FINAL PREPUBLICATION DRAFT for Journal of Critical Realism 14.

2 2015

PERSPECTIVE

All You Need Is Love

MERVYN HARTWIG
International Centre for Critical Realism, UK

This essay sets out some key qualities of love according to the philosophy of critical realism,
together with Roy Bhaskar’s arguments for them. It then considers how Bhaskar’s claims
stack up with the findings of modern physics, indicates how the category of love unifies the
philosophical system of critical realism and critiques Luc Ferry’s view that the reign of love
has already begun in the West, before briefly discussing the practical application of
Bhaskar’s philosophy of love in the work of feminist critical realist social theorist 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 meet
In 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
(Goethe)

It is not that there are the starry heavens above and the moral law within, as Kant would have it;
rather, the true basis of your virtuous existence is the fact that the starry heavens are within you, and
you are within them.
(Bhaskar)

1
Goethe 1832/2003, lines 11866-74 (Wie Felsenabgrund mir zu Füssen | Auf tiefem Abgrund lastend ruht, |
Wie tausend Bäche strahlend fliessen | Zum grausen Sturz des Schaums der Flut, | Wie strack mit eignem
kraftigen Triebe |Der Stamm sich in die Lüfte trägt:| So ist es die allmächtige Liebe, | Die alles bildet, alles
hegt). The translation is by A. S. Kline, whose superb translations of a great deal of classic Western (and some
Eastern) poetry from the time of the ancient Greeks on are a wonderful gift to the human species, entirely in
keeping with Bhaskar’s philosophy of love. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/.

1
Introduction

According to the dominant liberal metanarrative, reciprocity and exchange, recognition and
respect, equivalence and justice are more fundamental to human social life than love, trust
and solidarity.2 This is a theme that is widely echoed on the left, whether in the Lacano-
Hegelianism of Slavoj Žižek and others or the anti-Hegelian Marxian-Spinozism exemplified
by, for example, Frédéric Lordon; for all their differences, both are agreed that alienation is
foundational and irremediable and a global society based on an ethic of solidarity and love
as the primary human existential is an impossible dream.3 Critical realism4 attempts to
overturn this story. It maintains that the first act of referential detachment with the
emergence of human intentionality carried with it, not alienation as such, but the potential
for it, which was later contingently actualized. Alienation is a geo-historically relative
condition and reversible.5 Moreover, it argues, there are real limits to alienation at all four
planes of human social being, corresponding to the moments (MELD) of the self-
structuration of being as such: at 1M the transcendentally real self or ground-state; at 2E
the transcendental principles of universal solidarity and axial rationality that underpin our
social practices; at 3L the transcendental identity consciousness that is an irreducible
feature of social interaction with others; and at 4D the fact that we are natural beings and,
no matter how much we evolve or transform ourselves, can never get away from that.6
What links and grounds these limits is a fundamental human need for non-alienation, i.e.

2
In philosophy, see e.g. Rawls 1971 and Honneth 1995, for whom love is a mere form of recognition in primary
or intimate personal relations, albeit perhaps the most important one. For Habermas 1999, solidarity and
recognition 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 both presupposes, and is broadly presupposed
by, the latter, such that the two form a single system, which I refer to throughout as ‘critical realism’.
5
Most fundamentally estrangement from our essential selves (absence of totality), the split of alienation is not
between a fixed inner real self and one’s actual self, but between what one has become (essentially is and is
tending to become) and what one socially is obliged to be or thwarted from becoming. Its possibility is situated
by the transformational model of social activity (TMSA), in which people and society are understood as, though
interdependent, ‘radically different kinds of thing’ (Bhaskar 1979/2015, 33).
6
See Bhaskar 2012, 22-3. Some readers find Bhaskar’s MELD schema, and its extension in MELDARA/Z
perplexing or alienating, but a basic understanding of it is essential to grasping his system of philosophy
overall. It is not so difficult. The system is articulated in terms of seven dimensions of the self-structuration of
being or ontological-axiological chain – that is, its dialectic is a seven-term one, as follows (where ‘1M’ [first
moment] stands for non-identity, ‘2E’ [second edge] for negativity, ‘3L’ [third level] for totality, ‘4D’ [fourth
dimension] for human transformative praxis, ‘5A’ [fifth aspect] for reflexivity understood as spirituality, ‘6R’
[sixth realm] for (re-)enchantment, and ‘7A/Z’ [seventh awakening/zone] for nonduality, and where ‘<’ stands
for ‘is constellationally contained by’): 1M < 2E < 3L < 4D < 5A < 6R < 7A/Z; or, omitting the numerals,
MELDARA or MELDARZ. This is by no means a purely mnemonic device: Moment signifies something finished,
behind us, determinate – a product: transfactual (structural) causality, pertaining to non-identity; first is for
founding. Edge speaks of the point of transition or becoming, the exercise of causal powers in rhythmic
(processual) causality, pertaining to negativity. Level announces an emergent whole with its own specific
determinations, capable of reacting back on the materials from which it is formed – process-in-product: holistic
causality, pertaining to totality. Dimension singles out a geo-historically recent 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 for realms 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 (see e.g. note 66, below).

2
unity, union, identity-in-difference or the coherence of love.7 Love, trust, sharing and
solidarity, not reciprocity, exchange and recognition, which have a very different, tit-for-tat
moral logic, are ‘the ground of all human social life’ – what makes it possible.8

In support of this reversal, the present essay outlines some of the main qualities of love
according to the philosophy of critical realism (section 1), together with Roy Bhaskar’s
arguments for them (section 2). It then considers how Bhaskar’s claims fare in the light of
the findings of modern physics (section 3), shows how the category of love furnishes the
unifying logical infrastructure of the philosophy of critical realism (section 4) and critiques
the view that the reign of love has already begun in the West (section 5), before considering
the pertinence of these ideas for the analysis of love in the demi-real as exemplified in the
work of the feminist critical realist social theorist Lena Gunnarsson (section 6).

1. Qualities of love

The home of love in the rhythmic of being-becoming, according to critical realism, is 3L

totality. Love is that which holds totality together, the similar in the dissimilar,9 unity in
difference, ‘the cohesive force in the universe, which makes it whole, and in your ground
state that makes you coherent, strong, autonomous and whole’.10 Throughout the
biosphere it is closely related to trust. It is a key ground-state quality of humans and other
creatures, the driving force of all emotions, including negative ones like anger, which
depend upon a causally efficacious absence, incompleteness or distortion of love. In
contrast to reciprocity and recognition, love is always unconditional: the love in ‘conditional
love’ is unconditional but is mixed with or qualified by some other emotion such as fear or
jealousy; ‘to demand a reciprocity or a response from the loved one is to impose a
condition’.11 Recognition is competed for, agonistically, and a deficit in reciprocity issues in
debt; love sets aside relations of equivalence,12 freely giving and receiving and so
empowering us as persons, for to love and be loved is a fundamental human need as well as

7
Bhaskar (e.g. 2002c/2012, 180-81) acknowledges conventional categorizations of love but prefers to speak
simply of love and its five circles (for the latter, see below). In relation to the conventional distinctions
between eros, philia and agape, the concept of love in what follows refers to the constellational containment
of eros and philia within agape; eros and philia are prone to consort with reciprocity and conditionality (cf.
Boltanski 1990/2012, 102-28), but this is contained and transcended in agape. Love can be understood
theologically as God’s free gift to the world or in more secular vein as the emotional ground-state power
immanent within being.
8
Graeber 2011, 101. Graeber’s term for this ground is ‘baseline communism’. Graeber has independently
argued within anthropology a position similar to that of critical realism; like nonduality in Bhaskar’s account,
baseline communism is pervasive in social life but largely unrecognized. In Western philosophy the principle of
the priority of love to reciprocity and justice goes back at least to the ancient Greeks and is an important
theme within modern feminist theory and the emerging field of love studies; see especially Gilligan 1982,
Tronto 1993, Gunnarsson 2014, Jónasdóttir and Ferguson, eds, 2014. Cf. Assiter 2009.
9
Cf. Adorno 1951/2005, 191. If for Adorno ‘[l]ove is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar’ in the
transitive dimension, for Bhaskar it also is that similarity (intransitive dimension) – ‘the principle of union
behind all unions without which nothing could cohere’ (2002c/2012, 189).
10
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 194.
11
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 180, 217.
12
Cf. Boltanski 1990/2012, 94, who however restricts himself to ‘a psychology of relationships’ in
contemporary French society.

3
capacity – ‘we cannot help but love’.13 Love is joy, sheer delight in being-becoming, bliss-
consciousness. Love does not calculate or barter or seek to control or shape its object. Love
loves to let the other be, to flourish in their concrete singularity ↔ universality.

Love is unique in that it is both self-generating and self-sufficient. As such, it is inexhaustible,

limitless and needs no justification; rather, ‘everything has to be justified in terms of it’.14
Within the biosphere, the more love you give the more you get: ‘when you give love, you
become more love and even if you receive no love back, you are still more love than you
were before’, and capable of loving more deeply.15 ‘So in loving, you can never lose.’16 Love
constitutes creaturely senses of self-worth, shaping the very brains of infants17 and is central
to other powers such as creativity.18 It enables us to see far and clear if we don’t block it,
and has the potential to enrich every dimension of human experience. It is what above all
gives meaning to our lives. ‘What is a human being without love?’19 When you fall in love
with another person, love is imperious, demanding complete surrender; if you keep back
part of yourself, you will be split.20 In the moment of love, lovers experience transcendental
identity consciousness, as their awareness of separate selves dissipates; their egos ‘plunge
through [their] own transparency to meet the power that has created [them]’.21 But while
love is compelling, it cannot itself be compelled or forced; it cannot be demanded,
controlled or bought; ‘in love all thought of duties vanishes’.22

Love is forever, ‘an eternal commitment, turned towards the absolute’;23 when we
experience it we do not hesitate to swear that our love will never die. There are those who
say that (romantic) love does not last; true love, however, always leaves an enduring glow. If
you are untrue to love, the consequences of such false living can be monstrous.24 Love
arrives as a revolutionary, liberating force within the demi-real as the latter literally wages
war against absolute reality – ‘the vicious world’ of commodification and reification against
‘the virtuous world’ – for possession of relative 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 the levels of individual beings and also in a certain
sense of kinds of being, for life and death comprise a unity necessary for the unfolding of
being, and awareness of our finitude promotes a view of the whole and acceptance of

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 Romeo and Juliet [ii. 1. 175-77: “My bounty
is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep;] the more I give to thee, The more I have”. Hegel 1798a/1961,
307.
16
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 190, original emphasis. See the important discussion of 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.
21
Kierkegaard, cited in Badiou with Truong 2009/2012, 14. One does not have to understand this power as
divine as distinct from natural. It is immortally rendered palpable by Rembrandt in Isaac and Rebecca,
popularly known 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.

4
transformative change.27 With the geohistorical emergence of human intentional agency,
however, sustainable flourishing at the level of the species becomes a project that love
loves to promote. Love is a binding, unifying, healing and energizing force, arguably ‘the
most powerful force’ in the universe, according to Bhaskar, and ‘the fundamental driving
force of evolution’ on planet Earth.28

Bhaskar is of course by no means alone in such views. Many great philosophers, artists,
theologians, mystics and spiritual and religious people generally have shared or share them.
And not just explicitly spiritual and religious people – contrary to a common view, the power
of love is a prominent theme in Marx, for example, at least implicitly. It is presupposed by
the principle of the indivisibility of freedom – ‘the free development of each is a condition of
the free development of all’ – which Marx inherited from German Idealism and which for
critical realism is the moral alethia or object/ive of the human species, the heart of its
conception of free flourishing.29 For this principle to work in practice, each person would
have to care for the free flourishing of the other as much as they cared for their own. Critical
realism thus helps us to see that, contrary to the conventional view, Marx himself is a
profoundly spiritual thinker.30 But it sets up a metacritique of Marx, identifying a crucial
absence: Marx cannot ground the power of love in the real of the cosmos, so his spirituality
is limited. His theory presupposes 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 for love as the mightiest force
in the universe? They are basically the same as for metaReality in general, because love is
deemed to be a central quality of ground-states and the cosmic envelope, ‘the basis of
everything’, and metaRealism is ‘above all a philosophy of love’.32 Here I rehearse these
arguments briefly with the focus on love. Bhaskar sets them out in a variety of ways, the
most useful of which I find is in terms of objective and subjective considerations and a unity
of these.33

27
The theme of the dialectical unity of life and death is magnificently developed in the poetry of Rainer Maria
Rilke.
28
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, xliv, 175, 185.
29
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 Rule of 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 unto others, not as you would do unto
yourself, but as you would do unto them if you were they, not you. Bhaskar 2002b/2012, 344-5. By ‘spiritual’ I
mean centrally concerned with unity, wholeness and at-homeness (cf. Bhaskar with Hartwig 2011, 187f.).
31
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, ch. 7, s. 6 ‘The meta-critique of Marx’s critique of Hegelian dialectic’ (353-7). On
Enrique Dussel’s persuasive reading, Marx does 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 he cannot ground this at the level of the absolute. See Dussel 2001
and Arthur 2002.
32
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, xliv, 185.
33
Bhaskar 2002b/2012, 267-9.

5
The objective considerations are established above all by the method of transcendental
critique (transcendental argument plus immanent critique of rival views) – the same method
that was used to elaborate original and dialectical critical realism.34 First, there is an
argument that original critical realism, itself justified by transcendental critique,
presupposes metaReality: its central theme of non-identity presupposes identity. Quite
generally, the identification of difference depends on things having something in common.
More regionally, the theory of alienation, for example, presupposes the possibility of non-
alienation (identity-in-difference, unity),35 which presupposes love as a fundamental human
capacity.36 Human social life as such presupposes metaReality as its basis, mode of
constitution, and fine structure or deep interior – commercial transactions presuppose trust,
war presupposes peace and love, communication presupposes identity-consciousness, and
so on. For anyone undeluded by the demi-real such things seem self-evident. Only the pall
of actualism prevents people from seeing that, while you could have peace and love without
war and hate, you could not have war without peace and the nurture and support of loving
relationships; and that this indicates that peace and love are logically, epistemologically and
ontologically prior to war and hate. The method establishing fine structure is the
phenomenology of experience rather than transcendental critique. If you experience union
with anything, you experience bliss and perhaps a sense of re-union with a, or the, long-lost
beloved. Try it and see. It might just happen to you when you least expect it; involuntary
memories as recounted by Proust are arguably of this kind: flashes of blissful intimation of
nonduality.37 Or it can often be achieved by practising meditation or prayer. Or you might
just start noticing the moments of non-alienated bliss that are already 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 such experience, and then you
have stalemate.38

The subjective considerations flow from a pragmatic approach: we assume the existence of
metaReality in order to appeal to practice. If you act inconsistently with your
transcendentally real self, you will find that you are split and unhappy (unfulfilled) in some
way. Again, try it. Conversely, when people act in a maximally effective way individually or
collectively – for example, in the initial stages of the Arab Spring, in Tahrir Square, Cairo –
their ground-state qualities, 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 all its circles (3L), right-action (4D), a feeling of coming home to
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 all looking very
tragic and demi-real again now, but that does not gainsay the reality of that stupendous

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 is considered, with the early Hegel, ‘a
paramorph for the desire for de-alienation, that is, for the restoration, perhaps in a much more complex and
differentiated totality, of the unity between the agent and everything essential to her nature’. See also
Bhaskar 2000, 24 n4, 44,
37
See Hartwig 2011, 251, 260 n58.
38
Cf. Bhaskar with Hartwig 2011, 199. One can of course argue that such experience presupposes the
existence of a ground-state quality of love as a condition of its possibility, but then one is back on the terrain of
transcendental argument.

6
eruption of the pulse of freedom. What we have in the moment of eruption is the unity or
coherence of theory and practice in practice, or the coherence of love, which unifies all the
moments of MELDARA/Z, as I will presently show.

In the unity of objective and subjective considerations we build on critical realism’s

demonstration of the depth-stratification of being to argue the reality of a foundational or
absolute level of nonduality as a necessary condition for any being at all. Where else could
the outpouring of pure bliss and unity in Tahrir Square come from if not from the
fundamental structure of possibility of the uni-verse?39 To say that it is a specifically human
power or a human construction hardly answers the question in a thoroughgoing way.
Whence ‘the living tremor’ by which the dewy bud ‘stirs toward the light’?40 From a
transcendent God, perhaps, beyond the universe as we know and experience it? But a
transcendent God entails an immanent god, that people have the potential within us to
conform to God’s will. For that to be possible, we have to have a spark of the divine within
us. Here the argument is that the ground-state properties of human action established by
the subjective considerations are in resonance with the ground-state properties of being as
such, established by the objective considerations. This resonance is, once again, the
coherence of love.

3. Love and the forces of physics

How does the power of love relate to the forces of the universe as revealed by modern
physics? The general picture I get from the popularizing accounts by physicists is that there
is no necessary incompatibility; and that there are also (depending on the theory you find
most plausible) some very striking correspondences. Quantum physics seems to be just
starting to move beyond a protracted Kuhnian pre-revolutionary phase of proliferating
anomalies and interpretations, but nonlocality and quantum entanglement are now
regarded as beyond dispute: at a fundamental level everything is interconnected with
everything else. This chimes with the critical realist concepts of nonduality, generalized co-
presence, and love as the ultimate unifying force within being.

A range of theories – an emerging neo-Copenhagen interpretation,41 a possibilist

transactional interpretation (PSI)42 – posit a real sub-quantum underlying domain or ‘Hilbert
space’ of physically efficacious possibility that is both, qua unactualized, ‘outside’ or ‘pre-’
spacetime (i.e. has no position, cannot be associated with any region, in spacetime) and,
qua actualized, inside it. As Ruth E. Kastner puts it, ‘relativistic spacetime’ (Bhaskar’s relative
reality) is thus ‘a domain of actuality emergent from a [real] quantum level of possibilities’
(Bhaskar’s absolute reality); ‘the fundamental ontological reality is that of non-localized
fields and their excitations’,43 fields of potentia that give rise both to the vaulted structures

39
Cf. Shkliarevsky 2011, 79-80.
40
Goethe 1826/2011, 655.
41
Mason 2015. Werner Heisenberg himself held that ‘the mode of reality of the quantum state … is
potentiality as contrasted with actuality’ (Shimony 2009, original emphasis).
42
Kastner 2013.
43
Kastner 2013, 135, 153. As Kastner points out, Shimony 2009 makes a similar point.

7
and to the flux of the phenomena of spacetime.44 At the fundamental level there is thus, as
Bhaskar already put it in Dialectic (1993), ‘dispositional identity of things with their changing
causal powers, so that … to be is not only just to be able to do, but to be able to become’,45
rather than to be a concretely singular thing (e.g. a particle) with an intrinsic structure. 46 The
problem of observer-dependence, which has seemed to entail that the properties and even
existence of quanta or individual ‘particles’ depend on the observer and what kinds of
measurement they make, evaporates on this interpretation. For there are no quanta at the
fundamental level, simply potentia or the physical possibility of transactions that are
independent of the observer; when a transaction occurs it manifests differently to inertial
and accelerating observers and so is interpreted differently (perspectivally). 47 These ideas
have a great deal in common with the domain of the real and metaReal in Bhaskar’s
philosophy, and resonate with love as a cardinal property of the metaReal.48

Supersymmetric string or superstring theory49 explicitly postulates underlying identity: the

fundamental things of nature are strings or microscopically tiny lines and loops of energy
that are identical but capable of vibrating in an infinite array of patterns, constituting a
roaring ocean of energetic resonance. Both superstring theory and PSI also attempt to
provide, in different ways, a framework for the ultimate unification of quantum mechanics
and general relativity theory (TD), which in their earlier guises are mutually contradictory,
postulating an underlying unity of all nature’s fundamental physical constituents and forces
(ID), with a common origin in the vibrational modes of strings or the domain of real
possibility. This corresponds in important ways with the critical realist concepts of totality,
the resolution of contradictions, and the coherence of love. However, superstring theory
tends to be reductionist, blockist and incompatible with human agency and free will,
whereas the outlook of PSI, like the neo-Copenhagen interpretation more generally, is
emergentist, becoming and fully compatible with free will. Chaos and the void à la Alain
Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and 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 more fundamental.

If in Goethe’s words ‘die almächtige Liebe alles bildet, alles hegt’ (literally, ‘almighty love
forms everything, sustains everything’), how does this relate to the powerful tendency for
order to dissipate into disorder, maximizing entropy, imposed by the second law of
thermodynamics? Bhaskar’s dialectical work suggests that regional negentropy, creativity,
and emergence are perfectly consistent with underlying entropy within what he later

44
Cf. Porpora 2000. Kastner uses the metaphor of the tip of an iceberg floating on a sea or ocean to describe
the relationship between the domains of the actual and the real – a similar metaphor to that used by Bhaskar
(1993/2008, 5) to describe the relationship between the positive and the negative.
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 other empirically given object’ are
conceptualized as ‘fields of effects’ (my emphasis). The metaReal, as I understand it, is the most fundamental
sub-stratum of the real.
49
For an account of string theory that assumes no training in mathematics or physics, see Greene 1999/2000.
Like many physicists, Greene is reductionist and too prone to believe that string theory may well provide the
grand theory of everything.

8
referred to as relative reality.50 Thus the ‘natural history’ of the human species does not
necessarily, as W. G. Sebald puts it, follow ‘a course which, once the meridian is reached,
leads without fail down into the dark’,51 but exhibits a tendential rational directionality
within the self-structuration of being.52 In metaRealism the entropy of relative reality is
itself underpinned by the negentropy (undissipated pure or free energy) of the ground-state
or absolute reality. When we draw on this energy, for example in spontaneous right action,
we reverse entropy locally and temporarily.53 Recent nonequilibrium thermodyamical
theory, which treats entropy and negentropy as facets of a single energetic-informational
process, supports similar conclusions. As Clayton Crockett summarizes:

Being is energy conversion, which is why it is fundamentally differential or becoming rather

than a static entity. Nonequilibrium thermodynamics treats energy flows across a gradient,
and the reduction of that gradient produces entropy but also produces order. This fact
seems paradoxical, but it is not; it is part of the order of things.54

Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection broadly accords with this. It powerfully
calls into question the dominant reductionist block-universe view in physics that time is an
illusion and the future determined – that ‘what is real is only the history of the universe as a
timeless whole’ – in favour of the view that time and change are real and fundamental: the
universe is ‘evolving in time, with structure on every scale developing as the universe
expands’.55 This does not contradict the law of entropy; rather, in the myriad gravitationally
bound systems of the universe such as stars, solar systems, galaxies, and black holes, and of
course in life-forms on planet Earth and wherever else they might obtain entropy is
counteracted by the force of gravity and by dynamical self-organization resulting from the
flow of free energy though open systems.56 It suggests a great creative continuity or
monotonicity in the constantly evolving shaping powers and forms of being, and

50
Bhaskar 1993/2008, 256. The concepts of constraint1 and constraint2 align with negentropy and entropy,
respectively.
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 and Deleuze are vulnerable to the
critical realist critique of the analysis of change exclusively in terms of difference (Bhaskar 1993/2008), but this
does not affect the point at issue here.
55
Smolin 2013, 159, 194, 196-207. The view that the universe is a timeless whole in which there is a
simultaneous co-existence of all times and events is 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’ – a multiverse of possibly infinite parallel universes – is premised on
just such a blockism in which every possible universe is realized. In critiquing blockism, Smolin unfortunately
seems to commit the converse fallacy of punctualism, according to which only the here-now is real (‘all that’s
real is real in the present moment’, which is always ‘one of a succession of moments’, ibid., 222, 240). On
blockism and punctualism see Bhaskar 1993/2008 and Hartwig 2007.
56
For an account of dynamical self-organization in the biosphere, see Deacon 2012 and my (2013) review
essay of it. The binding force of gravity in the Bhaskarian system aligns it with love. For the theological
tradition that stresses God’s radical transcendence of the cosmos, by contrast, gravity is sometimes seen as
the opposite of love (agape) – God withdraws from the world in order to allow it to exist. See e.g. Ferry 2013,
39. Transcendence in Bhaskar is always transcendence-within-immanence.

9
recommends a welcoming attitude to transience and death as ‘the silent knowing
participant in everything alive’.57

It should be stressed that such correspondences do not of course ‘prove’ or ‘confirm’

metaRealism (unlike much mainstream scientific realism, Bhaskar’s philosophy is not just
read off from the results of science), and in any case many physicists see order emerging out
of primary chaos. Rather, such correspondences lend support to metaRealism. MetaRealism
would need revising if it was seriously out of kilter with science over the longer run. There
are many of course who hold that science has no bearing on questions of spirituality and
religion, which are viewed as having non-overlapping magisteria or jurisdictions (NOMA).58
But this is highly problematic: it introduces a fundamental split between theology/religion
and philosophy (where philosophy goes into such things), on the one hand, and science on
the other, and their respective objects; the domain of science, according to the originator of
NOMA, is ‘the empirical constitution of the universe’ and that of theology ‘the search for
proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives’, and never the twain shall
meet.59 But we do not live in two worlds, we live in one; and in the event – most unlikely I
think – that our universe is but one of an enormous array of universes, we live in but one
multiverse or cosmos. As one of my favourite quotes has it: ‘There is indeed another world,
but it is in this one’.60 Adapting it for our times: ‘There are indeed many worlds, but they are
all in this one as the infinite possibility of the real.’61 Philosophy and science cannot ‘see’ the
other side of the cosmic envelope, so to speak, but whatever 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 by the category of love? I think
this can best be shown by considering Bhaskar’s essays ‘Unconditionality in love’63 and ‘The
Tao of love and unconditionality in commitment’.64 They invoke the paths to union with
totality of the Vedic tradition, specifically the paths of truth (Jnana Yoga), practice (Karma
Yoga) and love (Bhakti Yoga). These correspond to 1M, 4D and 3L respectively in the MELD
schema. Bhaskar demonstrates that, though distinct, these paths are ultimately one: a tri-

57
Rilke 1975, 132. It is of course possible that the tendency of the universe towards complexity will reverse at
some time in the future.
58
Gould 1997. For a critique see Shkliarevsky 2011.
59
Gould 1997.
60
Paul Éluard, cited in Patrick White 1966/1969, epitaph. These lines are White’s rendition of part of a
sentence that appears in Paul Éluard, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Galliamard) 1968, Vol. 1, p. 986: ‘Il y a
assurément un autre 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), ‘a God who is separate from the world
is thereby finite and fails to be infinite’ – a point understood by ‘quite a few’ Christian and other theologians
but not by many philosophers who comment on Hegel.
63
Bhaskar 2002a, ch. 13, 339-63. This started life as a workshop talk in the beautiful gardens of Tagore’s
ashram in Bengal, India, in 2001.
64
Bhaskar 2002c, ch. 4, 172-232.

10
unity. If we add a path of creativity (and within that of beauty) (2E),65 which is closely bound
up with the emergence of totality, hence with love, we have a tetra-unity in terms of
MELD.66

First, the path of love itself. Considered formally, love is arguably at the heart of the three
main (1) modalities, (2) mechanisms of identification and (3) evolutionary forms of
nonduality, i.e. ways in which nonduality sustains and is connected with relative reality,
corresponding to the domains of the empirical/conceptual, the actual and the real,
respectively. (1) It is (a) at the heart of the fine structure or deep interior of ‘any moment or
aspect of being or consciousness’,67 closely linked, Bhaskar suggests, with sat-chit-ananda or
the implicit consciousness of beings, bliss-consciousness); (b) central to the constitution of
our social life in the form of transcendental agency and transcendental identification in
consciousness, which express love ‘in the sense of unity or becoming one’;68 and (c) the
most fundamental ground-state property of humans and other beings. (2) All three main
mechanisms of unification – transcendental identification, reciprocity (mutual exchanges
between beings at the level of the metaReal) and co-presence and generalized co-presence
(the enfoldment of all beings within every being at the level of the metaReal) – are arguably
forms of love, as are (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), human love radiates equally in all directions, like ripples in a pool
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 source of all
beings.

Engagement in any circle of love will take you to the point when you just are love; and when
you are in love with love itself. This is a very common experience, for the lover to find that
his or her love for the beloved passes naturally into a tremendous love for love, and this love
for love takes the lover into the space where they want love with the source ultimately of all
love; love or union with the source of all union. This extraordinary fact, that love does not
have to refer to anything outside itself, gives it a self-sufficiency or self-justifying character
sui generis.70

65
This substitutes for Hatha Yoga, ‘the path of physical strength or grace’, 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 likewise unified by love, but in a decidedly anthropic and contingent register. Love
for Badiou depends upon a highly contingent singular encounter between humans, an event in which the
power of ‘the void of being … is gathered within a subject’ (Badiou 2003, 33), whereas for Bhaskar it is present
everywhere as a ground-state force, sustaining everything we and other creatures and beings do.
67
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, xlii.
68
Bhaskar 2002a/2012, 187.
69
See especially Bhaskar 2002a/2012,187-9.
70
Bhaskar 2002a/2012, 182.

11
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 your
ground-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 with
our ground-states, as love ‘turns to the whole manifold of nature in order to drink love out
of every [being]’.73 This means that, contrary to a poststructuralist and Levinasian
shibboleth, the Other, though uniquely different, is fundamentally no stranger to me or you
or themselves. At the level of your ground-state, ‘the whole of … the other is actually a part
of you; and you a part of them’.74

Second, both the other paths, the path of truth and the path of practice, centrally involve
love. Bhaskar argues that the conatus to truth is ultimately a drive to union with what we
seek to know. For the experience of union or identity in the moment of absolute
transcendence in any process of learning or discovery can be rendered fully intelligible only
on the basis that it involves ‘the union between something already enfolded within the
discovering agent, brought up to consciousness by a moment of Platonic anamnesis or
recall, with the alethic self-revelation of the being known, existing outside him’,75 i.e. it
involves the union of two beings at the level of the implicit, supramental consciousness of
their ground-states. There is an etymological connection here in the Indo-European
languages; for example, the English word ‘belief’ is related to the German word for love, die
Liebe. As Linda Martín Alcoff and John D. Caputo put it, paraphrasing Hélène Cixous: ‘Belief
means what I like or love to think, what love wants me to think. Belief … loves to believe.’76
The path of practice, for its part – the conatus to free flourishing – is the drive to the totality
that is universal self-realization, to unity and so to love. In this way, the conatus to truth and
freedom, theory and practice – epistemological dialectics and emancipatory axiology – find
their ultimate unifying basis in love, and ‘the coherence of theory and practice in practice’ of
Dialectic is beautifully 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 or distortion, 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 the great theme of the Christ’s teaching, coherence

71
Cf. Kierkegaard 1847/1962; Assiter 2009. As Gunnarsson 2014 (111, n2 and ch. 7) argues, any dualism of self-
love and love for others is thus a (real) illusion. Foucault 2001/2005 traces ‘the gradual elimination of the
notion of care of the self from philosophical thought and concern’ (25) in Western 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, pace Hegel’s dualism of matter and
spirit, there is no reason to confine our drinking to the biosphere.
74
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 225.
75
Bhaskar 2002a/2012, xliv.
76
Alcoff and Caputo, eds, 2011, <**>.
77
At the level of the embodied personality the coherence of love is conceptualized as the ‘loop of love’. Love
and the emotions are ‘crucial mediators between mind and body [cf. the path of truth] and embodied
personality and the world [cf. the path of practice]’, including all four planes of social being. Bhaskar
2002c/2012, 186, 328.

12
 possibly the main theme of the Vedic tradition, clarity possibly that of the Buddha, and emptiness the
Taoist norm, flow intrinsically into each other.78

And since metaRealism shows that secular discourses of emancipation presuppose the
possibility of a society in which people are motivated primarily by love, we can say that it
also effects a unity of religious with emancipatory projects and so is maximally inclusive.79

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

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 human being, and giving will be seen as ‘the primary social act’.80
For while all negative emotions ‘exist [da] only in virtue of love [dr], on which they are
unilaterally dependent’, they can only exist in the absence or incompleteness [d a] of love,
and ‘disappear or dissolve when there is only love’.81 Where love is primary, master–slave-
type relations are abandoned as we freely and spontaneously do what is right. In
‘overcoming fear or division’, love ‘returns to itself’.82 This does not mean, as Luc Boltanski83
actualistically supposes, that people will be motivated exclusively by love; rather, what
Boltanski refers to as the regime of justice, based on reciprocity and calculation, and the
regime of violence will be subordinated to (constellationally contained and constrained
within) the regime of love.84 Love will assume the role currently accorded to exchange in
modernity and its discourse. Luc Ferry, a French neo-Kantian philosopher and conservative
politician, claims that this is already happening; we are on the brink of a new era of love,
indeed we are already there: ‘We are no longer, as with Kant, in the domain of an ethics of
respect but already in an ethics of love’.85 There is no denying that we could be on the brink
of an epoch of revolutionary transition that will usher in an era of love. But to succeed we
will in my view have to shed the savage capitalist demi-real,86 abolishing master–slave-type
social relations in their entirety, which presuppose love but are actually monstrously
parasitic on it. A brief review and Achilles’ heel critique87 of Ferry’s main argument will lend
support to this view.

78
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 191; see also pp. 332-53.
79
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, ch. 7.
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 the point deemed by the proponents of a
theory to be its strongest.

13
Ferry views (Western) history as very largely the expression of a developmental sequence of
great ideas or ‘principles of meaning’, which it is the task of philosophy to ‘discover’:
principles of cosmology, theology, humanism Mark I (‘the old humanism’), deconstruction,
and finally (as ‘the “end of history”’) love or humanism Mark II (‘the new humanism’).88 The
dynamo of the entire process is a gradual ‘humanization of thought’ as more and more
dimensions of human experience and potential are taken into account and enhanced. Whilst
Ferry argues that deconstuction of the claims of the old humanism centring on abstract
reason and rights has played an important preparatory role in the advent of the final phase,
his main argument for its arrival is that the dynamic of capitalism, by freeing workers both
from the ties of tradition and the means of production, has freed them to marry for love,
not convenience, thus providing a powerful basis in the private sphere for ‘a humanism of
love’ to become the dominant value in the public sphere. While it is very refreshing to come
across a philosophical liberal who explicitly espouses the primacy of love over reciprocity
and exchange, there is a contradiction at the heart of this argument that resonates with the
contradiction between power-over and love in the mode of production itself (see section 6,
below).

Having invoked the structural dynamic of capitalism to argue that love has become the
supreme value in the private sphere, Ferry spirits it away when it comes to explaining how
this paramountcy 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 the bearers of
the ideas that move history. It then follows that, if love has now become the supreme value
in the personal lives of 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 love with the ‘necessity’ for ‘sacrifices’90 in this epoch of financial crisis,
structure reappears with a vengeance in Ferry’s account as something that we have no
choice but to bow to: ‘Actually, it’s wrong to call [the current crisis] a “crisis”, as it’s a
structural problem from which it is not clear that we can really “emerge”.’91 In the name of
love, tighten your belts for another round of neoliberal cuts!92 The issue of structurally
generated exploitation, inequality and domination, 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 of transparency 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 either implausibly disavowed

88
Ferry 2013, 30, 35f.
89
See the discussion of what happens to love in the capitalist demi-real below.
90
See Ferry 2013, 50-51, 66-7, 95-8. Such sacrifices, Ferry unrealistically holds, ‘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 in a passage of What is Enlightenment?
that is a favourite with Ferry, must be sacrificed 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 the idea of individual autonomy is one
of the main strengths of Western modernity but departs radically from him on the issue of europism (see
Hostettler 2013) and the extent to which the idea of autonomy has been translated into practice.
94
Ferry 2013, 98.

14
(Eurocentrism) or openly embraced.95 If capitalism is an incubator of love, the reality is that
it also structurally generates money and power-over as supreme values; ‘desire and greed
are as essential to capitalism as order on the production line’.96 Ferry’s revolution of love
thus founders on the very same problem that scuttled the dialectics of love in the later
Hegel. The contradiction between generalized master–slave-type social relations and a
politics of love remains unresolved.97 Although all the negative emotions do indeed melt
away ‘when there is only love’, as Bhaskar suggests, they are ‘systematically related 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 thus
presupposes.98 Capitalism, the great incubator of pleonexia and power-over, and societies
dominated by it can plausibly be viewed as the locus of a new epoch of love only by
conjuring away their master–slave-type social structure.

6. Love and the demi-real

Bhaskar’s philosophy of love has been brilliantly put to work in the area of feminist theory
and gender studies by Lena Gunnarsson. In The Contradictions of Love99 Gunnarsson
combines a feminist Marxist approach (that of Anna Jónasdóttir, who uniquely 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 critical realism. While the concept of
love power is formed by analogy with Marx’s concept of labour power, it is distinguished
inter alia by its product (human life rather than the means of life) and the fact that it cannot
be bought or forced – it vanishes if deployed as a means to an end. The actualization of love
power informs and sustains the continuous creative process of production whereby human
life (embodied personalities and the species) is formed and re-formed. Within the
patriarchal power structures of master–slave-type societies, however, women’s love is
exploited by men, who appropriate ‘more erotic empowerment and care from women than
they offer in return’, and accumulate it in the form of ‘surplus worthiness’:100 ‘If capital is
accumulated alienated labour, male authority is accumulated alienated love.’101 As
recipients of love, women thus tend to suffer structurally induced impoverishment, while
men tend to enjoy a relative surfeit.

Gunnarsson devastatingly critiques existing, in particular poststructuralist feminist theories

of gendered power, diagnosing ‘a realist deficit’102 and rehabilitating concepts of ontology,
nature and natural necessity, emergence, unity in difference, human embodiment and
needs, and love itself, including the deep human need for it. Love is little discussed in the

95
Ferry 2013, esp. 29-30. Cf. the fundamental critique of anthropocentrism and related forms of centrism
throughout Bhaskar’s oeuvre. Bhaskar’s dialectical work develops a powerful argument that centrism,
triumphalism and endism are underpinned by the epistemic fallacy, the speculative and positivist illusions and
ontological monovalence, respectively; together these errors comprise the ‘unholy trinity’ of irrealism.
96
Bhaskar 2002c/2012, 198.
97
Bhaskar 1993/2008, 243, 326-32; cf. Gunnarsson 2015.
98
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.

15
poststream literature and, when it is, is often reduced to an ideological delusion or the
discursive performance of power – basically something to be done away with (!) in favour of
a concern with rights and power – rather than a liberatory force.

Gunnarsson endorses the metaRealist account of love as the ‘fundament of existence’, a key
ground-state capacity universal to human being, a potential ‘at the root of our being’ 103 that
is ‘fundamentally unexploitable and transcends all categories of opposition’.104 As such it is
‘a crucial driving force of people and, hence, history’.105 She agrees with Ferry and others
that love is increasingly important in Western societies: the experience of love determines
how households and reproduction are organized; love as a source of self-worth is becoming
ever more important because of the increasing difficulties of achieving self-worth under
capitalism (increasing job insecurity, the commodification of love power itself, etc.); and
love as a source of unity is vital for resolving the current global polycrisis. But she argues
that love is also a crucial locus of exploitation and a fundamental basis of men’s power in
the capitalist demi-real: women are subordinated to men through love – men exploit
women’s love power, and this is the pivot of women’s oppression by men.106 The generative
mechanism (formal cause) of this exploitation is the master–slave system of patriarchal
social relations in which both men and women are caught up and which powerfully affects
their practices.

Gunnarsson diagnoses, not the advent of the event of love in today’s globalized capitalism,
but a love crisis that prefigures and may precede such an event: the system of sociosexual
exploitation, involving the construction of women as less valuable and capable than men, is
in contradiction with the more fundamental nondual level that sustains it at a time when
love is more important than ever to human flourishing. This opens up possibilities of radical
change in the way loving is structured, with wider ramifications. For love is also a force that
can conquer oppression. Men are parasitic on women’s love power, and so dependent on it.
This empowers men in terms of power2, but disempowers them in terms of power1, so their
power2 is ‘ontologically fragile’.107 The reality of male power2 is constituted by exploitation
of women’s love power1, necessitating ‘the suppression of its true ontological ground’ at the
level of absolute reality, the power0 of love – a ground that is obscured in Jónasdóttir’s
account.108 When we shed the demi-real, love can come into its own, its productive power
unfettered.109 Gunnarsson underlines the importance of critical realist explanatory critique:
de-mystification of a system of exploitation that presents itself in our social practices as
something other than it really is; women and men do not so much deceive themselves as

103
Gunnarsson 2014, 119f., 164.
104
Gunnarsson 2014, 123.
105
Gunnarsson 2014, 29 n3.
106
Gunnarsson’s analysis is mainly in terms of heterosexual relations, but much of it would also apply, she
suggests, to same-sex relations.
107
Gunnarsson 2014, 264 et passim.
108
Gunnarsson 2014, 149, emphasis changed. This holds for power 2 in general, of course: it is ultimately
parasitic on the ground-state qualities of people. The concepts of love power 1 (love in its alienated form in the
demi-real, cf. the commodity labour power) and love power 0 are only implicit in Gunnarsson’s account, which
could I think be further sharpened by their introduction. For the distinction between power 2, power1, and
power0 see Despain 2011, 309-11, who follows the logic of Bhaskar’s account. In terms of Bhaskar’s
metatheory of the person, love power 1 corresponds to the embodied person, love power 0 to the real self.
109
Gunnarsson 2014, 163.

16
they are deluded by the social form of their own practices, which explanatory critique can
unmask as necessary (caused) but false and so in need of change if at all possible.

The ontological fragility of men’s patriarchal power entrains a duplex strategy of feminist
struggle as having key collective and spiritual dimensions that are closely interrelated.110
The collective aspect is geared around a relative withdrawal by women of love power1 from
men and redirection of sociosexual energies to each other, displacing the centrality of men
in their lives. The spiritual aspect consists of getting into their ground-states and working for
unity with all human beings and the cosmos. Withdrawal of love power1 is itself a spiritual
act: it is only superficially an act of hostility, it is really an act of love and solidarity that
augments the conditions for non-antagonistic relations between all people. Love power in
its alienated, demi-real form is distorted by the logic of exchange, with women giving too
much love in the vain hope of an equal exchange. Such practices obscure the crucial
differences between the paradigm of exchange and the paradigm of love, and the basis of
love power1 in love power0, which women’s struggle can lay bare. Men for 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 would help dismantle the male
atomistic ego, the Spectre that dominates the demi-real.111 This presupposes that women
reclaim the power of self-change and take responsibility for who and how they are instead
of disempowering themselves by blaming others. This is the metaRealist principle of the
primacy of self-change in the transformation of oppressive social structures, prefigured in
the practical mysticism of the hermetic traditions and more recently in the rallying cry of
second-wave feminism and the student movement: ‘The personal is political’.112 It includes
care of one’s own self, not over-identifying with the needs of others: being the autonomous
beings we really are and cultivating the art of loving our real 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 be resolved in practice, and so also in
theory; and reconciliation effected between feminist theory and critical realism and
between feminist politics and spirituality.

Conclusion

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

110
Gunnarsson 2014, ch. 9.
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, which
effects a brilliant critique of empiricism, demonstrates that Blake has a profound 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 in the Bhaskarian analysis of the self.
112
Gunnarsson 2014, 2, 153f.
113
Gunnarsson (2014, 158-9) notes a similar theme in the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray, who speaks of
returning to the selves we really are, letting go old selves and conceptions, ‘being faithful to our own Being’.
114
Gunnarsson 2014, 1.

17
Acknowledgement

This essay started out as a talk to Roy Bhaskar’s postgraduate seminar at the International
Centre for Critical Realism, UCL Institute of Education, London. It appears in this
commemorative issue in particular because Roy was very keen to see it in print, saying:
‘There must be a journal of critical realism somewhere that will publish it.’ It is dedicated to
Roy in profound gratitude for the powerful light he sheds on the paths of truth and
creativity, practice and love. Many thanks to Lena Gunnarsson for helpful comments on an
earlier draft.

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

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