Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27:2/30021–8308

On the Ontological Status of Ideas

ROY BHASKAR

Why should we be concerned with ontology? Or, more particularly with theontological status of ideas (as distinct, say from with their truth, efficacy orbeauty)? An important caveat: to argue these are legitimate is not to argue (whatI in fact deny) that all ideas possess the same ontological type, or categorical status.

First some simple considerations. Ideas, and ideational connections (includingcategory mistakes, logical contradictions etc.), are part of everything, andeverything is real. To deny the reality of a part of everything (of anything), suchas ideas (or say persons, or consciousness, or agency, or values—or mind, orbody) extrudes or detotalizes it or them from the world, that is the rest of theworld of which they are in principle causally explicable and causally efficaciousparts. This inevitably produces an implicit dualistic or split ontology.

One of the most frequent sources of the denial of the reality of ideas dependsupon a tacit restriction of criteria for ascribing reality to what can be perceiveddirectly, rather than experienced so to speak indirectly, viz. through its actualor potential effects, i.e. to a perceptual rather than a causal criterion. Thus aphilosopher or scientist schooled in or influenced by the empiricist doctrine ofesse est percipi might scout the reality of ideas because (s)he is tacitly supposingthat ideas cannot be tasted, touched, seen, heard or smelled, i.e. perceiveddirectly, rather than experienced indirectly through the efficacy of their effects.Tools and machines, and a fortiori the social relations in which they are formed,are not only, but also, the objectifications 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 socialbeing. These planes are those constituted by (a) material transactions withnature; (b) social interactions between agents; (c) social relations and institutions;and (d) the stratification of the personality.1

Another source of the denial of the reality of ideas depends upon the confusionof the ontological question of what is real with the epistemo-ontological questionof what (ideas) have a referent. Or more generally upon the conflation of theontological issue of the reality of ideas with the epistemological or ethical issuesof 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 calledthe epistemic fallacy, involving the reduction of ontology to epistemology.2

I want to ordinate my discussion of the ontological status of ideas in thispaper around four recent turns in social thought. These tendencies I shall inturn relate to the four dimensional (1M, 2E, 3L, 4D) schema for dialecticalcritical 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 mostprevalent mistakes in the ontology of ideas; (4) to touch on the issue of categorialrealism and the nature of a specific type of idea—ideologies; (5) to illustratesome 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 generallycultural) thought may be summarized as the (a) ontological, (b) processual, (c)ecological and (d) reflexive turns respectively. These may be related to the firstmoment, second edge, third level and fourth dimension of the system ofdialectical critical realism to which I have already referred.(a) The first ontological or realist turn is oriented against the epistemic fallacy,actualism, anthropocentricity (and the particular model of man which informsit) and what I have called the ‘primal squeeze’ between empiricism andrationalism consequent upon the denial of a stratified and differentiated accountof reality. The particular twist that dialectical critical realism puts on thesethemes involve inter alia both a dispositional and a categorial realism.

The former accentuates the ontological, epistemological and logical priorityof the possible over the actual, and insists upon a three-tiered analysis ofdispositions, in which they are seen to be analysed in terms of tendenciespossessed but unexercised, tendencies exercised but unactualized and tendenciesexercised and actualized in a particular outcome. It follows from this analysisnot only that powers cannot be reduced to their exercise, but that the domainof the real cannot be reduced to the domain of the actual (as in Humean analysisof laws) and even less to the domain of the empirical. Dispositions at once playa critical role in the dialectic of scientific discovery (bridging strata) and alsoform the only possible ultimata of a scientific ontology. Such ultimata maybe epistemologically transcendent, but ontologically immanent—for exampleingredient in the higher order of phenomena from them emerge.

There are two points worth stressing about the categorical realism whichontological realism, taken consistently, entails. First, categories are not to beviewed as something which the subjective observer imposes on reality; rathercategories such as causality, substance, process, persons, etc.—if valid—are

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constitutive of reality as such, irrespective of their categorization by observersor thought. However, secondly, social reality is conceptually dependent and, assuch, may be falsely categorized, providing a grid through which categoricalnecessity is, that is to say more basic categorial realities are, refracted. (Thuscategorical realities may be stratified.) I will come back to this later in mydiscussion 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 processof (trans) formation and dissolution of stratified (and differentiated) totalities. Inthe human field it constitutes a general schema for a learning process in whichabsence (2E), signifying incompleteness, leads to transcendence and a greatertotality (3L), in principle reflexively (4D) capable of situating itself and theprocess whereby it became. There is a renewed emphasis on geo-historicity,spacing and change – which, when qualitative, always involves a transcendentcause upon an immanent ground. (Ideational creativity is non-algorithmic). Beingis seen as self-organizing, tensed and creative, proleptically replete with possibil-ities of future (dis) emergence. As for the epistemic realm, in it there isno conflict between ontological realism, epistemic relativity and judgementalrationality.(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 analyticalways of viewing being it presages the need for a moment of transcendence, andeven ‘re-enchantment’ in a more satisfactory, post-Netzschean, post-instrumental-ist mode of being or way of life. The individual is situated in its Umwelt, entailinga transformed and vastly expanded conception of the self, both as a unit ofanalysis and as a unit of moral evaluation.(d) The reflexive turn, initiated by Descartes, pursued rigorously by the radicaliz-ation of transcendental argument from Kant, through Fichte and Schelling, toHegel and Marx, through Nietzsche and Freud, the other masters of thehermeneutic of suspicion, to the recent doyens of structuralism and poststructural-ism. In the twentieth century it has most frequently taken a concern with themeans and media by which a philosophical assertion or position articulates itself,especially linguistically. But, taken consistently, it implies the need for everyphilosophy, if it is to be adequate, to be capable of reflectively situating itself –which entails its own production and context as well. This is an absolute andnecessary condition for any adequate philosophical account of any subjectmatter. Moreover in explanatory critical social science reflexively situatedintentional causal agency (driven by desire or want) or transformative praxisabsenting the given (characterized by need or lack) comes to the fore as a keycritical concept, transcending the dualisms and dichotomies characteristic of thephilosophy of action.

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2. THE NECESSITY OF ONTOLOGY

Everything is contained (constellationally) within ontology (including epistemologyand ethics)—or rather its referent, being (including knowledge and values). Tosay that everything is real is not to say that everything is representationally real(representationally adequate), or of equal epistemic and ethical value (that is, itis not to say that it is instrumentally useful or intrinsically good). Crucial ofcourse are the questions of what kinds of reality ideas have. Moreover it ispatently not the case that ideas are a homogeneous category. Nor is it correctto assume that say ideas of different epistemic status do not have radicallydifferent kinds of reality. However the epistemic or ethical value or pedigree ofideas is irrelevant to their reality as such. The relevant question is not whetherideas are real, but what kind of reality they have, and whether ideas of differenttype (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 whichit is an explicably efficacious part. This at the very least issues in the failureof the philosophical position to satisfy the all important reflexive criterionfor philosophy.(2) Esoterically secretes an untheorized implicit ontology (so that ontologyis denegated, i.e. expressed while being denied), and in practice (as categoricalnecessity must be accommodated somehow) an illicit Tina compromise form4,i.e. an illicit conjugation of mutually inconsistent but surreptitiously comple-mentary components.(3) Results in a split ontology, which generates an antinomial-dilemmaticchain, fissuring being into formally discrete but tacitly related parts. Thisimparts to philosophy its characteristic dualisms. Dualism or split is thesign of alienation and underpinning the familiar dualisms (empiricism/rationalism, mind/body, fact/value) of philosophy, and the aporiai to whichthey give rise (problems of induction, agency and value), is the doctrine ofontological monovalence (a purely positive account of being) denying absence,negativity and change, on which doctrine rests actualism (cf. IM), extentional-ism (cf. 3L) and reification (cf. 4D) characteristic of commodification andall instrumentalist and manipulative reasoning alike.(4) Logically results in the generation of a nugatory epistemological orethical content (including the co-inclusion of null opposites). Thus Humeansubjectivism generates a nugatory solipsistic content, logically identical witha Parmenidean objectivism, without distinctions or boundaries. Irrealismconstitutes, 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 collapse—in what I call‘reductio ad irrealism’—into a null point from which nothing can be saidor done. In this way irrealist philosophy must be explicated as ideology andexplained 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 denythe reality of ideas (or say of persons or of the existence of causal relations inthe human world) extrudes or detotalizes them or the idealizer from the rest ofthe world – producing a split in the world, including an implicit, inconsistent,void and compromised ontology. Moreover to deny the reality of ideas makestheir production wholly mysterious and their effects impossible.

More positively, and to relate the topic of the reality to the 1M-4D analysisof dialectical critical realism-ideas are:

(1) real qua causally efficacious, that is, on a causal criterion for ascribing reality(cf. 1M). Specifically as explicably efficacious, dependent upon materiallyembodied intentional causal agency (therefore conceptualized under somedescription), emergent parts of the natural world system and constitutedwithin and contained by all four planes of naturalised social being, ideasare causally and taxonomically irreducible modes of matter, or moregenerally nature (including socialised nature5);(2) explicably efficacious parts of the natural world, products of the naturalisedprocess of thought (ideation) (2E). Just as a stratified world-view sustains thereality of ideas in virtue of their causal efficacy, so a processual world-viewallows us to sustain the emergent reality of ideational forms without denyingtheir diachronic emergence from nature. On this conception ideas arecausally and taxonomically irreducible to the conditions of their productionand physical realization alike. Moreover on a scientifically refined conceptionof emergence, the lower-order level provides only the framework conditionsof possibility of the higher-order level (which moreover characteristicallydetermines 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 semioticrelations over physical, syntactical and formal (including algorithmic) rela-tions. Ideas, then, as emergent powers of the total world system, are capableof acting back on the materials out of which they are diachronically formed.And they are causally and taxonomically irreducible modes of manifestationof 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 relationsto other parts and the whole, neither of which can synchronically be definedindependently of them. The orientation here (at 3L) is to deny dualisticdisembodiment, any kind of hypostasis or split which subverts the embodi-ment and materiality of ideas. This is as common in vulgarised forms ofMarxism as in classical philosophy. Thus tools, machines etc., cannot beconceived simply as material objects, but are also intrinsically the objectifica-tion of (socially produced and transformed) ideas. Moreover only a risingorganic composition of ideas can offset the rising organic composition ofcapital consequent upon a falling rate of profit as capitalism exhausts thepossibility of any one form or level of technological development.(4) Paradigmatically ideas are social products or transforms (at 4D). They musthence be conceptualised in a way which avoids the errors of naturalismand anti-naturalism, individualism and collectivism, and reification andvoluntarism alike. Thus we fall into voluntarism if we neglect the constrainingpower of the social reality of ideas (the inertia embodied in the presence ofthe past).

4. MISTAKES IN THE ONTOLOGY OF IDEAS

Because of the antinomial – dilemmatic inconsistencies and incoherencesproduced by the failure of inadequate positions (such as subjective and objectiveidealism, dualism, reductionist materialism, behaviourism etc.) in the meta-theory of ideas, the most common mistakes tend to lead into (and mutuallyentail, by a weird eristic of unreason) each other. Thus verificationist behaviour-ism, denying ontology, leaves the status of both what is verified and verifierproblematic, detotalizing and splitting them from (the rest of) being. Thisundermines the rationale and cognitive point of the exercise and results,moreover, in failure to sustain both the reality of the procedure and the reflexivecriterion for philosophy. Then again both reductionism, denying emergence andthe sui generis causal efficacy of ideas and hypostasis, denying the embodimentand 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 beillictly recombined with the asserted one. (Thus the eliminative materialismof Rorty in Part I of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature must be split-and-combined 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, detotalizingone or other significant 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 categoricallynecessary) then we have an explicit or implicit dualistic, dilemmatic, schizoidideational form. Dualism or split is in fact a characteristic feature of ourphilosophical 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 forconcepts of absence, void, non-being and entailing the deprocessualization,detotalization, the absence of ontology and the failure of philosophy tosatisfy a reflexive criterion for itself. Behind ontological monovalence is, Ihave argued, a deep-seated existential insecurity, rooted in the alienation ofhuman being from four plenar social being, and ultimately the cosmos. Thesplits of philosophy are indications of more profound social and naturalalienations.

5. CATEGORIES AND IDEOLOGIES

We have already seen that ontological entails categorical realism, whether thereality concerned is conceptually-dependent (or-mediated) or not. Social realityis of course conceptually dependent. As such it can be falsely characterized –and falsely categorized. Such falsely categorized realities may be thought asdependent, demi-realities, through which categorial necessity or truth or reality isrefracted. 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-fissured and (4) compromised (Tina) totalities willbe formed, subject to ideology-critique (immanent critique and dialecticalargumentation).

It does not seem to me very important whether ideologies are conceived asthe lived practices through which such dilemmatic totalities are constituted, or theerroneous ideas in terms of which they are characterized. In either case tocharacterize a theory or practice as an ideology is to stigmatize it and inparticular to say that it is (a) false, (b) categorially flawed, and (c) (and this is vital)explicable in terms of some theoretically and empirically validated theory of itsformation and its contemporary social and natural structuration and context. Iwould also suggest that to characterize a theory or practice as ‘ideological’requires the satisfaction of substantive as well as formal criteria, bearing on therole that the theory or practice plays in the discursive moralization of power2or master-slave relations.

In Transcendence and Totality I argue that any power2 (e.g. money)-based societywill be characterized by irrealist categorial structures, alienation and ideology.As such irrealism is symptomatic of an alienation of human being from thecosmos 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 universalityimplicit in any speech or other action does presuppose that truth is (or has) avalue, as Hugh Lacey argues in his comments in this volume on my fact-valueentailments. In other words it presupposes that there are evaluative grounds forrespecting truth and objecting to falsity. That truth is or has a value is implicitin any factual discurse, e.g. about mathematics or in the natural sciences.However the process of explanatory critique (or metacritique), in isolating the causesof error in socially inadequate conditions of being (socially constitutive categorymistakes), gives us a mode of transition to a negative evaluation on those causesand a positive evaluation on action directed at their removal (ceteris paribus),together with a consequent refutation of Hume’s law, without parallel in thepurely natural world, as I argued in Scientific 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 argumenta-tion, in turn a species of the genus of retroductive-analogical explanationcharacteristic of science. Dialectic indeed may be regarded as the generalmethod or procedure of sciences, or indeed of all learning processes, remedinginconsistencies, fissure, split by undoing absence, error, incompleteness andalienation by resort to (transcendence towards) greater, more inclusive totalities.Now in virtue of the conceptuality of social practice (its conceptually-dependentcharacter) transcendental argumentation, that is argumentation concerning theconditions of possibility of social practices as conceptualized in experience, isimplicit in the hermeneutic moment in all social science; and in virtue of thefalse but necessary character of conceptualizations in the social world underconditions of an alienated society, social science, ideology (explanatory-) critiqueand dialectical argument will all overlap.

Good dialectic is founded on recognition of ontology, absence, totality andtransformative praxis and satisfies the reflexivity criterion of philosophy. Baddialectic 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 master-slave or non autonomous society, more generally any society based on thealienation of human being from the cosmos, must be characterized by an irrealistcategorial structure. In such a society abstract universalizability as distinct fromdialectical universalizability and concrete singularity, instrumental as distinct fromintrinsic rationality, and dehumanization, reification and split will all be rampant.Formally the concepts of ideology, error, absence, incompleteness, detotalization,dualism, dilemma, split, illicit implicit ontology, Tina compromise form, demi-reality, alienation, irrealism, master-slave (power2 based) society, money, abstractuniversality and particularity, manipulative reasoning and the alienation ofhuman 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 analysedby for example Hegel in such categories as the beautiful soul, the stoic, theskeptic and the unhappy consciousness.

On the other good side we have connections between social science, ideologycritique, explanatory critique, transcendental dialectical and more generallyscientific realist reasoning, dialectical universalizability and concrete singularity,explanatory critical reasoning and universal human emancipation and theconatus of the logic of dialectical universalizability to a transformed transformativesociety, ultimately one characterized by de-alienation and re-unification at andbetween the planes of social being, characterized by the stratification of thepersonality, material transactions with nature, social interactions between agentsand social relations including sedimented institutions and structures of variouskinds. The ultimate goal of this process of de-alienation and de-reification mayindeed be a society that will never be achieved. Yet it seems equally that, toquote Marx writing to Ruge in 1843, ‘The world has long since dreamed ofsomething 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 whatthey are.’ Perhaps not sins, and perhaps not only, but the explanatory critique ofconsciousness, of ideas as lived realities, is arguably still an irreducible and apriori part of the charter of the social sciences.Roy Bhaskar

Centre for Critical Realism

London

NOTES

1 Plato ETC., London 1994, ch. 6.2 Cf. A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds 1975 (London 1997), ch. 1.3 See Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London 1993, ch. 1.4 See Dialectic, ch. 2.7.5 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. 184–5.

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