Everything

The Monist, 2015, 98, 156–167 doi: 10.1093/monist/onv003 Article Everything Iain Hamilton Grant* ABSTRACT To picture reality either as not involving its being pictured or as reducible to its being pictured yields inconsistent pictures, since in neither case can anything be pictured. The picture of reality as picture-involving yields the only consistent picture of reality. Yet its cost is completeness, and the reason for this is reality. The claim that picturing reality is involved in reality is idealism, but it is not an idealism that compromises reality’s ontological autonomy. Using Bosanquet’s reality theorem to the effect that “Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more than it is,” I argue that idealism per se is falsely held to vitiate reality’s autonomy. It does so only when the ideal is awarded an inflated status as fundament or source of reality. Bosanquet’s theorem makes it clear that inflation of this sort is not exclusively the hallmark of realisms or idealisms. Since by contrast the idealist is additionally realist concerning the ideal, fundamentalist and/or spontaneist ontologies become importantly exclusivist, yielding pictures that cannot picture picturing without inflation of either picturing capacities or unpictured reality. Therefore the picture of reality as picture-involving is alone able to account for picturing. If there is picturing then, I claim, real realism is inflationary. Disputing with the neorealists of his day concerning their overvaluation of one aspect of reality at the expense of others, the idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet offers the following corrective: “Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more than it is.”1 Bosanquet’s is not an existential permissivism à la Quine, but places epistemic events in reality such that the former are dependent on the latter. If Bosanquet is an idealist his case serves to remind us that idealism is not per se antirealism. Talk of everything is not all there is to everything, nor, qua talk, exclusive of it. Neither exclusively the character of everything nor exclusive of that character, talk of “everything,” or conceiving reality, is that feature of reality without which its conceiving is rendered impossible from the outset. Thus, an idealist such as Bosanquet is alone capable of providing a coherent account of reality because the idealist is in the happy position of acknowledging the additional reality of the idea without subjecting it to the special inflation against which his reality theorem warns. Taken thus, the theorem measures “takings as” or epistemic claims against the “everything” in which they feature. Yet in undertaking the recommended assessment, *University of the West of England, Bristol C The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Hegeler Institute. V All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com  156

Everything  157 it is clear that “everything” is similarly subject to overvaluation or special inflation. That is, should “everything” be itself subject to epistemic claims or “takings as,” it becomes, by virtue of being so conceived, “less than” the everything amongst which it figures. Conversely, “takings as” are themselves inalienably features of the everything in which they occur. In consequence, if we take “everything” to determine a concept of reality and add that in reality, special inflation occurs, then the everything in which such inflation occurs is subject in turn to special inflation, yielding as its outcome that reality is either unequal to itself, or that special inflation does not occur in it. Since the latter is expressly denied by the theorem, the attempt to conceive reality as everything results in the assertion that reality is not equal to reality and so renders reality inconceivable. If as recommended reality is not taken as the concept of reality but as the environment against which special inflation is assessed, the recursive operation, described above, of special inflation on that environment does not render conceptual articulation insuperable, but shows reality to be generally inflationary, or importantly nonfinal with respect to form. In what follows, I will take this assessment stratagem to assess claims concerning fundamentality and spontaneity. These stand, respectively but not exclusively, for realist and antirealist points of issuance: either reality issues from its fundaments, or ontology is spontaneous or evanescent. Against both I will argue for a nonfinalist or inflationary realism without which no real conceivings can feature in reality. To talk of everything is therefore not exclusive of the talk about everything that is a feature of it. The only alternative for a realist to talk of everything is either to talk of nothing at all, or to take the everything that is the object of such talk to be the singular reality. Thus, while it may seem odd to begin an account of realism with an idealist’s word on the subject, this oddness arises only owing to a false account of idealism. The false account stipulates that idealism is an antirealism insofar as it excludes from its catalogue of reals the standard features of the physical cosmos asserted by the vast majority of realists to constitute the fundamental nature of reality. This is necessary in order to make the claim that the ideal is more real than the material, or in extreme cases that matter enjoys no reality whatsoever, which positions are said to constitute idealism. Bosanquet’s is however a realism not vitiated by exclusion—everything is according to the hypothesis real. To exclude something from everything—whether the idea from the perspective of the physical realist or matter from that of the eliminative idealist—entails either a commitment to a class of entities whose sole common characteristic is that they do not exist, or a commitment to a realism concerning the only location wherein the discrimination of reals from unreals may take place, that is, a realism asserting the insuperability of the concept. For the concept therefore the concept itself has a greater extension than is satisfied by reals alone, precisely insofar as it enables the discrimination of unreals. In this sense the concept of reality is more than reality. Yet if the concept of reality is tested according to Bosanquet’s theorem, it emerges that the concept of reality, as a feature of reality, is less than reality. From this one sense of what Bosanquet warns against as “taking for more than” may be gained, namely the inflation of the concept as that feature of reality that is unilaterally greater than the reality it conceives.

158  Everything Since Bosanquet’s idealism gives reality as the environment within which conceivings of reality, specially inflationary or otherwise, occur, it provides that account of reality within which alone conceivings of reality are themselves conceivable. Since moreover, the theorem counters any “takings as” of some X for more than X is, it will reject as a false account any takings of the concept, idea, or proposition as exclusively real, since such takings as manifestly take one feature in reality to be more than it is, or to be equivalent to reality. For this reason idealism is in the position of theorising theorisings of reality as real occurrences, and therefore amounts not to a special claim that reality is ideally constituted, or spontaneously issuant from its being conceived, but rather to an additional realism concerning takings as, ideas, concepts, or propositions. This affords a picture of reality within reality, for which reason it will not provide a finished picture of reality, but one in which its picturing features as an episode in it. That the universe is precisely the sort of thing within which conceivings of it are really occurrent is exemplified by the Illustris programme.2 Illustris provides a hydrodynamically modelled simulation not of the universe as it is, but of the process by which it has come to be what it is. While the results of this simulated process bear striking resemblance to the distribution and types of galactic structures in the universe, a complete simulation of the process would ex hypothesi include, at a higher level of detail, the process by which the universe came to be simulated. Since this would be itself a simulation, however, completeness of finality of form would entail that the process by which this second-order simulation is attained be part of that additional simulation in turn, and so on. This does not show the project of picturing, simulating or conceiving the process to fail, but rather that real picturing is insuperably additive to the reality so pictured. In this sense Bosanquet offers a challenge to realist and antirealist picturing that seek either to eliminate the source of the picture from the picture, or that seek to reduce what is pictured to a feature of the medium in which picturing is alone possible. 1 . T HE TO P O L O G Y OF I M P O S S I B L E P I C T U R E S If an idealist is a philosopher committed to the reality of the idea, and if the idealist is not eliminativist in consequence of admitting the reality of the idea, we may give the following definition of idealism: the idealist is additionally a realist concerning the idea. The problem addressed above concerning the inflation of one element of reality (namely the idea) over others, is a problem of logical topology. The idealist’s logical topology contrasts with the famous “view from nowhere” (Nagel3) or the self-eliminating “side-ways-on picture” (McDowell4) in that it offers the prospect of a view on the real that is itself part of the real insofar as the idea, for the idealist, is not something to the unreality of which the idealist must be committed. The reality of the idea, however, is not the same as the reality of Rosetta’s probe Philae landing on Comet 67P. It is not the same, that is, except insofar as they are reals. Or, the idea is not equivalent to reality because the real in the idea is also the real in the comet. McDowell’s “sideways-on picture” is designed to show that a conceiving of reality outside the concept of reality can only be gained by deploying precisely the conceptual capacities withdrawn in principle from a reality outside the concept.

Everything  159 Accordingly, the conceiving of such an extra-conceptual reality is manifestly selfcontradictory. It follows that the sum of reality—McDowell’s “the world”—becomes wholly “embraceable” in thought.5 What starts as an attempt to picture what lies outside the picture ends by eliminating such an externality with the result that conceiving a reality that involves conceptual capacities is achieved at the cost of the elimination of that reality. What reality there is now issues from the picturing of it. The function this argument fulfils is to transfer responsibility for the world from the world to its spontaneous issuance from the conceptual capacities that are insuperably involved when it is conceived. Thus spontaneity now qualifies ontology, or the cost of the acceptance of the reality of conceptual capacities is precisely reality as such. Yet, the resultant conceptual space has therefore fewer dimensions than the object it was the task of the concept to conceive. In contrast, the “nonperspectival” or the view from “nowhere” is an attempt to avoid inflecting the reality so viewed with the machinations of mind involved in its viewing. It constitutes in this sense an attempt to acknowledge the “ontological autonomy” of reality with respect to the concept.6 However, by not acknowledging the additional dimensions of the concept, or reducing these dimensions to zero (nowhere, non-perspectival), the means by which reality’s autonomy is to be conceived precisely cannot be involved in the conceiving. The common deficit of both pictures is that reality suffers a reduction in its dimensions as a result of the invention of the concept. It is for this reason that the idealist, who is one when s/he is committed to the reality of the idea, enjoys a topological advantage over the foregoing pictures; namely, that the idea is additionally real entails that the reality thus conceived is augmented by the reality of its being conceived. Accordingly, the idealist manages to conceive of reality as enjoying the property of being a reality in which its conceiving can conceivably occur, without reducing reality to its being conceived or rendering reality inconceivable in principle. What unites Nagelspace and McDowellspace is their shared insistence on some autonomous or spontaneous instance from which viewing and world respectively issue. In the latter case for instance, conceptual spontaneity is the ground from which world as world issues. In the former case the object viewed is autonomous to the extent that its being viewed as such becomes impossible. In both cases, that is, some primary division occurs while no account is offered of the background upon which alone the division is conceivable. The idealist’s topology, by contrast, shows with respect to conceivings or “takings as” their limitations as arising in consequence of the reality as a feature of which conceivings occur. That they do so demonstrates the susceptibility of “everything” to discrimination as well as to the risk of special overvaluation. For the additional realist, there is therefore at least one part of reality from which reality as such may be treated. Such parts of reality are standardly called universals. However, the precise character of the universal remains unclear insofar as it is simply thought, for example, as maximally available for instantiation, or as that without which no statement concerning reality may issue at all. Clearly, the additional realist concerning the idea rejects the standard deflationary move against the universal. Accordingly, the idealist’s reality includes elements a deflationary realist’s would not. Consider, for example, the current trend for an “austeric” or merely semantic

160  Everything “fundamentality”—what this austeric picture leaves out is everything that is not semantically tractable. By contrast, the additional realist is afforded a larger space. The realist’s “everything” or realism’s universe includes universals not as autonomous or spontaneous points of issuance, but rather as iterations of it. For example, if there is at least one part of the universe in which the universe itself may be conceived, the universality of the universe is given not as fundament or as autonomous point of issuance but rather in the iterative focus of a universe in which the conceiving of this universe occurs. If accordingly we take it that Bosanquet’s reality is one admitting of the additional reality of the idea, reality is universal not in the sense of the Parmenides’ big sail but in the sense that it is maximally iterated, i.e., in everything. It is therefore realist about the universal and about its worldly character. This means that although maximally occurrent the universal is not a finalist or all-encompassing entity, but rather a feature of any universe in which, for example, its conceiving is conceivably occurrent. The reality theorems’ emphasis on the conditional character of this reality, however, entails that it is additionally fragile: everything is vulnerable to an extension which, in reality it does not admit. Bosanquet’s realism may therefore be characterised as recommending an ontologically distributive justice. There are two ways in which “everything” is fragile. Firstly, if we take “everything” to be the singular character of reality then “everything” becomes a contrastive case, not internally, but only with respect to some “not everything” now environing it. That is to say, should the everything be taken as itself discriminable, it is at once taken for simultaneously more and less than it is; more than, because in addition to the reality of everything that is, everything itself is conceived as enjoying discrete reality. Less than therefore in that such a “singular everything” now becomes less than the everything amongst which it features. The second sense in which everything is fragile is therefore epistemic; that is to say, everything is real as long as it is not taken for more than it is, for example, when some element of reality is inflated such that it becomes the fundament of ground of all others. To take a well-known example of such inflation, consider Berkeley’s metaphysical realism concerning the percept. He is not, that is, denying that reality obtains but rather asserting that it consists fundamentally of percepts. Here the “taking as more than” consists not in the inflation of percepts but rather in their equation with reality as such. Reality is guaranteed to occur given only its character as single uninterrupted instance of perception. While few realists, however austeric, would deny that percepts furnish part of reality, most would reject that reality as such is a continuous uninterrupted perception episode; but to decry it as antirealist mistakes both the purport of the thesis and the selective overinflation that characterises its error. We thus have some sense of what “taking as more than” entails. However, surely the problem of realism consists in positively characterising the manner in which this taking as “more than” is more than? Why, in other words, is this ontologically distributive justice subject at all to the epistemic misadventure of being taken as more than? The question as to what then “more than” is more than invokes the problem of identity. If we argue that taking X as more than X or assert that X does not equal X, is false, we might argue that X does not equal X just when some entity is

Everything  161 falsely understood. Yet this is to take singulars as the gauge of epistemic misadventure, whereas the reality theorem has “everything” as the measure of special inflation. If, remaining within the problematic of the universal, we characterize the particular as an iteration of a universal, then reality—“everything”—comprises maximal iteration of the universal. The particularity of the particular would accordingly be the partial arrest of a series. In this case, we encounter the problem of what “more than” is more than in two ways. Firstly, a particular is taken as more than it is, precisely when it is taken as independent of or as grounding the series of its iterations. Thus secondly, the particular is taken as more than it is when all its iterations are concentrated in that particular, or when it is taken as the universal. Again then, we might argue that a particular is determined by identity of spatiotemporal location. Yet, if this is so, then this X here now is not identical with that X there then; in consequence, the event identified as “taking as more than” consists again in extracting particularity from the series constitutive of it. Therefore we cannot conceive “taking more than” as consisting in exceeding the identity of the feature thus taken. Rather, the identity of the feature thus taken is itself, on this reading, an instance of “taking as more than,” that is, in extracting it from the everything in which it has its reality. Accordingly, the misunderstanding of some X as not equal to X is itself an unavoidable feature of an everything in which conceiving X as X occurs. This must be the case if mistaking the character of some X, i.e., error, is possible at all. Since, according to the theorem, error is possibly occurrent, it follows that instances of special inflation figure amongst everything, and are therefore subject to the same caveat. In this case, according to Bosanquet’s formula, these instances of special inflation must themselves be judged real. Yet this seems to affirm what the worldly law denies, namely, that illicit inflation is real. The law, however, in fact covers this case. If “taking as more than” is a feature of the world (for various reasons, Bosanquet argues that it is), this is the real function of epistemic misadventure. In both cases the mistake is to assume that the reality X designates may be cashed out in terms of real particulars, or that the laws of understanding are laws of things, that “everything” is equivalent to every thing. Recalling that, according to the theorem, “everything” is the measure of reality and, more specifically, of special inflation, while it admits of discrimination, everything does not assert the means of discriminability to consist in things, but rather, in conjunction with the negative condition of reality, that the precondition of special inflation is the overidentification of the logical X with some particular bearer of it. In short, the theorem warns against such identification as itself an instance of the special inflation of some fundamental character of reality because, while affording discriminability, “everything” by definition resists bottoming out in some specific character. The first instance of special inflation therefore to be considered is fundamentality. 2. FUNDAMENTALITY “Real X is more than real X” occurs most flagrantly in fundamentality talk. From everything, some X is extracted and given the function of fundamentality with respect to everything else. In general terms, this is like Goethe empirically discovering the primal plant from which all plants issue amongst plants in general. For if it is a

162  Everything candidate fundamental plant, its candidacy is flatly contradicted by its availability. If it is available therefore it is not that plant from which all plants issue, the “plantish” ground of all plants, and so begs rather than answers the question of what it is from which all plants issue. If some candidate fundamentality is discovered, what makes it a candidate fundamental is that it serves as ground for its consequents and, if fundamental as such, then for all consequents. Any such candidate fundamental, once identified, is subject to the same problem Goethe’s discovery of the primal plant demonstrates. That is, that some X satisfying fundamentality can be identified from among all X’s renders its candidacy for fundamentality moot. Should any candidate fundamentality satisfier, or principle of sufficient reason arise, it is question begging, since rather than answering the demand for a reason for what is and how it is, it causes the question to be reposed. This is not least because there are no nondisputable fundamentality candidates. John Foster, for example, engages in an illustrative dispute with physicalist fundamentalism.7 He does not dispute that fundamentality occurs, but only its character. Arguing that there can be no physical fundamentals, since if something is physical it is by definition derived, or a late acquisition of the universe in which it occurs, Foster argues accordingly for the fundamentality of the nonphysical, the extension of which is correspondingly broader than merely the opposite of obtaining physicals. The question as to which of these positions might be considered realist is dependent upon accounts of what it is that reality fundamentally consists in. Accordingly, neither party in this dispute is arguing that reality does not occur, but only disputes the character of a reality that is indisputably occurrent. Theodore Sider is aware of the problem of overdetermining the type of any candidate fundamentality.8 He therefore invests “structure” with fundamentality. Structure, he argues, is fundamental. He thus avoids overdetermining structure as belonging to any particular metaphysical account of reality’s consistency. However, structure may be argued to be fundamental in two senses: firstly, structure may be fundamental in that it is always occurrent. If always occurrent however structure would rather be universal than fundamental in virtue of its maximal ubiquity. Secondly, structure may be said to be fundamental because structure obtains whenever there is something rather than nothing. In this latter case, fundamentality of structure must be an acquired characteristic only once something exists. In this sense, structure becomes fundamental. “Becoming fundamental” is not a property of fundamentals but of consequents. That is, should some X obtain, it will be just X until something is consequent upon it. Only when something is consequent upon it, is it fundamental. If, by contrast, it is always there, or fundamentality is fundamentality in itself or from the outset, then it is Platonic, in the sense that it is what it is regardless of its issuing in consequent instances. Fundamentality is either (a) eternal, in which case it is neither fundament nor apex, neither first nor last, but that which renders these impossible; or (b) first in a series consequently upon that series obtaining, so that, as Aristotle had it, its actuality will lie in the power of its consequent.9 In this sense, it is fundamental to fundamentality that it ceases to be nonfundamental only when nonfundamentals—consequents or derivatives—issue from it.

Everything  163 It emerges then that fundamentality is not eternally but only centrally fundamental. To what is fundamentality central if it is fundamental? It must be fundamental to everything. To what parts of everything? If fundamentality is central, i.e., consequently occurrent depending on the fact of consequents, then fundamentality is central not in the everything but in each. The problem then of the identification or isolation of any candidate fundamental is precisely that it is a candidate plucked from everything to serve as fundament for everything. In this sense, it precisely illustrates the Bosanquetian problem of taking some X for more than it is. What then are the prospects for fundamentality? Here again Bosanquet’s reality theorem is helpful, since the “taking X as more than” is contrasted not with what X is in itself, but with everything. If everything is real, provided that it is not taken for more than it is, what is at issue is not the identification of what it is that whatever happens to be is, but precisely its contrast with a reality within which this taking as more than must feature. Thus even if it is conceded that fundamentality is so to speak central rather than prior, whatever it is that is fundamental must remain less than everything. If this is not the case then discriminability of fundamentals is a priori impossible. That fundamentality, if it obtains at all, can only obtain consequently or in the middle, alerts us to an additional problem concerning the identification of fundaments as opposed for example to their isolation. If the identification of a fundament serves as the basis of an epistemological project, namely to know what it is that is fundamental, then from this identified fundamental an ontology will issue. Curiously therefore, when the identification of fundamentality as prior is at issue it is so at the cost of its exclusion from the ontology that will be consequent upon it. Recalling that the equivalents of “everything” to every thing rests on the identification of logical laws with real bearers the question of the fundamentality of some particular reveals an additional dimension of this same amphiboly. If logical priority is taken as conferring authority of issuance, candidate fundamentals, as logically and ontologically prior to their consequents, become that part of reality from which reality itself issues. This is as clearly the case whether we are dealing with physical or with nonphysical candidate fundamentals, as John Foster argues. It thus reveals a second case of special inflation, namely spontaneity. 3. S P ON TA N EO US ON TO LO GY Maurizio Ferraris has identified the priority of epistemology over ontology as the genetic type of antirealisms dominant in the last century.10 Although this inverted priority may be attributed to Kant, it is not restricted to that one instance, and nor does it qualify reducibly “Continental” positions as antirealist. The same error, for example, is evident in Quine to the extent that ontology is to be the output of epistemological procedures ratified by the best of our natural sciences. The issue here is the same as in the case of fundamentality: it concerns the isolation of a point of issuance. In this sense, epistemology is prior to ontology just if knowing is the source of being; as Kant had it, “he who would know the world must first manufacture it.”11 Yet it follows from this that knowing is no longer a feature of being since being is a feature of knowing. This is necessarily false because either the knowing from which being

164  Everything issues is, in which case it is not true that being issues from knowing since knowing already is; or, the knowing from which being issues is not, in which case again it is not true that being issues from knowing. In both cases the assertion therefore denies what it asserts. In the present context, however, what is of note are the structural features that “being issuing from knowing” shares with the problem of “taking as more than,” or isolable fundamentality. In both cases, what is at stake is the isolation of a source of issuance. In the case of transcendental philosophy, this is ultimately alibied by the causal autonomy of the rational agent which, to be consistent, entails the general inflation of the moral case: if it is true that reason enjoys an extension in its practical use greater than in its theoretical, then theoretical reason is implicitly a subset of reason in general which is tasked as the population of the world with spontaneity. Yet if theoretical reason—reasoning concerning the metaphysical character of the world— is a subset of practical reason then reason will not be satisfied with a world that merely features spontaneity. Accordingly it follows from the primacy of practical reason not merely that instances of causal autonomy occur, but rather that such instance must theoretically be universalised: “the whole universe ought to be . . . .”12 The same is also the case if as Feyerabend argues “grammar contains cosmogony” or if ontology is evanescent.13 In each case, that is, the identification or isolation of a source of issuance entails the consequent character of being, leaving whatever it is that is antecedent to these consequents excluded from being and accordingly self-refuting. If therefore the thesis that being issues from knowing, or ontology from epistemology, and if fundamentality is, if it is at all a lately acquired feature of a universe that acquires it, then it follows that knowing issues from being just if being is. The character of this priority turns out not to be fundamental but central: being is not the same as thinking, but the reality in being is the reality in thinking. And this entails being an additional realist concerning the idea. It thus serves to locate the idea not in its own space but in space as such. 4 . S P A C E AN D L OC U S What then may be said of the shape of the space of reality? If reality is everything that is and if some shape occurs, it will not be the shape of everything that occurs— the fundamental shape if you will—but rather one feature in everything. We thus move from a simple “prior to the first layer” model of fundamentality to a universe populated by universes. From what standpoint can I know this? In Nagelspace: nowhere. I noted above that this was a poor division by virtue of its self-eliminating character. The attempt to find a standpoint from which reality as such will issue, or as Kit Fine has it, to step “outside reality” in order to conceive it as such, is precisely the attempt to give reality in itself a finished form or a space separated from reality and from which reality as such has that form.14 Here again at issue is the identification of a prior or fundamental point of issuance from which the concept of reality will issue. Yet the isolation of real space from conceptual space makes this issuance impossible. While not therefore arguing that being issues from knowing, the fundamentality or ontological autonomy

Everything  165 that reality as reality must enjoy ensures the latter is unviolated by conceptual machinations at the cost of excluding conceptual machinations from it. Therefore, the view from nowhere or the concept of reality as such conceived from outside of reality presents the epistemic adventurer in such spaces with impossible voyages, precisely because in both cases real space is not held to contain conceptual space. In other words, the problem with Nagelspace is that, by its own account, it isn’t there. By not being there it cannot account for the space it constructs. In McDowellspace by contrast the standpoint from which reality may be conceived occurs in conceptual space alone. Even if the world pictured sideways-on is indeed the world, it is so only after having been conceptually pictured, and so cannot escape the pressureless embrace of thought. In this picture epistemology is first philosophy if there are concepts at all. Moreover, since conceptual capacities are necessarily involved in discriminating employment instances of conceptual capacities, epistemology or conceptual space is the only space there is. This is classic downstream only constructivism: McDowell’s world is indeed, like Hegel’s nature, the falling away from itself of the idea.15 Yet insofar as instances of the employment of conceptual capacities occur, the metaphysics of the world embraced in thought does not resolve the question of the priority of epistemology relative to ontology, or of the pictured world as related to an unpictured one, but merely postpones and therefore begs it. If Nagelspace is accidentally eliminative of conceptual space from real space, McDowellspace is deliberately eliminative of the concept of extra conceptual space. For this reason we may call McDowell’s an eliminative idealism.16 If by contrast the idealist may be characterized as an additional realist concerning the idea, then the cost of the inclusion of the addition of the idea to reality is the nonfinality of form that reality accordingly suffers. Even if a concept of reality occurs within reality and gives reality a final shape, there is no final conceiving of having conceived this finally shaped reality that includes this final shaping in itself. Therefore, being an additional realist concerning the idea is to be a nonfinalist concerning reality or, what amounts to the same, being an inflationary realist. If conceptual space is neither taken to eliminate real space, nor to be spontaneously productive of it, nor yet to be incommunicably isolated from it, then we are left with the following articulation of the relation between real and conceptual space. Conceptual space is occurrent in real space just if real space is susceptible of discrimination. In turn, real space is so susceptible just if discrimination is occurrent. If then the idea is additionally real then not only is the concept part of reality, albeit not all of reality; but reality, in addition to environing the concepts occurrent in it, is additionally real as those concepts. Realism therefore remains problematic only so long as conceptual space is conceptually isolable from real space rather than a creature of it. Such isolability entails a one-layer primal fundamentality thesis. Yet consider for a moment what it is that conceptual space and real space share. If the one bounds or divides from the other in any respect, then qua space they are continuous. The isolability of conceptual space takes place in space that is as yet conceptually undiscriminated, and is therefore itself an instance of the special inflation against which Bosanquet warns, and the

166  Everything cost of this special inflation is the obfuscation of continuity by the creation of inprinciple discrete spaces between which transition is accordingly impossible. It may be objected that this is merely to think of the relation between the idea and reality from the perspective of the idea, in other words that this is simply a version of the argument of the sideways-on view that McDowell mounts. Yet this would be to mistake the reality of a conceptual space continuous with real space for an equation of the two, or it would be to give reality the fundamental character of thought. This is why the idealist is additionally, not exclusively a realist concerning the idea. The continuity of real with conceptual space entails that conceptual space is not spontaneously issuant but rather itself contoured and articulated by the everything in which it occurs. As the nature philosopher Schelling put it, “what thinks in me is what is in the objective world.”17 In other words, it is not merely the case that conceptual space is continuous with a real space as though thinking occupies only one side of this division. Rather, it is precisely amongst everything that thinking occurs as an additional feature in which thinking can be though as occurrent at all. Moreover, the thinking that occurs is itself a feature of this reality such that the reality in the comet is the reality in the idea. What inflationary realism recommends therefore is not that realism seek to bridge a notional distance between reality and its concept, but rather that the conceiving is itself an additional rearticulation of a reality that, far from being distant from it, is what is active in it. If having an issuant source of ontology within an ontology qualifies a position as antirealist, realism consists in an ontology that issues in epistemic episodes, which episodes in turn conceive priority only in its consequents. N O T ES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912), 240. Bosanquet’s specific claim against the neorealists of his era is the overvaluation of objects, in the following sense: “neorealism . . . treat[s] ‘things’ as not merely actual and individual constituents of the real universe, but as existents which unite in their own private existence, by themselves and apart from connection with each other and with percipients, all those features which they present to thought and perception.” In other words, the neorealist proposes first, that things are self-containing; and second therefore, that their involvements are self-limited. See The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1921), 128. Shy Genel et al., “Introducing the Illustris Project: The Evolution of Galaxy Populations across Cosmic Time,” MNRAS 445.1 (November 2014), 175–200. This provides belated support for Thales. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 35, 82. Ibid., 33. Nicholas Rescher, Understanding Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 102. John Foster, The Case for Idealism (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1982), see especially chapter 2. Theodore Sider, Writing the Book of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Aristotle, De Anima, 414b29–30. Maurizio Ferraris, Goodbye, Kant! What Still Stands of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Richard Davies (Albany: SUNY, 2013), especially chapter 5. Immanuel Kant, Opus postumum, trans. Eckart Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 240. J.G. Fichte, Praktische Philosophie (1795), in Fichte-Gesammtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften [GA] (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 1962–), GA II/3, 249.

Everything 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.  167 As recounted in Paul Feyerabend, Naturphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 89, citing Whorf: “According to Whorf . . . the grammar of a language contains a cosmology,” so that language “is not just an instrument for describing reality but forms it.” See also Hilary Putnam, “Reflections on Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking,” The Journal of Philosophy 76.11 (1979), 603–18, where he gives a diagnosis of the necessary subservience of Nelson Goodman’s evanescent ontology to the Good, as articulated in Goodman’s “Notes on the Well-Made World,” Erkenntnis 19.1 (1983), 99–107. Kit Fine, “The Question of Realism,” Philosophers’ Imprint 1.1 (2001), 1–30, www.philosophersimprint. org/001001/. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 17. See Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson, Idealism. History of a Philosophy (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2011); and Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), especially Chapter 3. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System der Weltalter (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998), 49 (my translation).