Critical realism and the metaphysics of justice

This essay concerns the problems of guilt that emerge in connection with genocide discussed after the Second World War by Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Jean Améry and Primo Levi. It looks at the different forms of guilt: of perpetrators, bystanders, victims who became perpetrators, and of collective guilt. It argues that a way to understand the structure of guilt is to consider the idea of survivor guilt, and its link to an underlying metaphysics of guilt. It considers primarily Levi’s account of survivor and accomplice guilt, and the ‘grey zone’ where judgements become problematic. The aim is to consider the ethical structure that supports our understanding of specific guilt categories, and this is linked to Roy Bhaskar’s account of MetaReality and the sense of a unity or identity that operates at a deeper level than the difference, conflict and change that the other levels of his thought seek to understand

Responsibility and the metaphysics of justice

In this chapter, I consider the problems of guilt in connection with genocide discussed after the Second World War by Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Primo Levi and Jean Améry. I look at the different forms of guilt: of perpetrators, bystanders, victims who became perpetrators, and of collective guilt. The way in to understand the structure of guilt is to consider the idea of survivor guilt, and the chapter link this to an underlying metaphysics of guilt. It considers primarily Levi’s account of survivor and accomplice guilt, and the ‘grey zone’ where judgment becomes problematic. The aim is to consider the ethical structure that supports our understanding of specific guilt categories, and this links Jaspers and Levi to Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of metaReality. There he argues for a sense of metaphysical unity or identity that operates at a deeper level than the difference, conflict and change that occupy his dialectical critical realist philosophy. The philosophy of metaReality rounds out and deepens his thought, and I explore it for the first time in this chapter, arguing that it represents a key to understanding the philosophical thoughts and thoughtful experiences of Jaspers and Levi. The chapter considers the shape and structure of ethical enquiry, and what it is that makes ethical enquiry possible. From that point of view, it becomes possible to understand better our concepts of guilt and justice

Love and justice : can we flourish without addressing the past?

The focus of this essay is on how we overcome the past by dealing with it. In this setting, the analysis is of the relationship between ‘moral transactions’ concerning blame, guilt, responsibility, apology and forgiveness and the possibility of transition away from states of trauma. The first section draws on previous work to set out a position on human love as the basis for an understanding of guilt and the ‘moral grammar’ of justice. The second section considers Martha Nussbaum’s claim in Anger and Forgiveness (2016) that the idea of transition should be prioritized at the cost of a moral transactional analysis that would engage the moral grammar of blame, guilt, responsibility, apology and forgiveness. The latter is seen as potentially obstructing the transition to a better world. I suggest to the contrary there are grounds for thinking that a successful transition requires relevant moral transactions

Love actually : law and the moral psychology of forgiveness

Love is the basis for a moral psychology of forgiveness. I argue for an account of love based on Roy Bhaskar's conception of its five circles, and of the ethical nature of human beings as concrete universals/singulars. Linking this to work of ‘The Forgiveness Project’, I argue that forgiveness can be understood metaphysically in terms of its relation to love of self, of the other, of the relation of self and other, of self, other and the wider community, and of self and other in their ontological depth as unique individuals. Forgiveness involves both a ‘giving to’ and a ‘giving up’, and this can lead to a profound sense of identity between a victim and a perpetrator. Forgiveness is different for each person; it may draw upon a public/legal setting as a proxy for universal judgement; and it confronts social-structural and political elements which may block its development

Further Reflections on the “Postmodern Turn” in the Social Sciences: A Reply to William Outhwaite

I am immensely grateful to William Outhwaite for commenting on my book The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). I should stress at the outset that I agree with most of the points he makes in his commentary, which I find very insightful, thought-provoking, and constructive. Hence, any reader expecting to be entertained by a cockfight between book author and book reviewer will be disappointed. Let me take this opportunity to reflect on some of the main issues raised in Outhwaite’s inspiring review

A philosophical memoir: notes on Bhaskar, realism and cultural theory

In this philosophical memoir I trace out the part that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science played in the development of a non-reductive account of realism in art and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, and the part his Dialectic (1993) played in the theorization of the concept of the philistine developed by myself and Dave Beech between 1996 and 1998. Our de-positivization of the concept as a symptomatic negation of the bourgeois ‘aesthete’ drew extensively on Bhaskar's notion of absence (in this instance of cultural skill and sensitivity) as a real absence. This in turn, allowed us to bring Bhaskar's realism and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into alignment, where the philistine plays a similar, if undeveloped and untheorized role. Overall, the article marks a recognition of the continuing possibilities of Dialectic for a theory of negation in contemporary art and cultural theory.University of Wolverhampto

“I Just Look at Books”: Reading the Monetary Metareality of Bleeding Edge

The essay analyzes 'Bleeding Edg'e for its pervasive representation of money, arguing that it operates as a metareality in the novel both on the levels of plot and style. Money is presented as a symbolic structure behind reality that is accessible to the initiated, the interpretation of which offers genuine insight about the world and its interrelations, in parallel to religious or scientific discourses. This does not simply mean that everything—politics, society, culture, technology, etc.—is ultimately determined by economic factors, but rather that money underlies the reality of these phenomena like a kind of source code, and that it is readable as such, for better or worse. In the novel, real and virtual money is heavily associated with moral values and their loss, although it is not at all only associated negatively with greed and the abuse of power. Money also harbors subversive potential in 'Bleeding Edge', as it can uncover corruption and fraud as much as other conspiratorial phenomena (especially in connection to 9/11). In particular, cash money can become an alternative medium of communication that combines the private and the public. Money does exhibit a tendency towards moral corruption in the novel, but at the same time it eludes any complete control and remains an economic as well as symbolic tool that can undermine the very capitalist system it seems to perpetuate

Residents’ coping responses in collaborative housing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Applying Bhaskar’s four-planar social being to tackle the affordability-integration-health nexus

The COVID-19 pandemic was a global health, social and housing crisis. Citylockdowns, stay-at-home and social distancing requirements were preventiverestrictions increasing residents’ loneliness in regular housing stock. Collaborative housing is an alternative community-led housing form where people live in complete apartments whilst sharing common spaces and resources, enabling socializing and mutual support. The paper reflects on the process of applying Bhaskar’s four-planar social being for designing a methodology to evaluate residents’ coping responses in collaborative housing during the pandemic. The methodology includes iterative stages such as integrative literature review, refining the conceptual framework and research questions, designing, pilot-testing and improving mixed-methods data collection tools and collecting empirical data. Data analysis focuses on (a) residents’ material transactions with the common spaces and the neighbourhood, (b) social interactions between residents in everyday life, (c) social relations with institutions and (d) the stratification of personality, which for this paper implies how residents influenced each other’s motivations, habits and agency. This approach enabled analysis at the intersection of housing affordability, social integration and health. The paper sheds light on the pros and challenges of having critical realism as a foundation for inter- and transdisciplinary mixed-methods research

Book Reviews

A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Rebecca W. Bushnell) (Reviewed by Richard Halpern) Shakespeare\u27s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Hugh Grady) (Reviewed by Douglas Bruster) Revision and Romantic Authorship (Zachary Leader) (Reviewed by Terence Allan Hoagwood) Wordsworth and Feeling: The Poetry of an Adult Child (G. Kim Blank) (Reviewed by Bruce Graver) Manet\u27s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Michael Fried) (Reviewed by Nancy Locke) After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Mikhail Epstein) (Reviewed by Ilya Kutik) The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (George Ritzer) (Reviewed by Mohamed Zayani

Freedom in Exile: A Linguistic-discursive Analysis of the Representations of the China x Tibet Conflict in the 14th Dalai Lama’s Autobiography

This article is part of an undergraduate course paper that studies the autobiography of the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso: Freedom in Exile. We analyse the discursive-linguistic representations of the conflict between China and Tibet within this autobiographical narrative through systemic functional linguistics. We understand the potential of the autobiographical narrative as a means to construe and organize life experiences through language and also giving new meanings to them. In this study we employ the theoretical and methodological apparatus of critical discourse analysis and the philosophy of critical realism in the attempt to understand the representational aspect of the texts. We use a qualitative research approach. The general objective of this study is to analyse the representations that the narrator creates of the contents of his vital experience by privileging and working with the ones that emerge from the conflict between China and Tibet. The specific objectives include: (i) to identify the lexical-grammatical choices regarding the constituents that structure these representations; (ii) to explore autobiographical writing; (iii) to analyse the representations discursively, in order to proceed to an explanatory critique of the discourse; (iv) to discuss and reflect upon the intransitivity of moral values to human emancipation and meta-Reality