The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing Like the Truth
Earlier today, your Director was leafing through a copy of The Western Canon by Harold Bloom. As you do. Bloom was opining about Shakepeare’s uncanny ability to present consistent and different actual-seeming voices of imaginary beings. Bloom puts this ability down, in part, to Shakespeare having the most abundant sense of reality ever to invade literature. Now, it is not for your humble Director to quibble over such claims, even if he wanted to (which he doesn’t), but ever on the lookout for a topic for our weekly get-togethers, I did think that the business of ‘reality’ might be a good one. And of course as you will know, your Director likes, at all times to keep it real…
I imagine that the question, “What is reality?” is not one that preoccupies many people (present company excepted of course). Most of the time, we’re often far too busy dealing with it or avoiding it. And the question usually only surfaces when something unsettles the ordinary flow of things. Trying to answer it in those instances can often depend on who we are in that moment. The physicist for example, will mutter about quarks and leptons, or, as happened to me once, aboard a Clapham Omnibus, the Higgs boson. The philosopher will speak of “noumena” and then look pained when you ask them to explain what that means. Teenagers, when asked to tidy their rooms, will reply with a sigh that it doesn’t really matter. In one sense they’re right, in another they’re terribly wrong, and in yet another, they’re just hoping you’ll go away. We might all assume we know what’s real, but the moment any of us start to pull at the threads of what reality is, the whole fabric of the question unravels.
Maybe reality isn’t what it seems.
Ever one to shake things up, our old friend, philosopher Jean Baudrillard, went so far as to claim that reality isn’t reality; arguing that we don’t live in a real world anymore, but a hyperreal world. In our world, signs, images, and symbols don’t point to the real thing; they become the thing, and in doing so push the “real” out of the picture entirely. Think of an advert for a holiday: you don’t just see a beach, you see the idea of relaxation, of luxury, of the life you ought to be living. The photograph of the beach shapes your desire more powerfully than the actual sand and sea ever could. In this way, the sign no longer represents reality, it actually creates it. The trainers on your feet are not trainers; they are Nike or Adidas; status, style, belonging. The brand-image replaces the leather and laces. The mug in your hand similarly is not just any old mug but a lifestyle choice, or a signifier of taste.
In this way every representation of a may point, not to the thing itself, but instead to something which may never have existed in the first place. Disneyland, Baudrillard’s favourite example, is not just a theme park but a polished fantasy that shapes our expectations of childhood, leisure, or even the look of our cities and homes. Sleeping Beauty’s castle captures this well: a representation of a representation of something that never existed; a fairytale inception in a hyperreal hall of mirrors. It is the logic dramatised in The Matrix, when Morpheus offers Neo the red pill or the blue: do you want to see reality as it really is, or keep living inside the simulation? Baudrillard’s unsettling suggestion, of course, is that we’ve already swallowed the blue pill and built our lives quite happily inside the fantasy.
Closer to home, social media offers another familiar illustration. People, it seems, do not simply photograph meals or holidays; they post them to signal lifestyle, status, or identity. This “reality” presented is carefully curated, often more performative than the lived experience itself. Friends “liking” a photograph of a sunset may respond not to the actual scene but to the constructed symbol of a serene, fulfilled and happy life. Netflix shows and TikTok trends construct experiences that feel real while being entirely mediated. Hyperreality, in this sense, is not a subtle trick, it is the medium through which people increasingly live. Reality and representation collapse; the distinction between what is and what is represented becomes hazy, sometimes irrelevant or nonexistent.
Baudrillard in the 1980s believed that hyperreality would become the dominant way of experiencing and understanding the world. I wonder if he has been proved right.
We encounter such phenomena even in the hallowed classrooms of Tiffin. Nowhere more so, I suspect, than in the literature lesson. I’m thinking of the student who has never read a novel but can recite SparkNotes as if the plot were their own memory. A kind of literary hyperreality which entirely misses the point. The summary now replaces the experience of the book. Or the student who uses Chat GPT to do their creative writing with no sense of the irony lacing such an endeavour. The cave-dwellers of Plato might have appreciated the comfort of such shadows. I suppose they knew no different. And they certainly did not want to know any differently when one of their erstwhile enslaved chums returned to tell them that the images they took to be real were in fact only projected shadows. Plato’s point may have been that we prefer our illusions, we prefer not to know them as illusions, and when we find out that they are we still prefer them.
Thus the struggle with reality is not a new one. Plato’s prisoners in the cave mistake shadows for the real thing; liberation is painful, and they resist it. Shakespeare’s plays teem with the difficulties we have with appearances and realities. Hamlet for example, struggles to express authenticity in a world which runs on deception. His famous, Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems’ expresses his belief that he is beyond such things pretending to be what he is not, but then, within minutes he is putting on his famous antic disposition, running around pretending along with everyone else. To be or not to be…might be the question but it all depends what you mean by ‘be’. In King Lear, the tragedy unfolds because Lear cannot distinguish between flattery and truth until it is too late. Lear must descend into madness before he can act rationally and his pal Gloucester must be blind before he can see what’s real. Painful stuff indeed.
In the modern age, this tension between the real and the simulated has become a central theme in our culture. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick was a master of this, constantly exploring the blurred lines between reality and artifice in works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for Blade Runner). His stories make us question what is genuine and what makes something truly human when the synthetic can mimic the real so perfectly.
So yes, hyperreality has its comforts. It is easier to scroll TikTok for “study hacks” than to do the actual studying. It is easier to curate an online persona than to wrestle with the untidiness of actual life. But there is a cost. The more we live in hyperreality, the less resilience we have when reality itself intrudes.
Angela Carter captures this in her usual style in The Lady of the House of Love. Her tragic vampire heroine, caught between archetype and desire, hesitates on the brink of transformation and asks: Who could bear the pain of becoming human? It’s the red-pill dilemma again: reality, when it breaks through the simulation, is rarely comfortable. To leave behind fantasy is not just to gain knowledge; it is to risk suffering, loss, the ache of flesh and mortality. To be human is to suffer reality in its rawness. T.S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, had already sighed: Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
So, reality hurts sometimes. The filtered selfie never ages, never disappoints; the real face wakes up with a spot on the end of its nose the morning of the school photo/interview/first date etc. The essay summary gives you the gist; the book itself asks hours of concentration, and the possibility that you might be confused or what’s infinitely worse these days, bored. Reality demands more from us than we are often inclined to give.
But perhaps Carter and Eliot remind us of something else: that the pain of reality is also what makes it matter. A friendship on screen can be curated, tidied, maybe ended with a click. A friendship in the flesh is messier, sometimes bruising, but also infinitely more rewarding.
At this point we must give a nod to the scientists over there waving their test tubes telling us that they know what real is because they have worked out how to measure all sorts of things about it. Science does, as we have discussed, insist that reality is what can be measured. And to a degree, it is right. Drop that mug of tea and it will fall whether you believe in gravity or not. Science is our most reliable and wonderful tool for explaining the “what” of reality: how things work, how they interact, how to put people on the moon or a mobile phone in every pocket. Bravo for science.
But there is a kind of hubris when science is invoked as if it can answer every question about reality. Physics can tell us what frequencies combine to make a Bach cantata, but not why it makes us weep. Neuroscience can trace which regions of the brain light up when you fall in love, but not why your heart skips when you glimpse a particular person across the room. Chemistry can tell us what the champagne is made of, but not why it is the drink of celebration. I once asked a group of Year 12s whether science could explain Shakespeare, one replied confidently: “Yes sir, because Shakespeare was made of atoms.” True, but not helpful. Reductionism risks missing the point. We are not reducible to our parts. Reality is not exhausted by its measurements, as we have discussed.
Borges toys with this theme in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, where an imaginary encyclopaedia conjures an entirely fictitious world so persuasive that it begins to displace our own. Cervantes gives us Don Quixote, tilting at windmills he believes are giants: one man’s delusion can be another man’s reality. And Literature keeps circling back to this because human beings keep circling back to it. What we see, what we believe, what we call ‘real’ is never straightforward.
This is where Iain McGilchrist offers a fresh and important insight. Reality is not best understood as a collection of isolated objects but as patterns of relationship. A note is only a vibration until it is joined with others in harmony. A human being is not merely cells, organs, or synapses, but a presence constituted in relation to others. Maybe Morpheus had it wrong. Perhaps there isn’t a “real world” behind the simulation waiting to be uncovered; perhaps reality is not a hidden machine to be exposed, but the living, relational fabric we are already part of. If so, there is no red pill or blue pill, only the choice of how deeply we are willing to attend to the world and to one another.
In schools, this is obvious. A student may appear on paper as a set of grades and predicted scores, but anyone who teaches knows that reality is far richer: the nervous silence before answering or the well timed quip that punctures the pomposity of the disguise of the all-knowing teacher. Reality emerges in these relationships, not in the abstract data points. Data as we know, is only meaningful when it is interpreted, not when it is collected and collated. And this is also why reality cannot be neatly pinned down. It shifts, not because it is illusory, but because it is alive.
One of the refrains I hear from students is, “This isn’t real life, sir.” Usually it comes during exam season. “Real life,” apparently, begins after school, though I note that many of the adults in your Director’s ever-decreasing circles frequently complain that “real life” begins only after work, after the mortgage, after the children have left home. “Real life,” it seems, is always elsewhere.
But perhaps the truth is the opposite: there is no “elsewhere.” Reality is precisely what is happening now, however unsatisfactory, stressful, or boring it might appear. Waiting in the dentist’s chair is reality. So is walking through the park opposite the Director’s apartment at sunset, and the awkward silence after I’ve said something foolish. We do ourselves no favours when we imagine reality is perpetually deferred. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of invigilating a three-hour exam, you’ll know how long reality can last. But the flip side is that those hours matter, however we may wish them away. To live only in anticipation of the “real” is to miss the reality already under our noses.
Reality, then, like all the best things, is paradoxical. It resists us in the painful fall or the awkward truth, but it also exceeds us. We cannot hold it in the palm of our hand or reduce it to a formula. It is both what hurts us and what makes life worth living.
In their collective wisdoms, Baudrillard warns us against the comfort of simulations; Carter reminds us that reality wounds; Eliot tells us we cannot bear it; Borges teases us with worlds that never were and McGilchrist invites us to attend to its relational patterns. But perhaps the most important thing is not to define reality but to live attentively within it: to notice when we are drifting into hyperreal shadows, to savour the moments when something breaks through with startling clarity, to accept that being human means bearing a reality that can bruise but also bless.
So, what is reality? If you think you can answer, I suspect you’ve missed it. Reality is not a puzzle to be solved but a condition to be borne, painfully, joyfully, attentively. Better to live it, even awkwardly, than to spend our days polishing simulations.
Until next week, Happy Reading/ Keeping it Real
Fun problems to solve #7a
The Unexpected Exam Paradox
The teacher tells the class: “There will be a surprise test next week. You won’t know the day until it happens.”
The students reason: “It can’t be Friday, because by Thursday we’d know and it wouldn’t be a surprise. It can’t be Thursday, because then Friday would be ruled out, it can’t be Wednesday because… and so on…” until they conclude the test can never be set.
Yet on Wednesday the teacher walks in and delivers the test and they are all surprised.
Where did reality slip through their reasoning?