Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice / Edition 1

by Alan Norrie

Overview

Dialectic and Difference is the first systematic exploration of Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical philosophy and its implications for ethics and justice.

That philosophy has three aims: a dialecticisation of original critical realism, a ‘critical realisation’ of dialectic, and a metacritique of western philosophy. In the first, real absence or negativity links structured being to dialectical becoming in a dynamic world. The second draws on Marx to locate the critical impulse in Hegel’s dialectic in a material, open and changing totality. The third identifies a central problem in western philosophy from the Greeks on, the failure to think real negativity as the essence of change (‘ontological monovalence’).

Bhaskar’s ethics connect basic human ontology with universal principles of freedom and solidarity. He marries (‘constellates’) these with a grasp of how principles are historically shaped. His account of freedom moves from the infant’s ‘primal scream’ to the eudaimonic society, but thinks the limits to freedom under modern conditions. The morally real in ethics and justice is displaced and reconfigured as relations between ‘the ideal’ and ‘the actual’.

Western philosophy systematically denies the real negativity that drives Bhaskar’s dialectic. Metacritique traces this to Parmenides and Plato’s account of non-being as difference. It enables a critique of the poststructural radicalisation of difference via Nietzsche and the doctrine of ‘Heraclitan flux’. Mobilised as ‘the other’ of Plato’s Forms, this remains a move on Platonic terrain. It too denies real negativity in structured being as the ground of historical change and moral praxis.

This text is essential reading for all serious students of social theory, philosophy, and legal theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415560368
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/27/2009
Series:	Ontological Explorations (Routledge Critical Realism)
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alan Norrie has recently taken up a Chair in Law at the University of Warwick. He was previously Drapers' Professor of Law at Queen Mary and Westfield College and Edmund-Davies Professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at King's College London. He has a longstanding interest in critical realist philosophy and is President of the International Association for Critical Realism.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1 Introduction: natural necessity, being and becoming 1

Three aims and four elements 1

Philosophical difficulty 2

Original critical realism: the necessity of being 7

Dialectical critical realism: being and becoming 11

Reworking dialectic: totality, ethics and metacritique 16

The grounds of justice 19

Conclusion 20

2 Accentuate the negative 22

Absence: what's in a word? 23

From product to process: critical realism's 'second edge' 28

The primacy of absence 34

Ontological monovalence and metacritique 42

Conclusion 47

3 Diffracting dialectic 50

Hegel's dialectic 51

Hegel's immanent critique: towards diffraction 58

Materialist diffraction: contradictions 65

Materialist diffraction in practice 75

Conclusion 81

4 Opening totality 86

Totality and totalities 88

Dialectical figures in totality 96

Detotalisation: philosophy and its (historical) discontents 105

Retotalisation: the concrete universal 113

Conclusion 118

5 Constellating ethics 120

Ethical starting points 121

Dialectical rationality: from 'primal scream' to eudaimoma 132

Constellating ethics and world 144

Conclusion 156

6 Metacritique I: philosophy's 'primordial failing' 158

Parmenides to Plato: absence as difference 160

Plato to Aristotle: difference and universal 169

Plato to Hume: the rationalist-empiricist vice 178

Metacritique and poststructural philosophy 182

Conclusion 189

7 Metacritique 0: dialectic and difference 192

Non-being and difference: Deleuze, Nietzsche and Heraclitus 193

Non-being as real absence: Bhaskar and Heraclitus 204

Conclusion 211

8 Conclusion: natural necessity and the grounds of justice 124

Natural necessity as 'material meshwork' 215

Natural necessity as 'reality principle": the real, ideal and actual 220

Natural necessity, the universal and the particular 224

Conclusion 230

Notes 232

References 245

Index 249

Editorial Reviews

"Matches Bhaskar’s striking originality with a clarity that should make his ideas more widely available. The reach of comparison with other thinkers, past and present, is truly impressive and very helpful. The emphasis on change, interaction, negativity and totality is particularly relevant for the explosive period our world has just entered." – Bertell Ollman, New York University, USA

"A major contribution to the understanding of a difficult but extremely important philosophical position. The expository and critical discussion is sustained at a very high level." – William Outhwaite, University of Newcastle, UK

"Elegant, thoroughgoing, accessible, genuinely illuminating. It brilliantly elucidates dialectical critical realism’s ethics and how it trumps poststructuralism in particular and irrealism in general." – Mervyn Hartwig, Editor, Journal of Critical Realism

From the Publisher