FINAL PREPUBLICATION DRAFT for Journal of Critical Realism 14.2 2015

PERSPECTIVE

All You Need Is Love

MERVYN HARTWIGInternational Centre for Critical Realism, UK

This essay sets out some key qualities of love according tothe philosophy of critical realism, together with RoyBhaskar’s arguments for them. It then considers how Bhaskar’sclaims stack up with the findings of modern physics, indicateshow the category of love unifies the philosophical system ofcritical realism and critiques Luc Ferry’s view that the reignof love has already begun in the West, before brieflydiscussing the practical application of Bhaskar’s philosophyof love in the work of feminist critical realist socialtheorist Lena Gunnarsson.

KEYWORDS alienation, Roy Bhaskar, critical realism, Luc Ferry,Lena Gunnarsson, love, metaRealism, reciprocity, recognition,solidarity, unity

Nature comes of love, love to crave.(Anon, medieval English lyric)

As this rocky abyss at my feet,Rests on a deeper abyss,As a thousand glittering streams meetIn the foaming flood’s downward hiss,As with its own strong impulse, above,The tree lifts skywards in the air:Even so all-powerful love,Creates all things, in its care.1

1 Goethe 1832/2003, lines 11866-74 (Wie Felsenabgrund mir zu Füssen | Auftiefem Abgrund lastend ruht, | Wie tausend Bäche strahlend fliessen | Zumgrausen Sturz des Schaums der Flut, | Wie strack mit eignem kraftigenTriebe |Der Stamm sich in die Lüfte trägt:| So ist es die allmächtigeLiebe, | Die alles bildet, alles hegt). The translation is by A. S. Kline,whose superb translations of a great deal of classic Western (and someEastern) poetry from the time of the ancient Greeks on are a wonderful giftto the human species, entirely in keeping with Bhaskar’s philosophy of

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(Goethe)

It is not that there are the starry heavens above and the moral lawwithin, as Kant would have it; rather, the true basis of yourvirtuous existence is the fact that the starry heavens are withinyou, and you are within them.

(Bhaskar)

love. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/.2

Introduction

According to the dominant liberal metanarrative, reciprocityand exchange, recognition and respect, equivalence and justiceare more fundamental to human social life than love, trust andsolidarity.2 This is a theme that is widely echoed on the left,whether in the Lacano-Hegelianism of Slavoj Žižek and othersor the anti-Hegelian Marxian-Spinozism exemplified by, forexample, Frédéric Lordon; for all their differences, both areagreed that alienation is foundational and irremediable and aglobal society based on an ethic of solidarity and love as theprimary human existential is an impossible dream.3 Criticalrealism4 attempts to overturn this story. It maintains that thefirst act of referential detachment with the emergence ofhuman intentionality carried with it, not alienation as such,but the potential for it, which was later contingentlyactualized. Alienation is a geo-historically relativecondition and reversible.5 Moreover, it argues, there are reallimits to alienation at all four planes of human social being,corresponding to the moments (MELD) of the self-structurationof being as such: at 1M the transcendentally real self orground-state; at 2E the transcendental principles of universalsolidarity and axial rationality that underpin our socialpractices; at 3L the transcendental identity consciousnessthat is an irreducible feature of social interaction withothers; and at 4D the fact that we are natural beings and, nomatter how much we evolve or transform ourselves, can never

2 In philosophy, see e.g. Rawls 1971 and Honneth 1995, for whom love is amere form of recognition in primary or intimate personal relations, albeitperhaps the most important one. For Habermas 1999, solidarity andrecognition are on a par, the other side of the same coin.3 See Žižek 2012, Lordon 2010/2014.4 While metaRealism goes beyond critical realism, it arguably bothpresupposes, and is broadly presupposed by, the latter, such that the twoform a single system, which I refer to throughout as ‘critical realism’.5 Most fundamentally estrangement from our essential selves (absence oftotality), the split of alienation is not between a fixed inner real selfand one’s actual self, but between what one has become (essentially is andis tending to become) and what one socially is obliged to be or thwartedfrom becoming. Its possibility is situated by the transformational model ofsocial activity (TMSA), in which people and society are understood as,though interdependent, ‘radically different kinds of thing’ (Bhaskar1979/2015, 33).

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get away from that.6 What links and grounds these limits is afundamental human need for non-alienation, i.e. unity, union,identity-in-difference or the coherence of love.7 Love, trust,sharing and solidarity, not reciprocity, exchange andrecognition, which have a very different, tit-for-tat morallogic, are ‘the ground of all human social life’ – what makesit possible.8

6 See Bhaskar 2012, 22-3. Some readers find Bhaskar’s MELD schema, and itsextension in MELDARA/Z perplexing or alienating, but a basic understandingof it is essential to grasping his system of philosophy overall. It is notso difficult. The system is articulated in terms of seven dimensions of theself-structuration of being or ontological-axiological chain – that is, itsdialectic is a seven-term one, as follows (where ‘1M’ [first moment] standsfor non-identity, ‘2E’ [second edge] for negativity, ‘3L’ [third level] fortotality, ‘4D’ [fourth dimension] for human transformative praxis, ‘5A’[fifth aspect] for reflexivity understood as spirituality, ‘6R’ [sixthrealm] for (re-)enchantment, and ‘7A/Z’ [seventh awakening/zone] fornonduality, and where ‘<’ stands for ‘is constellationally contained by’):1M < 2E < 3L < 4D < 5A < 6R < 7A/Z; or, omitting the numerals, MELDARA orMELDARZ. This is by no means a purely mnemonic device: Moment signifiessomething finished, behind us, determinate – a product: transfactual(structural) causality, pertaining to non-identity; first is for founding. Edgespeaks of the point of transition or becoming, the exercise of causalpowers in rhythmic (processual) causality, pertaining to negativity. Level announcesan emergent whole with its own specific determinations, capable of reactingback on the materials from which it is formed – process-in-product: holisticcausality, pertaining to totality. Dimension singles out a geo-historicallyrecent form of causality – product-in-process: human intentional causality,transformative agency or praxis. Aspect is for the sake of euphony,signifying the spirituality presupposed by emancipatory projects; Realm is forrealms of enchantment that the shedding of disenchantment discloses;Awakening is to understanding nonduality and the experience of being being,rather than thinking being, when, as the saying goes, we are ‘in the Zone’.The deployment of such schemas is not of course peculiar to Bhaskar (seee.g. note 66, below).

7 Bhaskar (e.g. 2002c/2012, 180-81) acknowledges conventionalcategorizations of love but prefers to speak simply of love and its fivecircles (for the latter, see below). In relation to the conventionaldistinctions between eros, philia and agape, the concept of love in whatfollows refers to the constellational containment of eros and philia withinagape; eros and philia are prone to consort with reciprocity andconditionality (cf. Boltanski 1990/2012, 102-28), but this is contained andtranscended in agape. Love can be understood theologically as God’s freegift to the world or in more secular vein as the emotional ground-statepower immanent within being.

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In support of this reversal, the present essay outlines someof the main qualities of love according to the philosophy ofcritical realism (section 1), together with Roy Bhaskar’sarguments for them (section 2). It then considers howBhaskar’s claims fare in the light of the findings of modernphysics (section 3), shows how the category of love furnishesthe unifying logical infrastructure of the philosophy ofcritical realism (section 4) and critiques the view that thereign of love has already begun in the West (section 5),before considering the pertinence of these ideas for theanalysis of love in the demi-real as exemplified in the workof the feminist critical realist social theorist LenaGunnarsson (section 6).

1. Qualities of love

The home of love in the rhythmic of being-becoming, accordingto critical realism, is 3L totality. Love is that which holdstotality together, the similar in the dissimilar,9 unity indifference, ‘the cohesive force in the universe, which makesit whole, and in your ground state that makes you coherent,strong, autonomous and whole’.10 Throughout the biosphere it isclosely related to trust. It is a key ground-state quality ofhumans and other creatures, the driving force of all emotions,including negative ones like anger, which depend upon acausally efficacious absence, incompleteness or distortion oflove. In contrast to reciprocity and recognition, love isalways unconditional: the love in ‘conditional love’ isunconditional but is mixed with or qualified by some other

8 Graeber 2011, 101. Graeber’s term for this ground is ‘baselinecommunism’. Graeber has independently argued within anthropology a positionsimilar to that of critical realism; like nonduality in Bhaskar’s account,baseline communism is pervasive in social life but largely unrecognized. InWestern philosophy the principle of the priority of love to reciprocity andjustice goes back at least to the ancient Greeks and is an important themewithin modern feminist theory and the emerging field of love studies; seeespecially Gilligan 1982, Tronto 1993, Gunnarsson 2014, Jónasdóttir andFerguson, eds, 2014. Cf. Assiter 2009.9 Cf. Adorno 1951/2005, 191. If for Adorno ‘[l]ove is the power to seesimilarity in the dissimilar’ in the transitive dimension, for Bhaskar italso is that similarity (intransitive dimension) – ‘the principle of unionbehind all unions without which nothing could cohere’ (2002c/2012, 189).10 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 194.

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emotion such as fear or jealousy; ‘to demand a reciprocity ora response from the loved one is to impose a condition’.11

Recognition is competed for, agonistically, and a deficit inreciprocity issues in debt; love sets aside relations ofequivalence,12 freely giving and receiving and so empowering usas persons, for to love and be loved is a fundamental humanneed as well as capacity – ‘we cannot help but love’.13 Love isjoy, sheer delight in being-becoming, bliss-consciousness.Love does not calculate or barter or seek to control or shapeits object. Love loves to let the other be, to flourish intheir concrete singularity ↔ universality.

Love is unique in that it is both self-generating and self-sufficient. As such, it is inexhaustible, limitless and needsno justification; rather, ‘everything has to be justified interms of it’.14 Within the biosphere, the more love you givethe more you get: ‘when you give love, you become more loveand even if you receive no love back, you are still more lovethan you were before’, and capable of loving more deeply.15 ‘Soin loving, you can never lose.’16 Love constitutes creaturely senses ofself-worth, shaping the very brains of infants17 and is centralto other powers such as creativity.18 It enables us to see farand clear if we don’t block it, and has the potential toenrich every dimension of human experience. It is what aboveall gives meaning to our lives. ‘What is a human beingwithout love?’19 When you fall in love with another person,love is imperious, demanding complete surrender; if you keepback part of yourself, you will be split.20 In the moment oflove, lovers experience transcendental identity consciousness,as their awareness of separate selves dissipates; their egos

11 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 180, 217.12 Cf. Boltanski 1990/2012, 94, who however restricts himself to ‘apsychology of relationships’ in contemporary French society.13 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 179.14 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 198; cf. Bhaskar 2000, 65; Kierkegaard 1847/1962, 17.15 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 190, original emphasis. ‘[C]ompare Juliet in Romeoand Juliet [ii. 1. 175-77: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love asdeep;] the more I give to thee, The more I have”. Hegel 1798a/1961, 307.16 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 190, original emphasis. See the important discussionof this in Gunnarsson 2014, ch. 7.17 Gerhardt 2004.18 Cf. Keller 2002, 11.19 Kierkegaard 1843/1987, vol. 2, 216.20 Cf. Hegel 1798a/1961, 305-6.

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‘plunge through [their] own transparency to meet the powerthat has created [them]’.21 But while love is compelling, itcannot itself be compelled or forced; it cannot be demanded,controlled or bought; ‘in love all thought of dutiesvanishes’.22

Love is forever, ‘an eternal commitment, turned towards theabsolute’;23 when we experience it we do not hesitate to swearthat our love will never die. There are those who say that(romantic) love does not last; true love, however, alwaysleaves an enduring glow. If you are untrue to love, theconsequences of such false living can be monstrous.24 Lovearrives as a revolutionary, liberating force within the demi-real as the latter literally wages war against absolutereality – ‘the vicious world’ of commodification andreification against ‘the virtuous world’ – for possession ofrelative reality.25 As for William Blake, so for Bhaskar:unless love prevails, ‘humanity itself will cease to exist’.26

Love is of course reconciled with death and transience at thelevels of individual beings and also in a certain sense ofkinds of being, for life and death comprise a unity necessaryfor the unfolding of being, and awareness of our finitudepromotes a view of the whole and acceptance of transformativechange.27 With the geohistorical emergence of human intentionalagency, however, sustainable flourishing at the level of thespecies becomes a project that love loves to promote. Love isa binding, unifying, healing and energizing force, arguably‘the most powerful force’ in the universe, according toBhaskar, and ‘the fundamental driving force of evolution’ onplanet Earth.28

21 Kierkegaard, cited in Badiou with Truong 2009/2012, 14. One does not haveto understand this power as divine as distinct from natural. It isimmortally rendered palpable by Rembrandt in Isaac and Rebecca, popularlyknown as The Jewish Bride (c. 1665). 22 Hegel 1798b/1961, 213.23 Badiou with Truong 2009/2012, 14; this is Badiou’s gloss on Kierkegaard.24 For an unsurpassed account see Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809/2008).25 Bhaskar 2000, 44; 2002a, 130.26 Quinney 2009, 166. 27 The theme of the dialectical unity of life and death is magnificentlydeveloped in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.28 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, xliv, 175, 185.

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Bhaskar is of course by no means alone in such views. Manygreat philosophers, artists, theologians, mystics andspiritual and religious people generally have shared or sharethem. And not just explicitly spiritual and religious people –contrary to a common view, the power of love is a prominenttheme in Marx, for example, at least implicitly. It ispresupposed by the principle of the indivisibility of freedom– ‘the free development of each is a condition of the freedevelopment of all’ – which Marx inherited from GermanIdealism and which for critical realism is the moral alethiaor object/ive of the human species, the heart of itsconception of free flourishing.29 For this principle to work inpractice, each person would have to care for the freeflourishing of the other as much as they cared for their own.Critical realism thus helps us to see that, contrary to theconventional view, Marx himself is a profoundly spiritualthinker.30 But it sets up a metacritique of Marx, identifying acrucial absence: Marx cannot ground the power of love in thereal of the cosmos, so his spirituality is limited. His theorypresupposes non-commodified ground-state qualities of love,creativity and so on, but he omits to theorize this level.31

2. Arguments for the primacy of love

How does Bhaskar accomplish this? What are the arguments forlove as the mightiest force in the universe? They arebasically the same as for metaReality in general, because love29 Ferry 2013, 32, is surely mistaken in holding that his ‘humanism of love’is ‘an entirely new point of view’; see in particular Graeber 2011.30 Marx’s concept of free development is an improvement on the Golden Ruleof the religious traditions that has come to be known as the Platinum Rule.It should be interpreted, not as an abstract universal, but as‘presupposing dialectical universality and concrete singularity’: do untoothers, not as you would do unto yourself, but as you would do unto them ifyou were they, not you. Bhaskar 2002b/2012, 344-5. By ‘spiritual’ I meancentrally concerned with unity, wholeness and at-homeness (cf. Bhaskar withHartwig 2011, 187f.).31 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, ch. 7, s. 6 ‘The meta-critique of Marx’s critique ofHegelian dialectic’ (353-7). On Enrique Dussel’s persuasive reading, Marxdoes actually theorize the non-commodified creativity of ‘living labour’,which by contrast to the commodity labour power stands outside capital as‘not-capital’ and is the ultimate source of value, though of course hecannot ground this at the level of the absolute. See Dussel 2001 and Arthur2002.

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is deemed to be a central quality of ground-states and thecosmic envelope, ‘the basis of everything’, and metaRealism is‘above all a philosophy of love’.32 Here I rehearse thesearguments briefly with the focus on love. Bhaskar sets themout in a variety of ways, the most useful of which I find isin terms of objective and subjective considerations and aunity of these.33

The objective considerations are established above all by themethod of transcendental critique (transcendental argumentplus immanent critique of rival views) – the same method thatwas used to elaborate original and dialectical criticalrealism.34 First, there is an argument that original criticalrealism, itself justified by transcendental critique,presupposes metaReality: its central theme of non-identitypresupposes identity. Quite generally, the identification ofdifference depends on things having something in common. Moreregionally, the theory of alienation, for example, presupposesthe possibility of non-alienation (identity-in-difference,unity),35 which presupposes love as a fundamental humancapacity.36 Human social life as such presupposes metaRealityas its basis, mode of constitution, and fine structure or deepinterior – commercial transactions presuppose trust, warpresupposes peace and love, communication presupposesidentity-consciousness, and so on. For anyone undeluded by thedemi-real such things seem self-evident. Only the pall ofactualism prevents people from seeing that, while you couldhave peace and love without war and hate, you could not havewar without peace and the nurture and support of lovingrelationships; and that this indicates that peace and love arelogically, epistemologically and ontologically prior to warand hate. The method establishing fine structure is thephenomenology of experience rather than transcendental

32 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, xliv, 185.33 Bhaskar 2002b/2012, 267-9. 34 See, for Bhaskar’s account of this method, Bhaskar 1986/2009, 10-27 and,for my understanding of it, Hartwig 2015a.35 Cf. Gunnarsson 2014, 130, n4; Ollman 1971/1996, 263f.36 Cf. Bhaskar 1993/2008, 243, where the desire to love and be loved isconsidered, with the early Hegel, ‘a paramorph for the desire for de-alienation, that is, for the restoration, perhaps in a much more complexand differentiated totality, of the unity between the agent and everythingessential to her nature’. See also Bhaskar 2000, 24 n4, 44,

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critique. If you experience union with anything, youexperience bliss and perhaps a sense of re-union with a, orthe, long-lost beloved. Try it and see. It might just happento you when you least expect it; involuntary memories asrecounted by Proust are arguably of this kind: flashes ofblissful intimation of nonduality.37 Or it can often beachieved by practising meditation or prayer. Or you might juststart noticing the moments of non-alienated bliss that arealready common in your everyday life. It is important, though,not to fall into the trap of arguing only from experience;sceptics can then say, well, I’ve never had any suchexperience, and then you have stalemate.38

The subjective considerations flow from a pragmatic approach:we assume the existence of metaReality in order to appeal topractice. If you act inconsistently with your transcendentallyreal self, you will find that you are split and unhappy(unfulfilled) in some way. Again, try it. Conversely, whenpeople act in a maximally effective way individually orcollectively – for example, in the initial stages of the ArabSpring, in Tahrir Square, Cairo – their ground-statequalities, normally in play but unnoticed or marginalized,will be very much to the fore: will, determination and energy(1M), creativity and freedom (2E), unconditional love and allits circles (3L), right-action (4D), a feeling of coming hometo one’s true self (5A), a sense that the world is enchanted(6R), and awakening to unity and nonduality as such (7A/Z).‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’, indeed. It is alllooking very tragic and demi-real again now, but that does notgainsay the reality of that stupendous eruption of the pulseof freedom. What we have in the moment of eruption is theunity or coherence of theory and practice in practice, or thecoherence of love, which unifies all the moments of MELDARA/Z,as I will presently show.

In the unity of objective and subjective considerations webuild on critical realism’s demonstration of the depth-stratification of being to argue the reality of a foundational37 See Hartwig 2011, 251, 260 n58.38 Cf. Bhaskar with Hartwig 2011, 199. One can of course argue that suchexperience presupposes the existence of a ground-state quality of love as acondition of its possibility, but then one is back on the terrain oftranscendental argument.

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or absolute level of nonduality as a necessary condition forany being at all. Where else could the outpouring of pure blissand unity in Tahrir Square come from if not from thefundamental structure of possibility of the uni-verse?39 To saythat it is a specifically human power or a human constructionhardly answers the question in a thoroughgoing way. Whence‘the living tremor’ by which the dewy bud ‘stirs toward thelight’?40 From a transcendent God, perhaps, beyond the universeas we know and experience it? But a transcendent God entailsan immanent god, that people have the potential within us toconform to God’s will. For that to be possible, we have tohave a spark of the divine within us. Here the argument isthat the ground-state properties of human action establishedby the subjective considerations are in resonance with theground-state properties of being as such, established by theobjective considerations. This resonance is, once again, thecoherence of love.

3. Love and the forces of physics

How does the power of love relate to the forces of theuniverse as revealed by modern physics? The general picture Iget from the popularizing accounts by physicists is that thereis no necessary incompatibility; and that there are also(depending on the theory you find most plausible) some verystriking correspondences. Quantum physics seems to be juststarting to move beyond a protracted Kuhnian pre-revolutionaryphase of proliferating anomalies and interpretations, butnonlocality and quantum entanglement are now regarded asbeyond dispute: at a fundamental level everything isinterconnected with everything else. This chimes with thecritical realist concepts of nonduality, generalized co-presence, and love as the ultimate unifying force withinbeing.

A range of theories – an emerging neo-Copenhageninterpretation,41 a possibilist transactional interpretation39 Cf. Shkliarevsky 2011, 79-80. 40 Goethe 1826/2011, 655.41 Mason 2015. Werner Heisenberg himself held that ‘the mode of reality ofthe quantum state … is potentiality as contrasted with actuality’ (Shimony 2009,original emphasis).

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(PSI)42 – posit a real sub-quantum underlying domain or‘Hilbert space’ of physically efficacious possibility that isboth, qua unactualized, ‘outside’ or ‘pre-’ spacetime (i.e.has no position, cannot be associated with any region, inspacetime) and, qua actualized, inside it. As Ruth E. Kastnerputs it, ‘relativistic spacetime’ (Bhaskar’s relative reality)is thus ‘a domain of actuality emergent from a [real] quantumlevel of possibilities’ (Bhaskar’s absolute reality); ‘thefundamental ontological reality is that of non-localizedfields and their excitations’,43 fields of potentia that giverise both to the vaulted structures and to the flux of thephenomena of spacetime.44 At the fundamental level there isthus, as Bhaskar already put it in Dialectic (1993), ‘dispositionalidentity of things with their changing causal powers, so that … to be is notonly just to be able to do, but to be able to become’,45 rather thanto be a concretely singular thing (e.g. a particle) with anintrinsic structure.46 The problem of observer-dependence,which has seemed to entail that the properties and evenexistence of quanta or individual ‘particles’ depend on theobserver and what kinds of measurement they make, evaporateson this interpretation. For there are no quanta at thefundamental level, simply potentia or the physical possibilityof transactions that are independent of the observer; when atransaction occurs it manifests differently to inertial andaccelerating observers and so is interpreted differently(perspectivally).47 These ideas have a great deal in commonwith the domain of the real and metaReal in Bhaskar’sphilosophy, and resonate with love as a cardinal property ofthe metaReal.48

42 Kastner 2013.43 Kastner 2013, 135, 153. As Kastner points out, Shimony 2009 makes asimilar point.44 Cf. Porpora 2000. Kastner uses the metaphor of the tip of an icebergfloating on a sea or ocean to describe the relationship between the domainsof the actual and the real – a similar metaphor to that used by Bhaskar(1993/2008, 5) to describe the relationship between the positive and thenegative. 45 Bhaskar 1993/2008, original emphasis.46 Kastner 2013, 151.47 Kastner 2013, 153-4; cf. Mason 2015.48 Already in Bhaskar 1979/2015, 111, ‘human beings, like any otherempirically given object’ are conceptualized as ‘fields of effects’ (myemphasis). The metaReal, as I understand it, is the most fundamental sub-stratum of the real.

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Supersymmetric string or superstring theory49 explicitlypostulates underlying identity: the fundamental things ofnature are strings or microscopically tiny lines and loops ofenergy that are identical but capable of vibrating in aninfinite array of patterns, constituting a roaring ocean ofenergetic resonance. Both superstring theory and PSI alsoattempt to provide, in different ways, a framework for theultimate unification of quantum mechanics and generalrelativity theory (TD), which in their earlier guises aremutually contradictory, postulating an underlying unity of allnature’s fundamental physical constituents and forces (ID),with a common origin in the vibrational modes of strings orthe domain of real possibility. This corresponds in importantways with the critical realist concepts of totality, theresolution of contradictions, and the coherence of love.However, superstring theory tends to be reductionist, blockistand incompatible with human agency and free will, whereas theoutlook of PSI, like the neo-Copenhagen interpretation moregenerally, is emergentist, becoming and fully compatible withfree will. Chaos and the void à la Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižekand others, as ultimate and primary within the universe,appear to be ruled out by these interpretations. While there is‘quantum frenzy’, order and symmetry would seem to be morefundamental.

If in Goethe’s words ‘die almächtige Liebe alles bildet, alles hegt’(literally, ‘almighty love forms everything, sustainseverything’), how does this relate to the powerful tendencyfor order to dissipate into disorder, maximizing entropy,imposed by the second law of thermodynamics? Bhaskar’sdialectical work suggests that regional negentropy,creativity, and emergence are perfectly consistent withunderlying entropy within what he later referred to asrelative reality.50 Thus the ‘natural history’ of the humanspecies does not necessarily, as W. G. Sebald puts it, follow‘a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without49 For an account of string theory that assumes no training in mathematicsor physics, see Greene 1999/2000. Like many physicists, Greene isreductionist and too prone to believe that string theory may well providethe grand theory of everything.50 Bhaskar 1993/2008, 256. The concepts of constraint1 and constraint2 alignwith negentropy and entropy, respectively.

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fail down into the dark’,51 but exhibits a tendential rationaldirectionality within the self-structuration of being.52 InmetaRealism the entropy of relative reality is itselfunderpinned by the negentropy (undissipated pure or freeenergy) of the ground-state or absolute reality. When we drawon this energy, for example in spontaneous right action, wereverse entropy locally and temporarily.53 Recentnonequilibrium thermodyamical theory, which treats entropy andnegentropy as facets of a single energetic-informationalprocess, supports similar conclusions. As Clayton Crockettsummarizes:

Being is energy conversion, which is why it is fundamentallydifferential or becoming rather than a static entity.Nonequilibrium thermodynamics treats energy flows across agradient, and the reduction of that gradient produces entropybut also produces order. This fact seems paradoxical, but itis not; it is part of the order of things.54

Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection broadlyaccords with this. It powerfully calls into question thedominant reductionist block-universe view in physics that timeis an illusion and the future determined – that ‘what is realis only the history of the universe as a timeless whole’ – infavour of the view that time and change are real andfundamental: the universe is ‘evolving in time, with structureon every scale developing as the universe expands’.55 This does

51 Santner 2006, 107, citing Sebald.52 See e.g. Bhaskar with Hartwig 2010, 104.53 Bhaskar 2000, 100.54 Crockett 2013, 159. See also Deleuze 1968/1994, ch. 5. Both Crockett andDeleuze are vulnerable to the critical realist critique of the analysis ofchange exclusively in terms of difference (Bhaskar 1993/2008), but thisdoes not affect the point at issue here.55 Smolin 2013, 159, 194, 196-207. The view that the universe is a timelesswhole in which there is a simultaneous co-existence of all times and eventsis critiqued by Bhaskar as ‘blockism’ or ‘block universalism’. Cf. Kastner,ch. 8, who contrasts blockism’s ‘block world’ with PSI’s world of becoming.Brian Greene’s (2011) argument for the reality of ‘many worlds’ – amultiverse of possibly infinite parallel universes – is premised on justsuch a blockism in which every possible universe is realized. In critiquingblockism, Smolin unfortunately seems to commit the converse fallacy ofpunctualism, according to which only the here-now is real (‘all that’s realis real in the present moment’, which is always ‘one of a succession ofmoments’, ibid., 222, 240). On blockism and punctualism see Bhaskar

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not contradict the law of entropy; rather, in the myriadgravitationally bound systems of the universe such as stars,solar systems, galaxies, and black holes, and of course inlife-forms on planet Earth and wherever else they might obtainentropy is counteracted by the force of gravity and bydynamical self-organization resulting from the flow of freeenergy though open systems.56 It suggests a great creativecontinuity or monotonicity in the constantly evolving shapingpowers and forms of being, and recommends a welcoming attitudeto transience and death as ‘the silent knowing participant ineverything alive’.57

It should be stressed that such correspondences do not ofcourse ‘prove’ or ‘confirm’ metaRealism (unlike muchmainstream scientific realism, Bhaskar’s philosophy is notjust read off from the results of science), and in any casemany physicists see order emerging out of primary chaos.Rather, such correspondences lend support to metaRealism.MetaRealism would need revising if it was seriously out ofkilter with science over the longer run. There are many ofcourse who hold that science has no bearing on questions ofspirituality and religion, which are viewed as having non-overlapping magisteria or jurisdictions (NOMA).58 But this ishighly problematic: it introduces a fundamental split betweentheology/religion and philosophy (where philosophy goes intosuch things), on the one hand, and science on the other, andtheir respective objects; the domain of science, according tothe originator of NOMA, is ‘the empirical constitution of theuniverse’ and that of theology ‘the search for proper ethicalvalues and the spiritual meaning of our lives’, and never thetwain shall meet.59 But we do not live in two worlds, we livein one; and in the event – most unlikely I think – that our

1993/2008 and Hartwig 2007.56 For an account of dynamical self-organization in the biosphere, seeDeacon 2012 and my (2013) review essay of it. The binding force of gravityin the Bhaskarian system aligns it with love. For the theological traditionthat stresses God’s radical transcendence of the cosmos, by contrast,gravity is sometimes seen as the opposite of love (agape) – God withdrawsfrom the world in order to allow it to exist. See e.g. Ferry 2013, 39.Transcendence in Bhaskar is always transcendence-within-immanence.57 Rilke 1975, 132. It is of course possible that the tendency of theuniverse towards complexity will reverse at some time in the future.58 Gould 1997. For a critique see Shkliarevsky 2011.59 Gould 1997.

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universe is but one of an enormous array of universes, we livein but one multiverse or cosmos. As one of my favourite quoteshas it: ‘There is indeed another world, but it is in thisone’.60 Adapting it for our times: ‘There are indeed manyworlds, but they are all in this one as the infinitepossibility of the real.’61 Philosophy and science cannot ‘see’the other side of the cosmic envelope, so to speak, butwhatever it is, it must be in this world as part of a whole,not as a half; as natural and immanent rather than supra-natural or transcendent, if you like.62

4. Love as the unifying category of critical realism

How is the philosophical system of critical realism unified bythe category of love? I think this can best be shown byconsidering Bhaskar’s essays ‘Unconditionality in love’63 and‘The Tao of love and unconditionality in commitment’.64 Theyinvoke the paths to union with totality of the Vedictradition, specifically the paths of truth (Jnana Yoga), practice(Karma Yoga) and love (Bhakti Yoga). These correspond to 1M, 4Dand 3L respectively in the MELD schema. Bhaskar demonstratesthat, though distinct, these paths are ultimately one: a tri-unity. If we add a path of creativity (and within that of beauty)(2E),65 which is closely bound up with the emergence oftotality, hence with love, we have a tetra-unity in terms ofMELD.66 60 Paul Éluard, cited in Patrick White 1966/1969, epitaph. These lines areWhite’s rendition of part of a sentence that appears in Paul Éluard, Oeuvrescompletes (Paris: Galliamard) 1968, Vol. 1, p. 986: ‘Il y a assurément unautre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci…’ (cited by Wark 2014).61 Note, again, that the real includes the metaReal. Cf. Kastner 2013.62 Cf. Hegel’s argument that, in the words of Robert M. Wallace (2014), ‘aGod who is separate from the world is thereby finite and fails to beinfinite’ – a point understood by ‘quite a few’ Christian and othertheologians but not by many philosophers who comment on Hegel. 63 Bhaskar 2002a, ch. 13, 339-63. This started life as a workshop talk inthe beautiful gardens of Tagore’s ashram in Bengal, India, in 2001. 64 Bhaskar 2002c, ch. 4, 172-232.65 This substitutes for Hatha Yoga, ‘the path of physical strength orgrace’, in the four traditional yogas (Bhaskar 2002/2012, 182).66 The four truth procedures of Alain Badiou’s philosophy – science, art,love and politics – correspond to the moments of MELD, and are likewiseunified by love, but in a decidedly anthropic and contingent register. Lovefor Badiou depends upon a highly contingent singular encounter between

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First, the path of love itself. Considered formally, love isarguably at the heart of the three main (1) modalities, (2)mechanisms of identification and (3) evolutionary forms ofnonduality, i.e. ways in which nonduality sustains and isconnected with relative reality, corresponding to the domainsof the empirical/conceptual, the actual and the real,respectively. (1) It is (a) at the heart of the fine structureor deep interior of ‘any moment or aspect of being orconsciousness’,67 closely linked, Bhaskar suggests, with sat-chit-ananda or the implicit consciousness of beings, bliss-consciousness); (b) central to the constitution of our sociallife in the form of transcendental agency and transcendentalidentification in consciousness, which express love ‘in thesense of unity or becoming one’;68 and (c) the most fundamentalground-state property of humans and other beings. (2) Allthree main mechanisms of unification – transcendentalidentification, reciprocity (mutual exchanges between beingsat the level of the metaReal) and co-presence and generalizedco-presence (the enfoldment of all beings within every beingat the level of the metaReal) – are arguably forms of love, asare (3) their dynamic or evolutionary forms of economy,synthesis and attraction.69

Beginning with self-love or love of our real self (amour de soi,not amour propre – the chief source of our self-worth), humanlove radiates equally in all directions, like ripples in apool or great music, in ever-widening circles of union(totalities): love for another human; all humans; all beings;and god or the cosmic envelope, the sustaining power or sourceof all beings.

Engagement in any circle of love will take you to the pointwhen you just are love; and when you are in love with loveitself. This is a very common experience, for the lover tofind that his or her love for the beloved passes naturallyinto a tremendous love for love, and this love for love takes

humans, an event in which the power of ‘the void of being … is gatheredwithin a subject’ (Badiou 2003, 33), whereas for Bhaskar it is presenteverywhere as a ground-state force, sustaining everything we and othercreatures and beings do. 67 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, xlii.68 Bhaskar 2002a/2012, 187.69 See especially Bhaskar 2002a/2012,187-9.

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the lover into the space where they want love with the sourceultimately of all love; love or union with the source of allunion. This extraordinary fact, that love does not have torefer to anything outside itself, gives it a self-sufficiencyor self-justifying character sui generis.70

While love of self is a precondition for the other circles,71

it is ultimately love of god – ‘god is … the only thing you can love’and true love is always ‘love loving love’, viz. you in yourground-state loving the divine quality of love in the ground-states of other beings.72 So these circles constitute ever-widening forms of self-realization, of action in consistency withour ground-states, as love ‘turns to the whole manifold ofnature in order to drink love out of every [being]’.73 Thismeans that, contrary to a poststructuralist and Levinasianshibboleth, the Other, though uniquely different, isfundamentally no stranger to me or you or themselves. At thelevel of your ground-state, ‘the whole of … the other isactually a part of you; and you a part of them’.74

Second, both the other paths, the path of truth and the pathof practice, centrally involve love. Bhaskar argues that theconatus to truth is ultimately a drive to union with what weseek to know. For the experience of union or identity in themoment of absolute transcendence in any process of learning ordiscovery can be rendered fully intelligible only on the basisthat it involves ‘the union between something already enfoldedwithin the discovering agent, brought up to consciousness by amoment of Platonic anamnesis or recall, with the alethic self-revelation of the being known, existing outside him’,75 i.e. itinvolves the union of two beings at the level of the implicit,

70 Bhaskar 2002a/2012, 182.71 Cf. Kierkegaard 1847/1962; Assiter 2009. As Gunnarsson 2014 (111, n2 andch. 7) argues, any dualism of self-love and love for others is thus a(real) illusion. Foucault 2001/2005 traces ‘the gradual elimination of thenotion of care of the self from philosophical thought and concern’ (25) inWestern modernity.72 Bhaskar 2002a/2012, 351, 359, original emphases. Cf. Adorno 1958/1991,72, ‘love is always directed as much to love itself as to the beloved’. 73 Hegel 1798a/1961, 307, which has ‘drink love out of every life’, but, paceHegel’s dualism of matter and spirit, there is no reason to confine ourdrinking to the biosphere.74 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 225.75 Bhaskar 2002a/2012, xliv.

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supramental consciousness of their ground-states. There is anetymological connection here in the Indo-European languages;for example, the English word ‘belief’ is related to theGerman word for love, die Liebe. As Linda Martín Alcoff and JohnD. Caputo put it, paraphrasing Hélène Cixous: ‘Belief meanswhat I like or love to think, what love wants me to think.Belief … loves to believe.’76 The path of practice, for itspart – the conatus to free flourishing – is the drive to thetotality that is universal self-realization, to unity and soto love. In this way, the conatus to truth and freedom, theoryand practice – epistemological dialectics and emancipatoryaxiology – find their ultimate unifying basis in love, and‘the coherence of theory and practice in practice’ of Dialectic isbeautifully finessed in metaRealism as the coherence of love.77

This suggests a basis for the unification of world religions:

Imbued with love, you will experience maximum coherence and strength,maximum coherence means maximum clarity, and maximum clarity,involving maximum light, translucence, radiance, no deviation ordistortion, is that state of maximum emptiness which I have argued …we need to be in if we are to be maximally free. So love, which is thegreat theme of the Christ’s teaching, coherence possibly the main themeof the Vedic tradition, clarity possibly that of the Buddha, andemptiness the Taoist norm, flow intrinsically into each other.78

And since metaRealism shows that secular discourses ofemancipation presuppose the possibility of a society in whichpeople are motivated primarily by love, we can say that italso effects a unity of religious with emancipatory projectsand so is maximally inclusive.79

How does love as the unification of MELDARA/Z relate toabsence as the unification of MELD? Why of course: theabsenting of absences leads to greater wholeness,completeness, inclusion.

76 Alcoff and Caputo, eds, 2011, <**>.77 At the level of the embodied personality the coherence of love isconceptualized as the ‘loop of love’. Love and the emotions are ‘crucialmediators between mind and body [cf. the path of truth] and embodiedpersonality and the world [cf. the path of practice]’, including all fourplanes of social being. Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 186, 328.78 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 191; see also pp. 332-53.79 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, ch. 7.

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5. A global society based on love?

So eudaimonia will be a society in which love is paramount.Love will come fully into its own as the primary mode of humanbeing, and giving will be seen as ‘the primary social act’.80

For while all negative emotions ‘exist [da] only in virtue oflove [dr], on which they are unilaterally dependent’, they canonly exist in the absence or incompleteness [da] of love, and‘disappear or dissolve when there is only love’.81 Where loveis primary, master–slave-type relations are abandoned as wefreely and spontaneously do what is right. In ‘overcoming fearor division’, love ‘returns to itself’.82 This does not mean, asLuc Boltanski83 actualistically supposes, that people will bemotivated exclusively by love; rather, what Boltanski refersto as the regime of justice, based on reciprocity andcalculation, and the regime of violence will be subordinatedto (constellationally contained and constrained within) theregime of love.84 Love will assume the role currently accordedto exchange in modernity and its discourse. Luc Ferry, aFrench neo-Kantian philosopher and conservative politician,claims that this is already happening; we are on the brink ofa new era of love, indeed we are already there: ‘We are nolonger, as with Kant, in the domain of an ethics of respectbut already in an ethics of love’.85 There is no denying thatwe could be on the brink of an epoch of revolutionarytransition that will usher in an era of love. But to succeedwe will in my view have to shed the savage capitalist demi-real,86 abolishing master–slave-type social relations in theirentirety, which presuppose love but are actually monstrouslyparasitic on it. A brief review and Achilles’ heel critique87

of Ferry’s main argument will lend support to this view.

80 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 175, 255.81 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 198.82 Bhaskar 2002c/2012,184.83 Boltanski 1990/2012. 84 Cf. Graeber 2011, 94-102.85 Ferry 2013, 82.86 Graeber 2014.87 An Achilles’ heel critique is an immanent critique that fastens on thepoint deemed by the proponents of a theory to be its strongest.

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Ferry views (Western) history as very largely the expressionof a developmental sequence of great ideas or ‘principles ofmeaning’, which it is the task of philosophy to ‘discover’:principles of cosmology, theology, humanism Mark I (‘the oldhumanism’), deconstruction, and finally (as ‘the “end ofhistory”’) love or humanism Mark II (‘the new humanism’).88 Thedynamo of the entire process is a gradual ‘humanization ofthought’ as more and more dimensions of human experience andpotential are taken into account and enhanced. Whilst Ferryargues that deconstuction of the claims of the old humanismcentring on abstract reason and rights has played an importantpreparatory role in the advent of the final phase, his mainargument for its arrival is that the dynamic of capitalism, byfreeing workers both from the ties of tradition and the meansof production, has freed them to marry for love, notconvenience, thus providing a powerful basis in the privatesphere for ‘a humanism of love’ to become the dominant valuein the public sphere. While it is very refreshing to comeacross a philosophical liberal who explicitly espouses theprimacy of love over reciprocity and exchange, there is acontradiction at the heart of this argument that resonateswith the contradiction between power-over and love in themode of production itself (see section 6, below).

Having invoked the structural dynamic of capitalism to arguethat love has become the supreme value in the private sphere,Ferry spirits it away when it comes to explaining how thisparamountcy is translated to the social and public spheres.For the latter purpose, he treats the social as merely‘collective’, i.e. an aggregate of individuals who are thebearers of the ideas that move history. It then follows that,if love has now become the supreme value in the personal livesof most individuals (which may itself be doubted89), it must be– or soon become – so at the level of the social too.Subsequently, in order to reconcile the paramountcy of lovewith the ‘necessity’ for ‘sacrifices’90 in this epoch of88 Ferry 2013, 30, 35f.89 See the discussion of what happens to love in the capitalist demi-realbelow.90 See Ferry 2013, 50-51, 66-7, 95-8. Such sacrifices, Ferry unrealisticallyholds, ‘are not death-dealing’ (95). This stance is at one with the‘sacrificial myth of modernity’ pinpointed in Enrique Dussel’s writings.The ‘culpably immature’ (‘lazy’, ‘cowardly’) non-European, as Kant put it

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financial crisis, structure reappears with a vengeance inFerry’s account as something that we have no choice but to bowto: ‘Actually, it’s wrong to call [the current crisis] a“crisis”, as it’s a structural problem from which it is notclear that we can really “emerge”.’91 In the name of love,tighten your belts for another round of neoliberal cuts!92 Theissue of structurally generated exploitation, inequality anddomination, both within Europe and abroad, is not addressed,except by vague rhetoric in terms of a uniquely European‘culture of autonomy’,93 ‘democracy’ and ‘full guarantee oftransparency and equity’94 and brisk consignment of slavery,colonialism, imperialism etc. to the past and outside.Moreover, the anthropocentrism of the very notion of the‘humanization’ of love is not discussed, and the Eurocentrism,triumphalism and endism that this entrains is eitherimplausibly disavowed (Eurocentrism) or openly embraced.95 Ifcapitalism is an incubator of love, the reality is that italso structurally generates money and power-over as supremevalues; ‘desire and greed are as essential to capitalism asorder on the production line’.96 Ferry’s revolution of lovethus founders on the very same problem that scuttled thedialectics of love in the later Hegel. The contradictionbetween generalized master–slave-type social relations and apolitics of love remains unresolved.97 Although all thenegative emotions do indeed melt away ‘when there is onlylove’, as Bhaskar suggests, they are ‘systematically relatedin a passage of What is Enlightenment? that is a favourite with Ferry, must besacrificed to the onward march of euro-enlightenment. See Dussel 1993/1995;Hartwig, 2011, 497, n54.91 Ferry 2013, 103.92 Ferry 2013, 104.93 See esp. Ferry 2013, 87. Bhaskar’s philosophy agrees with Ferry that theidea of individual autonomy is one of the main strengths of Westernmodernity but departs radically from him on the issue of europism (seeHostettler 2013) and the extent to which the idea of autonomy has beentranslated into practice.94 Ferry 2013, 98.95 Ferry 2013, esp. 29-30. Cf. the fundamental critique of anthropocentrismand related forms of centrism throughout Bhaskar’s oeuvre. Bhaskar’sdialectical work develops a powerful argument that centrism, triumphalismand endism are underpinned by the epistemic fallacy, the speculative andpositivist illusions and ontological monovalence, respectively; togetherthese errors comprise the ‘unholy trinity’ of irrealism.96 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 198.97 Bhaskar 1993/2008, 243, 326-32; cf. Gunnarsson 2015.

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to the social structure, of which they are internalized parts’and to the meshwork of categorial error that underpins demi-reality, the dismantling of which the reign of love thuspresupposes.98 Capitalism, the great incubator of pleonexia andpower-over, and societies dominated by it can plausibly beviewed as the locus of a new epoch of love only by conjuringaway their master–slave-type social structure.

6. Love and the demi-real

Bhaskar’s philosophy of love has been brilliantly put to workin the area of feminist theory and gender studies by LenaGunnarsson. In The Contradictions of Love99 Gunnarsson combines afeminist Marxist approach (that of Anna Jónasdóttir, whouniquely among feminist theorists puts love or ‘love power’,i.e. the capacity to love and participate in erotic ecstasy,at the centre of her theoretical system) with criticalrealism. While the concept of love power is formed by analogywith Marx’s concept of labour power, it is distinguished interalia by its product (human life rather than the means of life)and the fact that it cannot be bought or forced – it vanishesif deployed as a means to an end. The actualization of lovepower informs and sustains the continuous creative process ofproduction whereby human life (embodied personalities and thespecies) is formed and re-formed. Within the patriarchal powerstructures of master–slave-type societies, however, women’slove is exploited by men, who appropriate ‘more eroticempowerment and care from women than they offer in return’,and accumulate it in the form of ‘surplus worthiness’:100 ‘Ifcapital is accumulated alienated labour, male authority isaccumulated alienated love.’101 As recipients of love, womenthus tend to suffer structurally induced impoverishment, whilemen tend to enjoy a relative surfeit.

Gunnarsson devastatingly critiques existing, in particularpoststructuralist feminist theories of gendered power,diagnosing ‘a realist deficit’102 and rehabilitating concepts98 Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 198.99 Gunnarsson 2014.100 Gunnarsson 2014, 54, 56, 124, 167.101 Gunnarsson 2014, 60 n9, citing Jónasdóttir.102 Gunnarsson 2014, 11.

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of ontology, nature and natural necessity, emergence, unity indifference, human embodiment and needs, and love itself,including the deep human need for it. Love is little discussedin the poststream literature and, when it is, is often reducedto an ideological delusion or the discursive performance ofpower – basically something to be done away with (!) in favourof a concern with rights and power – rather than a liberatoryforce.

Gunnarsson endorses the metaRealist account of love as the‘fundament of existence’, a key ground-state capacityuniversal to human being, a potential ‘at the root of ourbeing’103 that is ‘fundamentally unexploitable and transcendsall categories of opposition’.104 As such it is ‘a crucialdriving force of people and, hence, history’.105 She agreeswith Ferry and others that love is increasingly important inWestern societies: the experience of love determines howhouseholds and reproduction are organized; love as a source ofself-worth is becoming ever more important because of theincreasing difficulties of achieving self-worth undercapitalism (increasing job insecurity, the commodification oflove power itself, etc.); and love as a source of unity isvital for resolving the current global polycrisis. But sheargues that love is also a crucial locus of exploitation and afundamental basis of men’s power in the capitalist demi-real:women are subordinated to men through love – men exploitwomen’s love power, and this is the pivot of women’soppression by men.106 The generative mechanism (formal cause)of this exploitation is the master–slave system of patriarchalsocial relations in which both men and women are caught up andwhich powerfully affects their practices.

Gunnarsson diagnoses, not the advent of the event of love intoday’s globalized capitalism, but a love crisis that prefiguresand may precede such an event: the system of sociosexualexploitation, involving the construction of women as lessvaluable and capable than men, is in contradiction with themore fundamental nondual level that sustains it at a time when103 Gunnarsson 2014, 119f., 164.104 Gunnarsson 2014, 123.105 Gunnarsson 2014, 29 n3.106 Gunnarsson’s analysis is mainly in terms of heterosexual relations, butmuch of it would also apply, she suggests, to same-sex relations.

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love is more important than ever to human flourishing. Thisopens up possibilities of radical change in the way loving isstructured, with wider ramifications. For love is also a forcethat can conquer oppression. Men are parasitic on women’s lovepower, and so dependent on it.This empowers men in terms of power2, but disempowers them interms of power1, so their power2 is ‘ontologically fragile’.107

The reality of male power2 is constituted by exploitation ofwomen’s love power1, necessitating ‘the suppression of its trueontological ground’ at the level of absolute reality, thepower0 of love – a ground that is obscured in Jónasdóttir’saccount.108 When we shed the demi-real, love can come into itsown, its productive power unfettered.109 Gunnarsson underlinesthe importance of critical realist explanatory critique: de-mystification of a system of exploitation that presents itselfin our social practices as something other than it really is;women and men do not so much deceive themselves as they aredeluded by the social form of their own practices, whichexplanatory critique can unmask as necessary (caused) butfalse and so in need of change if at all possible.

The ontological fragility of men’s patriarchal power entrainsa duplex strategy of feminist struggle as having keycollective and spiritual dimensions that are closelyinterrelated.110 The collective aspect is geared around arelative withdrawal by women of love power1 from men andredirection of sociosexual energies to each other, displacingthe centrality of men in their lives. The spiritual aspectconsists of getting into their ground-states and working forunity with all human beings and the cosmos. Withdrawal of lovepower1 is itself a spiritual act: it is only superficially anact of hostility, it is really an act of love and solidarity107 Gunnarsson 2014, 264 et passim.108 Gunnarsson 2014, 149, emphasis changed. This holds for power2 in general,of course: it is ultimately parasitic on the ground-state qualities ofpeople. The concepts of love power1 (love in its alienated form in thedemi-real, cf. the commodity labour power) and love power0 are only implicitin Gunnarsson’s account, which could I think be further sharpened by theirintroduction. For the distinction between power2, power1, and power0 seeDespain 2011, 309-11, who follows the logic of Bhaskar’s account. In termsof Bhaskar’s metatheory of the person, love power1 corresponds to theembodied person, love power0 to the real self.109 Gunnarsson 2014, 163.110 Gunnarsson 2014, ch. 9.

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that augments the conditions for non-antagonistic relationsbetween all people. Love power in its alienated, demi-realform is distorted by the logic of exchange, with women givingtoo much love in the vain hope of an equal exchange. Suchpractices obscure the crucial differences between the paradigmof exchange and the paradigm of love, and the basis of lovepower1 in love power0, which women’s struggle can lay bare. Menfor their part have to get into their ground-states, i.e.transform themselves, stop exploiting and dominating women.Collective withdrawal of love power might assist: it wouldhelp dismantle the male atomistic ego, the Spectre thatdominates the demi-real.111 This presupposes that women reclaimthe power of self-change and take responsibility for who andhow they are instead of disempowering themselves by blamingothers. This is the metaRealist principle of the primacy ofself-change in the transformation of oppressive socialstructures, prefigured in the practical mysticism of thehermetic traditions and more recently in the rallying cry ofsecond-wave feminism and the student movement: ‘The personalis political’.112 It includes care of one’s own self, not over-identifying with the needs of others: being the autonomousbeings we really are and cultivating the art of loving ourreal selves, expanding the self from within.113 In this way,the contradiction between love as a ‘locus of exploitation’and as a ‘force that can conquer oppression’114 can begin to beresolved in practice, and so also in theory; andreconciliation effected between feminist theory and criticalrealism and between feminist politics and spirituality.

111 ‘Each Man is in his Spectre's power| Until the arrival of that hour|When his Humanity awake| And cast his Spectre into the Lake.’ Blake 1804,41. Cf. Quinney 2009, whose analysis of William Blake’s thought, whicheffects a brilliant critique of empiricism, demonstrates that Blake has aprofound implicit understanding of both demi-reality and metaReality(though of course he does not use these terms, and neither does Quinney).‘Spectre’ or ‘Selfhood’ is Blake’s term for the illusory atomistic ego inthe Bhaskarian analysis of the self. 112 Gunnarsson 2014, 2, 153f.113 Gunnarsson (2014, 158-9) notes a similar theme in the feministphilosophy of Luce Irigaray, who speaks of returning to the selves wereally are, letting go old selves and conceptions, ‘being faithful to ourown Being’.114 Gunnarsson 2014, 1.

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Conclusion

More than ever in these times of peril for our species, allyou need is love: love of truth, creativity and beauty,freedom, right-action, self, the enchantment of being, love oflove.

Acknowledgement

This essay started out as a talk to Roy Bhaskar’s postgraduateseminar at the International Centre for Critical Realism, UCLInstitute of Education, London. It appears in thiscommemorative issue in particular because Roy was very keen tosee it in print, saying: ‘There must be a journal of criticalrealism somewhere that will publish it.’ It is dedicated toRoy in profound gratitude for the powerful light he sheds onthe paths of truth and creativity, practice and love. Manythanks to Lena Gunnarsson for helpful comments on an earlierdraft.

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Notes on ContributorMervyn Hartwig is general editor/book review editor of JCR. Email: mhartwig@btinternet.com.

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