Realism is commonly defined as a concern for fact or reality and a rejection of the impractical and visionary. As a word in common use, however, realism is employed to suggest a wide variety of meanings, the choice among them depending on the context of use and the pertinent community of interpretation, from the arts, especially film, literature, and painting, to philosophy, politics, and international relations.
As a term of art in philosophy, realism refers to a thesis that general properties, technically known as universals, have a mode of existence or a form of reality that is in a certain sense independent of the things that possess them. Opposing theses, known as nominalism, and conceptualism, hold that universals are not real or do not properly exist, that only individuals and particulars exist, and that it is only the corresponding general concepts of thought or universal terms of language, serving as equivocal denotations of many particular things, that deceive the mind into thinking so. Philosophical realism is also referred to as Platonic realism or Scholastic realism, depending on the nuances of the particular variant in mind. In some versions of realism, in stark contrast to everyday usage, a distinction is drawn between existence and reality, based on the idea that potentials can be real but that only actuals can exist.
In a separate context of discussion, realism is contrasted with both idealism and materialism, and is more controversially considered by others to be synonymous with the position in the philosophy of mind known as dualism. In recent transmogrifications of the word, realism is contrasted with anti-realism and irrealism.
Increasingly these last disputes, too, are rejected as misleading, and some philosophers prefer to call the kind of realism espoused there metaphysical realism and eschew the whole debate in favour of simple naturalism or natural realism, which is not so much a theory as the position that these debates are ill-conceived, if not incoherent, and that there is no more to deciding what is really real than simply taking our words at face value.
Realism in philosophy can also refer to other forms of realism such as moral realism and scientific.
Realism in art and literature uses naturalistic tendencies as a tool to make a biting relevant political statement.
Realism also refers to a mid-19th century cultural movement with its roots in France.
The second half of the 19th century has been called the positivist age. It was an age of faith in all knowledge which would derive from science and scientific objective methods which could solve all human problems.
In the visual arts this spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection of Romantic subjectivism and imagination in favor of Realism - the accurate and apparently objective description of the ordinary, observable world, a change especially evident in painting. Positivist thinking is evident in the full range of artistic developments after 1850- from the introduction of realistic elements into academic art, from the emphasis on the phenomenon of light, to the development of photography and the application of new technologies in architecture and constructions.
Realism sets as a goal not imitating past artistic achievements but the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer to the artist. The artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism in the academic art was unanimously rejected, and necessity to introduce contemporary to art found strong support. New idea was that ordinary people and everyday activities are worthy subjects for art. Artists - Realists attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned. They set themselves conscientiously to reproduce all to that point ignored aspects of contemporary life and society - its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.
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Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. In part a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the rationalization of nature, in art and literature it stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on usage and custom. It was influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and elevated medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period. The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature.
The ideologies and events of the French Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability in the representation of its ideas.
In a general sense, Romanticism refers to several distinct groups of artists, poets, writers, and musicians as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers and trends of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. This movement is typically characterized by its reaction against the Age of Enlightenment; whereas the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized imagination and feeling. Rather than an epistemology of deduction, the Romantics demonstrated elements of knowledge through intuition. But a precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism have been objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as completely continuous with the present, some see it as the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment, and still others date it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. Perhaps the most instructive—and most succinct—definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
Some modernist writers argue that Romanticism represents an aspect of the Counter-Enlightenment, a negatively charged phrase used to label movements or ideas seen by them as counter to the rationality and objectivity inherent in the Enlightenment, and promoting emotionalism, superstition and instability.