Reality: Turtles, Cats, and Kings
What is reality? In other words: what does it mean to Be?
What is reality? In other words: what does it mean to Be?
Some philosophers maintain that this is the deepest of questions, even defining metaphysics as the effort to provide an answer. In their struggle with that gnomic query, philosophy professors, their students, and those who simply seek the mantle of profundity offer a variety of equally gnomic replies. For example:
Ayn Rand said, “Existence is identity.” Sorry Ms. Rand, but that doesn’t work. Prince Hamlet has a very distinctive identity as a fictional character. His non-existence, then, is part of his identity.
A loftier authority, Josiah Royce, once wrote that reality “is the fulfillment of purpose, complete or incomplete.” But that is question begging. Yes, it is difficult to imagine any reality that cannot be considered the complete or incomplete fulfillment of somebody’s purpose. But it may be that is the consequence of our paucity of imagination.
The pragmatic answer to the question, “What is reality?” though, is the best. Pragmatists simply refuse to answer at all, or they answer with a shrug rather than with any string of words. For they know that to answer with words is only to substitute a longer expression for “reality.” How will that help anyone, what purpose will it serve (completely or incompletely), in the absence of any confusion in the first word that demands such paraphrase?
The pragmatist denies — sensibly — that there is any confusion about what “to be” means, except confusion caused by the metaphysicians themselves. Metaphysics, if it is understood as a focus on this problem, is the disease that it affects to cure!
Think of the old story about the tower of turtles. The specifics of the tale vary, but “It’s turtles all the way down,” some traditionalist logician always says in the punch line. In the case of human definitions within any logical or lingual structure, though, there is no infinite tower of turtles. There are, rather, what logicians call “primitive notions” that sit at the bottom, and that swim in the empty logical space below them. Reality is a primitive notion. Attempts to define it require that the sage making the effort conjure up some other turtle to put beneath that one. This is to define reality by appeal to an unreality, which is just as bad an idea as it seems to be when put in that bald way.
Beyond the question “what is reality” though, there is the far more worthwhile query, “what is real?” This means, “What kinds of things do we acknowledge as the furniture of the world and what are their relationships to one another?”
The threshold of this inquiry is: one or many? Is all of reality just One Big Thing? Or are there lots of little things related to each other in ways that have to be discovered ad hoc? Formally, this is the choice between monism and pluralism.
Here, again, Josiah Royce is an intriguing instance of a philosopher of impeccable credentials and great intellectual integrity who has gone wrong. Royce tried to prove pluralism impossible. Consider, he said, just two beings — a cat and a King. There is an old proverb, “a cat may look at a King.” But may it? If so, how does the cat know that it knows — how does it see that it sees? What distinguishes a real separate-from-me King from some fancied crown-wearing figment of the feline imagination?
Royce said that the only way to answer such question is to introduce an encompassing Knower. There must be someone who knows the cat, and knows the King, and that someone may also know that the former knows the latter. But, by the simple iteration of this conclusion, Royce arrives at Monism. There must be just one Knower, who knows everything because all cats and Kings, all cabbages and numbers and melodies, are simply facts within this capacious One Mind. Thus: monism — in this instance as sort of pantheism — is a logical necessity.
This is an ingenious argument, but a fallacious one. After all, there are a lot of ways in which the cat and the King interact. The King may put food in the cat’s bowl every morning, and the cat may well, through instinct and habit, become aware of this. The cat then, knows that yonder fellow is that King, the food supplier, and may rub against his leg as a show of gratitude or impatience. One needs no third mind for any of this … those two minds and the intervening world of food dishes, legs, kitchen floors, and palace walls will be enough.
Not only is reality a primitive notion, but the pluralistic idea of it that one develops spontaneously — as a collection of different things that rub against one another in interesting and complicated ways — is in essence, the correct one.