What is "reality"?

I was reading an article this afternoon, a piece written 37 years ago by Robert Pirsig called "Cruising Blues and Their Cure".  He writes about people who love sailing – on weekends, at any rate – who plan for years to spend their whole retirement sailing and then give it up after a few months because it's not what they thought it would be.  The complaints vary, of course, but most say that they just want to "get back to reality."  And Pirsig asks, reasonably enough, what that means.  He answers:

As best I can make out, reality for them is the mode of daily living they followed before taking to the water; unlike cruise sailing, it is the one shared by the majority of the members of our culture. It usually means gainful employment in a stable economic network of some sort without too much variance from what are considered the norms and mores of society. In other words, back to the common herd.

Plato characterized exactly the same way of life – making allowances for the differences of time and place – by using his famous image of the Cave:

Imagine men [says Socrates] to be living in an underground cave-like dwelling place, which has a way up to the light along its whole width, but the entrance is a long way up. The men have been there from childhood, with their neck and legs in fetters, so that they remain in the same place and can only see ahead of them ….  Between [the light] and the prisoners … a low wall has been built … [where] performers … show their puppets above it…. Do you think, in the first place, that such men could see anything of themselves and each other except the shadows which the fire casts upon the wall of the cave in front of them? – How could they?

And is not the same true of the objects [puppets and other things] carried along the wall? – Quite.

If they could converse with one another, do you not think that they would consider these shadows to be the real things? – Necessarily.

Pirsig goes on to discuss how odd it is to think that jobs and bank accounts and keeping up with the Joneses are all real, while sun and wind and waves and storms are unreal; and he has some valuable things to say about how to handle the blues.  But what interests me is this very word real itself, and the remarkable fact that these depressed weekend sailors and Plato use exactly the same word to describe exactly opposite things.  Pirsig's depressed sailors want to "get back to reality" by returning the the very world of social conventions and familiar opinions that Plato says is most strikingly unreal.  What gives?

The first thing to clear out of the way – because it's a red herring – is the notion that real means "physical" or "solid" while unreal means "insubstantial" or "dreamlike".  Pirsig's depressed weekend sailors don't think the seafaring life is a dream.  They know perfectly well that the ocean is physical, and that if they fail to keep their boats in good repair they could drown in a storm.  In the same way, Plato might call our conventional lives "unreal" in some sense; but even Plato would admit that if two thoroughly conventional guys get into a fist fight in a bar, they'll both come out of it with bruises and maybe broken bones.  So much for "unreal".

But if the distinction between real and unreal isn't about physical perceptibility, what's it about?  Consider the example of a mirage in the desert.  You look at the horizon and see it shimmering in a way that you normally associate with pools of open water.  You're thirsty so you are about to run towards it, but your experienced guide puts a hand on your shoulder and tells you, "Stop. It's not real."

What's not real?  The water?  If there's no water there, then how can he be talking about it?  Or does he mean the shimmering isn't real?  But of course it is – you can see it!  You know for a fact that the shimmering is there!

No, what he means is a third thing.  What your guide is trying to tell you, in fact, is:

I know you see a shimmering on the horizon. So do I. But it doesn't mean what you think it means. You are used to thinking that shimmering on the horizon means 'water' … that the value of shimmering on the horizon is that it is a sign for where you can find water. But I tell you now that in the desert things are different. In the desert, that shimmering has a different value from what you expected. It doesn't mean what you think it means. It's not important as a sign of water. It's not real.

And that's what is going on here.  When Pirsig's weekend sailors talk about "reality" what they mean is "the stuff that matters, the stuff that's important, the stuff that has value."  So does Plato.  Pirsig's sailors don't want to get away from the conventional lives of their neighbors for too long, because they are afraid they'll lose touch and never be able to go back.  They are afraid they will become permanently unable to play the subtle social games that they mastered long ago, that they now play unconsciously.  And they have no idea what life could look like outside those games.  All they see is an Abyss opening beneath their feet – an Abyss of bickering or misery or hardship or loneliness or destitution or any other nightmare they could care to name.  Whatever it is that they see stretch out before them, it's not the familiar game of chasing the shadows on the cave wall, and so to their way of thinking it's not important.  It's not valuable.  It's not real.  And they want no part of it.

Ironically, Plato and Pirsig agree with these people exactly about what they are facing, only they don't think it's all that bad.  In the rest of his article, Pirsig talks about the changes you go through if you just face up to the depression and live through it.  You come out the other side as a different person.  Your whole frame of reference changes.  You don't see things the way you used to.  And that means that if you ever do decide to go back to living on land, it won't be the same as it was before: you won't relate to your friends the same way, you won't relate to yourself the same way … you won't have the same life.  You can't go back.

Plato says the same thing more graphically.  When one of the captives in his picture gets free from the Cave and climbs out into the sun, he's dazzled at first by the bright light.  But gradually his eyes adjust, and he can see for the first time what the world truly looks like.  Then when he tries to go back into the Cave, he's almost totally blind.  The Cave is dark, all there is to see is a series of shadows flitting on the wall, and he stumbles around uselessly.  Even the village idiot sees the shadows more subtly than the fellow who escaped, because the idiot's eyes have never adjusted to regular daylight and therefore are attuned to the cavernous dark.

So Plato agrees completely with the weekend sailors that getting away from their conventional lives means losing touch with that way of life – probably for good.  The only place he differs is that for Plato it is the conventional lives that are unreal, because for him that way of life is the one that is unimportant and valueless.  And for Plato it is the life of deep insight – into your own nature and that of the world around you – that is important, that matters, that is of value.  For Plato, it is the life of insightful contemplation that is real.

Plato never spent his retirement sailing alone across the sea, but he and Pirsig would clearly have plenty to talk about.