• Roy Bhaskar
In his new book, Reflections on Meta-Reality (RMR), Roy Bhaskar claims to articulate a new philosophy that transcends Critical Realism, while preserving its insights. And indeed it proceeds by immanent critique of Critical Realism, thereby extending Critical Realism’s systematic attempt to think being. With the demise of historical socialism and the rise of bourgeois triumphalism in the late eighties and the nineties, the deficiency, absence or lack Bhaskar has pinpointed in the discourse and practice of Critical Realism and the Left in general is that insufficient attention is being paid to the spiritual dimension of human life, with the consequence that the Right is hegemonic in that area. So he self-consciously set out to remedy this lack, embarking on “the spiritual exposition of being.” ...
Its basic line of argument is that a non-dual world or ultimate zone of being underpins and is co-present in an occluded way in the dual world of alienation and contradiction in which we live, as a condition of its possibility, and that this requires a new philosophy of identity for its exposition. Realism about this world, about transcendence, thus entails the self-transcendence of Critical Realism itself, which is a philosophy of non-identity or duality. Bhaskar calls this non-dual world the cosmic envelope (in which the deepest natures or ground-states of all beings sit and are connected), describing it also as Bohm’s implicate order of pure enfolded being, of pure potentiality, of “Platonic anamnesis,” involving “a level of consciousness beyond thought itself.” Other key figures ... are generalised co-presence or synchronicity and the inwardness of being (everything is implicated or enfolded within everything else); and transcendental identification in consciousness between entities and beings within the explicated or become dual world we inhabit.
• Roy Bhaskar
... a unity-in-difference ... [is] co-presence ....
• Roy Bhaskar
... just as consciousness was implicitly enfolded in all being, all beings are implicitly enfolded within my consciousness and therefore within my being ....
... The theory of co-presence allows us to also see the necessity for a commitment to a eudaimonistic [flourishing or emancipated] society and more generally to the project and state of universal self-realisation.
The term “ground state” is a term ... [which includes] not only the more religious concept of “soul” but also the secular concept of our best or “higher selves”; all ground states are connected in ... the “cosmic envelope.”
... we move to the position of our meta-realism or more precisely that of meta-Reality ....
• Mervyn Hartwig
... he [Roy Bhaskar] he wishes to underline, not that PMR [Philosophy of meta-Reality] is not a system of philosophy, which it most certainly is, but that it “engages as much a polemic against thought, and the ego, and the products of thought and the ego, as it does against subject-object duality as such” and that it is a philosophy of truth rather than of reality, a metaRealism rather than a realism ....
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