Representations

The result of cognition are the representations which, due to the ‘dual’ nature of cognition itself, are intended to be representations of reality in the following ‘neutral’ sense: representations are the ways in which reality is present within the different forms of cognition, but we must also recognize that representations have their own ontological status: they are different from nothing, hence they are also part of reality, though at a different level (or of a different kind) with respect to the reality of which they are representations and which we can conventionally call “the world”.

At this junction, however, a subtle and unperceived historical change occurred in the way of conceiving knowledge. The classical and common-sense answer to the question “What do we know”? was “We know the world”; but suddenly, at the beginning of the 17th century, the answer became “We know our representations”, a statement for which no phenomenological evidence nor argument were offered, but was accepted as obvious by the most influential philosophers of that time, after having been expressed with special force by Descartes. The strange situation was that, on the one hand, the specific aim of cognition was still considered to be that of knowing the world but, on the other hand, it was admitted that we only know our representations and must try to prove (investigating only the domain of represen­tations) that they actually present how the world is. To put it differently: our knowledge consists of representations, and reality ‘in itself is supposed indepen­dent of our representations. Therefore, the proposal to know how reality is inde­pendently of our knowledge sounds almost contradictory, and this explains why the efforts for solving this ill posed problem were sterile.

An early solution of the difficulty was offered by idealism. Representations were usually called “ideas” by the philosophers of the 17th century, and some of them maintained that reality is not something that lies beyond representations, but is the very content of representations. In such a way the ontological independence of the world from cognition was denied, and for this reason since that time idealism was presented as the opposite of realism. The traditional ‘intentional identity' of cog­nition and reality was conflated in an ontological identity. The most famous expression of this original idealism is George Berkeley's statement esse est percipi (“to be is to be perceived”), but no less significant is the monistic philosophy of Spinoza, whose VII Proposition of the II Book of his Ethics states ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum (“the order and connection of the ideas is the same as the order and connection of things”). His doctrine was a clear (and recognized) prefiguration of the classical German transcendental idealism of the 19th century. Paradoxically, the fact of having ‘re-qualified' reality as the content of thinking permitted to consider idealism also as a form of realism with a clear advantage in principle: if we are able to explore correctly the world of the ideas we will ipso facto determine the structure of reality, and this is epistemological realism.

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