Essay: Ontological Realism

Any attempt to elaborate the nature and functioning of religious language is deeply influenced by the view of reality operative therein, whether explicitly or implicitly.  For example, if I adhere to a naturalistic account of reality, I will almost certainly seek to understand religion as a somewhat illusory outgrowth of evolved biological capacities, an outgrowth perhaps inescapable and necessary for human flourishing but more likely treated as a remnant of humanity’s pre-scientific naivety.  Likewise, if I consider the only certain reality to be that of subjectivity, whether in an idealistic or phenomenological manner, I will read religion as an expression of and response to ideas and existential structures.  Again, if I consider reality to be a contingent and culture dependent construct, I will relativistically see religion to be an outgrowth and expression of cultural forms.  Though I reject each of these conceptions of reality, I must affirm the profound insights yielded by each approach: religion does take shape within the context of human and cosmic evolution; religion does reach into the depths of human existence and give expression to some of our most fundamental concepts; and cultural forms do contribute to humanity’s great religious diversity.  Nevertheless, I reject attempts to elevate any of these perspectives to a position of interpretive primacy.

The approach I will here adopt is best described as an ontological approach.  Though the word ‘ontology’ refers simply to the study of being as such, it is by no means immediately clear precisely what this term means, as the meaning of ontology shifts as we come to understand being in a different manner.  For example, the physicalist believes being to be coextensive with scientifically known physical reality, and thus ontology is for him the study of physical reality in its most general form.  A physicalist’s ontological approach to religion and religious language would thus seek to understand these phenomena from their grounding within physical reality.  The physicalist will most likely feel no need to utilize concepts such as being and ontology, though, having resolved their content into the concepts of ‘physical reality’ and ‘physical science’, these being considered more accurate and precise than ‘being’ and ‘ontology’.  I want to make the opposite claim here, that the concepts of being and ontology as I employ them are most accurate and precise, as they capture both the excessive and intelligible aspects of reality as such.  Let me explain.

Within the trajectory of modern thought, we encounter a dialectic between forms of objectivism and subjectivism.  What I mean by this is that the assertion of objectivism, say in the philosophy of John Locke, generates a boomerang affect back towards subjectivism, say in the philosophy of David Hume.   The great generality of philosophical debates remain unreflectively caught within this dialectic, as having made their way into our collective habits of thought it is these two alternatives that today structure our thinking about being.  More often than not being is either bound inescapably within subjective interiority or reduced to material reality alone.

There is a certain strand of thought that recognizes both the objective and subjective faces of being to be related manifestations of a deeper reality.  Hegel’s dialectical philosophy presents one such approach to the idea that being encompasses both mind and world.  I read Hegel’s philosophy as realist in this regard, with the label of “idealism” coming from the fact that he locates ideas within the deepest structures of reality itself.  Hegel is by no means alone in his focus on being as such, as the likes of Martin Heidegger and William James, among others, carry out similar inquiries. Whereas Hegel’s ontology focuses on the teleological end of being’s dialectical unfolding, though, Heidegger dedicates his attention to being’s original movement as it opens both the world to us and us to ourselves, and James on framing a pragmatic metaphysics of pre-objective and pre-subjective “pure experience” suitable to reconciling the apparent tension between  the scientific vision of the cosmos and human experience.  Though by no means exhaustive of the ontological approaches available in contemporary thought, I find the distinction between dialectic (Hegel), existential (Heidegger), and onto-cosmological (James/Whitehead) to provide a particularly helpful trichotomy of approaches to ontology.  Having been revised, combined, and in many ways expanded by subsequent philosophers, through these ontological approaches we can see developing a growing body of knowledge concerning the structure of real being.