Realität (EN)

It so happens that I work a lot on the concept of reality these days. Reality is one of those concepts whose meaning, when it is called, seems rather clear: "Well, reality is the world in which I live," you might say. But whatever the initial answer is, to define reality requires further definitions: What is this world in which we live? How do we access it? Our five senses, for sure, have something to do with reality. They allow us to feel, touch, hear, see, and taste reality. Our mind, on the other side of these five receivers, interprets this input. We react to what we see, touch, smell, listen, and taste. In a nutshell: This process which grants us access to reality is experience.

We constantly experience what surrounds us. We think, too. We are able to think abstractly, which allows us to understand reality. But, like it or not, our receivers and our minds are conditioned by something else, something that is intangible: Culture. We see reality, for example, not only through the retina of our eyes, but also through the prism of culture. The objects, situations, and entities which populate reality are thus decoded to "make sense." Because we are beings who crave for meaning and significance. In fact, this craving for meaning is actually the reason why I'm trying here to dissect the notion of reality.

Related to the question of reality are the notions of time and space. What is "now"? This is nothing more than another abstraction, the meaning of which is dictated by culture. Culture allows us to "see" time, to experience it, but above all: it allows us to give meaning to our experience of time. And time happens to be perceived as linear: “Before” is the past, “After” is the future. And “now” is in-between. How do you quantify the present? It seems absolutely impossible. Is it worth a second? A millisecond? The present, in fact, can only be defined as “now.” "Today" is already too big to be accurate. Thus, the present is essentially an unquantifiable entity, whereas it is easy to "count" the past and the future. Similarly, we can also calculate both sides of time thanks to the present: "Tomorrow" is, roughly speaking, "now + 1" and "Yesterday" is, similarly, "now - 1".

And space? The spatial counterpart of "now" is simply "here." Again, note how relative this notion is. Here? You mean, sitting on a chair in the periodical room of the library of the city which is located in a region of a country on one of the continents of a planet in the universe? In Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus feels pretty small when he realizes the hugeness of space and the void which “fills” it. In fact, the concept of space is not necessarily something natural to man and, like Stephen, he learns to understand the meaning of “here” and “elsewhere.” The void, again, is a cultural concept that allows to measure the abstraction that separates a table from a chair.

As I said, man is nothing less than a machine which decodes reality. He processes and gives meaning to his surroundings. He decodes the signs on the side of the road and understands that if he exceeds the speed which is specified on the signs, he could get pulled over. Numbers are symbols that we must interpret to understand their meaning. The words written on the signs are just as many symbols that we decode without much effort. Such mechanisms are natural, but become obvious when one is confronted to a language whose alphabet is different: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Cyrillic, and Japanese ideograms, for example. Similarly, we understand easily what is the meaning of the drawing of a man on the bathroom door, or the drawing of a woman on the opposite door. And the logic behind this interpretation is nothing else than a convention, among millions of other conventions.

But what can we say when reality is indirectly experienced? When we listen to music in a concerthall, our experience is unditably direct. However, if the piece of music we are listening to is a record, it seems that the experience is different, since the reality it reflects occurred in the past, in a different place. Does this vicarious experience of reality change the nature of the reality of the music we are listening to? Here, it seems that experience takes precedence over reality. In fact, reality is not a static concept. It depends on experience itself. And experience is ever-changing, repeated, and always different, due to the spatio-temporal characteristic of reality. Reality r is intrinsically different from reality r + 1, r + 2, r + 3, etc. Similarly, r - 1, r - 2, and r - 3 are also distinct from reality r. Therefore, to listen to the same song on two different occasions results in two different experiences. We can say that listening to a record is to experience a reality within reality. And, “herein lies the miracle,” the media on which this piece is contained is the container of this particular reality. The same principle applies to videos. But what would happen if temporal reality was not linear but simultaneous? What would be the consequences on our perception of time if it combined the past, the present and the future? Could we experience the reality of the future?

It seems that things get a little more complicated when we read a work of fiction. Unlike a piece of music or a video, the reality we experience in a book is actually unreal. This reality does not exist in the past, or anywhere else. However, the fictionality of a novel does not prevent us from experiencing this fictional reality. How is this possible? The way we “experience” a text seems rather complex: We read words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, we decode them, we recreate their meaning(s), and, ultimately, we recreate a reality whose characteristics are individually unique. However, this process does not seem to fully explain the particular experience that we have when we read a text. Furthermore, we seem to process music and videos similarly. We "read" the sounds and images, which form a complex network of symbols. In any case, this “reading” allows us to create a reality that seems to be viable because of the power of our imagination. To understand the "issue" of fictional reality, we should not forget that, on the other side of the text, is the author. What has happened here? How did the author succeed in creating a fictional universe that, when it is “read,” comes to life in the reader's imagination? This, for me, remains a mystery.

When we read The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, for example, what is the nature of the reality contained within the text? Is there a reality contained within the text? Is the “thing” that the reader created neither real nor unreal? And what is fictionality? What is this strange power that we have and that makes "reading" so special? Can we seriously believe that a novel is real? Or even fictional? In what way would a novel be different from an essay, regarding the actualisation of what is "narrated"? Why do we like to follow the adventures of some random, fictional characters? What are we interested in here? Do we want to see them die horribly, just because it is "fake"? Do we really want to see them happy and successful in life, because that is what we want for ourselves? Is the invasion of Wells's Martians just for the thrill? Another author's fantasy? What does the distance of the reader do? And why do we agree to live the nightmare of Wells's anonymous protagonist? Why do we agree to witness with him the destruction of planet Earth? Because it is not real? Why!