Realism is first of all the recognition that things are. As soon as it is recognized that things are, it is also felt that they are in certain ways. To want to see wholly what things are and how they are, is to be realistic, to have realism in mind.
Therefore, to live at all is to be realistic; for things have to be recognized in some way. However, where the living thing has come to feel that the things that are and how they are, are against it, or are not necessary to it, realism is that much lessened.
Realism is of us directly, too. If we see ourselves as a thing to be seen wholly; if we want to know what we are and how we are, and we have nothing in ourselves against this, we have realism entirely. And if we don’t want to know this, in proportion to our disinclination, we do not have realism.
Realism is therefore the belief in the real, the love of the real, and the showing of that love. And if we are real, the realism is, clearly, of us, too.
Realism can also be described as the desire to know with no limitations of the desire itself or the possible objects of the desire.
The second aspect of the definition arises from the first. To want to know carries with it the wanting to know something. This something is different from the being who wants to know. Realism is, therefore, a belief in things to be known; and a belief in something which can know them, and which can be seen as different from the things known.
As soon as it is granted that a difference exists between what is known and what knows, realism is granted. If it is said that all knowledge is in our mind, but it is still granted that what knows in our mind is different from the thing known, there is still realism.
The question essentially is not whether all knowledge is in our mind or not, but whether the things to be known are made less or no. Not to be realistic is to lessen reality. If a person wishes to say that the whole world is in his mind, but that he has to know what is in his mind as something different from that in his mind doing the knowing, he is realistic; unless he makes reality less.
Suppose a person says China, ancient history, thermodynamics, all the people of New Orleans, a planet or two, all insects, all numbers, three college instructors, and five elegantly served meals (to be sure, other things, too) are in his mind. If he says that just by being in his mind, the matter ends, he knows these things, he has them, he has put them into form, everything is as he wants it—well, he wouldn’t be for realism. But if he said all the people in New Orleans were in his mind; but that he would have to know them and deal with them as if they were outside his mind thought of as the knowing thing—then he could say they were in his mind all he wanted. What he has done, really, is to call the outside world the more difficult, painful, less accessible section of his personality. Since he wants to work with this to be known section of his mind and wants to know it, and doesn’t want to say he knows it before he truly does—he is realistic. He may have done something superfluous in calling the universe the exterior of his mentality, but the appellation is not ruinous. The question is, has he lessened reality?
Idealism is realism wherever it says that a mind has objects: whether these objects are within or without. Whether a person says, “my New York” or “New York’s me,” is not so important unless this person in saying “my New York” diminishes the wholeness and variety of New York; or if, perhaps, in saying “New York’s me,” he unduly humbles himself by making himself less various, or simply less, than he is.
It is to be seen that in realism the knowing of ourselves is like the knowing of what is not ourselves. If we look at ourselves, think about ourselves, try to know ourselves, there is a self which is being known and a self which is knowing. After all, we know that our hands are white or black in the same way that we know another person’s hands are white or black: we had to see our hands before we knew they were white or black, just as we had to see another’s hands.
Solipsism or the belief that the universe exists because we exist, or that the universe is an extension of our perception, is idealism complete. But solipsism, too, would not be bad if it did not diminish what is to be known, what is to be dealt with. If a solipsist said when he burnt his finger he was burnt by an extension of his perception, this would not be bad (though likely unnecessary) if the solipsist saw that an extension of his perception was something he had to know and deal with just as if it were a pole or a doorstep or a city which was not an extension of his perception. When a solipsist says the universe exists because he knows it, and that still the universe can stub his toe, stop him from getting what he wants, give him a belly-ache, make him not know a fact about German literature—what he’s saying is that he can’t manage something which depends on him.
In this way, he is giving himself exteriority; for why should he himself frustrate himself? So he has a self which he can control and a self other than this one, outside of it, which he can’t control. If he wishes to call this outside self the dependent universe, let him; but if he diminishes it, he is being not realistic and as soon as solipsists are not realistic, they are no longer in the philosophic field; they are ignorant sinners.
It is important to see that just as we can’t control on soothing, instantaneous, marshmallow terms what is outside us, we can’t control ourselves, either. We have to learn in both instances. Learning, when truest, is the proud, free acceptance of imperfection and perfection, within and without.
Sometimes the basic meaning of solipsism is hard to get at because of the words used. It is very easy, with acceptable philosophic terminology, to make something sound like something else. (Of course by this I intend nothing against the goodness of philosophy itself.) Solipsism, for example, has been defined in a reputable dictionary as: “A term in metaphysics for the doctrine that nothing exists outside the cognition of the self, and that the self can know nothing outside its own experience.” (The quotation is from The Universal Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Henry Cecil Wyld: London, 1936.)
The first part of this definition says that solipsism is “the doctrine that nothing exists outside the cognition of the self.” This kind of definition is the kind I have tried to avoid, for it has in it terms asking for definition themselves. The word cognition is a word which is not very useful; in fact, is somewhat dangerous. Put in simpler terms, the definition is saying that solipsism is the doctrine that there is nothing besides what a self knows of itself. It can be presumed that at one time, the cognition of the self was less than it was later. Therefore, what was known by the self did not exist until it was known; for if it existed to be known, then something not yet known would have existed as a thing outside the cognition of the self.
The definition of solipsism says that if a self does not see something as being known in the self, it does not exist. This all may sound reasonably philosophic and deep, but what it is saying is that nothing but the self exists; and what the self doesn’t know about itself doesn’t exist, either. In this part of the definition, we can find that tendency to deny that the to be known, as a thing outside of ourselves, exists along with the thing knowing, or the self as knowing. This denial is also a denial of the beauty of the self and the deep beauty of being. It lessens the meaning of oneness, of existence.
The second part of the definition is also vague: “The self can know nothing outside its own experience.” The dangerous word here is experience. It can be understood that what the self has now in the way of experience, it once didn’t have—otherwise the self has always the same amount of experience, never changes, and is like an eternal glass ball in immobile space. However, if the self increases in experience, then it must know something (for experience without knowing just can’t be) which once it didn’t know. So there was something to be known. If a thing is to be known, then it is outside of the thing to be knowing. Therefore, what the definition does (by means of the vaguely used word experience) is to say that the self never knows anything new, and if it does know something, it knew it all the time just as it is: and this really means that though the definition uses the word experience it denies the existence of experience.
What I’m saying is said of the definition, not as a misdeed of the dictionary-makers so much, but as an example of how the meaning of an important term and how the idea that goes with it can be muffled, made to look reasonable, when appareled in soberly composite philosophic terminology. I could define cruelty as not such an ugly thing if I said it meant: “An attitude of the self posited on the belief that a feeling implying non-composure in a self differentiated from its own may have affective value for the first self.” When, however, I say, “Cruelty is pleasure in another’s pain,” it sounds a little different.
Well, solipsism (except with the changes I have given) is a cruel, ugly thing; it is common; its philosophy is had organically by many timid, conceited, divided people. Solipsism is against realism. For solipsism to be seen as it is, it needs to be talked of in rolls and butter terms. As I have pointed out, sometimes dictionaries don’t help.
The present work has as one of its chief purposes the showing that reality and realism are big enough to take in the pleasures and advantages of fantasy, “idealism,” “imagination,” escape, romance, poetry, et cetera. Realism as wholly likable will not be seen until it is seen wholly.
And there is a third aspect of realism. This aspect is concerned with art, principally. Realism here makes for a contrast between a dirty New York street and a green meadow in Camelot, between an ashcan containing the remnants of grapefruit eaten in a restaurant and a pomegranate in the hands of a white-shouldered Greek nymph. Realism in this sense is the accent on the undesirable, the tough, the ordinary. Writers like Fielding and Zola are looked on as realistic; Shelley and Yeats are not. Hogarth, in painting, is a realist; Corot is not. James Farrell in Studs Lonigan is a realist and Jane Austen most likely is not. Ibsen and Gorki are realists and Racine and Dumas are not.
Something of all this is justified. To welcome reality is to welcome all of it, and therefore not to welcome the muck and the smudge and the stench and the baseness, is not to be realistic. It is good that art has gone after conquering the ordinary and the unappetizing. This helps. It makes reality come into its own sooner.
The large question, however, still remains: What is reality? From this follows the question: How can one feel the wholeness of reality and not be neglectful of the specific? And how can we be affected by what’s real so that the real is truly represented in us?
There are dirty, ill-smelling garbage cans in the streets of cities. However, a mile upwards there is space of the most spacious kind, serene and ordinarily not ill-smelling. Is this space real, too? So we have the problem of being intellectually equitable in the matter of garbage cans and in the matter of space. Certainly, to be realistic only of the unappetizing receptacle of refuse is not to be realistic entirely.
The tough writer or painter or dramatist must ask then: How can one be proportionate about all of reality, while being realistic as to a shooting in a city alley, which left an unshaven functionary of a brothel lying in that alley with a shot in the bowels? How can one best be realistic concerning this happening? Is it by leaving out other things, or including them? If other things are left out—has not realism so far been affronted? The realistic artist has the job of being fair to all things while working hard to show an ugly thing. If he skimps this job, it isn’t because he’s a realist, but because he isn’t one. After all, it is more real to be complete than to be “tough.” A person has to ask somehow: What is complete reality?
We find that when a realist is big, it is not because he is tough, or because he sticks just to the immediate, the familiar, the repellent: it is because, beginning with these and not lessening these, he is excitingly proportionate about everything. So the realist, if he is big, is intensely interested in the everything which is the real. If he shirks that, his toughness won’t help him as artist or as observer. True realism, then, in getting in the ordinary, somehow gets in the strange, too. To get in the ordinary and not the strange would not be realistic about the real world, which for a long time has been ordinary and strange.
Realism, as a job, is having things in mind and saying them in such a way as not to make smaller or interfere with all that things are. This is because, as I have implied in the definition of Aesthetics, the subject of all art, including realistic or naturalistic art, is the world as such. To be artistic, you have to be interested, in some way, in meeting the world as such. That’s where the art comes from. The art about a broken-down hotel in a manufacturing locality of Delaware comes from where the art about the Mediterranean’s waves comes from. In this sense, all art is realistic. As long as one doesn’t get premature ideas, it’s all right to say that a novel concerning unhealthy workers in a cotton factory is realistic. It might be; it might, as art, not be. It depends on whether, while observing the unhealthy factory workers fighting against mix-up, disease, cruelty, the writer saw the world from which this came with intensity and some comprehensiveness.
Realism can begin anywhere. If it goes the artistic way, the source of the impetus and direction is a personality rightly heated and arranged as to all things. Toughness can be used to evade; to show off with; just as the out of the way and the glamorous can be used for complicated mischief.
If the purpose of realism is to show reality, it is advisable to linger as long as need be on the meaning of what is to be shown. The lingering, to be sure, has to be sharp and willing.