In Remembrance of Realism

by Simon Smith

Many things go through a fellow’s mind when he’s checking the proofs of his book, hunting down the last few typos (nasty little beggars, hiding among the black type and white space). Things like, ‘Is that really how that’s spelled?’, ‘Are there such things as philosophy groupies?’, ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ and, most significantly of all, ‘Is it lunchtime yet?’

A thing which shambled back and forth across my fevered mind made me grin cynically. It was a reviewer’s comment to the effect that, while the logic of my arguments was perfectly sound, readers would still, no doubt, disagree with the conclusions. I mention this, not by way of criticism. Quite the opposite, in fact; it was an extremely perspicacious remark. It tells us everything we need to know about philosophers, academics, perhaps even real people. (Another important clue to human nature may be the mushroom cloud, which is doubtless hovering over Southeast Asia e’er now.) The reasoning may be fine, but we are not convinced. Perhaps, we’re not as rational as we think. But let’s not get hung up on the supposed rationality of philosophical minds. Academia is home to many a narcissistic sociopath, dipsomaniac, pill-popper, and sex pest; ratio animalis hardly gets a look in.

Another thought, less cynical but more philosophical, concerned something I had forgotten to say about Peter Byrne. I spent the whole first chapter going to work on Byrne’s God and Realism (Ashgate, 2003) in order to show what a load of old toot it really is. Don’t get me wrong, I like Byrne’s book, it’s an excellent resource. Not, perhaps, the very best but representative of a type. God and Realism is a master-class in realist metaphysics and, most importantly, everything that’s wrong with it. Much of the old toot is the genuine article and turns up in every attempt to formulate philosophical realism. To be fair to Byrne, however, there’s plenty of original old toot there too; his contribution to the incoherence of realism cannot be gainsaid.

Having spent no little time dismembering Byrne’s so-called Innocent Realism, however, I forgot to say that, in the end, he’s actually right about something rather important.

Byrne’s point, in case anyone hasn’t read his book, is that theistical language is essentially realist. (This, despite explicitly stating that Innocent Realism is not remotely concerned with language; all he cares about is what actually exists.) We are told that to speak of God is (at the very least, to attempt) to refer to a mind-independent reality: the Creator of Heaven and Earth and all the rest of it.

Just here, the well-brought-up reader may be thinking, ‘Well, of course it is. The logic of theism has to be realist because it’s an attempt to refer to a Reality, which, putatively, is the creator of everything, including what we call “mentality”.’ Fair point. A Creator must be mind-independent, which is to say ontologically prior to, his or her Creation. Hardly an example of reasoning at its most sophisticated, but it’s fine as far as it goes, possibly. The trouble is, it doesn’t actually go very far.

The underlying obsession with things is, frankly, weird. It hints of clammy hands and a sinister glint in the eye. The reliance on necessitarian logic is a more serious problem. On its own terms, realism can be the only possible answer to the problem. Behind the acts and accidents of Creation there must be a Being such that… and so on and so forth. Ontological priority must be the only possible answer because if there’s another, then the inference back from the contingencies of actual existence to Creative Agency breaks down. And it’s not just the inference that’s in trouble; the logic of ‘God-talk’ toto caelo is undermined. To talk of God cannot, after all, be to talk of one contingent being among others, it must, absolutely must, be to talk of a Being whose existence cannot not be.

That’s all very well, except the realist’s overcooked inference is not the only possible answer. Consider the ways in which our intentions, far from being inevitably pre-fabricated, are frequently formed in the enactment of them; consider, for example, the ways in which ideas take shape in their expression, or explanation or, better still, the discussion. How often do our thoughts only really become clear when we talk them through with friends? Isn’t that the point of writing books and blogs and everything else, at least in part?

Let’s not get sidetracked. The point is, Byrne’s right: theism has to be realist; indeed it does. That’s why theism necessarily deconstructs itself. Separating Divine Will from Acts Creative and Providential strips Divinity of all its predicates, so breaks the back of personal analogies. It pushes its own logic to breaking point and beyond. And what does it leave us with? ‘Being-just-being-itself-in-plenitude’, that’s the expression I borrowed from Farrer. What does it mean? Not a great deal.

It’s this, in the end, which leaves theism defenceless against the ‘vulgar empiricism’, as Feuerbach termed it (The Essence of Christianity, Harper & Row, 1957), which persists in asking logically indecent questions like ‘does (really) God exist?’

Tellingly, empiricism, particularly in the guise of the modern sciences, is essentially idealist, as John Macmurray (The Self as Agent, Faber and Faber, 1957) and Michael Polanyi (Personal Knowledge, U. of Chicago, 1974) have shown. Everyone knows that the demand for sensory experience made science kin to the sense-datum philosophies which flourished at the beginning of the 20^th Century. What carried it beyond mere phenomenalism, however, was its commitment to the diagrammatic nature of reality. The sciences present us with maps of the universe, which have, thus far, been extremely useful for finding our way about, as it were. Insofar as they are useful – i.e. as they enable us to control, direct, and therefore understand the universe – we consider them accurate. Whether or not they correspond to a reality ‘beyond’ or ‘beneath’ the maps is hardly relevant and certainly of no concern of the scientist.

The sciences only get into trouble when they forget the diagrammatic nature of their universe and suppose their maps are real in and of themselves. Indeed, the scientist who imagines her epistemic tools are the only epistemic tools an enquiring mind, an enlightened mind, could ever need, has abandoned science in favour of philosophy, and bad philosophy at that. She has committed the cardinal error of aping theism and thinking her discipline a realist one. (Given how very critical of philosophy some scientists are, it’s curious how very eager they are to have a go.) Being somewhat more tidy-minded, the sciences generally get rid of all the mapmakers first, those diagrammatising minds, who lie behind their diagrams. So goes the deconstruction of scientific thought.

In A Science of God? (Geoffrey Bles Ltd. 1966), Farrer referred to the scientist who followed this rocky path, convincing herself that any reality her tools cannot discover is no reality at all, as a ‘small-minded scientist’. Interestingly, the idea that so unscientific creature could actually exist, particularly these days, he laughed to scorn. The ‘small-minded scientist,’ he insisted, was a bit of foolish caricature.

Ahem.

That, of course, is not the end of the story for any kind of enquiring mind. The scientist’s corrective is simple enough: get back to work and stop fussing about questions which don’t concern her. Theism, however, has a more difficult road ahead. The theist, or theistical philosopher, cannot simply ‘get back to work’; not, at least, without wilfully ignoring the logical and empirical disintegration of his metaphysics. Naturally, the philosopher who would choose bad philosophy and worse theology – not to mention a pernicious psychology – over a healthy and inclusivist alternative is, I suppose, as much a caricature as Farrer’s ‘small-minded scientist’. Besides, theism, or more simply, religious faith, is far too important to leave in clutches of that ‘vulgar empiricism’; for lived faith is personality writ large. Where deconstruction occurs, reconstruction will surely follow. And thanks to the likes of Farrer and Feuerbach we have far better tools to work with. That, however, is a thought for another day.