Part 2: Ontological Problems in Augmented Reality
1. Reality and reason
Reality is appearance augmented by reason. This gnomic thesis talks about a dif-ferent augmentation of reality than we have it in virtual reality. Nevertheless, there is an important similarity or even an identical feature. In virtual reality, too, the augmentation consists in adding possibilities. This is the reason why a reflection on Hegel’s insight that reality is a modal notion can be illuminating in our context of reflection.
One of the most notorious oracles of philosophy is Hegel’s statement that the real is reasonable and the reasonable real. Hegel himself complains in the foreword of his Philosophy of Right that an author, who has written two books on the topic, could hope that the learned public would be in a position to inter-pret a gnomic formula like this in its intended meaning. This precludes arbitrary connotations, which a naïve reader might have when he first meets a formula like “reality and reason are the same”. Unfortunately, a whole tradition of inter-pretations read the corresponding sentences in Hegel’s oeuvre in a mystical way and identify Hegel’s philosophy with a kind of spiritualism (‘Geistphilosophie’). It is, however, not too easy to show that these readings are wrong – and even ob-viously so, if one has undertaken the labour to really read Hegel’s texts and not
DOI 10.1515/9783110497656-005
© 2017 Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, published by De Gruyter.
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just to muse about some of his Heraclitean aphorisms, which turn his work into a kind of Wagnerian drama with few lights in a complex and therefore seemingly dark texture.
However, I am not concerned here with an interpretation of Hegel’s work as a whole, not even of particular parts, rather with a systematic background that lies at the bottom of its problems. This background concerns the notion of reality (‘Wirklichkeit’) in its contrast to actuality (‘empirische Realität’). Hegel’s ap-proach reconstructs the contrast in the context of a radical project. It is the proj-ect of reframing the distinctions between empirical and conceptual (time-gener-al, generic) propositions. Empirical propositions are (the contents of) statements about present or historical states of affairs a posteriori. They rest on qualitative differentiations, checked on the ground of sensation and perception, and say that something is a fact, for example that it is raining here and now – whereas yesterday in Berlin the weather was fine. Obviously, empirical statements pre-suppose a time and space of a speaker or at least a determination of a time and place from our perspective as in the case of naming the dates (‘anno dom-ini’). We also often need a determination of the spatial domain where an event has taken place or still is taking place – according to the corresponding ascer-tainment. In short, empirical statements are heavily indexical, historical. Their truth is always evaluated ex post, namely by us here and now. The qualitative distinctions that define the fulfilment- or truth- conditions refer in some way to actual situations.
We always actually make some differences. Even animals do this; but hu-mans always already invest some generic knowledge in the form of conceptual commentaries or ‘eidetic’ sentences that tell us ‘in general’ something about the type or genus of what we refer to and how we distinguish it from other things. This means, in turn, that a person’s actual perceptions always already stand in some definite relation to indefinitely many other possible perceptions as different ways of access to the very same object from other perspectives, for example yours at other times or theirs in the future. If I say, for example, that there is milk in the fridge, we presuppose to know what milk is. We also assume that milk as such is not poisonous. Such knowledge tells us something about the genus or species of the thing about which we empirically talk. Generic truths about milk as such or ‘in itself’ already ‘transcend’ in quite some important sense the presence of its empirical appearance in some way or other.
Hegel’s basic observation now is this. The traditional notion of empirical knowledge in its contrast to eternal truth is conceptual blunder. This is so be-cause there are no eternal substances like atomic matter at all – not to speak of souls, angels and gods. Everything in the world is finite. It has a beginning and an end, just as any living being has. This holds also good for any bodily
thing and, of course, for any limited process and event. It holds for atoms just as for subatomic particles. It holds for suns and stars just as for individual persons and animals, even species and families of living creatures. The only time-general things and truths are generic, pure, and abstract. Such things are forms. Pure knowledge is knowledge about forms. Such knowledge is conceptually presup-posed a priori in a relative sense when the corresponding concepts or words are applied to some or many empirical cases. The generic status of the sentences provides the reason why mathematics is so important for philosophy. We find here the paradigm case of pure knowledge as knowledge about ideal objects or forms that are applied in empirical knowledge. Philosophy is also (only) con-cerned with knowledge about forms, but not just with the ideal forms of math-ematics. Philosophy reflects on the real forms of knowledge about the world and about ourselves.
Our question concerning the difference between empirical actuality and ob-jective reality now runs already at its start into some formidable terminological problems. This is so because the Latin and English translations of Greek differ-entiations produce internal inconsistencies. One of it had already appeared above, where I ‘translated’ the word “actuality” by the German-Latin word “Re-alität” and the German word “Wirklichkeit” by the English-Latin expression
“(real) reality”. The problem here is this: “actuality” is thought to correspond to Greek “energeia”. Therefore, its correct translation into German is “Wirklich-keit”. For the German word expresses the actualizing work of some dynamic power, force, ‘dunamis’, which produces some phenomena (Erscheinungen).
From the appearances we ‘infer’ their underlying ‘causes’, the real reality behind the merely actual appearances. The problem is that the word “actuality” refers much more to the empirical appearances here and now than to the mode of being of lasting objects. These objects are addressed as the causes of their ap-pearances. As such, they are said to have forces and dispositions that can produce stimuli with certain responses. And they are already classified, sortal objects. The domain of the objects is a genus, species or type. Corresponding ge-neric dispositions, faculties, possibilities belong to what Aristotle had called en-ergeia and what still is understood in the German terms wirklich and Wirklichkeit – such that I will translate the latter by real reality in a kind of contextual termi-nology, proposed for our purpose. In fact, at least the everyday understanding of the word “actuality” refers to present appearances and not to its underlying ‘real’
or ‘objective’ reality. Precisely this fact leads to some confusions as they already have appeared above. The English word “actuality” has changed its logical place from the realm of causes and forces that explain or produce actual appearances to the empirical domain of appearances. But the appearances are a mere ‘sign’
for the real objects that produce them, or rather, we must infer an underlying re-Scientific Truth as Augmented Reality 85
ality from the appearances in the mode of abduction, by a principle of best ex-planation, which was made explicit and famous by Charles Sanders Peirce. This mode of abductive inference is the very reason for the conceptually necessary
‘fallibility’ of objective statements about real reality.
This shows already in which sense real reality is already in itself augmented reality. In the following, we shall explore some of the features of the ‘augmenta-tion’ of actuality by reason that turns it into ‘real reality’. And we shall see in which sense Hegel’s insight is not at all a spooky and extravagant ‘theory’
about the real world – another word for real reality – as the object of thinking and not just of perceiving. For what we perceive are actual appearances, not their real, objective, causes.
Actuality is Hegel’s “Realität” – in the sense of Kant’s “realitas phaenome-non”. As such, it belongs to the domain of qualitative distinctions, which we make partly individually, partly together in present situations. We invest, of course, subjectively and jointly accessible appearances, for example on the ground of deictical observations and collectively learned qualitative distinctions, which can be as primitive as that between ‘it’s raining’, ‘it’s snowing’ and ‘the sun shines’ – taken as a holophrastic expressions for fine weather. In fact, no-body really thinks already of the sun as a star that produces heat when he says that the sun shines in contrast to stormy or foggy weather. And if a child says “mama”, “papa” or, later, “uncle”, she often does not yet make distinctions between her real father or uncle and what looks as a father or uncle. In the case of “mama”, the toddler perhaps does not do more than distinguish practically between situations in which mama is there and cases when she misses her.
Even though the toddler certainly already can distinguish between her real moth-er and mothmoth-er-substitutes, she does not yet use the word “mama” as ‘naming an object with properties’. We do this only later after we have learnt the differences between grammatical roles, for example the special function of the word
“mama” in a context like “mama is the best mother of the world”. Here,
“mama” has turned into a (local, relativized) ‘proper name’ – as we can see by the identification with the (local, relativized) definite description “the best mother” (from the point of view of the speaker).