[lit-ideas] Re: Mop Rumpchuck


On Feb 27, 2008, at 12:15 PM, Robert Paul wrote:
I remember several discussions that might resemble the one you're interested in, but none of them, as far as I can recall were in response to the question 'Is that real?' 'Is that real?' doesn't strike me as an interesting philosophical question, any more than 'Is that a cat?' does. 'Is that real?'seems to be sensibly askable only in some setting in which the 'reality' of some particular thing is not immediately apparent, e.g., when being shown something that resembles a thousand dollar bill, the person being shown it might ask, 'Is that real?' where being real is contrasted with its being counterfeit or fake.
Separating what happened here on this list from other wisps of memory is difficult. I think that when I was preparing a talk titled, "Is that a real Scottish Sword" we had a discussion along the lines you suggest here.
Philosophical sceptics often dare other philosophers to demonstrate that there is a sure-fire way of distinguishing appearance from reality, so that it might appear that there was global, non- specific question about how we know that what we experience is reality itself and not just a bunch of conveniently coagulated sense-data. (Kant thought that we did the best we could with what we have.)
In the Sophist, and Theatetus, some of Plato's characters worry about being and non-being, and end up wondering how it is possible to speak of that-which-is-not. Russell and Meinong had the same worry: Whitehead was right about the footnotes.
Here's a clumsy version of the thoughts which caused my plea. For the introduction to my talk about shell-shock, I am thinking through how, as a director I might try to stage Lady Macbeth's most famous speech. (I know the connection between shell-shock and Lady Macbeth is not obvious; that's exactly why I think it might be interesting to begin there.) 

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.
The funniest production of this I've ever come across was at the Edinburgh Festival. Lady M. stood on one side of the stage, a plastic dagger suspended by fishing line swung on the other side of the stage. Lady M. moved across the stage. The dagger was dragged to where she had been. And so on. Simple humor, but well staged.
What we laughed at were two errors: the stage hands' ineptitude and the director's literal take on the problem of what Lady M. sees. Short conclusion: it's better if the audience doesn't share Lady M.'s fantastic vision.
When Science asks whether a phenomenon is real, the question may be Lady M.'s, roughly translated, "Am I imagining the phenomenon before me?" or it might be a more technical kind of question, "Do the statistics demonstrate what you claim, or might the pattern better be attributed to chance or background noise?" When Medicine asks, "Is the disease real," both possibilities obtain: "is the patient imagining that his or her perceptions add up to something we call a disease or ailment" and "does the cluster of symptoms fall within our definition of a real ailment"?
I guess I was checking whether I can say that, "while philosophers might find little reason to dwell on such matters, we might profit from spending a few minutes with them, to see what they can tell us about shell-shock and its relationship to PTSD." 

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon

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