Response to "Ideologues and Critical Realists"

Adam from http://www.nothingfromnothing.net/
has some insightful comments about my previous note on Obama as Critical Realist. I quote his response in full and will make some clarifications and respond in a little bit of detail soon.

Dear Thomas,

I’m reluctant to agree with your assessment on how we might draw a direct line from Obama’s judgmental rationality underpinning his Afghanistan foreign policy to that of a distinctive critical realist position. I worry that your insinuation of the core features of critical realism allows you to draw a weak parallel between your Obama example and CR–a move that both effectively relativizes CR and voids it of it’s definitive ethico-political affinity with emancipation.

For instance, in your attribution of Obama as an embodied exemplar of critical realist discourse, you wrote:

“while critical realists approach each issue with a drive to know- a need for information and a laborious process of weighing options, construing insights and ultimately making judgments”

Apart from an emphasis on the obvious ontological realism, CR places emphasis on a) epistemic relativism and b) judgmental rationality. On the latter two, I am able to see and understand your attempt at reading Obama through critical realism, or vice versa. To fairly restate your point we might say that: Obama was sifting through various discourses (epistemic relativism) and ended up making a decision based on some sort of criteria (judgmental rationality).

However, could we not argue that Thomas Hobbes, for instance, would also be a critical realist based on this limited (or expansive?) criteria due to his emphasis on rational calculative decisions that were derived from book-keeping as the model for rationality in general? Or similarly, would my nephew be a critical realist because he opened the breakfast cupboard and when faced with the laborious process of weighing his options (flakes or krispies!?) he made a discrimination after considering the range of options available to him?

On this metric, wouldn’t *everyone* who engages in social action guided through modes of knowledge and calculative intent be considered a critical realist? In what sense was Obama’s realization or the other examples I’ve provided “critical” in any way, not least that it would reflect the defining features of critical realism?

I think this is the cornerstone of CR and our issue at hand. As I’m sure you are aware, CR relies on transcendental arguments and would analyze historical practices (including present history) in ways that facilitate emancipation. Critical realists, Bhaskar argues, have a moral obligation to change practices and relations that presuppose false theories and discourses. To this end, human flourishing is the bedrock of any generalized conception of emancipation. Other values that we could include in the CR move to emancipation based on truth-claims that come to mind include virtue, ecological care, species-being, becoming, democracy, good, and so on.

In any case, for CRists, truth-claims have to be in accordance with ontology–there has to be some reality to speak about. I’m not entirely sure how, when directing a policy of war, we can actually say that Obama is advancing a project of emancipation. Wouldn’t ontology matter? What is happening on the ground in Afghanistan, or Pakistan for that matter? Would not a critical theorist, bound by social ontology and an ethico-normative political commitment to emancipation resist violence and suffering?

Critical theory *must* be willing to analyze the violence inherent in its own categories and scrutinize the effects of such categories. If Obama is a critical realist, how I ask, might he be reproducing, and not transforming (a key purpose of critical realism), oppressive structures of physical and cultural violence? On these terms, we would see that Obama comes out looking something much more like Hobbes’ theory of the Leviathan than his resembling of a Critical Realist.

From one (sometimes) critical realist to another, I hope you might revisit the ethico-political and normative dimensions of the critical realist position—that which makes critical realism, critical realism, and not, as Bhaskar once said about the naturalizing and normalizing tendencies inherent in positivism, the house-philosophy of the bourgeoisie.

Ideologues vs. Critical Realists: Obama as Critical Realist in his Treatment of The War in Afghanistan

Ideologues defer to ideology for some reason or another (intellectual laziness or political convenience?) while critical realists approach each issue with a drive to know- a need for information and a laborious process of weighing options, construing insights and ultimately making judgments.

Barack Obama is a critical realist (not his words but my assessment). I say this after observing his treatment of the war in Afghanistan. He was criticized for taking too much time in deciding what his approach to Afghanistan would be, though he defended himself by pointing out that his delaying a decision did not delay action on the ground.

As he laid out the plan for more troops in Afghanistan, he made public the process of his reasoning. This is something that he has done throughout his campaign and presidency- revealed his process of weighing options and ultimately deciding on a course of action. The New York Times describes his decision making process in the case of Afghanistan:

The three-month review that led to the escalate-then-exit strategy is a case study in decision making in the Obama White House — intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved. It was a virtual seminar in Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something “between a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner.”

Mr. Obama peppered advisers with questions and showed an insatiable demand for information, taxing analysts who prepared three dozen intelligence reports for him and Pentagon staff members who churned out thousands of pages of documents...

Aides...said the arduous review gave Mr. Obama comfort that he had found the best course he could. “The process was exhaustive, but any time you get the president of the United States to devote 25 hours, anytime you get that kind of commitment, you know it was serious business,” said Gen. James L. Jones, the president’s national security adviser. “From the very first meeting, everyone started with set opinions. And no opinion was the same by the end of the process.”


Read the full article here: How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan

Rikk Watts and Critical Realism: Reading Genesis 1

Rikk Watts' article "Making Sense of Genesis 1" for the American Scientific Affliation is a great example of critical realist biblical interpretation in the strain following Bernard Lonergan. He gives a great summary of Michael Polanyi's notion of tacit knowledge (a notion closely related to Lonergan's horizon) and Bernard Lonergan's understanding of the process of coming to know (moving from questions to insight and finally to judgment). He says,


"Michael Polanyi reminded us that taking a great many things on trust is the essential first step to knowledge, even and perhaps especially in that highest and holiest of all modern callings, science. All of us, Christians and scientists together, simply have to take a great deal on trust, to assume much, if we are ever to get started on the path to knowing. The saying is sure, without assuming something no one shall know anything. But having said that, it is important regularly to reassess those assumptions in the light of our growing knowledge and in doing so to recognize that truth in this kind of historical and literary endeavour is much more a matter of coherence than of certainty. Bernard Lonergan rightly understood that the first step in knowing was to pay attention to all of the data, then to apply our intelligence in seeking to understand, and finally to use our reason to judge between hypotheses."

The article itself is a great example of that process in action. Check it out by following the link above.

Sotomayor and Interpretation: an Interesting Article

Check out these interesting reflections on hermeneutics and the interpretation of the constitution (something I reflected on in my previous post).

The article is by Ernesto Tinajero for Sojourners.

Interpretation, Heremeneutics and Judge Sotomayor.

Originalism vs. the Living Constitution debate... (a case study for CR?)

(Follow the link above for a story on constitutional interpretation)

I haven't developed these thoughts to any extent- but there is an interesting parallel between debates surrounding the interpretation of the U.S. constitution and those surrounding the issues of interpreting any text generally (including Scripture).

The view of originalism is that the constitution should be interpreted according to what it meant to the founders and is the typical conservative view of interpretation.

The "living constituion" view is less well defined and seems to want to account for the need for the constitution to have relevance in different historical/cultural realities than those in which it was written. There is a spectrum of course, but this view tends to be the progressive approach to the constitution.

It seems that Critical Realism (as I understand it following Lonergan, Meyer, Wright etc.) has something to offer in such a debate. Neither can the text's meaning within it's original horizon be neglected, nor can the fact that historical and social realitites are constantly in flux be disregarded in interpretation. If interpretation is truly a fusion of horizons (in Lonergan's understanding, not Gadamer's) then both the original meaning of the text and the needs of present historical reality need to be respected in the interpretive event.

A Brief Note: Philosophical Horizons and Late Western Interpreters

This is a brief note- reflection on some of what I've drawn from Lonergan/Meyer (see previous posts) on making explicit philosophical horizons, which are implicitly passed on through interpretive practices and by the language used in interpretive contexts.

Philosophical categories often structure interpretation under the table- so to speak, without the awareness of interpreters/readers.  These categories are embedded in the very language used in order to make clear or elucidate meaning.

Making philosophical horizons explicit will often show the true root of disagreement between groups that come to a debate with implicit assumptions that are incompatible.  Dialectic, for Lonergan, is the process of laying bare those assumptions.

As a late-modern (or late western- i.e. neither modern nor post-modern) interpreter I've inherited certain categories that structure interpretation:

1. The individual as the primary category of human existence.

2.  Newtonian causality (one object bumps another setting off a chain of events) - even though no longer dominant in physics, the underlying notion is tacitly held by many of us in our approach to everyday events of causality, including textual ones.

3.  Spirit/body dualism (this is a classic Platonic distinction which held sway in various ways and times throughout interpretive history) 

4.   A parallel theological/material distinction which leaves things like economics and social reality out of interpretation in theological texts.

All of these things I would call tendencies- categorizations that I have inherited but which I can subvert as long as I make them explicit.   It is not that all of these categorizations are wrong, bad or untrue- though at times I feel that they can be misleading (especially when interpreting biblical texts).  The point is that if I am not at least aware of these tendencies in interpreting I will be far more likely to allow these assumptions to dominate.

Critical realism is about a posture of humility towards the world and an honest assessment of one's capability to know along with  a commitment to the drive to knowledge.   

More to come.