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.
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