What’s so good about reality?
There’s nothing “real” about language. You can’t eat it or wear it; you can’t pick it up and use it to keep off the rain. There are no stories to be found out there in the “real” world. You can’t hunt poems in the forest or look at essays in the zoo. Beyond the vibration of vocal chords, language, the most human of humanity's capacities, has no “reality” to it at all. Animals exist in the real world; humans, to the extent that we are more than animals, live in a reasoned world of language where the building blocks are metaphors and the mortar is narrative. Beauty, values and moral judgements are all human abstractions based in the real world but not to be found there. In an existential moment, Shakespeare made this same point: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” I make these observations because I have been thinking about the issues raised by a number of my colleagues as they address the popular perception of a dichotomy between the “real” world and th...