8.5.2006
I have been thinking for quite a while about the idea of explaining the
concept of reality by contrasting it with instances of unreality.
Interestingly, although we have a strong intuition that there is only one
reality, we have no problem with conceptualizing different sorts of
unreality: fiction, for instance, is about something that is not real; and
so is remembering past things (in a sense, because what we remember there
is no longer there - although it may have an actual influence on us which
is very lively). A particular aspect of such areas of unreality is what I
shall call their metaphysical apartness.
The term is borrowed from Roger Scrutons survey of the metaphysics of
sound in his Aesthetics of Music. The world of sounds is called
metaphysically apart from us because we cannot be in that world in the
sense of forming a part of it. We may have access to the sounds that
constitute it, in that we can hear them, perceive their relations in
pitches and so on; but it makes no sense to locate ourselves in the network
of relations which make up that world. We are not integrated in that network
as we are in the network of relations that constitute the world of physical
bodies, objects in space and time, or in the network of social and
communicative relations in which we enter as beings with the capacity to
use language. We may also be able to produce sounds and thereby influence
what happens in the sound world (note that we can only affect its
content, not its fundamental structure thereby - we cannot influence the
basic laws of that world, as the pitch spectrum, or the absence of opacity
in it), but again, we are not agents in that world: we cannot introduce
ourselves at a certain position, but only put some proper inhabitant of
that world there.
Yet there are structures which are shared between the worlds thus
divided. First of all, this is of course temporal structure. At least we
can, from our perspective, apply the system of temporal relations that we
use for the physical or social worlds (of which we are a part) to the
sounds that we perceive. We may say that the familiar time-relations
(simultaneity, the earlier-than and later-than relations, and also
presentness, pastness and futurity) apply to the world of sounds, and can
easily be co-ordinated with events in the physical world or the social
world. (Talk about events in the sound-world should also be reducible to
talk about events in the physical world - this means not, of course, that
it makes no sense to discuss it separately.)
There may be further common structural features without sharing an
entire relational system, though. Where the world of sounds has the entire
system of temporal relations in common with the physical world and the
social world, the world of the past shares only some of these relations
with them (namely, the tenseless relations of earlier-than and later-than,
and simultaneity). But there is no co-ordination here in the same sense as
there is a co-ordination between sounds in the sound-world and events
(people listening and being aware of pitch relations as intervals, people
intentionally producing sounds) in the social or physical world. Temporal
relations between any events that involve our perceiving (reading, viewing,
listening to records), acting (reporting), invoking memory etc. occur in
the present and are about something past; tenseless relations apply exactly
as usual; tensed relations are largely fixed or trivialized. Instead of the
identity that holds between events in the sound world and events in the
physical or social world, we have here something more close to aboutness:
events in the present are related to past events in that they are about
them (or referring to them, representing them).
Spatial relations, on the other hand, are shared and exactly co-ordinate
between the present and past world. But we seem to run into trouble here
when we try to put this claim more precisely. To describe the apartness of
the world of sounds felt in a way more natural than to describe the
apartness of the world of the past. Since the spatial relations are shared
between the world as it is and the world as it was in the past, it seems
easier to think of the past as a continuation or extension of the present,
not as something apart from it. This impression is in part created by
ongoing processes and persistent objects. Both are present, but are deemed
to have been there for a while. We should resist that impression. Insofar
these objects (or processes) have a direct continuous extension between the
present time and the past time in question, the co-ordination can be done
precisely because of that connection, and this means in the end, because of
something that is (still) there in the present. It is only when there is no
such connection that we may properly speak of them as located in the world
of the past (note that it is not that they can be perceived or otherwise
known to be such-and-such which makes them present; they must have present
existence).
(There is another reason for our hesitating to view the world of the past
as apart from the present: it is in our own memories that we have access to
the past (and to a lower degree in our imagination, when we us think
ourselves back into times about which we have only knowledge by testimony
or historical reconstruction). The vividness of such access to the past may
well obscure the fact that it is only imaginary that we may still return
there. We cannot, in whatever sense. The world of the past is in fact
even further apart than it may seem at first.)
When I said that spatial relations are co-ordinate between the present
and the past worlds, I did not qualify (as I did before) the events in the
present world, associating them roughly with either the objects of the
physical world or with social interactions between human beings capable of
language use. There are two reasons for that. One of them is that we are,
strictly speaking, required to make that distinction on both sides. We have
to coordinate physical events in the past with physical events in the
present, and social interactions in the past with those in the present.
Furthermore, since there is a co-ordination (or sometimes a translation)
between physical events and interactions, there may also be some quite
complex relationships between these at different times. Most of all these
interrelations are temporal, but there are some corresponding spatial
complexities involved here.
The second, and more important, reason is that space and time are often
seen as individuating physical objects. This may seem to speak against using
what is after all a temporal notion, namely pastness, to distinguish
between two worlds metaphysically apart.
I think a fruit of an analysis of this metaphysical apartness might
be the idea that there is at least one thing that can be said of reality:
it must contain us - we must be a part of it. We are not inside that world
of sounds; and we are also not in the past, but in the present. That was
not only the starting point of, it seems also to be a constant that is
presupposed in all of the discussion above. In any case, therefore the
hypothesis goes, in which we are able (by whatever criterion) to
distinguish between real and unreal, we would at least know on which side
reality is: the side on which we ourselves are located.
