Realism Theory Quotes

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?

There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars.

We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead.

However much the theory of political realism may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, there is no gainsaying its distinctive intellectual and moral attitude to matters political. Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles. The economist asks: "How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?" The lawyer asks: "Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?" The moralist asks: "Is this policy in accord with moral principles?" And the political realist asks: "How does this policy affect the power of the nation?

It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory.

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.

The idea that people would be happier if they maintained a constant state of realism is a beautiful sentiment, but Taylor and Brown found just the opposite. They presented a new theory that suggested that well-being came from unrealistic views of reality. They said you reduce the stress of terminal illness or a high-pressure job or unexpected tragedy by resorting to optimism and delusion. Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you through rough times and help motivate you when times are good. Indeed, later research backed up their claims, showing that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities. People who take credit for the times when things go their way but who put the blame on others when they stumble or fall are generally happier people.

Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure. Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion — between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking.

What unites the identitarians who lord over the art world is the belief that art is primarily, even solely, a political enterprise. That was also the premise of Socialist Realism, the theory and style of art promoted in the former Soviet Union. One could fairly contend that identitarian art is something like our era’s version of Socialist Realism.

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.31 To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist—probably to be found working in universities—who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale.

...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.

This is not to say that power and security are the sole or even the most important objectives of mankind; as a species we prize beauty, truth, and goodness. . . . What the realist seeks to stress is that all these more noble goals will be lost unless one makes provision for one’s security in the power struggle among social groups. . . . A moral commitment lies at the heart of realism. . . . What Morgenthau and many other realists have in common is a belief that ethical and political behavior will fail unless it takes into account the actual practice of states and the teachings of sound theory.

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism.

subjective experience is explainable, and its successful explanation is of ethical relevance because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier. Not only does this conviction guide Spinoza’s major philosophical decisions, it also explains the lasting appeal of his chief work,

The degree of rigidity is a matter of profound interest in the study of literary fictions. As an extreme case you will find some novel, probably contemporary with yourself, in which the departure from a basic paradigm, the peripeteia in the sense I am now giving it, seems to begin with the first sentence. The schematic expectations of the reader are discouraged immediately. Since by definition one seeks the maximum peripeteia (in this extended sense) in the fiction of one's own time, the best instance I can give is from Alain Robbe-Grillet. He refuses to speak of his 'theory' of the novel; it is the old ones who talk about the need for plot, character, and so forth, who have the theories. And without them one can achieve a new realism, and a narrative in which 'le temps se trouve coupé de la temporalité. Il ne coule plus.' And so we have a novel in which,. the reader will find none of the gratification to be had from sham temporality, sham causality, falsely certain description, clear story. The new novel 'repeats itself, bisects itself, modifies itself, contradicts itself, without even accumulating enough bulk to constitute a past--and thus a "story," in the traditional sense of the word.' The reader is not offered easy satisfactions, but a challenge to creative co-operation.

However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction process—of all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situations—for example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you.

The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is—insofar as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research. (Einstein 1949, 683–684)

Twentieth-century empiricism made an important mistake here. We can make sense of science only by treating much of it as an attempt to describe hidden structures that give rise to observable phenomena. This is a version of scientific realism, an idea that will be discussed later in this book. In science there are depths. There is not a simple and fixed distinction between two "layers" in nature-the empiricists were right to distrust this idea. Instead there are many layers, or rather a continuum between structures that are more accessible to us and structures that are less accessible. Genes are hidden from us in some ways, but not as hidden as electrons, which in turn are not as hidden as quarks. Although there are "depths" in science, what is deep at one time can come to the surface at later times, and there may be lots of ways of interacting with what is presently deep.

Music of the Grid: A Poem in Two Equations _________________________ The masses of particles sound the frequencies with which space vibrates, when played. This Music of the Grid betters the old mystic mainstay, "Music of the Spheres," both in fantasy and in realism. LET US COMBINE Einstein's second law m=E/C^2 (1) with another fundamental equation, the Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula E = hv The Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula relates the energy E of a quantum-mechanical state to the frequency v at which its wave function vibrates. Here h is Planck's constant. Planck introduced it in his revolutionary hypothesis (1899) that launched quantum theory: that atoms emit or absorb light of frequency v only in packets of energy E = hv. Einstein went a big step further with his photon hypothesis (1905): that light of frequency v is always organized into packets with energy E = hv. Finally Schrodinger made it the basis of his basic equation for wave functions-the Schrodinger equation (1926). This gave birth to the modern, universal interpretation: the wave function of any state with energy E vibrates at a frequency v given by v = E/h. By combining Einstein with Schrodinger we arrive at a marvelous bit of poetry: (*) v = mc^2/h (*) The ancients had a concept called "Music of the Spheres" that inspired many scientists (notably Johannes Kepler) and even more mystics. Because periodic motion (vibration) of musical instruments causes their sustained tones, the idea goes, the periodic motions of the planets, as they fulfill their orbits, must be accompanied by a sort of music. Though picturesque and soundscape-esque, this inspiring anticipation of multimedia never became a very precise or fruitful scientific idea. It was never more than a vague metaphor, so it remains shrouded in equation marks: "Music of the Spheres." Our equation (*) is a more fantastic yet more realistic embodiment of the same inspiration. Rather than plucking a string, blowing through a reed, banging on a drumhead, or clanging a gong, we play the instrument that is empty space by plunking down different combinations of quarks, gluons, electrons, photons,... (that is, the Bits that represent these Its) and let them settle until they reach equilibrium with the spontaneous activity of Grid. Neither planets nor any material constructions compromise the pure ideality of our instrument. It settles into one of its possible vibratory motions, with different frequencies v, depending on how we do the plunking, and with what. These vibrations represent particles of different mass m, according to (*). The masses of particles sound the Music of the Grid.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

How many leaders in the Islamic world are really familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have met some leaders of activist factions, and have been consistently shocked by their lack of knowledge. How many can even name the principal intellectual systems of our time? Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy, critical theory, and all the rest are closed books to them. Instead they burble on about the 'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism', or the 'New Crusader Invasion', or similar phantasms. If we want to understand why so many Islamic movements fail, we should perhaps begin by acknowledging that their leaders simply do not have the intellectual grasp of the modern world which is the precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to Islamic governance. A Muslim activist who does not understand the ideologies of modernism can hardly hope to overcome them. Islam and the New Millennium

This photo is classic aestheticism. The engaging expression, the loose dress and fluid posture. Early to mid-1860's, if I had to guess." "It reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelites." "Related, definitely; and of course the artists of the time were all inspired by one another. They obsessed over things like nature and truth; color, composition, and the meaning of beauty. But where the Pre-Raphaelites strove for realism and detail, the painters and photographers of the Magenta Brotherhood were devoted to sensuality and motion." "There's something moving about the quality of light, don't you think?" "The photographer would be thrilled to hear you say so. Light was of principal concern to them: they took their name from Goethe's color wheel theories, the interplay of light and dark, the idea that there was a hidden color in the spectrum, between red and violet, that closed the circle. You have to remember, it was right in the middle of a period when science and art were exploding in all directions. Photographers were able to use technology in ways they hadn't before, to manipulate light and experiment with exposure times to create completely new effects.

Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of "economic man," "political man," "moral man," "religious man," etc. A man who was nothing but "political man" would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. A man who was nothing but "moral man" would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence. A man who was nothing but "religious man" would be a saint, for he would be completely lacking in worldly desires. Recognizing that these different facets of human nature exist, political realism also recognizes that in order to understand one of them one has to deal with it on its own terms. That is to say, if I want to understand "religious man," I must for the time being abstract from the other aspects of human nature and deal with its religious aspect as if it were the only one. Furthermore, I must apply to the religious sphere the standards of thought appropriate to it, always remaining aware of the existence of other standards and their actual influence upon the religious qualities of man. What is true of this facet of human nature is true of all the others. No modern economist, for instance, would conceive of his science and its relations to other sciences of man in any other way. It is exactly through such a process of emancipation from other standards of thought, and the development of one appropriate to its subject matter, that economics has developed as an autonomous theory of the economic activities of man. To contribute to a similar development in the field of politics is indeed the purpose of political realism.

I want to share three warnings. First, to stand up for human goodness is to stand up against a hydra–that mythological seven-headed monster that grew back two heads for every one Hercules lopped off. Cynicism works a lot like that. For every misanthropic argument you deflate, two more will pop up in its place. Veneer theory is a zombie that just keeps coming back. Second, to stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employees has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians. Third, to stand up for human goodness means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naive. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic. The pessimistic professor who preaches the doctrine of human depravity can predict anything he wants, for if his prophecies don’t come true now, just wait: failure could always be just around the corner, or else his voice of reason has prevented the worst. The prophets of doom sound oh so profound, whatever they spout. The reasons for hope, by contrast, are always provisional. Nothing has gone wrong–yet. You haven’t been cheated–yet. An idealist can be right her whole life and still be dismissed as naive. This book is intended to change that. Because what seems unreasonable, unrealistic and impossible today can turn out to be inevitable tomorrow. The time has come for a new view of human nature. It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.

The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power. This concept provides the link between reason trying to understand international politics and the facts to be understood. It sets politics as an autonomous sphere of action and understanding apart from other spheres, such as economics (understood in terms of interest defined as wealth), ethics, aesthetics, or religion. Without such a concept a theory of politics, international or domestic, would be altogether impossible, for without it we could not distinguish between political and nonpolitical facts, nor could we bring at least a measure of systematic order to the political sphere. We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power, and the evidence of history bears that assumption out. That assumption allows us to retrace and anticipate, as it were, the steps a statesman - past, present, or future - has taken or will take on the political scene. We look over his shoulder when he writes his dispatches; we listen in on his conversation with other statesmen; we read and anticipate his very thoughts. Thinking in terms of interest defined as power, we think as he does, and as disinterested observers we understand his thoughts and actions perhaps better than he, the actor on the political scene, does himself. The concept of interest defined as power imposes intellectual discipline upon the observer, infuses rational order into the subject matter of politics, and thus makes the theoretical understanding of politics possible. On the side of the actor, it provides for rational discipline in action and creates that astounding continuity in foreign policy which makes American, British, or Russian foreign policy appear as an intelligible, rational continuum, by and large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen.

It is our care about who we are that motivates us to choose a role (professor, father, friend) to attempt to settle the issue of our Being, which in turn, like a magnet dropped onto a plate of iron filings, organizes the world into interrelated groups of tools and people that have determinate functions within our projects. Care is what reveals a meaningful world to us in the first place, and everything we experience must find its place within this practically structured world, including purportedly autonomous theory.

The overarching issue is the idea that “the mind is in some sense creative. . . . Some such theory is essential to every form of Kantianism.

One of the most neglected areas in the philosophy of perception concerns animal senses. It is surprising how many philosophers write about perception in the apparent belief that humans are the only perceivers in the world. Human senses evolved through the natural process as other animal senses, so there is no reason to regard human senses as special, or better than other animal senses.

One of the most neglected areas in the philosophy of perception concerns animal senses. It is surprising how many philosophers write about perception in the apparent belief that humans are the only perceivers in the world. Human senses evolved through the same natural process as other animal senses, so there is no reason to regard human senses as special, or better than other animal senses.

One of the most neglected areas in the philosophy of perception concerns animal senses. It is surprising how many philosophers write abut perception in the apparent belief that humans are the only perceivers in the world. Human senses evolved through the same natural process as other animal senses, so there is no reason to regard human senses as special, or better than other animals senses.

The Copenhagen Interpretation has long been the orthodox view of the quantum world and this is not surprising considering how weird the alternatives are. However realism has usually been assumed in the macro world, but given the modern research into animal senses, neurology, and cognitive psychology, realism must inevitably cease to be a serious explanation of the macro world. It seems quite obvious the macro world is sense dependent and the orthodox interpretation of the quantum world postulates a sense dependent world as well. This suggests the same rules can apply to both the macro and quantum worlds which eliminates the need for a dividing line between the two worlds.

Our understanding of the universe is completely dependent upon the sensory apparatus available to us. Different animals have different sensory apparatus and so will have different but equally valid views of the universe. It is only by going outside our sensory apparatus, and studying how other sensory apparatus work, that we are able to get a better understanding of our own sensory apparatus.

Each species has its own sensory world, which are often very different from each other's sensory world. There is some overlap between these worlds but there are many aspects of one species world which will be completely unknown to members of other species. The human view of the world is only one view and is no more valid than that of any other species.

A significant part of the history of science has been the dethroning of human beings from being the centre of existence. Copernicus and Kepler showed the Earth was not the centre of the universe with everything orbiting the Earth. Darwin showed that the human being is just another animal, which has evolved like all other animals and shares ancestors with all other living species. It is time to dethrone the human view of the world and recognize that it is just another view of the world, no more real or true than the view of any other species.

Our senses have evolved over millions of years in order to help us to survive. They give us information as to whether food is safe to eat, where potential prey may be and whether potential predators are around. They are designed to give us information relevant to our survival. Information not relevant to our survival, will not normally be available to us. Our senses are not designed to give us an accurate objective view of the world. They require a certain amount of energy to operate and human survival requires that energy is not wasted in providing us with information not relevant to our continued survival as a species. It is hardly surprising our senses do not give an accurate or objective view of the world. They are simply not intended for that purpose.

The third preliminary problem for every theory of reality is that of the experience of transcendence. We saw in the case of Berkeley that his erroneous principle *percipi est esse*, and his assertion that any being which we think, just for the reason that it is thought, cannot at the same time be regarded as subsisting independently of thinking, incorporate a failure to recognize the consciousness of transcendence peculiar to all intentional acts. This is an instance of the failure to recognize that not only all thinking in the narrower sense, in the sense of grasping an object on the basis of “meanings” and grasping a state of affairs through judgments, but *every* intention in general, whether perception, representation, remembering, the feeling of value, or the posing of ends and goals, points beyond the act and the contents of the act and intends something other than the act [*ein Aktfremdes*], even when what is thought is in turn itself a thought. Indeed, *intentio* signifies a goal-directed movement toward something which one does not have oneself or has only partially and incompletely. Berkeley (following Locke, who was the first to make the basic philosophical error which introduced “psychologism” into epistemology) arrived at the principle *esse est percipi* by making the idea [*Vorstellung*] (and even the sensation) into a thing, an immaterial substance, and by failing to distinguish between the act, the content of an act, and the object. Furthermore, Berkeley confused the being of objects with the fact of being-an-object, even though the latter has only a loose and variable connection with the former. On the other hand, the transcendence of the intentional object with respect to both the *intentio* and its present content is common to every instance of being-an-object. It is, for instance, proper to objects of pure mathematics which are certainly not real but ideal (for example, the number 3). These are produced from the *a priori* material of intuition in accordance with an operational law governing the steps of our thought or intuition. Transcendence is further proper to all fictitious objects and even to contradictory objects, for instance, a square circle. All these sorts of objects, e.g., the golden mountain or Little Red Riding Hood, satisfy the basic principle of the transcendence of objects over and above that aspect of them which is, at any moment, given in consciousness, just as much as do real objects existing independently of all consciousness and knowledge." ―from_Idealism and Realism_

Frida Kahlo once told her class of painting students that there is not one single teacher in the world capable of teaching art. The truth in these words comes to mind in every art class I teach. I believe you can teach technique and theory, but it is up to the individual to do the art part. For the student, this means giving yourself permission to work your way, whatever way that is. Once you accept that permission, you can incorporate foundation skills. This is no longer the Renaissance, and artists are no longer judged (or compensated) solely for realism and representation. There was a time when painting and drawing, coiling a clay pot, or fashioning a bucket to draw water from a well was part of daily life. Now we peck at keyboards, buy Tupperware, and drink from plastic bottles. By not using our hands, we lose our senses. I see this in my students. Proficient on the computer, they click out sophisticated graphics. But they are baffled by and fumble with a brush, frustrated at the time it takes to manually create what they can Photoshop in a flash. I’ve taught art for a quarter of a century and rely on sound lesson plans and discipline as well as creative freedom. Still, during each drawing, painting, and ceramic class I teach, I remind myself how I felt when I scratched out my first drawings, brushed paint on a surface, or learned to center porcelain on a wheel—how it felt to tame and be liberated by the media. And, how it felt to become discouraged by an instructor’s insistence on controlling a pencil, paintbrush, or lump of clay her or his way. For most of my Kuwaiti students, a class taken with me will be their first and last studio arts class. I work at creating a learning environment both structured and free, one that cultivates an atmosphere where one learns to give herself permission to see.

Frida Kahlo once told her class of painting students that there is not one single teacher in the world capable of teaching art. The truth in these words comes to mind in every art class I teach. I believe you can teach technique and theory, but it is up to the individual to do the art part. For the student, this means giving yourself permission to work your way, whatever way that is. Once you accept that permission, you can incorporate foundation skills. This is no longer the Renaissance, and artists are no longer judged (or compensated) solely for realism and representation. There was a time when painting and drawing, coiling a clay pot, or fashioning a bucket to draw water from a well was part of daily life. Now we peck at keyboards, buy Tupperware, and drink from plastic bottles. By not using our hands, we lose our senses.

He remembered taking a class in information theory as a third-year student in college. The professor had put up two pictures: One was the famous Song Dynasty painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival, full of fine, rich details; the other was a photograph of the sky on a sunny day, the deep blue expanse broken only by a wisp of cloud that one couldn’t even be sure was there. The professor asked the class which picture contained more information. The answer was that the photograph’s information content—its entropy—exceeded the painting’s by one or two orders of magnitude. Three Body was the same. Its enormous information content was hidden deep. Wang could feel it, but he could not articulate it. He suddenly understood that the makers of Three Body took the exact opposite of the approach taken by designers of other games. Normally, game designers tried to display as much information as possible to increase the sense of realism. But Three Body’s designers worked to compress the information content to disguise a more complex reality, just like that seemingly empty photograph of the sky.

As Rorty, James’s successor in twentieth-century philosophy, said, Russell had a theory of truth, a natural corollary of his foundationalism and his demand for certainty, against which pragmatism recoiled. But, as is his wont, Rorty goes further than he should: ‘Neither William nor Henry James would have had anything to say in a world without Russells’ (1982: 136). This is rather strained, to say the least, since William and Henry were putting their ideas forward before Russell came on the scene. But Rorty is using Russell as an archetype for ‘straight men’ who defend ‘common-sense realism’.

Since the proper test of a theory is not the realism of its assumptions but the acceptability of its implications, and since these assumptions imply equilibrium conditions which form a major part of classical financial doctrine, it is far from clear that this formulation should be rejected—especially in view of the dearth of alternative models leading to similar results.

In recent years the tension between realism and empiricism has often been debated under the topic of the "underdetermination of theory by evidence." Empiricists argue that there will always be a range of alternative theories compatible with all our actual evidence, and maybe a range of alternative theories compatible with all our possible evidence. So we never have good empirical grounds for choosing one of these theories over others and regarding it as representing how the world really is.

The position defended in this book is a version of scientific realism. A scientific realist thinks it does make sense to say that science aims at describing the real structure of the world we live in. Does the scientific realist think that science succeeds in this aim? That is a more complicated issue.

In his excellent and extremely comprehensive text, Engestrom (1991) locates Vygotsky's ideas within a dialectic approach, which was undoubtedly the framework that Vygotsky himself was exploring but never had time to develop in detail. There is no doubt that Engestrom offers a very distinctive perspective on Vygotsky's approach to concept formation. At the same time, by making clear what is involved in thinking about concepts within the notoriously (and perhaps inevitably) slippery terms of dialectic logic, his account also suggests why, for all its evocative power as critique, the dialectical method is unable to fulfil its promise as a theory for generating new knowledge.

At the same time, it has to be recognized that the conditions for this objectivity are not easily won. They cannot rely on the outmoded claims of positivist social science or a comfortable consensus that can hide real differences. It also has to be accepted that serious attempts to establish a social realist theory of knowledge have not progressed very far. Claims to objectivity have to be based on the intellectual grounds and the traditions and values of the discipline that go back more than a century. With regard to the

Realism in foreign affairs, besides being an attitude, also implies a theory about where peace comes from: not primarily from hegemonic power (as neocons and imperialists believe) or from international cooperation (as liberal internationalists believe), though those things are important. It comes, above all, from equilibrium. Equilibrium is not a good in itself, and sometimes it needs to be upset; but, for the realist, knocking things out of kilter sets off all kinds of unpredictable chain reactions, which can be hard to foresee and harder to control.

...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.

Until the advent of modern physics it was generally thought that all knowledge of the world could be obtained through direct observation, that things are what they seem, as perceived through our senses. But the spectacular success of modern physics, which is based upon concepts such as Feynman’s that clash with everyday experience, has shown that that is not the case. The naive view of reality therefore is not compatible with modern physics. To deal with such paradoxes we shall adopt an approach that we call model-dependent realism. It is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental elements and concepts. If two such physical theories or models accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.

Aristotle draws a sharp dividing-line between the activities of the physicist and those of the mathematician. The mathematician limits his enquiry to the quantifiable aspects of the world and so dramatically restricts what is describable in mathematical terms. Physics, for Aristotle, was far wider in scope and encompassed the earthly reality of sensible things. Whereas Plato had maintained that mathematics was the true and deep reality of which the physical world was but a pale reflection, Aristotle claimed mathematics to be but a superficial representation of a piece of physical reality. Such is the contrast between idealism and realism in the ancient world.

I landed on the roof of the hospital with a soft thud. The city was beautiful at night with all its lights on. Somewhere out there was Ryan, pacing the streets, hurt and angry, not understanding. I didn’t understand it, either. It was an abstract, somehow, a theory, this love. I loved everything. This city, my story, the Norns, Thor, Odin and the writer. I loved the einherjar, the battles, the books and my sisters. I loved it all to the point of my heart breaking. I loved it all for its beauty. So maybe I was capable of falling in love, after all. I was in love with the illusion. The stories intertwining underneath it all. In love with how it all came together to create an ongoing tale. In love with the fiction.

If we go back over the history of civilization, we find that in all “sciences,” except the exact ones, private opinions and theories have shaped our beliefs, colored our mental processes and controlled our destinies; we see, for example, pessimism opposed to optimism, materialism to spiritualism, realism to idealism, capitalism to socialism, and so on endlessly. Each of the disputatious systems has a large number of followers and each faction looks upon the others as deprived of truth, common sense and knowledge. All of them play with the words “natural law” which they ignorantly presume to have as the basis and content of their own particular doctrine. It

Working in Moscow from 1933 until 1945, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács (1885–1971) developed a theory of “Critical Realism” with respect to literature. Lukács admired narrative novelists such as Cervantes (1547–1616), Balzac (1799–1850), Dickens (1812–70), Gorky (1868–1936), Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955).

Why there are conspiracy theories mythic, realism, classified, secrets on every aspects of governance and law - two reasons protect humanity and protected from humanity. there is a third reason as well

Ever since the Prajnā-Pāramitā-Sūtras, or the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, practitioners of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna have sought to cultivate the recognition that all phenomena are empty (shūnya): Everything that we could possibly point to, talk about, or even merely think of is a conceptual construct. Hence, according to the masters of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, nothing that is composite has any essence (sva-bhāva); everything is “without self” (nairātmya). In its most developed form—that of the Madhyamaka school founded by Nāgārjuna—this teaching came to mean that nothing is independently real. In his Madhyamaka-Kārikā (24.18), Nāgārjuna notes that it is the Buddha’s teaching of “dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda) that we call ‘emptiness’ (shūnyatā).” Everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions or what in modern ecology is known as the “web of life” or “interconnectedness.” When we think of a star, for instance, we must admit that it is not so much a stable thing but a very complex process of limited duration. The same is true of our body, the mind, and every other conceivable thing. But in order to navigate in the world of appearances, we artificially construct a cosmos populated by stable things, as if these had inherent existence. The problem with this is that we begin to take them very seriously—including our body-mind—and start reacting either by attracting or rejecting them. In the case of our body, we even go so far as to identify with it, and as a result we suffer all kinds of negative consequences, notably the fear of death. The cure, according to Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, is to cultivate the vision of emptiness, realizing of course that “emptiness” itself is a mental construct and therefore empty of inherent existence. Practitioners who forget this truth are apt to take shūnyatā itself as a definitive view (drishti) rather than as an antidote to all abstractions, which is the intended purpose. This kind of thinking has led to accusations of nihilism: that nothing whatsoever is real at any level and that nirvāna therefore is a completely meaningless and undesirable goal. In fact, both nihilism and realism are erroneous. Already the Buddha declined to speculate about the nature of nirvāna; he simply wanted to point a way to its realization. The Madhyamaka school simply developed this fundamental teaching along rigorous logical lines, focusing on the art of refutation of all possible metaphysical standpoints. But the language of emptiness is not meant to be merely a game of logic. Its real function is to shatter the conceptual mind and guide it to the truth about phenomena. For this emptiness must not only be understood intellectually but experienced through the cultivation of wisdom and compassion by means of the ten stages of the bodhisattva path.

Ever since the Prajnā-Pāramitā-Sūtras, or the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, practitioners of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna have sought to cultivate the recognition that all phenomena are empty (shūnya): Everything that we could possibly point to, talk about, or even merely think of is a conceptual construct. Hence, according to the masters of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, nothing that is composite has any essence (sva-bhāva); everything is “without self” (nairātmya). In its most developed form—that of the Madhyamaka school founded by Nāgārjuna—this teaching came to mean that nothing is independently real. In his Madhyamaka-Kārikā (24.18), Nāgārjuna notes that it is the Buddha’s teaching of “dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda) that we call ‘emptiness’ (shūnyatā).” Everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions or what in modern ecology is known as the “web of life” or “interconnectedness.” When we think of a star, for instance, we must admit that it is not so much a stable thing but a very complex process of limited duration. The same is true of our body, the mind, and every other conceivable thing. But in order to navigate in the world of appearances, we artificially construct a cosmos populated by stable things, as if these had inherent existence. The problem with this is that we begin to take them very seriously—including our body-mind—and start reacting either by attracting or rejecting them. In the case of our body, we even go so far as to identify with it, and as a result we suffer all kinds of negative consequences, notably the fear of death. The cure, according to Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, is to cultivate the vision of emptiness, realizing of course that “emptiness” itself is a mental construct and therefore empty of inherent existence. Practitioners who forget this truth are apt to take shūnyatā itself as a definitive view (drishti) rather than as an antidote to all abstractions, which is the intended purpose. This kind of thinking has led to accusations of nihilism: that nothing whatsoever is real at any level and that nirvāna therefore is a completely meaningless and undesirable goal. In fact, both nihilism and realism are erroneous. Already the Buddha declined to speculate about the nature of nirvāna; he simply wanted to point a way to its realization. The Madhyamaka school simply developed this fundamental teaching along rigorous logical lines, focusing on the art of refutation of all possible metaphysical standpoints. But the language of emptiness is not meant to be merely a game of logic. Its real function is to shatter the conceptual mind and guide it to the truth about phenomena. For this emptiness must not only be understood intellectually but experienced through the cultivation of wisdom and compassion by means of the ten stages of the bodhisattva path. The inherent selflessness or emptiness of beings notwithstanding, a bodhisattva is altruistically dedicated to their liberation.

Nietzsche's ontological theory presumes neither a pre-given world of unknowable becoming nor a pre-given world of ordinary objects. Against all realisms, Nietzsche maintains that every ontology is the construction of an interpretation and that no world would remain over after the subtraction of every interpretation. Against idealism, he argues that interpretations are not the productions of isolated subjects or minds but complexes of evaluation and power that traverse the entire spectrum of organic life and are discernible even in the inorganic world. Indeed, Nietzsche short-circuits the distinction between idealism and realism by dissolving the poles of subject and object into the unified field of interpretation or will to power.

Die Hypostasierung von Allgemeinbegriffen hat in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte bekanntlich nicht selten eine verhängnisvolle Rolle gespielt. Eine Gruppe radikaler Begriffsrealisten des Mittelalters sah in Allgemeinbegriffen wie Wärme oder Kälte oder Farbe realere Wesen als in den Einzeldingen, denen nur eine abhängige Art von Realität zukomme. Die Universalien seien Substanzen, welche die Einzeldinge erzeugen und bestimmen. - Ähnlich sehen heute radikale Begriffsrealisten - die es allerdings sind, ohne es zu wissen - im Begriff des "Kapitalismus" ein Wesen, dem eine hohere Realität zukomme als den einzelnen Tatsachen und das diese einzelne Tatsachen erzeuge. Im Kapitalismus wird die causa efficiens gesehen - nicht nur des wirtschaftlichen, sondern alles geschichtlichen Geschehens. Diese magisch-mystische Betrachtungsweise beherrscht einen Teil der neueren soziologischen und wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Arbeiten. Ein auffallendes Beispiel bietet das Buch von SCHUMPETER "Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie" (Deutsche Ubersetzung 1946). Dort wird nicht nur erzahlt, welche Leistungen der Kapitalismus oder der kapitalistische Prozess (also die "Person" oder die "Substanz") auf technisch-wirtschaftlichem Gebiet vollbracht habe. Wir hören auch, dass der aufsteigende Kapitalismus die moderne Wissenschaft schuf, dass er die Malerei seit GIOTTO gestaltete, dass der moderne Pazifismus und die moderne internationale Moral Produkte des Kapitalismus seien, dass und wie er aber eine allgemeine Feindseligkeit gegen sich erzeugt habe und dass er selbst die Mauern zum Einsturz bringe, auf denen er ruhe. - SCHUMPETER ist Positivist. Er will Fakten darstellen, ohne Stellung zu nehmen. Er will im Stile COMTES, der St. Simonisten und vieler anderer Positivisten das Entwicklungsgesetz "beschreiben", das sich in den geschichtlichen Fakten vorfindet. Und er wehrt sich dagegen, von "Kraft", Ursache"" usw. zu sprechen, da sie metaphysische Begriffe seien. Was geschieht aber? Eine anthropomorph gedachte, iibernatiirliche Kraft - eben der "Kapitalismus" - wird für ihn zum Leiter des Marionettenspieles, das Geschichte heißt. Sie gibt den Gesetzgebern ihre Gedanken, den Wissenschaftlern ihre Einfälle, den Moralphilosophen ihre Vorstellungen von der Welt der Werte, und sie führt den Malern den Pinsel. Wir lesen eine Erzählung über ein zeitweise allmächtiges, nunmehr alterndes Wesen und sein Tun. Seit COMTE rühmen sich die Positivisten, das "theologische" und "metaphysische" Zeitalter überwunden und das dritte Stadium der Menschheitsgeschichte, nämlich das positivistische heraufgeführt zu baben. Wie COMTE und viele andere Positivisten merkt aber auch SCHUMPETER nicht, wie sehr er sich von seinem eigenen Programm entfernt und wie er in magisch-mystisches Denken zurückfällt. Wenige Metaphysiker haben so arglos mit einer personifizierten Substanz gearbeitet und so bedenkenlos geglaubt, in ihr die wirkende Ursache aller Geschichte zu finden, wie SCHUMPETER und andere Moderne in dem personifizierten "Kapitalismus". Aus dem mittelalterlichen Universalien-Streit und aus den Misserfolgen des hypostasierenden Begriifsrealismus konnten die heutigen Begriffsrealisten viel lernen, und der VerIauf dieses Streites sollte eine Warnung für sie sein.

Feminist contributions can claim a good deal of the credit for modern social theory displaying increasing sensitivity to the dangers of overgeneralising.

This model, the basis for cognitive-behavioral therapy, is contradicted by another theory that has a growing amount of clinical evidence behind it: the depressive realism hypothesis. This theory argues that depressed people aren’t depressed because they distort reality; they’re depressed because they see reality more clearly than other people do.

Revolutionary theory also enshrined the living utopian hope that the State would wither away, and that the political sphere would negate itself as such, in the apotheosis of a finally transparent social realm. None of this has come to pass. The political sphere has disappeared, sure enough - but so far from doing so by means of a self-transcendence into the strictly social realm, it has carried that realm into oblivion with it. We are now in the transpolitical sphere; in other words, we have reached the zero point of politics, a stage which also implies the reproduction of politics, its endless simulation. For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end. So politics will never finish disappearing - nor will it allow anything else to emerge in its place. A kind of hysteresis of the political reigns. Art has likewise failed to realize the utopian aesthetic of modern times, to transcend itself and become an ideal form of life. (In earlier times, of course, art had no need of self-transcendence, no need to become a totality, for such a totality already existed - in the shape of religion.) Instead of being subsumed in a transcendent ideality, art has been dissolved within a general aestheticization of everyday life, giving way to a pure circulation of images, a transaesthetics of banality. Indeed, art took this route even before capital, for if the decisive political event was the strategic crisis of 1929, whereby capital debouched into the era of mass trans politics, the crucial moment for art was undoubtedly that of Dada and Duchamp, that moment when art, by renouncing its own aesthetic rules of the game, debouched into the transaesthetic era of the banality of the image. Nor has the promised sexual utopia materialized. This was to have consisted in the self-negation of sex as a separate activity and its self-realization as total life. The partisans of sexual liberation continue to dream this dream of desire as a totality fulfilled within each of us, masculine and feminine at once, this dream of sexuality as an assumption of desire beyond the difference between the sexes. In point of fact sexual liberation has succeeded only in helping sexuality achieve autonomy as an undifferentiated circulation of the signs of sex. Although we are certainly in transition towards a transsexual state of affairs, this has nothing to do with a revolution of life through sex - and everything to do with a confusion and promiscuity that open the door to virtual indifference (in all senses of the word) in the sexual realm.

It was the doomed competition with photography that had led painting to lose its ways in the mindless transcription of reality. Admittedly the scorn for realism had been a traditional theme of premodern art theory, often mapped onto onto a geographic distinction. The direct imitation of reality was the northern European weakness, a limitation to be countered by an idealism cultivated in the Mediterranean realm.

The difference between international politics as it actually is and a rational theory derived from it is like the difference between a photograph and a painted portrait. The photograph shows everything that can be seen by the naked eye; the painted portrait does not show everything that can be seen by the naked eye, but it shows, or at least seeks to show, one thing that the naked eye cannot see: the human essence of the person portrayed... Political realism presents the theoretical construct of a rational foreign policy which experience can never completely achieve. At the same time political realism considers a rational foreign policy to be good foreign policy; for only a rational foreign policy minimizes risks and maximizes benefits and, hence, complies both with the moral precept of prudence and the political requirement of success. Political realism wants the photographic picture of the political world to resemble as much as possible its painted portrait. Aware of the inevitable gap between good—that is, rational—foreign policy and foreign policy as it actually is, political realism maintains not only that theory must focus upon the rational elements of political reality, but also that foreign policy ought to be rational in view of its own moral and practical purposes.

Scientific realism might seem just obvious: isn’t doubting our well-established theories a sort of anti-scientific scepticism? But there are reasons to treat it cautiously. The first we have already met: the threat of underdetermination. If we have two theories that make the same observational predictions but which contradict one another, then (at least) one of them must be false—in which case the no-miracles argument can’t be right.

Kashmir Shaivism asserts that all phenomena that ever appear in the universe enjoy an eternal existence within Absolute Consciousness. Because time and space do not exist for the Absolute, these phenomena do not exist within Consciousness in the same way that things exist in a room. Rather, they exist and shine within the Absolute as pure Consciousness. For example, a plant exists in a seed in the form of the potential of the seed to appear as a plant. The whole universe exists within Absolute Consciousness in the form of its divine potency. Consciousness is capable of appearing as anything and everything in the universe by Its own free will. Therefore, the philosophy asserts that all things have an eternal and absolutely real existence within pure and absolute Consciousness. This approach is known as spiritual realism and is another example of a theory that is particular to Kashmir Shaivism. Spiritual realism is considerably different from the realism of other philosophical systems, for instance material realism of the Nyaya-Vaisesika and Samkhya schools. Also, this realism should be differentiated from certain forms of idealism in both India and Europe. These idealists generally consider phenomenal existence to be the outward manifestation of past mental impressions appearing like things in a dream. According to Kashmir Shaivism, the things of this world are not a dream because they enjoy a concrete existence in time, present a common target for the activities of many people, and serve a particular function. The things of this world are real for all practical purposes. In other words, the authors of Kashmir Shaivism have worked out a pragmatic realism. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. xxi-xxii