Realism (philosophy)

“ A contrast with the metaphysical views of our common opponents will therefore help us, who are engaged in this discussion, to comprehend better the scope and implications of our own theory.
On the other hand, here as everywhere in philosophy, refutation is never our whole business. Even the most unreflective and popular Realism embodies a truth, which it is our duty as idealists to comprehend, and to include within a larger truth. ”

“ Realism, as opposed to Nominalism, is the belief that general terms denote real things and are not mere names or answerable to the mere conception of them, and as opposed to idealism, is in philosophy the belief that we have an immediate cognition of things external to us, and that they are as they seem. In art and literature it is the tendency to conceive and represent things as they are, however unsightly and immoral they may be, without any respect to the beautiful, the true, or the good. ”

“ The abbreviated account which follows of the philosophy of the nineteenth century will explain and illustrate this tendency. Before we set this forth, however, it may be well to define again the nature of Realism. What is Realism? In general it is the belief that reality or realities exist quite independent of anybody’s knowing them. Moreover, Realism has the distinction of being one of the four great types of metaphysical thought. These types are Realism, Mysticism, Critical-rationalism, and Idealism.74 In other words, Realism is an attitude of mind possible to a whole civilization. ”

“ Is not that another evidence of the influence of the classic idea about philosophy?
Even the new realists are not content to take their realism as a plea for approaching subject-matter directly instead of through the intervention of epistemological apparatus; they find it necessary first to determine the status of the real object. Thus they too become entangled in the problem of the possibility55 of error, dreams, hallucinations, etc., in short, the problem of evil. ”

“ And, accordingly, the doctrine known in the history of philosophy under the name of Realism, was enthroned in the schools, and being supported by the supposed authority of Plato, and in harmony with certain theological tenets then dominant, it kept its ascendancy for a time.
Realism is superseded by Conceptualism.26. Realism, even in its most extravagant form, is not one whit more erroneous than the two doctrines which supplanted it. ”

“ This naive realism breaks down however even by the necessity of distinguishing between sense perception, memory and imagination, and still more by scientific reflection, until it gradually yields to critical realism which substitutes object concepts which remain constant for the changing content of direct perception. ”

“ When you say, with such a consciously modified Realism, “The Real is not ever wholly independent of whether it is known or not; it is only relatively independent; and it is, in nature, such as to be knowable, or such as, under conditions, to become a cause or source of knowledge,” — when you modify Realism in this way, what is the true consequence for your fundamental Theory of Being? ”

“ Preëstablished harmonies, illusory forms of unreal linkage, or assumptions of intermediating principles, — assumptions such as lead the philosopher into a hopeless, because unreasonable, complexity, — such are the devices whereby Realism has in such cases sought to join again the sundered fragments of its disintegrated universe, like a careless child tearfully trying to mend a shattered crystal. ”

“ Realists, on the other hand, as a rule, suppress the content, and maintain that a thought consists either of act and object alone, or of object alone. I have been in the past a realist, and I remain a realist as regards sensation, but not as regards memory or thought. I will try to explain what seem to me to be the reasons for and against various kinds of realism. ”

“ But, on the other hand, it is not true that Realism need regard only such unconscious facts or beings as real in its sense of the word real. You, for instance, as a conscious mind, might be viewed by a realist as a being that he would call real in his sense. That assertion, if made by a typical realist, would simply mean that the contents of your mind, although present within your own consciousness, are real without regard to whether anybody else knows of your existence or not. ”

“ As itself a living whole, part acting upon part, each abstraction corrected by some counter-abstraction or perhaps by some inner self-opposition, as conscious too of its own conditions and limitations, as sophisticated and even humorous, both for all logical purposes and for all purposes of applicability in the life of society it is realism itself. ”

“ Yet Realism often makes little of this given character of being, although some forms of realism dwell more upon it, especially when in controversy with sceptics and mystics. But secondly, Is the real, in our present sense, also deeper than what is merely immediate? Yes, in a sense it is, if you mean by the given, merely the felt, or the observed, facts of sense, or of other experience. ”

“ I do not know whether realists would recognise such a view as realism. All that I should claim for it is, that it avoids difficulties which seem to me to beset both realism and idealism as hitherto advocated, and that it avoids the appeal which they have made to ideas which logical analysis shows to be ambiguous. ”

“ And so, in the end, we conceive these common objects, abstractly, as independent of all knowing processes whatever. When, to these social motives, we add that interest in escape from our private and finite disquietude of incomplete insight of which we before spoke, the special motives for the more abstract forms of Realism are in substance stated. It is true that there is a deeper and a very general motive at the heart of Realism, — a motive which we shall only later learn to appreciate. ”

“ Both those who advocate and those who combat realism seem to me to be far from clear as to the nature of the problem which they are discussing. If we ask: "Are our objects of perception real and are they independent of the percipient?" it must be supposed that we attach some meaning to the words "real" and "independent," and yet, if either side in the controversy of realism is asked to define these two words, their answer is pretty sure to embody confusions such as logical analysis will reveal. ”

“ According to this conception, I repeat, to be real means to be independent of an idea or experience through which the real being is, from without, felt, or thought, or known. And this, I say, is the view best known as metaphysical Realism, the view which, recognizing independent beings as real, lays explicit stress upon their independence as the very essence of their reality. ”

“ But if we indeed look yet more narrowly at the history of Realism, we find obvious motives running through the whole which make it seem in still other ways paradoxical. For upon such closer scrutiny we find that Realism has, as it were, vibrated between two historical extremes, extremes suggested by the well-known question whether the real world contains One independently real Being, or Many such beings, all equally independent of any knowledge that, not belonging to their own nature, refers to them from without. ”

“ The differences of detail as to the number and nature of independent “reals,” though of great importance for our complete estimate of an individual realist’s philosophical position, do not affect our general verdict on the tenability of the first principle of Realism. ”

“ An awakened realist, then, can readily see, if he chooses, that his Realism can get no coherent expression without becoming at once transformed into the very formulas of this our present and Third Conception of Being. ”

“ As a summary indication of the nature of our social consciousness, and of our social world, Realism is indeed the bulwark of good order. For good order, in us men, practically depends, from moment to moment, upon abstractions, since we have at any one instant to think narrowly in order to act vigorously. But viewed as an ultimate and complete metaphysical doctrine, and not as a convenient half-truth, Realism, as we shall find hereafter, upon a closer examination, needs indeed no external opposition. It rends its own world to pieces even as it creates it. ”

“ The realist, namely, gives you a conception of Being which pretends to be authoritative; but this authority appears, like the realistic type of Being itself, something merely external and therefore opaque. The realist demands, as a matter of common sense, that you first accept as real his Independent Beings. Hence, if you are to comprehend the realist’s position, you must make your own reflections; you must do your own critical thinking. Realism is essentially dogmatic, and gives you no aid in your attempt to sound the inner meaning of the realistic doctrine. ”

“ Strictly speaking, whatever goes deep enough to the truth of things, gets nearer reality, is realism; yet to get nearer reality is to attain true ideas, and that is idealism too. The great work of literature is realistic because it does not lose sight of the ideal. ”

“ Reject realism in art if you please, and accept realism in conduct. For the first time in my life I am comfortable: my mind, having worn out its walking-shoes, is now enjoying the luxury of slippers. Who can deny the realism of comfort? ”

“ We therefore do not explain the existence of meaning in the world by looking, in the end, beyond any meaning for the cause which has brought the significant world to pass. To view the matter in that way would be of the very essence of Realism, and would involve all the contradictions which have already led us to reject the realistic interpretation of Being. ”

“ For, as I must insist, it is precisely the problem of the One and the Many which will prove to be the great test problem of realistic metaphysics.
IV
And so we turn from the perplexing and varied history of the fortunes of realistic doctrine, to the even more forbidding task of reflecting upon the first principles of Realism. We lay aside for the time all thought of whether God, or the souls, or permanent matter, or the flashes of moonlight upon water, or the coquettish glances of our Sânkhya commentator’s world of Oriental courts and splendors, are to be regarded as real beings. ”

“ Experience and Thought are upon our hands; and together they determine for us the problems regarding Being. Realism offered to us the first solution of this problem by attempting to define the Reality of the world as something wholly independent of our ideas. ”

“ I thus merely indicate a general and a well-known popular view as to the relatively independent reality of things — a view which usually passes, in the ordinary speech of common sense, for Realism; although, historically speaking, the most thoroughgoing realists have avoided such concessions to popular opinion, just because they really ruin the independence of the Real. ”

“ I go further, and assert that in cases where there exists but a bare representation of a fact or of an event without idea, without generalization, there can possibly be found some qualities of realistic execution, but of realism there would be none: of that intelligent realism, I mean, which is built on observation and on facts—in opposition to idealism, which is founded on impressions and affirmations, established à priori. ”

“ Realistic also are the tyrants. Realism has lighted the fires for the martyrs, and has set up the scaffolds for the reformers. As to its most familiar cases of real objects, Realism is fond of socially important objects. Property in general, technical objects, money, mechanism, instruments, whatever can be passed from hand to hand, the solid earth on which we all alike appear to walk, — these are the typical and exemplary instances of realistic metaphysics. If you question Realism, the realist asks you whether you do not believe in these objects, as facts independent of your ideas. ”

“ In fact, the explicit outcome of our examination of Realism, at the last time, merely so far opposed one abstraction by another, and we ended, for the moment, in a denial of dualism, with a hint added of a coming theory of the genuine unity of Being. Before we proceed, however, to a closer study of the first historical rival of Realism, namely, to the Mystical definition of the ontological predicate, something is still needed by way of a reminder of our precise present position. ”

“ Moreover, my idea is a cognitive process only in so far as it is, at the same time, a voluntary process, an act, the partial fulfilment, so far as the idea consciously extends, of a purpose. The object meant by the idea is the object because it is willed to be such, and the will in question is the will that the idea embodies. And that is why Realism proved to be impossible ”

“ It is also true, that realism, in its abstract sundering of facts from desire, would seem often to have abandoned entirely any effort to win for our consciousness any final satisfaction in the presence of reality. ”

“ Realism defines Real Being as a total Independence of any idea whose external object any given Being is. Mysticism defines Real Being as wholly within Immediate Feeling. These two concepts, both of them, as I must hold, false abstractions, are still both of them fragmentary views, as I also hold, of the truth, — hints towards a final definition of the Other, of that fulfilment which our finite thinking restlessly seeks. ”

“ He brings, not something which is more poetic than realism, not something which is more spiritual than realism, not something which is more right than realism, but something which is more real than realism. ”

“ He is usually called a realist. But modern thought is investing this term with a meaning that differentiates it from naturalism. Its use of the word is akin to the philosophic meaning of realism, which recognises the reality not only of the species or individual but also of the genus, and considers the individual as a phase of the universal process which causes it. Modern thought, in fact, applies the word realist to one who views the particular in relation to the horizon at the back of it, to the universal process of which it is a temporary manifestation. ”