What is realism?

Are you a realist or not?
When people ask that question ,I ask ,what is your realism?For them realism means only one entity.But for me realism is a multitude of entities.It is a corruption of reality(Wallace stevens)the most independent elastic and prodigious of critical terms.There is the fantastic realism followed by formal realism,ideal realism,infrarealism,ironic realism,militant realism,naïve realism,national realism,naturalist realism,objective,optimistic,pessimistic,plastic,poetic,psychological,quotidian,romantic,satiric,socialist,subjective,supersubjective,visionary realisms the adjectives neverending.Wimsatt and Brooks names low,high and drab realisms.Then there is a spiritual realism.Which one of these you mean when you ask ,”Are you a realist or not”In a way ,we all are realists.But in our own way.
Realism,a critical term adopted from philosophy .It is sath,dharma,or may be idealism.Originally meant for universalism.Opposite of it was conceptualism(universal exists only in the mind)and nominalism (which denied the existence of universalism .It is just a name)
Truth is either scientific or poetic.Scientific truth is discovered by a process of knowing ,through observation and comparisons.It is technically refered to as a correspondence theory.Poetic truth is created by a process of creation,and is a coherence theory.Science is the truth of a positivist determinist whose aim is to document ,delimit,define and correspondence theory defers automatically to the fact and requires that truth be verified by reference to it.It is taking confidence from substantial agreement of majority in its description of reality which it therefore calls objective.
Coherence theory deals with intuitive perceptions.Selfevidence is formost.Correspondence theory is semantic and coherence theory is syntactic conception of truth(Russell)and hence both are functions of our brain and are realistic in their own way.
It is the troubled conscience of socalled realists that accord a special value to documentary drama,facts and to confessional poetry.A value which is applied illegitimately from without instead of being generated from within .Pretensions are more awarded than real performance in it.Correspondence theory is conscience of literature and coherence theory is consciousness of literature.In the latter realism is not imitation of someone else,but is original creation.
In this sense ,poetry is the real thing ,but it is created in another real world.Thia world is a dictionary of Hieroglyphics.(Baudelaire)Transcendentalism in poetry involves idealism and expresses itself ultimately as symbolism in literature.For idealists the transcendental doctrine alone is true ,according to which the goal of humanity is the establishment of a higher consciousness(Ernest Renan 1890).Picasso said “your self is a sun with a thousand rays in your belly.The rest is nothing”Something like the sahasrasuryaprakasa
of vishnu in his nabhipadma.
Metaphor offers a kind of satisfaction to intellectual nostalgia for the predualistic stage of consciousness.But the puritanical realist and th enovean romancier reflects metaphor as a contrivance in his obstinate burrowing away from the light of the mind.Whereas realism of consciousness derives all its strength from its simplicity ,realism in its conscious phase depends upon an awareness of its own complexity.
The naïve realist guided by the light of conscience ignore the actual process of creation.The informed realist knows that he is guided only by the light of the mind,so the process itself assume great importance.(Diary 4.9.1994)

Godell’s incomplete theorem
There are several problems which mathematics can never solve .Man will never know the final secret of the universe,however much he/she try.Because so many simple problems are still there which mathematics cant prove.Wittgenstein like a Zen mystic said”we feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered ,the problems of life remain completely untouched.The solution of problem of life is seen in vanishing of the problem.In Godell’s book ,the consistency of continuum hypothesis,Canton’s continuous principle cannot be disproved from existing axioms of the set theory.
What is Cantons continuum problem?He wrote in it:Despite their remoteness from sense experience we do have something like a perception of object of a set theory ,as it is seen from the fact that the axioma force themselves upon us as being true.This kind of mathematical intuition or perception is better than any sense perception.They too represent an aspect of objective reality ,but their presence in us is due to another kind of relationship between us and reality(unlike our senses).Godells incompleteness theorems are on an importance comparable to Pythagorus proof that square root of 2 is irrational.Pythagorus said that no ratio of natural numbers can fully describe the relation between the diagonal and the sides of the square.Godell showed that no finitely describable theory can codify all mathematical thruth.Sets of all true statements about mathematics is finitely unnameable and thus essentially random and infinite.His theorem :”The rational thought can never penetrate to the final ultimate truth” is the same as that of Sankara who said that logic can never explain the absolute ,but swanubhoothy can.
When Godel say “I do objective mathematics”he meant,the mathematical entities exist independently of the activity of mathematician,just as the stars would be there even if there are no astronomers to watch them.For him mathematics ,even that of infinities ,was essentiall y an empirical science.According tothis standpoint we do not create mental objects we talk about ,instead we find them on some higher plane that the mind sees into ,by a process not unlike sense perception.Godel said ,possibility is observer-dependent and therefore real.Because it is not subject to our will.Any one can go and see the Tajmahal .It is there for anyone to see.Like that anyone who takes some trouble to learn mathematics can see set of natural numbers himself with an independent existence ,an existence as a certain abstract possibility of thought .Just like Brahma concept.It is there for anyone who takes trouble to enquire (Only for the enquirer it reveals).
But how to enquire and perceive an abstract possibility of thought?
The method is exactly that of the Brahmagnani.Godell says three things.
1.Close off all other senses by lying down in a quiet place and seek with your mind.(This is called chithavrithy nirodha)
2.It is a mistake to let everyday reality condition possibility and only to imagine combinings and permutations of physical objects.The mind is cpable of perceiving infinite sets.
3.Ultimate goal of such thought and of all philosophy is the perception of the absolute.
Kurt Godell thus shared with Einstein a certain mystical turn of thought.The central teaching of mysticism is Reality is ONE.The practice of mysticism consists in finding ways to experience this higher unity directly.The one has variously been called the Good,God,Cosmos,Mind,Void,Absolute.No door in the labyrinthine castle of Science opens on to the absolute.But it is possible to jump out of the maze (Bandhana)if one understands it,and expereience absolute oneself.
This is the reality of mystics,mathematicians,yogi and the Advaithi ,and both Einstein and Cantor belonged to this class ,like our Sankara.They did chithavrithinirodha,concentrated on absolute and experienced it.Therefore when Godell say that Mind is everywhere opposed to the being localized in the brain of people,it is the basic mystic teaching of ancient philosophers who used the same method.He came across the same discovery ,because he tried the same method(Travelled the same road so that he could see the Taj Mahal. )