NEOREALISM. - An Anglo-American philosophical-scientific movement that forms part of the broader movement of contemporary "realism," different from the classical realism of Greek and medieval philosophy, whose metaphysical dualism of subject and object it abandons or denies; the object, though recognized as real independently of the subject, is not an entity different from it (metaphysical monism). Neorealism is therefore opposed to idealism and also to pragmatism and to Bergson's intuitionism, which makes the object a content of subjective consciousness, whether empirical or transcendental. Yet it reduces consciousness, on the one hand, to a physical event, a thing among things (consciousness is one among the many groups of external relations among real entities), and on the other hand it identifies the objectivity of knowing with scientific knowledge, without escaping subjectivism.
English neorealism, besides the lesser names of J. Laird and C. D. Broad, both professors at Cambridge, and the greater name of S. Alexander, Australian by birth, numbers those of G. E. Moore (b. 1874), formerly professor at Cambridge, and of B. Russell (b. 1872), formerly Moore's colleague at the same University. Besides the Principia ethica (London 1903) and the Ethics (ibid. 1912), Moore wrote several essays in Mind (some of which were later collected in Philosophical Essays, London 1922), the most significant of which is The refutation of Idealism (1903). For Moore, what is experienced is not identified with the experience (with the appearing to a subject), so true is it that in sensation and in the idea we are not conscious of something objective that is distinguished from our act of perceiving and thinking. The objective reality of the pen with which I write, for example, does not depend on my perception. The fact that I am conscious of it does not mean that the real fact depends on this mental act; consciousness is a "transparent medium," a kind of mirror, in which the object experienced presents itself as it is outside consciousness. There is therefore a mutual independence of physical facts and of mental or conscious facts.
More complex is the figure of Russell. Besides recent studies on political, social and moral problems, he expounded his logical doctrine in The Principles of mathematics (Cambridge 1905), restated in the celebrated three-volume work Principia mathematica (ibid. 1910-13), written in collaboration with Whitehead (v.); and his "scientific philosophy" in numerous works (The problems of philosophy, London 1912; Our knowledge of the external world, Chicago and London 1914; Analysis of mind, London 1921; Analysis of matter, ibid. 1927, etc.). For Russell too, objective entities are distinguished from the subjective consciousness with which they enter into relation: objects are what and where the mind says they are, and independent of it. All sense-data have equal value and there are no "illusions" of the senses. Every subject has its own perspective; the sensible world is the system of all possible perspectives. But for Russell the reality of subjects other than myself is a hypothesis: we believe it only because such a belief is natural. Moreover, for Russell (whose philosophical system is a kind of hotchpotch of Humean empiricism, Leibnizian metaphysics and fantasy) the subject is a logical fiction, used only for grammatical convenience. The radical subjectivism that persists in him beneath an apparent objectivism and realism leads him to ground ethics on desires (Religion and science, London 1936): to say that a thing is good is a way of saying "I like it," and to say that another is bad is to express a different subjective attitude toward it. These are therefore not objective statements, true or false, but personal desires. Ethics has the task of promoting those positive desires that generate happiness and of weakening those that generate unhappiness. As for logical doctrines, Russell demonstrated that mathematics is the logic of scientific knowledge, but he claimed to identify logic and mathematics, which is tantamount to resolving all knowledge into scientific knowledge. And this is the uncritical and aphilosophical scientism characteristic of one who has scientific and not philosophical interests, not unaccompanied by a certain culturalistic superficiality, as the History of western philosophy (London 1946) attests, a work well stocked with blunders.
More naive than the English is North American neorealism, as it emerges from the volume of studies The new realism (New York 1912), written in cooperation by Ed. B. Holt, W. T. Marvin, W. P. Montague, R. B. Perry, W. B. Pitkin, E. G. Spaulding. As mathematical logic demonstrates, one and the same term can become part of different sets without being modified thereby. If the idealistic principle were true that things exist in relation to the spirit that perceives and thinks them, the relation would have to modify the terms that constitute it. Instead it does not modify at all the objects known, whose reality therefore is not exhausted in the relation and is independent. Not esse est percipi, but percipi est esse. The world is a set of simple entities (mental, physical, real, unreal, good or bad, sensations, conceptual entities of mathematics and the sciences), to which it is a matter of indifference to form part of the complex "consciousness," since they can simultaneously form part of other infinite complexes while always remaining in themselves what they are. The neorealists maintain (without proving it) a radical monism: spirit and matter are not two substances, but two different groupings of simple entities; consciousness is not defined by the nature of its particular elements, but by the particular way in which the elements group themselves. It is a group of neutral entities selected by the nervous system, which reacts with a corresponding response. As a spotlight (according to Holt) illuminates now this now that section of a landscape and causes one group of objects to form part of the illuminated section and another of the dark one, so the nervous system, obeying its vital interests, directs consciousness now upon one now upon another group of objects. In other words, the nervous system, among the innumerable entities of the universe, selects and carves out those that serve the preservation and development of itself and of the organism. So-called illusions and errors (themselves objective facts) are due to a cut of the nervous system not corresponding to vital ends. How consciousness arises from this naturalistic monism remains a mystery, which the simplism of the neorealists does not concern itself at all with explaining.
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Michele Federico Sciacca