A bit more reality

I rode my bike to school for the first time this week. It was beautiful: good for the soul.

Mornings in Singapore are a gentle space. The air feels fresher and the hint of the heat to come gives morning a note of preciousness – like the last mouthful of a favourite cake.

My bike glides along with the rubber whispering to the asphalt and the pedals turning quiet circles. There’s no traffic in the park and no need to watch too hard for others on the path. My mind can drift with the rhythm of the ride.

Somewhere I read that this state can be described as “flow”. Reflecting more on my last post, I think I’d describe it as the space outside of language. It’s a place where one simply is and there is something inherently paradoxical about trying to write about it.

Who am I when I can’t use language to describe who I am?

Wittgenstein made the assertion that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." I think he meant something a little more specific than the state about which I am writing, but his writing about language reminds us again and again that language is profoundly paradoxical and the richest of mysteries. I love to arrive at work and explore this richness with my students but I also relish the space I have found for quietness as my bicycle glides through the park.

What’s so good about reality?

There’s nothing “real” about language. You can’t eat it or wear it; you can’t pick it up and use it to keep off the rain.  There are no stories to be found out there in the “real” world. You can’t hunt poems in the forest or look at essays in the zoo.

Beyond the vibration of vocal chords, language, the most human of humanity's capacities, has no “reality” to it at all. Animals exist in the real world; humans, to the extent that we are more than animals, live in a reasoned world of language where the building blocks are metaphors and the mortar is narrative. Beauty, values and moral judgements are all human abstractions based in the real world but not to be found there. In an existential moment, Shakespeare made this same point: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I make these observations because I have been thinking about the issues raised by a number of my colleagues as they address the popular perception of a dichotomy between the “real” world and the digital world. So the argument goes: too much time on computers is taking people away from what is real. Computers, the latest manifestation of an evolving information technology which we might trace back through TV to telephone, novel through newspaper and all the way back to fire-side stories and cave paintings, are placed in opposition to a real world of face-to-face interactions.

My argument is that there is nothing inherently more real about a face-to-face chat than there is about a twitter feed. Both exist in the abstracted world of language where meaning must be negotiated and reason evolved. What these two communication forms share is inherently more significant than what separates them.

I value conversations - in whatever form – for their capacity to expand my humanity and to build a just and reasoned world. There is plenty on Twitter that is inane and pointless but I have had my share of face-to-face conversations of this kind, too. What is important is not the form of the conversation but its content.

It's important to add that I value reality. Some of the most precious moments of my life have been whilst sitting quietly on a mountain or in a semi-meditative state sailing in rough weather. But I also value my humanity and, for me, being truly human is bound to my sense of myself in language as I make meaning from the world and build a reasoned response to the complexities of my cultural environment.

As Jürgen Habermas’ theory of “Communicative Action” suggests, becoming a reasonable person happens in all kinds of ways in all kinds of interactions; digital interactions like this one that I am having with you being no more or less valid than any other.