Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

228

system of its own. The founder of a Syrian school of Neoplatonism,

Iamblichus, a pupil of Porphyry (who in turn had been a pupil of Plotinus),

thought of himself as a Pythagorean sage and about CE 300 wrote the last

great synthesis of Pythagoreanism, in which most of the disparate post-

classical traditions are reflected. It is characteristic of the Neo-Pythagoreans

that they were chiefly interested in the Pythagorean way of life and in the

pseudoscience of number mysticism. On a more popular level, Pythagoras and

Archytas were remembered as magicians. Moreover, it has been suggested

that Pythagorean legends were also influential in guiding the Christian

monastic tradition.

Medieval and Modern Trends

In the Middle Ages the popular conception of Pythagoras the magician

was combined with that of Pythagoras “the father of the quadrivium”; i.e., of

the more specialized liberal arts of the curriculum. From the Italian

Renaissance onward, some “Pythagorean” ideas, such as the tetrad, the golden

section, and harmonic proportions, became applied to aesthetics. To many

Humanists, moreover, Pythagoras was the father of the exact sciences. In the

early 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus, who developed the view that the

Earth revolves around the Sun, considered his system to be essentially

Pythagorean or “Philolaic,” and Galileo was called a Pythagorean. The 17th-

century Rationalist G.W. Leibniz appears to have been the last great

philosopher and scientist who felt himself to be in the Pythagorean tradition.

It is doubtful whether advanced modern philosophy has ever drawn from

sources thought to be distinctly Pythagorean. Yet Platonic-Neoplatonic

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

229

notions, such as the mathematical conception of reality or the philosopher’s

union with the universe and various mystical beliefs are still likely to be

stamped as Pythagorean in origin. Even today a relatively uncritical

admiration of Pythagoreanism is common.

Evaluation

The history of the projection of Pythagoreanism into subsequent thought

indicates how fertile some of its core concepts were. Plato is here the great

catalyst; but it is possible to perceive behind him, however dimly, a series of

Pythagorean ideas of paramount potential significance: the combination of

religious esoterism (or exclusivism) with the germs of a new philosophy of

mind, present in the belief in the progress of the soul toward the actualization

of its divine nature and toward knowledge; stress upon harmony and order,

and upon limit as the good; the primacy of form, proportion, and numerical

expression; and in ethics, and emphasis upon such virtues as friendship and

modesty. The fact that Pythagoras, to later ages, also became alternatively

conceived of as a Dorian nationalist, a sportsman, an educator of the people,

or a great magician is a more curious consequence of the productivity of his

teaching.

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

230

Realism

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.

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 color 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 color

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 color seems created by the mind. But if this is so of purple, the

Idealists ask, is it not true, also, of all colors? 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

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

231

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.

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.

Nature and Scope of Realism

Realism and the Problem of Knowledge

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

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

232

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 colors, 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.)

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.

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

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

233

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.

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.

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.

Philosophical Senses of Realism

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.

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

234

Basic Kinds of Realism

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).

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

235

Distinctions Among the Realisms

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; 1038

8-1039

19), 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.

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.

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

236

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.

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.

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.

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

237

History of Western Realism

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.

Ancient Realism

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 BCE), 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

CE, 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