NEOREALISM. – An Anglo-American philosophical-scientific school, which forms part of the broader movement of contemporary “realism,” distinct from the classical realism of Greek and medieval philosophy, whose metaphysical dualism of subject and object it abandons or denies; the object, although acknowledged to be real independently of the subject, is not an entity different from it (metaphysical monism). N. therefore opposes idealism and also the pragmatism and intuitionism of Bergson, 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 between real entities), and on the other identifies the objectivity of knowing with scientific knowledge, without escaping subjectivism.
English n., besides the lesser names of J. Laird and C. D. Broad, both professors at Cambridge, and the more important one of S. Alexander, Australian by birth, includes those of G. E. Moore (born in 1874), formerly professor at Cambridge, and B. Russell (born in 1872), formerly Moore’s colleague at the same University. In addition to Principia etica (London 1903) and Ethica (ibid. 1912), Moore wrote several essays in Mind (some of them 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 experience (with appearing to a subject), so much so that in sensation and in the idea we are conscious of something objective, which is distinct 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 experienced object presents itself as it is outside consciousness. There is therefore a reciprocal independence of physical facts and mental or conscious facts.
The figure of Russell is more complex. In addition to 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), WHITE, STEPHEN (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 distinct from the subjective consciousness with which they enter into relation: objects are what and where the mind says they are, and are independent of II. 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 in them only because such belief is natural. Moreover, for Russell (whose philosophical system is a hodgepodge of human empiricism, Leibnizian metaphysics, and imagination), the subject is a logical fiction, employed 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 something is good is a way of saying “I like it,” and to say that something else is bad is to express a different subjective attitude toward II.
These are therefore not objective affirmations, true or false, but personal desires. Ethics has the task of promoting those positive desires that generate happiness and weakening those that generate unhappiness. As for logical doctrines, Russell demonstrated that mathematics is the logic of scientific knowledge, but claimed to identify logic and mathematics, which is tantamount to resolving all knowledge into scientific knowledge. And this is the uncritical and aphilosophical scientism proper to one who has scientific rather than philosophical interests, not unconnected with a certain cultural superficiality, as attested by History of western philosophy (London 1946), which is replete with blunders.
More naive than the English version is the North American n., as it appears in the volume of studies The new realism (New York 1912), written jointly by Ed. B. Holt, W. T. Marvin, W. P. Montagne, R. B. Perry, W. B. Pirvin, and E. G. Spaulding. As mathematical logic demonstrates, one and the same term can enter into different sets without itself being modified. If the idealist principle were true that things exist in relation to the spirit that perceives and thinks them, the relation would have to modify the terms constituting II. Instead, it does not modify the known objects at all; their reality therefore is not exhausted by 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), for which belonging to the complex “consciousness” is immaterial, since they can simultaneously belong to infinitely many other complexes while remaining in themselves what they are. The neorealists maintain (without demonstrating 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 manner in which the elements are grouped. It is a group of neutral entities selected by the nervous system, which reacts with a corresponding response. Like a reflector (according to Holt) illuminates now one and now another section of a landscape, causing one group of objects to become part of the illuminated section and another of the dark section, so the nervous system, obeying its vital interests, directs consciousness now toward one and now toward another group of objects. In other words, among the innumerable entities of the universe, the nervous system selects and cuts out those that serve its own and the organism’s preservation and development. The so-called illusions and errors (also objective facts) are due to a selection by the nervous system that does not correspond to vital ends. How consciousness arises from this naturalistic monism remains a mystery, which the simplistic character of the neorealists takes no care whatsoever to explain.
BIBLI: I. Woodbridge Riley, American thought from puritanism to pragmatism, New York 1915; A. Aliotta, Il nuovo realismo in Inghilterra e in America, in La cultura filosofica, 9 (1915), pp. 192 ff. (now in the volume Il problema di Dio e il nuovo pluralismo, 2nd ed., Rome 1948); R. Kremer, Le néo-réalisme américain, Paris 1920; id., La théorie de la connaissance chez le néo-réalisme anglais, ibid. 1928; C. Vanzetti, Il nuovo realismo americano and W. P. Montagne, in Giorn. crit. della filos. ital., 8 (1927), pp. 54–67, 128–43; F. Meli, N. e behaviorismo anglosassone, ibid., 13 (1932), pp. 257–80; G. E. Muirhead, Filosofi inglesi contemporanei, Milan 1939; G. Santayana, Il pensiero americano, ibid. 1939. On Russell, P. A. Schöpp, The philos. of B. R., ibid. 1946; on Moore, id., The philos. of G. E. M., Evaston and Chicago 1949. Michele Federico Sciacca
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