Journal of Critical Realism

ISSN: 1476-7430 (Print) 1572-5138 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjcr20

All You Need is Love

Mervyn Hartwig

To cite this article: Mervyn Hartwig (2015) All You Need is Love, Journal of Critical Realism,
14:2, 205-224

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1476743015Z.00000000061

Published online: 30 Apr 2015.

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 journal of critical realism, Vol. 14 No. 2, April, 2015, 205 – 224

PERSPECTIVE

All You Need is Love

Mervyn Hartwig
International Centre for Critical Realism, UK
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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 j Auf tiefem Abgrund lastend ruht, j Wie
tausend Bäche strahlend fliessen j Zum grausen Sturz des Schaums der Flut, j Wie strack mit eignem kraftigen Triebe j
Der Stamm sich in die Lüfte trägt:j So ist es die allmächtige Liebe, j 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.

ß W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1476743015Z.00000000061

 206 MERVYN HARTWIG

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
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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, that is, unity, union,

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).
 ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 207

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, together with
Roy Bhaskar’s arguments for them. It then considers how Bhaskar’s claims fare
in the light of the findings of modern physics, shows how the category of love
furnishes the unifying logical infrastructure of the philosophy of critical realism
and critiques the view that the reign of love has already begun in the West, 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.
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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 capacity — ‘we cannot help but love’.13 Love does not calculate or

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.
13
Bhaskar [2002c] 2012, 179.
 208 MERVYN HARTWIG

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
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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 transformative change.27 With the geohistorical emergence of human intentional
agency, however, sustainable flourishing at the level of the species becomes a project

14
Bhaskar [2002c] 2012, 198; cf. Bhaskar 2000, 65 and 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.
27
The theme of the dialectical unity of life and death is magnificently developed in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
 ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 209

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 holding 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
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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 fails to theorize this level.31

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
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

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– 45. By ‘spiritual’ I mean centrally concerned with unity,
wholeness and at-homeness (cf. Bhaskar with Hartwig 2011, 187– 8).
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.
34
See, for Bhaskar’s account of this method, Bhaskar [1986] 2009, 10– 27 and, for my understanding of it, Hartwig
2015.
 210 MERVYN HARTWIG

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
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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 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 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.

35
Cf. Gunnarsson 2014, 130, n. 4; Ollman [1971] 1996, 263 – 4.
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’.
37
See Hartwig 2010, 251, 260 n. 58. See also Bhaskar 2000, 24 n.4, 44.
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.
 ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 211

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
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as such, established by the objective considerations. This resonance is, once again,
the coherence of love.

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 entangle-
ment 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 and to the flux of the phenomena
of spacetime.44 At the fundamental level there is thus, as Bhaskar already put it in

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.
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.
 212 MERVYN HARTWIG

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
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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 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

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.
50
Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 256. The concepts of constraint1 and constraint2 align with negentropy and entropy,
respectively.
 ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 213

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
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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 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

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 [1993] 2008 as ‘blockism’ or ‘block universalism’. Cf.
Kastner 2013, 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’, Smolin 2013, 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.
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.
 214 MERVYN HARTWIG

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
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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

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-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

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 Éluard 1969, 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.
65
This substitutes for Hatha Yoga, ‘the path of physical strength or grace’, in the four traditional yogas (Bhaskar
[2002c] 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 aleatory 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.
 ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 215

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
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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

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,

67
Bhaskar [2002c] 2012, xlii.
68
Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 187.
69
See especially Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 187– 9.
70
Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, 182.
71
Cf. Kierkegaard [1847] 1962; Assiter 2009. As Gunnarsson 2014 (111, n. 2 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 de facto dualism of matter and
spirit, there is no reason to confine our drinking to the biosphere.
 216 MERVYN HARTWIG

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 that is, 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,
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the English word ‘belief’ is related to the German word for love, die Liebe.
As Linda Martı́n 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 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.

74
Bhaskar [2002c] 2012, 225.
75
Bhaskar [2002a] 2012, xliv.
76
Alcoff and Caputo, eds, 2011, 12.
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.
78
Bhaskar [2002c] 2012, 191; see also 332 – 53.
79
Bhaskar [2002c] 2012, ch. 7.
 ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 217

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 [da] 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
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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.
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 deconstruction 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

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.
88
Ferry 2013, 30, 35– 6.
 218 MERVYN HARTWIG

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 the section, ‘Love and the demi-real’, 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’, that is, 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:
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‘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 (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

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,
n. 54.
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.
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.
 ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 219

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.

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’, that is, 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
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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 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

98
Bhaskar [2002c] 2012, 198.
99
Gunnarsson 2014.
100
Gunnarsson 2014, 54, 56, 124, 167.
101
Gunnarsson 2014, 60 n. 9, citing Jónasdóttir.
102
Gunnarsson 2014, 11.
103
Gunnarsson 2014, 119 – 20, 164.
104
Gunnarsson 2014, 123.
105
Gunnarsson 2014, 29 n. 3.
 220 MERVYN HARTWIG

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
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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 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

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 removed. This holds for power2 in general, of course: it is ultimately parasitic on
the ground-state qualities of people. The concepts of love power1 (love in its alienated form in the demi-real, cf. the
commodity labour power) and love power0 are only implicit in Gunnarsson’s account, which could I think be further
sharpened by their introduction. For the distinction between power2, 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 power1 corresponds to
the embodied person, love power0 to the real self.
109
Gunnarsson 2014, 163.
110
Gunnarsson 2014, ch. 9.
 ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 221

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, that is, 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,
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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.

Acknowledgement
This essay started out as a talk to Roy Bhaskar’s postgraduate seminar at the
International Centre for Critical Realism, the 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.

111
‘Each Man is in his Spectre’s powerj Until the arrival of that hourj When his Humanity awakej And cast his Spectre
into the Lake.’ Blake 1804, 41. Cf. Quinney 2009, whose analysis of 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, 153– 4.
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.
 222 MERVYN HARTWIG

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Notes on contributor
Mervyn Hartwig is general editor/book review editor of JCR.
Correspondence to: Mervyn Hartwig, 37 Stockwell Green, Stockwell, London
SW9 9HZ, UK. Email: mhartwig@btinternet.com