Appearance, reality and idealism

In our everyday lives most of us work with a rough and ready distinction between what is real and what is appearance. Austin said that in the case of the real/unreal distinction it is ‘unreal’ that ‘wears the trousers’; that, in other words, we understand by ‘real’ what is not unreal, and we understand ‘unreal’ by reference to a number of prototype situations and cases. A real duck is one that is not unreal and that is likely to mean one that is not fabricated, ‘mock’ or ‘pretend’. A toy duck used as a decoy is not a real duck, for two such reasons. Nevertheless, it would be odd to use the words ‘apparent’ and ‘appearance’ in connexion with it, even if the aim of using it as a decoy is to present an appearance of a duck to whatever it is that is being decoyed. A toy duck is not an apparent duck, nor is it in itself the appearance of a duck; all the same it is not a real duck. Such considerations might suggest that appearance does not constitute a straightforward contrast with reality.

When I say that in our everyday lives most of us work with a rough and ready distinction between reality and appearance, I do not mean merely that we have a rough and ready understanding of how to use ‘real’, ‘unreal’, ‘apparent’ and ‘appearance’, let alone ‘is’ and ‘appears’.

Persons and selves

Contemporary philosophical discussions concerning persons centre largely on the criteria of personal identity. Questions about the criteria of identity for Xs are, however, correlative with questions about the kind of concept that the concept of X is. It is the nature of a given thing which determines the sort of circumstances in which it is appropriate to speak of one thing of that kind being identical with what is putatively another. John Locke, who is to all intents and purposes the originator of our modern problems about personal identity raises those problems in the course of a chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2.27) which is concerned with identity and diversity in general, and there is a sense in which he was quite right to do so. For personal identity does not raise problems distinct from those concerning identity in general unless there is something special about the concept of a person which brings that about.

I say that Locke is to all intents and purposes the originator of our modern problems about personal identity. Mediaeval philosophers were of course concerned with the problem of the principle of individuation, as we saw in Chapter 4, and in confronting the question of what ultimately distinguishes two things or two things of a certain kind they presumed certain answers to questions about the identity of those things. That included questions about human beings and about the soul.

The concept of the mental

I said in Chapter 1 that a discussion of what reality is entails saying something about things, their spatio-temporal framework and the persons or selves for whom they are things. I did not mean to suggest that reality is merely reality for some person or persons – that reality is relative to a point of view had by a person or persons – and I took pains in Chapter 2 to emphasize that fact. It is nevertheless a truism that our conception of reality depends upon the concepts that we have, even if reality itself is not necessarily limited by those concepts. Our conception of reality is one that includes persons as well as other things, and an account of reality must therefore make reference to them. The only question is whether it is necessary to give separate treatment to them. Why set human beings or persons (and I shall shelve until later the question whether these are the same) apart from the rest of nature? If materialism were true, that might suggest that there is, in the end, no reason for setting persons apart from the rest of nature, despite the prima facie difficulty arising from various facts about human beings, including the fact that we can speak of what reality is for them. On the other hand, Hilary Putnam has suggested that the very notion of reference to things, which is involved in the idea of things being reality for us, is something that materialism cannot explain.

I am indebted to Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson of Cambridge University Press for suggesting that I write this book and for encouraging it on its way. I hope that it may prove something of a companion piece to my The Theory of Knowledge (Macmillan, 1971). At all events, the thanks that I expressed in that book to Birkbeck College students are due again here. I have lectured on metaphysics at the College for more years than I care to remember, and successive generations of students have criticized, probed and commented on the views that I have expressed, in the way that Birkbeck students are ever willing to do. My debt to them is vast and I shall always be grateful.

Parts of a draft of the book were also read at a seminar which I, together with Mrs Dorothy Edgington, gave at the College. I am grateful for many comments made by her and others at the seminar.

I owe a very special debt to Mr Ian McFetridge who kindly read the first draft of the book and who made comments and criticisms which have been invaluable. He has saved me from many mistakes. Apart from the criticisms which he made, I am very grateful to him for the encouragement that his remarks afforded.

Thanks are due to other colleagues and students for points which are too numerous to mention. I am grateful, finally, to Mrs Georgia Wyver and Miss Maureen Cartwright for secretarial assistance of many kinds and for general help with the book.

What is metaphysics?

It is not easy to set out exactly what metaphysics is, and the whole question of what it is has often been thought problematic. From time to time it has even been doubted whether it really exists or is possible. The origins of the term ‘metaphysics’ are, however, clear enough. The word is the title of one of Aristotle's works, or rather it is the title that was given to a certain compilation of Aristotelian writings in the ancient world, probably in the library at Alexandria. The compilation was so called because it seemed to those responsible for it to consist of works coming after those on physics (meta taphusika). The title was in that sense a library classification. The correctness of the library classification would imply that there was at least a similarity of theme in those writings. It would not necessarily suggest that Aristotle himself had any conception of a distinct discipline, an autonomous branch of philosophy, the exposition of which was to be found there. Indeed, in the work that we now have under the title Metaphysics Aristotle discusses matters which have, to say the least, a considerable overlap with those discussed in the Physics and in other works of his.

It would be a mistake nevertheless to suggest that there is not in the Metaphysics discussion of issues which have a definite similarity to and continuity with those discussed by later philosophers under the same heading.

The distinction

I indicated in Chapter 4 that particularity would generally be accepted as one characteristic of substances. I did not argue for that thesis, although I referred to arguments presented by Aristotle and Strawson for the conclusion that it is particular substances, or their Strawsonian equivalent, that primarily exist. Indeed Aristotle claims in the Categories (2b5) that unless particular substances existed it would be impossible for their corresponding species and genera and non-substance properties to exist. Strawson argues for a similar conclusion regarding material objects as basic particulars from the point of view of speaker–hearer identification.

It is arguable that later, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle came to a different conclusion because of further refinements in his view of what must hold good of a substance. He says that the primary cases of substance must be identical with their essences, and that amounts to their being self-explanatory, causa sui as Spinoza puts it. It is sometimes said of this later view that it amounts to the identification of substance with form, and because the word for form is the same as that for species it implies that Aristotle came to give greater priority to species than to particular instances of them. If such a view seems esoteric from the point of view of common sense, it should be noted that, if one attaches importance to what is permanent and persistent in the world, species have by that criterion a greater importance than particulars.

The traditional conception of substance

The term ‘substance’ is one of the most confusing terms in philosophy. For Aristotle, at least some of the time, the paradigm cases of substances were, as he put it, ‘this man, this horse’, i.e. particular things of that kind. For complicated historical reasons, however, substance has sometimes come to be equated with what Aristotle called ‘matter’; thus iron and sulphur, and other stuffs, have come to be called ‘substances’. For further complicated historical reasons substance came to be regarded by e.g. Locke as the underlying something or other which is supposed to give support to the properties that inhere in it. Indeed the Latin etymology of the term ‘substance’ will suggest to anyone having a sensitivity to it that notion of something standing beneath the properties. Locke thus called it a ‘something I know not what’ – a suggestion that is not conveyed by either of the other two usages. The situation is complicated still further by the fact that the Latin etymology is relevant only to those modern discussions which rely on the term ‘substance’. The Greek word which Aristotle used – ‘ousia’ – and which is traditionally translated ‘substance’ has none of the suggestions that the Latin etymology of ‘substance’ provides, but has additional suggestions of its own, particularly a connexion with being.

Must substance be simple?

As we saw in Chapter 4, it is not part of the Aristotelian tradition about substance or indeed of our ordinary thinking about substances (if there is any such thing) that substances are simple. It might indeed be said that they are quite the contrary. The things that we should ordinarily think of as substances are complex both in the sense that they have a multiplicity of properties and in the sense that they are spatially divisible. Moreover, it is important to note the point which in Chapter 4 I mentioned as recognized by Plato – that the predicate ‘one’ is a relative term so that whether something is counted as one or many must depend on the answer to the prior question ‘One what?’ The thought that substances must be simple is the same as the thought that they must be one in an absolute sense.

It is Leibniz, among philosophers concerned with substance, who seems most concerned also with the simplicity of substances. It is arguable that he thought that they must be simple, and not merely in possession of the spurious unity which attaches, as he put it, to sacks of pistoles (i.e. the unity of a mere collection), because he thought that this followed from the fact that substances are primary as regards existence. In other words, he thought that substances must be absolutely simple because any complex thing, whether that complexity is actual or potential, is capable of being analysed into, and is thus dependent on, the things of which it is a complex, and so cannot be primary.

What are space and time?

To say that the reality which we all share consists of many kinds of things, and that among those things substances have a certain preeminence, is to leave out important features of that reality if it is not also emphasized that substances change and persist through time and occupy space. I mentioned these considerations in Chapter 4, but it is important that one should try to arrive at some understanding of them. What in particular are space and time? What sort of things are they? One natural answer is that they comprise continua, three-dimensional in the case of space, one-dimensional in the case of time; that is to say that they consist of continuous manifolds, positions in which can be occupied by substances and events respectively, and which have an existence in their own right. It is in virtue of the occupancy of such positions that events and processes are to be seen as taking place after each other and substances are to be seen in certain spatial relations. That cannot be taken as in any sense a definition of ‘time’ and ‘space’, since what I have said about space makes reference to spatial relations, while what I have said about time makes reference to ‘after’, which must be taken in a temporal sense. Nevertheless, what I have said about continua might well be taken as the natural thing to say.