Chapter 2 Chapter 1 Phenomenon and Reality

Is there any knowledge in the world so certain that no reasonable man doubts it?This question, which at first glance does not seem difficult, is indeed one of the most difficult questions one can ask.We are fully involved in the study of philosophy when we realize the obstacles to finding a straightforward and reliable answer—for philosophy is nothing but an attempt to answer such fundamental questions.Philosophy, however, does not answer questions crudely and dogmatically, as we do in everyday life, or even in science, but begins by exploring the bewildering aspects of such questions and recognizing what lurks in us. All kinds of ambiguity and confusion in daily concepts, and then critically answer.

In everyday life we ​​imagine many things to be true; but on closer inspection we find them so full of apparent contradictions that only reflection can enable us to know what we can really believe.In discussing truth, we naturally start from our existing experiences, and knowledge is undoubtedly derived in a sense from these experiences.But direct experience tells us what that thing really is, and any statement about that is likely to be false.I feel that I am sitting on a chair at the moment, and in front of me is a table of a certain shape, and I see some writing paper on the table.I turned my head and saw the buildings outside the window, as well as clouds and the sun.I believe the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; I believe it is a hot celestial body many times the size of the earth; I believe that the sun rises every morning due to the rotation of the earth, and it will continue to do so in the future .I believe that if a normal person walked into my room, he would see these chairs, tables, books, and papers as I do; and I believe that the table I saw was my hand of this table.All this seems so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning, except in reply to someone who doubts that I can know.But we have reason to doubt all of them, and all these require many deliberate discussions, before we are sure that we have been able to state them in a completely true form.

To make our difficulty clear, let us focus on this table.It looked oblong, brown, and shiny, and to the touch, it was smooth, cold, and hard; it made a wooden sound when I struck it.Anyone who has seen, touched, and heard the table will agree with this description, so that no difficulty appears to arise; but our troubles, if we try to be more precise, are it has started.Although I believe the table is "really" uniform, the reflective parts appear much brighter than the rest, and some parts appear white due to the reflections.I know that if I move my body, the reflective parts will be different, so the distribution of colors on the surface of the table will also change.It can be seen that if several people are looking at the table at the same time, no two people will see exactly the same color distribution, because no two people can see the table from exactly the same point of view, and any change in point of view requires Some kind of change in the way light is reflected.

For the most practical purposes these differences are insignificant; but to a painter they are of the utmost importance.The painter must get rid of the habit of thinking that objects have the same color as common sense thinks they "really" have; he must acquire the habit of seeing objects as they appear to be.Here we have begun to encounter a distinction which constitutes the greatest difficulty in philosophy—the distinction between "appearance" and "reality," between what things seem to be and what they are.The painter wants to know what things seem to be, the practical man and the philosopher want to know what they are; but the philosopher wants to know more strongly than the practical man, and because he knows the difficulty of answering this question, he can more troubled.

Returning to the table, it is evident from what we have found above that there is not one color that stands out as the color of the table, or of any particular part of the table,—it appears from a different point of view. different colors, and there is no reason to think that some of them are more truly the color of the table than others.And we also know that even when viewed from a certain point, the colors appear to be different because of artificial lighting, or because the beholder is color-blind or wears blue glasses, whereas in darkness there is no color at all; although Touched and knocked, the table has not changed.So color is not something intrinsic to the table, but something that depends on the table, the observer, and the way the light falls on the table.When we speak of the color of a table in everyday life, we mean only that color which the table appears to a normal observer standing from an ordinary viewpoint under ordinary lighting conditions.But other colors, which appear under other conditions, are equally entitled to be regarded as real; so that, to avoid preference, we are compelled to deny the table itself any peculiar colour.

The same can apply to its texture.One can see the grain of the wood with the naked eye, but viewed from the other side, the table appears smooth and flat.If we look at it through a microscope, we see rough hills and valleys, and all kinds of differences that cannot be seen with the naked eye.Which of the two is the "real" table?Naturally, we always want to say that what we see through a microscope is more real, but when we look at it with a microscope with a higher magnification, that will change again.Why, then, should we trust what we see through a microscope, since we cannot trust what we see with our own eyes?In this way, the senses from which we start are again unreliable to us.

Talking about the shape of the table, it couldn't be better.We are all conditioned to judge objects in terms of their "real" shape, and we do so without thinking, that we think we do see real shape.But in fact, if we want to draw pictures, we must know that a certain object will have different shapes when viewed from different points of view.If our table is "really" rectangular, it appears to have two acute and two obtuse angles from almost any point of view.If the opposite sides were parallel, it would appear that they would converge to a point at a distance from the observer.If the opposite sides are equal in length, it will appear as if the closer side is longer.All of these things are usually unnoticed when looking at a table, because experience has taught us to conceive the "real" shape from the apparent shape, and the "real" shape is what interests us as practitioners. thing.But the "real" shape is not what we see; it is what is inferred from what we see.Moreover, as we move about the room, what we see is constantly changing its shape; so here again, the senses do not seem to give us the truth about the table itself, but only the truth about the table itself. It's just about the table.

The same difficulty occurs when we consider the sense of touch.Indeed, the table always gives us a hard feeling, and we also feel that it is resistant to pressure.But the sensation we get depends on how much pressure we put on the table, and on which part of our body we use to press it; , they cannot be regarded as directly showing a definite quality of the table, they are at most only signs of a certain quality, which may be the cause of all the sensations, but it does not exist in any of the sensations outwardly. .The same thing obviously applies to the sound caused by knocking on a table.

Thus it is evident that the real table, if it exists at all, is not the same table that we directly experience by sight, touch, and hearing.The real table, if it exists at all, is not directly known to us, but must be an inference drawn from what we directly know.Therefore, there are two very difficult questions here: (1) Is there a real table? (2) If so, what kind of object might it be? There are a few simple terms with clear meanings that help us think about these two questions.Let us call the things directly recognized in the senses "sense data": such as colors, sounds, smells, hardness, thickness, and so on.We shall call the experience of being directly aware of these things "senses."Thus, as long as we see a color, we have a feeling for it, but the color itself is a sense-data, not a feeling.

Color is something we perceive directly, but perception itself is sensation.This is quite obvious: if we are to know a table, it is necessary to rely on sense-data—brown, rectangular, smooth, etc.—with which we associate these; The table is the sense-matter, and it cannot be said that the sense-matter is directly the property of the table.Thus, assuming such a real table, the question arises of the relation of sense-data to the real table. A real table, if it exists, we shall call it a "physical object".We must therefore study the relation of sense-data to physical objects.The totality of physical objects is called "matter".Our two questions can thus be restated as follows: (1) Is there any such thing as "matter" at all? (2) If so, what is its nature?

The first philosopher to formally formulate the reason that the immediate objects of our senses do not exist independently of us was Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753).His "Three Dialogues of Hellas and Philanos Against Skeptics and Atheists" is an attempt to prove that there is no such thing as matter at all, and that the world is nothing but minds and their ideas.Hylas had always believed in matter, but he was no match for Philanos, who mercilessly made him contradict himself, so that Philanos' own statement about denying matter seemed to be Common sense.The arguments he uses are of very different value: some are important and correct; others are muddled or equivocal.However, Berkeley still has his merits. He pointed out that the existence of matter can be reasonably denied by us, and pointed out that if anything can exist independently of us, then they cannot are the immediate objects of our sensations. When we ask whether matter exists, two different questions are involved, and it is important to be clear about these two questions.Usually we use "matter" to refer to something as opposed to "mind", to something that we consider to occupy space and not belong to any kind of mind or consciousness at all.Berkeley primarily denies matter in this sense; that is, he does not deny that the sense-data which we ordinarily take to be signs of the existence of tables are signs of the existence of something independent of us, but he does It is not considered that this something can be "non-mind", that is, it can be neither a mind nor a concept possessed by a certain mind.He admits that something must persist when we go out of the room or close our eyes, and that our supposed seeing of the table actually gives us reason to believe that something persists even when we do not look at it with.But he thinks that this something cannot be qualitatively different from what we see, and it cannot be completely independent of seeing, although it must be independent of our "seeing".Thus, he maintains that the "real" table is an idea in the mind of God.In so far as we can only infer it, but never directly perceive it in the present, the idea has the necessary eternity and independence from us, and at the same time it is not something entirely unknowable, but matter Not so anymore. Other philosophers since Berkeley have held the view that although the table does not depend on being seen by me, it does depend on being seen (or otherwise felt) by a mind ,—although not necessarily dependent on the mind of God, but often must be dependent on the whole synthetic mind of the universe.They hold this view, like Berkeley, chiefly because they think it impossible for anything to be real—at any rate nothing is known to be real except the mind with its thoughts and feelings.We may formulate the arguments they use in support of their views roughly thus: "Anything that can be thought is an idea in the mind of the thinker; therefore nothing can be thought but ideas in the mind; Therefore, anything else is unimaginable, and everything that is unimaginable cannot exist." Such an argument is fallacious, as far as I am concerned; and it is certainly not made by those who make it so abruptly and so blatantly.But whether this argument is valid or not, it has been advanced in a very wide variety of forms; and many philosophers, perhaps a majority, have held the view that, apart from mind and the idea of ​​mind, Nothing is real.Such philosophers are called "idealists".When they try to explain matter, they either say, like Berkeley, that matter is really nothing but a bundle of ideas; or, like Leibniz (1646-1716), say that everything that appears to be matter, In fact, it is more or less just a collection of primitive minds. But these philosophers, in spite of their denial of matter as opposed to mind, admit that there is matter in another sense.It will be recalled that we asked two questions; (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what kind of object might it be?Both Berkeley and Leibniz admit that there is a solid table, but Berkeley says it is certain ideas in the mind of God; Leibniz says it is a mass of souls.Thus, both of them answered our first question in the affirmative; it was only in answering our second question that they diverged from ordinary opinion.In fact, almost all philosophers seem to agree that there is a real table.They almost all agree that however much our sense-data—colour, shape, smoothness, etc.—depend on us, their presence is a sign of something that exists independently of us, and that this something, Though perhaps quite different from our sense-data, it may be regarded as the cause of our sense-data when we have an appropriate relation to the real table. It is now evident that the point on which philosophers have agreed--the notion that there is a real table, whatever its nature may be--is of the utmost importance; Before asking the question, it is worth considering what reasons we have for accepting this view.In the next chapter, therefore, we shall deal with the reasons for assuming a real table. Before we go any further, it would be well to consider what we have discovered so far.It seems that if we take an ordinary object which we think to be cognizable by the senses, what the senses immediately tell us is not the truth about that object independent of us, but only about certain sense-data. truth; and, so far as we can see, these sense-data depend on our relation to the object.In this way, what we directly see and feel are nothing but "appearances"; and we believe that they are signs of some "reality" behind them.But if the reality is not what it appears to be, is there any way for us to know whether there is any reality at all?If so, is there any way we can discover what it looks like? Such questions are so confusing that it is difficult to know that even the wildest hypotheses are not true.Thus, the table we are familiar with, although it has never excited our thoughts, has now become a problem full of amazing possibilities.All we know about it is that it's not what it is.Beyond the bounds of this trivial result, we are all free to guess at will.Leibniz tells us that it is a mass of souls; Berkeley tells us that it is an idea in the mind of God; charge. Among these startling possibilities, doubt reveals to us that perhaps there is no table at all.Philosophy, if it does not answer as many questions as we would like, at least has the right to ask questions that increase curiosity about the world and can point out what lurks beneath the surface of the most mundane things of everyday life. Bizarre and mysterious.