On Our Relationship to Reality

On Our Relationship to Reality

July 4, 2020

I was delighted today when I read the famous Karen Armstrong saying something that, with a couple of caveats, I have been asserting for years. Beginning on the first page of her book The Lost Art of Scripture, Karen Armstrong makes this profoundly (though not completely) true statement of what the human relationship to external reality actually is:

[N]eurologists tell us that in fact we have no direct contact with the world we inhabit. We have only perspectives that come to us through the intricate circuits of our nervous system, so that we all—scientists as well as mystics—know only representations of reality, not reality itself. We deal with the world as it appears to us, not as it intrinsically is, so some of our interpretations may be more accurate than others. This somewhat disturbing news means that the ‘objective truths’ on which re rely are inherently illusive. The world is there; its energy and form exist. But our apprehension of it is only a mental projection. The world is outside our bodies, but not outside our minds….We are surrounded by a reality that transcends—or ‘goes beyond’—our conceptual grasp.[1]

What Armstrong says here is profoundly true—mostly. Indeed all we have is our perception of reality not reality itself. We are created as centered selves whose brains create a world in which we live. To Armstrong’s statement I would add only a couple of correctives.

First, from what Armstrong says we can conclude that the neurologists have finally caught up with the philosophers. Empirical philosophy has insisted since the eighteenth century that all we humans have is our perception of reality. David Hume, 1711 – 1776, was a pioneer in this understanding. To some of us its truth seems obvious, yet I have had a hard time convincing people of that truth. Most people simply don’t want to, or can’t, deal with the reality that perception and how our minds work with perception is all we have. That a great many people reject the notion, however, doesn’t make it false. It just means that the contention that perception is all we have is so radically different from what most people believe that when they hear it they just reject it. It’s truth however is not the least bit affected by that rejection.

Second, I do not accept Armstrong’s contention that the “world is there” with the necessary implication that we can know absolutely that it is there, that it in fact exists apart from our perception of it. We all live with what in my book Liberating Christianity I call the objectivist assumption.[2] We act as though we actually knew that the world that we perceive has objective reality apart from our perception of it. We have to make that assumption. Living with that assumption facilitates our lives. Not making that assumption can be deadly. But that reality doesn’t make it more than an assumption. We can assert, I suppose, that there must be something out there that generates the perceptions we have of it. Yet we know that the human brain is quite capable of creating worlds that are radically different from the worlds most of us create on the basis of our perceptions. This truth is most apparent in cases of mental illness in which people live in a reality that is real to them but not to anyone else. There simply is no way to prove that what we perceive as objective reality actually has any objective reality at all.

I would therefore modify Armstrong’s wonderful statement in a couple of ways. I would point out that what she means is that the neurologists have finally caught up with the philosophers. I would modify here statement that “the world is there” to “we assume that the world is there.” I would make those modifications to Armstrong’s statement, but I hope that a great many people will read her words and take them to heart. Human thought and therefore human life depend on the world’s people coming to understand them and all of their profound implications.

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[1] Armstrong, Karen, The Lost Art of Scripture, Rescuing the Sacred Texts, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2019, pp. 3-4.

[2] Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 2008. See in particular pages 200 to 203.