The Death of Reality

If you spend even a week studying through some of the foundational texts of Western civilisation starting from Plato to Galileo to Mill to Russell to contemporary post-modernists, you will perhaps be struck by the observation that many of the intellectual changes that have transformed the cultural landscape of Europe over the last six hundred years revolve around a curious irony. On the one hand, we are routinely asked to believe that human beings are not anthropo-centric anymore, and that thanks to Copernicus and Company we do not believe anymore that the world has to be just what we say it is. We are reminded time and again by astrophysicists in particular that we are but specks of dust or blobs of slime on a tiny top whirling through vast expanses of space and time. On the other hand, many people in our generation claim that there is nothing more to reality than what we put into it, and it would seem that they have resurrected a form of anthropo-centrism which they otherwise claim to be vigorously opposed to. Indeed, they have arrived at a profoundly anti-Copernican conclusion : the whole world revolves around me, the 'I' who invents my own values and my own beliefs, and this is an anthropo-centrism that nobody would have dreamt of proposing even in the heyday of Ptolemian cosmology.

I shall call these people the New Idol-Worshippers (NIW); people who believe that their mental inventions need not be rooted in reality, and develop a relationship of infatuation with them that borders on worshipping them. The basic problem with these inventions or constructs is this : even if these constructs are the collections of what are believed to be the highest and the noblest ideals of humanity, they remain mere products of the NIW's subjective fantasies and there are no good reasons why others should accept them as well. This is because these constructs are not grounded in reality but are a network of inter-connected words, such that, according to the NIW, this network IS the world.

In short, the NIWs proclaim that there is no extra-linguistic reality, there is no world out there beyond these words that we speak. There is, of course, more than a grain of truth in this claim : our ability to convey to one another what we believe the world is really like is often severely constrained by the limitations and the ambivalences of the written and the spoken word. This, however, does not warrant the conclusion that it is impossible to think or to communicate without language. One can think of, for example, the fascinating levels of intimacy that lovers of dogs and cats can develop with their pets without the use of any (human) language or (human) discursive or cognitive processes. Coming to the intra-species domain of human beings, we usually operate with the presupposition that we mutually inhabit a bio-physical reality that is not being created by the speaker in the process of speaking, but exists even before (and after) she began to speak the first word. If you believe that every person makes up the world out of absolute nothingness for herself, this would imply that we can never 'latch' our words onto something solid and external, and given this complete lack of fit why would you even take the trouble of trying to read Dostoivsky in Dutch translation, Proust in Portuguese, or Tagore in Tamil?

That is, it is only in a very limited sense that we construct our own reality, and this is the sense that our perspectives on the world are moulded by several factors such as our genetic heritage and our socio-cultural upbringing. These factors themselves, however, are not produced by us, by our minds, by our words, or by our language : they existed even before we arrived on the scene. Therefore, there is a reality that exists independently of our mental conceptions though we are unable to articulate or capture the nature of this reality precisely and completely through our language.

Contrary to what the NIWs believe, language, then, is not an idol to be worshipped; it is a tool to be used with fear and trembling, for it can both disclose to us the several dimensions of reality or lead us further away from it.