Realism Without an Outside: Cognition-Relative Realism and the Limit of Positive Determinability

The classical opposition between realism and solipsism usually presupposes that one can meaningfully speak of a relation between consciousness and the external world. Realism asserts a reality independent of cognition; solipsism points to the inescapability of one’s own experience. The present paper argues that this opposition itself already presupposes too much: the problem lies not only in the assertion of an external world, but already in the concept of the “outside,” because it gives the indeterminable a form that can arise only within a cognitive system. The central thesis is this: the so-called outside is not a positively determinable domain that stands independently over against the cognitive system, but a stabilized interpretation of the limit of positive determinability as a counter-domain. This limit does not designate a spatial division between inside and outside, but the end of an operation of determination. Likewise, the “within” of a cognitive system is not meant spatially, but designates the reach of a context of determination. From this, neither naïve realism nor dogmatic solipsism follows. Concerning what is no longer positively determinable, it can be decided neither that it exists nor that it does not exist. Every positive determination as reality, matter, cause, structure, or world-in-itself would already be a form-giving operation within a cognitive system. The thesis is therefore not an ontology, but a limiting rule of positive determination. At the same time, realism does not thereby lose its significance. As cognition-relative realism, it describes the form in which reality can acquire meaning, resistance, and orientational force within a cognitive system. Realism does not begin merely with the assertion of real objects, but with the construction of an external and embedding order; from the perspective of this order, the cognitive system retroactively reconstructs itself as part of it. This retroactive reconstruction is functionally powerful, but must not be confused with full access to one’s own conditions of cognition.