The first step on the realist path is to recognize that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognize that, however hard one tries to think differently, one will never manage to; the third is to realize that those who claim they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget to act a part. If one then asks oneself why, one’s conversion to realism is all but complete.[1]
Philosophical ideas have a way of winding themselves into the background of our conscious cognition without that conscious awareness itself recognizing the influences of those ideas. Today, many of us still are possessed by implicitly idealist beliefs: that is, those beliefs which emerged consequent to René Descartes seventeenth-century philosophical revolution. For instance, we tend to think of ideas as “in our minds”. We use expressions like “thinking out loud” (when the truth is that most of our thinking is, in fact, “speaking silently”). And yet, as the above quote from Étienne Gilson’s “Handbook for Beginning Realists” asserts, we cannot but act as though our cognition really is of things that really are.
Realism vs. Idealism
It has sometimes been claimed that the entire history of Western philosophy—or at least, going back to its two earliest systematic thinkers, Plato and Aristotle—has been one long debate between the positions of realism and idealism. This claim, however, seems to make a fundamental mistake. Plato seemingly believed in the reality of the Ideas. But whatever the Ideas were, they did not exist within the mind. Contrariwise, the idealism of modernity posits, in Gilson’s terminology, that our “thoughts” are the objects of our thinking. In the expression of Leibniz, modernity follows the way of “ideas”.
By contrast, from antiquity (including Plato) through Latin Scholasticism, most philosophers held that things are our thoughts’ objects. The English word “real” derives from the Latin reale, itself an adjective derived from the noun res: which we translate as “thing”. A “thing” is what it is regardless of what we may think about it. Thus, for the realist, all our knowledge is measured against things.
An Argument for Idealism
But idealism, counter-intuitive though it may seem, has a kind of argumentative advantage. As Gilson writes:[2]
Most people who say and think they are idealists would like, if they could, not to be, but believe that is impossible. They are told they will never get outside their thought and that a something beyond thought is unthinkable. If they listen to this objection and look for an answer to it, they are lost from the start, because all idealist objections to the realist position are formulated in idealist terms. So it is hardly surprising that the idealist always wins. His questions invariably imply an idealist solution to problems.
Indeed, the idealist’s strongest argument against realism, it would seem, is to trap the realist in presupposing an idealist premise. As Patrick Lee Miller begins his own argument, “If Idealism is not true, then there must be a gap between the subject and object of knowledge.” This consequent—the claimed gap between subject and object—would indeed condemn us to no solution but idealism. But do we have to accept this conditional premise? If the object known is not within the subject (i.e., if it is not an idea), does that mean there exists a gap?
Gilson’s Critique
Throughout the “Handbook”, Gilson presents a multifaceted critique of idealist belief. In many sections, he delivers concise and punchy objections. But the most fundamental point, on which turns not only the critique of idealism but also Gilson’s advocacy for realism, concerns a distinction between thought and knowledge. We will turn to this notion of knowledge momentarily. In the meantime, let us note that thought, as customarily said even to this day, signifies something believed to belongs to a person. I have my thoughts. You have your thoughts. My thoughts are not your thoughts, and vice versa. To start with thoughts, therefore, is to start with one’s own thoughts; with thoughts belonging to the self. Thus, Gilson:[3]
For the idealist, who starts from the self, this [namely, asking how he can prove the existence of a non-self] is the normal and, indeed, the only possible way of putting the question. The realist should be doubly distrustful: first, because he does not start from the self; secondly, because for him the world is not a non-self (which is a nothing), but an in-itself. A thing-in-itself can be given through an act of knowledge. A non-self is what reality is reduced to by the idealist and can neither be grasped by knowledge nor proved by thought.
Put succinctly, Gilson here accuses the idealist of a vicious circle, stuck forever in himself. Or, to paraphrase John Deely, “you cannot accept ideas as the base of knowledge and escape solipsism by any means.”[4]
Being Realists
But what does it really mean, “to be a realist”? Does Gilson’s argument for realism persuade us that we should, indeed, be realists? Does his distinction of knowing against thinking prove solid and true? This lattermost might prove, in the final analysis of his “Handbook”, to be most problematic. He defines knowledge as “an act of the intellect which consists essentially in grasping an object”.[5] Does this seem sufficient to us? Is it sufficiently distinguished from “thought”?
Join us this Wednesday (10 April 2024) as we discuss the entirety of Gilson’s “Handbook” [12 pages here in PDF] and whether we are or ought indeed to be realists—and, if we are, just what that means.
Philosophical Happy Hour
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
[1] Gilson 1935: “A Handbook for Beginning Realists”, §1.
[2] Ibid, §2.
[3] Ibid, §7.
[4] Cf. 2007: Intentionality and Semiotics, xxiv.
[5] Gilson 1935, §3.