Realism and Idealism: A Hopeless Pursuit Without God

by Zach Lacy

The labyrinthine depths of Tlön invite us inward, towards a world where the very fabric of the universe is malleable to the minds of man. Thus, it leaves us to face the blurred lines between perception and reality: a concept not unfamiliar to our own world and its philosophical traditions. In his short story entitled “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges examines the rational consequences of realism and idealism in a highly plastic world. Created by a secret society of intellectuals, the fictional world of Tlön represents a foil to our own world. Tlön embraces idealism wholly, with a metaphysical structure lacking any material existence. This world relies solely on perception: what is not perceived simply does not exist. The language of Tlön embraces this ideal, as “there are no nouns in Tlön,” but merely “impersonal verbs…with an adverbial value” (Borges 8). Borges exemplifies this concept further, for in Tlön there is no “word ‘moon,’ but there is a verb which in English would be ‘to moon’ or ‘to moonate’” (Borges 8). This rejection of the material extends into every crevice of the Tlönian’s being, rejecting any notion of a material world into even their language. Borges builds this world as the antithesis of our own, and yet this conception of reality doesn’t seem so far from the one many know.

In his examination of the metaphysics of Tlön, Borges forges a world in which a lost object may be found simply by wishing of a seeker—whether they be the original owner or not; however, it should be incapable of existing outside of the perception of the mind. If the idealist reality of Tlön is true and no object is permanent, there should be no way in which an object could be “found.” This “found object,” a physical embodiment of one’s desire, is called a hrönir by the Tlönians. The author posits that “centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality,” but rather that the manifestation of the mind may hold enough power to will substance into being (Borges 13). The reader is told that one of the prison directors of Tlön informed his inmates of buried remnants that never existed (in a world of idealism, the conception of history is incoherent), and upon their search, these artifacts were found: “a golden mask [and] an archaic sword,” crafting material existence not before existent (Borges 14). And this is perfectly in line with the world they know, for within perfect idealism, nothing is permanent, nothing is lasting, and nothing can truly be material without perception.

In the story, while Tlön’s world of idealism begins to crack, actual material objects coming into concrete being through the hrönir rather than remaining ideas, our earthly world of concrete realism reveals cracks which are a mirror image of those in Tlön. The stories of Tlön are heard and repeated through public consciousness, gaining mass following in the cultures of Earth. On earth, pieces of idealist Tlön begin to appear; the narrator recalls an encounter in a bar one evening in which the man was found with “small, very heavy cones” with the iconography of “certain religions in Tlön” in his pockets, cones that should have been mere fictions (Borges 17). Borges shifts, noting our world’s own materialist reality rending and meshing with the immaterial ideal of Tlön. Neither world can preserve its own reality without remnants of the other invading it, and both are unable to find a foundation in reality. Borges does not solve this problem for the reader, but his various philosophical references and allusions to our own reality provide a clear call to action to investigate the problem: that these views cannot and will not be reconciled without God.

Outside of Borges’s depictions of these opposing philosophical forces, these ideologies are irreconcilable with our social norms. Idealism, in the wrong hands, fosters a toxic individualism and nihilism by focusing on the self without a recognition of the reality or continuity of others. The undergraduate student, eager for salvation from their crushingly surface-level reality, is lured into a trap with a logical terminus that the world is devoid of truth outside of the mind. This extreme relativism plagues the university classroom and polarizes the student. Fabricated truths lead to fabricated divisions. On the opposing end, radical materialism, or realism, is cultivated by the new atheism of Richard Dawkins and others, wherein men “are not immaterial selves or souls…and they don’t contain any immaterial substance.”1 Dawkins, a pillar of the new atheism movement and self-proclaimed ‘militant atheist,’ personifies this realism. A related strain of these realists redefines an ‘objective reality’ within a subjective framework, focusing less on the truth and more on the perceived truth. This materialism is epitomized in the embracing of social and physical science which places qualitative value on the world with no questioning of why things function, only apparently how.

Perhaps this is a pessimistic depiction of our present condition, but these views are based in a much older philosophical tradition. For the sake of this paper, I will use René Descartes as the paradigm realist–by accepting the independent existence of the material–and George Berkeley as the paradigm idealist (the very same Berkeley mentioned in the Borges piece). Descartes’s realism differs from the modern conception very drastically, but sets up the fundamental school of realist thought within the mind-body problem—the notion that the material body and the immaterial soul exist as independent substances, but must react in some way in order for man to function. He creates a distinction between the mind and body as separate entities and substances and affirms the reality of an exterior extended world, while maintaining the existence of a soul that exists outside of the body and continues past the existence of the body. On the opposing side of argument, George Berkeley rejects this dualism and the idea of identities independent of the mind, relying on perception for existence. This debate can be epitomized in rather quaint latin statements: the battle between cogitō ergo sum and esse est percipi – “I think, therefore I am” versus “to be is to be perceived.” These statements hinge upon their respective philosophies and draw a helpful picture of these opposing views.

In Borges's materialist world of today, the ideas that Descartes–the father of modern realism–postulated have developed into the societal ills and relativism discussed above: perhaps the soul exists, but what function can it serve? I am a “thing that thinks”2 and “corporeal things exist,”3 but this perspective seems to create a sense of dismal hopelessness. Descartes’s most notable phrase is memorized by every hopeful physics and philosophy student: “I think, therefore I am.” In order to convince oneself of some conception, there must exist some thing which holds the capacity to be convinced. Descartes carries his argument further and establishes the existence of quasi-reliable sensory experience, granting the existence of a world which reflects our present reality and is based on sensory experience. These two ideas converge in the mind–body union, giving birth to an independent notion of identity. The soul and the body exist as separate entities, but without God, how could this be possible? Without God, what purpose does an immaterial soul serve in the absence of an afterlife? Descartes, setting out in his Meditations to prove the existence of God, clearly reaches an answer to this, but later interpreters of realism reject this logical leap. Dawkins, for example, rejects the very idea of a soul, arguing that while Descartes’s realism may serve a function in the corporeal world, the soul is purely material; therefore, the self is purely material.

On the opposing philosophical side, Tlön is embodied by the secret society of Orbis Tertius, founded by George Berkeley, a real Irish philosopher and father of idealism. Berkeley addresses the problem of idealism’s impossibility within the world, viz., the problem of the persistence of material objects which are apparent to common sense. In his attempt to reconcile this idealism within a visibly materialistic conception of reality, Berkeley establishes a mantra to summarize his philosophy of idealism: esse est percipi–to be is to be perceived. Berkeley rejects the fundamentals of materialism, “he attacks Cartesian and Lockean dualism…[and] rejects…that material things are mind-independent things or substances.”4 Berkeley holds that, although objects exist only within perception, this perception appears to be grounded in a reality outside of the mind, a reality which cannot help but be based in concrete matter. But again, the world is found in a stalemate. Can truth and reality be reconciled within this radical idealism? Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism attempts to brace this question with a quasi-Platonic view, that what one sees is not a material object, but a mere “representation [that] cannot exist outside our mind,”5 representations that merely appear to be material, but form a conception of something outside oneself (Kant 437). What one sees may in fact have some ontological material basis, but what we see is only the reflection of a higher material form from which this basis is grounded. And yet, both Kant and Berkeley’s conceptions seem to lack a sense of grounding in our reality.

It appears that both realism and idealism have formed a breaking point and stalemate, they cannot be argued and they cannot be reconciled. The materialists venerate the field of science to cement their views in quantitative evidence without considering the philosophical possibilities; the idealists’ viewpoint is self-confirming. The idealists cannot consider the material world because all they know is subjective, while the materialists go against the very basis of idealism by rejecting any notion of immateriality. This stalemate extends outside of the textbook and into the classroom with relativists proving their own beliefs through the very fact that their opposition holds a different position to theirs, and the atheists rejecting all sense of the immaterial through scientific “proofs” of the functions of nature. Stuck in this despair, Berkeley and Descartes find the same way out, the solution to Borges's problem: God.

Berkeley reaches this conclusion in the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, where he finds the necessity of God through the very idealist framework he established. While it accords to man’s common sense to accept a material grounding of reality, this notion leads to skepticism of the immaterial and must be avoided, so Berkeley finds. To exist is to be perceived, though we must inquire as to the identity of the perceiver, Berkeley qualifies. The character of Philonous asserts his claim of idealism (representing Berkeley’s stance): that the reality of the things he senses exists purely in the mind and “cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit” (Berkeley 46). However, the appearance of materiality–the continuity of things in space and time–challenges this claim: sensible things appear not by man’s thought, but by thought of another greater; therefore, “there must be some other mind wherein they exist” (Berkeley 46). Through this lens, Berkeley, through Philonous, concludes the existence of God through the existence of sensible objects outside of the mind and one’s own perception. To exist is to be perceived, but not to be perceived in one’s own mind, but the mind of God to whom sensory perception and sensory experience of all the senses is credited. Idealism is reconciled with perceptions of reality, placing the power of true perception into the higher Being of God, creating objective reality and meaning within God’s understanding.

On the alternative side of the debate, Descartes sheds light on material senses through the understanding of God. Descartes reaches this conclusion through a variety of methods, initially using God to establish a corporeal reality, then using God to understand man’s capacity for sensory error, and finally to escape a dismal trap of repetitive doubt. To begin, in his third Meditation, Descartes considers the seemingly infinite regress of sensory experience without an understanding of God: for example, the idea of heat “cannot exist in me unless it is put there by some cause which contains at least as much reality as I conceive to be” in temperatures which are hotter than average (Descartes 28). But for this idea to be in my mind, that itself must have been put there by some cause which contains at least as much reality as that idea. This continues to an apparent infinite regress, if there exists not an original cause: God, the primary cause. Under this foundation, God exists and allows for corporeal reality in sensory experience. Descartes then continues, through his fourth meditation, to create an understanding of man’s capacity for error, because of God’s gift of free-will to man. The will is greater than the knowledge of man, so when man makes a decision based on the will rather than knowledge, a will subject to the limitations of man’s nature, error is able to occur. This is not a defect of God, but a defect of man made possible through free-will. Finally, Descartes is able to concretely rely on the existence of God to create an objective reality and sense of truth. Descartes uses the example of a triangle, which contains properties that can be understood through man’s understanding of geometry, and can be relied on axiomatically. However, without a conception of God, how could anyone rely on continuing truth when the proof of the triangle is no longer accessible to them? These axioms would have to be continually proved ad infinitum; nonetheless, with the conception of God one can see that “the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends uniquely on my awareness of the true God” (Descartes 49). Because God exists and does not deceive, truth can be continually perceived, corporeal reality can be relied on, and the error of man can be reconciled without undermining God’s perfection. Relating this back to realism, Descartes's arguments use the existence and nature of God to create objective meaning, prove the existence of an immaterial substance of God, and prove the existence of a material, corporeal world existent outside of the perception and sense of man.

To conclude, Borges presents an intricate problem with deep roots in the scholarship of philosophy. Both idealism and realism reach a stalemate and begin to crack our understanding of reality, just as the very foundation of Tlön begins to, as the story reaches its end. Embodied in the modern world’s relativistic tendencies and general lack of objectively perceived truth, this issue especially plagues the minds of undergraduates, politicians, academics, not to mention everyone else existing in our social world. Berkeley and Descartes both reach a compelling conclusion to their respective ideologies, namely, that God creates the understanding of our reality. God’s existence creates meaning in a meaningless world, reality in a world without truth, and hope in a nihilistic world. Whether idealism or materialism wins the age old debate, only through the understanding of God can one truly embrace their reality; only then can one find meaning