Appearance and reality

The possibility that things are systematically not as they present themselves, and what follows if they are not.

Theme: Being and reality
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term fixed: c. 475 BC

In plain terms

Some of the time things are not as they look, and we correct for it without difficulty. The stick in the water is straight; the coin seen at an angle is round. These are local errors and the world itself supplies the fix.

The philosophical question is what happens if the error is not local. Suppose the whole way things present themselves is a function of how we are built, so that no amount of looking harder gets behind it. There would be nothing wrong with any particular perception, and no experiment would reveal the problem, because the apparatus doing the checking is part of what is in question.

That is a much stronger claim than sometimes we are wrong, and almost every major position in metaphysics is a response to it.

As a philosopher would put it

Parmenides separates truth from opinion and consigns the observable world to the second. Plato's divided line and the cave give the separation an epistemology: the sensible is an image of the intelligible, and knowledge proper is of the latter.

The modern form begins with the primary and secondary quality distinction - Galileo, Locke - on which shape and motion are in the object while colour and taste are effects in us. Berkeley's objection is that the arguments for moving colour into the mind work equally well on shape, so the distinction collapses and matter goes with it.

Kant's is the decisive move. Space, time and the categories are the forms our sensibility and understanding impose; we know appearances thoroughly and things in themselves not at all - not because our instruments are poor but because knowing is structured. The Advaita and Buddhist traditions arrive at a two-level account for different reasons, and Nietzsche rejects the whole framework, arguing that a true world behind the apparent one is a fiction and that abolishing it abolishes the apparent world as merely apparent too.

Where you meet it

Every ship's navigator using a sextant works with a false model of the solar system, on purpose. The Nautical Almanac tabulates the apparent positions of the sun, moon and stars on a celestial sphere with the earth at its centre and the sky rotating around it.

Nobody involved believes it. The publishers compute those tables from heliocentric orbital mechanics, then convert them into the geocentric frame because that is the frame the observer is actually standing in. The sextant measures an angle between a body and the horizon, and for that purpose the appearance is the correct quantity.

So an appearance known to be an appearance is not discarded. It is tabulated to arc-second precision and used to cross oceans. That is the position most philosophers actually occupy on this question, and it is rarely stated as clearly as a set of tables states it.

What is actually disputed

Whether there is anything behind the appearances.

Realists hold that there is, and that science progressively describes it; the argument is that the success of our theories would be a miracle otherwise. Kant holds there is, and that we cannot know it - a position attacked from both sides, since a thing-in-itself said to cause appearances is already having a category applied to it.

Phenomenalism and idealism deny the gap by denying the second term: to be is to be perceived, and there is nothing behind appearances because appearance is all there is. Nietzsche denies it by rejecting the distinction outright. And the pragmatist line asks what turns on the question, since a reality that makes no difference to any possible experience is one nothing hangs on.

Commonly confused with

Māyā c. 800 Māyā names a concealment with a ground behind it, and carries a soteriology. This is the general question and carries none.

Defined against

Truth The distinction only bites if truth is something appearances can systematically fail to deliver

Philosophers

Parmenides of Elea Truth and opinion, and the world we see put on the wrong side
Plato The cave, and the image-original structure
George Berkeley Removes the reality term and keeps the appearances
Immanuel Kant Appearances known thoroughly, things in themselves not at all
Friedrich Nietzsche The true world abolished, and the apparent one with it
Shankara Two levels of truth, reached from a quite different direction

Works

On Nature The original division
Republic The cave and the divided line
Critique of Pure Reason Phenomena and noumena
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous The collapse of the primary-secondary distinction
Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself The problem taken up directly
Brahmasutra Bhasya The transactional and the ultimate

Schools

Eleatic School Where the division begins
Old Academy Where it becomes an epistemology
British Empiricism Where the qualities are sorted
Advaita Vedanta Two levels of truth
Madhyamaka Buddhism Two truths, without a ground behind them
Nietzscheanism Where the framework is refused

Related concepts

Māyā c. 800 · Perception c. 330 BC · Objectivity 1781 · Subjectivity 1846 · Qualia 1929

Parmenides divides his poem into the way of truth and the way of opinion; Kant's phenomena and noumena in 1781 is the version everything modern argues with.