Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

To what extent was Roy Bhaskar’s later philosophy shaped by Theosophism?

This is a topic I’ve intended to write about for years but I was reluctant to, in case it seemed like an attack on Roy Bhaskar rather than an exercise in intellectual history. But I was struck a long time ago by the obvious connection between Bhaskar being raised in a theosophist family and the spiritual turn which took many critical realists by surprise. He recounts in Mervyn Hartwig’s The Formation of Critical Realism how both his parents were “adherents of Theosophy … and remained such for the rest of their lives” (pg 19). Interestingly he describes it as “basically Hinduism for westernised Indians” which I would see as a contentious description for a religious founded in the United States by a former American military officer and a Russian mystic from an aristocratic society. He repeats later that “Theosophy is in many ways a westernised version of Hinduism, and also Buddhism (it is a moot point exactly what the differences between Buddhism and Hinduism are”). This perhaps reflects how their Theosophism cut across multiple social milieux in London in his lived experience as a child, in contrast to my own vantage point as someone who came to this largely as an intellectual exercise (though I have been to Krishnamurti meetings at various points in my life):

We lived in a house where the next Indian family was miles away, but even so there were Indian families that we were in regular contact with; it was almost like a big extended family. Much of my childhood when I wasn’t at school was spent accompanying my parents on visits to these other Indian families or to the various societies and functions my parents attended, especially the Theosophical Society. My father was prominent in all the main societies he joined: at one stage he was president of the Punjabi Society, the Hindu Society, another Indian Society, and the Rotary Club. And my mother was equally prominent in these societies, and in, for instance, the Inner Wheel (the female equivalent of Rotary). My father was also a Freemason; on Saturdays I would see him packing up a little bag and taking it off for his various ceremonies. I think he was a member of several lodges and again he rose to the fore in institutional terms. My parents led quite busy lives.

pg 19-20

He describes a distance from the content of the lectures but an appreciation of the setting, which conveys a sense of having imbibed something of an ethos if not the tenants of the group:

Whenever my parents took me to the Theosophical Society I used to really enjoy that, not so much for the content of the lectures and so on – I didn’t attend many of them – but for the time I would spend in the library (if I didn’t have to
look after the younger children), where I got lost in a world outside my life and existence.

Pg 24

He would read “books about American history, psychoanalysis, and so on” with a developing ambivalence to theosophism (“OK as far as it went, but there were many questions it did not address, or did not seem to address”) coalescing around a concern with “how it could alter situations in the here and now”; he described the racism he was subject to and feeling like an outsider much of the time, which made the notion of universal brotherhood appealing. But it was the critique of monotheism which spoke to him most:

This was the idea you mentioned that the different religions are different paths to essentially the same goal, which is knowledge of, or identification with, or bringing about, the absolute. To put it in theological critical realist terms, the different main teachings of these world religions are different conceptions of the absolute.

In Bhaskar’s account we can see Theosophism as deeply formative influence on him, in which he was attracted to some doctrines while remaining ambivalent about others, as well as questioning their relevance to the social world. In the next stage of this project I want to explore some of the themes from metaReality which echo Theosophist teachings, such as the multiplanar nature of being and the figure of the world teacher, as well as the overlaps with the physicist David Bohm who studied with the post-Theosophist Krishnamurti.

, , ,