Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27:2/3 00218308

On the Ontological Status of Ideas

ROY BHASKAR

Why should we be concerned with ontology? Or, more particularly with the ontological status of ideas (as distinct, say from with their truth, efcacy or beauty)? An important caveat: to argue these are legitimate is not to argue (what I in fact deny) that all ideas possess the same ontological type, or categorical status. First some simple considerations. Ideas, and ideational connections (including category mistakes, logical contradictions etc.), are part of everything, and everything is real. To deny the reality of a part of everything (of anything), such as ideas (or say persons, or consciousness, or agency, or valuesor mind, or body) extrudes or detotalizes it or them from the world, that is the rest of the world of which they are in principle causally explicable and causally efcacious parts. This inevitably produces an implicit dualistic or split ontology. One of the most frequent sources of the denial of the reality of ideas depends upon a tacit restriction of criteria for ascribing reality to what can be perceived directly, rather than experienced so to speak indirectly, viz. through its actual or potential effects, i.e. to a perceptual rather than a causal criterion. Thus a philosopher or scientist schooled in or inuenced by the empiricist doctrine of esse est percipi might scout the reality of ideas because (s)he is tacitly supposing that ideas cannot be tasted, touched, seen, heard or smelled, i.e. perceived directly, rather than experienced indirectly through the efcacy of their effects. Tools and machines, and a fortiori the social relations in which they are formed, are not only, but also, the objectications of ideas, of the social products (reproducts and transforms) of ideation, of the naturalised process of thought. This process occurs in what I have elsewhere characterized as four planar social being. These planes are those constituted by (a) material transactions with nature; (b) social interactions between agents; (c) social relations and institutions; and (d) the stratication of the personality.1 Another source of the denial of the reality of ideas depends upon the confusion of the ontological question of what is real with the epistemo-ontological question of what (ideas) have a referent. Or more generally upon the conation of the ontological issue of the reality of ideas with the epistemological or ethical issues of their truth (e.g. representational adequacy), instrumental or moral value.
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Knowledge and value are not, or not only opposed to, but also (constellationally) contained within, being. One common form of this mistake is what I have called the epistemic fallacy, involving the reduction of ontology to epistemology.2 I want to ordinate my discussion of the ontological status of ideas in this paper around four recent turns in social thought. These tendencies I shall in turn relate to the four dimensional (1M, 2E, 3L, 4D) schema for dialectical critical realism I have proposed recently3. In the course of my discussion I hope (1) to indicate systematically why ontology matters and why it is inexorable; (2) to demonstrate the reality of ideas (of different types); (3) to anlayse the most prevalent mistakes in the ontology of ideas; (4) to touch on the issue of categorial realism and the nature of a specic type of ideaideologies; (5) to illustrate some good and bad dialectical connections of ideas (and related phenomena).

1. FOUR RECENT TURNS IN SOCIAL THOUGHT

The developments I wish to focus on in recent social (philosophical and generally cultural) thought may be summarized as the (a) ontological, (b) processual, (c) ecological and (d) reexive turns respectively. These may be related to the rst moment, second edge, third level and fourth dimension of the system of dialectical critical realism to which I have already referred. (a) The rst ontological or realist turn is oriented against the epistemic fallacy, actualism, anthropocentricity (and the particular model of man which informs it) and what I have called the primal squeeze between empiricism and rationalism consequent upon the denial of a stratied and differentiated account of reality. The particular twist that dialectical critical realism puts on these themes involve inter alia both a dispositional and a categorial realism. The former accentuates the ontological, epistemological and logical priority of the possible over the actual, and insists upon a three-tiered analysis of dispositions, in which they are seen to be analysed in terms of tendencies possessed but unexercised, tendencies exercised but unactualized and tendencies exercised and actualized in a particular outcome. It follows from this analysis not only that powers cannot be reduced to their exercise, but that the domain of the real cannot be reduced to the domain of the actual (as in Humean analysis of laws) and even less to the domain of the empirical. Dispositions at once play a critical role in the dialectic of scientic discovery (bridging strata) and also form the only possible ultimata of a scientic ontology. Such ultimata may be epistemologically transcendent, but ontologically immanentfor example ingredient in the higher order of phenomena from them emerge. There are two points worth stressing about the categorical realism which ontological realism, taken consistently, entails. First, categories are not to be viewed as something which the subjective observer imposes on reality; rather categories such as causality, substance, process, persons, etc.if validare
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constitutive of reality as such, irrespective of their categorization by observers or thought. However, secondly, social reality is conceptually dependent and, as such, may be falsely categorized, providing a grid through which categorical necessity is, that is to say more basic categorial realities are, refracted. (Thus categorical realities may be stratied.) I will come back to this later in my discussion on ideology. (b) The second turn in social thought re-emphasizes the categories of absence, process, and dialectic. Dialectic may be seen as the (experience of) the process of (trans) formation and dissolution of stratied (and differentiated) totalities. In the human eld it constitutes a general schema for a learning process in which absence (2E), signifying incompleteness, leads to transcendence and a greater totality (3L), in principle reexively (4D) capable of situating itself and the process whereby it became. There is a renewed emphasis on geo-historicity, spacing and change which, when qualitative, always involves a transcendent cause upon an immanent ground. (Ideational creativity is non-algorithmic). Being is seen as self-organizing, tensed and creative, proleptically replete with possibilities of future (dis) emergence. As for the epistemic realm, in it there is no conict between ontological realism, epistemic relativity and judgemental rationality. (c) The ecological, relational or holistic turn is motivated by the new physics (both micro and macro), the life sciences generally as well as the social sciences. Profoundly critical of atomistic, extentionalistic, mechanistic and merely analytical ways of viewing being it presages the need for a moment of transcendence, and even re-enchantment in a more satisfactory, post-Netzschean, post-instrumentalist mode of being or way of life. The individual is situated in its Umwelt, entailing a transformed and vastly expanded conception of the self, both as a unit of analysis and as a unit of moral evaluation. (d) The reexive turn, initiated by Descartes, pursued rigorously by the radicalization of transcendental argument from Kant, through Fichte and Schelling, to Hegel and Marx, through Nietzsche and Freud, the other masters of the hermeneutic of suspicion, to the recent doyens of structuralism and poststructuralism. In the twentieth century it has most frequently taken a concern with the means and media by which a philosophical assertion or position articulates itself, especially linguistically. But, taken consistently, it implies the need for every philosophy, if it is to be adequate, to be capable of reectively situating itself which entails its own production and context as well. This is an absolute and necessary condition for any adequate philosophical account of any subject matter. Moreover in explanatory critical social science reexively situated intentional causal agency (driven by desire or want) or transformative praxis absenting the given (characterized by need or lack) comes to the fore as a key critical concept, transcending the dualisms and dichotomies characteristic of the philosophy of action.

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2. THE NECESSITY OF ONTOLOGY

Everything is contained (constellationally) within ontology (including epistemology and ethics)or rather its referent, being (including knowledge and values). To say that everything is real is not to say that everything is representationally real (representationally adequate), or of equal epistemic and ethical value (that is, it is not to say that it is instrumentally useful or intrinsically good). Crucial of course are the questions of what kinds of reality ideas have. Moreover it is patently not the case that ideas are a homogeneous category. Nor is it correct to assume that say ideas of different epistemic status do not have radically different kinds of reality. However the epistemic or ethical value or pedigree of ideas is irrelevant to their reality as such. The relevant question is not whether ideas are real, but what kind of reality they have, and whether ideas of different type (e.g. kind, epistemological or ethical status) have different kinds of reality.

Denial of ontology (e.g. in the epistemic fallacy)

(1) Detotalizes the idea, agent, and/or discursive act from the world of which it is an explicably efcacious part. This at the very least issues in the failure of the philosophical position to satisfy the all important reexive criterion for philosophy. (2) Esoterically secretes an untheorized implicit ontology (so that ontology is denegated, i.e. expressed while being denied), and in practice (as categorical necessity must be accommodated somehow) an illicit Tina compromise form4, i.e. an illicit conjugation of mutually inconsistent but surreptitiously complementary components. (3) Results in a split ontology, which generates an antinomial-dilemmatic chain, ssuring being into formally discrete but tacitly related parts. This imparts to philosophy its characteristic dualisms. Dualism or split is the sign of alienation and underpinning the familiar dualisms (empiricism/ rationalism, mind/body, fact/value) of philosophy, and the aporiai to which they give rise (problems of induction, agency and value), is the doctrine of ontological monovalence (a purely positive account of being) denying absence, negativity and change, on which doctrine rests actualism (cf. IM), extentionalism (cf. 3L) and reication (cf. 4D) characteristic of commodication and all instrumentalist and manipulative reasoning alike. (4) Logically results in the generation of a nugatory epistemological or ethical content (including the co-inclusion of null opposites). Thus Humean subjectivism generates a nugatory solipsistic content, logically identical with a Parmenidean objectivism, without distinctions or boundaries. Irrealism constitutes, so I argue elsewhere, a thicket such that if you enter it anywhere
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you are embroiled in it everywhere and must collapsein what I call reductio ad irrealisminto a null point from which nothing can be said or done. In this way irrealist philosophy must be explicated as ideology and explained in terms of alienation.

3. ON THE REALITY OF IDEAS

I have already argued that if everything is real, ideas (including category mistakes, logical contradictions, illusions, errors generally) must be. Moreover that to deny the reality of ideas (or say of persons or of the existence of causal relations in the human world) extrudes or detotalizes them or the idealizer from the rest of the world producing a split in the world, including an implicit, inconsistent, void and compromised ontology. Moreover to deny the reality of ideas makes their production wholly mysterious and their effects impossible. More positively, and to relate the topic of the reality to the 1M-4D analysis of dialectical critical realism-ideas are: (1) real qua causally efcacious, that is, on a causal criterion for ascribing reality (cf. 1M). Specically as explicably efcacious, dependent upon materially embodied intentional causal agency (therefore conceptualized under some description), emergent parts of the natural world system and constituted within and contained by all four planes of naturalised social being, ideas are causally and taxonomically irreducible modes of matter, or more generally nature (including socialised nature5); (2) explicably efcacious parts of the natural world, products of the naturalised process of thought (ideation) (2E). Just as a stratied world-view sustains the reality of ideas in virtue of their causal efcacy, so a processual world-view allows us to sustain the emergent reality of ideational forms without denying their diachronic emergence from nature. On this conception ideas are causally and taxonomically irreducible to the conditions of their production and physical realization alike. Moreover on a scientically rened conception of emergence, the lower-order level provides only the framework conditions of possibility of the higher-order level (which moreover characteristically determines the initial and boundary conditions of the lower-order level). Thus synchronic emergent powers materialism is consistent with the epistemological, ontological and logical priority of semantic, hermeneutic and semiotic relations over physical, syntactical and formal (including algorithmic) relations. Ideas, then, as emergent powers of the total world system, are capable of acting back on the materials out of which they are diachronically formed. And they are causally and taxonomically irreducible modes of manifestation of matter, more generally nature (or let us say being).
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(3) As such they are parts of nature or the universe, in all kinds of relations to other parts and the whole, neither of which can synchronically be dened independently of them. The orientation here (at 3L) is to deny dualistic disembodiment, any kind of hypostasis or split which subverts the embodiment and materiality of ideas. This is as common in vulgarised forms of Marxism as in classical philosophy. Thus tools, machines etc., cannot be conceived simply as material objects, but are also intrinsically the objectication of (socially produced and transformed) ideas. Moreover only a rising organic composition of ideas can offset the rising organic composition of capital consequent upon a falling rate of prot as capitalism exhausts the possibility of any one form or level of technological development. (4) Paradigmatically ideas are social products or transforms (at 4D). They must hence be conceptualised in a way which avoids the errors of naturalism and anti-naturalism, individualism and collectivism, and reication and voluntarism alike. Thus we fall into voluntarism if we neglect the constraining power of the social reality of ideas (the inertia embodied in the presence of the past).

4. MISTAKES IN THE ONTOLOGY OF IDEAS

Because of the antinomial dilemmatic inconsistencies and incoherences produced by the failure of inadequate positions (such as subjective and objective idealism, dualism, reductionist materialism, behaviourism etc.) in the metatheory of ideas, the most common mistakes tend to lead into (and mutually entail, by a weird eristic of unreason) each other. Thus vericationist behaviourism, denying ontology, leaves the status of both what is veried and verier problematic, detotalizing and splitting them from (the rest of) being. This undermines the rationale and cognitive point of the exercise and results, moreover, in failure to sustain both the reality of the procedure and the reexive criterion for philosophy. Then again both reductionism, denying emergence and the sui generis causal efcacy of ideas and hypostasis, denying the embodiment and materiality of ideas, produce forms of dualistic disembodiment leading to (a) detotalization, alienation, split, dilemmatic chains; (b) implicit totality in which the split or denied segment of reality must be illictly recombined with the asserted one. (Thus the eliminative materialism of Rorty in Part I of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature must be split-andcombined with the conversational hermeneutics of Part III); hence (c) illicit compromise form, producing a vast variety of ideological possibilities. All these irrealist positions are incomplete, and so erroneous, detotalizing one or other signicant part of reality. If the split off part of reality must
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nevertheless in practice be sustained (that is to say, it is categorically necessary) then we have an explicit or implicit dualistic, dilemmatic, schizoid ideational form. Dualism or split is in fact a characteristic feature of our philosophical tradition. Most prominent here is mind-body dualism. It can, as I have already suggested, be traced back to the doctrine of ontological monovalence,6 a purely positive account of being denying the necessity for concepts of absence, void, non-being and entailing the deprocessualization, detotalization, the absence of ontology and the failure of philosophy to satisfy a reexive criterion for itself. Behind ontological monovalence is, I have argued, a deep-seated existential insecurity, rooted in the alienation of human being from four plenar social being, and ultimately the cosmos. The splits of philosophy are indications of more profound social and natural alienations.

5. CATEGORIES AND IDEOLOGIES

We have already seen that ontological entails categorical realism, whether the reality concerned is conceptually-dependent (or-mediated) or not. Social reality is of course conceptually dependent. As such it can be falsely characterized and falsely categorized. Such falsely categorized realities may be thought as dependent, demi-realities, through which categorial necessity or truth or reality is refracted. All error depends on, though it is not of course the same as, incompleteness; and if what is omitted is categorially necessary (1) dualistic, (2) implicit, (3) inconsistent-ssured and (4) compromised (Tina) totalities will be formed, subject to ideology-critique (immanent critique and dialectical argumentation). It does not seem to me very important whether ideologies are conceived as the lived practices through which such dilemmatic totalities are constituted, or the erroneous ideas in terms of which they are characterized. In either case to characterize a theory or practice as an ideology is to stigmatize it and in particular to say that it is (a) false, (b) categorially awed, and (c) (and this is vital) explicable in terms of some theoretically and empirically validated theory of its formation and its contemporary social and natural structuration and context. I would also suggest that to characterize a theory or practice as ideological requires the satisfaction of substantive as well as formal criteria, bearing on the role that the theory or practice plays in the discursive moralization of power2 or master-slave relations. In Transcendence and Totality I argue that any power2 (e.g. money)-based society will be characterized by irrealist categorial structures, alienation and ideology. As such irrealism is symptomatic of an alienation of human being from the cosmos and a lack of autonomy that only a eudemonistic society oriented to
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universal human emancipation can rectify. The logic of dialectical universality implicit in any speech or other action does presuppose that truth is (or has) a value, as Hugh Lacey argues in his comments in this volume on my fact-value entailments. In other words it presupposes that there are evaluative grounds for respecting truth and objecting to falsity. That truth is or has a value is implicit in any factual discurse, e.g. about mathematics or in the natural sciences. However the process of explanatory critique (or metacritique), in isolating the causes of error in socially inadequate conditions of being (socially constitutive category mistakes), gives us a mode of transition to a negative evaluation on those causes and a positive evaluation on action directed at their removal (ceteris paribus), together with a consequent refutation of Humes law, without parallel in the purely natural world, as I argued in Scientic Realism and Human Emancipation.7

6. GOOD AND BAD DIALECTICS OF IDEAS (AND RELATED PHENOMENA)

I have argued elsewhere that dialectical is a species of transcendental argumentation, in turn a species of the genus of retroductive-analogical explanation characteristic of science. Dialectic indeed may be regarded as the general method or procedure of sciences, or indeed of all learning processes, remeding inconsistencies, ssure, split by undoing absence, error, incompleteness and alienation by resort to (transcendence towards) greater, more inclusive totalities. Now in virtue of the conceptuality of social practice (its conceptually-dependent character) transcendental argumentation, that is argumentation concerning the conditions of possibility of social practices as conceptualized in experience, is implicit in the hermeneutic moment in all social science; and in virtue of the false but necessary character of conceptualizations in the social world under conditions of an alienated society, social science, ideology (explanatory-) critique and dialectical argument will all overlap. Good dialectic is founded on recognition of ontology, absence, totality and transformative praxis and satises the reexivity criterion of philosophy. Bad dialectic is founded on the denial of these concepts, a denial it cannot (like itself) consistently sustain. In Trasncendence and Totality I have shown that any masterslave or non autonomous society, more generally any society based on the alienation of human being from the cosmos, must be characterized by an irrealist categorial structure. In such a society abstract universalizability as distinct from dialectical universalizability and concrete singularity, instrumental as distinct from intrinsic rationality, and dehumanization, reication and split will all be rampant. Formally the concepts of ideology, error, absence, incompleteness, detotalization, dualism, dilemma, split, illicit implicit ontology, Tina compromise form, demireality, alienation, irrealism, master-slave (power2 based) society, money, abstract universality and particularity, manipulative reasoning and the alienation of human being from and at all four planes of four-plenar social being form a
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family circle. Substantively we have the external and internal splits analysed by for example Hegel in such categories as the beautiful soul, the stoic, the skeptic and the unhappy consciousness. On the other good side we have connections between social science, ideology critique, explanatory critique, transcendental dialectical and more generally scientic realist reasoning, dialectical universalizability and concrete singularity, explanatory critical reasoning and universal human emancipation and the conatus of the logic of dialectical universalizability to a transformed transformative society, ultimately one characterized by de-alienation and re-unication at and between the planes of social being, characterized by the stratication of the personality, material transactions with nature, social interactions between agents and social relations including sedimented institutions and structures of various kinds. The ultimate goal of this process of de-alienation and de-reication may indeed be a society that will never be achieved. Yet it seems equally that, to quote Marx writing to Ruge in 1843, The world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess in reality . . . to obtain forgiveness for its sins mankind need only declare them for what they are. Perhaps not sins, and perhaps not only, but the explanatory critique of consciousness, of ideas as lived realities, is arguably still an irreducible and a priori part of the charter of the social sciences. Roy Bhaskar Centre for Critical Realism London

NOTES
Plato ETC., London 1994, ch. 6. Cf. A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds 1975 (London 1997), ch. 1. See Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London 1993, ch. 1. See Dialectic, ch. 2.7. Cf. My Emergence, Explanation, and Emancipation in Explaining Human Behavior, ed. P.F. Secord, London 1982. 6 See Transcendence and Totality, London 1997. 7 London 1986, pp. 1845.
1 2 3 4 5

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