I have found that in my everyday interactions I tend to lump people into two broad groups; realists and anti-realists.

The Realist

The realist is motivated in her everyday life by an idea of ‘how things are anyway’ and orients her beliefs, values and actions accordingly. When asked ‘what should be done?’ her immediate reaction is to think about which action best mirrors or fits the nature of things . The realist will tend to repeat phrases such as ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ and ‘the fact of the matter is’. She is moved by the idea of a non-human authority, and wishes to humble herself against this authority. She tends to be dogmatic and monistic in the sense of believing that there is One set of True values and One underlying reality that unifies everything in the universe.

She holds steadfast to this idea that there is an intrinsic nature of reality, above and beyond our descriptions of it, and there is a way for human beings to discover it. This may be through the methods of the sciences or through divine revelations or through other means or other special and chosen human beings such as scientists and prophets that serve as intermediaries. It may be shrouded and not fully knowable to human beings because we are too feeble to know or too sinful or too limited in our faculties, but in principle, there exists this knowledge. If we do not have that knowledge now, then it will be revealed by future human beings smarter than us and with more powerful tools that are better able to carve nature at its joints. If not in the future then at any rate it is known by some higher being, be it aliens, the angels, the Gods and so on - but the most important part is that there is this joint-carving knowledge which gets us at the One set of uniform Truths that is independent of human linguistic practices. And we might add to this that, once we gain access to this set of Truths, we will reach some kind of future felicity, some kind of Utopia, because after all “the truth shall set us free”, either in the form of a celestial heaven up above or a paradise on earth. 

The realist values metaphysics and believes that there are presuppositionless Truths out there waiting to be discovered, and that there is a virtue called ‘the love of Truth’ which she possesses. The pursuit of this truth is to her an end in itself and holds more weight than any normative, pragmatic or social consideration. What matters most to her is to get closer and closer to what she takes to be the intrinsic nature of reality, be it through science or religious experience or whatever other means available. Her favourite figures are Tolstoy’s Bolkonsky, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Doyles’ Sherlock Holmes, especially when he is in the mood of saying "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

She tends to be attracted to necessities such as the idea of an intrinsic ‘human nature’ that is fixed and static and believes that contingencies are rare, or even that there are no contingencies whatever and that “everything happens for a reason”. When faced with a problem, she will often try to adapt it to her conception of the underlying reality rather than reshaping that conception. She likes to have solid foundations and the thought that her beliefs might be circular utterly daunts her.

When introduced to a new concept that describes a mode of being that is foreign to her, she will tend to reject it because it does not conform to Reality. To her, we are answerable to this nonhuman entity (be it Reality, God, How Things Are Anyway) when carving out our concepts, and not only to other present and future human beings. In this sense, she is resistant to change and is usually socially conservative in her values. She is concerned about “getting things right” and draws inspiration from Plato and Aristotle and despises thinkers like Pyrrho. Her group’s intellectual genealogy is traced to modern day thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Bennett, Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, and Bill Kristol—back to the philosopher Leo Strauss.

Finally, she regards the anti-realist as being delusional and naively anthropocentric for failing to see the world as it truly is.

The anti-Realist

The anti-realist, on the other hand, is motivated by the utilitarian maxim ‘happiness to the greatest numbers’ and the christian idea that ‘love is the the only law’, and apply them both in her moral (what ought be done) and epistemic (what ought be believed) reasoning. She will often utter and live by mottos like ‘do whatever makes you happy’ and ‘who cares as long as X doesn’t hurt anyone?’. When asked ‘what should be done?’ her immediate reaction is to think about which action brings about more happiness. She cares not about essences and ‘the nature of things’ and her primary consideration is social, pragmatic and normative. She prides herself in being anthropcentric in the sense that she does not care about prostrating herself against anything non-human and will view the world as irreducibly social and consisting of a continuous cycle of negotiations with her fellow human peers. The anti-realist does not deny that there is an external reality that emits causal pressures which resist against her desires, but because she believes reality is inescapably mediated by our descriptions of it, she is more concerned about which descriptions lead to a happier, richer, more fulfilling life rather than about which descriptions better correspond to reality. Her favourite figures are Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Sartre’s Roquentin, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Karamazov, Tolstoy’s Bezukhov and Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

The anti-realist thinks that the realists’ virtue for the love of truth is a vice that leads people to cling onto old, less pragmatic, ways of thinking that may hurt her fellow peers, and sees it as the love of chains. Her favourite credo is that truth is made (intersubjectively) and not found. She draws inspiration from poets and novelists that offer her new, more imaginative perspectives that she had not preciously considered. Her way of persuading others is to ask them to ‘try looking at it this way’ instead of saying ‘this way is the True and only way’. She regards the realist as being hypnotised by a platonic spell and socialised into a platonic language game, the wrong language game.

I find myself in this latter group.