Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27:2/3

0021–8308

On the Ontological Status of Ideas

ROY BHASKAR

Why should we be concerned with ontology? Or, more particularly with the
ontological status of ideas (as distinct, say from with their truth, efficacy or
beauty)? An important caveat: to argue these are legitimate is not to argue (what
I in fact deny) that all ideas possess the same ontological type, or categorical status.
First some simple considerations. Ideas, and ideational connections (including
category mistakes, logical contradictions etc.), are part of everything, and
everything is real. To deny the reality of a part of everything (of anything), such
as ideas (or say persons, or consciousness, or agency, or values—or mind, or
body) extrudes or detotalizes it or them from the world, that is the rest of the
world of which they are in principle causally explicable and causally efficacious
parts. This inevitably produces an implicit dualistic or split ontology.
One of the most frequent sources of the denial of the reality of ideas depends
upon a tacit restriction of criteria for ascribing reality to what can be perceived
directly, rather than experienced so to speak indirectly, viz. through its actual
or potential effects, i.e. to a perceptual rather than a causal criterion. Thus a
philosopher or scientist schooled in or influenced by the empiricist doctrine of
esse est percipi might scout the reality of ideas because (s)he is tacitly supposing
that ideas cannot be tasted, touched, seen, heard or smelled, i.e. perceived
directly, rather than experienced indirectly through the efficacy of their effects.
Tools and machines, and a fortiori the social relations in which they are formed,
are not only, but also, the objectifications of ideas, of the social products
(reproducts and transforms) of ideation, of the naturalised process of thought.
This process occurs in what I have elsewhere characterized as four planar social
being. These planes are those constituted by (a) material transactions with
nature; (b) social interactions between agents; (c) social relations and institutions;
and (d) the stratification of the personality.1
Another source of the denial of the reality of ideas depends upon the confusion
of the ontological question of what is real with the epistemo-ontological question
of what (ideas) have a referent. Or more generally upon the conflation of the
ontological issue of the reality of ideas with the epistemological or ethical issues
of their truth (e.g. representational adequacy), instrumental or moral value.

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140 Roy Bhaskar
Knowledge and value are not, or not only opposed to, but also (constellationally)
contained within, being. One common form of this mistake is what I have called
the epistemic fallacy, involving the reduction of ontology to epistemology.2
I want to ordinate my discussion of the ontological status of ideas in this
paper around four recent turns in social thought. These tendencies I shall in
turn relate to the four dimensional (1M, 2E, 3L, 4D) schema for dialectical
critical realism I have proposed recently3. In the course of my discussion I hope
(1) to indicate systematically why ontology matters and why it is inexorable; (2)
to demonstrate the reality of ideas (of different types); (3) to anlayse the most
prevalent mistakes in the ontology of ideas; (4) to touch on the issue of categorial
realism and the nature of a specific type of idea—ideologies; (5) to illustrate
some good and bad dialectical connections of ideas (and related phenomena).

1. FOUR RECENT TURNS IN SOCIAL THOUGHT

The developments I wish to focus on in recent social (philosophical and generally

cultural) thought may be summarized as the (a) ontological, (b) processual, (c)
ecological and (d) reflexive turns respectively. These may be related to the first
moment, second edge, third level and fourth dimension of the system of
dialectical critical realism to which I have already referred.
(a) The first ontological or realist turn is oriented against the epistemic fallacy,
actualism, anthropocentricity (and the particular model of man which informs
it) and what I have called the ‘primal squeeze’ between empiricism and
rationalism consequent upon the denial of a stratified and differentiated account
of reality. The particular twist that dialectical critical realism puts on these
themes involve inter alia both a dispositional and a categorial realism.
The former accentuates the ontological, epistemological and logical priority
of the possible over the actual, and insists upon a three-tiered analysis of
dispositions, in which they are seen to be analysed in terms of tendencies
possessed but unexercised, tendencies exercised but unactualized and tendencies
exercised and actualized in a particular outcome. It follows from this analysis
not only that powers cannot be reduced to their exercise, but that the domain
of the real cannot be reduced to the domain of the actual (as in Humean analysis
of laws) and even less to the domain of the empirical. Dispositions at once play
a critical role in the dialectic of scientific discovery (bridging strata) and also
form the only possible ultimata of a scientific ontology. Such ultimata may
be epistemologically transcendent, but ontologically immanent—for example
ingredient in the higher order of phenomena from them emerge.
There are two points worth stressing about the categorical realism which
ontological realism, taken consistently, entails. First, categories are not to be
viewed as something which the subjective observer imposes on reality; rather
categories such as causality, substance, process, persons, etc.—if valid—are

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 On the Ontological Status of Ideas 141
constitutive of reality as such, irrespective of their categorization by observers
or thought. However, secondly, social reality is conceptually dependent and, as
such, may be falsely categorized, providing a grid through which categorical
necessity is, that is to say more basic categorial realities are, refracted. (Thus
categorical realities may be stratified.) I will come back to this later in my
discussion on ideology.
(b) The second turn in social thought re-emphasizes the categories of absence,
process, and dialectic. Dialectic may be seen as the (experience of) the process
of (trans) formation and dissolution of stratified (and differentiated) totalities. In
the human field it constitutes a general schema for a learning process in which
absence (2E), signifying incompleteness, leads to transcendence and a greater
totality (3L), in principle reflexively (4D) capable of situating itself and the
process whereby it became. There is a renewed emphasis on geo-historicity,
spacing and change – which, when qualitative, always involves a transcendent
cause upon an immanent ground. (Ideational creativity is non-algorithmic). Being
is seen as self-organizing, tensed and creative, proleptically replete with possibil-
ities of future (dis) emergence. As for the epistemic realm, in it there is
no conflict between ontological realism, epistemic relativity and judgemental
rationality.
(c) The ecological, relational or holistic turn is motivated by the new physics
(both micro and macro), the life sciences generally as well as the social sciences.
Profoundly critical of atomistic, extentionalistic, mechanistic and merely analytical
ways of viewing being it presages the need for a moment of transcendence, and
even ‘re-enchantment’ in a more satisfactory, post-Netzschean, post-instrumental-
ist mode of being or way of life. The individual is situated in its Umwelt, entailing
a transformed and vastly expanded conception of the self, both as a unit of
analysis and as a unit of moral evaluation.
(d) The reflexive turn, initiated by Descartes, pursued rigorously by the radicaliz-
ation of transcendental argument from Kant, through Fichte and Schelling, to
Hegel and Marx, through Nietzsche and Freud, the other masters of the
hermeneutic of suspicion, to the recent doyens of structuralism and poststructural-
ism. In the twentieth century it has most frequently taken a concern with the
means and media by which a philosophical assertion or position articulates itself,
especially linguistically. But, taken consistently, it implies the need for every
philosophy, if it is to be adequate, to be capable of reflectively situating itself –
which entails its own production and context as well. This is an absolute and
necessary condition for any adequate philosophical account of any subject
matter. Moreover in explanatory critical social science reflexively situated
intentional causal agency (driven by desire or want) or transformative praxis
absenting the given (characterized by need or lack) comes to the fore as a key
critical concept, transcending the dualisms and dichotomies characteristic of the
philosophy of action.

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142 Roy Bhaskar
2. THE NECESSITY OF ONTOLOGY

Everything is contained (constellationally) within ontology (including epistemology

and ethics)—or rather its referent, being (including knowledge and values). To
say that everything is real is not to say that everything is representationally real
(representationally adequate), or of equal epistemic and ethical value (that is, it
is not to say that it is instrumentally useful or intrinsically good). Crucial of
course are the questions of what kinds of reality ideas have. Moreover it is
patently not the case that ideas are a homogeneous category. Nor is it correct
to assume that say ideas of different epistemic status do not have radically
different kinds of reality. However the epistemic or ethical value or pedigree of
ideas is irrelevant to their reality as such. The relevant question is not whether
ideas are real, but what kind of reality they have, and whether ideas of different
type (e.g. kind, epistemological or ethical status) have different kinds of reality.

Denial of ontology (e.g. in the epistemic fallacy)

(1) Detotalizes the idea, agent, and/or discursive act from the world of which
it is an explicably efficacious part. This at the very least issues in the failure
of the philosophical position to satisfy the all important reflexive criterion
for philosophy.
(2) Esoterically secretes an untheorized implicit ontology (so that ontology
is denegated, i.e. expressed while being denied), and in practice (as categorical
necessity must be accommodated somehow) an illicit Tina compromise form4,
i.e. an illicit conjugation of mutually inconsistent but surreptitiously comple-
mentary components.
(3) Results in a split ontology, which generates an antinomial-dilemmatic
chain, fissuring being into formally discrete but tacitly related parts. This
imparts to philosophy its characteristic dualisms. Dualism or split is the
sign of alienation and underpinning the familiar dualisms (empiricism/
rationalism, mind/body, fact/value) of philosophy, and the aporiai to which
they give rise (problems of induction, agency and value), is the doctrine of
ontological monovalence (a purely positive account of being) denying absence,
negativity and change, on which doctrine rests actualism (cf. IM), extentional-
ism (cf. 3L) and reification (cf. 4D) characteristic of commodification and
all instrumentalist and manipulative reasoning alike.
(4) Logically results in the generation of a nugatory epistemological or
ethical content (including the co-inclusion of null opposites). Thus Humean
subjectivism generates a nugatory solipsistic content, logically identical with
a Parmenidean objectivism, without distinctions or boundaries. Irrealism
constitutes, so I argue elsewhere, a thicket such that if you enter it anywhere

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 On the Ontological Status of Ideas 143
you are embroiled in it everywhere and must collapse—in what I call
‘reductio ad irrealism’—into a null point from which nothing can be said
or done. In this way irrealist philosophy must be explicated as ideology and
explained in terms of alienation.

3. ON THE REALITY OF IDEAS

I have already argued that if everything is real, ideas (including category mistakes,
logical contradictions, illusions, errors generally) must be. Moreover that to deny
the reality of ideas (or say of persons or of the existence of causal relations in
the human world) extrudes or detotalizes them or the idealizer from the rest of
the world – producing a split in the world, including an implicit, inconsistent,
void and compromised ontology. Moreover to deny the reality of ideas makes
their production wholly mysterious and their effects impossible.
More positively, and to relate the topic of the reality to the 1M-4D analysis
of dialectical critical realism-ideas are:

(1) real qua causally efficacious, that is, on a causal criterion for ascribing reality
(cf. 1M). Specifically as explicably efficacious, dependent upon materially
embodied intentional causal agency (therefore conceptualized under some
description), emergent parts of the natural world system and constituted
within and contained by all four planes of naturalised social being, ideas
are causally and taxonomically irreducible modes of matter, or more
generally nature (including socialised nature5);
(2) explicably efficacious parts of the natural world, products of the naturalised
process of thought (ideation) (2E). Just as a stratified world-view sustains the
reality of ideas in virtue of their causal efficacy, so a processual world-view
allows us to sustain the emergent reality of ideational forms without denying
their diachronic emergence from nature. On this conception ideas are
causally and taxonomically irreducible to the conditions of their production
and physical realization alike. Moreover on a scientifically refined conception
of emergence, the lower-order level provides only the framework conditions
of possibility of the higher-order level (which moreover characteristically
determines the initial and boundary conditions of the lower-order level).
Thus synchronic emergent powers materialism is consistent with the epistemological,
ontological and logical priority of semantic, hermeneutic and semiotic
relations over physical, syntactical and formal (including algorithmic) rela-
tions. Ideas, then, as emergent powers of the total world system, are capable
of acting back on the materials out of which they are diachronically formed.
And they are causally and taxonomically irreducible modes of manifestation
of matter, more generally nature (or let us say being).

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144 Roy Bhaskar
(3) As such they are parts of nature or the universe, in all kinds of relations
to other parts and the whole, neither of which can synchronically be defined
independently of them. The orientation here (at 3L) is to deny dualistic
disembodiment, any kind of hypostasis or split which subverts the embodi-
ment and materiality of ideas. This is as common in vulgarised forms of
Marxism as in classical philosophy. Thus tools, machines etc., cannot be
conceived simply as material objects, but are also intrinsically the objectifica-
tion of (socially produced and transformed) ideas. Moreover only a rising
organic composition of ideas can offset the rising organic composition of
capital consequent upon a falling rate of profit as capitalism exhausts the
possibility of any one form or level of technological development.
(4) Paradigmatically ideas are social products or transforms (at 4D). They must
hence be conceptualised in a way which avoids the errors of naturalism
and anti-naturalism, individualism and collectivism, and reification and
voluntarism alike. Thus we fall into voluntarism if we neglect the constraining
power of the social reality of ideas (the inertia embodied in the presence of
the past).

4. MISTAKES IN THE ONTOLOGY OF IDEAS

Because of the antinomial – dilemmatic inconsistencies and incoherences

produced by the failure of inadequate positions (such as subjective and objective
idealism, dualism, reductionist materialism, behaviourism etc.) in the meta-
theory of ideas, the most common mistakes tend to lead into (and mutually
entail, by a weird eristic of unreason) each other. Thus verificationist behaviour-
ism, denying ontology, leaves the status of both what is verified and verifier
problematic, detotalizing and splitting them from (the rest of) being. This
undermines the rationale and cognitive point of the exercise and results,
moreover, in failure to sustain both the reality of the procedure and the reflexive
criterion for philosophy. Then again both reductionism, denying emergence and
the sui generis causal efficacy of ideas and hypostasis, denying the embodiment
and materiality of ideas, produce forms of dualistic disembodiment leading to

(a) detotalization, alienation, split, dilemmatic chains;

(b) implicit totality in which the split or denied segment of reality must be
illictly recombined with the asserted one. (Thus the eliminative materialism
of Rorty in Part I of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature must be split-and-
combined with the conversational hermeneutics of Part III); hence
(c) illicit compromise form, producing a vast variety of ideological possibilities.
All these irrealist positions are incomplete, and so erroneous, detotalizing
one or other significant part of reality. If the split off part of reality must

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 On the Ontological Status of Ideas 145
nevertheless in practice be sustained (that is to say, it is categorically
necessary) then we have an explicit or implicit dualistic, dilemmatic, schizoid
ideational form. Dualism or split is in fact a characteristic feature of our
philosophical tradition. Most prominent here is mind-body dualism. It can,
as I have already suggested, be traced back to the doctrine of ontological
monovalence,6 a purely positive account of being denying the necessity for
concepts of absence, void, non-being and entailing the deprocessualization,
detotalization, the absence of ontology and the failure of philosophy to
satisfy a reflexive criterion for itself. Behind ontological monovalence is, I
have argued, a deep-seated existential insecurity, rooted in the alienation of
human being from four plenar social being, and ultimately the cosmos. The
splits of philosophy are indications of more profound social and natural
alienations.

5. CATEGORIES AND IDEOLOGIES

We have already seen that ontological entails categorical realism, whether the
reality concerned is conceptually-dependent (or-mediated) or not. Social reality
is of course conceptually dependent. As such it can be falsely characterized –
and falsely categorized. Such falsely categorized realities may be thought as
dependent, demi-realities, through which categorial necessity or truth or reality is
refracted. All error depends on, though it is not of course the same as,
incompleteness; and if what is omitted is categorially necessary (1) dualistic, (2)
implicit, (3) inconsistent-fissured and (4) compromised (Tina) totalities will
be formed, subject to ideology-critique (immanent critique and dialectical
argumentation).
It does not seem to me very important whether ideologies are conceived as
the lived practices through which such dilemmatic totalities are constituted, or the
erroneous ideas in terms of which they are characterized. In either case to
characterize a theory or practice as an ideology is to stigmatize it and in
particular to say that it is (a) false, (b) categorially flawed, and (c) (and this is vital)
explicable in terms of some theoretically and empirically validated theory of its
formation and its contemporary social and natural structuration and context. I
would also suggest that to characterize a theory or practice as ‘ideological’
requires the satisfaction of substantive as well as formal criteria, bearing on the
role that the theory or practice plays in the discursive moralization of power2
or master-slave relations.
In Transcendence and Totality I argue that any power2 (e.g. money)-based society
will be characterized by irrealist categorial structures, alienation and ideology.
As such irrealism is symptomatic of an alienation of human being from the
cosmos and a lack of autonomy that only a eudemonistic society oriented to

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146 Roy Bhaskar
universal human emancipation can rectify. The logic of dialectical universality
implicit in any speech or other action does presuppose that truth is (or has) a
value, as Hugh Lacey argues in his comments in this volume on my fact-value
entailments. In other words it presupposes that there are evaluative grounds for
respecting truth and objecting to falsity. That truth is or has a value is implicit
in any factual discurse, e.g. about mathematics or in the natural sciences.
However the process of explanatory critique (or metacritique), in isolating the causes
of error in socially inadequate conditions of being (socially constitutive category
mistakes), gives us a mode of transition to a negative evaluation on those causes
and a positive evaluation on action directed at their removal (ceteris paribus),
together with a consequent refutation of Hume’s law, without parallel in the
purely natural world, as I argued in Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation.7

6. GOOD AND BAD DIALECTICS OF IDEAS (AND RELATED PHENOMENA)

I have argued elsewhere that dialectical is a species of transcendental argumenta-

tion, in turn a species of the genus of retroductive-analogical explanation
characteristic of science. Dialectic indeed may be regarded as the general
method or procedure of sciences, or indeed of all learning processes, remeding
inconsistencies, fissure, split by undoing absence, error, incompleteness and
alienation by resort to (transcendence towards) greater, more inclusive totalities.
Now in virtue of the conceptuality of social practice (its conceptually-dependent
character) transcendental argumentation, that is argumentation concerning the
conditions of possibility of social practices as conceptualized in experience, is
implicit in the hermeneutic moment in all social science; and in virtue of the
false but necessary character of conceptualizations in the social world under
conditions of an alienated society, social science, ideology (explanatory-) critique
and dialectical argument will all overlap.
Good dialectic is founded on recognition of ontology, absence, totality and
transformative praxis and satisfies the reflexivity criterion of philosophy. Bad
dialectic is founded on the denial of these concepts, a denial it cannot (like itself)
consistently sustain. In Trasncendence and Totality I have shown that any master-
slave or non autonomous society, more generally any society based on the
alienation of human being from the cosmos, must be characterized by an irrealist
categorial structure. In such a society abstract universalizability as distinct from
dialectical universalizability and concrete singularity, instrumental as distinct from
intrinsic rationality, and dehumanization, reification and split will all be rampant.
Formally the concepts of ideology, error, absence, incompleteness, detotalization,
dualism, dilemma, split, illicit implicit ontology, Tina compromise form, demi-
reality, alienation, irrealism, master-slave (power2 based) society, money, abstract
universality and particularity, manipulative reasoning and the alienation of
human being from and at all four planes of four-plenar social being form a

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 On the Ontological Status of Ideas 147
‘family circle’. Substantively we have the external and internal splits analysed
by for example Hegel in such categories as the beautiful soul, the stoic, the
skeptic and the unhappy consciousness.
On the other good side we have connections between social science, ideology
critique, explanatory critique, transcendental dialectical and more generally
scientific realist reasoning, dialectical universalizability and concrete singularity,
explanatory critical reasoning and universal human emancipation and the
conatus of the logic of dialectical universalizability to a transformed transformative
society, ultimately one characterized by de-alienation and re-unification at and
between the planes of social being, characterized by the stratification of the
personality, material transactions with nature, social interactions between agents
and social relations including sedimented institutions and structures of various
kinds. The ultimate goal of this process of de-alienation and de-reification may
indeed be a society that will never be achieved. Yet it seems equally that, to
quote Marx writing to Ruge in 1843, ‘The world has long since dreamed of
something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess in reality
. . . to obtain forgiveness for its sins mankind need only declare them for what
they are.’ Perhaps not sins, and perhaps not only, but the explanatory critique of
consciousness, of ideas as lived realities, is arguably still an irreducible and a
priori part of the charter of the social sciences.
Roy Bhaskar
Centre for Critical Realism
London

NOTES
1Plato ETC., London 1994, ch. 6.
2Cf. A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds 1975 (London 1997), ch. 1.
3See Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London 1993, ch. 1.
4See Dialectic, ch. 2.7.
5Cf. My Emergence, Explanation, and Emancipation in Explaining Human Behavior, ed. P.F.
Secord, London 1982.
6 See Transcendence and Totality, London 1997.
7 London 1986, pp. 184–5.

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