also bequeathed another legacy to philosophy: the generation of a purely positive, complementing a purely actual, {DPF:5} notion of reality, in what I am going to nominate the doctrine of ontological monovalence. In this study I aim to revindicate negativity. Indeed, by the time we are through, I would like the reader to see the positive as a tiny, but important, ripple on the surface of a sea of negativity. In particular, I want to argue for the importance of the concepts of what I am going to call 'real negation', 'transformative negation' and 'radical negation'. Of these the most basic is real negation. Its primary meaning is real determinate absence or non-being (i.e. including non-existence). It may denote an absence, for example, from consciousness (e.g. the unknown, the tacit, the unconscious), and/or of an entity, property or attribute (e.g. the spaces in a text) in some determinate space-time region, e.g. in virtue of distanciation or mediation, death or demise, or simple non-existence. It connotes, inter alia, the hidden, the empty, the outside; desire, lack and need. It is real negation which, as we shall see, drives the Hegelian dialectic on, and it is our omissive critique of Hegel — his failure to sustain certain crucial distinctions and categories (including in the end that of absence itself) — that must drive the dialectic past and beyond him. But real negation also connotes a process of mediating, distancing or absenting, i.e. it has a systematic process/product bivalency or homonymy. In fact, as we shall see in the next chapter, it also signifies both process-in-product and product-in-process, so that it has a fourfold polysemy. How could one argue for the importance of real negation in, for example, science? Writings — books, research papers, experimental records — provide striking examples of it. Consider a book in a library. It typically involves an absent (and possibly dead) author, an absent reception necessary for its presence in the library, and absences — spaces inside and in between sequences of marks — necessary for its intelligibility, its readability. Again experimental activity involves a real demediation of nature, preventing or absenting a state of affairs that would otherwise have occurred, so as to enable us to identity a generative mechanism or complex free from outside influence or with such interference held constant. These may, if one likes, be taken as transcendental deductions of the presence of real negation in science, as conditions of its possibility. Real negation — think of empty spaces and absent x's where x stands in principle for any entity or feature. Of course what is absent or void at or from one level, region or perspective may be present at another. This is what I shall refer to as the 'duality of absence'.
Transformative negation refers to the transformation of some thing, property or state of affairs. Such a transformation may be essential or inessential, total or partial, endogenously and/or exogenously {DPF:6} effected. Like real negation it has a process/product bipolarity: it can refer to the outcome or the means whereby it is brought about. All cases of transformative negation are also cases of real negation but the converse is not the case. They all involve the cessation or absenting of a pre-existing entity or state. A special, and highly important, case of transformative negation is radical negation, which involves the autosubversion, transformation or overcoming of a being or condition. It is, of course, important in the human domain to distinguish negating processes from self-negating processes and self-negating from self-consciously negating processes. All these species of negation — real, transformative and radical — have a systematic structural/empirical — or better, real/actual — ambiguity which I shall discuss in due course. Transformative negation, especially of the radical kind, is what Hegelians call 'determinate negation', but this is a misnomer — for real radical negation may all be more or less determinate — that is, they may be fully determinate (think of the negation of the raw material in a finished automobile) or indeterminate in various degrees; or they may be 'fuzzy', duplicitous or otherwise other than determinate. In Hegelian dialectic real, transformative, radical and determinate negation are all identified, resulting in a linear self-generating process, e.g. of the unfolding of the concept in the Logics, but it is important to keep them distinct and see their identification as an important but limiting case.
If real negation is the most all-encompassing concept — extending from non-existence to metacritique — it is in transformative negation that the key to social dialectics lies. Indeed its schema is given by the transformational model of social activity which I have elaborated elsewhere and which will be suitably dialecticized and generalized in C2. Radical negation, for its part, is obviously the pivotal concept in self-emancipation and this connects with 'radical' in a more familiar sense. Moreover, to the extent that we are dealing with a self-contained totality, all transformative negation, that is to say change, will tend to occur as a result of or take the form of radical negation(s), as is arguably the case with global interdependence today.6 The orthodox Platonic analysis of negation and change in terms of difference not only conflates substantial with formal relations7 (change is paradigmatically substantial) but also overlooks the fact that differentiation typically presupposes change. This is not to deny that there is equally a case for a category of difference, e.g. established by distinct emergent domains or by sheer alterity or otherness (that is, real determinate other-being), not analysable in terms of change, i.e. without recourse to a unitary origin, a case forcibly prosecuted by Derrida. In rather the same way the implicit supposition behind the {DPF:7} doctrine of ontological monovalence is that any instance of real negation can be analysed in purely positive terms. But Pierre's absence from the café doesn't mean the same as his presence at home (although the latter entails the former — which is equally entailed by his death) any more than it means the same as Jean's occupying his customary place.*
The chief result of ontological monovalence in mainstream philosophy is to erase the contingency of existential questions and to despatialize and detemporalize (accounts of) being. I shall be concerned with a variety of other modes of negation besides the ones I have already referred to. One may be briefly mentioned here — subject negation. This refers primarily to a subject in the process of formation or dissolution (e.g. in Hegelian logic passing over into its 'predicate'). As such it is clearly a variant of transformative negation, but I am going to extend its meaning to cover cases of non-transformative and non-trivially transformative real negation (e.g. non-existence and simple space-time distanciation without any other significant change) and counterpose it polemically to the prepositional and predicate negations of standard logic. For it will be vital to my vindication of negativity that one can refer to absence, including non-existence; or, if one prefers to put it this way, that reference is not, contrary to the tradition from Plato to Frege, tied to positive existence. This, I will show in C2. Non-being, within zero-level being, exists and is present everywhere.
{DPF:8} I shall also be occupied with negativity and negation in many other senses of the verb to 'negate', including 'deny', 'reject', 'contradict', 'oppose', 'exclude', 'marginalize', 'denigrate', 'erase', 'separate', 'split','sunder', 'cancel', 'annul','destroy', 'criticize' and 'condemn', and with their interconnections. But my primary emphasis will be on the categories of real, transformative and radical negation of determinate and indeterminate kinds. One other preliminary matter before I pass on. Real determinate negation, absence or non-being, is not equivalent to Hegel's nothing, which entirely lacks determinacy, and any sort of depth. Negativity, although it is the dynamic of Hegel's system and is in fact in the guise of contradiction greatly exaggerated by Hegel, is never developed or even simply retained — it is always cancelled and positivity restored. Seeing this is one of the merits of the young Hegelians. One of the few philosophers to pay serious attention to categories of negativity is Sartre, but it should be said straight away that my real negation is not equivalent to Sartrian nothingness but more to his négatité; though, as I have defined it, it is not intrinsically related to human activity.
More generally, in this work, I shall be showing how critical realism, hitherto focusing — in what I shall call its first or prime moment (which I shall abbreviate to 1M) — on the concepts of structure, differentiation, change, alterity (as in the transitive/intransitive distinction — epistemic/ontic non-identity within ontology), transfactual efficacy, emergence, openness, etc., must be meshed with the characteristically dialectical categories, arguments, themes and pabula expressed in the ideas of negation, negativity, becoming, process, finitude, contradiction, development (which need not be progressive and may just be regarded as directional change including regression, retrogression and decay, in a thing or kind to at the limit fragmentation,chaos and/or collapse),spatiality, temporality, mediation, reciprocity and many more — including such figures as the hiatus, chiasmus and pause — at what I will call a second edge (abbreviated to 2E) of development. 1M suffices for, e.g., an adequate account of science which abstracts from space, time and the process of change, which posits 'principles of difference' or 'metaphysical inertia'. At 2E, which is the narrowly dialectical moment in a four-sided dialectic, the very principles of indifference are called into question and difference, and we have 'metaphysical (neg)entropy'. This is the moment of cosmology, of human geo-history, of personal {DPF:9} biography, laborious or routinized work but also of joyful or idle play. At a third level (abbreviated to 3L) of development we have the characteristically totalizing motifs of totality, reflexivity (which is its inwardized form), concrete universality and what I will call 'concrete utopianism', subjectivity and objectivity, autonomy (practico-epistemological duality, consistency and coherence), reason and rationality including phronesis or practical wisdom, and the unity of theory and practice. This is at once the inner truth or pulse of things and the spot from which we must act, the axiological moment and (if there is such) metaphysical alethia. I will postpone thematizing it until after a consideration of the (very different) Hegelian totality. But 3L is not the end of the matter. A fourth dimension (4D) is required — for the critical realist totality is radically open. So we must return to practice. But this is not as a Nietzschean forgetting, but as active and reflexive engagement within the world in which we seek to achieve the unity of theory and practice in practice. Each level in this dialectic is preservative. 4D presupposes 3L presupposes 2E presupposes 1M. (This does not mean that every category at 2E is instantiated in some employment of a 3L category. Thus one can have dialectical connection without contradiction.) We are left with non-identity, structure, negativity, finitude, essentially transformative change, holistic causality and phronesis at the end — in agency. But agency is, of course, in a sense already there at the outset in the phenomenologicality of science, so we can say, if we like, that the end is implicit in the beginning,* but if we go along with this rather Hegelian way of speaking, we must see the agency as a radically transformed transformative praxis, oriented to rationably groundable projects — ultimately flourishing in freedom.
What is the characteristic error at 3L which stands to 2E and 1M as ontological monovalence and actualism respectively do? It consists in ontological extensionalism — or what could also be called ontological partiality or 'externalism', where external is to be taken in the sense {DPF:10} of the denial of internal relationality. A relation aRb is internal if and only if a would not be what it is essentially unless it were related to b in the way that it is. Partiality is, of course, closely related to separability, which goes back to Aristotle's definition of substance taken up in crucial respects by Descartes, and in Aristotle derived perhaps ultimately from the Platonic theory of predication. The canonical, and also extreme, version of ontological extensionalism is provided by Hume's famous dictum that things 'seem conjoined but never connected'.* (This is an extreme formulation because it denies even necessary relationships between externally related things.) Besides denying internal relations, other modes of extensionalizing thought and/or practice consist in hypostatizing the moments or aspects of a totality, treating space-time as independent of the system of material things, conceiving morality as independent of the network of social relations (and in particular denying a fact to value and theory to practice link), failing to recognize (and/or being indifferent to) identities-in-differences or unities-in-diversities and/or differences-in-identity or diversities-in-unity, abstracting from specifying differentiations, e.g. by subsuming a particular under a universal without mediation, failing to see the tri-unity of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity and objectivity (e.g. within language or experience) but then equally failing to articulate this tri-unity as formed within an always already existing social world into which we are 'thrown' and as occurring only within an over-reaching material objectivity, of which the social world is a contingent, emergent but cosmically ephemeral outcome. Let us just consider for a moment the thought-reality relationship. A philosophical ontology can be detotalizing or partial in at least four ways: (1) it can objectivize reality, e.g. by extruding thought from it; (2) it can subjectivize reality, e.g. by failing to locate thought within a non-ideational and mediated reality encompassing it; (3) it can split reality, e.g. on eidetic/sensual (Platonic), phenomenal/noumenal (Kantian), or social/physical (hermeneutical) lines; and/or (4) it can adopt some combination of these expedients. Let us take a concrete case — that of Humean empiricism, dominant in mid-twentieth-century philosophical, scientific and social thought and present in that of Kant, Hegel and much post-Nietzschean post-structuralism. We can see its characteristic error at 1M to lie in anthropomorphizing and actualizing reality, at 2E that of positivizing and deprocessualizing (de-spatio-temporalizing) it, at 3L that of subjectivizing it and at 4D, in a characteristic and necessary {DPF:11} inversion,13 reifying and fetishizing that part of it which is the product of human practices. If we write dr as a domain of the real, da as the domain of the actual, d+ as the domain of the positive, ds as the domain of the subjective, empiricism can thus be seen to rest on an illicit generalization of the special case dr ≥ da ≥ d+ ≥ ds ≥ de where the latter is identified in terms of human experience, and where human sense-experience is conceived as a product or function of reified facts, i.e. de = df. More generally I shall be arguing that western philosophy, including most dialectical and specifically Hegelian thought, is characterized by a disemancipatory anthropocentricism/morphism, marked by ontological actualism, monovalence, extensionalism, subjectivism (in its post-Cartesian period) and de-agentification (a denegation of human agency).
These levels of deepening of critical realism should not be hypostatized. What they specify are co-present and systematically 'intermingle' in reality. Furthermore, although, as in Hegel, it is the second moment — of negativity — that is the narrowly dialectical one, each of the others and the whole are implied in it as a system. Moreover, there are dialectics specific to each level. Thus the dialectics of 1M are typically dialectics of stratification and superstructure-formation or superstructuration, including emergence. The typical dialectical figures here are what I shall call the dialectical comment, which I shall write as dc', and dialectical reason (dr'), which I shall explicate in relation to Hegelian dialectic. I shall later link these figures to a characteristic pattern of problem-generation, resolution and critique in science and philosophy and to the theme of theory/practice inconsistency, which I shall see as essential to dialectic generally and pivotal to the emancipatory spiral of transformist politics and (counter-)ideology. Dialectical reason includes, in metacritical analysis, displaying the common or dialectical grounds (dg') of apparently opposed but mutually complicit dialectical counterparts or contraries, as, I shall argue, in the Kantian opposition between knowledge and faith, or more generally between anthroporealism and transcendent — which I shall rigorously differentiate from transcendental — realism, or between empiricism and idealism. This includes the logic of what Derrida has called 'supplementarity',14 and what Freud called 'compromise formation'. Metacritical dialectical reason also isolates the duplicities and dialectical paralogisms generated by philosophies of identity including Hegel's own. At 2E the dialectics are characteristically dialectics of change, including interchange (reversal), and transition. Determinate transformative negation, though it is present in some guise in all dialectics, comes to the fore here, but the most distinctive {DPF:12} figure at 2E is dialectical process (dp') — as when, for instance, we are incessantly forced to revise our descriptive, taxonomic and explanatory vocabularies in the light of unexpected, and possibly recursive, epistemic and/or ontic change.
At 3L the characteristic figure is dialectical totality (dt'), as when separated phenomena come to be seen as aspects of a unified (or disunified) whole. Hermeneutics provides a good initial heuristic for understanding what it is to think in this dialectical mode. In a painting it is not only that the parts cannot be understood except in relation to the whole and vice versa but — and this is the clue to Hegelian totality — they mutually 'infect' each other — the whole is in the part, as my body is in my writing hand. This is what Althusser meant by 'expressive totality',15 though he vastly underestimated the extent to which Marx not just in his exploratory work but also in his systematic writings used, in Pareto's graphic image, words 'like bats'.16 Nor can we say that this was necessarily wrong — it is merely a particular kind of totality. Montage, and pastiche generally, and entities like the British Working Class in February 1992, provide examples of very different sorts of totalities. Let me give a concrete example of a 3L dialectic — the Lefebvrean dialectic of centre and periphery,17 where this is to be understood partially literally in terms of the globalization of capitalism and culture and partially as a metaphor for the dialectic of power and resource flows between an increasingly integrated and homogenized 'centre' and an increasingly marginalized and fragmented periphery, in the 'south', in the 'north' and in the 'south-in-the-north' — and in the physical, social and psychic peripheralizations therein. At 4D the dominant pivotal figure is dialectical praxis, which I shall write as dφ. Relating it to the immediately preceding example, the dialectic here calls for the retotalization of the periphery in the mutual recognitions of identities-in-difference and unity-in-diversity, mediated therefore by mutual recognition of differential (personal, social, local, etc.) identities and involving a degree of recentrification (psychic, social, local and global) in a transformed transformative praxis for the retotalization of the human race. This would involve a non-preservative dialectical sublation (ds') of the pre-existing state of affairs.
Sublations, generally, as species of determinate transformative negations, may be totally, essentially or partially preservative. Within and outside these categories further important discriminations may be made, e.g. a transformative negation may preserve what is held to be of value in, even though it is not essential to, the sublated social form. But sublations are not, of course, the only dialectical result (dr0). Results include stand-offs, the mutual undoing of the contending {DPF:13} parties, the preservation of the status quo ante, retrogression and many other outcomes besides sublation. Nor does it make sense to talk of an Aufhebung in many types of what may be properly called dialectics — e.g. in social life, of Verstehen (per se), of structure, process and agency, of presence and absence or of embedding and disembedding in space and time and from space in time and vice versa, or of overlapping, intersecting or disjoint spatio-temporalities. These involve polarities or more complex figures that may figure in sublations or generally outcomes, but, as part of the transcendental parameters of any conceivable social life, are not themselves sublatable, or so it would seem reasonable to suppose. Of course a dialectical outcome or result, of any of these characteristic modes, is only spatio-temporary; the potential starting point for a new round of real transformative negation.
By the end of this chapter the very different topologies of the critical realist and Hegelian dialectics will become apparent. But it should perhaps be said here and now, if it is not already obvious, that, although I will show their connections, my 1M, 2E and 3L do not correspond to the Hegelian moments of understanding, dialectic or negative reason and speculative or positive reason shortly to be discussed. They encompass different types of dialectic, within each of which (dialectical) negativity has a role to play; and the movement or dialectic of critical realism as a whole (which, of course, includes 4D), to be articulated fully in the chapters to come, traverses and envelops all these phases or levels. Nor do the moments of dialectical critical realism match the tetrapolity of analytical, dialectical, totalizing and practical reasoning. For a start, 4D consists not in practical reasoning but in (reasonable) practice — not the same thing at all. Moreover, critical realist dialectical reasoning comprises all these modes of reasoning and practice and their unity. In particular there is a dialectic of dialectical and analytical (or formal) reasoning in the course of which discourse moves in and out of the domain of formal reasoning, be it of a deductive or, for example, inductive type, in which meanings and values remain fixed (or stable in their indeterminacy), which is of great importance in science, philosophy and everyday life. Furthermore, dialectical critical realism is dialogical — discursive, inter-subjective through and through. This will become plain when I discuss the communicative dimension of what I have called the 'social cube' (which is really a space-time cubic stretch or flow) in C2.9. In this way critical realist dialectic incorporates an important range of historical connotations to the word, to be introduced in §6 and thematized in C2, which Hegelian dialectic, rooted in a post-Cartesian monological philosophy of consciousness, however aware of its social {DPF:14} matrix, lets slip — a point that Habermas has not been slow to stress.18
There is one other preliminary matter that should be dealt with here before I turn to Hegelian dialectic. It may be contended that critical realism is, or began as, a philosophy of — and for — science, even if it is conceded that it is not a scientistic philosophy.19 How then can I treat of theory generally, or by what right do I identify it as a subset of the domain of the real, or indeed envelop in my critique philosophies — including epistemologies — which do not purport to be about science? Let us consider the last objection first. There is an important grain of truth here. There is indeed a big difference between science and everyday knowledge, which the philosophical tradition has — at least in its post-Lockian period — tended to conflate or otherwise obscure, the significance of which I will bring out anon. But I think, and would like to show, that science provides a hidden 'analogical grammar'20 for the metacritical analysis of philosophies — at any rate at 1M. (At 2M, 3L and 4D the wider social context is more important, though we should never underestimate the power buried in the human psyche-soma.) Correspondingly, transposing philosophical theses of an epistemological kind into their presuppositions about and implications for science can be extraordinarily illuminating. In particular it affects a concretization (itself a dialectical development) of these, which makes it easier to identify exactly what their insights, aporiai, tensions and effects are. A parallel recasting of ethical positions and arguments into social theoretic positions can be equally illuminating. To turn to the first objection now, it is the case that the transcendental arguments used to establish critical realism were in the first instance thrown up by existing reflections on (theories of) science, of which they constituted an immanent critique. But in C3 I intend also to derive (dialectical) transcendental realism both without recourse to science and by taking up the challenge of Heideggerian existential phenomenology. There I will consider science precisely as engaged concernful human activity with Dasein exploring its Umwelt with its equipment (language, pre-existing, yet not necessarily articulated, knowledge and tools), constituting a 'referential totality' ready-to-hand; that is, I will in effect treat science as an existential (employing categories). I will also consider the extent to which dialectical transcendental, more generally critical, realism can be {DPF:15} generated by reflection on the presuppositions of the pathology of everyday life.
Finally, I should make it explicit that I do not see science as a supreme or overriding value, but only as one among others to be balanced (in a balance that cannot be wholly judged by science) in ergonic, emancipatory and eudaimonistic activity. Nor do I think the objects of science exhaust reality. On the contrary, they afford only a particular angle or slant on reality, picked out precisely for its explanatory scope and power. Moreover, alongside ethical naturalism I am committed to moral realism and I would also like to envisage an adjacent position in aesthetics, indeed viewing it as a branch of practical philosophy, the art of living well. A last word here. Starting with knowledge as a systematic phenomenon I reject that cognitive triumphalism, the roots of which lie in the epistemic fallacy, which identifies what is (and what is not) with what lies within the bounds of human cognitive competence. Reality is a potentially infinite totality, of which we know something but not how much. This is not the least of my differences with Hegel, who, although a more subtle exponent of cognitive triumphalism, Prometheanism or absolutism, nevertheless is a conduit directly connecting his older contemporary Pierre de Laplace to Lenin and thence diamat and the erstwhile command economies of the omniscient party states. But Hegel was a much more subtle exponent of cognitive triumphalism, as we shall in due course see.
There are two principal inflections of the dialectic in Hegel: (α) as a logical process of reason; and (β), more narrowly, as the dynamo of this process, the method, practice of experience of determinate negation. But to understand both one must go back to the roots of this most complex — and hotly contested — concept in ancient Greek thought. Here I will be dealing briefly with material that I will treat in C2 in more thematic and historical detail.
(α) Derived from the Greek dialectikē, meaning roughly the art of conversation or discussion — more literally, reasoning by splitting into two - Aristotle credited Zeno of Elea with its invention, as deployed in his famous paradoxes — most notoriously, of motion. These were designed to vindicate the Eleatic cosmology by drawing intuitively unacceptable conclusions from its rejection. But the term was first generally applied in a recognizably philosophical context to {DPF:16} Socrates' mode of argument, or elenchus, which was differentiated from the Sophistic eristic, the technique of disputation for the sake of rhetorical success, by the orientation of the Socratic dialogue towards the disinterested pursuit of truth. Plato himself regarded dialectic as the supreme philosophical method and the 'coping-stone' of the sciences — using it to designate both the definition of ideas by genus and species (founding logic) and their interconnection in the light of a single principle, the Form of the Good (instituting metaphysics). At one and the same time dialectic was the means of access and assent to the eternal — the universal-and-necessarily-certain — and such Forms or Ideas were the justification for the practice of dialectic. In this inaugural moment of the western philosophical tradition, fundamentalism, classical rationalist criteria for knowledge and dialectic were indissolubly linked. Aristotle's opinion of dialectic, which he systematized in his Topics, was considerably less exalted.21 For the most part he regarded it as a mere propaedeutic to the syllogistic reasoning expounded in his Analytics, necessary to obtain the assent of one's interlocutors but, being based on merely probabalistic premisses, lacking the certainty of scientific knowledge. This last was, however, dependent on the supplementation of induction by nous or that intellectual intuition which allowed us to participate in the divine, i.e. knowledge as Plato had defined it (although Plato had not claimed to achieve it), the true starting points (archai) of science. There are places, however, where Aristotle took dialectic, as the method of working from received opinions (endoxa) through the discussion and progressive probative augmentation of conflicting views and aporiai, as an alternative way of arriving at archai.22 If he had taken this course consistently, Aristotle, however, would never have satisfied Platonic criteria for knowledge (epistēmē rather than doxa), never have got beyond induction. The first great achieved identity theorist was already caught in a vice between Plato and Hume — a vice that was to determine the subsequent trajectory of western philosophy: historical determination by rationalist epistemology, structural domination by empiricist ontology.
The sense of conversational interplay and exchange, involving the assertion, contradiction, distinction and qualification of theses, was retained in the practice of medieval disputation. It was this sense that was probably most familiar to Kant, who also took over the Aristotelian conception of dialectic as relying on premisses which were in some measure inadequate as well as the analytical/dialectical contrast. For Kant, dialectic was that part of transcendental logic which showed the mutually contradictory or antinomic state into which the intellect fell when not harnessed to the data of experience. {DPF:17} By a turn to transcendental subjectivity, Kant combined, or seemed to combine, the satisfaction of rationalist demands on knowledge with empiricist criteria for being — but only at the price of leaving things-in-themselves unknowable. Kantian dialectic showed the inherently limited nature of human cognitive and moral powers, the resulting inherent impossibilities, as well as the conditions of possibility of human (non-archetypal, non-holy) intelligence and will. For Kant this was enlightenment, but it entrained a systematically sundered world and a whole series of splits, between knowledge and thought, knowledge and faith, phenomena and noumena, the transcendental and the empirical, theory and (practical) reason, duty and inclination, this world and the next (splits which were also interiorized within each term separately), as well as those expressly articulated in the antinomies. These dichotomies were to be only weakly (albeit influentially) repaired in the teleologies of the Critique of Judgement.
This spread of connotations of dialectic includes, then, argument and conflict, disputation, struggle and split, dialogue and exchange, but also probative progress, enlightenment, demystification and the critique of illusion.
Hegel synthesized (α) this Eleatic idea of dialectic as reason with another ancient strand, (β) the Ionian idea of dialectic as process — in (γ) the notion of dialectic as the self-generating, self-differentiating and self-particularizing process of reason. This second (Ionian) idea typically assumed a dual form: in an ascending dialectic, the existence of a higher reality (e.g. the Forms or God) was demonstrated; and in a descending dialectic, its manifestation in the phenomenal world was explained. Prototypes of these two phases are the transcendent dialectic of matter of ancient scepticism, in which the impermanence of the sensate world, or the existence of error, or of evil, is taken as a ground for positing an unchanging or completely true, or perfectly good, realm — logically, of the forms, theologically of God; and the immanent dialectic of spiritual diremption of neo-Platonic and Christian eschatology from Plotinus and Eriugena to Silesius and Böhme, which sought to explain why a perfect and self-sufficient being (God) should disclose itself in the dependent and imperfect sphere of matter. Combination of the ascending and descending phases results in a quasi-spatio-temporal pattern of original unity, loss or division and return or reunification (graphically portrayed in Schiller's influential Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind) or a quasi-logical pattern of hypostasis, actualization and redemption. Combination of the Eleatic and Ionian strands yields the Hegelian absolute — a logical process or dialectic which actualizes itself by alienating, or becoming other than, itself and which restores its self-unity {DPF:18} by recognizing this alienation as nothing other than its own free expression or manifestation — a process that is recapitulated and completed in the Hegelian system itself.
The three principal keys to Hegel's philosophy — spiritual monism, realized idealism and immanent teleology — can now be cut. Together they form the pediment to it. The outcome of the first dialectical thread in Kant was a view of human beings as bifurcated, disengaged from nature and inherently limited in both cognitive and moral powers. Hegel's generation, as we shall see in C4, experienced the Kantian splits, dichotomies, disharmonies and fragmentations as calling for the restoration of what Charles Taylor has nicely called an 'expressive unity'23 — lost since the idealized ancient Greek world — that is, in philosophical terms, for a monism — but one which, unlike Spinoza's, paid due heed to diversity, which would be in effect a unity-in-diversity, and to the constitutive role of subjectivity; that is, one which preserved the legacy of Luther, Descartes and the Enlightenment formulated in the great Kantian call to 'have courage to use your own reason'24 or radical autonomy from 'self-incurred tutelage',25 and that was firmly predicated on the achievements of the critical philosophy. For Hegel the problem of elaborating a non-reductionist and subject-ive monism gradually became tantamount to the problem, posed by the ascending phase of the second dialectical thread, of developing a complete and self-consistent idealism. Such an idealism would, in fusing the finite in the infinite, retain no dualistic or non-rational residues,thereby finally realizing and vindicating the primordial Parmenidean postulate of the identity of being and thought in thought, underpinned by a progressivist view of history. Neither Fichte nor Schelling has been able to accomplish this. In Fichte, the non-ego or otherness of being, although originally posited by mind, remained as a permanent barrier to it; so that the principle of idealism became a more Sollen or regulative ideal. Schelling, on the other hand, genuinely transcended dualism in his 'point of indifference' uniting man and nature, but less than fully rationally. For Schelling, this identity was achieved only in intuition, rather than conceptual thought, with the highest manifestation of spirit art rather than philosophy, so that the Parmenidean principle remained unrealized in thought. By contrast, in the Hegelian Geistodyssey of infinite, petrified (natural) and finite mind, the principle of idealism, the speculative understanding of reality as (absolute) spirit, is unfolded in the shape of an immanent teleology which shows, in response to the problem of the descending phase, how the world exists (and, at least in the human realm, develops) as a rational totality precisely so that(infinite) spirit can come to {DPF:19} philosophical self-conciousness in the Hegelian system demonstrating this. Absolute idealism is the articulation and recognition of the identity of being in thought for thought.
In this logical process or dialectic the problem of reunification of opposites, transcendence of limitations and reconciliation of differences is carried out in the characteristic figure of what I shall call 'constellational identity'. In this dialectical inscape, which qualifies the monism of Hegelianism, the major, typically idealist, term (thought, the infinite, identity, reason, spirit, etc.) over-reaches, envelops and contains the minor, more 'materialist', term (being, the finite, difference, understanding, matter, etc.) in such a way as to preserve the distinctiveness of the minor term and to show that it, and a fortiori its distinctiveness, are teleologically necessary for the major one. The effect of the Hegelian perspective or Ansicht is, on Hegel's own account,'more than a comfort, it reconciles, it transfigures the actual which seems unjust into the rational'.26 'To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to enjoy the present, this is the rational insight which reconciles us to the actual, the reconciliation which philosophy affords.'27 'The dissonances of the world' thus appear, in his friend the poet Hölderlin's words in Hyperion, 'like the quarrel of lovers. Reconciliation is in the midst of strife, and everything that is separated finds itself again' — in the movement of self-restoring sameness or self-reinstating identity, which is the life of absolute spirit.
Hegel conducts four principal types of demonstration of this life:
(β) The motor of this process is dialectic more narrowly conceived. This is the second, essentially negative, moment in what Hegel calls 'actual thought', which drives the dialectics of (1)–(4) on. It is styled by Hegel as the 'grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative'.28 It is not the case, according to Hegel, that a concept merely excludes its opposite or that the negative of a term (or proposition) simply cancels it. If this were so then Aristotle's {DPF:20} criticisms of Platonic diairesis and Kant's of pre-critical metaphysics would indeed entrain the anti-speculative implications they themselves drew. Rather, to the contrary, from the vantage point of reason, as distinct from the understanding, a genus always contains, explicitly or proleptically, its own differentiae; and, in a famous inversion of the Spinozan maxim 'omnis determinatio est negatio', negation always leads to a new richer determination — this is transformative negation — so imparting to categories and forms of life an immanent dynamic and to their conflict an immanent resolution rather than a mutual nullification. Although the principle of the mutual exclusion of opposites, entailing rigid definitions and fixed polarities, is adequate for the finite objects grasped by common sense and the empirical sciences, the infinite totalities of reason (which, of course, constellationally embrace the former) require the dialectical principle of the identity of exclusive opposites. And Hegel's central logical claim is that the identity of opposites is not incompatible with their exclusion, but rather depends upon it. For it is the experience of what in non-dialectical terms would be a logical contradiction which at once indicates the need for an expansion of the universe of discourse or thought and at the same time yields a more comprehensive, richly differentiated or highly mediated conceptual form. It is this experience in which dialectic proper consists as the second member of a triad composed of the understanding, dialectic (or negative) and speculative (or positive) reason, representing the principles of identity, negativity and rational totality respectively. I will go into the fine structure of this dynamic shortly. On this interpretation, the dialectical fertility of contradictions depends upon their analytical unacceptability. (Hence any dialectical logic must incorporate an analytical one as a special — and vitally generative — case.) From the achieved vantage point of (positive) reason the mutual exclusivity of opposites passes over into the recognition of their reciprocal interdependence (mutual inclusion): they remain inseparable yet distinct moments in a richer, more total conceptual form-ation (which will in turn generate a new contradiction of its own). It is the constellational identity of understanding and reason within reason which fashions the continually recursively expanding kaleidoscopic tableaux of absolute idealism.
Dialectic, then, in this narrow sense, is a method — or better, experience — of determinate negation — which enables the dialectical commentator to observe the process by which the various categories, notions or forms of consciousness arise out of each other to form ever more inclusive totalities until the system of categories, notions or forms as a whole is completed. And in a still narrower sense — in {DPF:21} which it is the second member of the understanding-dialectic-reason (U-D-R) triad — it is the truth, theory of or comment on (dc' in the terminology introduced in §4 above) the experience or practice of the phase (notion, etc.) immediately preceding it, yielding or showing a contradiction — in effect a theory/practice inconsistency — which speculative reason (dr') will resolve, only, of course, for the resolution in turn to be susceptible to a further dialectic probe. Now it is clear enough that if we stay at the level of the understanding we will not find or recognize contradictions in our concepts or experience — in general it takes an effort or quantum leap — in what we may call a σ transform — to find the contradiction(s), anomalies or inadequacies in our conceptualizations or experience — and another quantum leap — which we may call a τ transform — to resolve them. And Hegelian dialectic is just this method or practice of stretching our concepts to the limit, forcing from and pressing contradictions on them, contradictions which are not immediately obvious to the understanding (hence the need for the σ transform), and then resolving them, a resolution which is not immediately obvious either (hence the need for the τ transform). (This is one of the reasons why Hegelian dialectic is so difficult to understand; and a respect in which Hegel's talk about the self-development of the concept, as if it were automatic [understanding-like], is at the very least disingenuous.) From this perspective Kant's great merit is that he advances, at least in the case of the antinomies, to the level of dc' (he makes the σ transform), but fails to take the further leap into speculative reason, fails to resolve them (to make the τ transform), so falling back as a (transcendental idealist) philosopher of the understanding. But in fact Hegel does not think that the U-D-R scheme exhausts the matter. I should hasten to add that the σ and τ transforms are my own gloss on Hegel. He thinks the understanding, which at one point he characterizes as an 'almighty power', is a great advance on the pre-reflective reasonableness of ordinary life which readily tolerates contradictions without finding anything problematic in them, so there is need for a transition from pre-reflective thought, what I shall call the ρ transform, to the understanding before we are in a position to engage in ordinary (non-speculative) science or philosophy. It was, of course, to this pre-reflective reasonableness that the later Wittgenstein was always trying, but never quite able, to return. Hegel also thinks that we have to 'return' to life, but after (dialectical and speculative) philosophy — in post-philosophical wisdom (in what I will call the υ transform). So we could schematize the whole process as in Figure 1.1.
For Hegel, then, truth is the whole, the whole is a process and this process is reason (dt' as dp' as dr'). Its result is reconciliation to life {DPF:22} in (Hegelian) freedom. Error lies in one-sidedness, incompleteness and abstraction. Its symptom is the contradictions it generates and its remedy their incorporation into fuller, richer, more concrete, inclusive, englobing and highly mediated conceptual forms. In the course of this process, the famous principle of dialectical sublation (ds') or Aufhebung is observed: as the dialectic unfolds, no partial insight is ever lost. In fact the Hegelian dialectic progresses in two basic modes: (α) by bringing out what is implicit, but not explicitly articulated, in some notion or social or conceptual form (what I will term 'teleonomic push'); or (β) by repairing some want, lack or inadequacy in it ('teleological pull'). Both are instances of real negation in my terms, but only (α) is consistent with a rigorously ex ante, autogenetic process/progress of a kind to which, however we interpret him epistemologically (on which in a moment), he is certainly in his dialectics committed. Both may, moreover, be said to involve some theory/practice inconsistency, at least insofar as the notion or form makes, implicitly or explicitly, some claim to completion or adequacy, as the category Being from which the Logics start may be said to do. Truth is, however, not only the whole but a norm against which the adequacy of any particular reality to its notion and its stage in the development of the notion or reality (i.e. the idea in its otherness and return to self-consciousness) can be assessed. 'Dialectical', then, in contrast to 'reflective' (or analytical) thought — the thought of the understanding — grasps concepts and forms of life in their systematic interconnections, not just their determinate differences, and considers each development as a product of a previous less developed phase, whose necessary truth or fulfilment it, in some sense and measure, is; so that there is always some tension, latent irony or incipient surprise between any form and what it is in the process of becoming. In short, Hegelian dialectic is the actualized entelechy of the present, comprehended (and so enjoyed) as the end of everything that has led up to it.
It is now possible to make some systematic connections between the Hegelian dialectic and the argument we have developed so far, and to comment further upon the former. I shall distinguish (α) Hegel's global dialectics, of the kind discussed in §6(α), from (β) his local dialectics, of the sort schematized by the U-D-R movement of thought and from, within this, the dialectical moment proper (γ). The general character of any U-D-R movement or transition is that of a preservative determinate negation. Now this has the very interesting property of representing a non-arbitrary principle of stratification, structuration or superstructure-formation, which I shall explore later. Suffice it to say now that, properly transposed and situated, it forms the kernel to the solution of an important class of philosophical problems (those turning on the absence of an analogue of dr' or dg' at 1M) as well as being an interesting ontological figure in its own right (forming, for instance, an analogue of real material emergence). Within any U-D-R movement, the dialectical moment proper (dc') reports and speculative reason (dr') remedies a real negation or absence in the base concept or form at, let us say, level L1. The dialectical movement to the resolution at L2 consists in a transformative negation of a determinate and preservative type (in consciousness or experience of that at L1). But I have said in §3 above that all transformative negations are also real negations (though the converse is not the case). In virtue of what is this transformative negation a real negation? It absents the absence in L1. (This is the sense in which determinate negation is the negation of the negation.) It does this by dialectically bracketing and retaining or incorporating the base concept, say e; the lack, inadequacy or internal incoherence within e, identified in D; and the tension, inconsistency or contradiction between e and what it is meant or trying to be (or implicitly is), identified in the probing comment, and a fortiori the theory/practice inconsistency between the base concept and its comment, in what is in effect a continually unfolding process within a permanent memory store. In this expanding warehouse of reason, each successive operation is in principle bracketed and retained.* Hegelian {DPF:24} determinate negation constitutes, then, at once a transformation in the consciousness of the dialectical observer and an expansion of the existingconceptual field. Both are(in principle) additiveand cumulative: nothing except absence itself is lost.
The Hegelian totality is constellationally closed, completed. Hegel's, like Aristotle's, is an achieved identity theory, but, unlike Aristotle's, it incorporates the sequence of stages (or conceptual shapes) leading up to it as moments within it and is in fact nothing but this movement of shapes including the finalizing consummating stage, the self-consciousness of spirit as (absolute) spirit in the Hegelian system itself. Speculative philosophy — and its social matrix, rational history — is constellationally finished, at an end. It is at a plateau. There remains a future, of course, but this can be grasped by the understanding — it does not require dialectic or speculative reason. This is the constellational identity of the future within the (Hegelian) present. Now, whatever Hegel says about the autogenetic development of the concept, it is clear as noonday that very few of Hegel's local dialectics take the (α) teleonomic push form, that is, satisfy the requirements of rigorous ex ante progress. It is the failure of concepts and forms to meet the requirement of the posited end — the absolute idea as absolute spirit — this lack and this teleology, that pulls the Hegelian dialectic forwards. It is generally only retrospectively, ex post, that a stage can be seen to be deficient. If Hegel's local, and by extension global, dialectics did satisfy the ex ante requirement, then the dialectical comment that issues from the σ transform (dc') and the speculative reason issuing from the τ transform that resolves it (dr') could both — and together — be said without qualification to constitute immanent critiques — dc' of the base concept or form (at L1) and dr' of that and dc'. As it is, we have to qualify this, and to distinguish accordingly between (α') genuinely auto-subversive (ex ante radical and so determinate transformative) negations and (β') merely retrospectively situatable (ex post) ones. (In the latter case the critique is really transcendent, not immanent.) And accordingly we might distinguish between good and bad radical negations. Of course, as the Hegelian totality is constellationally closed, all the contradictions, whether teleonomically or teleologically generated, are internal ones — and neglect of external contradictions, and more generally constraints, has been a damaging feature of Marxian social theory in the Hegelian mould, one which the foil, say, of Aristotelian dialectics may help to correct. This question of the autogenesis of the dialectical movement is closely bound up with the linearity of the Hegelian dialectic. Once again Hegel's theory is at odds with his practice here. His dialectics are not in fact logically, as {DPF:25} distinct from textually, linear: they job around all over the place, affecting an incessant variety of perspectival switches motivated by Hegel's desire not to just illustrate his dialectics but also to absorb and treat more and more phenomena dialectically in a continuing — and in principle open-ended — process of dialectical suction. Nor is there any reason in principle why dialectics of a Hegelian (or non-Hegelian) type should be linear. They could consist in recursively unfolding matrices, Gestalten or any of a variety of topological modes. Surface linearity does, however, seem imposed by the requirements of the textual, especially narrative, form — in what I have elsewhere called 'continuous series'.29 (Derrida's use, and concept, of spacing is in fact a conscious attempt to overcome this.) These issues of autogeneticity and linearity are related to, but in principle distinct from, the epistemological status of Hegel's dialectics. There are three main interpretations: (a) that they are, or purport to be, totally self-generative and autonomous, dependent on no external subject-matter — the realization of the dream of intellectual intuition from Aristotle to Fichte in a hyperintuitive30 and parthenogenetic process, including — in the transition from Logic to Nature, i.e. in the alienation of the absolute idea — a moment heterocosmic with the creation of the world by God; (b) that they are, or purport to be, the dialectical treatment of various subject-matters, most notably those treated by previous philosophers, which Hegel has thoroughly (and perhaps totally) assimilated and critiqued and is now dialectically expounding — this is the transformative or re-appropriative interpretation, most notably formulated as a critique of Hegel's own self-understanding (or representation) of his practice by Trendelenburg; (c) that they are simple phenomenological descriptions of a dialectic in the real or at least of the notion as conceptually understood reality — an interpretation that obviously fits the Phenomenology and the historical lecture series best and which has been most persuasively and influentially argued by Kojève.31 I shall return to these issues later.
Corresponding to the distinction just made between good and bad radical negations (and immanent versus transcendent critiques), I want to distinguish between good and bad totalities. Good totalities are, though this is not their only characteristic, open; bad totalities are, whether constellationally or otherwise, closed. Now this is the exact opposite of Hegel's point of view. For him an open totality would conjure up the spectre of an infinite regress — it would be a 'bad infinite'. But why should an open totality involve an infinite regress? An infinite regress implies more of the same, that significant changes (and even the principles of change) might not change, which is just {DPF:26} what the concept of an open totality denies. Later I will show that totalities in general are and must be open. But for the moment let us stick with Hegel. Even if it is admitted that there is some kind of inadequacy or lack in an open totality (tautologically, a lack of completion), there is no inadequacy or lack in the thought of an open totality, which is what is at stake here. This thought can even, and perhaps must, be constellationally contained within the present (itself an indefinite boundary zone between past and future). Of course, Hegel's realized idealism, his principle of identity, will not allow him to accept this; there must be no mismatch — rather an identity — between totality and the thought of totality. But if truth consists in totality and the conformity of an object to its notion, it is clear that the concept of an open totality must be more true (complete and adequate) than the concept of a closed totality, because it is more comprehensive, englobing and contains the latter as a special case.
As I have described it, the real work of the dialectic is done by the σ transform which identifies the anomaly or lack in e (at L1) and the τ transform which remedies it at L2. I shall show in §9 how this U-D-R process can illuminate the epistemological dialectic in science, just as the non-arbitrary principle of stratification (logically) or superstructure-formation (spatio-temporally) involved in Hegelian preservative dialectical sublation illustrates analogous principles in nature and society. I shall also be arguing in C2.6 that although Hegel's global and crucial local dialectics fail, dialectical arguments are a perfectly proper species of transcendental argument belonging to the wider genus of retroductive (ascending)–explanatory (descending) argumentation in science. Dialectical arguments (and, for instance, the ontological necessities [and contingencies] they can establish) are no more the privilege of absolute idealism than transcendental arguments are the prerogative of Kant. I shall further argue that in the theory/practice inconsistency which the dialectical moment proper (dc') reports he has identified the most basic form of critique (in philosophy, science and everyday life): immanent critique. Unfortunately, locally and globally theory/practice inconsistency (which I shall sometimes abbreviate to T/P inc.) or incoherence is always for Hegel resolved in thought, in theory. The practice therefore remains. Transformative negation is confined to thought. There is no 4D in Hegel, rather the transfiguration of actuality in the post-philosophical reconciliation or υ transform. Once again Hegel is untrue to his theory of truth. If reality is out of kilter with the notion of it, it is reality which should be adjusted, not its truth. The unity (or coherence) of theory and practice must be achieved in practice. Otherwise the result is not autonomy, but heteronomy and the {DPF:27} reappearance of a Kant-like rift. Even the thought of the unity of theory and practice (in theory or practice) must be achieved in practice. Hypostatizing thought not only detotalizes reality, it also detotalizes the thought of reality. Here once more the Hegelian totality is revealed as incomplete. This amounts, of course, to an immanent critique of Hegel: his totality is incomplete, his theory inconsistent with his practice and the master concept which drives his dialectics on (for the most part teleologically) — lack or absence (in my terms, real negation) — is not preserved within his system. Positivity and self(-identity),the very characteristics of the understanding, are always restored at the end of reason. Hegelian dialectic is un-Hegelianly-dialectical.
It is also a special case. Within the σ and τ transforms — as at the actual or notional moment D which mediates them — we have moments of indeterminate and underdeterminate negation. (The same applies mutatis mutandis in the case of the ρ and υ transforms.) Linear radical negation — the production of an outcome as a result of a self-negating process alone — is clearly untypical: as we move in the Logics from simple to more complex categories (and the same holds true in Hegel's other textual dialectics), more and more determinations are brought in — and we shall see later that Hegel's doctrine of the speculative proposition, for example, can be heuristically fruitful in social science — but these determinations are always still internal or radical ones, or at the very best constellationally internal. More generally, it is clear that real transformative negations in geo-history are very really of the (even essentially) preservative, i.e. additive (superimpository), type. Indeed, insofar as every notional or social form — including those occurring in the universality of thought — is finite (i.e. insofar as the premisses of Hegel's dialectic of determinate being or 'matter' is true), all space-time beings are 'vanishing mediators'.32 However, in an Hegelian Aufhebung, is not error (partiality, one-sidedness) lost? Hegel will perhaps want to say that the erroneous has been retained as a partial aspect of the truth, but either the error has been cancelled in the coming-to-be or fruition of the end or nothing has been cancelled and Aufgehoben loses its threefold meaning — to annul, preserve and sublimate — and the whole Hegelian project is without point or rationale, for, at the very least, a lack of reconciliation to actuality must be lost. In fact in any genuine (materialist) Aufhebung it is clear that something has to be lost, even if it is only time ([neg]entropy). On the other hand, it is equally obvious that processes occur in geo-history which are not, at least with respect to some determinate characteristic and within some determinate space-time band, negating but purely accretory, {DPF:28} cumulative engrossments or developments. Generally one cannot say a priori whether the geo-historical outcome or result (dr0) of a process of a Hegelian-dialectical type will
Waiving this last for the moment, we can say that Hegelian dialectic identifies what is patently a limiting and special case of a more general schema which can be written as
dr0 ≥ dr† ≥ dr' ≥ dr'' ≥ dr'''.
Any general theory of dialectic will have to be able to situate the conditions of possibility and limits of non-resolutary results, non-reasonable resolutions, non-radical-preservative-determinate-negational reasons, and non-reconciliatory radical preservative determinate negations.
A few more preliminary points are called for before we grasp the nettle of 'the positive in the negative' of Hegelian dialectic. I have hitherto advanced two slightly different (but, in the Hegelian scheme itself, mutually implicative) interpretations of (γ), or the dialectical moment proper. On the one hand, I have said it gives, or is, the theory of the practice, experience or form preceding it — i.e. dc' as in effect (T1[P1]). On the other hand, I have said it reports a theory/practice inconsistency, or more general lack or inadequacy within it, i.e. dc' as (–T1[P1]). In the first moment, dc' as D1, it expresses the theory legitimating the metacritical statement which it articulates in the second, dc' as D2. D2, like D1, is a type of dialectical comment insofar as it isolates at a (notional) meta-level within the transition between L1 and L2 what is true of but not contained in L1, explicitly {DPF:29} articulating an internal rift within L1 between the practice P1 and its own self-consciousness or theory as expressed at D1, viz. T1. This is the general form of the figure of practico-[axio-]epistemological inconsistency. But there is also a third inflection to the dc'. This is to see it as expressing an inconsistency between the theory of the practice at L1 expressed in the dialectical comment and the theory of that practice prior to the comment, i.e. at L1 itself. And we could write the D3 form as T2 (L1)/T1 (L1). It will be important to differentiate these nuances subsequently in differentiated and non-idealist contexts, when the dc' will vary as ideology to ideology-critique (the former taking the (T1[P1]) form, the latter (–(–T1[P1])), for in ideology-critique the metacritique, which isolates the absence that drives the dialectic on, constitutes a critique both of the theory and of the theory-practice ensemble — hence the double negation. So we really need to modify the central sector of Figure 1.1 as shown in Figure 1.2.
Second, the actuality to which we return in the υ transform is not quite the same as the actuality we left in the ρ transform. It is now a (rationally transfigured and comprehended) world in the Hegelian Ansicht. (And metacritically — but this is also Hegelian Nachdenken [after-thought] — it could be added a world transformed in part by the Hegelian practice itself.) Third, as I have been interpreting it, the ρ, σ and τ transforms (and in critical realist dialectic the φ transform in 4D, and even, metacritically in Hegelian dialectic, the υ transfiguration) are all determinate negations (with indeterminate and, in principle, multiply-including non-radically and non-linearly determined, fuzzy, duplicitous, polymorphous and indeed a variety of other possible declensions or aspects). But, to reiterate, this terminology is my own, not Hegel's, and the determinate negation of e at L1 is just dr', including the case where dr' = dc' (in which the notional σ and τ transforms are not distinguishable).
It should also be said that the U-D-R schema, which Hegel himself employs, is an abstract idealization of Hegel's actual practice. In many cases there is no obvious tension or inadequacy in a conceptual form. In some instances (as just mentioned) dc' = dr', i.e. what is resolved is an incoherence within a single concept (the dyadic case, on which it is clear that, if Hegelian dialectic is to be both rigorously ex ante and consistently linear, it must ultimately rest or continuously {DPF:30} employ); in others, the resolution is between two opposed concepts, coupled in a non-identity relationship (the famous triadic paradigm, the classic dr'as ds'); in yet others, the resolution is of an incoherence or partiality within or a contradiction or anomaly between a whole cluster of concepts (the polyadic case, which we can subsume under the formula dr' as dt'). In some instances there is an immediate resolution (dc' as dr'), in others the resolution is motivated by a whole sequence of aporetic or antinomial phases (reiterated σ transforms). In some dialectical sequences or rounds the originating element is just the final resolving concept of the preceding round; in others the transition between local dialectics is mediated by more global considerations; in others still there is no very obvious or at best a (e.g. globally mediated) tenuous connection. Where there is no (obvious, or at least immanent/teleonomic) failing in a conceptual or social form, there may just be a perspectival switch (including reversal), a deepening, a concretization, a pun or a joke. No attempt to fit Hegelian dialectics into a unitary mode will work — although the Being-Nothing-Becoming and Unity-Difference-Unity-in-Difference heuristics can illuminate. However, it is noteworthy that the former is radically undermotivated and that the latter is not a local dialectic. Moreover, I agree entirely with Findlay when he remarks that 'whatever Hegel may say in regard to the presence of contradictions in thought and reality' (a presence, I hasten to add, which dialectical critical realism will vindicate, though situate), he is in practice concerned with 'the presence of opposed, antithetical tendencies ... which work in contrary directions'.33 In fact we shall see that it requires critical realism (and in particular its non-actualist and non-monovalent ontology) to show the rationale of, and sustain, Hegel's own logical innovations.
Sticking for the moment with Hegelian exegesis it is clear that, irrespective of the three epistemological interpretations outlined in §7, the Hegelian autogenetic moment is meaning-dependent and self-particularizing, breaking with the form–concept and concept–instance distinctions of Kantian transcendental analytic. It is also clear that Hegel is committed to the speculative identity of process and totality (dp' as dt') at the point of completion. Now from the consideration that the Hegelian determinate negation is simultaneously both a transformation in the observer's consciousness and an expansion of the whole conceptual field it follows that the latter can only be held in the mode of 'negative presence' — what I am going to call, following Kosok's path-breaking study, 'negative referral'.34 Now in any determinate negation, whether of the Hegelian conceptual sort or the critical realist metatheoretical (distanciated and {DPF:31} transformationalist) gloss on its type, there is and must be both a moment of indeterminacy (prior to the result) and a point of transition (the moment of its becoming). If we say of N that they are not moral, we leave it open whether they are immoral or amoral (or indeed neither). 'Not moral' is the indeterminate negation of 'moral'. Ontologically, indeterminate negation, say at the σ or τ transforms, precedes determinate negation, both at each moment in the process and at the end, conceived as the formation of a comment or result. It is a moment of genuine contingency, openness, multi-possibility (and doubt), closed by the ensuing greater determinacy or determination. But epistemologically, in Hegelian dialectic, given the dominance of teleological pull over teleonomic push and the speculative identity of process and product, we can in general abstract a moment of indeterminacy only retrospectively, after we know the result. The ontological and epistemic orders are reversed in this in principle four-tiered structure of Hegelian local dialectic. What about the transition point itself? Take a triadic dialectic, where (–e) is the determinate negation of the originating conceptual or social form e, and o is the sublation of (e) and (–e). In principle it seems that we have a choice: either (α) we can say neither (e) nor (–e) apply in the transition state or boundary zone, rejecting the law of excluded middle and/or bivalence, assigning a third value (e.g. ontologically, indeterminate/ underdetermined/fuzzy; epistemologically, undecidable); or (β) we can say that both (e) and (–e) apply, thereby rejecting the law of non-contradiction. In Derridean rejection of 'identity theory' the first option is characteristically taken. In the former case we seem to sacrifice completeness (there is no reference to either determinate element in the boundary zone); in the latter case completeness is achieved (there is reference to both), but we seem to sacrifice consistency. In the Hegelian cumulative memory store, completion must be (constellationally) attained — the Hegelian totality is (allegedly) full — so Hegel must take the second option.
But it is the way in which he takes it that is interesting. The contradiction between the positive contraries (e) and (–e) becomes a signalling device for(as well as the purportedly autogenetic mechanism of) the expansion of the conceptual field or universe of discourse. The erstwhile positive contraries are retained, but now in a negative mode (i.e. in the mode of negative presence — that is, as negative sub-contraries), in the formation of o. This is the transition point within the transition zone, the moment of determination which is the negation of the non-identity relationship (e) ↔ (–e) in which the mutually exclusive elements were coupled, which are thereby both preserved as negative presences. In this way completion (local {DPF:32} totality) is attained as a result of contradiction; identity reinstated after non-identity. This last is the constellational identity of identity and non-identity: the envelopment of non-identity by identity for the sake of the preservation/restoration/achievement of identity. This process — of the transmutation of positive contraries into negative subcontraries — explains what I meant earlier when I said that the dialectical fertility of contradictions depends upon their analytical unacceptability and illustrates the 'dialectical bracketing' to which I later referred.
Three consequences follow from this (δ) node within the Hegelian dialectical moment proper, (γ) or D. First, in the expanded field, the erstwhile contraries are reinstated in their full distinctiveness, yet they remain inseparable moments of the totality which both transcends and encompasses them. Second, such dialectical opposites illustrate one way in which the traditional table of oppositions can be completed, for if contraries do not permit both (e) and (–e) and sub-contraries neither (e) nor (–e) and contradictories do not permit either, dialectical opposites permit both35 — though, and this remains crucial, not at the same time. But there is a simpler way of completing the table of oppositions, and one on which — if Findlay and I are right — Hegel's practice actually depends. In a multiply determined result the exercise of two or more tendencies are invoked to explain the outcome. They are, now simultaneously (but not at the same ontological level), both really present (i.e. transfactually efficacious) and actually absent (i.e. not manifest or 'realized'); and insofar as they are tendentially opposed or negating they are at once positive contraries and negative sub-contraries (they cannot both be actualized but they can both be present); and, insofar as they have a common causal ground or condition of existence (dg'), they share the dialectical characteristic of being distinct yet inseparable. Critical realism can in this way vindicate, generalize, critically situate and show the limits of (Hegel was an arch expressivist-kinetic-actualist) Hegel's logical insight. The third consequence is the reinstatement of the principle of identity. In general Hegel wants to assert all of the following: 'A is A', 'A is (i.e. passes over into) not A', 'A is B' (the determinate result of the transition) and 'A is A after all'. There are two ways of looking at this last proposition. On the one hand, it is only because A remains self-identical throughout the generative process of the local dialectic (β) that we are able to climb via B to C and thence to CN. On the other hand, from the perspective of the achieved summit of the global dialectic (α), all the steps that are climbed are explicit — no longer implicit. Their inadequacy and lack is cancelled in the Hegelian retrospective return, though it is not {DPF:33} forgotten — held in negative presence (but not positive absence — real negation) — in the cumulative memory store of the climb, contained in-and-for-itself at the summit. At this point their logical-rational-spiritual necessity in the chain of things triumphantly shines out: the Eleatic (Parmenidean) face glowing in the Ionian (Heraclitean) fire.
It is now time to redeem my earlier promise and show how dialectic and more especially dialectic of a recognizably Hegelian provenance, albeit one refashioned in critical realist terms, can cast light on central concerns and problems of philosophy. First, let us consider the structure of the U-D-R local dialectic sketched in Figure 1.1 and the non-arbitrary principle of stratification it in principle affords. I want to interpret the schema illustrated in Figure 1.3 as essentially the schema for the epistemological dialectic in the sciences; and the ρ and υ transforms as standing for the relational dialectics in and out of science. Very concretely the ρ transform corresponds to the long training a scientific neophyte must undergo before being able to 'do' science; the U stands for the practice of normal science in something like Kuhnian terms; the σ transform for the gradual or sudden emergence of major anomalies or contradictions in the existing theoretical paradigm, or research tradition or programme. At this point a negative comment — dc' — on the practice of the pre-existing community becomes possible and inevitable, revealing at the very least some lack or inadequacy in it (real negation) and some inconsistency between its own self-understanding and the way it is (T/P or practico-epistemological inconsistency or incoherence). This — D — is the epoch of scientific revolution — with the node within the node (the δ moment) coming from the hint of the restoration of consistency by an expansion of the pre-existing conceptual field, a process only notionally completed at R after the τ transform. In general the epistemological dialectical resolution will involve retroductive-analogical thinking, utilizing paramorphic model-building or other condensations (so that the transformative negation is not an exclusively radical one) and heavily reliant on absented, {DPF:34} distanciated and transformed pre-existing knowledge (Bachelard's 'scientific loans'). The determinate result of this labour of transformative negation (in the transitive process of science) will be the identification of a new level of ontological structure, say S2, described in a new theory T2 capable of explaining most of the significant phenomena explained by T1 (at U) plus the anomalies at D, albeit in its own (T2's own) terms. The phenomena at S1 identified by T1 are 'saved' (for the most part) — this is the preservative aspect; theory at T1 is negated, falsified (the aspect of indeterminate, excluding negation) and transformed into something that could not be predicted and had to be won, fought for, achieved in a labour culminating in the determinate negation and replacement of T1 by T2. As science is a social and inter-subjective affair this may involve, besides (and in) work, what is in effect a life-and-death struggle for prestige and recognition, accompanied by reconciliation, at least in the next generation, as the scientific community coalesces around the new paradigm. This now initiates, in principle, the possibility, which may always be circumscribed or practically closed for any number of circumstantial reasons, of a new infra-scientific local dialectic exemplifying my open totality (Hegel's 'infinite regress'). In the meantime there are a variety of interpretations that can be put on the υ transform. It can be seen under the aspect of applied science or technology, immediately involving social—natural relations, and/or under the aspect of the (re-)appropriation by the lay community of the skills and knowledge forged in the intra-scientific domain from which the latter is emergent. The ρ transform for its part can be seen not only as scientific training, but also as spanning a whole series of extra-scientific inputs, most notably the social matrix, itself embedded in nature, in which science occurs. More radically, under the sign of the new sociology of science, this whole epistemological dialectic could be interpreted as a 'doxological' dialectic in which the ρ and υ transforms were conceived as pervasive in their impact and knowledge/doxa as inextricably coupled to power in the manner of Foucault or alternatively symbolic capital in the style of Bourdieu.
How plausible this will strike the reader I do not know. But Hegel himself would probably have been horrified. Science, for him, was a matter of the understanding — what he meant by 'science' was what we now mean by philosophy, and I would not be unwilling to apply my model there too. But the years separating us from Hegel have seen revolution upon revolution in the sciences and the idea of negatively rational or dialectical (γ) and positively rational or literally speculative thought is at least now not at all out of place therein. There is something like a logic of scientific discovery,36 which I am calling the {DPF:35} epistemological dialectic here. Of course this will be highly subject-specific and context-sensitive, matters which will occupy us later on. Before I consider one of the implications of the potentially non-arbitrary principle of stratification or superstructuration implicit in Hegelian dialectics, let me step back a bit to dwell on the notorious problem-field of induction. I should say at the outset that I will treat it only in 1M terms, a 2M treatment will be given in C2. The problem of induction in its simplest form is the problem of what warrant we have for supposing that the course of nature will not change. On the ontology of transcendental realism, the stratification of nature provides each science with its own internal inductive warrant. If there is a real reason, located in the nature of the stuff, and independent of the disposition concerned, such as its molecular or atomic structure, then water must tend to boil when it is heated. In the epistemological dialectic sketched, this explanatory reason is obtained as a result of the τ transform to dr', when the identification of a new level of structure S2 is sufficiently confirmed for science — a process in motion — to take this as a starting point — a fact, for a new dialectical round. It is inconsistent with this reason/explanation that water should tend to freeze, blush shyly or turn into a frog. But it remains the case that in an open world any particular prediction may be defeated, so transcendental realism allows us to sustain the transfactuality (universality) of laws in spite of the complexity and differentiation of the world, e.g. so as to enable us to infer the mediated efficacy of tendencies in extra-experimental contexts, thus resolving the metacritically identifiable problem of what I have termed 'transduction'.37 An ontology of closed systems and atomistic events and a sociology of reified facts and fetishized conjunctions are conditions of the possibility of the traditional problem of induction and conditions of the impossibility of its resolution. Closely connected with this problem are the problems of distinguishing a necessary from an accidental sequence of events, of subjunctive conditionals and of Goodman's and Hempel's paradoxes. All these stem from the absence of a real (non-conventional) reason, located in the nature of things, for predicates to be associated in the way they are. In virtue of his genetic constitution, if Socrates is a man, he must die. Turning too on the absence of a principle of stratification is the traditional problem of universals. If there is something, such as the possession of the same atomic or electronic configuration, which graphite, black carbon and diamonds share, then chemists are rationally justified in classifying them together — the reason is that structure. On the other hand/ there is nothing of any deep ontological import that all greengroceries possess in common — in such a {DPF:36} classificatory context a resemblance, rather than a realist, theory works best (and, of course, critical realism can accommodate and explain this fact, too). In general, theoretical science is concerned only with what kinds of things there are, insofar as it illuminates their ways of acting (the generative mechanisms of nature); and it is concerned only with what things do, insofar as it illuminates what kinds there are (the structured entities of nature). This is the dialectic of explanatory and taxonomic knowledge within the epistemological dialectic in science.
Also belonging to the same problem-field are the Platonic self-predicative and, as I shall show in C4, the twentieth-century self-referential paradoxes. Thus Plato tries to account for some instance of blueness in terms of its participating in the Form 'blue' as distinct from, say (as of course he could not say), its reflecting light of wavelength 4400Â, i.e. invoking a new level or order of structure. This is also the clue to a rational theory of truth, as we shall see in due course. When we know why something is true our assumption that it is true is grounded, in a way in which it is not when we are only subjectively empirically certain of it. The absence of a non-arbitrary principle of stratification is the critical diagnostic key to many other philosophical aporiai, or so I shall argue in C4.2. Thus it is easy to find immediate and direct homologues of the problem of induction — e.g. Kripke's interpretation and generalization of Wittgenstein's private language argument;38 or analogues of it — for instance, the Hobbesian problem of order as thematized in the history of sociological theory. To repeat my forewarning, this is only a 1M resolution — at 2E the course of the deep structure of nature may indeed change, but to this backgammon is hardly an appropriate response. It should be already clear that dr', conceived as the outcome of an irreducibly empirical and heteronomous dialectic in science, involving the transformative negation of T1 by T2 and the identification of a new level of ontological structure S2 capable of resolving the aporiai (dc') of T1, saving, explaining, grounding and very probably redescribing the phenomena of the base structure S1, can at the very least be illuminating. Once again Hegel would have been horrified by this result. The rational necessity arrived at is not deployed by Geist, it is not intrinsically related, but contrafactually related, to human subjectivity, and it remains non-constellationally contingent whether it is ever actualized. But in this book I am into the business of denying Hegel exclusive property over his insights. Dialectic neither began nor ended with Hegel.
I hope I have made a prima facie case for connecting critical realism, (especially Hegelian) dialectic and essential concerns of philosophy. {DPF:37} These connections will become explicit in the course of Dialectic, together with their implications for social theory and practice. In particular my critique of Hegelian dialectic will be systematized in C4 in the course of a sublation of the traditional problem-fields of philosophy. Dialectic will be diffracted and retotalized.
* In an earlier publication in which I introduced the terms real and radical negation, their definitions were transposed.8 I now call the notion of absence, including non-existence, 'real negation' because, as I have just argued, it is the primary concept and embraces that of transformative negation including self-negation. Moreover, conceptually, it extends our ontology synchronically, irrespective of over what space-time span the indefinite synchronic is defined, so that it does not depend essentially upon process. I should also mention that in my exposition of what I now call real negation I confused the epistemological question of our criteria for the reality of absence with the ontological question of whether, for example, a thing is, quite independently of us, absent (distanciated or non-existent), not there. I also failed to notice that our criteria for ascribing reality to absences need not be causal, but can be perceptual — as in Sartre's example,9 where I see Pierre's absence from the café (when I am expecting to meet him), or as in the case of simple non-existential proofs in science, which will be discussed in C2. This was because I was tacitly thinking of non-being (or more generally absence) as necessarily involving depth, thus overlooking the simplest species, where it involves merely spatio-temporal distance. Anthony Giddens has given some currency to the term 'distanciation'.10 However, it seems to me that in his work it sometimes means (a) stretching (and thereby extending presence or embedding) and sometimes simply (b) distancing (and thereby absenting and possibly disembedding). I shall make use of this term, and exploit this duality of meaning to connote the play of absence and presence, e.g. in the conceptual distanciation that occurs in analogical, metaphorial or metonymic work in the transitive process of science, which executes a crucial role in the epistemological dialectic. p. 7
* Thus I have previously argued that ontological realism (in the intransitive dimension) is consistent with and necessitated by epistemological relativism (in the transitive, geo-historical process of science), which is in turn consistent with and practically entailed by judgemental rationality (in the axiologically irreducible, intrinsic aspect of, or normative moment in, science).11 Even more simply, one might cite the ontological arguments of transcendental realism as exemplifying 1M; the meta-sociology of the transformational model of social activity (which is also the logic of the transitive dimension of science) as prefiguring 2E; the naturalistic ethics entailed, or at least facilitated, by the theory of explanatory critique as intimating 3L; and the emancipatory axiology so situated as indicating 4D. But, as we shall see, this historical sublation is not entirely preservative insofar as the moments of critical realism are affected by its dialectical deepening which is also a cross-fertilization. p. 9
* 'All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another, but we can never observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined but never connected.'12 p. 10
* Negations do not nullify and contradictions do not spread within this system — because to say of something that is false does not remove it (it has been said) and to say of a pair or more that they are contradictory is not itself contradictory (their contradictoriness is bracketed and negated at a higher level and in this simple way — which bears obvious analogies with the theory of types in standard logic — both the contradictions and their determinate negation are retained). p. 23