Tag: Highlight

Thoughts are more real than objects (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Metaphysics

Jeremy Dunham, PhD | 2024-04-20

What is idealism? Throughout history, in most cases, philosophical idealism is a metaphysical position. The idealist is concerned with reality’s fundamental nature. It is often mistakenly thought to be a reductive theory of the fundamental nature of reality. Many critics have supposed that the idealist tries to reduce reality to the subjective states of individual minds. According to this form of subjective idealism there is no world outside our minds. This view is often associated with the British empiricist Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753). Famously, when told that such idealism was irrefutable, the English author Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) shouted, “I refute it thus” and kicked a stone. The idealist therefore is thought to be the one who denies. They are anti-realist, anti-materialist, anti-naturalist, and certainly anti-stones.

This way of thinking about philosophical idealism is misleading. Many kinds of philosophers have both voluntarily and involuntarily been referred to as idealists. However, they are united by an understanding of idealism as a form of realism. Idealism is not a reductive philosophy. It argues for the real existence of elements of reality often dismissed. It is a realism about ideas. Even Berkeley frames his position as a realism. He wrote that “the real things are those things I see, and feel, and perceive by my senses.”

Berkeley opposed his view to those who regard our rich conscious phenomenal world, the world of tastes, feels, colours, and sounds, as in some way less real than the physical world. For Berkeley, the real stone is the coloured object which we see and feel and that resists us when kicked. If Johnson kicked the stone as hard as I imagine, he entered a world of pain. For Berkeley, this world is the real world. His idealism is ampliative, not reductive. Its aim is to account for the full extent of our reality. Berkeley, then, is not anti-stone. He argued that only idealism can do justice to stones.

Although idealism may refer to a doctrine that affirms the reality of our ideas in this subjective sense, there is another sense of the word ‘idea.’ This is the Platonic Idea, often referred to as ‘Form’ or ‘Universal.’ Idealism shares something in common with the modern philosophical view known as Platonism. But there are significant differences. Platonists defend the existence of universals in addition to particular properties. A Platonist about properties, for example, believes that in addition to the individual things in the world that have redness amongst their properties, such as the red pen in front of me and the red symbols on my computer screen, there is the universal redness. This universal isn’t in front of me. It doesn’t exist anywhere in space or time. It is an abstract object. An abstract object is neither physical nor mental. It is causally inert, fixed, and unchanging. Yet, when we see redness in the world, this redness is an exemplification or instantiation of that universal. Particular red things are united by the fact that they instantiate this universal. Accordingly, the modern Platonist seems to postulate two worlds. One of abstract objects and another in which they are instantiated. However, since the abstract objects are causally inert, the relationship between these worlds is mysterious.

One of the most important schools of idealism in its history is that known as absolute idealism. It originates with Hegel in Germany, but flourished towards the end of the nineteenth-century with many adherents in the Oxbridge philosophy departments and worldwide. Here, the idea in idealism explicitly refers to Plato’s ideas. However, the absolute idealist attempts to bring the two worlds described above together into one. Consequently, the abstract universal is made concrete.

In several places, Plato suggests that things have the properties they do in virtue of participating in the Idea (or universal). A beautiful thing is beautiful in virtue of the fact that it participates in the Idea of beauty. However, this suggests that the particulars stand in a causal relationship with the universals. Ideas are causally responsible for the existence of properties in the concrete world. Perhaps we are wrong to think of Plato’s Ideas as abstract objects after all? Abstract universals are causally inert, so whatever relationship there is between them and their instantiating particulars, it cannot be causal. This is the absolute idealist’s starting point. The universals do not exist outside of our world. They are immanent to it. They are not abstract, rather they are concrete. As Hegel claimed, since the living world is concrete not abstract, those who consider universals as abstract kill the living thing.

This kind of idealist argues that our world has the structure or form that it does because of the universals immanent to it. Hegel wrote that “The universal is the essential, true nature of things” and that “through thinking these over we become acquainted with the true nature of things.” Any individual bear, for Hegel, has a universal nature. It’s that aspect of its nature it shares with any other bear and thus enables us to identify it as a bear, even if we’ve never seen this individual bear before. But it is also different to every other bear. It has particular features that distinguish it from any other bear and make it an individual.

Crucially, in the case of the concrete universal, the particular features that make an individual the individual it is are not external to the universal but rather contained within it. You do not get the individual bear by bundling a bunch of extra particulars to the universal bear. Hegel dedicates much of his famous Phenomenology of Spirit to demonstrating that if you start with properties that are only externally related, it’s impossible to combine them together into the kind of unities that make up our world. A bear isn’t a bundle of qualities. It’s a self-preserving organism for which the parts depend on the whole as much as the whole depends on the parts. Its particular properties, like the thickness of its fur, are different in the winter than in the summer because they are internally related to the organism as a whole and sensitive to its survival needs.

What does it mean to say that the concrete universal contains particulars within itself? It means that the individual bear becomes the individual bear not by addition, but by negation. To think the abstract universal, you abstract away all the properties that differentiate one bear from another and the universal is whatever is left. The concrete universal, on the other hand, includes all those differences. The particularisation of the bear is the process by means of which it negates the properties that do not belong to it, leaving behind just those that make it the individual bear.

This is the meaning behind Hegel’s often quoted phrase: all determination is negation. ‘The true, infinite universal’, Hegel writes, ‘determines itself… it is creative power as self-referring absolute negativity. As such, it differentiates itself internally.’ This points to an important characteristic of the concrete universal: it determines the development of the individual. The universal guides the bear’s ideal development. It should develop from a cub to a yearling and then from a young adult to a mature adult. However, it develops in its own particular way. Although all bears develop from cub to yearling, only this individual cub developed in this particular way. The thought is that if you took away from the universal every particular way that the bear might develop, leaving us with the abstract universal consisting of just the features all bears share, you’re actually left with nothing. Certainly, you’re left with nothing living. You’ve murdered the living thing.

According to the most prominent contemporary metaphysical readings of Hegel, such as Robert Stern’s, the concrete universals should be understood as similar to Aristotelian substance kinds. This means that there are as many concrete universals as there are individuals to instantiate them. Emily is the individual human she is because she is a self-particularising concrete universal. However, the absolute idealists who dominated the British philosophical world towards the end of the nineteenth century believed that all these concrete universals were ultimately interrelated as parts of one all-encompassing concrete universal.

For the nineteenth-century British idealist Bernard Bosanquet, the perverse thing about abstract universals is that the wider their extension is, the less there is to them. This is because you get the universal giant panda when you abstract everything particular away from every individual giant panda. Then, to get the universal bear, you must abstract all the features that particularise it as one of its particular species of bear, like giant panda. To get the universal mammal you then abstract all the features that make each animal a mammal rather than a reptile, bird, or fish. The more things that supposedly instantiate a universal, the sparser the features of that universal are.

On the contrary, the logic of the concrete universal, Bosanquet says, does violence to the ‘inverse ratio of intention to extension.’ There is not less to the universal animal than there is to the universal bear, rather there is more because the universal animal contains bear within it and a whole host of other animals too. It’s the most substantial Noah’s ark you can imagine. However, if bears are part of a higher universal of mammals and mammals are part of a higher universal of animals, why stop there? Couldn’t there be a universal ‘living thing’? And perhaps one above that? For Bosanquet, this is exactly right. We keep going until we end up with just one concrete universal, the absolute Idea, the world as a whole. For Bosanquet this is ‘a system of members, such that every member, being ex hypothesi distinct, nevertheless contributes to the unity of the whole in virtue of the peculiarities which constitute its distinctness.’ In agreement with the Aristotelian reading of idealism, each individual is the self-particularising of the concrete universal, but, ultimately, it’s one and the same concrete universal self-particularising in various different ways.

The result of this is that we owe our individuality to a larger whole in which we are all systematically related and which relates us to each other in a fundamental way. Earlier I claimed that many people incorrectly regard idealism as a philosophy that is characterised by the things that it is against. However, here we find something that this kind of idealist really is anti: the idea of fundamental separateness. This has significant ethical implications. The most important absolute idealist of the twenty-first century, Timothy Sprigge (1932-2007), wrote that absolute idealism’s main message is that ‘we are nearer the core of things when we partly transcend it [our separateness] in cooperative ethical, cultural, and intellectual endeavours and in mutual aid.’

Idealism is a label that has been used to refer to a huge variety of different philosophical positions. I’ve focused on metaphysical versions to show how different idealism is from its common misconceptions. Idealism is not a reductive philosophy but an inflationary one. Idealism aims to do justice to the full extent of the characteristics of the world in which we live. Any thorough-going realism, any realism that takes every feature of our world seriously, must be a realism about the idea.

Many of the ideas in the article were developed in collaboration with Iain Hamilton Grant and Sean Watson when we wrote our 2011 Idealism book together. I’m also very grateful for many conversations with Robert Stern since then which have improved my understanding of the concrete universal. Thanks also to Joe Saunders and Emily Thomas for their comments on an earlier draft. 

A subjective world can still be real (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. Paul Franks, PhD | 2024-03-31

For all I know on the basis of my current experience alone, I could be living in the matrix instead of inhabiting the mind-independent world. My experience could seem just as it seems right now, but it could be caused by something other than the mind-independent world in which I take myself to perceive and act. This familiar thought may be motivated by consideration of dreams, as it was for Descartes, or by more contemporary reflections on virtual reality. From this thought, many philosophers have inferred that what I perceive at any given moment is always and only mind-dependent, an inner world.  Kant calls this empirical or material idealism: the objects we experience, the material causes of our sensations, are not real. It seems to lead to a sceptical worry: how can I know that I don’t inhabit the matrix: a virtual or ideal reality, with an opaque causal ground? Both Berkeley’s immaterialist idealism and Kant’s empirical realism offer ways out of the matrix. But Kant’s solution does what Berkeley’s cannot: it vindicates the everyday world in which we determine the sequence of our thoughts in time by means of mind-independent objects and events.

According to what has come to be called Berkeley’s master argument, there is no way to think the idea that terms such as “mind-independent reality” purport to express.

But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance in a park, or books in a closet, and no one to perceive them. I answer, you may do so, there is no difficulty in it, but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive?  . . . you have the power of imaging or framing ideas in your mind: but it doth not show that you can conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. (Principles of Human Knowledge, sec. 23)

On its own, this argument seems fallacious. Perhaps, as Bertrand Russell suggested, Berkeley is confusing “idea” as act, which is mental, with “idea” as object of mental activity, which may not be mental. Others have suggested other fallacies.

But the argument should not be taken on its own. It needs supplementation by Berkeley’s account of idea formation and usage, roughly equivalent to what we would now call semantics. In his critique of Locke’s account of abstract ideas, Berkeley says in effect that ideas are sensible images, and that images are always concrete and determinate. To be sure, we use general words, such as “human” or “thing,” but we do not thereby signify indeterminate ideas, as Locke had suggested. Instead, we use words in general ways: I have formed concrete ideas of images of many humans, and I may now use the word “human” to signify any and all of them. There is no need to posit monstrosities such as Locke’s idea of a triangle that has no determinate angles or lengths of sides.

Now let us apply this rejection of Lockean abstraction to the term “mind-independent reality.” No idea can occur in the mind without my perceiving it. To separate ideas from mental awareness is no less absurd than the separation of triangle-images from determinacy of side and angle. Since we can attach no meaning to the sceptical worry that mind-independent reality is entirely different from what we perceive, we should stop worrying about it.

So what do we mean, according to Berkeley, when we think or talk about everyday objects, like the famous tree falling in the forest with nobody around?  We refer, he suggests, to reliable patterns of perceptions.  If I say that the tree’s fall makes a sound when nobody perceives it, I mean that, if somebody were to be there, they would perceive it. As a theist—indeed, a bishop of the Church of Ireland—Berkeley thinks that God guarantees the reliability of the patterns, although God can modify it when desirable, which explains miracles. (There are significant difficulties with the view—known today as phenomenalism—that objects are what J. S. Mill called “permanent possibilities of perception”, especially without theism, but those are for another day.)

This view goes along with Berkeley’s instrumentalism about natural science. In late antiquity, astronomy was distinguished from terrestrial physics. Terrestrial physics was realistic, dealing with mind-independent dispositions to motion. But the heavens were so remote that celestial physics lay beyond human comprehension, and astronomy was therefore nothing more than a mathematical model: an instrument for prediction using epicycles and other devices to which no reality could be accorded. In the early modern scientific revolution, thinkers such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton aspired to a fully realistic physics, involving laws of motion and real forces operative both on earth and in the heavens. But Berkeley went in the other direction. He rejected the idea of a realistic, explanatory physics. Instead he understood all physics in terms of models with instrumental use only.

Berkeley’s way out of the matrix retains empirical idealism: what I perceive at any given moment is always and only mind-dependent. One of Kant’s major arguments—the Refutation of (Empirical) Idealism—offers another off-ramp. The argument is that I can have an inner, mental life only if I also have a life of perceptual engagement with the external, mind-independent world. It turns on what Kant calls time-determination.

I determine my inner, mental life in time insofar as I assign temporal sequence to, say, the parts of a thought, or the steps in an argument.  If I had only the capacity to assign temporal order to my mental acts, then I could not check or correct my order assignments at all.  But I can check and correct my order assignments, because I situate them within an objective temporal sequence that involves the external world. I determine objective time by perceiving regular change, such as the motion of clock hands, against a stable background, such as a clock-face. If my assignments of before and after to my subjective acts can be right or wrong, this can only be because I can also situate them within objectively determined time, and I can determine objective time only because I can perceive both relative motion and relative rest outside me in mind-independent objects. When I think of myself as having one thought before another, I am implicitly thinking of myself as being able to determine when in objective time I had those thoughts, so I am implicitly thinking of myself as perceiving a world beyond the mind.

Consequently, to think of myself as merely dreaming, or as trapped in the virtually real matrix, is to think of myself from a perspective outside the dream or the matrix—to think of myself as inhabiting mind-independent reality. It may be true that, for all I know, I am dreaming or in a matrix at the present moment. But this does not entail that there is no perceivable mind-independent world of the sort I take there to be.

Empirical realism is what Kant calls the resultant position that I can directly perceive the mind-independent objects of experience. But he famously argues that empirical realism is sustainable only if one also accepts transcendental idealism: the view that, although the objects of experience are perspectival, and appear to us in virtue of the spatio-temporal form of human sensibility, this does not impugn the mind-independence of the underlying material causes of sensation, any more than the fact that I can see the River Hudson only through a window partly occluded by a tree, means that the river is partly occluded in itself.

Kant’s own arguments for transcendental idealism are closely interwoven with his commitment to the mathematics and physics of his day.  In light of the development of non-Euclidean geometry shortly after his death, and the application of non-Euclidean geometry in relativity theory a century later, Kant’s arguments for transcendental idealism have not aged well. Nevertheless, the basic insights of transcendental idealism—that human cognition is perspectival and, indeed, always involves taking a perspective, which is a human activity even if it is one of which we are usually unaware—still ring true. In fact, the very fact of scientific revolution, illustrated by the shift from classic to relativistic physics, deepens the point, because we are now inclined to say, not that there is one immutable human perspective, but that there can be several, which underlines the involvement of human activity, since we not only take perspectives, we change perspectives. Taking a perspective, as Kant was the first to insist, involves the active determination of a material world in which we can determine time. Relativity theory radicalizes this brilliant insight by introducing multiple perspectives from which time may be determined distinctly. But, even with this revision, time determination necessarily involves the material world external to the individual. So the world is both transcendentally ideal—relative to an actively taken perspective—and also empirically real.

Kant’s combination of transcendental idealism and empirical realism harmonizes far better with our ordinary experience of the world, and with the enterprise of natural science, than Berkeley’s combination of phenomenalism and instrumentalism. If you are looking for a way out of the matrix, I suggest you take Kant’s rather than Berkeley’s.

Does quantum mechanics beckon the end of naturalism? (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Metaphysics

Bruce L. Gordon, PhD | 2024-03-10

Naturalism remains a popular philosophy in the academic world. Its articulation varies, so let’s be clear what we mean. Theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll’s definition will suffice: “Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world—the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world—no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings.” Advocates of naturalism tend to regard it as the inevitable accompaniment of a scientific mindset. It seems appropriate, therefore, to undermine it using the most fundamental of sciences: quantum physics.

Given its scientific pretensions, it’s appropriate that the doctrine that the natural world is self-contained, self-explanatory, and exceptionless is at least falsifiable. All we need is one counterexample to the idea that nature is a closed system of causes and effects, or one clear example of nature’s non-self-sufficiency, to be justified in rejecting naturalism, yet contrary evidence and considerations abound. Rather than trying to cover the gamut of cosmological fine-tuning, the origin of biological information, the origin and nature of consciousness, and the evidentiary value of near-death experiences,  let’s focus on the implications of quantum physics as a less familiar aspect of naturalism’s failure.

Quantum physics sets aside classical conceptions of motion and the interaction of bodies and introduces acts of measurement and probabilities for observational outcomes in an irreducible way not ameliorated by appealing to our limited knowledge. The state of a quantum system is described by an abstract mathematical object called a wave function that only specifies the probability that various observables will have a particular value when measured. These probabilities can’t all equal zero or one and measurement results are irreducibly probabilistic, so no sufficient physical reason exists for one outcome being observed rather than another. This absence of sufficient material causality in quantum physics has experimentally confirmed consequences that, as we shall see, put an end to naturalist conceits.

The delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment provides a good example with which to start. This experiment measures which path a particle took after wave function interference inconsistent with particle behavior has already been created. The interference can be turned off or on by choosing whether or not to measure which way the particle went after the interference already exists. Choosing to look erases wave function interference and gives the system a particle history. The fact that we can make a causally disconnected choice whether wave or particle phenomena manifest in a quantum system demonstrates that no measurement-independent causally-connected substantial material reality exists at the microphysical level.

We see this in other ways too. First, the physically reasonable assumptions that an individual particle, like an electron, cannot serve as an infinite source of energy or be in two places at once, entail that quantum particles have zero probability of existing in any bounded spatial region, no matter how large. Unobserved electrons (for example) don’t exist anywhere in space, and thus have no reality apart from measurement. In short, there is no intelligible notion of microscopic material objects: particle talk has pragmatic utility in relation to measurement results and macroscopic appearances, but no basis in unobserved (mind-independent) reality.

Secondly, microphysical properties do not require a physical substrate. Reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, quantum physics has its own Cheshire Cat in which quantum systems behave like their properties are spatially separated from their positions. For example, an experiment using a neutron interferometer has sent neutrons along one path while their spins follow another. In macroscopic terms, this would be like still having the spin once the top is taken away, having a dance without any dancer, or having a water wave without any water. Under appropriate experimental conditions, quantum systems are decomposable into disembodied properties—a collection of Cheshire Cat grins.

But how, then, should we understand the transition between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds? Every quantum wave function is expressible as a superposition of different possibilities (states) in which the thing it describes fails to possess the properties those possibilities specify. No quantum system, microscopic or macroscopic, ever has simultaneously determinate values for all its associated properties. You could think of it this way: imagine a house that, if you were looking at the front, didn’t have a back, and vice-versa. Everything we experience with our senses, if we take it to be a mind-independent object rather than just a phenomenological appearance, is metaphysically incomplete. What is more, under special laboratory conditions, we can create macroscopic superpositions of properties that are, classically speaking, inconsistent—for instance, a single object appearing in more than one location simultaneously. Large organic molecules have been put into such superpositions, and Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) have superposed a billion electrons moving clockwise around a superconducting ring with another billion electrons moving anticlockwise, so that two incompatible macroscopic currents are in superposition.

What this reveals is that the macroscopic stability we normally observe is the product of what physicists call environmental decoherence—the destructive interference of probability waves as quantum systems interact. You can imagine this as two water waves the same size meeting each other from opposite directions. When the crest of one wave meets the trough of the other, there is destructive interference as the waves cancel out and water’s surface is momentarily flat and calm. The quantum realm behaves analogously: our experiential world of appearances is cloaked in an illusory stability, while underneath, innumerable probability waves are destructively interfering in a roiling quantum sea.

It is important to keep in mind that, while this quantum sea is the basis of our experiential reality, none of the mathematical-structural components of interacting quantum wave functions are materially real. They are mathematical abstractions, a hollow and merely quantitative informational architecture. Speaking of the mathematical framework of physical theory, Robert Adams remarks that “[it] is a framework that, by its very nature, needs to be filled in by something less purely formal. It can only be a structure of something of some not merely structural sort… it participates in the incompleteness of abstractions… [whereas] the reality of a substance must include something intrinsic and qualitative over and above any formal or structural features it may possess.” Our experiential reality rests on a quantum-informational construct that is not materially substantial.

As a final observation before nailing the coffin of naturalism shut, in the case of laboratory-created macroscopic superpositions, our conscious self is not in the superposition but rather observing it. We are substantial, but the world of our experience is not. Our mental life transcends quantum reality. While this reality is given to us and not produced by our own consciousness, it is merely phenomenological—it goes no deeper than the perceptual possibilities across all five of our sensory modalities decohering (destructively interfering) to produce our world.

But why should this be so? When there is no sufficient physical reason why one observation occurs rather than another, why should mere perceptions cohere across our sensory modalities, and why should all of us inhabit the same world? Saying that since no physical explanation is possible, no explanation is required, would be a mistake of disastrous proportions. If there were no reason why we observe one thing rather than another, if the regularities of nature were metaphysically ungrounded, then our current perception of reality and its accompanying memories might be happening for no reason at all. How could we know? No objective probability and hence no likelihood is assignable to something for which there is no explanation, so we couldn’t even say this possibility is unlikely.

Let’s be perfectly clear. If we affirm brute chance by saying that some things can happen for no reason at all, we have deprived ourselves of any basis for deciding which things these are, and they could well include all of the perceptions and beliefs we currently take ourselves to have. This means we don’t even know whether we’re in touch with reality. We’re stuck with an irremediable skepticism that deprives our experience of any credibility, not only destroying any basis for doing science, but eliminating the very possibility of our knowing anything at all! Embracing brute chance by denying that every contingent event must have an explanation is the pathway to epistemic nihilism. An explanation must exist.

But what could the explanation be? The laws of nature, specifically those of quantum physics, won’t suffice. They’re neither logically nor metaphysically necessary. The reality they describe did not need to exist and they certainly didn’t cause its existence—in short, they are in need of explanation themselves. Clearly, naturalism is inadequate: it cannot meet the ineluctable explanatory demand. A proper ultimate explanation must terminate upon something that transcends contingent reality and has self-contained existence as its very essence.

The required conclusion is obvious: since every contingent state of affairs requires an explanation, there must exist a transcendent, independent, necessarily existent being the existence of which is explained by its intrinsic necessity. This being is unique, not just because two or more necessary beings is overkill, but because their mutual dependence would create unexplainable contingency. Furthermore, since spacetime and mass-energy are contingent phenomena, this transcendent being must be incorporeal. Finally, in explaining why any reality exists, especially in the absence of a uniquely best reality, a non-arbitrary self-determined decision based on a perfectly ranked and complete set of reasons known to this necessarily existent being must be made. This means the necessary ground for the phenomenological reality of our experience is a transcendent, omniscient Mind. Given such considerations, quantum physics not only shows the falsity of naturalism, it leads to a transcendent form of idealism. Goodbye, Richard Dawkins, and hello, Bishop Berkeley!

Wittgenstein on the practical significance of the physicalism vs idealism debate (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Philosophy

Prof. David R. Cerbone, PhD | 2024-03-03

In his very first meeting with Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein is reported to have said “that he did not think either realism or idealism was satisfactory: one would have to take some third position between them.” According to Rush Rhees, Russell rebuked the young Wittgenstein for seeking an intermediate position, since “you would have to have an intermediate position between this new one and each of the others, and so on ad infinitum.” But Wittgenstein’s early dissatisfaction with both realism and idealism persisted throughout the ensuing four decades of philosophical thinking and writing. He developed a neither-nor attitude towards realism and idealism, which is particularly clear in his much later comments on the subject in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (also published under the title Zettel, which means “scraps” or “fragments”). Here he suggests that the debate between idealists and realists has no practical significance for our lives.

These late remarks of Wittgenstein do not focus on the doctrinal details of these two “-isms.” In general, his writings are disappointing if one comes to them looking for attention to such details. In academic philosophy, realism and idealism come in myriad sophisticated versions with all manner of modifiers (transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, empirical realism, scientific realism, and so on). Wittgenstein’s interest lies instead with some of the more basic impulses that motivate philosophers to develop such intricate theories. He does so in the remarks we’ll be looking at by considering otherwise unnamed adherents to such views—the idealist rather than idealism, and the realist rather than realism. Wittgenstein invites us to consider the realist and idealist not so much as archetypical philosophical figures, but as otherwise ordinary people. What do these considerations reveal?

The first remark begins with Wittgenstein asking us to consider “a convinced realist” and “a convinced idealist,” each of whom has children. It would be natural to suppose that they would each want to pass on their respective convictions to their children: “In such an important matter as the existence or non-existence of the external world they don’t want to teach their children anything wrong.” However, Wittgenstein wonders what differences in parenting practices there might actually be between the idealist and the realist. “What will the children be taught?”, he asks, “To include in what they say: ‘There are physical objects’ or the opposite?” He indicates a degree of scepticism about this suggestion in his conclusion to this first remark: “If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children ‘There are no fairies’: he can omit to teach them the word ‘fairy’. On what occasion are they to say: ‘There are…’ or ‘There are no…’? Only when they meet people of the contrary belief.”

Wittgenstein’s appeal to fairies here is puzzling, since practically no one believes in the literal existence of fairies, yet children generally are taught the word ‘fairy.’ Little children tend to be quite conversant with fairy-talk, having been exposed early and often to storybooks, movies, and the like where fairies feature prominently (Peter Pan comes immediately to mind, but there are many others). While children may become adept at dressing like fairies or drawing them, none are taught to catch them (unless this is just a fanciful way of talking about catching fireflies), nor are fairies included when children start to learn about the kinds of animals that populate the world. They thereby pick up (eventually) that fairies are make-believe, usually without being told this explicitly. Occasionally, saying “there are no …” may come into play. If a child is instructed to make a list of things that fly and after listing birds, butterflies, and airplanes chooses to add fairies to the list, one might imagine the parent or teacher saying, “Well yes, I suppose, but of course there are no fairies.”

We might instead, then, be tempted to think of the differences between the practices of realist and idealist parents as akin to the differences between what a devout Christian and a committed atheist would teach their respective children. The Christian will talk to her children about God and Jesus, sin and atonement, salvation and redemption, both directly and through stories in which such ideas figure; moreover, she will talk of such matters in a manner and tone that conveys her convictions. Meanwhile, the atheist will by and large omit such topics of instruction and discussion, except when her children return from a playdate with the Christian’s children and she must explain to them what the other children believe. Of course, when she does this, the atheistic parent’s tone and manner is likely to be quite different from that of the Christian.

Wittgenstein does not directly answer his question about instruction when it comes to “There are physical objects.” The concept “physical object” is awfully abstract and it would seem that a child must learn a lot before being introduced to such a notion. The same goes for a child learning about appearances, which is of importance especially for the idealist (what the realist counts as physical objects, the idealist considers mind-dependent appearances). Wittgenstein instead pivots to a more pedestrian example. Even if the convinced idealist eventually teaches—or tries to teach—his children that there are no physical objects, nonetheless “the idealist will teach his children the word ‘chair’ after all,” since “of course he wants to teach them to do this or that, e.g. to fetch a chair.” He then asks: “Then where will be the difference between what the idealist-educated children say and the realist ones? Won’t the difference only be one of the battle cry?”

Wittgenstein is still asking here about just what kind of difference these supposed doctrinal differences really make. When it comes to chairs and the like, what the idealist’s children come to learn will not look much different from what the realist’s children learn: the children of both parents will become equally conversant with chairs, not just with talking about them, but with sitting on them, arranging them, counting them, making sure there are enough in the room for the number of guests, getting more from the other room if not, and so on.

Can we therefore say that the children of both the idealist and the realist are first taught to believe (naively, as it were) that there are chairs, to accept that there are chairs with a kind of certainty? Wittgenstein rejects this appeal to certainty: “There isn’t any question of certainty or uncertainty yet in their language-game. Remember: they are learning to do something.” So the realist’s children might in the fullness of time be taught that chairs are physical objects, while the idealist’s children might come to learn about chair-appearances, but all of that is subsequent to the kind of imitation and instruction that leads to children sitting on, arranging, and fetching chairs. Moreover, whatever they learned at that earlier time—what they learned to do with chairs—is unaffected by whatever is added later. Hence Wittgenstein’s likening of the addition as only one of “the battle cry.”

Notice that this is not the case when it comes to the contrast between the parent who is a devout Christian and the parent who is an atheist: the differences here are not superfluous in relation to practice in the way the respective convictions of the realist and idealist are. To be sure, there will be overlap in what the different children learn, but there will be divergence as well: the Christian children will spend their childhoods going to church, learning various prayers, saying those prayers earnestly in various settings, and even when the Christian and atheist children do the same thing, their reasons and motives might be quite different. Nothing like that divergence happens with idealist and realist children: the child who is eventually taught that the chair is a physical object will sit on, fetch, and count chairs in exactly the same way as the child whose parent told her that chairs were systems of appearances. Nor, we might add, will there ever be a “fairy moment” of that kind that happens with the child making a list of things that fly. “There are no chairs” will only ever mean what we mean when walking into an empty room expecting (or hoping) to sit down.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes his method in philosophy as “marshalling recollections.” Much later in the text, he describes himself as “supplying remarks on the natural history of human beings.” These remarks do not concern “curiosities” of the kind we might take in at a natural history museum (e.g. the finer points of seal hunting or the vast variety of early muskets). Instead, they are “facts that no one has doubted, which have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes.” I think the remarks we have been considering about chairs are the kind of natural-historical observations Wittgenstein has in mind. “Human beings sit on chairs” strikes us as obvious and not even worth saying. A placard in a natural history bearing that observation would hardly warrant a passing glance. But confronted with the question, “Are chairs real?”—a question that sets us off in the direction of realism and idealism, appearances and physical objects, belief and certainty—that mundane observation is just the kind of thing we tend to ignore. “Are chairs real? I’ll have to sit and think about it.” Once the thinking has started, what the thinker did before getting started has already been forgotten.