Reality: Part I

You know you’ve been waiting for it, and I guess I had to write about…you guessed it, “reality” and its many, many meanings.

Someone who loves words has to write about their relationship to "reality" at some point. Today's the day!

I have to start with my late father’s diatribe against philosophers: “If they’d done more dishes, they’d have known better what reality was.” I don’t ever remember him doing any dishes; I’ll leave it at that.

(Correction: Family members have pointed out that they remember him doing dishes, so I need to set the record straight in that regard; obviously, he strove, at least at some points, to attain reality, at least as he saw it. Please note these issues of consistency and selectivity in my next post.)

I can also remember the anger from a classmate who had just been introduced to Plato. She pointed skyward, like Plato in the “School of Athens”, but without conviction, only with a kind of betrayal, as if class had ruined her day. “You mean, the real world is up there?” Her single and final afterword was unprintable.

Imagine the implications: If you’re a Boston Celtics fan, the essence of Kevin Garnettness lives in the celestial “form” of Kevin Garnett, in that basketball game in the heavens than which none greater can be imagined. The Kevin Garnett who labors somewhere near where the Mass Pike begins (or ends, depending on your point of view), is only an imperfect copy.

Yes, friends, what we consider “realism” and “idealism” in current parlance were actually reversed in the Middle Ages. Realism had to do with the forms in heaven, and “ideas” were the imperfect, sense-derived human notions that individuals labored under, far removed from celestial “universals”.

Thinkers who took after Plato were known as “realists”, while those who followed Aristotle’s more earth-bound ideas (remember him pointing downward in the “School of Athens”) were Nominalists, those concerned with the “names” of things (also called “Terminalists”, after terms for things). Realists thought that you knew what a tree was because you were born with an imperfect copy of “treeness” in your mind, while Nominalists figured you looked in a book, saw a picture of a tree, then read the caption.

In the Enlightenment, when thinkers considered sense perception the baseline for reality, these “Empiricists”, or insisters on the primacy of sense perception, had to account for extra-sense images in some way, so they came up with “innate ideas”, or ideas you were born with.

You might find these sorts of disputes quaint, or not so quaint, simply irrelevant.
But they’re not.

Linguistic Analysts of recent decades still think that all we can “know” boils down to language, and the rest is, well, something that mystics worry about.

You might think that scientists would be the greatest believers in reality, or common sense; well, what about nuclear physics, particle theory, etc….when was the last time you saw a “quark” or some other sub-atomic particle?

Or, consider the ongoing, seemingly intractable disputes between religious fundamentalists and those who consider themselves more “open” to multiple realities, Biblical criticism, etc. The problem for fundamentalists is NOT convincing others of “miracles”…in fact, their insistence is the opposite. Their obsession is and must be proving that all their beliefs can be proven in material fashion so that it can be common sense reality, empirically able to test and prove. If they can make that case, then, they can say that their religious outlook is “true” and cannot be disproven. What does that need do for mysticism, that root of all religion? Such materialism, such an insistence on material, “objective” reality kills mysticism, that most subjective impulse.

Social control in totalitarian regimes, whether religious or secular, depends on just that, the control of reality for a populace at large.

Stay tuned.