Mind Your Own Beeswax! and other Camel Droppings

 

Betty Bassett, "Why Questioning Reality is the Most Grounded Thing You Can Do"

Understanding your beliefs about the nature of reality is more than academic. It's helpful to consider different perspectives on how this question can be answered. Each lens offers a different image from which you can determine your beliefs:

Are you an idealist?

Plato proposed that reality is fundamentally mental and that the physical world is a shadow of the true, unchanging reality.

Approach: Reflect on if you believe the world you see is a true representation of reality.

Do you think there are deeper truths?

Are you an empiricist?

John Locke asserted that our knowledge of the world is derived from sensory experiences.

Approach: Consider the role of your senses in shaping what you think is reality.

How much do you trust what you perceive? Do you believe that knowledge comes only from what you can see, hear, taste and touch?

Are you a rationalist?

René Descartes emphasized the role of reason and intellect in understanding reality, famously stating, "I think, therefore I am."

Approach: Ponder the importance of logical reasoning in your worldview.

Do you prioritize logical deduction over what you experience in deciding what is real?

Are you a phenomenologist?

Edmund Husserl focused on consciousness as the way in which we experience the world.

Approach: Examine your subjective experiences and how they shape your perception of reality.

How do your thoughts, feelings, and awareness shape your understanding of what is real?

Are you an existentialist?

Jean-Paul Sartre argued that we define our own reality through our actions and choices

Approach: Reflect on the ways that you create meaning in your life.

How do your decisions define your circumstances and your reality?

Answers to Inspire Deep Thinking

To help you understand what you believe about reality, here are a few examples of how people could answer this question:

A Scientist: "I believe reality is made of matter and energy."

A Spiritual Seeker: "I believe that reality is a manifestation of a divine presence.”

A Pragmatist: "I believe that reality is what we can observe and measure. Our understanding is based on practical outcomes."

An Artist: "I believe reality is perceptions and emotions. It's subjective and influenced by our inner worlds and creative expressions."

 Real-World Applications

Defining your beliefs about the nature of reality has implications on how you conduct your life:

Self-Awareness: By deciding on what your beliefs are, you gain insight into what drives your thoughts and actions.

Decision-Making: Clearly articulating your beliefs about the nature of reality can narrow your choices. It helps you decide through which lens you will cope with the challenges of life.

Relationships: Deciding on what you believe helps you appreciate the perspectives of others that may differ.

Resilience: If you can define your sense of reality then it provides resilience in the face of uncertainty. Your definition serves as an anchor, grounding you when external circumstances are tumultuous.

Purpose and Meaning: Knowing yourself well enough to define the nature of reality leads to an understanding of your purpose and what brings meaning to your life. This can be profoundly enriching in the way that you live each day.

The question "What are my core beliefs about the nature of reality?" is not just an abstract query; it's a tool for self-discovery. By reflecting on your own beliefs, you can gain greater self-knowledge and make decisions that are true to your values. This journey helps you know yourself. So, take a moment to ponder this question. The insights you gain might just transform your reality.

Here are some ways that people have answered the question to the nature of reality:

Immanuel Kant: "All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason."

Arthur Schopenhauer: "The world is my representation."

Søren Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

William James: "The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude."

Henri Bergson: "The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

Alfred North Whitehead: "The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe."

Bertrand Russell: "The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics."

Martin Heidegger: "The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”

Jean-Paul Sartre: "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

Simone de Beauvoir: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "The body is our general medium for having a world."

Karl Jaspers: "Philosophy is not the possession of wisdom but the search for wisdom."

Gaston Bachelard: "The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.”

Gilles Deleuze: "A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window."

Michel Foucault: "The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them."

Jacques Derrida: "There is nothing outside of the text."

Richard Rorty: "Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”

Slavoj Žižek: "The virtual reality of ideology is for us real, precisely because of the fact that we take it as real."

Peter Sloterdijk: "We have been misled by the progress of physics to the erroneous view that we can touch the deepest level of reality by studying elementary particles."

Alain Badiou: "The only thing we can truly change is the meaning of things."

John Searle: "There is a sense in which human consciousness is a manifest fact of nature."

Thomas Nagel: "Whatever you think about what it is like to be a bat, you will have to think it under the constraint of your own viewpoint.”

David Chalmers: "Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind."

Graham Harman: "Reality has no one center."

Timothy Morton: "The ecological thought involves a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge.”

Plato:  "Reality is created by the mind, we can change our reality by changing our mind."

Aristotle:  "The whole is more than the sum of its parts."

René Descartes:  "I think, therefore I am."

Immanuel Kant:  "We experience the world not as it is, but as we perceive it."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel:  "Reality is the unfolding of the absolute idea."

Friedrich Nietzsche:  "There are no facts, only interpretations."

David Hume:  "The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance."

Arthur Schopenhauer:  "The world is my idea."

Jean-Paul Sartre:  "Existence precedes essence."

Martin Heidegger:  "The being of beings is their being."

Ludwig Wittgenstein:  "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Bertrand Russell:  "The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours."

Alfred North Whitehead:  "The world is a process, not a thing."

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz:  "Reality consists of monads, which are simple substances that form the building blocks of the universe."

Baruch Spinoza:  "Reality is one substance, and everything else is a mode of that substance."

John Locke:  "The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone."

George Berkeley:  "To be is to be perceived."

Henri Bergson:  "Reality is a continuous process of becoming."

Michel Foucault:  "Knowledge is not for knowing; knowledge is for cutting."

Slavoj Žižek:  "The real is impossible; the impossible is real."

Gilles Deleuze:  "The virtual is fully real in its own right."

Jürgen Habermas:  "Reality is not given but mediated by language and communication."

Hannah Arendt:  "The reality of the public realm relies on the presence of others."

 References

Settlecase, Parker “7 Philosophical Questions to Help You Journal.” YouTube, July 1, 2024
https://youtu.be/MT0jz-5kJFE?si=PUiolvA9amaLLdBY

Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Edited by John Cottingham, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber, Yale University Press, 2007.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, 1962.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden, Routledge, 2001.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford University Press, 1975.

Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Edited by Jonathan Dancy, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson, Routledge, 2012.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, 1978.