Main Philosophical Directions

Directions of Epistemological Theory

Dualistic Realism

Under realism, one typically understands any worldview that seeks to satisfy the claims of various elements of the actual world, distinguished by pre-scientific thought as both material and spiritual, and to preserve for them significance commensurate with their actual influence. Accordingly, realism attempts to reduce such elements to distinct yet closely interconnected principles or to comprehend them as different facets or forms of the same being. In both cases, the emergence of realistic worldviews relies on the preceding development of other systems, materialist and idealist, which have unilaterally emphasized principles that are unified or subordinated by realism to a more general notion. Hence, realism, both in its natural position and historically, is a later worldview compared to materialism and idealism. It relates to the latter to some degree as critical thought does to empiricism and rationalism within epistemological currents. However, influenced by conditions that favor the development of realism from the two extreme tendencies of materialism and idealism, opposing directions frequently emerge that can be considered reactionary to realism, even as they may arise from the quest for strict unity and consistency—a quest that is ever-present in metaphysical thinking. These circumstances contribute to the fact that the development of realism is far less self-enclosed than that of materialism and idealism. It predominantly appears—this we have already observed with respect to the analogous critical thought, especially in its negative form, skepticism—at least in history at the terminal or pivotal points in the development of materialistic and idealistic systems, and rarely represents a wholly continuous evolution.

The first fully developed form of a realistic system is represented by Aristotelian metaphysics. Here, the dual dependence of realism on opposing systems and its conciliatory tendency are strikingly evident. The worldview advanced by Aristotelian metaphysics relies on the materialism of ancient natural philosophy on one side and on Platonic idealism on the other. It reconciles the claims of both by recognizing the principles of matter and form as equally necessary and thus equally valid; in this sense, the Aristotelian system does not consider matter solely as the fundamental principle, as do ancient cosmological systems; nor does it accept it, alongside Plato, as "non-being," whereby the knowledge of pure being, ideas, and their objective activity is obscured in sensory things. Aristotle's fundamental law states: "Without matter, there is no form; without form, there is no matter." Consequently, he replaces the concepts of form and matter with equivalent notions of "potentiality" and "actuality," δύναμις and ενέργεια. Forms are actualized according to purposes; thus, they represent spiritual forces (entelechies) and are therefore akin to Platonic ideas. However, they are not, like ideas, transcendent entities; they are immanent to matter: essence and substance represent reality constituted from matter and form and are predominantly something individual, as the latter possesses more immediate reality in the actual world than the genus formed from many distinct things. By consistently developing his view on the relationship between form and matter in actual being, Aristotle also assigns a different significance to the concept of the soul: the soul is no longer an intermediate link between the world of ideas and the sensory world; it is itself one of the active forms, the entelechy of the living body, the vital force in all its functions, from nutrition to thought. Thus, arising from his overarching metaphysics, Aristotle constructs a realistic physics, psychology, ethics, and politics. Only in theology and the most abstract part of psychology, in the doctrine of the thinking spirit, does the system retain an ideal tint, which, however, through the introduction of all beings into the series of development, acquires a fundamentally realistic character.

In the subsequent centuries, materialistic systems emerged that further developed the Aristotelian principle of immanence, alongside idealistic systems that returned to Platonic philosophy. After both types of systems jointly gave rise to eclectic worldviews, particularly in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, as well as in the early beginnings of scholasticism, which is aligned with Plato, realism arose once again in direct connection with the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy in the scholasticism of the 13th century and in other systems of subsequent church philosophy. The realistic direction that predominated in this period, along with the realistic currents of later times, took the form imparted to realism by Aristotle, preserving idealistic elements from theology, since Aristotle himself did not strictly maintain realism, permitting a dualism between the idea of God and the sensory world. This dualism, further intensified by scholastic theology due to the acceptance of revelation and the adoption of Christian religious representations—more vital and content-rich compared to Aristotle's conception of God—provided church philosophy with a means to satisfy, as evenly as possible, the claims of faith and secular life.

Realism in this dualistic form was once again pushed to the background at the dawn of modern philosophy, primarily by materialistic and idealistic currents, but it was revived in the science of the 17th century. Alongside the traditions of church philosophy, it was profoundly influenced, as much as materialism and idealism of that time, by new mathematical and scientific views. Cartesian philosophy serves as a central point, where, on one hand, all influences from both the earlier church realism and the contemporary currents predominant in the exact sciences converge, and from which, on the other hand, rays emerge illuminating the path for the forthcoming materialistic natural philosophy and the idealistic systems of the subsequent century. Yet, Cartesian philosophy, by dualistically uniting opposing principles, bears a realistic character, making it the direct foundation for subsequent realistic worldviews. Compared to Aristotelian realism, Descartes' realism is more external: it integrates materialistic and idealistic elements akin to ancient church philosophy. His natural philosophy leans toward materialism, while psychology gravitates toward idealism. This character of Cartesian dualism arises from the fact that the principles of matter and form, united in Aristotle's singular actual substance, are reduced by Descartes to two substances: body and soul. This change, in turn, results from the establishment of a new conception of the soul. Once the latter is made an independent substance, realism must adopt a dualistic form; it must seek not so much to reconcile the oppositions of materialism and idealism as simply to unify them within itself. However, in Descartes' system already lies the germ for its further development into a monistic system. Descartes inevitably posits the various substances he proposes—God, soul, and extended nature—in relation to one another, subordinating the latter two to the first: God is the eternal, uncreated substance; the soul and nature are created by God. Drawing further consequences from this idea of dependence and rigorously applying the notion of substance as a self-subsisting essence leads to the transition to monistic realism.