ABSTRACT
We are now in a position to complete the four-part dialectic of dialectical critical realism, represented as the MELD schema. We began with 1M original critical realism and an ontology of real, determinate non-identity, into which we inserted a second-edge (2E) understanding of negativity as absence, and of the importance of being as becoming. Negativity as the basis for the spatio-temporalisation of being and its irreducible contextualisation then pointed to a move to a third-level (3L) sense of the whole or (open, partial) totality, and now we turn to 4D, the importance of agency as ethical practice. This is the move that completes Bhaskar’s dialectical journey, and it returns us to the early (1M) insistence on agency as a human power enduring in and through social structure. Now, however, that power has to be thought in the context of 2E spatio-temporality and contextualisation and 3L totality, as a result of which it now presents itself as four-planar being generating the concrete universal as a concrete singular, and located in an understanding of levels, constellationality, duality, hiatus, perspective switch and meta-reflexivity as the dialectical architecture in the realm of totality.
