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10 Creativity and Reality

In my previous chapters I suggested that much of our thinking about the nature of reality is confused or erroneous. At the same time, I suggested that there are types of creativity that accompany virtually all our statements or beliefs about reality. In this chapter I want to establish at least three things: first, that what in our familiar language is called reality is a com- pendium produced by vague but common feelings about reality; second, that there are different kinds of comparable and interrelated feelings of this sort; and finally, that the inherent modes of creativity in this area exist within a parti- cular dimension of their own and that even without our attempting a thorough analysis a preliminary outline of it may help us understand these aspects of human consciousness.

William James and Recent Science

Not much effort along these lines has been made by philosophers in the last hundred years, but in The Varieties of Religious Experience, written by William James at the beginning of the twentieth century, we find a paragraph that may get us started:

Singer, Irving. Modes of Creativity : Philosophical Perspectives, MIT Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/michstate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3339583. Created from michstate-ebooks on 2018-08-10 05:37:20.

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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess.1

Elsewhere James remarks: “In its inner nature, belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else.”2

James’s position is not entirely clear. Sometimes he speaks of the phenomenon as a sensing of reality, and at other times he calls it the “perception of reality.” A chapter in his Principles of Psychology has that title. Occasionally, as we have just seen, he refers to it as the “feeling” of reality. He does not seem to consider this variation of terminology significant. But through- out his work the words sense, perception, and feeling are dif- ferently defined and differently used. The former two are distinguished with respect to the relative simplicity of their objects or contents. The function of sense or sensation “is that of mere acquaintance with a fact. Perception’s function, on the other hand, is knowledge about a fact, and this knowledge admits of numberless degrees of complication.”3

I suggest that none of these formulations is adequate. If the “sense of reality” were indeed a sense (a form of sensation), albeit a sense more deep and general than any specific sensation, it would have to follow that it consists in the acquaintance with an entity or fact that is thought of as “real.”

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To have a sensation of hardness is to experience contact with an actual something taken as “hard.” But the same cannot hold for the alleged sense of reality. There we are not engaging with anything in its self that is deemed real: we are instead having an overall experience, barely conscious, that seems to indicate the reality of some object or circumstance.

Similarly, the sense of reality cannot be a perception of reality. For then, it would have to occur as the property of an individual content, the knowledge of which would depend on its relations to other things. Such a description can be adequate for explaining how it is that we distinguish illusory objects from those that are nonillusory. It tells us the conditions in which something that is real can be expected to occur. It does not, however, tell us what any sense of reality is.

Finally, as a last resort, we may understand and even accept James’s surmise about a “feeling of reality.” But then we need to learn exactly what kind of feeling that might be. It is not enough to present it as a “general” or “sort of” feeling allied to the emotions. At the same time, there has been some impressive support for James’s vague idea in the current speculation of brain and cognitive theorists. Though usually couched in professionalistic caveats about the nascent character of scientific research in this area, it yields a refreshing departure from purely physicalistic thinking about human consciousness.

For instance, in an article entitled “Emotion and Consciousness,” Kathleen Wider argues that “it is not the thinking activity of the mind alone that produces the most basic level of self-awareness. It is the affective nature of consciousness, which usually includes a cognitive element, that does.” Wider amplifies this statement by claiming that

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“there is always something it is like to be a subject of consciousness, to be me at this moment, here and now, and that ‘something it is like’ is constituted by a feeling.”4

I see this as a promising, though partial, elucidation of the Jamesian reference to a feeling of reality underlying or circumvenient to our sensing of the world. Wider sustains the forcefulness of her suggestion by citing the work of brain theorists such as Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio, who tentatively remark not only that all consciousness is rendered self-conscious by ingredient aspects of feeling and affectivity as a whole but also—in Panksepp’s words—that “every moment of our conscious life is undergirded by feelings.”5

Wider brilliantly illustrates this phenomenon by showing how emotions, as representative of other feelings, orient and control the varied contents of her consciousness: “The driver who has just moved into my lane has purposively cut me off. My children have the volume on the television turned up high to irritate me; even the carpet I trip over has, I feel, tripped me. Everything of which I am aware is present to me in a certain way in part because of my emotional state.”6 After further descriptions about feelings of romantic love causing a heightened sexualization of the world as we experience it, Wider concludes: “It is in virtue of the affective quality of consciousness that whenever I am conscious, I am pre- reflectively conscious [of myself ], of how it is with me now.”7

Taking this as a guiding principle that cognitive and brain science may soon develop much further in the empirical and creative work it does, I suggest that this notion of an affective and self-referential underpinning of all consciousness may lead us to a proper interpretation of the generic feeling of reality. To get there, we need to supplement the ideas about a

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prereflective awareness of oneself with other ideas that appear in Aristotle’s De Anima. Having noted that the self receives information about the world from the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, Aristotle puzzled over the fact that we also have a broader and more comprehensive sense of the fact that we are such that the five senses operate in the ways that are familiar to everyone. Aristotle concluded that an inner agency supervenes upon the outer ones. In a recent translation, he asserts: “There is a common faculty that accompanies all the senses, by which one senses [for example] that one is seeing and that one is hearing. For certainly it is not by sight that one sees that one is seeing. . . . It is, rather, thanks to a certain part of the soul that is common to the sense organs.”8

In the history of philosophical speculation about the self, this inner aptitude has been named and interpreted in many ways.9 To me it seems plausible to think that it belongs to one’s feeling of oneself as the being that has whatever consciousness one may have at any time. Sensory experience is a part of that. It serves as the intermediary between us and what we receive as possible information about a world that we are sensing. Since the senses perform this function within a prereflective context that is shaped and somewhat controlled by the gamut of feelings with which we identify ourselves, the intermediate experience creates a varying complexity of notions about what is real in us as well as outside in some external reality.

From this, it follows that the feeling of self, of “oneself”— whatever it may be for each person at any moment—is deeply rooted in our consciousness alongside the individual contents of our experience, including the sensory data that seem to come from the world in which we live. The feeling of reality is therefore actually a conglomerate of feelings about one or

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another event or circumstance that we recognize as supremely outstanding in our life at that time. Upon it we have rendered the valued category of being real that may in itself ascribe greater meaning for us than other, lesser, aspects of existence. Therein lies the creativity in the feelings of reality that we have. Like all the rest of human creativity, they sustain inven- tive and imaginative gestures, acts, and attitudes that bestow a special importance upon sensations and all else of con- sciousness that occurs within the self that is ourself.

The great nineteenth-century psychologist and psychiatrist Pierre Janet described “le sentiment du réel” (the feeling of what is real) as attention or attentiveness: “To hold a perception or an idea with the feeling that it is quite real, that is to say, to coordinate around this perception all our tendencies, all our activities, this is the very work of attention.”10 That suggestion is worth exploring further, but first I want to consider some relevant views of David Hume, the founder of modern empiricism.

Humean Intimations

Hume devoted a great deal of space to the issue we have been discussing, although he never uses the exact same words as James. His terminology is idiosyncratic and his approach is clearly different from James’s (or mine), but still it is an equivalent feeling of reality to which he referred in his Treatise of Human Nature:

’Tis evident, that whatever is present to the memory, striking upon the mind with a vivacity which resembles an immediate impression, must become of considerable moment in all the operations of the

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mind, and must easily distinguish itself above the mere fictions of the imagination. Of these impressions or ideas of the memory we form a kind of system, comprehending whatever we remember to have been present, either to our internal perceptions or sense; and every particular of that system joined, to the present impressions, we are pleased to call a reality.11

This kind of reality is for Hume “the object of the memory and sense.” The next step takes him to “the judgment”: “But the mind stops not here with the system of memories. For finding, that with this system of perceptions, there is another connected by custom, or if you will, by the relation of cause or effect, it proceeds to the consideration of their ideas; . . . it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies with the title of realities.”12

From this point of vantage, we can better appreciate the import of Hume’s assertion that belief “consists not in the nature and order of our ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind.”13 In this context he is surely referring to the feeling of reality. Without analyzing what in particular is accepted as real, he states:

This operation of the mind, which forms the belief of any matter of fact, seems hitherto to have been one of the greatest mysteries of philosophy: tho’ no one has so much as suspected, that there was any difficulty in explaining it. . . . An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us: and this different feeling I endeavour to explain by calling it a superior force, or vivacity, or solidity, or firmness, or steadiness. This variety of terms, which may seem so unphilosophical, is intended only to express that act of the mind, which renders realities more present to us than fictions, causes them to weigh more in the thought, and gives them a superior influence on the passions and imagination.14

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The Feeling of Reality

For us in the twenty-first century, what remains essential in Hume’s position is the underlying assumption that the feeling of reality present in the operation of belief consists in the kind of powerful response that still needs to be explained. Unlike any ordinary belief, I wish to argue, this feeling is not some- thing that automatically issues from the mere occurrence of consciousness but rather embodies a separate act of creativity on our part.

Janet’s identifying “le sentiment du réel” with attention or attentiveness, as we have seen, takes us a step closer to the truth. Incomplete as this suggestion may be, it implies, at least, that the feeling of reality has a being that is independent of perceiving or bodily sensing and consequently is not itself having a perception or sensation but rather exists as an affec- tive mode or disposition. Even so, we may ask: what kind of attention or attentiveness is the feeling of reality to which Hume and James might have been alluding?

James skirts my kind of probing by asserting: “Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality.”15 He reaches this conclusion, and even emphasizes it as in my quotation, after considering the state of a “new-born mind, entirely blank and waiting for experience to begin.”16

Similar remarks are made by Alexander Bain, whom James quotes. “The leading fact in Belief, according to my view of it, is our Primitive Credulity,” Bain says: “We begin by believing everything; whatever is, is true. . . . The animal born in the morning of a summer day proceeds upon the fact of daylight; assumes the perpetuity of that fact.”17 But how can one know that

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a newborn animal “assumes the perpetuity” of anything? The animal may not make provision for surviving after nightfall; it may accept the givenness of daylight without ever seeming to ponder about it; and yet one cannot conclude from these premises that it is entertaining beliefs about perpetual daylight or anything else. At best, the most one could say is that the newborn is incapable of believing in nightfall. From this, it does not follow that “the animal” has acquired the beginnings of feelings about reality, as James and Bain suggest.

I do not wish to question the close relation between belief and the feeling of reality. Rather, like Hume, or at least my interpretation of him, I view the feeling of reality as a unique phenomenon in all human experience, even when there is no belief. Apart from belief, the feeling of reality reduces to the submissive and minimal acceptance by someone of an explicit circumstance with which that person is involved. With the advent of a vital problem and the search for its solution, the feeling of reality pervades one’s belief and thus transforms the original acceptance into a more complex situation.

Suppose I wish to know what time it is. That is the problem— the time. I undertake an inquiry: I look at my watch. If I have reason to doubt its ability to keep correct time, I carry the inquiry further. If I trust my watch, however, I leave matters there, and, in so doing, manifest my belief that the time is whatever it says it is. But the situation will have changed once my investigation arises and is geared to the motivating problem I have described and its possible solution. This new situation is more than merely perceptual, for now the feeling of reality is intermeshed with it as the basis for beliefs I may then have.

In daily experience and throughout our attitudes toward various things, the feeling of reality often burns with a low

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intensity, with a cool, if steady, pilot light. The ordinary world is habitual, and generally seductive to our consciousness, precisely because it occurs without any need for a massive display of affect or cognition. When awareness is fervidly aroused, however, and our perception of objects is as keen as Hume could allow any impression to be, then the incandescent quality of our feeling of reality may approach the kindling point. As James puts it: “One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem more utterly what they are, more ‘utterly utter’ than when we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in which a man’s very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.”18

The Feeling of Unreality

When a person is disposed to reject an experience or mode of feeling, the situation is often permeated by a tone of dissatisfaction with oneself and with respect to one’s involve- ment in this experience. That is the setting for the “feeling of unreality.” Undergoing it is not the same as believing that some things or events are in fact unreal. For instance, once I have awakened, I recognize my dream of last night as having been only a dream. But while I was actually having it, my dream may have smacked of reality as much as any part of my waking life. One should therefore say that during the dream experience I had the feeling of reality in relation to the dream itself, and as a vibrant occurrence authentically just as it was. Once I am awake, I still experience a feeling of reality, but now

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the conscious condition I am in is something richer than the dream itself. What currently exists is my belief that the dream really happened last night, that it had a content that my memory imperfectly reports to me, and that it may possibly be interpreted in one fashion or another. Thus the dream, that fanciful and fleeting kind of nocturnal event, may be characterized as something whose ingredients were “unreal” without their necessarily arousing in me a feeling of unreality. The latter is an unwelcome state that many people undergo, and its troubled character is not at all unreal.

The feeling of unreality can also be a specific component of our dreams. As the dream progresses, we may feel that the events in it are somehow not what they seem and not true to life as we know it. This intimation that what appears differs from what is real is, however, not the same as actually having a feeling of unreality, which would serve as a somewhat unpleasant repudiation of the dream experience in its entirety. Squeamishly going through the dream, we would refuse to treat it as any account of what does or might exist. We reject it as such; we do not take it as even a plausible representation, terrifying though it may be.

Persons who are tormented by the feeling of unreality have a panoramic problem. All of life may seem to them unsettling and unreliable. Nevertheless, for some of these people, the experience is a transitory dislocation that passes after a brief shudder. It then borders on what Freud calls the unheimlich, or “uncanny.” In his article with that title, Freud refers to this as “purely an affair of ‘reality-testing’, a question of the material reality of the phenomena.”19 And then there are the familiar psychiatric reports of people who feel they are living in a dream: “I live in a dream, in empty space”; “I feel none of the things of this world”; “I see

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everything through a veil and within a fog”; “I hear people speak as if in a dream”; “I don’t really distinguish between what I’ve lived and what I’ve dreamed.” And so forth.

This condition resembles what Janet treated as “the sentiment of unreality.” He took it as the symptom of a debilitating mental disease. Some of his patients insisted that everything in their life was unreal, and even that the world itself had no true reality. They were not talking as philosophers, Platonic or otherwise; they were not formulating some version of the distinction between appearance and reality. They were instead describing the feelings of unease or even of psychological pain that they experienced throughout daily life. When Janet asked these patients whether they thought the chair they were sitting on was not real, they answered as normal people would. “Of course it is,” they said, “but it doesn’t feel real to me.”

More recently, Oliver Sacks has documented the frightful condition of “The Disembodied Lady” who suffered a loss of her body’s feeling of its own muscular activity. “Something awful’s happened,” she exclaimed. “I can’t feel my body. I feel weird—disembodied.”20 In her case, her feeling of unreality resulted from a neurological affliction coupled with the horror of no longer having the feelings that used to put her in touch with her physical reality.

One might possibly interpret such utterances as, in part or on some occasions, a characteristic form of creativity in relation to the variable feeling of reality that most people have without always being aware of its existence. One can even take the verbal locution of Sacks’s patient or Janet’s as an artful cry for help, a quasi-metaphoric effort that poetically calls attention to the agonizing feeling of homelessness in the world the patient inhabits, and an extremely anxious alienation from it.

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Even so, we must always remember that, whatever its vividness of expression, the feeling of unreality reveals a deficiency in potential creativity of a sort that a healthy feeling of reality makes available to people who enjoy being alive. Those persons engage in purposive behavior, they relish the beauty and goodness they are lucky enough to experience, and, to some degree or other, they fulfill both artistic and nonartistic ideals that matter greatly to them. Creative though the feeling of unreality may be in its limited and perverse way, it defeats that triumphant and life-enhancing aspect of human nature. Here, again, we may find reason to believe that— benign and wondrous as creativity often is—it remains capa- ble of being harmful and perhaps dangerous beyond all expectation.

The Function of Creativity

If only because the feelings of either reality or unreality contain these affective as well as innovative dimensions, they each contribute to a mode of creativity that is irreducible to any others. The feeling that the perceptual world we encounter is real rather than a fantasy of our imagination is unlike the feeling of pain that strikes us when someone pricks our finger. The latter occurrence is a separate and unwelcome reality. We have not created it; what caused that sharp effect is the physical act of being stabbed in this manner. If, however, on another occasion, we simply open our eyes and feel that what we see is really there, and nothing that might be considered an illusion like the nonexistent oasis in the desert, the circumstance is quite different. This much of the overall experience results from a creative device that we ourselves have imposed upon

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the visual appearance. The underlying disparity shows itself in the affective tone of our feeling that we are “at one with reality,” as the phrase goes, and fully alive rather than drifting aimlessly in a vapid and dreamy condition, whether awake or asleep.

This particular type of creativity is so evanescent, albeit pervasive in ordinary life, that it is easily taken for granted, as if it were a routine response like turning off the gas before you leave a kitchen. It does indeed resemble a pervasive habit, but one that we all acquire in our earliest days. At birth, the infant’s mind may be characterized, in James’s famous saying, as a “booming, buzzing confusion” (a phrase he sometimes varied as a “blooming, buzzing confusion”). We have no reason to think that feelings or ideas about reality have a place in that amorphous state, but like creativity of any sort, they develop gradually and possibly very quickly. The feeling of reality that can eventually operate creatively in a person’s life occurs without his or her giving much thought to it on most occasions.

This is not to say that the experience is uniform at every moment. When, out of the corner of your eye, you detect a glimmer of light behind you as you cross the street, you intuit that it results from the headlights of an approaching car. You know that the danger of being hit is real and you react accordingly, but you don’t fully perceive either the lights or the car as the real objects they must be. If you did, you would be attending to them as realities—forcefully present in your experience of them, clearly etched in your mind. You would actively realize what they are.

In much of our conscious life we voyage through the perceptual world taking notice of the objects we encounter but not being fully aware of their reality. Even if we look at them

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directly, they may resemble the glimmering lights in my example. We see the cityscape as building blocks that crowd out the horizon but are hardly distinguished from one another. The shrubbery and other vegetation outdoors mainly serve as markers on our route, or even obstacles to be avoided in our trajectory. The people we pass are frequently indiscernible as individuals though clearly human. We know them to be real, and that alone can be a creative occurrence that we enact, but if, as happens very often, we scarcely fixate on their individual properties, we are not attending to them as the realities that they are. Until that happens, our feeling of reality is hidden or present only imperfectly; in any event, it exists as a circum- scribed version of the creative potentiality in us.

Many years ago I enjoyed watching Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, walk through the Infinite Corridor at MIT reading a book that he held in his left hand while keep- ing himself on course to wherever he was going by means of a finger of his right hand, which guided him along the wall on that side. He was inten tionally obliterating anything in his environment that might com pete with the reality in which he was engrossed. I see that as an iconic image of what I have been describing as often characteristic of us all as we wend our way through the world.

The Augmenting of Felt Reality

My discussion thus far may help elucidate the fact, which I have been examining in much of my writings, that love is creative by its very nature. The beloved becomes extraordi- narily, and sometimes unmatchably, real to the lover because of the attention that has been creatively bestowed upon her or

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him. The sense of that person’s indefeasible reality is a prod- uct of the creativity that is manifested by the bestowal needed for love to occur and develop. The same can be said about the concomitant appraisal, without which there could be no bestowal. To the shrewd and fixated appraiser who intently eyes some commodity (or person being treated like a com- modity), nothing could be more real at the moment. Unless this concerted act of appraisal is transformed into the different type of value creatively bestowed upon a person, thing, or ideal as it is in itself, there will not be love but only a professional interest and perhaps acquisitiveness or greed. At its best, the feeling of reality may also be present and glowing with an all-inclusive ardor that results from joining the alternate attitudes that love creatively unites.

Many philosophers have offered advice about how to move beyond the meager and largely diminished feeling of reality that people experience most frequently. All of Plato’s metaphysics can be read this way. On the assumption that everyday perception is always illusory, as it sometimes is, Plato devises means by which one can transcend the unreality of that world we naively accept as it appears. Through purified reason, more abstract than even mathematics and the reaches of scientific speculation, he discerns the universal properties that comprise the definition of everything in our language that alludes to absolute reality—above all, the good and beautiful as they instill meaning to whatever comes into existence.

At the top of the ladder of his analysis, the Platonic philosopher envisages these principles of goodness and beauty, the highest Forms, as they permeate the existence of all that is and all that is possible in the cosmos. Though Plato calls this intuition purely rational, it is offered as an expressive and

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transcendent disclosure about a realm of being that shows itself more exactly and more explicitly in feelings of reality than in anything else that belongs to the lesser condition of mere appearance.

The idea of God that later theologians in the Judeo- Christian tradition depicted, and that millions of people have believed in, renders the Platonic views about the final intuition into articles of religious faith that make the underlying mythol- ogy more accessible to devotees. In the process, the dogma also declares the importance of affective elements such as creative love and the giving of oneself. In loving God, who is also designated as the embodiment of what is real in the being of everything, the true believer has a feeling of reality that completely exceeds the distorted experiences of ordinary life. I see the search for such a feeling as a momentous, though highly questionable, event in the history of human creativity.

As part of its program, Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century sought to unify the realms of appearance and reality. Earlier thinkers who were pantheists had long since claimed that God and nature are the same, and therefore that the absolute reality of the former is indistinguishable from the developmental reality of the latter. For the Romantics, many of whom were not themselves pantheists, this meant that there must be a way of experiencing nature that includes that greatest and most encompassing feeling of reality. The vehicle toward it was sometimes identified as the aesthetic attitude, not only in the making and appreciating of works of art but also in feeling love for oneself, for other persons, for nature as a whole, and in short for everything that exists. Though Nietzsche is not representative of all romanticism, this view about the culminating feeling of reality reaches a pinnacle in

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his notions about amor fati to which I previously referred: the love of both the good and the evil in the world.

In earlier books I have documented the faults in both the Romantic outlook and the philosophy of Nietzsche. Their alertness to the aesthetic is, however, a saving remnant that redirects our modern mentality away from the stultification inherent in Platonic metaphysics as well as the governing rationalism that evolved out of it and that still remains in current scientistic theory. As a way of seeing the world, the aesthetic pervades the mode of creativity that underlies our feelings about reality. Attending to something or someone as truly real, rather than fictitious or hallucinatory or the product of idle dreaming, is a creative act in itself. It is not instinctive or innately programmed as concomitant to our having an experience. If that were so, all there is in our consciousness would appear to us as equally and most fully real.

That is not the case, though everything is what it is and not another thing, and so even the most elusive sensation has a reality as just the datum that it is. But this does not mean that every sensation induces a feeling of its own reality. Any such response is superimposed by us upon the bare sensation or perception as an artifact of our creativity in experiencing it as real rather than illusory or a figment of our imaginative powers. Though imagination also belongs to the aesthetic, it results from a compartment in it that differs from any other reality.

Types of Feeling of Reality and Unreality

There are three kinds of feeling of reality, and correspondingly three kinds of feeling of unreality. There is an existential, a

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moral, and a valuational aspect of each. The existential is an attentiveness with respect to the instantiated being of any sensory or perceptual aspect of consciousness, and by exten- sion any judgment, belief, theory, or worldview that purports to give descriptive information about the way things are, phenomenologically or otherwise. Most of us have this type of feeling of reality when we consider the everyday world of material objects to be real. It is also the feeling the daydreamer has insofar as he rests content within his rainy Sunday world of seductive fantasy.

The existential feeling of reality can also be illustrated by an extreme type of self-delusion like hallucination. This is often defined as an experience, sensory or perceptual, of some object that seems to be real but is not. One patient reported having what he called “thoughts-out-loud,” which he recog- nized to be voices that were hallucinatory but that affected him as being real. We can denigrate any such response by calling it a cognitive aberration, but the semipoetic character of its depiction nevertheless alerts us to an imaginative ele- ment within this mental state. That may be what makes the condition so invidious to persons who feel its allure.

The moral aspect of the feeling of reality consists in its ability to influence one’s entire affective life—the feelings about right and wrong, about what we should do in some situation, and generally how to live for the sake of attaining adequate happiness and a pattern of meaningfulness that matter to oneself as well as others. Though, in The Principles of Psychology, James provided a lengthy and sophisticated anal- ysis of what he calls the sense of reality, he allowed himself to wander in The Varieties of Religious Experience through a quagmire of dubious reports fed to him by people who claimed

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to have undergone strange but very powerful intuitions in relation to what they considered extranatural “presences.” The force and apparent acceptability of such visitations often had a great effect upon these individuals, sometimes even convincing them that life is worth living after all, in one system of morality or another. James’s manner of investigation into these statements is quizzical and uncertain throughout, but his willingness to treat them seriously reveals at least a modicum of possibly unwarranted sympathy with the beliefs that issued from them.

For me what matters most is the way that the feeling of reality in situations like those can alter the quality and direction of a person’s subsequent existence. The examples show how basic views about value and evaluating may come into play as a result of sensings of this sort. Particularly, and most obviously, if the moral reorientation leads to some religious conversion or lifelong commitment, the valuational result may be earth- shaking to the individual as well as devastating to members of the family or society whose past intimacies or meaningful attachments are now dismissed and radically devalued.

For people whose cosmic awareness has thereby been intensified or even initiated—as the scribe alleges to have happened to Saul of Tarsus (Saint Paul) on the road to Damascus—the momentous impact can include a wholly new configuration of attitudes toward the world as a whole. But instead of concluding that the existential feeling of reality can have this type of moral and valuational consequence only for religious people who respond in this way, I see these creative results as essential to merely having a feeling of reality as it exists creatively in every person. The experience of Paul was an extreme and very dramatic occurrence, comparable to

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being struck by lightning and never being the same again. Yet it is what happens continuously, though unobtrusively and usually without the grandiose spectacle of Paul’s religiosity, when we feel that we are most solidly in touch with what seems to us to be reality. However gradually, our feelings about how one should live in order to have a happy or meaningful life, often sustaining our actual ability to live accordingly, progressively change throughout the moral and social modes of creativity.

Aesthetics of Reality and Unreality

Much of these changes in the tone and quality of our feelings of reality is consciously willed by human beings, at times artificially produced by them. For instance, consider the successive periods in the reception of television images. When they were first introduced several decades ago, audiences were fascinated by the realistic spectacle of live people and real life situations being filmed and recorded with some degree of verisimilitude. Viewers watched the images with a feeling of reality that was unaffected by their grainy appearance and lack of color in the early days. As the technology advanced, all that gave way to sharpened images, resulting from greater definition of the pixels, and colored in approximation of what people take to be normal perception. This effect was, and is still, much preferred because it provides a feeling of reality that most audiences value exorbitantly.

The school of realism in all the graphic media has always held aloft this effect as a source of aesthetic truthfulness. In fact, however, it is often the case that an accentuated feeling of reality is created at the cost of lessening the accuracy and

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authenticity in some representation of a person or circumstance being filmed. Whether in a painting or a television image, the high definition and exquisite precision of the perceptual outcome may in fact deviate from what people ordinarily see. Unless they wear eyeglasses that “correct” their vision to make it as sharp as possible, the world as they see it is usually quite different. Far from being true to the nature of our visual field, the representations thought to be realistic often sacrifice the utter truthfulness of that in order to attain a preferential feeling of reality as more suitable for whatever is being portrayed. This paradoxical trade-off is caused by the unavoidable dependency upon the techniques necessitated by a particular art form as the grounding of its chosen mode of creativity.

To an accomplished artist such dependency is scarcely an impediment. For one who has an adequate talent in his art, the imposed constraints become creative opportunities, much as the poet Richard Wilbur suggested when he said that the genie gets his power from having been in the bottle. Moreover, versatile artists find alternate ways of coping with the paradox I have mentioned. For example, in order to convey through their moving images alone the chaotic and ambiguous state of modern urban life, the New Wave filmmakers of the years just after World War II intentionally made black-and-white movies that were grainy, disjointed, and sometimes unfocused. Instead of increasing our perceptual feeling and awareness of reality, they sought to augment our sociological or even political sense of it. These directors were relying upon gritty cinematic effects as a way of commenting about contemporary life.

As another mode of coping creatively with this situation, poets like Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams overtly attempted to use their verse as a means of what Frost called

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“realization.” They described affective realities and portrayed events in daily existence with a desire to induce in their readers some deepened feeling of reality that pervaded their ex- perience, which the audience would otherwise have treated as commonplace or routine. The imagistic poetry of the early T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as many others in the twentieth century, was designed in a similar fashion. Those who were properly attuned to this form of creative writing would not perceive something new but instead they would savor the newness in whatever might now present itself forcefully to their imagination.

In the pictorial arts, that kind of endeavor goes back to the time of Giotto and even the Roman portrait painters of the first century AD. In neorealistic films like The Bicycle Thief we do not see reality itself (assuming for the moment that we know what that is), but rather we are shown images of realities in a way that enables us to recognize them while captivating our interest and involvement through familiar, even clichéd, feelings about their reality.

In the thinking of creators like Schopenhauer and Walt Whitman, who were quite different in other respects, this project of realization overlapped with other philosophical ideas they had. Whitman believed that his poetry could vividly bring to view the normally ignored sensing of commonplace things and events in our joint experience. This quest for augmented social and communal realization was itself inherent in Schopenhauer’s belief that all of us, and everything else, constitute “the Will,” which he calls metaphysical Being in itself. In this view, the compassionate response that Schopenhauer considered basic in the formation of any ethical system results from the implied intuition that all existing

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creatures are realities that we must creatively identify with our own reality.

While this doctrine is not the same as religious pantheism, it nevertheless originates from Eastern as well as Western conceptions of divinity as not only the underlying reality of everything but also the supreme realization, the most creative and wholly real manifestation, of the reality that everything has merely in being what it is. I think this is what propels the Nietzschean notion of cosmic love, the love of everything that exists. All things and persons and events in the universe would then be accepted as the realized reality that invariably belongs to them and that occurs in the empirical world under the rubric of appearance.

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