Truculent Realism

Truculent Realism

by Greg Nyquist

“Even under the most favourable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its centre. As the senses open to us only partial perspectives, taken from one point of view, and report the fact in symbols which, far from being adequate to the full nature of what surrounds us, resemble the coloured signals of danger or of free way which a railway engine-driver peers at the night, so our speculation, which is a sort of panoramic sense, approaches things peripherally and expresses them humanly.”            —George Santayana

That the human animal hates the truth has long be known. “No normal human being wants to hear the truth,” H. L. Mencken reminded us in an essay entitled, appropriately enough, “Hymn to Truth.” “What remains to the world, in the field of wisdom, is a series of long-tested and solidly agreeable lies. It is out of such lies that most of the so-called knowledge of humanity flows.” (1958, 246) Coleridge once remarked in his Table Talk, “I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for truth’s sake.”

Philosophers have an even worse reputation in this respect—a fact Friedrich Nietzsche couldn’t help noticing. “What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly,” wrote Nietzsche, “is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they are—how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray; in short, their childishness and childlikeness—but that they are not honest enough in their work, although they all make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely.” (1968a, 202-203) Nietzsche’s remarks are borne out by the history of philosophy. Time and time again we find philosophers guilty of special pleading. Nearly all of them harbor a secret agenda which they are eager to “prove.” Whether that agenda accords with reality is a matter of little concern to the philosopher or his followers. The agenda always comes first. Moreover, it is often the most brilliant philosophers, the ones who exhibit the greatest sophistication and skill in argument, that are the worst offenders. Their genius is used, not to discover the truth, but to rationalize it away.

To note the basic mendacity of philosophers and of people in general is to belabor the obvious. The more intriguing question is: why are they like this? Why are people, especially philosophers, so hostile to reality? What are they afraid of? Don’t they realize that what is true is immutable and cannot be changed merely by wishing it away? Don’t they understand that, however horrible the truth might be, sticking one’s head in the sand of wishful thinking will not improve matters one jot? The truth cannot be evaded. Philosophers can pretend that white is black, black is white, green is yellow, and blue red. But if black is black and white white; if green is green, yellow is yellow, and blue is blue, all the brilliant metaphysical arguments in the world cannot make it otherwise. If a material world exists independent of our perception of it, then all the treatises of Berkeley, Malabranche, Hegel and the rest of the idealist fraternity miss the mark. If God exists, no amount of rhetorical ratiocination, no matter how brilliantly stitched together or convincingly presented, will alter this brute fact. Truth is truth and reality is reality; words will not make it otherwise.

This being the case, why not simply face up to the truth and accept it like a man? Why go through all these metaphysical somersaults if in the end it’s not going to change one damn thing? If truth cannot be evaded, even with the help of a few big words, why not simply admit the fact and put an end to all the blather? Why must we continue to endure year after year all the immutable nonsense—all the poppycock, all the cross-eyed mysticism of the astrologers, prophecy maniacs, environmental quacks, political ideologues, and other impostors? Why must people continue to believe in what is palpably not true, when there is very little practical benefit, and often very great practical harm, to be endured from such evasion?

The philosopher George Santayana placed the blame for such denials of truth on the inveterate egotism of the human race. “Life imposes selfish interests and subjective views on every inhabitant of earth,” he wrote; “and in hugging these interests and these views the man hugs what he initially assumes to be the truth and the right. So that aversion from the real truth, a sort of antecedent hatred of it as contrary to presumption, is interwoven into the very fabric of thought.” (1937, 508) Yet this is only part of the reason. Let us face it: the pathology of evasion goes well beyond epistemological conceit. There exists in human beings a congenital propensity to expect more from the world than the world can possibly provide. Our desires, our expectations nearly always extend well beyond the narrow parameters of reality. Such unrealistic expectations inevitably lead to disappointment, as truth and reality combine to make a mockery of our fondest hopes. This sting of disappointment is what, in effect, seals the deal and turns the human being against the truth. His expectations have been refuted in the most decisive way imaginable—not by words, but (far more humiliating) by reality itself, by the cold hand of the truth. But instead of acknowledging this melancholy fact and doing his best to frame his expectations within the boundaries of the possible, the human animal retreats into his own fantasies. If he is a vengeful sort of person, he looks for scapegoats. It is his parents, his spouse, his children, his country that are to blame for his miseries—or the Jews, the blacks, the Europeans, the Christians or some other group he doesn’t particularly care for. It is anyone but himself and his inordinate desires.

If he is more inner directed and not prone to blame others for his self-caused miseries, his retreat from reality will cause him to stumble headlong into some form of idealism, that intellectual bane of philosophical honesty. He will venture out like Don Quixote in search of windmills to tilt at. Whether it’s the windmills of New Age mysticism or Hegelian metaphysics, homeopathy or astrology matters little. All nonsense is pretty much alike, and equally inefficacious.

There is yet another way to deal with this problem of false expectations, one which sedulously avoids the sort of evasion and wishful thinking prominent among sentimentalists and other cowards before the truth. It is what I call realism, which means: to always face up to the truth regardless of how bitter or cruel it may be and to never engage in wishful thinking or evasion. An important corollary to this principle is the development of realistic expectations, which means: expectations which have a decent chance of being realized in the world of fact.

This may not seem like a very original or profound philosophy. But originality, whether profound or not, is greatly overrated. After all, what good is originality, if achieved at the expense of truth? Better to be imitative and shallow but true, rather than profound, original and false.

Yet we would be mistaken if we were to conclude, merely because of its similarity with common sense, that realism is superficial and unoriginal. If realism is as plain and shallow as its enemies insist, why has it aroused the enmity of so many intellectuals and philosophers? This condescension at the hands of the chattering classes towards realism is not caused by realism’s superficiality or lack of originality, but by resentment against a world that will not conform to wayward human desires. Intellectuals want to rule the world with their ideas. But the world will not allow itself to be run on the basis of mere patter. It is made of sterner stuff than that.

The intellectual, enraged at the impotence of his ideas, takes his revenge by declaring the world a mere fiction. “When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced,” the philosopher F. H. Bradley petulantly insisted. “Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning. And as I cannot try to think of it without realizing either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced, I am driven to the conclusion that for me experience is the same as reality. The fact that it falls elsewhere seems, in my mind, to be a mere word and a failure, or else an attempt at self-contradiction. It is a vicious abstraction whose existence is meaningless nonsense, and is therefore not possible.” (1893, 128) Even considering the source, this is a remarkable quote. Indeed, it is practically a confession.

These are words Bradley should be muttering to a priest or a psychiatrist, not to the public at large. He has the effrontery to admit that anything “in no sense felt or perceived becomes to me quite unmeaning.” Doesn’t he realize what he is admitting here? To regard anything not perceived as “unmeaning” is practically to come out and embrace solipsism. Yet this is not the worst of it. Later on we find our redoubtable idealist describing the notion of a real world existing beyond one’s mere perceptions of it as “a vicious abstraction whose existence is meaningless nonsense.” Take a moment to let this statement sink in. The “vicious abstraction” Bradley is talking about is the external world of trees, mountains, rivers, oceans, animals, men, and God. He is saying that this great unfathomable mystery of a world is a mere abstraction in our heads. Worse, it is a “vicious” abstraction. But why vicious? If it is only an abstraction, why is Bradley so dead-set against it? To reject it with such an intense display of rhetorical annoyance suggests an unphilosophical anger or despair, as if Bradley feels resentment against the mere idea of a world existing apart from our conscious awareness of it. Wherefore the resentment? What does Bradley have against the external world of fact and nature and God? Why does he so desperately want to believe that all of existence is confined to the narrow parameters and pathetic egotism of human consciousness?

My suspicion is that Bradley’s animus against reality is motivated by an unwillingness to face up to hard facts. He wants the world to be better than it is. He wants a world that is malleable to his thought, to his wishes, to his desires. In other words, he is like a spoiled child who wants everything his own way and resents the fact that reality will not cater to his infantile sensibilities. He takes his revenge by concocting an idealist philosophy that denies the reality he so passionately resents and abhors. Truth is not truth, nor is reality real; these are mere “vicious” abstractions that are not even possible!

I realize that Bradley would scarcely put it in such terms. By playing fast and loose with the ambiguity of words, he creates the illusion that he is saying no such thing, even if, at bottom, that is what his philosophy ultimately means. When Bradley talks of “reality,” he of course doesn’t mean what ordinary people mean by it. Nor is his notion of truth in line with the truth we all confront in everyday life. Yet we would be seriously amiss if we took Bradley’s redefinitions of these common terms too seriously. When a man insists that the external world is a vicious abstraction, we should take him at his word and not let him talk us into believing that his words don’t mean what a normal individual would take them to mean. If they mean something else, then why not say so up front? Either way, Bradley is guilty of a serious philosophical crime. If we take him at his word, he must be condemned for cowardice before the truth; if we assume that his words mean something other than what they say, he must be condemned for obscurity.

Bradley’s philosophy of “objective idealism” passed out of fashion long ago. Idealism as an official philosophy has been more or less dead since the Second World War, suffocated by its own inanity. But the fear of disagreeable facts that served as the primary motivation for the idealist imposture still exists among the philosophic fraternity. We find plenty of evidence of it in many of the so-called “postmodern” philosophies, especially in deconstructionism and other left-wing heresies. These philosophies, at bottom, are not really very different from the great idealist illusions of yore. They are simply more shameless in their embrace of evasion. Today’s idealists have no intellectual conscience.

Consider two widely influential academic “philosophers”: Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida. Rorty has spent most of his career arguing against the correspondence theory of truth. Since our beliefs cannot be said to correspond to anything, no belief can be regarded as any more true or false than any other. Philosophy becomes, for Professor Rorty, a mere edifying conversation, full of pretty words and nonsense. Derrida, the man most responsible for inflicting academic literary studies with the curse of deconstructionism, agrees with Rorty’s assessment of the essential equality of all beliefs. There are no foundations for anything, no “metaphysics of presence,” as Derrida cryptically puts it. No belief is more fundamental, more true than any other. (Honderich 1995, 779)
Another fashionable belief in academia is the notion that reality is little more than a “social construct.” The popularity of this phrase can be traced back to the belief that all political and social thought is determined by the prevailing intellectual and cultural climate of the age. There are a certain number of core beliefs that arise in any society which nearly everyone accepts without second thought. They are regarded as unquestionably true. No one dares question them if they wish to avoid the contempt of the community.

The initial motivation for stressing (and perhaps even exaggerating) this trait of society is to discredit conservative beliefs. Progressive thinkers were looking for a way to explain why, in 1920s, the masses rejected the ideals of the Left. They assumed from the start that it had nothing to do with the essential hollowness of left-wing ideals. The masses could not possibly have rejected progressivism for sound reasons. How could any committed leftist believe that? The Left, by definition, stands for the people. It alone cares for the welfare of the common man. If the masses did not see this, it could only be explained on the basis of some type of social conditioning or coercion. Hence the origin of what is known as the “sociology of knowledge,” the belief that political beliefs mostly consist of subconscious social aspirations. Most people desire to move up in the social order. For this reason, they sympathize with the ideology of the dominant economic and political classes of society.

Karl Mannheim, the so-called father of the sociology of knowledge, was a democratic socialist who believed that society should be led by rational planners and scientists — in other words, by people who thought like he did. Mannheim hoped to reform the social sciences by making social scientists aware of their social conditioning. “Whenever we become aware of [the social forces] that have dominated us, we remove them from the realm of unconscious motivation into that of the controllable, calculable, and objectified,” Mannhiem wrote in his most influential work, Ideology and Utopia. “Choice and decision are not thereby eliminated; on the contrary, motives which previously dominated us became subject to our domination; we are more and more thrown back upon our true self and, whereas formerly we were the servants of necessity, we now find it possible to unite consciously with forces with which we are in thorough agreement.” (1936, 190) Translated into plain English, this means that as soon as people understand that their political views are surreptitiously foisted upon them by conservative social forces, they will all become democratic socialists like Professor Mannheim.

Initially, Mannheim’s doctrine was interpreted realistically; that is, it assumed the existence of real world and a truth that described this world. It merely claimed that people’s views of the world were inevitably distorted by social conditioning, normally in a conservative direction. In Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim made it very clear that he believed in the reality of truth, and in the importance of grasping this truth. “After having recognized that political-historical knowledge is always bound up with a mode of existence and a social position, some will be inclined, precisely because of this social determination, to deny the possibility of attaining truth and understanding,” Mannheim wrote. “Nothing could be more dangerous than such a one-sided and narrow orientation to the problem of knowledge.” (1936, 186, emphasis added)

Mannheim’s words of warning did little to prevent the sociology of knowledge from being taken in a subjectivist direction. To be sure, it was more a habit of thought than an actual, explicit doctrine. Intellectuals, especially academic intellectuals, are notoriously loathe to commit themselves to any explicit doctrine. They prefer to mask their real thoughts behind big words and befuddling circumlocutions. Yet in conversation they will not infrequently adopt the view that reality itself is a social construct that could be changed by adopting a new construct. They will even give plausible examples to support their view. Take the institution of private property. In our society, private property is a very critical institution. But it doesn’t have to be that way, argue the academic intellectuals. Private property is a mere social construct. We could, if we chose, do away with it altogether. In that case, it would cease to be a reality. Property held in common would be the new reality, the new social construct.

Contrary to what romantic leftists might wish to believe, private property is not a mere “social construct” that can be changed at the drop of hat. There exist a number of powerful psychological forces that provide its foundations — forces which ultimately arise from intractable currents deep in human nature. Machiavelli wrote in The Prince that a ruler, if he would preserve his power, “must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.” Machiavelli understood human nature. He knew that human beings have possessive instincts, that their property is intimately tied up with their social status, and that they will tenaciously defend anything connected to the preservation of their social status.

The unwillingness to accept certain realities of human nature is the primary motive behind the subjectivist interpretation of the sociology of knowledge. The Left has for many decades been in denial about the nature of man. As Stephen Pinker explains in his book The Modern Denial of Human Nature, the Left regards “the malleability of humans and the autonomy of culture as doctrines that might bring about the age-old dream of perfecting mankind. We are not stuck with what we don’t like about our current predicament, they argued. Nothing prevents us from changing it except a lack of will and the benighted belief that we are permanently consigned to it by biology.” (2002, 27)

But the reality of these “biological” patterns of feeling and thinking that constitute human nature will not go away merely because left-wing intellectuals don’t like them. If such patterns exist—and the evidence, as Stephen Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and other scientists have demonstrated, is overwhelming — then they have to be accepted as real. Evasion will not make them go away. If a thing is real, it exists despite what we think or fail to think about it.

As obvious as this realistic view of the truth and the world may appear to common sense, nonetheless there are plenty of philosophers who have denied its validity. I have already discussed what I believe to be their motive. They deny the validity of realism because they want to believe in things that aren’t true. Fair enough. I would be more than willing to accept their position, if only they themselves would acknowledge it. I certainly have no special fondness for the truth, and can well understand why some people might especially dislike it. My only problem with the whole anti-realist mentality is its deep-seated mendacity. The anti-realist insists that, far from hating the truth, he loves her very dearly. It’s his love of truth, he would have us believe, that leads him to reject the realist view.

Only a human being could be so mendacious! Out of love for truth they would deny the truth! How do they justify such brazen dishonesty? Like any common swindler, they have plenty of rationalizations at hand to explain their hostility toward common sense. A very popular one goes something like this. Realism is an absurd doctrine because it creates an unbridgeable gulf between existence and human cognition. “According to [realism], reality has an existence separate from ideas,” is how philosopher Michael Oakeshott phrased the argument; “things exist and are real by themselves, and outside experience. Indeed, they never enter experience at all; for, to enter experience is to cease to be a thing. Reality, consequently, is what is unknowable, it is what is independent of experience.... A gulf is fixed between experience and reality and there is no way in which it can be bridged, and yet, until it is bridged, reality must remain a nonentity and experience a contradiction. And the necessity of finding some starting place for our conception of reality, other than this antithesis between experience and reality, is once more pressed upon us.” (1933, 57)

This argument, when boiled down to essentials, does little else than assert that only consciousness (or “experience”) is knowable, and that anything outside of consciousness is, by definition as it were, “unknowable.” But isn’t consciousness aware of things outside of itself? Isn’t that what knowledge is all about — awareness of external things, like food, water, shelter, companions, rivals? And if this is the case, where do idealists like Oakeshott get off claiming that consciousness cannot know anything outside of itself?
Oakeshott’s entire argument rests on a failure to understand the realist view of knowledge. Like most idealists (and many realists as well), he has no idea what realism is all about. To set the record straight, I thought it would be helpful to explain the core issues out of which the realist view of knowledge and the universe emerges.

The core premise of realism is that perceived objects exist independently of perceptions. Everything I see outside my window—the street, the trees, the houses, the telephone poles—exists whether I perceive them or not. My consciousness has nothing to do with their existence, beyond observing and recording the perceptions they evoke. Things are what they are, despite what I think or fail to think about them.

If this seems like nothing more than what common sense would assert—well, that is true. All of us believe that the physical world exists “independently” of consciousness in the sense that it would exist whether we were consciousness of it or not. Idealists and other anti-realists seek to challenge this belief, mainly because of their dislike of “matter.” Most idealists are willing to admit that a world exists “independent” of consciousness in the realist sense of the term. What they object to is the notion that this independent world is made up of matter. “If what you mean by the word ‘matter’ be only the unknown support of unknown qualities, it is no matter whether there is such a thing or no, since it no way concerns us,” insisted the idealist philosopher George Berkeley; “and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about what we know not what, and we know not why.” (1965, 92-93)

Why do idealists dislike matter? Mostly for religious reasons. Matter, they believe, poses a threat to religious beliefs. If matter alone exists, then there is no longer any need for God. But if matter does not exist at all, then God becomes absolutely necessary. That, in any case, is the gist of their contention. I regard this anti-matter view as palpably absurd. In fact, it would be extremely easy to turn the argument on its head and use it as a pillar of atheism. Atheists have long contended that God exists, not as an external reality in the world of fact, but as a mere idea swimming about in the minds of theists. Well, isn’t that what idealism makes of God—a mere idea swimming about in our minds?

The existence of God is meaningful and relevant only on a realist basis. If you reduce all of existence to mere thoughts and ideas, how have you made the belief in God any more plausible? Ideas must be ideas about something. Take away the external world of fact and substance and ideas have nothing to refer to except other ideas. God is thereby reduced to a mere idea referencing other ideas. Does such a trick make God any more real? No, not at all. God can only be real if He exists outside of our conception of Him. That is in fact what it means to say that God exists: that he exists independent of our thoughts of him, and would exist whether anyone thought of Him or not.

I fear this theological digression has veered us off our course. The real issues at stake between idealism and realism actually have little to do with questions involving the existence of God or matter. They really come down to differences of philosophical methodology. Idealists vehemently deny that this is so, insisting that the issues at stake are primarily “metaphysical”; but this view is itself founded on methodological differences. Metaphysics deals with “what” questions: what is the ‘fundamental’ reality? what are illusions? what is mind? what are facts? etc. etc. Realism cares very little for “what” questions. It is more interested in “how” and “why” questions. “What” questions tend to degenerate rapidly into semantics. Hence the tendency of metaphysics to consist of little more than futile debates over the meaning of words. The realist, however, cares little for words. Why argue about words? The realist is interested in things, not words. It is the actual terrorist, not the word “terrorist,” that constitutes a threat to American citizens. It is the actual bowl of rice, not the word “rice,” that nourishes the body. It is the actual alarm system, not the words “alarm system,” that protects the house from intruders or fire. Things are important, not words. Words are merely useful instruments of description. They contain no reality in and of themselves. For this reason, it is foolish to argue about words.

The method of the realist is to ignore questions concerning what a thing is and instead to inquire how a thing behaves. Questions such as What is the essence of man? or What is life? are of little interest to the realist. He is more interested in knowing How do men behave? or How do living things behave in contrast to dead things? The eye of the realist is always on things, not words.

Behind this method lies one of the most important principles in the realist pantheon—perhaps the most important principle of all. The realist believes that consciousness is fundamentally representational; that words, ideas, concepts, images are, in and of themselves, mere figments, and only obtain the status of truth when used to symbolize and illuminate external realities. The fact that an individual experiences the sensation of red when he perceives an apple is entirely without factual significance unless the perceived color is taken as having a bearing on the apple’s physical state. Ideas, words, concepts have no cognitive value unless they are taken as signs for things or the characteristics of things.

This view of consciousness and human knowledge is what idealism seeks to deny. The idealist regards any “separation” between mind and matter, knowledge and reality, ideas and things as an unjustifiable “bifurcation of nature.” Hence Oakeshott’s conviction, quoted above, that realism fixes a “gulf” between “experience and reality” “which cannot be bridged.” But this is a caricature of the realist view. Who besides an idealist ever claimed that an unbridgeable gulf exists between thought and reality? Realism merely distinguishes between thought and the object of thought. The idea of a cat and the cat itself are not identical. Can anything be more obvious? Yet the idealist will have none of it. This “separation” of the cat from its idea, the idealist insists, introduces a problematic chasm between knowledge and reality.

Why is the attempt to distinguish the idea from its object so problematical? Objects can be represented in many different forms. A cat can be photographed, painted, rendered in marble, portrayed in sound, by word, even as indentations on a piece of paper (i.e., braille). If the idealist rejection of representationalism were correct, all knowledge, all art, all language would have to be dismissed as nonsense, because all these forms of expression create unbridgeable gulfs between the object and the representation of the object.

Idealism’s denial of representationalism leads to the bizarre view that only the representation is real. Imagine if someone told you that only a photograph of the Grand Canyon is real, not the canyon itself! That is really what the logic of the idealist position amounts to. The idealist stops at the representation and says: that is the reality. He gives no arguments for his position; only arguments against the realist position. Representational knowledge is “inexplicable,” he argues, for how can the mind represent anything that is not itself mind? But this is a silly objection. It would be like suggesting that portrait painting is inexplicable because paint and canvas have nothing in common with the human face. So what if they don’t? The fact that two mediums are different is what gives rise to the need for representation. If mind and matter were identical, you would not need to represent one medium in the other. That is the whole point of having ideas. Ideas are the paint and canvas of consciousness. They are the aesthetic materials out of which the mind represents to itself the external world. They serve as symbols of outlying realities, just as a person’s name serves as a verbal and written symbol of his identity. Is your name identical with yourself? No, of course it isn’t. Realism begins by admitting this palpable fact.

The acceptance of this dualism of things and ideas is fraught with momentous implications. If the object of truth consists, not in words or ideas or concepts, but in the substantive realities symbolized by such mental figments, then it behooves us to make the object of knowledge, rather than its medium, our primary concern. For the realist, external reality, the reality of things and facts, always has priority over our ideas of reality. Indeed, the purpose of ideas is tell us something about reality. Ideas, therefore, must be docile to reality, not vice versa. Here we find the great error of idealism. Idealism, in whatever form it may take, always seeks to give ideas priority to reality. The empirical world, the idealist claims, is always in some degree “mind-dependent.” In other words, reality depends at least to some degree on what we think about it.

Because of the ambiguity of words, it is not entirely false to say that reality is in some sense dependent on thought. How an individual thinks can alter his behavior, can make him act in such a way as to change certain aspects of the empirical world. It can turn him into a creator of beautiful objects, of houses, paintings, vast gardens; or it can turn him into a nihilist, a destroyer of lives, wealth, even entire civilizations. But what is significant for the realist is the fact that these changes can only be made on reality’s terms, not on the mind’s terms. There is something that exists in reality that would exist whether any mind recognized it or not. This mind-independent aspect of reality often constitutes what is most important in reality. For instance, the fact that arsenic is a dangerous poison is in no way dependent on any mind for its veracity. It would be true even if no mind ever recognized it. Animals that ingest arsenic will die. That is the reality of it. No amount of mind-dependence, regardless of how cleverly it is rationalized, can ever alter this fact. Arsenic kills. This is the indisputably mind-independent fact of the matter.

The idealist error regarding the entire question of mind-dependence stems from a confusion between facts and our knowledge of facts. It is our knowledge of facts that is mind dependent, not the facts themselves. The facts would be facts whether any mind recognized them or not. But to know them as facts depends on the mind’s ability to recognize and accept them as such.

Idealists would have us believe that the problems of realism are logical or epistemological or metaphysical—in short, that they are technical and caused by the philosophical difficulties of proving the existence of mind-independent realities. As a matter of fact, the difficulties of realism are nothing of the sort. They arise, not out of philosophical problems, but out of psychological problems, out of the unwillingness of human beings to accept unappetizing or mundane facts. From the very beginning, the human being is predisposed against believing in the independent reality of external things. The very young child, Arthur Koestler tells us, “does not differentiate between ego and environment. The mother’s breast seems to it a more intimate possession than the toes on its own body. It is aware of events, but not for a long time of itself as a separate entity. It lives in a state of mental symbiosis with outer world, a continuation of the biological symbiosis of the womb, a state which Piaget calls ‘protoplasmic consciousness.’ The universe is focused on the self, and the self is the universe; the outer environment is only a kind of second womb.” (1964, 292) Man is born an idealist and only becomes a realist through the harsh and pitiless lessons of experience.

The philosophy of idealism is an attempt to recapture the innocent sense of wonder and egotism experienced in the depths of infancy, before the mind first begins to grasp the horrid “bifurcation of nature,” the dualism between consciousness and reality. The long process of growth and tutelage through which a child becomes an adult involves, among other things, learning what it means to live in a dualist world where experience is merely symbolic and reality always remains beyond the immediate grasp of consciousness. Some of these lessons are not always easy to learn. They involve the painful recognition of the ego’s humiliating limitations. For not only is the real world — the world of fact and substance — independent of the ego in the sense that it does its own thing despite what the ego may wish or need, it is also deeply mysterious and, in its furthest reaches, inexplicable. It is made of recondite stuff, of a substance that defies description or understanding. The universe is an immense, baffling puzzle which can only be pieced together in discordant fragments. What the universe may be in and of itself only God knows. From the mind’s perspective, it is fundamentally a mere surd — a bewildering miracle that rarely makes any sense.

At its core, realism is a philosophy of renunciation and disillusionment. It renounces the notion that the world is made for the convenience of man’s petty desires. Thoughts and wishes are one thing; reality is something else altogether. The validity of this postulate, if once accepted, yields a number of important corollaries, the sum of which make up a unique vision of the relation of man and his spirit to the universe. These corollaries are as follows:

1. Facts come first. If facts exist whether anyone recognizes them or not, then it follows that the mind, if it is to know facts, must accept them on their own terms, rather that on its terms. The mind must always remain docile to facts, knowing full well that a fact will not change merely because the mind decides to evade or rationalize it away. While this may sound fairly obvious, it is actually very difficult to put into practice. The mind views all facts through a prism of theory. A fact without a theory would be unintelligible. The identification of a fact is not a revelation falling out of the sky. It is an act of the mind based on a whole host of tacit presuppositions, without which no fact could ever be discovered. Before a fact can be recognized, the mind must first make the assumption that facts exist and the mind knows how to identify them. Out of these assumptions grow myriads of corollary assumptions, many of which are too subtle for words. Nearly all these presuppositions exist well below the threshold of consciousness, so that we remain utterly oblivious of them. Indeed, philosophers often adopt explicit convictions that are odds with the tacit presuppositions which govern their everyday lives.

The inability of the mind to identify facts without theories has been a source of great confusion in philosophy. Some philosophers have argued that, if facts can only be understood in the light of theories, this conclusively proves that theories are prior to facts. Kant believed that the human mind imposes certain innate theories upon reality. “The understanding does not derive its laws from, but prescribes them to, nature,” Kant declared in his Prolegomena. Man’s mind, argued Kant, “is the origin of the universal order of nature, in that it comprehends all appearances under its own laws, and thereby first constructs, a priori, experience.” (1902, §36, §37) This view clearly places theories first, prior to facts. The mind is equipped with a collection of innate theories through which it organizes the data of the sense to construct the experience of reality. These innate theories—or “categories,” as Kant described them—are true despite what the facts might say. If you run across a fact that contradicts one of these “categories,” the fact must give way to the category.

Realism rejects the notion that any theory, whether innate or not, can be used to dismiss the validity of a fact. If the evidence supporting the validity of the fact is good, the presumption of truth must always be on the side of the fact. This, ultimately, is what it means to say that facts come first. The role of theories is to describe reality, not create it.

But what about the need for theories to interpret and understand facts? If no fact can be known without a theory to illuminate its relevance, how can realism continue to insist that facts come first? If no fact can be grasped without a theory, doesn’t this prove beyond any doubt that at least some theories are prior to facts?

As a matter of fact, it proves no such thing. Let us keep in mind the dualism between the mental and the real. Theories are always mental. Facts are real: they involve events happening in a substantive, non-mental reality. In order for the mind to grasp a fact, it must reduce the fact to the mental level. This is where theories prove critical. The mind cannot perceive reality directly, because reality is physical and the mind is mental. To grasp reality, the mind must first translate the data of the senses into mental form. All cognition is done in terms of symbols and metaphors. Consciousness does not mirror reality; it represents it.

Theories play a critical role in this process. They help organize and construct our mental representation of reality in meaningful ways. But this does not mean that such theories are prior to facts. They may be prior in cognitive terms, but they have no priority in terms of reality. Their cognitive priority does not make them more real than the facts they interpret. The fact that Julius Caesar was killed on the Ides of March in 44 B.C. is a fact regardless of whether it is recognized or not. If some theory came along and interpreted the historical data in such a manner that the essential facts were distorted or misrepresented, this would tell against the theory, not the fact. Theories can be mistaken; facts are never wrong. Our belief in a given fact may be mistaken. But if a fact is real, it is true regardless of how it is interpreted (or misinterpreted) by the mind.

The fact that theories, even theories used to interpret facts, can be and often are mistaken is the key to grasping the realist view of the relationship between fact and theory. The goal of the mind is not, as Kant suggests, to impose its theories on nature, but to use theories to correctly perceive and interpret facts. Given the fact that, in cognitive terms, theories come first, how is this done? If no fact can be understood without first being illuminated by a prior theory, how can the mind possibly escape imposing its theories on the facts?

The philosopher Karl Popper has suggested a way out of this quandry. Popper admits, as is only too obvious, that “we cannot ever describe empirical facts (or otherwise react to them) without interpreting these facts in terms of our theories (or of our, perhaps unconscious, expectations). But this does not mean,” Popper insists, “that laws of nature, such as Newton’s theory, are a priori valid, and irrefutable, even though it is true that we impose them on those very empirical facts to which we would have to appeal for a refutation. On the contrary, we have learned from Einstein that our intellect may form, at least tentatively alternative theories; that it may reinterpret the facts alternatively in terms of each of these new theories; that, in the competition of these theories, we can decide freely, sounding their depth, and weighing the result of our criticism, including our tests; and that only in this way can we hope to get nearer to the truth.” (1983, 153)

The key to grasping Popper’s solution to this problem is to realize that mind can use many different theories to interpret the facts. There are many different ways of looking at the world. Some ways, however, are better than others. The challenge of human cognition is to discover, through a process of trial and error, theories that allow us to more accurately interpret the facts of reality. Cognition is fundamentally experimental. The individual intent on knowing the facts of reality must be open to new ways of looking at the world, especially when there is a chance that he is misinterpreting the facts. Knowledge is not a game for scholars and philosophers: it is a vital necessity of human welfare. In extreme cases, a misconception of the facts can lead to disaster and death.

Every time a claim of knowledge is acted upon, it is put to the test. If I believe that external objects only exist when I am perceiving them (esse est percipi), and use this belief to interpret the sense data that passes through my consciousness, I will soon find myself unable to account for any causal processes that happen to be unperceived. Not only the tree falling in the forest, but the fire burning in the grate unattended, the roof that leaks when no one is home, the earthquake no one feels would all count as inexplicable fictions without the assumption of an external substantive world. Idealism, if it could really be used as an interpretive schema through which to view the world, would turn men into idiots, unable to understand any relation of cause and effect that is not immediately perceived. Fortunately, even the most intransigent idealists do not live by their creed, but only support it speculatively, as a kind of philosophical game or conceit. Idealism, as a practical philosophy of life, is impossible, and those who embrace its absurdities ignore them when confronting the practical necessities of existence.

The best test of the truth of a doctrine, especially an interpretive doctrine like idealism, is practical action. Interpretive theories—that is to say, theories used as the basis of interpreting facts—cannot be directly corroborated by experience, since they constitute the very principles out of which experience is understood. But they can be tested indirectly, by constantly examining the practical efficacy of our interpretations of the facts. If these interpretations somehow don’t seem right, if our expectations often wind up being thwarted or we constantly find ourselves believing in things that we later discover to be untrue, this is an indication that something is wrong with the theories we use to interpret the facts. Kant’s belief that the mind imposes its theories on reality is plainly untrue, as anyone who has ever tried to interpret reality by a wrong theory will soon enough discover.

Facts really do come first, despite the prior need of theories to interpret them. The goal of cognition is not to impose our theories on the facts, but to use theories to see things as they really are and not as we may feel inclined to see them.

Another misunderstanding related to this issue of the primacy of facts arises from the contention that all knowledge of fact is ultimately based on observation. David Hume was probably the most persuasive advocate of this position. “If I ask why you believe any particular matter of fact, which you relate, you must tell me some reason; and this reason will be some other fact connected to it,” he wrote in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. “But as you cannot proceed after this manner, in infinitum, you must at last terminate in some fact, which is present to your memory or senses; or must allow that your belief is entirely without foundation.” (1910, 342)

This appears to be a very reasonable point of view. If a fact is true, it should be observable. If Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, at Ford’s theater, anyone who was there should be able to testify to hearing the gunshot and seeing John Wilkes Booth jump from Lincoln’s box and escape across the stage. This is all true; but its truth does not warrant Hume’s conclusion that all facts must terminate in an observation. In point of fact, many do not.

There are a great many events that occur without anyone observing them. But although no one has ever seen them, they are facts nonetheless. If Lincoln had been shot at an empty theater, his assassination would be no less a fact than if it had taken place in broad daylight in front of thousands of witnesses. We do not have to observe a fact to know of its existence. Most facts are inferred rather than seen. If I come across a fallen tree in a forest, I do not conclude, as some idealists have, that, because no one observed it falling, it never actually fell.

But although Hume’s contention about observation and factual truth is not always true, it nonetheless contains a very important insight, albeit in exaggerated form. Philosophy in Hume’s day was dominated by rationalistic speculation. With a handful of exceptions, nearly all philosophers who came before Hume believed that matters of fact could be determined by logical reasoning. Hume challenged this belief with simple but persuasive arguments. “If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything,” Hume pointed out. “The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits. It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another.” (1910, 444)

Many philosophers deeply resented Hume’s attack on rationalistic speculation. For a variety of reasons, none of them justifiable, they wished to preserve the traditional privilege of the philosopher to discover facts about the world through “reason.” Unfortunately (as Hume was among the first to point out) facts cannot be validated solely by “reason.” At some level, observation must enter into the process as well.

You will never learn, for example, what elements compose sulphuric anhydride through logical reasoning alone. People can think and reason about sulphuric anhydride all they like; but no syllogism suggested by the “immanent reason” of things will ever yield the secrets of this compound. To learn about it, they have to go into a laboratory and do the experiments and research. “Chemistry is learned in the laboratory and not by philosophical mediations, even of the Hegelian brand,” noted the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. (1916, §95)

This does not mean, as some crude empiricists have suggested, that facts can only be validated through observation. It simply means that matters of fact cannot be determined solely by logical reasoning or rhetorical mumbo-jumbo. Metaphysics is not some royal road to truth; it is merely a species of philosophic conceit—a kind of philosophers’ stone whereby wishful thinking and intellectual laziness is magically transformed into “truth.” Such metaphysical truths are cognitively worthless. Most of the time, they turn out to be false, as when Plato insisted that the planets must have circular orbits because of the divine perfection of the circle. But even when they happen to be true, their truth is purely fortuitous. What truth requires is evidence, which includes not only perceptual observation, but historical documents, compiled data from scientific experiments, inferences from observation, or other reports from external sources. Logical reasoning can never be regarded as conclusive evidence for any matter of fact, especially in comparison with empirical evidence.

In modern philosophy, the arch-champion of vacuous rationalistic speculation is Friedrich Hegel. No philosopher went further in his attempt to defend logical reasoning at the expense of the empirical methods of science. A typical case occurred early in Hegel’s career. “In the year 1800 a band of six German astronomers ... set out to search for a new planet to fill the gap between Mars and Jupiter in the numerical series of planetary distances, discovered by Titius and known as Bode’s Law,” relates philosopher Michael Polanyi. “The young Hegel poured scorn on an enquiry following up a numerical rule which, being meaningless, could only be accidental. Arguing that nature, shaped by immanent reason, must be governed by a rational sequence of numbers, he postulated that the relative spacing of the planets must conform to the Pythagorean series... This would limit the number of planets to seven and allow a large gap between the fourth and fifth planet, i.e. Mars and Jupiter. The quest for an eighth planet to fill this gap was therefore chimerical.” (1962, 153-154)

Here we find Hegel basically insisting that he already knows that the endeavor to find an eighth planet is a waste of time! How does he know this? By his “reason,” from which he determined that there must be only seven planets, and not one more! The German astronomers, on the other hand, believed in no such rationalistic nonsense. They held, as Bacon and Hume had before them, that matters of fact must be settled, if they are to be settled at all, by empirical investigation. So instead of consulting their “reason,” they consulted their telescopes and astronomical charts. Within a year they had discovered a small planet, Ceres, between Jupiter and Mars. Many hundreds more have been discovered since, leading to the supposition that at one point a planet existed between Mars and Jupiter but for some reason was subsequently broken into pieces. Through the empirical research of the astronomers, the scientific method had once more been vindicated. Empiricism had triumphed over the conceited rationalism of Hegel.

In 1846, Neptune was discovered, further shattering Hegel’s rationalistic illusions. If it had been up to Hegel, none of these discoveries would have been made. Why bother doing all this research, when Herr Hegel can discover truth from the rationalistic dregs of his own mind? This is precisely the great sin of rationalism: that it attempts to discourage empirical research by suggesting that the basic laws of the universe can be determined more easily through logical reasoning. This stifling conceit, this incubus of progress has for many centuries been one of the greatest stumbling blocks to attaining factual truth.

It does not speak well for philosophy that Hegel should have become the most influential thinker of the nineteenth century, and that brilliant men like F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and Josiah Royce should have become mere lickspittles for Hegel’s nauseating theories of the Absolute. What could have possessed such men to become zealous champions of empty nonsense? Why do so many philosophers insist on turning inward to discover the truth when, as a matter of fact, more truth can be found looking the other way, out at the great world?

There are three obvious motivations behind the whole mendacious business. First, there is the conceit of it: the desire of the philosopher to believe that he is smart enough to unlock the secrets of the universe simply by consulting his own mind. “Beware lest any man ruin you through philosophy and vain deceit,” warns Paul in the Bible. But that is precisely what rationalistic speculation amounts to in the end: nothing but vain deceit.

A second important motivation behind the rationalist imposture is simple laziness. To determine the truth about matters of fact through investigation, research, and experiment requires hard work. No doubt it is easier to simply fall into a soft, comfortable armchair and come up with a solution merely by consulting one’s own mind. Pareto used the old controversy over the existence of antipodes to illustrate the futility of rationalism. “Good sense and prudence ought to have counseled people to leave the task of solving that problem to experience,” Pareto insisted. But that would have been too difficult. So instead we find ancient philosophers attempting to settle the issue a priori, by reasoning about it. Here is one example, compliments of the Christian apologist Lactantius Firmianus: “Can anyone possibly be so stupid as to believe that there are men who walk with their feet up and their heads down?” Lactantius wrote. “Or that there [at the antipodes] all that which with us lies on the ground is upside down? That crops grow downward? That rain, snow, and hail fall upward to the earth?”

This reasoning, though perfectly “sound” as far as it goes, is, in its ultimate conclusions, untrue. And while it would no doubt have been very difficult for Lactantius to go and discover empirically whether such antipodes really existed, if he could not have tested his assertions empirically, he should have admitted his ignorance and left it at that. Or, at the very least, he should have gathered all the documentation known at the time of those who had traveled great distances to far away lands. From the reports, say, of India or China, circumstantial evidence could have been gathered on the question, strengthening the case for the existence of antipodes. After all, China is not that far removed from being an antipode to places like Spain or Britian, both of which Lactantius, who lived in Africa during the third century A.D., would have known about. And although there did not exist very good information at the time concerning the size of the earth, two places of such great distance could have served as a warning to Lactantius against drawing conclusions about something he knew little, if anything, about.

To give another example of how rationalism leads astray, consider the question of whether non-banks can create credit. Here would be a question that needs to be settled by empirical research. But that is not how economist Frank Shostak chooses to settle it. “These days, most economists agree that the Federal Reserve System tends to expand the US money supply,” Shostak writes. “But in recent years, banks’ share of total financial assets has been declining. In 1980, it stood at 37%, while in 1999, the share fell to below 24%.
“Does this decline suggest that a major contributor to the expansion of money supply (which continues unabated) might be non-banks? If so, do non-banks have the unlimited power to create money? “Some economists have claimed as much. But the answer to both questions is no. Non-banks deal in credit transactions, not credit creation. The difference is crucial.”

Shostak then attempts to prove these bald assertions through the use of an entirely fictional example: “Let’s say Joe deposits $1 million with a money-market mutual fund. A mortgage supplier borrows the $1 million from the mutual fund and lends it to Jane, who in turn uses the $1 million to buy a house. The recipient of the $1 million, i.e., the seller of the house, deposits the money with a money-market mutual fund.”

“Has the economy's money supply increased by $1 million? Not at all. What we have here is a credit transaction, money transferred from a lender to a borrower. Credit always involves the purchase of a future good by the creditor in exchange for a present good.”

Shostak’s artificial example is palpably misleading. It assumes a very simplistic situation. We could easily disprove it by adding a few details. Consider Joseph Schumpeter’s take on the problem as expressed in his 1939 Business Cycles:

“By confining the manufacture of credit to banks, we are roughly conforming to fact. But this restriction is unnecessary. In various ways, firms may create means of payments themselves. A bill of exchange or a note is not, in itself, such a means. On the contrary, it generally requires financing and thus figures on the demand rather than the supply side of the money market. If, however, it circulates in such a way as to effect payments, it becomes an addition to the circulating medium. Historically, this has occurred repeatedly. An example is afforded by the practice which prevailed in the Lancashire cotton industry until at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Manufactures and traders drew bills on each other which, after acceptance, were used for the settlement of debts due to other manufacturers and traders, much as bank notes would be. This should be taken into account in any estimate of the quantity of credit creation…” (Noland 2000)

Note that Schumpeter is not content with merely explaining how non-banks can expand credit—or even with merely asserting that this happened in history—no, he feels obliged to provide an empirical example—i.e., the Lancashire cotton industry. This is precisely what is missing in Shostak’s article. If something is true, evidence demonstrating its existence needs to be brought forward. Assertions without any evidence have little cognitive value. They are the equivalent of Lactantius’ denial of antipodes—or Hegel’s denial of an eighth planet.

The realist allows the evidence speak for itself. He avoids imposing his ideas, or his arguments, or his logic on the facts, because—to repeat what was said earlier—facts come first.

Another important motive behind the desire to replace fact checking with logic chopping stems from the desire for impossible or nonexistent things. Many people are incapable of accepting reality as God made it. Perhaps they desire a perfectly “just” society; or sexual license without unpleasant consequences; or a pain-free existence; or any number of equally childish things. It hardly matters what they are. They may be as noble or beautiful or desirable as you please; but if they don’t accord with reality; if they are mere pipe dreams, without a basis in fact; if they are the product, not of sober inquiry, but of wishful thinking: then they must be regarded as beyond the cognitive pale. Truth has nothing to do with what you or I or anyone else desires or wants. A fact may be ever so unpleasant and contrary to morality, desire, and all things wonderful. But if it is a fact it must be accepted as a fact, despite what anyone may feel about it.

Evasion of fact, regardless of motive, inevitably leads to dogmatism—the logical outcome of nearly all nonrealistic philosophies. Once fact-checking is replaced by logical reasoning, there is nothing that cannot be “proved,” —as the history of philosophy so well illustrates. From Plato’s conviction that the orbits of the planets had to be circular because the circle was the most “perfect” form to Blanshard’s conviction “that nature is shot through with filaments of necessity,” (1962, 472) we find one philosopher after another making assertions for which they have no evidence. As conjectures, perhaps they would be excusable. But when they are presented as the inevitable conclusions of “reason,” they must be regarded, not as facts, but as dogmas.

2. Facts are surds. One of the fundamental premises of rationalistic idealism is the conviction that reality is “rational.” Or, as Hegel put it: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.” This principle, though it may seem rather vague and abstract, nonetheless has a very definite purpose within the rationalist weltanschauung. It serves as a justification for using logic to determine matters of fact. For if the world is a self-contained rational system, then it follows that one fact will logically entail every other fact, so that from the knowledge of one fact, you could (in theory at least) deduce every other fact about the universe.

Few rationalists today would adopt this extreme form of their philosophy. Most would be willing to admit that some facts cannot be validated in this way. But they would be loathe to admit than no facts can be discovered through logic alone. “Speculative philosophers of the past have sought to arrive by reasoning at general truths about the world,” explained the rationalist Brand Blanshard. “They assumed that so far as this reasoning was valid, it somehow reflected the necessities in the nature of things.” (1962, 167)

It is these “necessary connections” that “reason,” according to Blanshard, seeks to identify. He gives several examples. To begin with, there is “logical law,” which, Blanshard argues, “tells us something about the actual structure of things.” Then there is arithmetic. “The multiplication table has generally been taken as offering prime examples of propositions which are at once necessary and true, and there is no good reason to deny this,” Blanshard insists. (1962, 423, 426) Same goes for geometry. What is true of a geometrical circle must be true (more or less) of a factual circle. The necessities inherent in geometrical laws are reflected in natural world.

What of these examples? Is it really true that logic, mathematics, and geometry are all examples of necessary truths? Perhaps. But how is anyone to know whether these truths are in fact necessary? Necessary in what sense? Necessary because they couldn’t be otherwise? How could anyone possibly know that? How does one distinguish between a necessary truth and an unnecessary one?

Whether truths are necessary or not no one can tell. But even if necessary truths existed, what would be the point? Why is it so important to know whether necessary truths exist in the factual world? For the rationalist, the point is very clear: if necessary truths exist, logical reasoning can be used to determine them. The rationalist desires necessary truths so he can forgo the arduous task of verifying truth through empirical research.

This is precisely where realism and rationalism part company. A realist can, if he so chooses, believe in necessity. Realism has no settled position on the issue. Some realists believe in necessity, others do not. But what no realist can tolerate if he wishes to remain consistent to the central tenets of his philosophy is to believe that the existence of necessary truths justifies rationalist speculation concerning matters of fact. They do no such thing. Facts must be validated empirically. Logical reasoning is just too unreliable.

This is not to imply that logical reasoning is useless. Logic is an important tool for human cognition. It can be very useful in developing hypothetical theories and making educated guesses concerning matters of fact. But on any question concerning a matter of fact, it is always preferable to use empirical research rather than logical speculation to determine matters of truth. Knowledge based on observation is generally far more reliable than knowledge based on mere logic chopping.

For any number of reasons, logic often fails when used as the sole or primary method of determining factual truth. Even in circumstances where it appears to be irrefragible, experience can thwart it. Rationalists are fond of giving the example of pocket change as an instance of logical reasoning leading to factual truth. Suppose I have 89¢ in my pocket. Somebody gives me an additional 11¢. Can’t we conclude, using logical reasoning, that I must now, by necessity as it were, have a dollar’s worth of change jangling about in my pocket?

We can indeed make such a conclusion, but that doesn’t mean we will always be right. What if I have a hole in my pocket? What if a few of the coins had fallen out when I sat down? These may seem like remote considerations, yet they cannot be dismissed out of hand. Pockets do sometimes develop holes. Nickels, dimes, quarters, pennies do sometimes fall out of pockets on their own, especially when one sits slumped in a deep chair or couch. While I would expect that in most cases a dollar's worth of change would in fact be found my pocket, I do not see any necessity in it, for the precise reason that in some cases circumstances will contrive to bring about different results. And so it is for most, if not all things in life. Logic can help us form educated guesses of what to expect in the world of fact; but the facts will occasionally disappoint our logic. That is just the way reality is. Common experience confirms this repeatedly. We have all run across situations in which we thought some fact or another must be so, because logic seemed to demand it, only to find that it wasn’t so, because some circumstance which our logic failed to anticipate interfered and produced an unexpected result.

Contrary to what Brand Blanshard and other rationalists believe, logic does not hold true of the real world. If it did, every fact could be deduced from every other fact. But this is clearly not the case. The death of a child is not logical deduction from other facts, but an inexplicable tragedy. Nor is it true that every logical truth must find exemplification in reality. Some of course do find exemplification; but most do not. Even a mathematical equation as simple as 2+2=4 is not universally true in reality. As George Santayana points out, “there is a psychological sphere to which logic and mathematics do not apply. There, the truth is dramatic. That 2+2=4 is not true of ideas. One idea added to another, in actual intuition, makes still only one idea, or it makes three... There are therefore levels of reality, and these the most important to mankind, that elude all mathematical axioms.” (1937, 408)

Often what rationalists mean when they say that reality is “logical” or “rational” is that it makes sense, that it is, in some obscure way or another, “intelligible”—or “potentially intelligible.” If all that is meant by intelligible is that human beings can understand at least some matters of fact, then no realist would find anything to quibble about. We all understand certain things about the world. We understand, for example, that human life is mortal, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that pleasure is preferable to pain, etc. etc. But this does not mean that we can understand everything about existence. We have no idea, for instance, why the gravitational force between any two bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Nor do we have any idea why the solar system has nine planets instead of five or twenty. We have no idea why any number of things are the way they are rather than some other way. All facts are ultimately inexplicable. As Santayana cogently observes, “facts are surds, they exemplify fragments ... chosen for no reason: for if a will or reason choosing anything (say the good) were admitted, that will or reason would itself be a groundless fact, and an absolute accident. Existence is necessarily irrational and inexplicable.” (1923, 208)

This is easily proven by the following thought experiment. Take the existence of anything—say, the emergence of human life. Now try to explain it. There are two ways to deal with this problem. You could begin by seeking the immediate cause of human life. According to many philosophers and theologians, human beings were created by God. The immediate cause, then, of the human life is God’s will. Man’s existence is explained by God and there’s an end to it. But is God’s will really a complete and final explanation to the riddle of human life? No, not quite. For as soon as we ascribe the emergence of human life to God’s will, we are confronted with additional questions. Why did God choose to create human life? Theologians can undoubtedly give any number of answers. Yet every answer will serve only to spawn further questions. Let us suppose it is determined that God created man because of love. Very well. How then do you explain God’s love? Because, say the theologians, God is good. Excellent, but then how do you propose to explain God’s goodness? God is good because he is God, replies the theologian. That is just God’s nature. Okay, fine, but that is fact: it is not a final explanation, because it still leaves questions answered, such as: Why is it God’s nature to be good? Theology artfully tries to dodge these issues by suggesting that such inquiries verge on blasphemy. We should be content with God as the ultimate explanation and leave it at that.

Here we are confronted, not with rational argument, but with blatant intimidation. “Stop asking all these questions,” we are warned, “or God will be angry with you.” Will He really? And how, sir, may I be so bold as to inquiry, did you come to this intimate knowledge of the deity? We have run into such claims before. This or that inquiry is arbitrarily declared to be offensive to God. We are not to study the genesis of life or the beginning of the universe or the genome or any number of other mysteries of the God’s creation because that would show disrespect to the deity. If we had listened to such nonsense we would still be in the Middle Ages.

There is one other sense in which God is considered the ultimate cause, not merely of human life, but of the universe generally. It is generally assumed that God is the final or ultimate cause of all things, the primary cause of all causes. However, even if this is true, it does not mean that God constitutes the ultimate explanation for all things, since the existence of God still remains a mystery—a surd fact, if you will. There is no way of getting around it. If the statement God exists truly represents a fact about the universe, then it remains, at bottom, an inexplicable mystery, just like all other facts.

There is another way of trying to arrive at the ultimate explanation of a thing. Instead of asking for causes and reasons ad infinitum, we can seek for an explanation of the general nature or laws of the universe. Taking this approach to the question of human life, we get very different answers than we found by searching for particular reasons and causes. Certain scientists will tell us that life emerged from a process of “evolution.” We need not go into the particulars of what this word evolution means. Suffice it to say that natural selection, genetic mutation, and sexual selection are the three main ingredients in the process. Species develop through the utterly gratuitous mutations of genes. Those mutations which advance both survival and reproductive capability tend to dominate, leading to the development of new traits. For example, the eye emerged—or so we are led to believe by the darwinians—by just this process of mutation and natural selection. Even an eye in its nascent form, the theory contends, provides creatures with a definite advantage, in terms of sexual reproduction, over creatures without any such eye mutations whatsoever.

Although this theory, on the face of it, does not seem very plausible, this alone does not suffice to disprove it. Nature may be as implausible as it likes. If through some occult process nascent eyes grant a positive advantage in sexual reproduction, so that the gene for a nascent eye is more likely to be selected than the non-nascent eye gene, then we must accept the theory as a fact and be done with it.

If this is all the Darwinists meant by their theories, there would be little to quibble about. We might, to be sure, question the application of the theory to this or that circumstance. Some traits, such as the tendency to sexual rapacity in men, do seem to be a product of natural selection. Other traits, such as eyes, do not. But the theory as a whole would not be in the least objectionable if it weren't presented—as it is by at least some of its advocates—as an ultimate explanation of things. Obviously, it can be no such thing. Even if it were true that all human life is entirely the product of Darwinian evolution, this still would leave a whole host of questions begging for answers, and the emergence of human life, though illuminated to a certain extent, would still remain at its core utterly confounding. How are we supposed to explain, for instance, mutations? Or sexual selection, especially in relation to half-emerged organs? What advantage can half a liver or half a nose or half an appendix possibly have in sexual reproduction? Indeed, where did the sexual organs themselves come from? If they emerged in stages, like everything in else in evolution, what survival and reproductive advantage could they possibly confer in their nascent forms? Darwinian evolution, even if true right down to the very last hypothesis, remains every bit as inexplicable, if not more so, than the most astringent forms of biblical creationism.

No theory can fully explain how human beings came into existence. On whatever theory, the emergence of the human race remains an inscrutable enigma. All facts are ultimately surds. They merely exist, and there’s an end to it.

If this is so, if everything is ultimately inexplicable, then what is the use of explanation? If all facts are surds, why should we go to the trouble of trying to explain them? Isn’t it an utterly hopeless enterprise right from the start?

It all depends on what is meant by the term “explanation.” If what is meant is some kind of “ultimate” or “metaphysical” explanation, then it is a hopeless enterprise, because no such explanation is possible. All explanations must end in either a particular fact, a particular uniformity of nature, or an infinite regress of causes. Facts, as we know, are surds. No ultimate reason explains their existence. Their accidental and irrational nature is demonstrated by the inability to deduce facts a priori. The same is true of uniformities in nature, or natural laws; they also defy logical explanation. We still have no idea why one set of uniformities prevails rather than some other set. Why should water freeze at 32º and not 15º or 56º? We don’t know. That’s just the way it is. Nor are we any better off if we attempt to explain facts by tracing the causal chain that lead to them, because all such chains inevitably lead to infinite regresses—and what could be more absurd, more contrary to the laws of human understanding, than an infinite regress?

Although the ultimate reason for a thing cannot be known, its practical nature falls well within the range of the human mind. We cannot know ultimately why apples exist; but we can know that they are food, that they are nutritious, that they grow on particular trees, and that certain trees can be cultivated for the express purpose of producing more apples. We cannot know ultimately why penicillin is useful in combatting harmful bacteria; but we can know how to develop and use it to treat infections. We cannot know ultimately why most politicians are dishonest; but we can know to be on our guard against them.

Since knowledge of the ultimate reason for things has no survival or reproductive value, our mind has no tools with which to grasp such profundities. The human mind has been developed by God and nature to handle preeminently practical tasks. We have no use for the ultimate. Ultimate explanations tell us nothing about what is really important in human life. They tell us neither how to live or to die, what to strive for or what to avoid, what to worship and what to abhor—in short, they tell us nothing that we really need to know.

Do they even give us information on how to determine matters of fact through logical reasoning and abstruse speculation, as the rationalists believe? No, of course not. Indeed, explanations, whether ultimate or not, have nothing to do with the question of whether facts can be reached through logic alone. The question of intelligibility on the one hand, and of the cognitive efficacy of rationalistic speculation on the other, are entirely separate. Logic alone can never make any particular instance of causation intelligible. Causation is not logical. If it were, we could deduce that fire must produce smoke. But no such deduction is possible prior to experience. Without observation, no one would have any idea whether fire produces smoke. Knowledge of matters of fact begins with observation. In the absence of empirical data, nothing can be known of the external world. Looking outward is the starting point of all wisdom.

3. All human knowledge is non-literal and symbolic. If a dualism exists between experience and knowledge on the one side, and the objects of experience and knowledge on the other, it follows that our ideas can never be literal copies of the objects they represent. All percepts, images, sensations, or any other datum experienced by the mind are purely symbolic. They serve as the pigments out of which the mind represents the external world.

The non-literal character of mental phenomena has given rise to several utterly gratuitous philosophical problems. An implicit assumption of many idealists and other malicious skeptics is that unless man’s consciousness precisely duplicates or mirrors the external world, his knowledge cannot be valid. If the sunflower appears yellow to the mind, then it must be yellow in reality. Otherwise, yellow becomes a “subjective” property, dependent for its existence on the mind. And if yellow is regarded as a subjective quality, is the proposition Buttercups are yellow really true? But if it is not true, then what about other qualities manifested by objects? If objects can’t really be yellow, can they be rough or noisome or loud? Is everything we sense merely subjective, so that all we can say about the objects of reality is that they have bodies and shape?

If perception is regarded in this light, then one is confronted with but two choices: either the sensory qualities of objects actually exist in the objects themselves and are mirrored by perception in consciousness; or they are created by the mind and exist only in fancy. Neither alternative is supportable. The first is clearly false. Color, for instance, does not inhere in objects, as common sense naively assumes. Physically, color is reproduced through sensations of different wavelengths of light. When the mind perceives yellow in a buttercup, it is not perceiving “yellow” wavelengths, because, first of all, light is not colored, and secondly, the actual wavelengths are not always constant. The same yellow sunflower may emit light waves of different lengths at different times—and yet they will all appear the same shade of yellow to the observer! This occurs because the brain compensates for variations in wavelength from the same object.

Does this mean that color must therefore be regarded as a purely subjective phenomenon, without any basis in reality? No, of course not. Yellow is not a subjective quality in the malicious sense that it is just an illusion of the mind. The experience of yellow in the sunflower, which is shared by all human beings who are not color-blind, is entirely veridical and objective. Sunflowers are in fact yellow, as anyone who perceives the flower can see for himself. However, they are not literally yellow. The quality of yellow perceived in buttercups is a symbol or representation; it is a mental description of an object of reality, not a direct copy or image of it. The qualities that a thing has are symbols or signs of its characteristics—as, for example, redness in an apple is a sign of ripeness. These so-called “secondary qualities,” like color, taste, and loudness, would hardly be regarded as merely subjective if philosophers had looked beyond their mere aesthetic appearance and attempted to grasp their significance as symbols. All the qualities of things as they appear to the mind are clues by which the mind attempts to understand the objects of reality. They help us figure out whether things are edible or poisonous, friendly or dangerous, useful or futile, In this sense, these secondary qualities can be regarded as objective and true.

The belief that certain qualities in perception are “subjective” leads to the distinction in traditional represenationalist epistemology between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. Primary qualities are defined by Locke as those that “are inseparable from the body, in what estate soever be”; secondary qualities are defined as “such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities.” (1964, 112) This distinction, however, between qualities which are in the mind and qualities which are both in the mind and in external objects is not a valid one. The fact is, all qualities are purely mental, even the primary ones. External objects may have all manner of properties and characteristics; but they cannot have qualities. Such qualities inhere only to appearances—which is to say, they are nothing more than mental descriptions of objects, real or imagined.

George Santayana regarded the failure to understand and appreciate the non-literal, symbolic character of knowledge as a consequence of a desire to have, as he put it, “intuitions of things,” by which he meant seeing things directly, without any intervening representations or “essences,” as if man could see things precisely as they really are, free from the aesthetic trappings of normal human perception. “The absurdity of wishing to have intuitions of things reaches it climax when we ask whether things, if nobody looked at them, would still look as they do; but whether their intrinsic essence, whether they are looked at or not, resembles such essences as eyes of one sort or another might gather by looking at them, is an idle question. It is not resemblance but relevance and closeness of adaptation that render a language or an expression true.... Accordingly, the symbols of sense are most relevant to their object at the remove and on the scale on which our daily action encounters it.” (1923, 88-89)

If knowledge is figurative and symbolic, rather than literal and straightforward, doesn’t this imply a troublesome degree of cognitive inadequacy? Aren’t symbols vague and confusing?—open to not one but many interpretations? If so, how can human knowledge possibly find a basis in mere poetry?

These questions all assume that literal knowledge is somehow superior to symbolic or representative knowledge. This is one of those “common sense” assumptions that people tend to accept without question, as if it were too obvious to doubt. Yet if we apply a little critical thought to the matter, we will find that it is not so obvious as common sense would have us believe.

Consider the rather obvious fact that knowledge can be communicated from one person to another. What does this tell us about the knowing process? Among other things, it tells us that knowledge is expressible, that it can be transferred from one mind to another. Yet this process of communication is not simply a matter of plugging one mind into another. Communication requires expression through language. Our thoughts, our feelings must be framed in words before we can communicate them to another person. Does this mean that our words are identical to our thoughts? No, not at all. It is widely acknowledged that words are inadequate to express our deepest thoughts and feelings. How, then, do we communicate through language?

If, instead of trying to solve this problem in reference to philosophy, we turn our attention to literature, we will find the answer to our problem. What separates the great literary genius from the rest of us is his ability to express various thoughts and realities that often seem too subtle for words. In other words, great literature seeks to express the inexpressible. And how does it go about doing this? Does it proceed on the basis of an unimaginative but exhaustive literalism? Or is it by sheer poetry, metaphor, and other figurative turns of speech?

The answer is obvious. Shakespeare and Milton, Goethe and Dante did not achieve their status as great literary artists by being excessively literal and pedantic. The profound expressive qualities in their work are built on the poetic devices of metaphor, symbol, and figurative turns of speech. These devices not only serve to bring their descriptions to life, they also add that special kind of insight into the nature of things that only great literature can provide.

Just as great writers and poets are more expressive because of their promiscuous use of figurative turns of speech, so the external world is best understood when represented through the medium of poetry. Literalism dulls consciousness, casting a pall of unreality over everything it touches. Only poetry can bring the world of sense to life, giving it a vividness and rigor that an uncompromising literalism could never duplicate.

To illustrate this assertion, consider the following two descriptions of a nighttime walk among flowers. First, a literal description:

I cannot see what kind of flowers are next to my feet. Nor can I distinguish what the smell is among the boughs of the trees. Because there is a low level of light where I am, I can only make educated guesses using my sense of smell and my prior knowledge of flowers and seasons. Upon these guesses I imagine that I walk among grasses, thickets, and wild fruit-trees. I imagine hawthorn’s that appear white, and eglantines in a pastoral setting, and violets that fade after a few days and are covered in leaves, and the musk-rose, which comes in early May and whose pedals often are found covered in a dew that reminds me of wine; I imagine a place frequented by flies, who make a soft buzzing sound, on a summer evening.

Here is how John Keats draws the picture:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet;
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild:
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmourous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild:
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmourous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Along with the usual assortment of poetical techniques, Keats uses symbols and metaphors to make his portrait of night considerably more vivid. He writes of the “soft incense” of the flowers, which “hangs upon the boughs.” In purely literal terms, this is nonsense: smells don’t hang upon bows. But in terms of representation, these metaphors heighten the sense of reality of the pictured scene. Phrases like “embalmèd darkness,” “seasonable month endows,” “mid-May’s eldest child,” “dewy wine,” and “murmourous haunt” also help create a special atmosphere that brings Keats’ descriptions to life.

The greater expressiveness of the figurative to the literal, of the poetical to the prosaic should answer any questions about the inadequacy of so-called “indirect” or “symbolic” knowledge. However inadequate such knowledge may be, it is clearly less inadequate than the sort of “literal” knowledge imagined by various types of positivists and other naive realists. The notion that the mind could literally duplicate the world within the narrow bounds of consciousness is absurd. The world is all out of scale in relation to the mind. It exists on an entirely different plane of reality. The human mind, before it can attain knowledge of what exists outside its sphere, must translate the overwhelming complexity of real world into terms native to consciousness. The world, if it is to be represented at all, must be represented in the peculiar idiom of the mind. Just as a painting is a representation in terms of paint placed upon a canvas, so is knowledge a representation in terms of symbol, metaphor and other figurative devices placed within the sentient folds of consciousness.

There is one other objection to dualistic knowledge which I needs must address before moving on. If, as I have argued, knowledge is dualistic and representational, how then are we to distinguish between true and false representations? If knowledge describes reality figuratively and symbolically, rather than literally and precisely, how can we be sure that any of our mental representations do in fact “correspond” to reality?

Questions like these have plagued philosophy. For centuries, philosophers have tried to explain how knowledge is possible. The reason most philosophers have failed in this endeavor is because they have held false ideals of knowledge. Many philosophers have adopted the entirely gratuitous assumption that human knowledge could only be regarded as valid if the knowing process can be explained. Since human cognition depends on a number of intuitive processes that take place “behind the scenes,” as it were, out of the range of conscious awareness, attempts to explain human knowledge in explicit conscious terms must always appear inadequate.

The complexity of the knowing process defies articulation. Many philosophers, under the illusion that the process of knowing is fully aware of itself, have thought that human cognition could be reduced to a set of methods or rules that could be followed as one follows a recipe in a cookbook. Add a few observations, mix them with a good dose of logical analysis, and voilà, a valid conclusion! Alas, knowledge doesn’t happen so easily. Thinking is not something that can be taught with textbooks and diagrammed by flowcharts. Human thought is not a method or routine, but an art. No one can learn how to think from memorizing rules and precepts. Thinking is developed through a long and exhaustive tutelage in reality—through experimentation, problem solving, and the stress of life.

Philosophers would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if, instead of asking how knowledge was possible, they had merely been content to inquire into why human beings desire and need knowledge. It is in the practice of human living that knowledge finds its primary justification. Cognition is not a luxury or embellishment of human living; it is a fundamental necessity. Man’s welfare depends on it.

This view of knowledge is consistent with the basic premises of realism. If idealism were correct, knowledge would be a mere embellishment, an idle pastime in a world made entirely of dreams and other immaterial fancies. The world is of course no such thing. No empty stomach was ever filled, no parched throat ever succored by an idea. Dreams will not cure an infection or mend a broken leg; and no one ever died from words alone. We live in a substantive world that exercises a profound influence upon our daily lives. Knowing how to get on in this world is a matter of life and death. If, as pyrrhonic skepticism and idealism both assert, knowledge of a material world is impossible, then survival would also be impossible. The fact that we can live in such a world is evidence enough that it exists.

This is not to suggest that human survival proves that an external world exists. The existence of any substantive fact or object can never be proved logically. As we have already established, all facts are surds and their existence can never be deduced a priori. Our knowledge of the external world is established on the basis of observation—in particular, of the observation that things subsist in their own plane of reality, following their own laws and conditions. If I let a pot of rice cook for an hour on a stove, I don’t have to keep an eye on it to make sure that it cooks, as idealism implies. I can leave the house and come back an hour later to find my rice ready to eat. Even idealists themselves, when they aren’t arguing on behalf of their preposterous doctrines, don’t abide by them. In matters of everyday life, the idealist tacitly accepts the validity of representational knowledge and lapses into the same dualistic realism advanced in this essay. Idealism is a mere paper philosophy: it is only followed speculatively, in debate and controversy, but never in practice, because it contradicts the demands of practical action. The idealist can never practice what he preaches. Simply to survive, he must behave as if realism were true and that his ideas, which he takes for the ultimate reality, are merely representations of a deeper, less scrutable reality.

When idealism is challenged on the issue of practicality, it usually responds in one of two ways. It either repeats its mantra that epistemological dualism, and hence representational knowledge, is impossible (or “unprovable”), or it insists upon the internal consistency of the idealist doctrine. We have already seen that the first of these claims has no ground at all to stand on. If by “unprovable” we mean the inability to establish representational knowledge on the grounds of logic, then the criticism is entirely irrelevant, since no external existent or fact can be proved logically. Logic does little more than trace the various implications of our ideas. Propositions radiate logical implications like the sun radiates heat. If all men are mortal, then Socrates, being a man, is also mortal by logical implication. But whether men are in fact mortal or Socrates is in fact a man is something that can never be established solely on logical grounds. Some other process, call it observation, understanding, cognition, or whatever name you please, must be involved in the exercise. The process itself can never be the subject of logical proof, but must demonstrate its worth in action or experiment. For this reason, to argue that representational knowledge is impossible or gratuitous because it is unprovable is entirely beside the point. All knowledge of the existence of things is unprovable in this sense. But to insist that, because it is unprovable, representational knowledge must be rejected out of hand, would be to turn all of existence into an empty daydream. We all of us, despite our speculative allegiances, believe not only that things exist, but that they also subsist as well, which is to say, that there is a permanence in them, that they exist and follow their own laws and tendencies even when no one is around to perceive them.

The assertion of idealism’s internal consistency is no less irrelevant to the issue at hand. Consistency, of itself, proves nothing beyond an agreement among ideas. There are any number of confidence schemes and other patent frauds that are perfectly consistence to their own wayward principles. Conspiracy theories are notoriously consistent and draw much of their power from the congruity of their internal relations. The problem with such theories is not necessarily that they lack logical rigor, but that no evidence exists to support their baseless pretensions. Evidence, then, is what is ultimately lacking in the idealist creed. It is only on the basis of epistemological dualism, which posits a substantive, external reality and a mind which can model that reality in terms of symbols and metaphors, that the concept of evidence becomes intelligible.

4. Human thought is largely metaphorical. Consider the following common turns of speech:

—Her family gave us a warm welcome.
—Next Christmas will be huge for the family.
—The color of her clothes don’t go together.
—Stock prices are too high.
—He is high on dope.
—The local baseball team stinks this year.
—He’s in a good a mood.
—The time just flew by.
—He’s moving on to the next level.
—He’s on top of the situation.
—I can’t grasp the meaning of what you say.
—He’s fallen in love with her.
—Their relationship has gone from bad to worse.
—He’s close to losing it.
—We’ve been drifting apart for years.
—They are at a crossroads in their relationship.
—I see what you mean.

—Her family gave us a warm welcome.
—Next Christmas will be huge for the family.
—The color of her clothes don’t go together.
—Stock prices are too high.
—He is high on dope.
—The local baseball team stinks this year.
—He’s in a good a mood.
—The time just flew by.
—He’s moving on to the next level.
—He’s on top of the situation.
—I can’t grasp the meaning of what you say.
—He’s fallen in love with her.
—Their relationship has gone from bad to worse.
—He’s close to losing it.
—We’ve been drifting apart for years.
—They are at a crossroads in their relationship.
—I see what you mean.

This is a very small sample of metaphors used commonly in everyday speech. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of them. They are so commonplace that we hardly notice how ridiculous they would be if interpreted literally. How can anyone, for instance, describe a welcome as “warm”? What did they do—take out a thermometer and measure the person’s body temperature? And why do people say an individual is on dope when the chemical is in the individual’s body? These expressions are so ingrained in our habitual modes of thought and description that the absurdity of their literal implications passes unnoticed.

Cognitive scientists regard such turns of expressions as “primary metaphors.” According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, these primary metaphors are rooted in the very structure of the human brain: their presence can be traced to the sensorimotor section of the brain. Distance, location, size; seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, tasting; moving, lifting, throwing, dodging: these are the activities out of which primary metaphors emerge. (1999, 45-59) We say a person is on television. Yet they are not literally on the television set. Here we have a metaphor based on location. Someone says,“ I will see to it that it is done.” But he really means he will make sure that it is done. Here we have a metaphor based on sensation. And then we have the ubiquitous fallen metaphors, such as: He has fallen in with the wrong crowd. No literal fall has taken place. The metaphor in this case is based on motion.

The extent to which thought is permeated with metaphor goes well beyond Lakoff and Johnson’s primary metaphors. In a sense, all human thought, and even all human experience, is a kind of metaphor. Knowledge and experience are never literal for the simple reason that human consciousness is, as we have already discovered, altogether symbolic. Experience consists of a stream of images, sounds, smells, tactile sensations, and tastes that flow unbidden through the sluices of consciousness. But the real world is not made up of sensations. The external world is not some giant sensorium which fills the senses. Critical differences exist between physical or substantive things on the one hand, and the data of sense and consciousness on the other.

Just as there are many philosophers who, under the influence of rationalistic idealism, regard representationalism with scorn, so there are many positivists and no-nonsense empiricists who have no use for metaphor and who pride themselves on what they fancy to be their literalism and their direct manner of thinking and speaking.

Metaphors, these hardheaded, plain speaking men would insist, are indistinct and vague. They can easily be used to confuse or manipulate other people. They often lead to misunderstanding and bewilderment. The individual who desires to know things as they are and intent on communicating this knowledge to others should say precisely what he means and avoid the vague, amorphous patter of rationalists and poets.

But what about the expressive power of metaphor and other figurative turns of speech to bring reality to life within human consciousness? What do literalists have to say about that? A typical attitude of the literalist is to regard mere expressiveness as dangerous. Very well, he argues, suppose metaphors are more expressive. Why is this necessarily a good thing? After all, where are metaphors most frequently used? Isn’t it in literature, in poetry? But isn’t literature and poetry mostly lies—make-believe stories and wishful thinking? Sure, metaphors are very good at making imaginary things vidid and lifelike. Yet isn’t that precisely the problem? If metaphors bring reality more to life, aren’t they also capable of bringing unreal things more to life? And if you have two metaphors, each of which assumes a diametrically opposed view of reality, how are you to tell which is correct? Both will seem equally real, because metaphors have the capability of making even false things appear real. This being the case, how do you distinguish a “true” metaphor from a “false” one?

These objections, although superficially compelling, nevertheless reveal, on deeper inspection, false epistemological ideals. It is tacitly assumed that no thought or proposition can be true unless it corresponds directly to the thing or process that it represents in reality. Since the real world of fact and substance is all out of scale with consciousness, this is impossible. Our thoughts cannot possibly have an entirely perfect, one-to-one correspondence with the external world. Reality is far too complicated for that. The human being, merely to grasp what he needs to know in order to make his way in the world, must translate the overwhelming complexity of existence into manageable terms. The world must be represented in the idiom of the human mind. Symbol, metaphor, analogy—these make up the native grammar of man’s intellect. And while it is true that a metaphor, taken in and of itself, is neither true nor false, this does not mean that truth is unknowable or that all metaphors are created equal.

I would hasten to point out at this juncture that not all truth must be represented with metaphor. Some truths are best represented with more direct symbols. As an example, consider the question of whether a tenth planet exists. This is a simple matter of fact which is either true or false. Either the tenth planet exists or it doesn’t exist. If there is no tenth planet, then the statement The tenth planet does not exist expresses the true state of affairs. Note the absence of metaphor in the statement. This is generally the case with statements asserting the existence of things. Such statements do not rely directly on metaphor. Either a thing exists or it doesn’t exist—end of story. Knowledge of the existence of things is the closest the mind comes to knowing things literally.

Yet it isn’t always so simple. What if we discover a small spherical object orbiting the sun somewhere beyond Pluto. Would we automatically consider it a tenth planet? No, not necessarily. It depends on the size of the object. If it were no bigger than a beach ball, I doubt anyone would consider it a planet. If it were no bigger than an asteroid, there still would probably be astronomers who would not accept it as a planet. Where precisely the line between a planet and an asteroid should be drawn cannot be determined so easily. It is a question that requires a qualitative judgment. Such judgments cannot always be reduced to a simple question of either/or. They involve making a decision on the qualities of the object and whether those qualities provida a compelling reason for regarding it as belonging to one class or another.

Generally speaking, qualitative judgments tend to be considerably more complicated than judgments concerning the existence of things. The qualities of a thing, as it is perceived by the intellect, are often saturated in metaphor. There is an important reason for this. Qualities can only be described in terms of other qualities, but never in themselves. How, for example, does one describe the feeling or sentiment of love? You cannot say love feels like love, even though this is true, because a person who has no experience of love would be none the wiser. How then does one describe a quality like love? Well, it can only be described in terms of other qualities—that is, in metaphor, as Shakespeare does in a famous passage from Romeo and Juliet:

Love is a smoke rais’d with the fume of sighs;
Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with lovers’ eyes;
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.

Consider, as a contrast, Spinoza’s description of love: “Amor est titillatio,” (Love is titillation.) Let us not be put off by the equation of love with titillation. Spinoza does not mean this literally. He is not saying that love is titillation and titillation is love. He is really using a metaphor. Because he doesn’t use Shakespeare’s poetical rhetoric, it is not so obvious.

All descriptions of love, whether poetical or philosophical, scientific or satirical, will all indulge in the use of metaphor at some level. That is to say, they will attempt to describe love in terms of other qualities. Such metaphorical descriptions cannot, of course, be regarded as true or false, but only as being more or less apt. Not all descriptions are equally vivid or “lifelike.” Some are better than others. And not merely superior in terms of expressive value. Shakespeare’s description of love is obviously more expressive, more vivid and lifelike, than Spinoza’s. But that doesn’t necessarily make Shakespeare’s description any more true. If, however, love were described as a big round pumpkin, I would venture to say that such a metaphor, while not literally false, is not particularly apt. In any case, the qualities of a pumpkin clearly do not illustrate love as well as Shakespeare’s or Spinoza’s metaphors illustrate it.

Incidentally, the critical role of metaphor in human cognition helps explain why philosophical idealism, despite its palpable absurdity, cannot be tested empirically and refuted by scientific experiments. Abstract philosophical systems are immune to empirical refutation because they are largely metaphorical. Idealism is nothing else but a vast and complicated metaphor. No fact can be used to falsify the idealist hypothesis because every fact can be reinterpreted within the framework of the basic metaphors of idealism. For this reason, idealism cannot be regarded as literally true or false. It is a metaphor based on the idea that all reality is mental or spiritual in nature.

Is idealism an apt metaphor for experience? Not according to the realist view. There are two reasons for this. To begin with, idealists themselves are unaware that their philosophy is largely metaphorical. Too often they regard it as the literal truth, which of course leads to extreme absurdity. But even as a metaphor, idealism falls short of the mark. By insisting that existence is entirely (or largely) spiritual, idealism fails to make the critical distinction between mind and matter. This failure blinds the idealist to the important insights of epistemological dualism, such as the symbolic nature of cognition and the critical role that metaphors play in human understanding.

Although realism is also a kind of metaphor, it provides a far more apt description of existence than is provided by other so-called “metaphysical” theories. The natural world really does seem to exist independently of our consciousness of it. This explains why our ideas can be wrong—and also why there are degrees of error, with some ideas being closer to the truth and others less so. Since reality and our conception of reality are not one in the same, as idealism alleges, error becomes explicable: an error is simply an idea that does a poor job of describing (or “modeling”) reality within the precincts of the mind. To describe reality as spiritual is to describe it with a large degree of inadequacy. The metaphor of reality as both spiritual and physical is far more adequate, since clearly some objects in reality behave very much like subsisting objects and, as far as we can tell, do not depend on the mind in the same way that ideas and other purely spiritual objects do.

4. Human knowledge can never perfectly represent its object. If human knowledge is essentially representational, it follows that no object of knowledge can ever be perfectly represented within the mind. Although we have already touched on several facets of this problem, in the light of its importance to the realist position generally, a few more comments would appear to be in order.

Historically, the tendency among philosophers is to either ignore the inadequacy of cognitive representation or to make too much of it. In the first camp are those who could be called the “mirror” epistemologists—those philosophers who believe that human thought literally “mirrors” the world. As one example, consider the view, propagated by Scott Ryan, a follower of such idealist philosophers as Blanshard and Bradley, that “the object of an idea just is the idea itself fully developed.” In other words, according to this view, a perfectly developed idea would be identical with the object which it represented. This view is poles apart from the dualistic realism championed in this essay. It badly misconceives what the mind is all about and puts forth an ideal of knowledge that can only lead to unrealistic cognitive expectations. Knowledge becomes the logical development of ideas, instead of an exploration of the outlying world.

On the other side of the fence are those who commit the opposite error of assuming that representationalism leads to nihilistic skepticism. We have already seen why such skepticism is not justified. The partial cognitive inadequacy of representational knowledge does not entail belief that man’s intellect is impotent. Partial inadequacy means exactly that: partial. In other words, it means that our knowledge is not perfect and that we must approach questions of fact with a modesty befitting the limitations of a weak and fallible creature. The inadequacy of representational knowledge leads, not to total skepticism, but to epistemological caution. Philosophy, whether of knowledge or of human nature, ought to be a school in humility.

What lessons do the limitations of representational knowing impress upon the wise and humble philosopher? In the first place, these lessons counsel against taking a dogmatic attitude. However wise a philosopher may be, since his ideas can never be fully adequate, he should always seek to test them against the facts. Openness to criticism, to new experiments, to novel experiences is critical to anyone who seeks to know as much as is humanly possible. While no idea can perfectly represent its object, some ideas are less inadequate than others. The mind seeks, not for perfectly adequate ideas, but merely for ideas that are good enough for most of the situations that confront us in life. To ask for anything more would be the height of conceit. The wise man accepts his own limitations, including the limitations of his wisdom.

The limitations imposed on the mind by representational knowing go well beyond the adjurement to be cognitively humble. They also warn us of the folly of attempting to settle questions of fact on the basis of rationalist speculation. Only the excesses of human vanity could ever justify the conviction that matters of fact can be discovered merely through armchair speculation, as if the knowledge of the external world could be discovered by turning inward, by looking away from the facts and at one’s own conceits!

But most important of all, the awareness of the limitations of the human mind teaches us the value of experience and tradition. Although it would be a mistake to conclude that traditional ways of looking at the world are always superior to novel methods revealing new perspectives, the accumulated experience of past generations should never be dismissed out of hand. If something has proven its value over many centuries, we must have very compelling reasons before we try an entirely novel approach. Traditions are venerable because they are based on the experience of many people over a long period of time. While it is true that traditions occasionally become outworn and need to be replaced, we nevertheless should be careful not to reject the wisdom of our forbears too hastily. And we should never seek to replace a venerable tradition merely because some egotistical philosopher, his head swollen with rationalist conceit, tells us that the tradition is contrary to “reason,” —a word which, in philosophy, stands for little more than armchair speculation based on vague generalizations and wishful thinking. In short, social and political innovation must find its justification, not in “reason” and other forms of irresponsible speculation, but in an empirically responsible social science. Even then, we must proceed very cautiously, taking short, careful steps, always keeping in mind the limitations of human cognition and the ease with which mistakes, often of a very costly nature, can be made.

5. The primacy of the will. The primary motivation behind the philosophical rejection of realism stems from the conviction, prominent among nearly all idealists, that a realist view of the world necessarily leads to “materialism.” Berkeley, the first modern idealist, opposed realism precisely because it posited the existence of a material world, belief in which he regarded as inimical to the Christian faith. “How great a friend material substance has been to Atheists in all ages were needless to relate,” wrote Berkeley. “All their monstrous systems have so visible and necessary a dependence on it, that when this cornerstone is once removed, the whole fabric cannot choose but fall to the ground.” (1965, 92)

Is Berkeley right? Does realism inevitably lead to the horrors of materialism? No, not necessarily. While some forms of realism are compatible with materialism, not all forms of realism are materialistic. The dualist form of realism advanced in this essay represents a type of realism which, by definition, cannot possibly be regarded as materialist, since it begins on the assumption that both matter and spirit exist. There is, however, another charge often made against realism. I have in mind the charge of epiphenomenalism, a doctrine widely regarded as even more horrible than even the worst forms of materialism.

Why is it regarded with such ill favor? Namely for one reason: epiphenomenalism allegedly turns human beings into mere puppets, lacking even the merest sliver of dignity or freedom. Consider one of the most uncompromising expressions of the doctrine, compliments of the Darwinian philosopher, Thomas Henry Huxley: “Consciousness … would appear to be related to the mechanism of [the] body, simply as a ... [side] product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the [sound of a] steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive … is without influence upon its machinery.” (Popper & Eccles 1977, 72)

One can hardly imagine a more deterministic vision of human nature than this! We are simply automatons going through the mad gyrations of the molecules within our brains. Consciousness is nothing more than an impotent bystander, forced to stand on the sidelines and watch the human farce unfold, yet unable to take an active role in the process. Man as the plaything of matter—such is the vision of epiphenomenalism, one of the most extreme forms of determinism ever cooked up by the ingenuity and pervisity of the human intellect.

Surely the type of realism advanced in these pages cannot be guilty of leading to, let alone espousing, a doctrine so ghastly, so inhuman, as this horror of all horrors, epiphenomenalism! Before coming to a judgment on this issue, a reminder is in order. The fact that a certain doctrine is considered ghastly, inhuman, horrible, or whatever other adjective of disapprobation one can think of should have no bearing on are cognitive assessment of it. Realism does not determine truth on the basis of what is pleasing to human conceit. Quite the contrary, realism seeks especially to embrace just those truths that cowards shun. If something really is true and therefore exists independently of what we think or fail to think about it, trying to deny its truth and existence merely because we don’t like it will not make its reality go away. Sticking our heads in the sand in the hope that what we don’t want to know won’t hurt us is not an acceptable strategy for the realist.

So what is the truth, then, about epiphenomenalism? Is it fact or fiction? As realists, must we embrace the horror? Or can realism evade this dreaded doctrine?

Here are the hard facts. Whether we like it or not, all the logical implications of dualistic reason strongly point to a doctrine that, in some respects at least, resembles epiphenomenalism. Once the philosopher has distinguished mind from matter, there is no reason for him to stop there. The tendency in philosophy has been to confound motivation and cognition, will and intellect. Since these two modes of human nature are obviously not identical, to understand them more thoroughly, we need to separate them and take note of their differences. By a process of careful analysis, we soon discover that willing and thinking, although clearly related, are very different activities; and, more critically, that in the absence of willing, the mind is impotent. In this sense, mind and knowledge could be regarded as “epiphenomenal.”

This form of epiphenomalism, however, should not be confused with the type embraced by monistic materialists, who regard the mind as little more than the shrill byproduct of the brain. It simply asserts the primacy of the will over the intellect. The identification of mind and consciousness with self is one the great errors of traditional philosophy. Mind, consciousness, intellect—these are all secondary phenomenon. What makes a person tick, what gives him his predilictions and personality, is his will, which can be defined as the locus or seat of appetition. All our needs, wants, fantasies, emotions flow out of the will. What a man essentially is is determined by the will; or rather, to put it as bluntly as possible: a man is his will.

Whether the secondary status of mind renders it a mere epiphenomenal byproduct of the will is debateable. It is only epiphenomenal in the sense that it cannot make decisions. It’s role is to think, which is a very different matter from willing and making decisions. But the mind does have the power to know. In terms of thinking and knowing, the mind is not epiphenomenal.

I realize that this might seem somewhat counter-intuitive. We all tend to identify the self, the very kernel of our souls, with our minds. However, this identification of mind with self is an illusion of perspective. When a man makes a decision, it seems to him that his mind, his intellect, his consciousness are making the decision, and not the will itself. The very process of deliberation, in which we are conscious of sorting through various alternatives, lends credence to the illusion that the intellect is the ultimate power within the individual, and not the will. A closer examination of the matter, however, will refute this mind-centric view of human nature.

Consider any decision that you have made recently. How did it happen? If you look into the matter carefully, you will find that the genesis of your decision arose solely from your will, and that your intellect merely served as a counselor to this will. If you remove the will from the human organism, what have you in its place? Merely an empty husk of an individual, incapable of coming to any decision or taking any action. Such a being would be an impossibility, a solecism of human nature. Deprive a man of his will and you have deprived him of his very self, indeed, of his very life; for the will is the very stuff of life.

If a man had no will, he would be completely indifferent to everything about him; he would, in short, be without life, for what else is life but desire, emotion, sentiment, and passion? The intellect itself would be useless without will. For if a man did not care about anything, he surely would not be interested in knowledge. Everything a man does arises out of the motives of his will. Knowledge itself, even so-called “disinterested” knowledge, arises only as a consequence of the will.

The tendency to confuse intellect with will has a long and illustrious history. Philosophers argue and wrangle about what they call “freedom of the will.” But what they really mean is freedom of the intellect. They want to defend the identification of the self with the mind. If, however, you accept the basic premises of realism and epistemological dualism, you have no choice but to conclude that any assertion of the primacy of the intellect is little more than a reversion to idealism. The idealist confuses knowledge of a thing with the thing itself. To identify a man’s self with his intellect is to commit this error in its most basic form. A man is not his own self-knowledge. His self-knowledge is merely a report of something existing “outside” the intellect, in another sphere or mode of existence. This other sphere or mode is precisely what the term will is attempting to describe and elucidate.

Does this mean that the will exists in another dimension, separate from matter and consciousness? No, not at all. Keep in mind that words and ideas are merely imperfect symbols of realities existing outside the mind’s ken. It would be a mistake to take these terms too literally. The dualism offered in this essay is not of the rigid type. I am not contending that everything that exists fits into exclusive categories. The universe may exist in as many categories or modes as it pleases. It is up to the intellect to discover how many such categories or modes actually do exist. Dualistic realism does not seek to divide the universe into two modes of reality; it simply seeks to distinguish one type of reality (i.e., matter) from another (i.e, consciousness). That there may exist other types of realities which do not easily fit in either of these categories is not only possible, but highly probable. In fact, the obvious existence of the will would seem to settle the issue once and for all. Please, let us not make idols of the words we use them to describe reality. They are but symbols used in the service of knowledge. They are not themselves the stuff of knowledge, but merely the lineaments or outward forms of knowledge.

That mind and matter are not entirely “separate” is proved by the fact that damage to the brain can affect the workings of both the intellect and the will. Injuries to the under surface of the parietal and occiptal lobes can lead, for instance, to prosopagnosia, a condition which impairs the ability to recognize individuals by their faces, although recognition by voice remains unaffected. Injuries to prefrontal lobe of the cerebral cortex can affect initiative and emotional balance. (1998, 108, 100-101) These examples demonstrate the material basis of both will and intellect. It would be easy, on the basis of this evidence, to conclude that matter is the ultimate cause or fundamental “reality” of the universe. But here we must be careful not to bite off more than we can chew. Let us recall one of the basic premises of realism: that, since knowledge is not, as the idealist asserts, the whole of reality, it follows that our ignorance far outweighs our knowledge, and that there exist many things in reality that we know nothing about, and still others that we will never know anything about. The universe is a very large place, and the human mind is, in comparison, very limited in its scope and powers. To assume, as hard-core materialists assume, that the material basis of human will and intellect necessitates the view that only what is physical can be real is to assume what the human mind can never prove, verify, or know. The very fact that human beings are conscious and that they make decisions demonstrates the existence of a mode of reality that cannot be reduced to the sort of dice and billiard balls materialism common among the cruder sort of scientific materialists.

One more point to consider. To say that mind and will both have a material basis is not equivalent to claiming that everything is ultimately reducible to matter. The basis of a house is its foundation. Yet this does not mean that a house is ultimately reducible to its foundation. The foundation is simply one of the essential conditions that provide for the construction and stability of the house. It is by no means the primal cause of the house. It would be absurd to describe it as such. What, in truth, is the cause of the house? The human purpose, or will, required to plan and construct it! Take the teleological factor out of the equation, and neither the house, nor even the foundation upon which the house is “based,” would exist!

There are some philosophers, no doubt, who would argue, in response to this line of reasoning, that the equation of a house’s foundation with its basis is materially different from the saying that consciousness has a material basis in the structure of an organism’s body; that, in other words, the argument equating the two is not valid, that it rests on a false analogy. Anyone who could reach such a conclusion has obviously failed to understand what has been put forth in this essay, especially regarding the role that metaphors play in human knowledge. I do not deny that describing a house’s foundation as its basis involves the use of metaphor. Who would deny that? But so is the view that consciousness has a material basis in protoplasmic matter. That view, too, is a metaphor! Now the question is: which metaphor more aptly describes reality?

On its own resources alone, the intellect is nothing. Its motive power, its fuel comes directly from the will in the form of purposes, motives, passions, etc. There is no such thing as a detached, disinterested intellect. Thinking, like everything else within the human organism, requires motivation, purpose, desire, will. A perfectly indifferent man, if such a monstrosity could ever exist, would be incapable of thinking. What reason or motive would such a man have for exercising his intellect? No process of thought can ever be explained without assuming a specific interest or motive.

David Hume understood the truth of this better than most philosophers. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume wrote: “‘Tis obvious, that when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry’d to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction. ‘Tis also obvious, that this emotion rests not here, but making us cast our view on every side, comprehends whatever objects are connected with its original one by the relation of cause and effect. Here then reasoning takes place to discover this relation; and according as our reasoning varies, our actions receive a subsequent variation. But ‘tis evident in this case that the impulse arises not from reason, but is only directed by it. ‘Tis from the prospect of pain or pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object: And these emotions extend themselves to the causes and effects of that object, as they are pointed out to us by reason and experience. It can never in the least concern us to know, that such objects are causes, and such others effects, if both the causes and effects be indifferent to us. Where the objects themselves do not affect us, their connexion can never give them any influence; and ‘tis plain, that as reason is nothing but the discovery of this connexion, it cannot be by its means that objects are able to affect us.” (1739-40, 461-462)

In this passage, Hume compares reason and emotion, but he might as well be comparing will and intellect, because it amounts to the same thing. Reason is simply a function of the intellect, and emotion a product of the will. Hume shows that reason (or the intellect) merely discover the objects of knowledge, but never motivates these discoveries. The motive power is some emotion, which is to say, some outgrowth of the will.

Neuroscience and cognitive science appear to be discovering the same truth in their empirical investigations, as witness books like Lakoff's and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh and Antonio Damasio’s Descartes Error, both of which take aim at Descartes view that emotion plays no part in reasoning. According to Lakoff and Johnson, “we now have overwhelming evidence that the mind does not work like this.” (1999, 414)

To be sure, Descartes was not completely wrong. He knew, for instance, that will and intellect are not one and the same and that it is useful to distinguish one from the other. But he took his dualism way too far. Reason and emotion, intellect and will are indeed “separate” in the sense that neither reason nor the intellect provides any sort of motivating force. The intellect, the mind, is a mere tool of the will, which is always in control and ultimately makes all the decisions. And while there exists a mutual dependence between will and intellect, the will nevertheless enjoys primacy within the human organism, just as Schopenhaur suggested two centuries ago.

6. Realism, to be effective, must be truculent. The dualism championed in this essay does not deny a certain level of integration and even reciprocal causation between the mind and its object on the one side and the intellect and the will on the other. The mind is in fact “embodied” within matter and therefore influenced by it. Thinking can be influenced by a number of grossly physical causes, including hormones, aphasia, drugs, and even alcohol.

Even more important are the influences of the will—the influences of sentiment, passion, desire, lust, self-interest, upon the intellect. “The intellect is really like the mirror-surface of water, the water itself being like will,” wrote Schopenhauer; “the agitation of the water destroys at once the purity of that mirror and the distinctness of its images.” Schopenhauer goes on to make some trenchant remarks concerning the influence of hope on the workings of the human intellect: “Hope makes us regard what we desire … as being probable and near… Plato has very finely called hope the dream of him who is awake. It’s nature lies in the fact that the will, when its servant, the intellect, is unable to produce the thing desired, compels this servant at any rate to picture this thing to it, and generally to undertake the role of comforter, to pacify its lord and master, as a nurse does a child, with fairy-tales, and to deck these out so that they obtain an appearance of verisimilitude. Here the intellect is bound to do violence to its own nature, which is aimed at truth, since it is compelled, contrary to its own laws, to regard as true things that are neither true nor probable, and often scarcely possible, merely in order to pacify, soothe, and send to sleep for a while the restless and unmanageable will. We clearly see here who is master and who is servant.” (1958, 216 - 217)

The problem Schopenhauer raises is as old as mankind. How can we discover the truth about the world when our minds are so easily led astray by the passions and lusts of the body? The realist must be realistic about this as well. He must acknowledge the very serious threat that wishful thinking poses to realism. And he must seek out stratagems to counteract it.

At the beginning of this essay, realism was offered as antidote to cowardly evasion of truth. But to overcome this cowardice, it is not enough simply to know that truth and will are not identical, and that wishing for something to be true in no way makes it true. The realist must be aware of how easy it is to laspe into evasion and cowardice. This is why he must be truculent in his realism. Facts, especially unpleasant facts, must be sought aggressively, without any concern for personal feelings or the tender proprieties of the fearful and the feebleminded. Facts are facts. No matter how strongly the realist may want to believe in some ideal of the heart, he cannot allow these feelings to get in the way of his search for truth.

The realist, in order to remain true to his philosophy, must be hard on himself; but this does not mean he should be hard on others as well. Concern for the feelings of others is not inconsistent with realism. The realist must remain tactful toward others, understanding their weaknesses and going out of his way to spare them unnecessary pain. It is simply a matter of common decency to do so. The realist should confront others with harsh facts only when he has no other choice, when persistent evasion would lead to catastrophe. Forcing people to accept unpalatable truths when nothing can be gained from the exercise would be cruel. The realist seeks to spare others as much as he can, while never sparing himself.

Why should the realist be so hard on himself in pursuit of the truth? Why should he force himself to accept unpleasant facts, when it is so much more agreeable to adopt the widely accepted strategy of evasion and wishful thinking? When the issue is reduced to the barest essentials, it comes down ultimately to a question of simple, plain honesty. Those who would distort or ignore facts because they don’t like the truth are not being honest. For the realist, truth is a matter of honor. The realist faces up to harsh facts because he desires, above all, to be honest and straightforward, and not crooked and false. The realist, in short, places truth above self.