Towards the reconciliation of idealism and realism through Monistic Idealism: Bridging the Gap

Ontology can be interpreted as both the study of 'what is', the ultimate nature of reality (meta-physics), or 'being in the world' (social reality). The principal debate concerning ontology has been, for hundreds of years, between material realists and idealists about the relationship of mind to matter. Material Realism posits that things are real, made of matter, separate to the knower, and that consciousness is epiphenomenal. Idealists on the other hand, say matter is an illusion created by our minds. Therefore the apparent irreconcilable problem is that for material realists consciousness depends on matter and for idealists, matter (if it exists), depends on consciousness. The dialectic of the two positions is consequently played out in the social world of academics and researchers in terms of implications for epistemology, approaches and method as well as quality/validity criteria. Valuable resources are squandered in polemical "paradigm wars" resulting in mutual disdain and worse, mutual rejection of knowledge through a failure to recognise, through the insights of contemporary physicists, that reality (and social reality) can be described at different levels simultaneously. This paper pursues a reconciliation of material realism and idealism through a metaontology of Monistic Idealism which posits that consciousness is the ground of all existence and being, from which matter springs, and from which individual human consciousness has subsequently evolved. Consequently, human consciousness can be seen as individual and, at the same time, at a different level of description, as ground consciousness. Monistic Idealism thus simultaneously transcends the realism/idealism debate and part/whole dichotomy through recognising that phenomena behave in a way or have features that reveal a paradoxical dual nature (what unifies us is that we are each unique). The implication of embracing ontological paradox through a "metaontology" of Monistic Idealism is the simultaneous validation of diverse research paradigms and traditions. Tensions between approaches to research and findings could be used by the researcher to 'co-create' and tell a more complete story if there is recognition that answers to research problems are very much a reflection of the question asked and who is asking it. Synthesis of findings by the researcher provides a way of transcending last century's ontological dualism.