METAPHYSICS :- THE NATURE OF REALITY

Hey Intellect thirsty folks! Let's start today's blog with a story.

 Long ago, There was a tribe of human civilisation living in a cave. They used to reside all inside the cave only and their only source of contact with the immediate world around them was the shadows of the outer World that used to fall on the walls of the cave from outside. They were not able to see themselves because of darkness but they could easily see the Shadows. As a result, 3-D was not even a concept for these people. They used to think that the world is 2-Dimensional.

One day one of the guys somehow, instead of seeing the shadows tried to touch them and due to the little light available around the shadows, He was able to see himself. Now He followed the light to reach outside the cave. Firstly his eyes were too full of light to see the World out there. But as soon as, things became normal, He was able to see the world. The World which was 3-D , beautiful colours all around and birds flying. He was so amazed by this discovery of this new World that in the ecstasy of this, He went inside the cave to tell his other friends about this. But the people inside didn't believe him saying," You were day dreaming, and if even this is true, you are now cursed by the devil for going out. We, the people of the cave, are destined to live in the cave. Our priest told us so." The curse part was even supported by the fact that his eyes were no longer able to see those shadows (obviously because of going out in highly intense light). There were a lot of evidences ( not proper) to support the opinion of the majority and the guy had none. 

The story is from the famous book of the ancient Greek Thinker Plato, The Republic. 

THE PLATONIC WORLD

Philosophers since time immemorial, are thinking about the crucial question of the nature of reality. The most ancient discussion about this is seen in the dialogue between Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle was firmly in the position that the world immediately out there is the only reality while Plato gave the thought of a Platonic world, A World of ideas, where material world is just interpreted as a set of ideas. The difference between The Platonic World and The Aristotlian World is that Platonic World includes the existence of all abstract feelings that only exist as ideas in nature like :- Love, hatred, cold etc. 

Plato Innunctiated these points in The Republic, viz. 

1. Philosophy requires you to question your beliefs and even to reach at the point where you may conclude that all your beliefs were false. 

2. Philosophy is approaching truth. It is never at the truth, It is always approaching it. That's why it is awesome. 

3. Our illusion about the world is this materialistic world view. In constrast to the cave example, The material bodies are the shadows in this case. The actual world is a world of ideas. The idea about your loved one, not the loved one himself/herself lives with you and so on. 

However bizzare the work of Plato seems regarding Metaphysics and the nature of reality, there are a few things that are true regarding this, 

1. There is no way to disprove the hypothesis. I mean, How do you detect a world of ideas. And of course you do, You can get a feel that a world of ideas exist. But only a world of ideas exist and no material world is something you can't risk a hypothesis but can't even disprove. 

This is like the statements of religion. Religious arguments about this world are also the same, right?! Statements you can't prove, because it has phrases like," When you observe it, it changes or Normal Human beings are not able to see the Divine".The problem with these statements is that It includes the condition that since you are a part of the delusion  , you can't detect it. 

2. The Hidden insight which is useful for us is that one should never fear the situation when we may loose all our beliefs and will be thrown in the abyss of doubts and doubts alone.

3. The World is really agnostic about the nature of reality. What is really real and what is apparently real may be same or different but we can't identify the line of divide between the two because the former may be just an idea(or both may be, who knows). 

An Urdu poet Jaun Elia writes in one of his couplets, 

               ज़िन्दगी समझ में आए कहाँ से, 

               पढ़ी है ये इबारत दरमियाँ से! 

Translating, 

              Life is and will be incomprehensible, for we all read this book from the middle. 

So, basically nobody has any idea what's going on. No wonder it is easy to fool people in the name of God and stuff.

But following Plato's reasoning, you can't say Religion is false nor that it is improbable. It is just one of the ideas and Plato would have been a kind of an opportunist guy who is Hindu today, Muslim tomorrow, atheist after that and Christian a month from now according to his needs. If everything is just an idea, we are able to believe whatever we want. 

CARTESIAN SKEPTICISM 

Coming back from Athens, The Thinker we stumble upon who thought about the nature of reality is René Descartes who gave a method called the method of doubts to tackle the question of what is real !  

Following the method of doubts leads us to the term Cartesian Skepticism which is being skeptical about anything in a rational manner. 

This method of doubts works on the analogy of basket of Apples. If you have a basket of Apples in which some of them are rotten. The only way to seperate the rotten Apples from the right ones is to turn the basket upside down and check one by one for the right ones and then put them in the basket again. 

He started by doubting the empirical beliefs. The beliefs that we get directly by our sense organs. What we see, hear ,smell , touch etc. 

Our sense organs fool us all the time. Ever saw your friend in a street full of people and then found that it was just a stranger?  Hot water feels hotter when your hand is already at lower temperature than the normal. 

These momentary deceptions of our sense organs that lead to question a particular incident or a sensory perception  was called " A local Doubt"  by René. 

But What if the local doubts are all part of a bigger deception? This was termed by René as "A Global doubt". A global doubt is doubt about existence of everything around and the interrelations too. 

Then an Idea blinked in his mind. He asked, what actually may be the reason of this deception? He then gave  " the evil genius" Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, there is an evil genius who planned this deception all along. The deception ranges from the idea of creation to the proofs supporting this to the existence of the individual himself. 

An English Philosopher, Bertrand Russell, also gave a similar "5 minute hypothesis", which was " What if the world is only created five minutes ago and all the proofs of it's existence before five minutes is just a planned propaganda". However bizzare this may seem, but there is no way to disprove the hypothesis. 

Bertrand's argument was somewhat agnostic about existence. He said why should we bother about existence or whether anything is real Or not when logically, there are thousand ways in which the world may have been created and there's no way to find out which one is our one. On the contrary, René was in a kind of existential crisis where he wanted answers. 

The thought that was Eureka for René was that, may be everything is a deception. May be the evil genius is also creating thoughts in my mind, but he can't plant doubts in my mind. I mean this must be voluntarily done by a thinker on his own. Doubt is someone's originality. Basically René said he may be dreaming it all but he must not be dreaming that he is dreaming. 

He was sure that He is Doubting and his doubting is without doubt a reality. Since, Doubt is a thought, it needs a thinker. Thus, René arrived at his Eureka statement which is I think the most popular statements in metaphysics and philosophy, 

COGITO ERGO SUM 

( I THINK THEREFORE I AM) 

A doubter must exist in order to doubt. This was the first Apple that René took back in his basket. Using this, He then started reasoning, and brought back God in his belief basket. He said, God also must exist. 

All this is compiled in his books Mediations on first philosophy and discourse on method. 

This is not over yet. The next is Combating Skepticism. That would be the end of all of Metaphysics. These stuff that I write in my blogs are the most popular works in philosophy. There is always a large pile of work in front of me before I start with a certain topic. Obviously I can't tell you everything. But This is what an undergrad of Philosophy must be knowing by the end of his first semester. 

The plan is that I will complete this philosophy section in it's totality making you aware with the briefs of all of philosophy that happened till date. Then I have thought to proceed in multiple directions. 

The current directions in my mind are, 

1. Change the subject. I can teach you by my current understanding, Undergraduate Physics, History, Economics, Political philosophy, Sociology, Psychology. I know this much only unpto the level of a normal undergrad. If you want a particular out of this and you read upto this point, you can directly request in the comments to write about these. 

2. I can drown myself in the sea of individual philosophers and tell you about works of individual philosophers by reading their books and writing about them with titles like :- Revisiting Neitsche or something like that. 

3. I can begin with Marxism. This is my most fascinating dream to explain Marx to the normal public so that they may know more about Communism and why the Spectre of Marx still haunts the leaders of today. 

4. I can begin on writing social issues which I don't like to do as you know, I don't want my blog posts to be trash can of opinions based on certain ideology that I follow. You will also complain I am biased( which of course I am) . 

5. I have a few good Urdu poets and I am fond of poetry in this language. I can teach you the basics of Urdu poetry with how to interpret poetry in its utmost imaginary reality. Explaining the trends in Urdu poetry, including progressive age, postmodernist age and so on. 

Please comment which path you want me to follow after the philosophy section is over. This is to be done in comments section. If nobody comments, I will do what my mood swings will tell me to do at the time of decision. 

As the Sanskrit phrase goes

               सा विद्या या विमुक्तये 

( knowledge is what frees you) 

So Read and keep reading. The only salvation. 

Ok then! See you in the next blog.