2.14 Reality Exists Independently of Our Thinking

2.14 Reality Exists Independently of Our Thinking

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 2.14 Die Wirklichkeit besteht unabhängig von unserem Denken

Here we stand at a crossroads that has caused confusion time and again in the history of philosophy.

There is a school of philosophy which claims that reality is ultimately a product of our consciousness. Things do not exist independently of us; rather, they are produced by our consciousness — or at least essentially shaped by it. This view is called idealism.

Around 1905, Husserl himself made a turn to so-called transcendental idealism. Simply put, he came to the view that the real world depends on consciousness and that the conscious subject co-constitutes reality. Many of his students refused to follow him in this turn and criticized it.

The method advocated here is diametrically opposed to idealism. Its principle is that things exist in themselves. They are what they are, whether or not anyone knows them. A tree is a tree even if no human being sees it. A human being is a human being, even if no one acknowledges him as such.

This is not a naive belief, but a philosophical insight that can be tested by reason. The arguments are simple and decisive:

First: whoever claims that reality is a product of our consciousness must explain where the distinction between dream and reality comes from. For if everything were only consciousness, there would be no difference between dreaming and waking. There would be no error and no deception. For deception presupposes that there is something about which one can be deceived — a reality that obtains independently of the deception, as Augustine helps us understand.

Second: Reinach refuted the objection that all being might be dependent on consciousness as follows: “Being thought” and “being dependent on thinking” [are] not simply the same. [… That I think of the world does not mean that the world depends on my thinking. The whole world is supposed to be independent of my thinking, and yet I think this world.] No logical contradiction!¹

This point is fundamental for everything that follows. For if reality did not obtain independently of our thinking, then the question “What is the human being?” would be meaningless. There would then be no essence of the human being that we could know. There would be only various constructions — and none of them would be truer than the others.

But whoever looks honestly will recognize: there is a reality. And this reality has an order. And in this order there are beings that we can know — if we are willing to make the effort of careful looking.

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Fußnoten

1. Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, Munich: Philosophia, 1989, p. 380. German original: „Gedachtsein“ und „abhängig sein vom Denken“ [ist] nicht ohne weiteres dasselbe. [… Dass ich an die Welt denke, bedeutet nicht, dass die Welt von meinem Denken abhängt. Die ganze Welt soll unabhängig von meinem Denken sein, und doch denke ich diese Welt.] Kein logischer Widerspruch! ↩