It is 1882, 140 years ago. Bismarck is chancellor in Germany, Gladstone is Prime Minister in Britain, and memories of the Civil War are still fresh in the United States. A relatively unknown academic, Frederick Nietzsche, publishes what is now known as The Gay Science, originally translated as “The Joyful Wisdom”. His academic career has foundered. He has given up his academic post, and almost no one is buying his work. Yet this particular book will be a major influence on all subsequent western thought.
In the third section of The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes his most controversial claim: God is dead, and goes on to say that we killed him. While he sometimes has Christianity in his sights, the case he is making is broader than the demise of a Christian God. Nietzsche is pointing to the demise of an authority higher or above the human and making the case that belief in the divine had been killed by the gradual unfurling of the Enlightenment and the progress of human knowledge.
The book and the claim had no immediate impact for there was, initially, no discernible audience. Yet the claim was prophetic. Religious belief in the West has been in gradual but continuous decline ever since. In Nietzsche’s time, almost all children were baptized. Today, in England, only six per cent of the population regularly attend church.
So, what replaced God? Reality. A reality uncovered by observation, understanding and science. For those who have now taken leave of the notion of God, reality has a straight-forward, down to earth quality. It is the opposite of superstition. It may not have the magic and mystery of religious belief, but it enables in its place a calm, measured assessment of the world.
Yet strangely, reality, our replacement for God, turns out to share some of the key characteristics that have traditionally been applied to God. For example, God is understood to be everywhere and everything, but at the same time unknowable, elusive, unattainable. And so, it turns out, is reality.
A universe of fields and energy
Most will accept that reality is everywhere and everything. Less obvious is that it is unknowable, elusive and unattainable. I’m a longstanding critic of philosophical realism and the notion that our language and theories are capable of describing reality. So you might expect me to claim that reality is elusive and unattainable. However, over the last few years, many leading neuroscientists working on human perception and cognition have come to similar conclusions.
A few years ago, Beau Lotto, professor of neuroscience at the University of London, used optical illusions to demonstrate that “Our brains did not evolve to sense reality; they evolved to give us what is useful for our survival.” Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California Irvine, argues that what we take to be reality is akin to icons on a desktop. “Whatever reality is, it is not what you see. What you see is just an adaptive fiction.” While David Eagleman, a Stanford neuroscientist and leading researcher into brain plasticity concludes “reality is an illusion – perpetuated by our brains”.
It’s not just several prominent neuroscientists. The framework of contemporary physics has also uncovered the elusive nature of reality. Once we imagined reality was ultimately made of indivisible minute particles we called atoms. Now we have a series of Chinese boxes each with smaller particles, protons, neutrons, quarks, leptons, bosons. As we examine them closer their material quality itself evaporates. Instead, we have a universe of fields and energy. It is as if we have lost the stuff of the world altogether. Niels Bohr, one of the founders of contemporary physics, concluded "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
Heisenberg, one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, who won a Nobel prize for the creation of quantum mechanics, abandoned the notion that science was capable of uncovering reality altogether, “objective reality has evaporated”. More recently, Stephen Hawking, who in A Brief History of Time had thought a theory of everything was in our grasp, abandoned this view in 2010 and concluded that science was only capable of providing models and the ultimate character of the world was beyond us. “There is no model-independent test of reality”.
The last century has also seen the relentless uncovery of the inability of human thought to break free from the limitation of its particular perspective. Our narratives and theories, our histories and most fundamental beliefs, have been identified as the outcome of a particular language, history and culture, and the product of particular brain chemistry and physiology. There is no human access to a God’s eye view of the world that can somehow see the world as it ‘really’ is. Sociologists, historians and philosophers have all played their part in uncovering the profoundly limited and human character of thought and perception. So, from all sides, the idea that we have access to reality is under attack.
Peering behind the veil?
But the puzzle over reality is even trickier than it first appears. For it initially encourages the notion that we might be able to peer behind the veil and discover the truth. Confronted with the impossibility of this task, there is a temptation to search instead for an alternative underlying hidden or non-material version of reality, as if behind the illusion we can find the real thing. This has led some to propose that reality is consciousness, or material things are also conscious. Thinkers like Donald Hoffman and Iain McGilchrist have rightly identified the extent to which our account of the world is a product of our particular brain physiology. But they then go on to toy with these idealist or panpsychist 'solutions'.
But this is a wild goose chase. The new non-material 'reality' is going to be just as illusory as the materialist account. If what we take to be reality is an illusion, we are not going to be able to frame a metaphysical story that describes how it really is. Any account we give of this underlying 'reality' will itself be from a limited human perspective, and limited also by the constraints of a given language, culture, and context.
In the 18th century, the hugely influential philosopher Immanuel Kant reframed the history of thought by posing the question: how must thought be structured in order for us to have knowledge? Instead, we now have to address the central question about reality by beginning from the opposite starting point – that we have no knowledge and no means of reaching through to describe the ultimate character of reality. The contemporary philosophical challenge is to explain how it is possible for us to intervene with such precision and accuracy in the world, even though we cannot know how things are. How is that we are able to share and talk about a seemingly fixed and known reality? How is that you can make your way home using your previous experience or by consulting Google maps? How is it that we can invent successful vaccines or send satellites into space if our theories are not precise descriptions of an objective reality and ultimate knowledge is not possible?
There is not going to be one definitive answer to this question. As if we might give a final explanation of the nature of the human condition. For to do so would at once be a description of an ultimate reality. But that does not mean that there is nothing to say. We have to attempt to provide a means to make sense of our circumstances, even while knowing that it cannot be a final account.
Responding to the world
The framework I have used to help escape from this deep puzzle, initially outlined in the book Closure: a story of everything, proposes that reality should not be taken to be a thing or combination of things that we might describe. Instead it proposes that we close the openness of the world with our sensations, thoughts and language. Through this process of closure, we hold the world as things, objects and actions. People and objects, the sea and the sky, atoms and histories are not found in the world, they are instead ways by which we close the openness of the world. Language does not describe the world, instead it holds the world as something. Language provides us with metaphors for the world.
You might think this is a very unlikely starting point. After all, if the world is nothing in particular, how is it that we all agree on so much? If our language and thought have nothing in common with reality, how is it that we can intervene so precisely?
While the question first appears baffling, the starting point of an explanation is straight-forward. We make sense of reality not by describing it but by reacting to its consequences. Our senses do not observe the world, they respond to the world, and we hold those responses as things and characteristics through the process of closure.
What the framework of openness and closure demonstrates is that we can give a detailed account of the success of our theories and beliefs without proposing that they describe how reality ultimately is. In providing this demonstration, the theory also accounts for why it is itself possible without at the same time claiming to have definitively described the nature of the human condition.
In abandoning the notion that our accounts of the world describe reality, we have to rethink the nature of all belief. Our theories and beliefs, our accounts of the world, are not only no longer absolute, they cannot be an attempt to be absolute. Our theories are not, to use a phrase that Hawking used when he believed in a theory of everything, a glimpse into “the mind of God”. They are instead human frameworks, created at a given point in cultural history, set in a certain language, that help us to achieve things that we would not be able to do otherwise.
Doubling down on reason
The passing of reality is not something to regret, but something to lift our spirits.
We can feel confident of the value and strength of our current theories and accounts of the world, while at the same time recognising that they will in due course be modified and eventually abandoned in favour of alternatives that will be thought to be more effective, or more powerful, or more desirable. Millenia of exploration and testing of our temporary metaphors have enabled us to refine them and create versions that allow us to have lives that those in the past could hardly imagine.
This ability to improve our circumstances and address our desires and goals does not need to come at the cost of limiting the world to the stories we have adopted or to imagining that there are no alternatives, or that we might have arrived at a final answer, or that there is a truth of the matter.
Observation and reason led us to imagine that we were uncovering the ultimate character of the world, that reality was being laid bare. It was no such thing. Instead, we were refining our closures to enable them to be more successful at predicting what would happen and helping us to intervene to achieve outcomes we could not achieve otherwise.
In contemporary culture, partly as a result of an awareness of the importance of perspective, many have become critical of observation and reason. Instead, we need to double down on observation and reason; not to uncover the truth, but to test our closures, our metaphors, our ways of holding the world. For it is only by observing where they work and where they fail that we are able to refine them – or, if need be, abandon them in favour of others. Instead of being critical of observation and reason, it is the idea that we are uncovering reality that we need to abandon. The idea that there is a correct way to think. An endpoint where we can rest our account of the world. Our closures provide us with what we take to be reality but they have nothing in common with openness, and their success is not dependent on describing the world.
Reality, it turns out, is a theological notion. An ultimate that cannot be reached. And it is time we rid ourselves of its superstition. It is not only God that is dead, but reality itself.
By giving up the idea of uncovering reality we can instead seek to realise the unlimited potential of openness, enabling us to achieve things we do not think currently possible. We can improve the circumstances in which we operate, and counter prejudice and injustice, but we should not imagine that we are right, or that we have said how the world is. Instead, we have offered a way of thinking that enables change, and that helps create new, different, and hopefully better futures.
Postscript: The approach I have advocated here is but one way to respond to the uncovery of our inability to describe reality. There will, of course, be others. At the same time, any such account offers a means of holding the world, which has the appearance of holding fast that which in the end cannot be held at all.
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Hilary Lawson is founder of HowTheLightGetsIn festival. As a festival partner, New Humanist is offering a 20 per cent discount on tickets to all of our readers, with the code NEWHUMANIST23. Don't miss out on tickets here. And for those of you who can't be with us in person, all the debates and talks from the festival will gradually be released online, on the Institute of Art and Ideas platform, IAI.TV.
