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2 ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL SCHOOLS |
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Understood in its broadest philosophical sense, Realism connotes any
viewpoint that accords to the objects of man's knowledge an existence that is
independent of whether he is perceiving or thinking about them. Though it may
seem strange to the unphilosophical layman that the independent existence of
objects "out there" should be questioned, the philosopher, faced with
the many profound challenges that Idealists have posed against the independence
of objects, knows that the problem of the existence of objects--whether in
thought or in concrete form--is far from trivial. (see also cognition
, perception, idealism) |
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Clearly, Idealists have argued, musical tones such as middle C do not have
existence as tones in the air; they appear, instead, to be qualities that the
mind itself generates when the appropriate hair cells in the organ of Corti are
stimulated. Nor does the colour
purple have existence as a quality in the world outside of the mind; there can
be, in fact, no such thing as a beam of pure (monochromatic) purple light
inasmuch as purple is a unique kind of colour that is perceived when vibrations
at the opposite extremes of the visual spectrum (red and violet) are mixed
together in the same beam. At least in this one case, the colour seems created
by the mind. But if this is so of purple, the Idealists ask, is it not true,
also, of all colours? Similarly, under certain circumstances heat is felt as
cold and rotation as oscillation. It is not surprising, therefore, that
philosophers have asked what, if any, residual properties an object might have
in and of itself after due allowance has been made for those qualities that the
mind and perspective of the observer have imposed upon it; nor is it surprising
that they have asked what, if anything, it would mean to insist on the objective
existence of an object of which all of the qualities were mental. Realists, on
the other hand, have held that, in spite of the foregoing considerations as
proposed by the Idealists, there still remains a sense in which objects can have
an existence that is independent of minds. (see also epistemology) |
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Realism exists, however, in several strikingly different versions: its
objects may be, for example, either individual things (such as "the
Moon"), or merely particular qualities of things (such as
"roundness," "yellowness"), or species and genera of things
(such as "moons," "planetary bodies"). In one way or
another, however, whether it regards things from the viewpoint of the things
themselves or from that of the human activities related to them, Realism tends
to stress some definite function of the independent existence of objects. |
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One of the major problems confronting Realism involves the distinction
between private, public, and so-called ontological objects. A private object is
a sheer datum (such as a perceived patch of yellow) taken purely as an
uninterpreted item in the knower's own inner experience; a public object is one
that the mind has projected into an objective conceptual frame of space and time
shared in common with other minds, an object that the mind has constituted as a
percept (such as the perceived Moon)--though it is still acknowledged to be in
part mental (e.g.,
its yellowness; or its visual size, which is larger when it is near the
horizon); and an ontological object is the Kantian "thing-in-itself"
(the Moon as it really is), which may as well consist of monads, of God's
thoughts, of will, or of action, as of force and matter. Though Realists and
Idealists both acknowledge that the knower transcends the private object, they
make different assumptions about the relationship between the public and the
ontological object: on the one hand, the Realist holds that the physical
sphericity, yellowness, and hardness perceived (or perceivable) in the public
object are in some degree actual properties of the ontological thing-in-itself;
the Idealist, on the other hand, holds that the public object is merely a
phenomenon, from which little can be inferred about the underlying onta
(realities), least of all of their basic qualities, which are probably quite
different from the roundness and hardness of the perceived object. The Idealist
may, in fact, surmise that the nature of the onta
is conveyed more faithfully in the fundamental mental tone of the public
object--in the colours, feelings, and durations (which are of the nature of
mind)--than in its specific material properties. (A third contender, that
philosopher known as the metaphysical solipsist, would hold to the viewpoint
that the ontological object does not exist at all.) (see also sense-datum) |
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Similarly, if a particular thing regarded in its particularity (such as the
Moon) is distinguished from a universal--i.e., an entity comprising the essence
of the thing (moonness)--that which it shares with all the other things of the
same species or genus (as with the moons of Jupiter)--then a form of Realism can
be defined as asserting the independent reality of universals, which it may even
exalt above that of particulars. |
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Accordingly, Realism may be variously opposed to the tenets of other
philosophical positions. As opposed to Nominalism,
which denies that essences (or the specific and generic natures of things) have
any reality at all (except as names), and conceptualism,
which grants such universals reality only as concepts within the mind, Realism
allows to the specific or generic nature of the thing a distinct existence in
reality outside the mind. Against Idealism (see below), it asserts that the
existence of sense objects (such as the perceived Moon) and that of their
qualities is external to thought. In opposition to phenomenalism
and sensationalism, which regard objects as
comprising nothing more than private volleys or families of disconnected sense
fragments, Realism grounds objects in real unified and enduring substances.
Unlike conventionalism, a philosophy of science
that regards scientific laws and theories as freely chosen constructs that are
simply devised by the scientist for the purpose of describing reality, Realism
holds that laws and theories have determined and real counterparts in things. |
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The term Realism first appeared early in the 19th century, though the
adjective Realist dates from the late 16th century. These terms have been
applied, however--often retroactively--to various systems that have arisen
throughout history. |
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In its broadest scope, the term Realism has application in a number of
distinct areas. In literature, art, and aesthetics, in law, and in philosophy,
it emphasizes real existence or relation to it. The present article is concerned
solely with Realism in the philosophical area. |
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Even within philosophy Realism has a wide range of applications. Though a
definitely modern term, Realism is freely used today for tenets of the Greek and
medieval epochs, as well as for the modern period. |
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Among philosophical Realisms, two fundamentally different kinds can be
distinguished: the Realism of natures and the Realism of things. In the Realism
of natures, that which is viewed as having an existence external to the mind is
an entity that, in some sense, is set apart in the world of things--an entity
that is variously understood as the Form or Idea in which a thing participates,
such as "manness" or "bedness" (Platonic Realism), as the
essence or to ti en einai, "the 'what it is' of a thing" (Aristotelian
Realism), or as its nature, either absolute, specific, or generic (medieval
Realism or the Realism of universals), or, finally, as laws or theoretical
models abstracted from scientific observations. In the Realism of things, on the
other hand, that which is viewed as having an existence external to the mind is
the total, concrete, and individual object of experience, which the Realist
regards as retaining its chief properties at all times, even when left unseen.
This Realism, too, can be variously conceived: the externality of the world, for
example, can be regarded as simply and obviously given (commonsense Realism);
the object itself, though external, can be viewed as the sole entity standing
before the mind and grasped by it (neo-Realism); or the object can be conceived
as, in some sense, duplicated, so that the mind directly encounters only a
counterpart of the external object and not the object itself (critical Realism),
a counterpart which was sometimes regarded as a representation of it
(representational Realism). |
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As previously noted, the term Realism has been applied retroactively to the
transcendence of the Platonic Forms or Ideas, to the extent that for Plato
the natures of things have, in the ideas of them, an existence more real than
that of sensible, individual things. Yet, from its emphasis on ideal as opposed
to concrete existence, this Platonic doctrine would be classed as an Idealism
instead of a Realism. In the parallel issue in Aristotelianism, the stand that
the universals, or specific and generic natures, exist only in the mind but are
nonetheless grounded in the real forms of things has been called a moderate
Realism. Aristotle himself, however, vigorously
denied that the universals have any substantiality (Metaphysics, Z:
13-14; 1038b8-1039b19), which clearly suggests that, for
him, the universals have no existence independently of cognition; this tends, in
this first context, to invalidate the designation Realism for the Aristotelian
doctrine. |
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Correspondingly, Realism is used to describe medieval views that allowed
species and genera some kind of distinct existence outside of their conception
by the mind. There it meant not only that individual men and individual animals
and so on exist outside cognition but also that the specific nature of man and
the generic nature of animal and the like have an existence of their own in the
outside world. For Realism, objects "fall into" such categories as
humanness, mountainness, and so on naturally. For its opponents, however, this
is not always the case: thus, in terms of a modern illustration,
graniteness--that which all the granite rocks share in common--does not exist
except as an artificial category set up by the mind (conceptualism) because it
merges by imperceptible gradations into diorite or felsite as its mineral
composition and texture gradually change. (see also Middle
Ages) |
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Yet in actual fact the various medieval doctrines do not fit neatly under
these divisions. In the philosophies of several medieval Scholastics,
for instance, both the particular thing and the universal are distinguished in
one way or another from a third entity, the specific or generic nature taken
absolutely in itself. This so-called absolute nature was given a "being of
its own" by Avicenna, the early 11th-century
Persian philosopher and physician, and--in the 13th century -- by Henry of Ghent,
an eclectic Christian Scholastic, and by the voluntarist John Duns
Scotus, an important medieval Franciscan Scholastic, who gave the
absolute nature a reality that was distinct in form from the individual thing,
but unitively contained in it. Thomas Aquinas
gave it no being at all. Though these views reflect radically different
metaphysical settings, they all variously bar the natures from real existence
when separated in any way from the individual. |
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In its conventional applications to Greek and medieval thought, accordingly,
Realism turns out to be an elusive and even confusing notion. It seems to be an
inept way of emphasizing difficulties that are significantly present in the
philosophies of these epochs, which require understanding and solution. But the
granting of extramental existence to the generic and specific natures has raised
more difficulties than it has solved. |
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All of these ancient and medieval doctrines--whether Realistic,
conceptualistic, or nominalistic--accept the external existence of individual
sensible things. From this viewpoint, they would all be Realisms in the second
main sense of the term, that of the Realism of ordinary things, which is the
sense in which Realism is predominantly employed in the modern era. Here it
means the epistemological (or theory-of-knowledge) view that things taken as
individual wholes have an existence that is outside of human cognition. |
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In these and other related ways, modern writers have seen the philosophic
attitude called Realism continually surfacing in the stream of Western thought,
suggesting that it is a perennial feature. |
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In pre-Socratic thought, even in Parmenides
(late 6th century), known for reducing reality to the One, the relevant reality
of the objects of cognition was everywhere assumed. In Plato (5th and 4th
centuries BC), the separate and more excellent existence of the natures, or
Forms, was strongly asserted at times, though quite often the immanence of the
form in individuals was just as surely implied without any satisfactory
reconciliation of the contradiction. With Philo of
Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher in the 1st century AD, the
existence of the Platonic Forms was located within the mind of God, a view also
found in the early 5th century in Augustine of Hippo
(De diversis quaestionibus, "On Diverse Questions"). In the
medieval Augustinian tradition, for instance in the writings of
Anselm of Canterbury, the influence of this interpretation persisted. In
the early 6th century, on the other hand, Boethius,
perhaps the intellectual founder of the Middle Ages, in transmitting
Aristotelian logic to the West, presented the universal notions with a strong
cast of Platonic Realism, while acknowledging that the Aristotelian view was
different. Among medieval thinkers in the early 12th century, such as William
of Champeaux, the Parisian logician and theologian, the Platonizing
tradition of Boethius was dominant, though it was brought under fire by such men
as Roscelin, founder of nominalism, who saw
universals as mere words. With the stormy controversialist Peter
Abelard, who was the foremost dialectician of his time, the Boethian
Realism was attacked. But according to Abelard, more than mere words were
required to justify universality; in his view, universals were concepts
signifying real things and had their ultimate basis in the divine ideas, as in
the Augustinian tradition. (see also theology,
Platonism) |
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The approach of the early medieval thinkers to the problem of universals was
made from the side of logic. But it soon involved theological issues, which,
when added to the much deeper study of its metaphysical backgrounds made by
Boethius, led the scholars to place the relevant questions in a different
setting. The natures or common essences of things came to be scrutinized from a
threefold viewpoint: as existent in sensible things, as existent in the mind,
and as absolutely existent in themselves. This subjected the problem to
metaphysical investigation. In that setting, Aquinas allowed neither being nor
unity to be attributed to the nature taken absolutely. Duns Scotus, however,
accorded it a lesser unity than that of the individual and gave it a kind of
being proportionate to this real specific unity, but which required unitive
containment of the nature by the individual. In these different ways the nature,
so taken, provided the ground for the universal that existed only in the mind.
Views incorporating this feature have been called moderate Realisms, though the
designation is open to the same objection as it is in its application to
Aristotle (see above, Distinctions
among the Realisms ). In later
Scholastic tradition the currents became badly confused, and unending
controversy raged on the various kinds of universals and the respective status
of each type. |
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In the familiar formula cogito
ergo sum ("I think; therefore, I am") proffered by the
first notable modern philosopher, René Descartes,
methodical thinking was rooted in thought itself, thus raising the problem of
how any material world outside of thought could be reached philosophically. In
Descartes and a half century later in the British Empiricist John
Locke, an external origin for sensations was accepted, though without any
thoroughly philosophical justification. Rather, the denial of an external world
was regarded as too absurd to be countenanced. In this perspective Locke's
philosophy displayed a commonsense Realism. According to one of Locke's
contemporaries, the Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche
(known for his claim that God's will is the true cause of motion), religious
faith guaranteed the external world. The Cambridge
Platonists, a sober group of 17th-century moral and religious
Rationalists, in a similar atmosphere of faith and with a Cartesian
understanding of sensation, acquiesced in the external existence of sensible
things while, against a Neoplatonic background,
they accorded a respectively greater reality to the objects of intellectual
cognition. For Berkeley, an early 18th-century Empiricist
and Idealist, the scriptural guarantee was lacking because matter was nowhere
mentioned in the revealed descriptions of the sensible universe; accordingly, in
his view, no sensible world outside cognition was left. But in David
Hume, whose teachings marked the climax of the Empiricist movement, even
the cognitive subject, or soul, vanished. (see also Cartesianism) |
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Facing the impossibility of a genuine philosophical justification for arguing
to an external world from the starting point of mind or idea, Claude Buffier,
an early 18th-century French Jesuit, and, shortly later, the Scottish Realists
leaned explicitly on common sense as the motive for accepting the world's
external existence. The most prominent exponent of this school was Thomas
Reid, an opponent of paradox and skepticism. And John
Witherspoon, who was called from Scotland to the presidency of Princeton
University, held that "the impression itself implies and supposes something
external that communicates it, and cannot be separated from that
supposition." Consequently, the attempt of the viewpoint of Berkeleian
immaterialism "to unsettle the principles of common sense by metaphysical
reasoning" could, in his view, never produce conviction. |
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Around the turn of the 20th century, a strong revolt against Kantian
subjectivism and the dominant Idealisms appeared in such thinkers as William James,
a psychologist and Pragmatist; Bertrand Russell, perhaps the most influential
logician and philosopher of his time; and G.E. Moore, a meticulous pioneering
Analyst. Thus it was that very early in the century philosophers came to use
Realism, as opposed to Idealism, for their own ways of thinking. In 1904, James
signalled the resurrection of natural Realism. In 1910, W.P. Montague of
Columbia University and Ralph Barton Perry of
Harvard University and several others signed an article entitled "The
Program and First Platform of Six Realists," and followed it with a
cooperative volume, The New Realism (1912). New Realism, or neo-Realism,
in defending the independence of known things, explained that in cognition
"the content of knowledge, that which lies in or before the mind when
knowledge takes place, is numerically identical with the thing known." To
other Realists this epistemological monism, as
Perry called his theory of knowledge, failed to extricate itself from the
egocentric predicament (i.e., from the incapacity of the mind
to transcend its private experience) that they all professed to see in the
logic of Idealism. Nor could it give a satisfactory explanation of the mind's
proneness to error, or even of cognition itself as being significantly different
from the things known. Another type of Realism was advanced against neo-Realism
in a similarly cooperative volume entitled Essays
in Critical Realism (1920), by the naturalist George
Santayana and several others. To the monism of the neo-Realists such
writers opposed an epistemological dualism, in which the object in cognition and
the object in reality are numerically two at the time of perception. They
divided, however, into a majority group and a minority group on the status of
the immediately given object. For the majority group this datum was not an
existent but merely an essence; for the others it was an existent--a mental or
psychic existent for some and a physical (brain) existent for others. Here
agreement failed, and the cooperative effort of the critical Realists soon fell
apart. |
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These and the ensuing discussions left a recognized distinction between the
schools of representative Realism and direct Realism: for representative Realism
the immediate confrontation of cognition occurred over against a mental
representation of the external object; for direct Realism the confrontation was
immediately with the thing existent outside of cognition. The critical Realists
themselves, in claiming that the datum was not an object as such but only the
means of perceiving it, disavowed any representationalism; but in others, who
proposed that the sense-datum was the image directly apprehended and was
markedly different from the physical object, representative Realism was
definitely present. Representationalism
may also be seen in the Realism of the Belgian Neoscholastic Désiré
Mercier, who founded the school of Louvain, and in the physiological
Idealisms of contemporary neurophysiologists. In essence, representationalism
was the inferential procedure employed by Descartes and Locke for reaching the
external world. Direct Realism, on the other
hand--as defended by recent writers--acknowledged no intermediate object between
cognition and the external thing perceived. |
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Within the ambit of contemporary discussions, naive Realism was the label for
any unquestioning belief that things in reality correspond exactly to human
cognition of them. Expressly meant as a prephilosophical attitude, naive Realism
can hardly be included under philosophical procedures. Yet its appropriateness
to the man in the street has also been widely challenged; for the ordinary man
is keenly interested in distinguishing critically between reality and figments
of cognition and is continually doing so in ordinary life. He does not proceed,
however, as did the aforementioned Realisms: he does not first regard the object
in terms of its status in cognition and then explore its relation to reality.
But to come under the notion as introduced by the Realists, naive Realism must
be explained in terms of the cognitional relation--e.g., as one of the
"three typical theories of the knowledge relation." It is,
accordingly, a philosophical category, though historians and controversialists
shun the listing of recognized philosophers under such a title. |
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Further, a number of philosophies that neither bore the name of Realism nor
defined reality in terms of its relation to cognition are frequently regarded as
Realisms today. Aristotelianism, for example, explained the reality of things
through their substantiality, Thomism through their existence in themselves,
Scotism through the metaphysical priority of a nature possessed in common, and
contemporary linguistic philosophy, as in John
Austin, an important mid-20th-century Oxford Analyst, through a
completely ostensive view of language; yet all have been seen as Realisms. The
process philosophies of the Pragmatist John Dewey
and of Alfred North Whitehead, an influential
cosmologist and metaphysician, and--still more controversially--the philosophy
of Charles Sanders Peirce, an individualistic
American logician and Pragmatist, may also be taken as Realisms, even though
they did not stress the basic relation to cognition; for these thinkers agreed
that things as a fact do have, or may have, existence outside cognition, even
though this existence was not reached from cognition nor defined through its
relation to cognition. With them the cognitional relation was only an
inessential afterthought. Serious interest in explaining as Realism the
traditional tenets of pre-Cartesian philosophies may be seen in the writings of
many contemporaries. Yet for Aristotle and Aquinas, what was meant by the
reality of sensible things is already established metaphysically, through their
substantiality or ontal (real) existence, before they are compared with
cognition; hence to bring in the further notion of Realism for this purpose
seems meaningless. The notion is therefore extraneous to the philosophical
procedures of thinkers who locate the starting point of their philosophy in some
actuality of the real thing itself; for relation to cognition does not play an
operative role in their basic procedures. Only by means of entirely extrinsic
bonds can they be grouped with the genuine Realisms. |
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From the foregoing survey of the historical development of Realistic thought,
the major issues upon which Realism focusses attention stand out clearly. For
both speculative and practical reasons, men wish to distinguish sharply between
what they call reality and what they recognize or suspect to be merely products
of their own cognition. Accordingly, the ancient Platonic concentration on
specific and generic natures and, in Aristotle, the essential role played by the
universal in reasoning led to a close scrutiny of the way in which these natures
exist. Undoubtedly, they exist in human thought. For the Realistically inclined
thinker, however, their crucial role tends to demand counterparts if human
thinking is to bear on what really exists. Still more drastic are the
post-Cartesian philosophies in which the existence of external things themselves
does not enter human cognition in direct confrontation. Finally, the
mathematical and scientific constructs, which have been so fruitful in man's
struggle for mastery over nature, seem to require for the Realistically minded
thinker some counterpart in the things themselves in order to provide an
adequate philosophical explanation of their success. |
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When the issues are faced in the foregoing manner, some lines of a procedure
common to the various explicit Realisms emerge upon which it may be possible to
base an evaluation. Universals, sensations and perceptions, scientific formulas
and laws are all found to be existent in cognition. From that sure starting
point, attempts are made to show that objects either corresponding to them or
identical with them exist outside the mind. That pattern seems to be the general
procedure followed in any way of thinking that has spontaneously given rise to
the notion of an epistemological Realism and that can, with historical and
philosophical significance, be labelled such. As is likewise apparent from the
foregoing survey, this way of thinking follows a dubious procedure: Realism is
not primarily a doctrine of the existence of things but rather a doctrine of
cognition. In Realism, cognition is regarded as the object most present to
itself; i.e.,
a man knows his own thought processes more intimately than anything else.
But the genuine Realist seems unwittingly to take the material thing as his
model in conceiving cognition. No external object can be more present to a
material thing than that material thing itself. If cognition is conceived after
this analogy, it will be what is most present to itself, and will have to be the
starting point from which the Realist reasons. This starting point seems to
offer no exit. The objects reached from it can be only internal products or
occurrences in the mind, for it offers nothing more basic from which to reason
than the cognition itself. Any philosophically genuine Realism seems, in
consequence, prone to failure in its basic objective. |
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Accordingly, Realism, in the senses responsible for the epistemological use
of the term, has long since ceased to inspire vigorous debate. In a Platonic
tradition that continues in modern thought, however, Realism in respect to the
natures of things is by no means dead. In regard to the Cartesian problem of the
world's external existence, representative Realism seems to have shared the fate
of the sense-datum and to be quite inoperative outside of the wake of
neurophysiological writings. But attempts at direct Realism are still made. In
the scientific field the opposition to conventionalism and to retaining a merely
instrumental status for laws or theories has remained a lively issue. Moreover,
modern means, such as the electron microscope (which shows molecules in real
existence) and the hope of being able to see atoms foretoken a greater
correspondence of scientific constructs with the structure of reality than had
previously been demonstrated. But this verification process consists in a
comparison of reality with thought rather than in any attempt to reach reality
from cognition alone. (
J.O./L.H.St.) |
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