How big is reality? Three ways of answering that question

How do you answer the question as Professor Peter Kreeft frames it below? Excerpt from his The Philosophy of Tolkien:

How big is reality?

There are only three logically possible answers to this question.

The first is that "there are more things in heaven and earth (i.e., in reality) than are dreamed of in your philosophies (i.e, in thought)." That was Shakespeare's philosophy, as expressed by Hamlet to Horatio, who found it hard to believe in ghosts. This is the philosophy of the poet and of the happy man, for whom nature is a fullness, a moreness, and therefore wonderful. It is the philosophy of all pre-modern cultures.

The second possible answer is that there are fewer things in reality than in thought; that most of our thought is mere myth, error, convention, projection, fantasy, fallacy, folly, dream, etc. This is the philosophy of the unhappy man, the cynic, the pessimist" "Trust nobody and nothing." This philosophy is hardly ever found in any pre-modern culture, except in a small minority.

The third possibility is that there are exactly the same number of things in reality and in thought, that is, that we "know it all."

What difference does it make to your life which philosophy you believe?

It makes a total difference, a difference to absolutely every single thing in your life. It colors everything. For if you believe the first philosophy, as Shakespeare did, as Tolkien did, and as most pre-modern people did, then your fundamental attitude toward all reality is wonder and humility. You are like a small child in a large house. As Tolkien said in one of his letters, "You are inside a very great story." You expect mysteries, you expect moreness: terrors to stop your heart and joys to break it. Reality is big. I think of the simple, hauntlng line in Ingmar Bergman's movie The Seventh Seal: "It is the Angel of Death that's passing over us, Mia, it's the Angel of Death, the Angel of Death. And he's very big."

The larger-than-life world is the one our ancestors lived in. Our culture's greatest sadness is that we no longer live in this world. Tolkien's greatest achievement is that he invites us to live inhabit this world again. ...

If you believe in the second philosophy, that there are fewer things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies, then you are cynical, skeptical, suspicious, bored, jaded, detached, ironic, and definitely non-heroic. You are a reductionist: you reduce mystery to puzzle, love to lust, thought to cybernetics, reasoning to rationalizing, ideals to desires, man to ape, God to myth. In other words, you are a typically modern or post-modern man. ... You buy into the first step of the scientific method: "Doubt everything that is not proved; treat every thought as guilty until proven innocent, false until proved true." ...

The third philosophy is rationalism, in fact, arrogant rationalism: Everything in my thought is real, and everything real is in my thought. In ancient Greece Parmenides said "What is thought and what is real is the same", and in modern Germany Hegel said, " The real is the rational and the rational is the real"; but I think only those with a divinity complex can actually believe that. ...

Thomas Howard calls good fantasy a "flight to reality" because, though its details are fictional, the nature of its world, its universal principles and values, are true. Tolkien shows us the nature of the real world by his fantasy. He is making a statement about reality, about being, about metaphysics when he says:

The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered,
[-- J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories," in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays]

--Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien

 

Comments

[Lynn Johnson]

What a powerful comment on the post-modernism taught in universities today. Are they really universities or the opposite, tiny places that teach the world is smaller and less than our thoughts?