Masaryk's realism is a modernist conception which assumes a rationally-grounded conviction that the modern educated and critically reflective person finds themselves in a deep existential crisis. The reason for this crisis is the loss of belief in transcendence-in that which goes beyond the individual and provides them with the guarantee of a universal sense to life. Masaryk's realist project thus intentionally hinges on two levels of transcendence in the creative focal point of which the experiencing subject immediately finds themselves and with which the subject is, in reality, in a continuing principled relation. The levels are first, that in which the "real" consciousness of our existence is dynamically created and, secondly, that of our reflective relating to the objective world, which is the domain of the exact sciences. Masaryk considers his distinctive conception of metaphysics as the legitimate philosophical component into which the two levels of our principled reflection fit. He understands metaphysics here as, on the one hand, the ultimate framework of all sciences and, on the other hand, as significantly incorporated into his conception of psychology. Psychology, however, in his conception is not just a narrowly specialised discipline, rather it justifiably recognises its metaphysical dimension, and this in connection with a conception of ethics, and, as a necessarily epistemological consequence, with religion too. Masaryk's realist conception of "scientific" metaphysics thus presents itself as an admirable attempt to bridge the two separately perceived areas to which a person as a conscious subject in reality is in a fundamental relation: the spheres of the "fallibility" of science and the "certainty" of faith. Equally, it significantly reflects Masaryk's lifelong endeavour to achieve the closest connection of theory and practice, which in the mid-1890s he characterised as "political" realism. On the threshold of the world war, this conception then issued in his activistically orientated anthropology. The author of the article is of the opinion that there remains a basically unanswered question: that of whether Masaryk's conception of realism can be, even today, considered as still relevant and significant, or whether it should kept to the periphery of contemporary research interest as only an ideological museum-piece.
