Real ontology (Realontologie) is the name Hedwig Conrad-Martius gave to her foundational philosophical project: an ontology that does not stop at the forms of our thinking but investigates the structures of being of reality itself. The question is not how do we think about being? but what is being, and how is it constituted in itself? The phenomenological method serves here as a means of access — not as a restriction to consciousness, but as a path to the things themselves.
Conrad-Martius developed her real ontology in confrontation with both idealism and positivism. Against idealism she insists that reality is not brought forth by consciousness but lies prior to it and bears it. Against positivism she shows that reality reaches deeper than the empirically measurable: there is substance, essence, being — dimensions of reality that disclose themselves only to intellectual insight, not to experiment. Her investigations of space, time, matter, and life are attempts to lay bare these deeper strata of reality phenomenologically.
For the question of personhood, real ontology is significant because it provides the framework within which the being of the person can be understood: as real being, not as mere ascription, not as construct, not as function. The person is real — and real ontology asks what this being-real means. Conrad-Martius’s concept of the “self-power” (Sich-selber-Können) of intellectual substance shows that the substantial being of the person is no rigid being-present-at-hand but the most living form of being-real. Real ontology thus stands in close kinship with the Munich-Göttingen School of realistic phenomenology, whose methodological basic stance it shares and ontologically deepens.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Conrad-Martius, Hedwig (1923): “Realontologie.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 6, pp. 159—333.
- Seifert, Josef (1996): Sein und Wesen. Heidelberg: Winter (Philosophie und Realistische Phänomenologie, vol. 3).
- Seifert, Josef (1976): Leib und Seele. Ein Beitrag zur philosophischen Anthropologie. Salzburg: Universitätsverlag.