254. How stable is reality?

Bergson adopted the view, taken from phenomenology, proposed by Husserl, that somehow we can ‘bracket’ our cognitive or linguistic predilections to see reality ‘as it really is’. That appears to be a reversal of the Kantian doctrine that we cannot observe reality ‘as it is in itself’. I cannot go along with such reversal.

But to what extent are we caught in biased conceptualization? If indeed, as I have proposed in this blog, we are caught in an ‘object bias’, conceptualizing everything by analogy to objects in space, is this inescapable?

Bergson claimed that his notion of ‘duration’, of flux, a process of emergence, yields insight not only into our subjective experience of time, and our thought, but also constitutes the true nature of the world around us. Things are processes. He defined intuition as duration in action, with the ability to dodge the object bias, to grasp the process nature of all things.

I think that perhaps with much trouble we can escape from forms of conceptualization, but while that may bring us into another way of seeing things that may in some sense be better, and we have good arguments, this will be a step in an ongoing ‘imperfection on the move’. That we can escape has been proven by modern physics, that managed to escape by means of mathematics, yielding results that are confirmed by experiment but are utterly baffling to our intuition.

Not to be imprisoned in the object bias, we might take metaphors for our thought from other things than objects in space. Earlier in this blog, I suggested to conceive of identity in terms of networks rather than some essential substance inhering in an individual or culture. But I grant that this still entails the basic notion of things (people) taking up positions in such networks. Yet, it allows for insight into the social embedding and development of identity, as opposed to the intuition of the individual as an autonomous object in space.     

Now, is ongoing process, rather than enduring substance, the reality of all things around us? Is the apparent stability of objects, as they move in space, an illusion?

In the preceding item in this blog I argued for a combination of stability and change. And then we can grasp a notion of ‘relative stability’: a greater or lesser stability relative to the speed and nature of change.

Living beings grow, age and die as they move around as distinct things in space. Earlier in this blog, in a discussion of identity (items 8-12), I argued that there is no fixed essence of identity that gets ‘expressed’ in life. Identity is not unitary, has multiple, possibly conflicting, aspects, and is subject to ongoing development, or Bergsonian duration, if you like. Yet, counter to David Hume, for example, there is some coherence and stability of identity, with the body as a focal point for perceptions, thought and emotions.

How about lifeless objects? Bergson noted that a cube of sugar changes as it is dissolved in water. How about a stone, say?  Chemistry and particle physics teach us that there of molecules and atomic, and sub-atomic processes of all matter.

With human beings it is not only physical growth and aging, but also development of identity, personality, in interaction with the world, especially the social world.

And how about changing mood, as a person moves about, acts and speaks?

Finally, as discussed before in this blog, the meanings of abstract concepts, such as happiness, identity, meaning, etc. have yet more instability. The example I gave was that the meaning of a words changes as it is shifted from one sentence to another. The stability of the form of the word, and its pronunciation, is misleading. 

In novels, meaning is more fluid than in established scientific discourse, and in poetry more fluid still.