What’s your favorite ism? There are so many to choose from. Many of us today are rejecting isms in general as hazardous to our health. But the sad fact is that even if we don’t acknowledge or actively deny them, most of us have at least an operational ism we accept, if not consciously then certainly subconsciously.
If isms are hard to avoid, we may as well be explicit about our isms, whether we’re a card-carrying proponent of a particular ism, or simply a passive and helpless vector for the more malicious types of isms out there.
This essay seeks to help you ask the questions to flesh out what ism or isms you find appealing, or the isms you hope to reject, in the area that I’m calling loosely “the philosophy of reality,” but what is known in philosophy as ontology or metaphysics.
The basic question that ontology/metaphysics seeks to answer is this: What is real? This question is the basis for all other philosophical questions, so it’s good to have a handle on this.
I became interested in isms at a young age, having spent some time with a commune as a 10-year-old, which challenged conventional views about religion, science and spirituality, and I’ve always had a philosophical turn of mind. However, I didn’t get very serious about my isms until my early to mid-30s when I began reading more deeply in the philosophy of mind.
I had a favorite philosopher in my late teens, Bertrand Russell, an Englishman born in 1872 known for being brilliant and unconventional. I read some of his work in metaphysics, philosophy of religion and social philosophy, and while I could follow along with his rejection of Christianity and his more radical social ideas, much of his metaphysics went over my head at that age.
I also read some great books by Douglas Hofstadter and Dan Dennett in my late teens and early 20s that got me thinking about the philosophy of mind, which is closely related to ontology. The philosophy of mind seeks to answer, among other questions: What is the nature of mind and its relation to the material world? This is the classic mind/body problem, which was rebranded in the mid-1990s by the now well-known philosopher David Chalmers as “the hard problem” of consciousness.
Chalmers’ book, The Conscious Mind, made me think more seriously about the philosophy of mind, but it’s not an easy read, and when I read it way back in the 1990s I didn’t come to any firm conclusions.
My favorite isms
I continued to read casually in philosophy over the years, including Teilhard de Chardin’s book, The Human Phenomenon, which made a big impression on me in my early 20s.
But I remember a particular car ride with my father, driving down from Northern California to San Francisco, where I began to think more seriously about my philosophy of reality, my ontology. I was in my early 30s at this point. The question I asked myself went something like this: What are the fundamental components of reality that a good philosophy needs to include? At the time, I included the following ideas: matter, energy, space, time and mind. These concepts still seem to me like they must be included in a good philosophy of reality.
Since that time, I’ve added God or Source to my list, and this represents to me the ground or ocean of being. It’s the metaphysical ground from which our manifest reality grows.
Along these lines, here’s the first question I suggest for creating your very own philosophy of reality:
1. What concepts do you need to include in your philosophy of reality?
Concepts aren’t reality, but since we’re human and we’re talking about human-created philosophies, words and concepts are our tools. What concepts — words or phrases that refer to something about reality — do you need to include in your philosophy?
I’ve suggested six seemingly fundamental concepts above, but another common concept that makes it into various ontologies is the idea of information. Physicist John Wheeler talked about “it from bit” as the new implication of quantum mechanics and modern physics. It from bit means that things come from information, the opposite of the usual idea of “bit from it,” or information coming from or being based on physical stuff.
Personally, I don’t consider information to be a fundamental concept, since I’m in the “bit from it” camp, but that’s just me.
In eastern philosophy, we have in the Vedanta tradition, Brahman as a basic concept. Brahman is fundamental reality. Only Brahman is real and all else is caused by Brahman in some manner. My preferred translation for Brahman is Source or ocean of being, and I have found a strong place for this concept in my ontology that is fleshed out in my 2017 book, Mind, World, God.
In Buddhism, Emptiness plays a similar but not identical role. Emptiness is mostly a concept that states that there is no fundamental reality, only relationally/dependently arising processes. But in some Buddhist philosophy Emptiness takes on the character of Source/Brahman also, an ontological concept. This is a good longstanding debate.
In both eastern and western philosophical traditions, there also has been much discussion about some kind of ether as a fundamental concept. Ether can be either a purely physical concept, the medium through which light moves as in 19th Century physics, or it can be a more spiritual concept that can be a lot like Brahman or Emptiness.
Once you have your basic concepts lined up that need inclusion in your philosophy of reality, we need to ask the next question:
2. What concepts are truly fundamental?
Can we whittle our list of basic concepts down further by considering which concepts are truly fundamental? Is matter truly fundamental for you? Can you envision a universe in which matter didn’t exist? How about space? Is space truly fundamental? Or time? It’s become fashionable in recent years in both philosophy and physics to argue that none of these three concepts are truly fundamental.
Maybe mathematics is truly fundamental and everything else springs forth from mathematics? This was an idea that the Phythagoreans in ancient Greece argued. Some modern thinkers have suggested the same thing, such as Max Tegmark in his book Our Mathematical Universe.
Or is only God real? This is a common answer in both east and west.
Or is there no place for God in your ontology? This was my position for a long time, being a fairly smug atheist well into my thirties. My version of God today is not a personalized or conscious God. Rather, I find an impersonal God as creative source a compelling concept, but one could argue differently and not be labeled crazy.
If you reduce your ontology to one truly fundamental concept, you are a monist. For example, Plato’s philosophy of idealism, which argues that only Ideas or Forms are real, residing in some other realm unsullied by the imperfect manifestations of our physical reality, is a type of monism. This is “idealist monism” or “monist idealism.”
If you reduce your ontology to two basic concepts, such as mind and matter, as Descartes and many others since have done, you are a dualist. Dualism suggests that there are two basic types of stuff and somehow they interact. A common and early critique of dualist philosophies like Descartes was pointing out that if the two stuffs are indeed fundamentally different, such as mind and matter, it’s hard to see how they interact at all. Where is the “handle” in matter for mind to grab onto? And vice versa. Descartes suggested that the pineal gland was the place in humans where mind/spirit interacts with our bodies, but this never made sense even at the time.
If you don’t point out in your philosophy any one or two basic concepts as fundamental, but you are instead open to many different stuffs interacting, even stuffs or concepts that we haven’t named yet, you would be considered a pluralist. Pluralism suggests that reality is complex and we attempt to whittle it down to one or two basic stuffs at our own peril. American psychologist and philosopher William James was a well-known pluralist and one of his best books is The Pluralist Universe.
Now we’re ready for our third big question, which needs to be answered whether or not we consider ourselves to be a monist, dualist or pluralist:
3. What is the relationship between mind and matter?
Almost all ontologies will include mind and matter as necessary concepts. But even if we consider these concepts not fundamental we’ll need to include in our ontology how they interact. There is indeed a mind here, now, thinking and writing these words. And I presume the same holds true for you, even though I can’t know you actually are conscious like I am conscious, because I can only know my own consciousness directly. So we can easily agree with Descartes’ well-known “I think, therefore I am,” at least insofar as we must agree that there is some thinking being here, now, as this thought occurs.
Most of us would also agree that there is some world apart from our own mind, though this is a less firm conclusion than accepting that mind/consciousness exists. There surely appears to be a world out there separate from my body, which I perceive through various senses, and seems to have existed before I was born. There are some who would debate all of these statements, but let’s accept them for now in order to address this question: what is the relationship between mind and matter?
Does matter produce mind, as evolutionary biologists would suggest in looking at the history of life on our planet and its evolution into thinking creatures like human beings? Or does mind produce matter, as idealists or nondualists would argue? That is, is reality really all just in our heads? If so, whose head is it in? Mine, yours, God’s?
If you believe that minds evolve out of matter where there was previously no mind, you are a materialist. Materialism argues that only matter/energy (in modern physics matter and energy are considered equivalent, like two sides of the same coin) is fundamental and mind/consciousness is a product of matter and energy.
This is the most common view among western philosophers and physicists, but it’s facing a lot of challenges in recent years as more people recognize that it seems a stretch that mind, something so different than objective matter, would just appear at a particular moment in the history of life on our planet, and in a similar manner at some seemingly arbitrary point in the history of each organism as it develops.
If you believe that matter and energy are instead products of mind/consciousness, which is fundamental, then you are an idealist or a non-dualist. Nondualism is a species of idealism generally in eastern philosophical traditions. Nondualism suggests that only Brahman or Source is real and all else is an illusion or hallucination. It’s not always clear how the manifest reality we call the external world exists in relation to Brahman/Source, but it is clear that whatever reality the external world has in this ontology that it is a far lower grade of reality than Brahman/Source.
I’ll generally treat idealism and nondualism as equivalent isms in this essay.
I’ve already mentioned dualism, which suggests that there are two fundamental stuffs and in this case those two stuffs are matter/energy and mind/spirit/consciousness. Or we can talk about the seeming complementary nature of subjectivity and objectivity. How do these aspects of reality interact? That’s the question that dualists must answer.
So are you a materialist, idealist or dualist?
If you don’t like any of these options, there’s at least one more worth mentioning. In fact, it’s the ism I subscribe to with respect to the philosophy of mind: panpsychism. I came across this idea first in Chalmers’ book mentioned above, but I read a lot more about it over the next couple of decades. David Ray Griffin’s book, Unsnarling the World-Knot, clinched it for me, when I read it a decade ago, in arguing in a compelling and non-paradoxical manner that all matter has some associated mind. Griffin writes in the tradition of process philosophy, which was advocated by Alfred North Whitehead and others in the first half of the 20th century.
Panpsychism suggests that all matter has some associated mind or consciousness and vice versa. Where there is matter there is mind and where there is mind there is matter.
This is a nice middle ground for some because it recognizes the co-equal nature of both matter and mind. In fact, it’s all about perspective: what is mind for me (my thoughts and feelings) is for you my body and brain. The distinction between matter and mind becomes one of perspective, literally where you are. Your subjective thoughts and feelings are, from my perspective, the person centered on your body and brain, objectively.
And rather than struggle with the interaction problem that we see with dualism — how do mind and matter interact if they’re fundamentally different realms of stuff? — panpsychism suggests instead that matter and mind are two sides of the same coin. Again, where there is matter there is mind and where there is mind there is matter. They go together.
It gets a little more complicated when we put these two questions together: a) how many fundamental stuffs are there and b) how do mind and matter relate to each other? This can lead to some clunky terms, but, for example, you might be a monist materialist – only matter is truly fundamental. Or a monist idealist — only ideas are truly fundamental.
Or you might be, like I am, a monist panpsychist: only Source is truly fundamental and matter and mind bubble up together from Source. Source is beyond the mind/matter distinction.
Words are so cliché
Or, if you’re in a bad mood or just a rebel in general, you might prefer the approach that Zen Buddhism and some other approaches take: rejecting words and philosophy as wholly inadequate to reality. Reality is ineffable and no matter how hard you try to eff the ineffable it’s still ineffable. This is Zen: words are lame tools, as is logic itself, so spiritual practice and meditation should be used to try and see through the limitations of words and logic. Words may be pointers to reality, but they should never be mistaken for reality itself.
All right, I’ll leave it at that. Happy philosophizing.
— Tam Hunt is a writer and lawyer based in Hawaii.