Reality and How It Gets That Way

The field of philosophy is divided into an Aristotelian zone and a Kantian zone. The natives of either of the two areas always seem absurd, and often unintelligible, to the natives of the other. —Dávila

As we have seen, the Kantian zone confines us to our own projected preconceptions, while the Aristotelian situates us in a little thing called reality. Prior to Kant it occurred to no one to try to inhabit his zone, since life takes place in the zone of reality he claimed we could not know. Thus the two zones to which Dávila alludes come down to reality and unreality.

One of the paradoxes of the modern age is that science presumes to unproblematically reach the very reality that post-Kantian philosophers claim we cannot reach. As a result, many thinkers continue living on the wrong side of the philosophical tracks, in the ghetto of unreality. 

For example, postmodernism is predicated on the idea that we dwell in our ideas about reality, as opposed to reality. Indeed, reality itself is just another idea, and probably an oppressive one to boot. One might say There are a thousand truths and only one error, which is to say, reality and its numberless alternatives.

Immanent idealist enclosure versus transcendental realism.

But there is science and there is scientism, and here again the latter dwells in the same intellectual slum as postmodernism, as both stem from the same poisoned Kantian root. For scientism claims to know reality while secretly reducing it to LH mathematical abstractions, while postmodernism inhabits an ontologically closed matrix of speech referring to more of it. Kant gave us the blueprints to a house we can never actually live in, rather, just some a priori trailer we share with the rest of the anthropic trash.

The point is, choose wisely between zones, for one’s first step determines the direction of every subsequent step, or even whether our steps will lead somewhere or nowhere. To paraphrase Thomas, a teensy error at the beginning results in ginormous ones at the end. By now most everyone knows there are two paths one can go by, nor is it ever too late to change the road we’re on. Surely the RH piper will lead us to reason, whereas the LH reduces the world to a lifeless rock that can by no means roll.

This is not to make the simplistic assertion that we ever reach reality per se. Rather, we reach into reality, and it into us. For cosmotheandrism, our philosophic wonder is rendered asunder when we commit the blunder of undermining this prior union of mind and world. Analogously, we can divide an organ— or even a single cell — from the body and treat it as an extrinsic part, even though the parts are always intrinsically related to the organismic whole.

Yes, but only in the real world.

In this real world, what we call reality is an event that occurs in the luminous and ever-deepening space between the subjective and objective worlds. But critically, this should not be seen as a bonehead excuse for the cancer of relativism—

Play nice.

Okay, which McGilchrist politely rejects out of hand: “Some postmodernists leap from the uncertainty of truth to its nonexistence,” this being but another metaphysical nul de slack that seals one in absurcularity. We can only know of the relative because we partake of the absolute, just as we can only know about subjective illusions because of objective perceptions, or necessity because of freedom. In truth, “both views currently on offer in so much public debate today -- naïve positivism and naïve deconstructionism -- are typical left hemisphere fictions.” Bothe are “lacking in subtlety, and devoid of any sense of our true connection to the world.”

Harsh but fair, because for the LH, truth will be an abstract map or model, a re-presentation, while the presentation -- the presence itself -- is apprehended by the RH. The most consequential difference between the two “is the distinction between the experience of something as it ‘presences’ to us in the RH, and as it is ‘re-presented’ to us in the left” (McGilchrist). Thus, presence must be prior to its re-presentation. A hypertrophied LH reverses this flow and essentially superimposes the secondary representation onto the primary presence. So don’t do that. Always be present to the Presence.

Presence is an equivocal word, is it not? For example, back in high school, when the teacher would call my name in the morning, I would say “present,” even though I was subjectively absent. Somewhere else. Similarly, we’ve all had the experience of being with people who are not truly present, or sometimes we might not be present to them, as in when my wife asks me to take out the recycling when I’m watching a baseball game.

It also reminds me of music, in which the performer may be more or less present, that is, truly inhabiting the performance vs. phoning it in. Or “stage presence.” What is that? Whatever it is, it is obvious and known in some kind of direct manner analogous to how intellection works. Anyone can see with great immediacy that Marlon Brando is not Keanu Reeves. When a performer is truly present to our own presence, magic happens, because it is a direct RH presence-to-presence communication. Can the LH – or mere reason – know anything of this? However the magic is pulled off, the genuine artist is somehow made present in his or her work. Indeed, for some, the presence of beauty can be a more powerful argument for the Theos than any mere re-presentation of reason. For example, viewing Michelangelo’s Pieta may be more immediately persuasive than, say, Aquinas’ five ways to God

We know when we are in the presence of beauty, but how is it that beauty presents itself to us? For Aquinas, one of the properties of beauty is radiance, but how does it do that? For it is as if there is something alive and communicative about beauty. It is not merely in the eye of the beholder, any more than physical light is produced in the eyeball. This perceptible radiance is O shining through the object or person in all its metaphysical transparency, but it is not adequately perceived by the LH. For there is always a flow of presence characterized by the intersection of time and eternity, or vertical and horizontal. What makes it flow, and what unblocks the stoppage? Where is the cosmic plunger?

If there were only horizontality, there could be no awareness of time, no history, no now, and no Anthropos. We inhabit an ambiguous space indeed, where time passes and we are aware of its passing, but which can only be recognized from above, beyond, or outside time.

These are deep waters.

Either that, or you’re all wet.