[인용] Roy Bhaskar on Materialism and Realism

앞으로 이 블로그에서 인용할 일이 꽤 있을 것 같아 옮겨둔다. '유물론'이라는 단어가 잘못 받아들여지는 방식에 대한 가장 통렬한 비판이다. 결국 중요한 것은 유물론조차도 실재론적으로 이해되어야 한다는 것. 

"Just invoking materialism without specifying exactly what the sense is does not get you very far. It is often claimed that ideas and ideology have a material existence ultimately rooted in physical matter. But what is physical matter? If you go down one level of the stratification of nature you come to atoms that are weird in terms of our normal conceptions of concrete materiality and in fact turn out to be not a-tomic at all! If you go down another couple of levels you are dealing with distributions in space and successions in time. You are very far removed from ‘concrete materiality’. The world of quantum fields and quarks is not the world of concrete objects and solid material things. What the belief in brute physicality as exhaustive of the world depends on is in fact a species of commodification; it is an ideological materialism that commodifies and fetishizes the properties of concrete material things. By downplaying or denying the possibility of intentional agency, it is just as much orientated against the possibility of social science as is super-naturalist idealism or the resort to faith in totally transcendent, supernatural causes.

In many cases I would rather not use the terms ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’: I would rather just talk about ‘science’, ‘realism’ and ‘ontology’."

- Roy Bhaskar,<The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective>

적어도 사회과학적 담론의 맥락에서, 이념/기억 등이 물질성을 갖는다는 표현을 물리적 세계에 연장성extension을 가져 질량과 강도를 지닌 무언가가 존재한다는 뜻으로 이해하면 곤란하다. 마찬가지로 유물론적으로 분석해야 한다는 주장을 모두 세상의 물리적 알갱이들로 구성된 것에 대해서만 이야기해야 한다는 주장으로 받아들이는 것은 잘못된 이해다. 결국 중요한 것은 인과적 힘을 가지고 이 세상에 영향을 미치는 실재하는 것들에 초점을 맞추는 것이다.