The Paradox of Reality…
The Mirror or the Maker? — Man imposing his subjective beliefs on the World and then discovering his own inventions or the Contingent Being of Man pursuing truth and an objective reality through a light of illumination (Gift of Reason — Faith & Reason) from a higher order eternal source (the Necessary Being of God)
“He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see”…
― Ayn Rand
“Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality”…
— John Searle
“The very idea of Europe… … is founded on the tradition of Logos”…
– Augusto del Noce
“Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality”…
— David Bohm
“ “Real” is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not”…
– Charles Sanders Peirce
Paradox
/ˈparədɒks/
a seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well-founded or true
a statement, situation or concept that appears to be self-contradictory or logically inconsistent, yet may contain a hidden truth
Is Reality a construct of Human Consciousness whereby Man imposes his subjective beliefs on the World and then discovers his own inventions — a Mirror?
Or is Reality a process of Man discovering the “Real” — an Objective Reality whose properties are independent of the Conscious Self -Ego?
A Relationship between the Contingent Being of Man (Created) and the Necessary Being of God (Created) — the Maker?
Man as Observer and God the Observed (Creator).
The Paradox of Reality captures the tension between two seemingly alternative but interdependent concepts.
Man as an Observer implies Reality is shaped through human consciousness, abstraction, perception, and subjectivity. A Reality defined by our individual ( e.g. Hegel’s Second Nature, Umwelt and Sensemaking) and collective embodied temporal experiences ( e.g. Nominalism, Sophism and Collective Sensemaking ) making the Conscious Self–Ego central to our understanding.
“Reason is negative and dialectical because it resolves determinations of understanding into nothing; it is positive because it generates the universal and comprehends the particular therein”…
— Hegel, Science of Logic
The Contingent Being of Man.
Alternatively, God as Creator asserts that Reality exists objectively, independent of human perception ( Realism) because it originates from a Divine, higher eternal source being God. This reality is absolute, immutable, and not contingent on human awareness.
“Hegel thought he was defending the Spirit, but caught himself in the most infinite errors ever seen, and incalculably harmed the cause of the Spirit”…
– Giuseppe Capograssi
The Necessary Being of God.
“For Aristotle, philosophy originates from wonder at reality. Ancient philosophy is therefore first and foremost open to reality, aimed at objective truth”…
– Augusto del Noce
The common foundation is grounded in the Univocity and Sacred nature of Being.
A Primacy of the Unchangeable.
“Traditional spirit means affirming the Primacy of Being, the Primacy of the Unchangeable… and the ontological value of the principle of non-contradiction (which, not by chance, appears in the 4th book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as the end point of the critique of Sophistics)”…
— Augusto del Noce
Through the combination of Faith and Reason (the Gift of Reason ) it illuminates the common concept of Being that is shared by the finite contingent Being of Man ( Created ) and the infinite necessary Being of God ( Creator).
It enables Man to remove contradictions and through the pursuit of Truth reveal the unchangeable order (i.e. alignment of Subjective Beliefs of Man (Conscious Self—Ego) with an Objective High Order Reality (God)).
An embodied lived Reality of individuals.
One that integrates a Primacy of Human Consciousness with a Primacy of Existence with a Primacy of Action all grounded in a Primacy of Being, meaning and higher-order moral truths.
“I cannot fulfill myself as a man without affirming the existence of God and being open to the supernatural” …
– Augusto del Noce
“Now subjectivism reduces all science to the knowledge of one individual, the Ego — which, as just shown, is no science at all. If its fundamental definition of knowledge means anything, or is faithfully adhered to, subjectivism teaches that the intelligent subject has no intelligence save for itself — has no warrant for believing in the existence of anything save itself — knows nothing but the inexplicable order of its own sensations and thoughts. It reduces all existence to an unrelated One, while of an unrelated One no science is possible. In a word, subjectivism if logical, annihilates science at a blow”…
– Francis Ellingwood Abbot
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