Reality and Appearance

Reality and Appearance

Appearances are part of reality, even when they are illusions; they are real things, no less so when not representing reality correctly. But is reality part of appearance? Certainly, not all reality is presented in appearances, since some parts of reality have appeared to no one (unless we include God). But is reality everpart of appearance—does reality ever appear? I will argue that reality never appears as it is in itself. In its actual nature it never appears; it never appears as it is. No aspect of it ever appears as it really is. This means that we never experience reality as it is in itself in any respect. It would be widely agreed that some of its appearance is foreign to it as it is in itself (e.g., secondary qualities); I am suggesting that all of it is strictly outside the scope of appearance. For example, no one has ever seen an object as it is in reality, though it is a certain way in reality. The reason for this is simple, indeed truistic: appearances are always viewpoint-relative, but reality is not. The way the physical world is in itself is independent of any viewpoint; no viewpoint is built into it. But viewpoint is always built into appearance, necessarily. The easiest case is spatial perspective: we sense things from a position in space, but things in space don’t themselves have any spatial perspective. Perspective belongs to the appearances but not to the reality that appears. In other words, perspective is subjective (subject-relative) while reality is objective (not subject-relative). Appearance contains a point of view; reality does not. There is no point of view in reality, just brute existence—being in space is not a matter of being perceived to be in space. This is a fact about reality—a metaphysical fact—but it is a fact that cannot be represented in perceptual appearances. Thus, reality could never be perceived just as it is: the way it is for no one cannot be captured in an appearance to someone. Nor could it be captured by the universe itself, since the universe does not appear to itself. If it did, it would have a point of view, thus undermining its claim to complete objectivity. To put it differently, sense-data cannot represent objective states of affairs objectively. Sense-data may be caused by objective states of affairs (no doubt they are), and in that sense may be said to be de re objects of experience, but they cannot represent how the states of affairs are in themselves and only in themselves. That, indeed, is a conceptual truth.

At this point questions crowd in. Is this conclusion true only for perceptual experience but not for appearance in thought? What does it imply about human knowledge? What about Berkeley? Is it true for numbers and mental states? I will consider each question in turn. The first question is answered by observing that thought and perception are not unconnected: to the degree that our thoughts reflect our perceptions, they too are incapable of representing reality as it intrinsically is. Even a mild version of empiricism will generate this result. Certainly, we can’t imagine the real world without any tincture of our world of subjective appearance, because imagination tracks the senses. And isn’t it true that if we try to focus on our thoughts about the physical world, we find that we are forced back to a perspectival conception of reality? If I try to think of the world from noperspective, I find that I don’t know what I am thinking—my own self keeps intruding (hence the temptations of solipsism). Every conception of things is a type of view, but there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. We ask about someone’s views, tacitly conceding that they are locked into a certain perspective, even if it is just the human (or mammalian) perspective. Reality does not come to us neat but diluted by our own sensibility, sensory or intellectual. The phenomenal world is our world; we can’t grasp reality noumenally. So, thought cannot escape the tyranny of the appearances. At the limit we are subject to the tyranny of intelligence (reason, intellect) in that we see things from our cognitive vantage point—our concepts, our logical faculties. The subject cannot escape himself altogether. But reality is under no such constraint, simply possessing being itself, knowing subjects be damned. Thought, by contrast, cannot escape its status as thought: thought is always present to itself, intrusively so. Thought is not transparent. There is no such thing as a fact being embedded in thought just as it is, neither more nor less. Thought always adds and subtracts, because thought is a form of appearance (the intellectual form). A physical fact thought about is always thought about under a mode of presentation, but facts themselves have no mode of presentation—they are pure reference, so to speak. Being is not being for anyone. There is thus a fundamental mismatch at the heart of all mental representation. The mind never encompasses reality just as it is in itself. The idea is contradictory.

Does that mean that human knowledge of reality is impossible? No, because knowledge does not require complete objectivity; it requires, rather, a type of tracking. The knowing mind must correspond to reality, reliably, deeply, but it need not be reality—as if only the object itself can truly know its own nature. Knowledge does not require identity between subject and object, only correlation. Knowledge is true justified belief—a type of mapping—not the upload of world into mind. Scientific knowledge is not compromised by the admission that it cannot describe the world in completely unadulterated objective terms, as if the knowing subject has somehow disappeared. The knowing mind never collapses into the world; it parallels it. Maybe we have a fantastic ideal of knowledge in which the mind is invaded by the world as it objectively is, setting up camp in it as it were; but realistically, knowledge cannot aspire to such an encounter–it must be content to provide an atlas of reality, a guide. No one ever contended that x knows that p if and only if x’s mind apprehends reality as it objectively and intrinsically is: that is far too strong a requirement. Scientific realism does not require that reality should enter wholly and directly into the scientific mind, like a shoe in a box. It does not require an epistemology of containment.

What about Berkeley? It might be supposed that a Berkeleyan metaphysics could prevent reality from eluding the clutches of appearance. If reality is appearance (idealism), then it cannot lie outside of appearance; it must be a type of appearance, viewpoint and all. And surely, we can grasp appearances! But remember that reality for Berkeley is appearance in God’s mind not just any old mind (yours, your neighbor’s); and therefore, the kind of appearance that constitutes reality is not like ordinary human appearance. Do we really grasp what it would be for something to appear thus-and-so to God? Do we grasp the full reality of divine appearances, and not from our own limited perspective on them? Doubtful: so, we don’t have a conception of reality in Berkeley’s system that allows it to be captured by our human appearances—it transcends them. It probably transcends them even more than material substance—it is further from our natural modes of comprehension. At any rate, such a metaphysics doesn’t render reality one whit closer to what can enter into human representations; we are not acquainted with a reality so conceived, as we are not acquainted with ordinary objects under metaphysical materialism (i.e., the doctrine that physical objects are material not mental).

I just said that we know our own appearances—that they appear to us just as they are in themselves. But is that really true? This raises the broader question of whether any elements of reality appear to us just as they are, neither more nor less. Does pain, for example, appear just as it is intrinsically? That certainly seems like a more appealing proposition than it does for physical objects outside the mind, but on closer inspection it too comes to seem questionable. For it is arguable that pain also has dimensions that don’t show up in its appearance to us: it may have an underside that escapes our introspective awareness. What about its functional and cerebral properties? These don’t reveal themselves to our powers of introspection, so the first-person appearance of pain is not a mirror of the full nature of pain. And when we include these physical features by taking the brain and behavior into account we are back with elusive physical facts. Is it even clear that we have a complete picture of the phenomenology of pain just from our ordinary introspective awareness? Maybe there are details and similarities that are not immediately apparent to us: the reality of pain’s phenomenology might exceed the appearances it presents to us. After all, first-person introspection is just one perspective on pain, though doubtless a central one; pain itself might have a subjective reality that goes beyond such a perspective. It is a constituent of objective reality as well as a conspicuous presence in my subjective image of the world. It has being-in-itself as well as being-for-me.

Lastly, what should we say about mathematics? When I think about numbers do I grasp their objective reality? I know truths about them, to be sure, but do they offer their whole being to my cognitive faculties? I don’t view them from a particular spatial perspective, so it isn’t as if I falsify their inner nature in the way I do with concrete objects. But do I really perceive (intellectually) their actual intrinsic nature? Is there no more to their intrinsic nature than what appears to my mind? That seems hard to maintain: we don’t even know whether they are abstract, mental, or notational! We are ontologically myopic with respect to numbers. What if they exist in Platonic heaven right next to the Form of the Good—is that any part of our normal encounters with numbers? Scarcely. We may have a very partial and biased picture of mathematical objects; their reality may differ significantly from their appearance to us. Thus, I am inclined to believe that number appearance does not fully disclose number reality, though our knowledge of truths about numbers is one of our stronger areas of knowledge. It is hard, then, to escape the conclusion that reality never coincides with appearance. Appearances always omit aspects of reality as well as impose aspects alien to the thing itself. Our very concept of reality is too rarified for comfort, though indispensable.[1]

[1] Hume would say that we have no impression of subject-independent reality corresponding to our putative idea of it. The idea is thus under suspicion of emptiness. That is no doubt too strong, but it is true that the idea is unnervingly abstract and disturbingly noumenal.