CHAPTER 3: R EALITY AND B EING

I NTRODUCTION Metaphysics is the attempt to answer the question: What is real? You might think that reality just consists in physical objects. But what do we say about goodness, justice, or God? Or economic forces?

M ETAPHYSICS – SO WHAT ? Identifying what is real is important. If we say that something is real, then we are saying that it has importance, actuality, and power.

T HE S EARCH FOR R EALITY Perhaps we can never say what reality is, as the question might be meaningless. If so, perhaps we cannot say with certainty which aspects of the universe around us are real.

3.2: R EALITY : M ATERIAL OR N ONMATERIAL ? Materialism: Reality as Matter Materialism is the view that matter is the ultimate constituent of reality. Both eastern and Western philosophers have accepted this view.

E ASTERN M ATERIALISM : T HE C HARVAKA P HILOSOPHERS OF I NDIA. These philosophers ridiculed the spiritualism of their countryman, and were referred to as “Lokyata”, which means “those who go the worldly way”. Believed that since all we know is what we perceive through our senses, and what we perceive is material, then all that we can know is material.

W ESTERN M ATERIALISM. Democritus believed that reality could be explained in terms of matter, with the smallest pieces being atoms. People lost interest in Democritean materialism as they were more interested in working out how to lead a good and happy life. But a growing interest in the scientific method in the seventeenth century led people back to being interested in materialism. Hobbes, for example, thought that our mental states were states of our material brains.

O BJECTIONS TO M ATERIALISM The basic objection to materialism lies in its difficulty in accounting for human consciousness. Consciousness is always intensional and it is subjective. It also has no apparent location, mass, or volume. So, if materialism is to be acceptable it must reduce consciousness to physical states. But it seems that consciousness has features that cannot be reduced.

O BJECTIONS TO M ATERIALISM In addition to this, it seems that the elementary particles from which the universe is composed are not matter as traditionally conceived, but more like energy, or fields, or probability waves. To some extent materialists have adjusted to these findings by revising what they conceive of as matter.

O BJECTIONS TO M ATERIALISM But Werner Heisenberg in the 1930s held that we cannot tell whether a particle has a definite location until it interacts with an observer. This seems to show that on its most basic level the world is intertwined with the mind.

I DEALISM : R EALITY AS N ONMATTER Modern atomic theory has pushed some philosophers to claim that reality is more than matter. Some philosophers have held that we live in a purely nonmaterial world: the universe is only mind and idea.

T HE D EVELOPMENT OF W ESTERN I DEALISM Idealism is the view that reality is comprised only of minds and their ideas. This view is as old as the ancient Greek Pythagoras, and was formalized by Plato, who held that the individual entities that we perceive around us are merely shadows of reality. This fit in well with the views of Augustine, who held that the only enduring world was the spiritual, the world without matter.

T HE D EVELOPMENT OF W ESTERN I DEALISM But the founder of modern idealism is George Berkeley, who claimed that the conscious mind and its ideas are the only reality. Berkeley argued that our experience of the external world consists of the sensations of our senses (e.g. cats, flowers, rocks, houses,…). So, all that exists are the sensations and the ideas that we experience and the minds that experience them.

S UBJECTIVE AND O BJECTIVE I DEALISM Berkeley’s views has elements of both. Berkeley held that things are mind-dependent; this is the subjective element of his view. Berkeley held that not all of the contents of our minds are the same; some are within our control, and some are not. Those that are not are uniform and consistent; this consistency comes from God, for Berkeley. This second aspect of Berkeley’s idealism is its objective aspect, for now certain parts of reality are independent of one’s mind.

E ASTERN I DEALISM Indian philosophy has housed many idealist philosophers, such as Vasubandhu, whose views were in many ways similar to Berkeley’s. Vasubandhu held that we only perceive sensations in our minds, and that only minds exist.

O BJECTIONS TO I DEALISM Do idealists commit the fallacy of anthropomorphism, projecting a human faculty onto the nonhuman universe? Objections to Subjective Idealism It might be that subjective idealists fail to distinguish between my perception of a thing and the thing itself. Why should we believe that perceptible things are mere collections of perceptible qualities? Why not just distinguish between perceptions and their objects? Subjective idealism doesn’t really answer the question of how things are so much as it dissolves it.

O BJECTIONS TO I DEALISM Objections to Objective Idealism Do we need an explanation, such as God, for the continuity of (e.g.) the classroom? Also, why believe that God’s mind is intelligible to us? How can we distinguish between our perceptions and God’s perceptions?

W HAT DO YOU THINK ? What do you think is “real”? How do you understand this question? Are economic forces “real”? In what sense? What would it be like to live in an idealist universe? Would it be any different from the universe you live in now? Could this universe be an idealist one? Do you think that idealism gives us a reason to believe that God exists? Why, or why not?