What is Reality?
There is no more basic question in philosophy than the question of what constitutes reality. On the one hand, it seems obvious that when we speak the word “reality” we designate all that is present to conscious experience whether it be something purely internal such as my private thoughts, personal feelings, or bodily sensations, or something external, material, and shared like the table at which we enjoy coffee and conversation. But that has seldom been enough of an answer for us, for we have minds with a capacity for transcendence that leaves us endlessly yearning to know more. And knowing more is all the more urgent and consequential because we are aware of our own mortality as well as the mutability of our entire earthly world. There is everywhere the potential for unforeseen events to occur that can suddenly threaten our sense of safety and wellbeing. We seek the security of knowing if not controlling the mechanisms and meaning of life, its originating causes and our destiny.
With the birth of mind these questions arose. A pragmatic aptitude and keen perceptual consciousness saw connections, some simple, benign, born of nature’s wisdom. But the hungry mind learned to read into the visible certain imagined vital forces that seemed to animate our world, forces that lay beyond what is visible, some of them seeming stable or eternal in their cyclicality but others expressing a free and fickle temperament, governed by fiat. We saw more than a mother’s breast in nature; we also saw her moodiness, reactive tendencies that required attention and peacemaking rituals. These sacred services could only be conjured by discerning minds, a gift given to a priestly few. Thus arose the mytho-poetic generation of gods and rituals that express reverence and placate theses invisible anthropomorphic forces of nature. Subsequent developments in philosophy, starting in 5th century BC Greece, and in the Judeo-Christion religious tradition, represent our major ways of addressing the ultimate questions of metaphysics in the West.
First Nature
Reality is the substance of all that is in my surrounding world, all that is not alive, firm and fixed in its physical state, and all that lives and has its source of movement within itself as life striving to persist in its being. This is the domain of nature whose ecosystems and life forms have evolved over geological spans of time. And beyond this “first nature” lies a “second nature,” specific to a uniquely human world, which includes further horizons of reality, nonmaterial domains of feeling, thinking, and willing experienced subjectively within our embodied conscious lives as persons with corresponding objective fields of phenomena as felt, thought, or willed.
Second Nature
Second nature evolves, too. Its change is of our own making, intersubjectively constituted in our communal lives as people. We are social beings, born into a world that is shaped by predecessors, transgenerational patterns of living, which form traditions. We and this world are historical, characterized by cultural frameworks of value, beliefs, and norms that reflect our identity and guide patterns of right living. This normative dimension expresses an ethos, a lived orientation toward values we first come to know through the modeling of others, but then later independently, pre-reflectively, intuitively, along with their relative ranks, higher and lower, which convey a sense of oughtness about what is good, right, and proper.
What Does It Mean to Be Human?
Transcendence
These two realms of nature merge in human life. We are at once embodied beings who, like other species, feel hunger, fear, pleasure and pain. But the strivings to thrive of first nature are conjoined with a life of mind that differentiates second nature by adding a transcendent dimension of consciousness and freedom. So, while our fellow species, many of whom are sentient and able to bond with us, live and thrive largely through their instinctual capacities to adapt, we bear the burden of choice and the awareness of doing good or ill. The choices and risks in using our mind are longstanding themes in myth, religion, and philosophy.
Morality and Responsibility
Since beings whose lives are fully encompassed by first nature are governed by instinct and the whole of their surrounding environment is governed by the causal principles of physical nature, we might say that first nature is guided by necessity. By contrast, second nature might be characterized as a domain governed by freedom, in particular moral freedom. We are free to follow lower, instinctual tendencies or appetites governed by self-interest, but we are also free to recognize and strive to realize intrinsically higher values, such as those of self-sacrifice, communal feelings of care, all through supererogatory acts of love.
Personhood and Values
Following Max Scheler’s theory of ethical personalism, personhood consists in being the living, subjective center of intentional acts, acts that are about something. And as he characterizes personhood, it includes both conscious and preconscious modes of mental life, rational and affective modes of knowing. Primary among affective modes of knowing is our felt, intuitive grasp of values. And corresponding to this grasp of value is an objective a priori ranked ordering of values: Sensory (pleasure/pain), Pragmatic (useful/not useful), Vital (noble/ignoble), Spiritual (aesthetic, philosophic, juridical), and Sacred (holy/unholy).
Postscript
I will pick up from here with a phenomenological approach to philosophical anthropology introduced by Max Scheler and other first-generation phenomenological philosophers of the 20th century, focused particularly on its bearing on moral personalism and psychology. As a teaser, I leave you with this quote: “That which can be called originally “good’ and ‘evil,’ i.e., that which bears the non-formal values of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ prior to and independent of all individual acts is the ‘person,’ the being of the person itself.” (From Max Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, p. 28).
