Sunday, February 7, 2016


245. Forms of realism

I discussed realism before, in item 28 in this blog, but here I want to elaborate.

According to ‘metaphysical realism’ ideas of the world are realistic, objective. According to Plato they exist independently from the thinking subject, but can be grasped, with difficulty. According to the ‘rationalism’ of Descartes, they are innate, given to us by God, in pre-established harmony with reality.

According to empiricism (think of British philosophers Locke and Hume), knowledge is realistic because based on elementary observations (‘sense data’). Ideas arise by association between such elementary observations. But how objective are the elementary observations?

According to philosophical idealism, observations, even elementary ones, are formed by ideas in the form of mental categories. According to Kant, our perceptions of the world are formed by fundamental categories of time, space and causality, and we do not know the world ‘as it is in itself’. This caused a revolution in the theory of knowledge that still reverberates in philosophy.

Later philosophers (e.g. Hegel) contested the notion of the unknowable ‘thing in itself’. How can we even know whether or not we know, if our ideas are formed by mental categories? Classical scepticism (Phyrronism) renounced judgement on the issue (called ‘epoché’): we cannot know whether or in what sense we have true knowledge of the world in itself. That is the line I take.

Some philosophers have tried to get away, more or less, from the Kantian constraint.

In his ‘phenomenology’, Edmund Husserl claimed the possibility of ‘bracketing’: setting aside forms of thought about the world, the whole of ‘symbolisation’, to see how phenomena enter our experience. I think it is an illusion to think that we can set aside all forms of thought.

Jacques Lacan, and following him Slavoj Žižek, assumed that the ‘Real’, beyond the established symbolic order, shows up as a ‘gap’ in that order, manifests itself in contradictions. I accept that contradictions may indicate the falsehood of our conceptualisations. 

I do think that our conceptualisation of the world can and does change. Einstein’s theories transformed our notions of time and space.

As formulated by Žižek[i], there has been a shift from the question ‘how, if at all, can we pass from appearance to reality’ to ‘How can something like  appearance arise in the midst of reality?’

That is the line I have taken in this blog, developing an argument from evolution. As I argued in item 28, if we assume that the world does exist in some form, whether or not we know it, and it is difficult not to make that assumption, then the basic notions or mental capabilities with which we have developed those ideas must have been realistic in the sense of being adequate for survival in evolution.

We are inclined to think of the thing in itself as a substance. The priority, in most of human evolution, lay in dealing with objects in time and space, such as food, prey, shelter, enemies, weapons, … I proposed that this has yielded the object bias, a tenacious grasping for substance. Perhaps reality may better be conceived as a wave phenomenon, or a field of force, or a network of relations. But whatever new way of looking at the world we come up with, we cannot be sure that it is the final revelation. The intuition of substance is inadequate for abstractions, such as happiness, love, knowledge, meaning, justice, identity, nation, morality, etc. This is important because the proper conceptualization of such abstractions may now be crucial for survival of the human species.

To see how ideas may be constructed from action in the world, I developed a ‘cycle of discovery’ (see items 31 and 35). The basic logic is as follows. An established view is carried into a new area. There, it encounters misfits, things that cannot be accounted for. This exerts pressures to adapt. First, one will seek solutions from established repertoires of thought and practice. When that fails one seeks inspiration from practices in the new environment to mend the problems, experimenting with hybrids, combinations with the old. This yields insight into the potential of novel elements as well as obstacles in the old logic that prevent the realization of that potential, and insights into how one might try to alter the old logic. This yields new prototypes that need to be tested, and this will sooner or later converge on a ‘dominant’ design that develops into a new standard.    

In this, realism enters in two ways. First by submitting what exists to the stress of novel conditions, with novel demands and opportunities. Second, in competition between old and new, and between different versions of the new.



[i] In his Less than nothing.

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