I opened the Beyond Reality debate with a quotation from Ambrose Bierce: “Reality is the dream of a mad philosopher.” Bierce’s words seemed apposite because to me the notion of a single overarching ‘reality’ which might apply equally and objectively to all humans, now and forever, is a wild fantasy.

A standard dictionary definition of reality runs thus:

“Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.”

This sounds, at first, quite reassuring. Someone, somewhere, has carefully divided ‘things’ into two fixed categories:

(a)   ‘Things’ which actually exist. These are objectively Real

(b)   ‘Things’ which exist only as ideals or notions. These are not objectively Real.

‘Things’ can apparently only be one or the other – (a) or (b), real or unreal. Therefore, we might speak about someone refusing to face up to reality (meaning category a), or refusing to accept reality, and by this we would apparently suggest that there is something we all understand to be real (things as they actually are) which this poor person cannot accept. Worse still, their attempts to evade this immutable ‘reality’ have led them into the further sin of being ‘unrealistic’.

 Yet, what are things – actually or otherwise? And, who, or what, has divided all these ‘things’ into such neat, polarised categories: actual/notional, real/ unreal, objective/subjective?

In order to ascertain that something is ‘objectively’ real, you would need to be an objective judge of objectivity. Effectively, you would need to be omniscient, to perceive all time, all space, so you can fix the parameters of the real and the unreal. You would need, therefore, to be non-human, because the condition of human life is transience – non-eternality, non-omniscience – so there is a further question of how this non-human and therefore objective perception of reality would relate to non-objective and therefore human experience anyway.

The notion of reality as divisible into the notional (subjective) and the actual (objective) is therefore merely a notion. The entire definition of reality quoted above exists only in category (b). Therefore, by its own logic, it is not real. Or, it is the dream of a mad philosopher.

However, scientific materialists, for example, might say that this is specious. In line with the Johnsonian ‘kicking the stone’ school of thought, they might say that if we kick the stone, then we have felt it, and it is real. The stone we cannot kick, and cannot feel, is not real. Therefore, we don’t need omniscience; we can be assured – by directing our feet at solid objects – that certain things are objectively real and certain things are not. Equally, when Shakespeare writes of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and how “he startled like a guilty thing”, our scientific materialist/Johnsonian would explain that Shakespeare is just being poetic, and a ghost cannot be a ‘thing’ – not a real one anyway, only a notional one – and cannot be real because we cannot feel it and definitely cannot kick it.