Theme
What is ultimately real
63 philosophers, 9 traditions
What is reality fundamentally made of or grounded in? Answers range from water, forms and the One to brahman, emptiness, the Dao and existence itself.
Is the world at bottom one thing or many, and is its ground something we can see, name or even think? In Greece, Thales proposed water as the first principle (archē) of all things, and Parmenides argued that what truly is must be one, whole and changeless. Plato placed the most real things in eternal forms beyond the senses, and Plotinus traced everything back to a single, indescribable One.
In India, Vedānta asked how the world stands to brahman. Śaṅkara held that only nondual brahman is ultimately real, while Rāmānuja and Madhva kept the reality of individual selves and things. The Buddhist Nāgārjuna denied that anything has an intrinsic nature at all. In China, the Daodejing pointed to a nameless Dao as the source of heaven and earth, and Zhu Xi explained the world through pattern (li) and vital stuff (qi). In Persia, Mulla Sadra argued that existence itself, not essence, is what is real.
Philosophers today still debate whether the whole is prior to its parts, a view that Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza and Hegel may have held.
Through time
6th century BCE
Anaximander
Beneath the elements lies the Boundless (apeiron), eternal and without definite character. Hot and cold separate out of it, and the world takes shape from their interplay; on one reading of his fragment, things also perish back into it.
Laozi
Beneath all things lies the Dao, the nameless, formless source from which heaven and earth arise. Having no shape or limits, it can’t be any particular thing, so it can be described only as wu, nonbeing: “All things under heaven are born of being; being is born of wu.”
5th century BCE
Anaxagoras
Reality is an unlimited mixture of eternal ingredients, each present in every part, however small. Only mind (nous) stands apart, unmixed; by setting the mixture spinning, it separates out the world we see.
Parmenides
Reason shows that what is must be “ungenerated and deathless, whole and uniform, and still and perfect”, since nothing can come from what is not. The changing world of the senses belongs to mortal opinion. Scholars still debate whether he meant that only one thing exists.
Empedocles
Reality is four everlasting roots, fire, air, water and earth, moved by Love, which unites them, and Strife, which divides them. Accepting Parmenides that nothing can come from nothing, he treated birth and death as mixture and separation.
Drew on and argued against Parmenides
Zeno of Elea
Common sense assumes that there are many things and that they move, but both assumptions lead to contradictions. Whether he meant to prove Parmenides’ monism, or only to show that its critics were in no better position, is disputed.
Drew on Parmenides
Democritus
Reality is atoms and void. Atoms are indivisible, unchangeable and infinite in number; the visible world, with its colours and tastes, is clusters of atoms constantly forming and breaking up, and even whole worlds come to be and pass away.
Drew on and argued against Parmenides
4th century BCE
Plato
The most real things are not what we see and touch but the forms: eternal, changeless beings such as beauty itself. The many beautiful things around us take their character from the one form, and the world of the senses is defective by comparison with that more perfect realm.
Drew on Parmenides; drew on and argued against Anaxagoras
About 300 years later
1st century BCE
Lucretius
There are only atoms and the void. Atoms are eternal and far too small to see, and everything else, from stones to souls to whole worlds, is a temporary arrangement of them that will one day come apart.
Drew on and argued against Empedocles
1st century CE
Wang Chong
All change in the world is due to qi, which Heaven gives forth spontaneously and without intention. All generation, change and decay, from the birth of a person to the course of the seasons, is the unwilled movement of qi, not the work of any divine agent.
Drew on and argued against Laozi
2nd century CE
Nāgārjuna
Nothing is ultimately real in the sense of having an intrinsic nature (svabhāva). Things depend on causes, parts and the minds that conceive them, and these chains of dependence never end in a foundation. This is not nihilism: things still exist and work at the conventional level.
3rd century CE
Plotinus
Everything depends on one first principle, the One, which is utterly simple and beyond anything we can say of it. Its unlimited power overflows to produce Intellect, then Soul, then the physical world, each less perfect than its source; sensible things are only images of true, intelligible beings.
Drew on Plato
Wang Bi
All beings arise from nothingness (wu). This is not a hidden substance but the necessary ground of being, for whatever gave rise to beings cannot itself be one; “Dao” is only a name for it. It shows itself in the world as order and principle (li).
Drew on Laozi
Guo Xiang
There is no creator or organising principle behind things; even Wang Bi’s “nothingness” came too close to a first cause. Everything arises of itself through self-transformation, each thing shaped by all that came before it and shaping all that follows.
Argued against Wang Bi
5th century CE
Proclus
Everything derives from the One, which is beyond all multiplicity. Reality unfolds from it in ordered levels, the gods (henads), being, life, intellect and soul, each staying in, going out from and returning to its cause.
Bhartṛhari
Reality is Brahman, whose essence is the Word (śabda), and the world of many things is that Word made manifest. Because every object we know is known through language, the unity behind all words is also the unity of all that exists.
Gauḍapāda
Only the unborn, non-dual Self, pure consciousness, is real. Nothing is ever truly born: the world of plurality is imagined upon the Self through māyā, like a dream or a city seen in the sky, and vanishes when the Self is known.
Drew on Nāgārjuna
6th century CE
Zhiyi
Every moment of experience, however slight, contains the whole of reality and is identical with it; each mental act and each content is itself ultimate reality.
Dushun
Ultimate reality is not a blank emptiness. What awakening reveals is li: endless, ceaseless activity that nonetheless has a coherent pattern.
7th century CE
Candrakīrti
Nothing, not even the categories we explain the world with, escapes dependent origination; the Mādhyamika shows this by drawing out the absurd consequences of any claim to intrinsic existence.
Drew on Nāgārjuna
Xuanzang
Only consciousness is real: nothing exists outside the mind, and external objects are a misconception. Alongside consciousness one further principle is real, suchness, the mind’s true nature and the equivalent of the Madhyamaka void.
Wonhyo
All beings arise from the One Mind and return to it. In itself it is pure and beyond the reach of language; its aspects of suchness and of arising and ceasing account for both emptiness and the changing world.
Argued against Xuanzang
Fazang
Everything is empty, and emptiness means universal interconnection: each thing pervades and contains all others, like the jewels of Indra’s net, each reflecting all the rest. Things differ only on the surface, as the parts of a golden lion are all the same gold.
Drew on Wonhyo
Śrīgupta
Nothing has an intrinsic nature: what seems real can be neither truly one nor truly many. What we call real is conventional, dependently arisen and causally effective.
Drew on Nāgārjuna
8th century CE
Śaṅkara
Only nondual brahman, pure consciousness, is ultimately real: the single foundation on which the whole universe depends, and one with our own self. The world of many objects is real at the everyday level, but transient and dependent, just as pots and plates are passing forms of clay.
Drew on Gauḍapāda
Śāntarakṣita
Ultimately, nothing has an inherent nature, since nothing is truly one or truly many. Conventionally, things arise from causes, act and pass away, and are of the nature of consciousness; seeing this is a step towards seeing that even the mind is empty.
Bhāskara
The world and individual selves are real, not illusions; they are Brahman made finite and many by limiting conditions, which liberation removes.
Argued against Śaṅkara
9th century CE
Kūkai
The cosmos is the body and mind of the cosmic Buddha Dainichi. Every thing and event in it is his preaching of the Dharma, in the gestures, sounds and images that are his “three mysteries”, so reality itself is the Buddha’s self-expression.
11th century
Ratnakīrti
Reality is a single, undivided awareness that knows itself. There is nothing outside it, not even other minds; the distinctions between self and world, and between one person and another, are errors of everyday thought.
Zhou Dunyi
Reality flows from the Supreme Polarity (taiji), which is also Non-Polarity (wuji): through yin and yang and the Five Phases it generates the myriad things. The many are one, a single dynamic system in which human beings are integral parts.
Zhang Zai
There is nothing that is not qi. Things form as qi condenses and pass away as it disperses into the Great Vacuity, which is not emptiness but qi in its rarefied state. The process has no outside cause and no creator; it is simply the nature of qi.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Everything other than God is made of matter and form, even soul and intellect, rooted in a purely spiritual first matter. God, a simple unity beyond description, acts through the divine Will, which stands between the First Essence and the world.
Drew on Plotinus
Cheng Hao
The ultimate reality, called heaven, the way, change and human nature, is principle (li). Principle is not a thing but the unceasing activity of giving life, never apart from the things it animates: “outside dao there are no things and outside things there is no dao”.
Studied with Zhou Dunyi
Anselm of Canterbury
The greatest reality is God, that than which a greater cannot be thought: supremely good, timeless and wholly active. All other good things are good through him, the one thing that is good through itself.
Cheng Yi
All things have their principle (li), and the many principles are ultimately one, the transcendent ground of everything that exists. Principle is not qi, but it is what brings about the alternation of yin and yang, and the two never exist apart.
Studied with Zhou Dunyi; drew on Zhang Zai
12th century
Rāmānuja
Against Śaṅkara, the unity of all things in Brahman does not make the many unreal. Brahman stands to persons and things as a soul to its body: all are Brahman by forming its body, yet each keeps its own identity. Only an individual can be ignorant, so individuals can’t be illusions.
Argued against Śaṅkara
Peter Abelard
Only individual things exist, in all their variety. Universals, propositions, relations and wholes are not further things in the world; universality is a feature of words, not of reality.
Zhu Xi
The world is a patterned whole made of qi, a cosmic vapour that condenses into all things, and ordered by li, pattern. Zhu gave li priority, since it makes possible both an ordered world and moral norms, yet li is never found apart from qi.
Drew on Zhang Zai, Zhou Dunyi, Cheng Yi and Cheng Hao
Maimonides
God is absolutely one and simple, beyond any genus or definition, so we can say what God is not but never what God is. Positive attributes, however exalted, bring in a plurality and a likeness to created things that God cannot have.
13th century
Ibn Arabi
There is no true existence but God, the Real, which is nondelimited and discloses itself in every delimited thing. The cosmos is an isthmus between the infinite light of Existence and the darkness of nonexistence, and nothing is truly known but God.
14th century
Dolpopa
Beneath defiled consciousness lies a pure, transcendental knowing: a single absolute that already has every quality of a Buddha.
Tsongkhapa
Things are empty of intrinsic existence, and that emptiness is the ultimate truth; yet the conventional world is real in its own way, and even emptiness holds only conventionally.
Drew on Candrakīrti; argued against Dolpopa
16th century
Vallabha
The world is not an illusion laid over Brahman: it is as real as Brahman, so between them there is no dualism of real and unreal at all.
Giordano Bruno
There is one infinite, eternal universe, a single living being that never changes in essence. Its countless worlds and everything in them are passing modes of this one being, animated by a world soul.
Drew on Lucretius, Plotinus and Parmenides
17th century
Mulla Sadra
What is fundamentally real is existence, not essence. Existence is one simple reality that comes in degrees of intensity, and the many things of the world are its grades; essences are only the mind’s ways of making sense of it. Even substance itself is constantly changing.
Drew on Ibn Arabi
Wang Fuzhi
Reality is vital force, which takes form as people and things and dissolves into the formless void; principle is nothing apart from it, and changes as conditions change.
Drew on and argued against Zhang Zai
Anne Conway
Reality consists of three kinds of being: God, Christ as “Middle Nature”, and created nature. Everything created is living spirit; there is no dead matter, and body is only spirit in a denser, darker condition.
Baruch Spinoza
There is only one substance, infinite and self-caused, and it is God, or Nature. Everything else, minds and bodies alike, exists in God as a mode of its attributes of thought and extension, and follows from the divine nature by necessity. There is no transcendent creator standing apart.
Drew on Maimonides
18th century
George Berkeley
Only minds and their ideas are real. The things we perceive are collections of ideas, whose being is to be perceived; there is no unthinking material substance behind them, and their order comes from God.
Dai Zhen
Reality is the ceaseless flow and transformation of qi. Pattern (li) is not an abstract entity existing apart from qi, as Dai took the Song Neo-Confucians to hold, but the typical order by which concrete things are organised and behave.
19th century
Arthur Schopenhauer
The inner nature of everything is Will: a blind, aimless, non-rational striving that we discover within ourselves as our deepest drive. The world as we experience it is that Will’s appearance, ordered by the forms of our minds.
Drew on Plato
Charles Sanders Peirce
The universe has evolved from a state of pure spontaneity into one governed by habits of varying strength. Mind is associated with freedom and spontaneity, matter with entrenched habit, and chance remains a real feature of the world.
William James
Reality is made of “pure experience”, neither mental nor physical. Minds and material things are different arrangements of it, and relations between experiences are as real as the experiences they relate.
Drew on Charles Sanders Peirce
20th century
Alfred North Whitehead
Reality consists of internally related processes and events, “actual occasions”, rather than bits of matter simply located in space. Taking such abstractions for the concrete facts of nature is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Drew on William James
Nishida Kitarō
The one reality is pure experience, prior to the split into subject and object. Its ultimate ground is absolute nothingness: not a being behind the world, but the place in which all things are, active and creative, determining itself without any determiner.
Drew on Plato
Tanabe Hajime
Absolute nothingness is not a place or ground behind things but a ceaseless movement of negation. Because it can act only through relative beings, absolute and relative, and nothingness and being, each mediate the other.
Drew on and argued against Nishida Kitarō
Feng Youlan
Reality has two realms: the True Realm of principle (li), universal, abstract and eternal, and the Real Realm of material force (qi) and concrete things, which imperfectly express it. Principle comes first in being, though not in time, and all things are one in the Great Whole.
Nishitani Keiji
Beneath the world of objects set over against an ego lies first the abyss of nihility and then, beyond it, the field of emptiness: an open clearing where things are neither reified nor nullified but let be, in unobstructed relation with one another.
Drew on Nishida Kitarō
Léopold Sédar Senghor
Being is vital force. Everything that exists, people, animals, plants and minerals, exists through a force that God has given it, as African religions understand the world.
W. V. O. Quine
What exists is what our best scientific theory, regimented in first-order logic, says its variables range over. On Quine’s account that means physical objects, the contents of regions of space-time, and sets.
Drew on Alfred North Whitehead
Gilles Deleuze
Reality is made of difference, not stable things: multiplicities rather than substances, events rather than essences, the virtual rather than the merely possible.
Drew on Baruch Spinoza
Jacques Derrida
Metaphysics has always ranked essence above appearance and the intelligible above the sensible. Deconstruction reverses these hierarchies and shows that each term is bound up with its opposite, so neither can serve as a pure foundation.
David Lewis
There are infinitely many concrete possible worlds, as real as ours. Within our world there is nothing but a mosaic of local natural properties, on which laws, chances and causation all depend.
Studied with W. V. O. Quine
Terms on this page
- archē
- Principle or origin: the starting point or fundamental principle of all things, which the first Greek philosophers sought. Aristotle reports that Thales took it to be water.
- brahman
- The ultimate reality taught in the Vedānta. Advaita identifies it with the self (ātman); Madhva held that the self and brahman are fundamentally and permanently different.
- qi
- Vital force or material force (氣), the stuff of which all things are made. Neo-Confucians paired it with principle (li), and explained the differences between people by the qi each is endowed with.
- apeiron
- The Boundless or Unlimited, “that which has no boundaries”: Anaximander’s name for the source of all things.
- wu
- Nonbeing or nothingness (無), literally “not having”. The Laozi says that being is born of nonbeing and speaks of the Dao itself as nonbeing; Wang Bi and He Yan held that nothingness is the root of all beings.
- nous
- Mind, reason or intellect. For Anaxagoras, cosmic nous is dispersed throughout everything and set the world in motion; scholars disagree whether it is a mind or rationality itself.
- svabhāva
- Intrinsic nature or inherent existence: the nature a thing would have of itself, uncaused, unchanging and independent of anything else. Nāgārjuna argued that nothing has it.
- māyā
- The creative or magical power by which, in Advaita Vedānta, the one reality appears as a world of many things. Gauḍapāda held that all dualities are projected by māyā and do not really exist.
- taiji
- Supreme Polarity (太極), or Supreme Ultimate: in Zhou Dunyi, the core of actual existence, which produces yin and yang as it moves between stillness and activity.
- wuji
- Non-Polarity (無極): in Zhou Dunyi’s cosmology, the origin of everything real, itself without definite form, which he paradoxically identifies with the Supreme Polarity (taiji).
- dao
- The Way (道). In the Laozi it is the nameless, formless source of all things, which can only be called dark or profound; Confucians spoke of the gentleman’s way, and Neo-Confucians identified the Dao with principle.
Sources
- Jonathan Schaffer, Monism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy