Realism, Idealism, and the Commitments of Common Sense

Howard Michael Kaplan

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/N22Q71

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Realism, Idealism, and the Commitments of Common Sense

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As Wilfrid Sellars put it, one of the principal aims of philosophy "is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." In this I think Sellars is right: the discipline is charged with taking a "synoptic view," with accounting for our diverse pre-philosophical commitments concerning, for example, what things there are, who we are, how we know, what we ought to do, etc. Crucially, explaining these commitments means explaining how they are possible together. There is good reason to believe, however, that these commonsense commitments are inconsistent, so that providing a view of the whole requires denying or revising some in order to vindicate others. Realism and idealism, I believe, can usefully be understood as different ways of negotiating these commitments. In the dissertation, I build on this idea to question the plausibility of metaphysical realist (reductive) approaches to ontology, on the one hand, and to articulate some of the motivations for an idealist (understanding dependent) approach, on the other. To focus the discussion, I use Martin Heidegger's work from the period of Being and Time as an extended case study. In my view, much of the recent Anglophone literature on Heidegger misunderstands his position, arguing that he is a metaphysical realist or deflationist about ontology. Those are inadequate interpretations of Heidegger's work, collapsing the distinction he draws between being and beings, in the first case, and suggesting that he somehow 'overcame' ontology, in the second. More importantly, such interpretations neglect his insight into our commitment to ontological pluralism--the idea that there are many irreducible ways of correctly accounting for what there is--as essential for a defense of a commonsensical understanding of ourselves and the lifeworld in the face of the fundamental distortions that reductive ontological strategies would impose. The idealist reading of Heidegger preserves and explains this pluralism. The idealist defense of pluralism, however, also brings with it an incommensurability thesis and so relativism. I do not take a position on whether or not it is possible to modify Heidegger's view to preserve his defense of pluralism without also committing to relativism. Instead, I limit my discussion to describing the importance of ontological pluralism in accounting for the way things 'hang together' and to the challenge that Heidegger's work presents both to those who wish to reject pluralism (perhaps in favor of some form of metaphysical realism) or get it for free by avoiding all revisionary claims, and so the entire problematic of realism and idealism.

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