Philosophical Bits 1:
Metaphysics
This is real. I am not merely an actor in a story. That is, I am not a character in a fiction. My life may have narrative form, but it is a true story, not made up.
I am walking outdoors in Oregon in winter. The world I see around me—a sidewalk, houses, trees, lampposts, streetlights, cars and trucks, white clouds and dark gray clouds, the broken shafts of morning sunlight—all this is real.
In contrast there is fiction. I wrote a sci-fi novel, Castles. It’s a long thing, to be published in three volumes, with scores of characters, and most of the action takes place on an imagined planet on the other side of the galaxy. However entertaining or instructive the story, the events in it didn’t really happen; it isn’t true. (I leave aside for the moment the idea of symbolic truth.) The people and places in my story aren’t real.
Consider Alice’s experiences in Through the Looking Glass. Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell her she is only a character in the Red King’s dream. “If that there king would wake up, poof! You’d be gone.” Alice, of course, rebels against the idea that she isn’t real, and at the end of the story she wakes up. The Red Queen, whom Alice was angrily shaking, turned out to be a cat. But readers of the story are provoked to wonder: Alice really is a figure in a fairy tale, despite her insistence that she is real; how do we know we aren’t also fictional characters? Lewis Carroll, the author, was a mathematician. It is no surprise that the layers-inside-layers of the world inside the looking glass provoke us to think.
So how do I know “this,” the world of my morning walk, is real? Do I slap my foot (or both feet or my hand) against the sidewalk? What would that prove? Can I “shake” something or someone (like Alice shaking the Red Queen) and wake myself from a dream? I’ve had lots of dreams, and I have experienced waking from dreams. I am extremely confident that I am not dreaming. It seems I can tell the difference between dream and reality. Can I? The Matrix—another story—envisions a dystopian future in which most people are systematically deceived about reality. I am confident that I do not live in a supercomputer-generated illusion. Is my confidence misplaced?
In an Intro to Philosophy course, I introduce students to philosophical jargon. Every discipline has its own jargon, I reassure the students. Philosophy’s words are no more intimidating than the technical terms of other fields. Just think of the strange words you learn in biochemistry or neuropsychology. You’ll get used to it. You’ll even begin to use these words yourself.
Here are two words to begin: metaphysics and epistemology. In metaphysics we ask: What is real? In epistemology: How do we know?
Some philosophy students quickly decide, when they learn there are competing theories in both metaphysics and epistemology, that philosophy is entirely a matter of opinion. Nothing is true or false, right or wrong. We don’t know what is real or how to know. I must assure them there is a difference between good philosophy and bad philosophy—and they will begin to recognize the difference when I mark their papers.
Some philosophers, sceptics, would say I should not assert the reality of the world of my walk, but their assertions—made with great confidence at various times in the 20th century—have been rightly undermined.
I do not live in the made-up worlds of Through the Looking Glass, The Matrix, or Castles. I live in the real world, and I am grateful for my existence.
