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THE DEATH OF REALITY
by
Karey Perkins
The second law of thermodynamics is entropy: everything moves from order to disorder. For example, if one sprays a water bottle, the droplets will move from a concentrated stream, to eventually become randomly dispersed throughout the room. Or one can simply observe the deterioration of any object, such as the rotting of a dead tree branch as it moves from a finely organized state, each tree cell once carrying out its specified duty, to a misshapen pulp throughout years of weather exposure. Or, more painfully, one might watch the slow decline of one's brand new 1965 Mustang which, over the years, will demand new parts until finally, if not maintained, that spiffy car will become a decayed piece of rust, well on its way to becoming unrecognizable if one were to extrapolate one's vision 100 or 200 years into the future.
The defining characteristic of entropy is the movement from organization and systematic function to disorganization and randomness. In the case of the car, each part was specialized, working together with the other parts to unite into serving a function or purpose. As it decays, the parts become, however slowly, unrecognizable until finally there is no specialization, no differentiation; all parts of the car become one mass, a unity of rust and decay. Two hundred years later, one would find it impossible to tell the carburetor from the tailpipe from the steering wheel.
There is an exception to this sad tale (by Aristotle's definition, a tragedy), and that is the phenomenon of life. At the moment of conception, a random single purpose sperm unites with a random egg. Then, the reversal of entropy begins; division of cells take place, each becoming more diversified and specialized, until, where there once was one cell, there now exists a finely specialized dance of cells, each serving a multitude of purposes working with each other, coordinating intricately, constituting a living being. Similar processes occur in all types of life on earth. The complex interaction and coordination of cells continue until age sets in and the curve toward death (entropy) begins in the living being.
The impulse to organize, to differentiate, to classify and to divide -- the rebellion against entropy -- is the impulse to life. The mind of man has this impulse. He perceives his world, and overlays a system of organization, relationships, classification, or division onto it. The question of modern philosophy is: to what extent is this classification and division of his world that man imposes on his reality connected to ,the actual external world, to "reality," or to the "truth" of the way things really are. Philosopher David Hume's view of external reality as merely random sensations, and man's attempt to organize these "bundles of perceptions" into relationships, classifications, cause-and-effect as an illusory process, has more in common with twentieth-century philosophers such as Saussure, Nietzsche, and Derrida than those of his own time. For these theorists, man's concept of reality is just that -- a concept that exists, artificially contrived, in his own mind, and has little relation to objective reality.
The impulse of man is to organize his reality into paradigms, structures, classifications, divisions, opposites, privileged entities over peripheral entities, rule and sets of rules, that may have little or no connection with the outer, objective world of reality -- that may be devoid of truth. In other words, in the eyes of these modern philosophers, reality is not what is conceived of in a "realist conception of truth" (Alston). External reality, or truth if you prefer, is either non-existent, unattainable, illusory, or at the very most, only partially knowable (i.e.: "blind realism" (Almeder) ). Man lives in an arbitrary made-up world of artificially imposed systems. And the reason he does this is attributable to a variety of reasons by these philosophers' -- neuroses, need for comfort, lack of any other knowable defining reality, need to communicate, need for existential meaning, need for community, need for fixedness, fear of instability or change, fear of death -- but the reasons man does this is less important than the fact that he fails in his attempt to know the world accurately, and that any knowledge of his world will be erroneous, or at least doubtful in some way.
Nietzsche was the most clear on this subject. He believed that man's attempt to organize and classify the world, and to find meaning, is arbitrarily imposed, and ultimately, a self-delusion. Man is lying to himself:
The fictitious world of subject, substance, 'reason,' etc., is needed -- : there is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish. "Truth" is the will to be master over a multiplicity of sensations: -- to classify phenomena into definite categories. In this we start from a belief in the 'in-itself' of things (we take phenomena as real). (Nietzsche 364)
He describes the process by which this arbitrary classification takes place when he describes man's concept of a "leaf" as a "leaf." In other words, since no one leaf is exactly like another, that we group "leaves" together as one, ignoring their differences, is an imposition of our will on the outer world. Man then "forgets," becomes unconscious of the fact that he has randomly imposed this organization to the outer world. The advantage of this is that he "no longer suffers himself to be carried away by sudden impressions, by sensations,[;] he first generalizes all these impressions into paler, cooler ideas, in order to attach them to the ship of his life and actions" (Nietzsche 359).
These classifications are arbitrarily imposed. That language shapes and defines these arbitrary impositions has been verified in various psychological tests. For example, in one test, subjects were asked to place color tiles into groups. Those
subjects placed color tiles into the color groups for which their society had names (labels/classifications). In other words, if the society did not have a name for "orange", the subject would place an orange tile in the red group (or yellow group), unable to perceive it as different from the red tiles.** Eskimoes have 27 different words for variations of what those in warmer climates call only "snow." Floridians and Hawaiians would not perceive 27 different kinds of snow were they to visit Alaska one day.
One can only "see" or perceive as reality those things for which one has assigned a word, a classification in one's system of perceptions. While new words are assigned, but often one's system of perceptions limits one from venturing outside that to "see" new things, a different world-view, so much of reality goes, at least, unnoticed.
A psychological/developmental example is the experience of the new born baby, a mostly unconscious being (or to a lesser extent, a toddler) who has not learned any socially imposed systems yet. The mind of the brand new child is bombarded with sensations and perceptions, of an infinite amount because the experience of the world has an infinite amount of perceptions, sensations, and experiences to offer at any one moment in time. As the child grows, and as he becomes less unconscious and more conscious, his conscious mind takes over, and begins to do what the conscious does -- organize, analyze, choose, prefer one sensation over another, reject one perception over another, relate one experience to another -- through a combination
of an arbitrarily, socially-given system and the individual personal preference of the child -- to fit some limited amount of these phenomena inundating his mind into an understandable pattern, and subjugate those leftover multitudes of phenomena into
the unconscious.
The psychological/intellectual development of man demands that he attach himself to one (or several) of these arbitrarily imposed systems, which he then, as he continues in his intellectual development, must question and abandon and grow towards others or towards independence of any, to the extent that he can. This is Derrida's assumption that we must reject the privileged opposition of the dichotomy for the peripheral one, and his assertion that we cannot live without the opposition, for our minds need it; the one end of spectrum gains its identity and meaning in the other. Ultimately Derrida's exhortation that we live in the realm of "differance" is as close as he comes to rejecting any imposed structure onto reality (Derrida 405). However, to live without any system entirely is to skirt the fringes of a "reality" that is functional; it is to plunge headlong into mental entropy, into madness as admired in Cooper and Laing's anti-psychiatry (Rivkin and Ryan 337).
To backtrack to the roots of Derrida's philosophy of "differance," Saussure's view of linguistics also calls into questions man's ability to connect with an external, objective, real world. "The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a sound and a sound image" (Saussure 78). In this claim, we are getting further from a concept of an objective reality, from an understanding of truth 00 a reality. The subjective nature of language is emphasized by Saussure: "...terms involved in the
linguistic sign are psychological and are united in the brain by an associative bond" (Saussure 78). Thus, language (and by extrapolation, reality) is subjective and relational -- defined lees by a real world existence of a corresponding object to an idea than by the subjective relationship of one concept, which has its location in the psychology of the subject, to another concept. This idea of the subjective, relational nature of language is emphasized further: "The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. Proof of this is that the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified" (Saussure 88). Further, Saussure insists that the linguistic sign (signifier) is arbitrary (79). That is, not randomly chosen, but having "no natural connection with the signified" (79). We are moving farther from reality in two ways: (1) one, in that the word (signifier) itself has less of a connection to an external truth or any kind of "realness" than to the concept of the external truth in the subject's head (signified); and (2) two, in that the word's link to the external truth (or concept) is of less importance than it's link to other words (signifiers).
In addition, for Saussure, "to learn English is not to memorize a set of utterances; it is to master a system of rules and norms which make it possible to produce a set of utterances" (Culler 74). And these rules are arbitrarily set, just as the
sign itself is arbitrary. The arbitrary nature of sign has enormous consequences: there is no fixed bond, no natural, essential correspondences or essences of meaning; human reality consists of arbitrary actions determined merely by agreement, context
and convention. It is by nature meaningless, foundationless, other than the arbitrary meaning we assign it, impose over it. "Actions are meaningful only with respect to a set of institutional conventions" (Culler 73). Thus, everything becomes arbitrary, empty discourse; literary interpretations are mistakes; and as language structure is open to change completely, so social structure, arbitrarily given, is open to change completely. "Social and cultural phenomena .... Do not have essences, but are defined by a network of relations, both internal and external" (Culler 73).
If language is the foundation of our existence, and if there are no positive terms that are not defined in opposition, then nothing is self-identical, self-defined, nothing has intrinsic identity. Self/objective reality is perceived through its placement in the paradigm; through opposition; through comparison to and exclusion from other things. As Derrida echoes in his later work, the only reason the signifier is intelligible at all is that we know it is NOT other things.
Why do we create these arbitrarily imposed systems on our reality? Many philosophers conjecture reasons; according to the theory of entropy it is an impulse to LIFE, a basic function of man, and a tool which enables man to DO things, that is, to function in the world. For Derrida, the limited human convinces himself that there really are only two items in opposition of which one is preferred (the privileged and the periphery, speech and writing, life and death, male and female, social and individual, presence and absence ....). However, perhaps a more accurate system is not two items in opposition, but an infinitude of entities along a spectrum, an endless bombardment of phenomena that the subject's consciousness is far too limited to perceive, much less to use for any sort of effective functioning in the world. Thus, Nietzsche's "lie" becomes necessary. The subject picks and chooses his perceptions, and classifies what he can into neat boxes...to understand the world -- in an erroneous, limited, way -- but in an adequate enough way that he can survive, produce, learn and grow.
The choice of system will affect when and how and what and how effectively man does things. Let us hope he chooses an effective system, for it is unrealistic to hope he chooses a system based in any kind of reality that is privileged over another
reality. Man is finite; reality is infinite.
Notes
**(One can try this at home: in our society, the name and concept for the color "teal" or "aqua" is little used and rarely perceived. Wear a teal sweater and ask several people to tell you what color it is. About half will say it is blue, the other half will say it is green. I had a teal car once; this happened to me constantly.)
Works Cited
Almeder, Robert. Blind Realism: An Essay on Human Knowledge and Natural Science. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992.
Alston, William P. A Realistic Conception of Truth. Ithaca: Cornell, 1996.
Culler, Jonathan. "Introduction: `The Linguistic Foundation'." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998: 73-75.
Derrida, Jacques. "Differance." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998: 385-407.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "On Truth and Lying in an Extra -- Moral sense." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998: 358-361.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "The Will to Power." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998: 362-367.
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. "Introduction: The Class of 1968 -- Foot -- structuraliom par lui -- mefne." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998: 333-57.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. "Course in General Linguistics." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998: 76-90.
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