Project Vision 21

During my years as a university philosophy professor, I would often ask my students to complete the following exercise: think of a psychological dream they had had, describe that dream in writing, read the text aloud, and, finally, share the dream dialogically with another person. Before long, they discovered that they had created four different realities.

With a little reflection, the students could clearly see that the images of their dreams, as they existed within their minds, were not adequately reflected in the text they themselves had written. At the same time, the text changed when it was read aloud, and later the narrative also differed—sometimes considerably—from the dream, the written text, and the reading.

In some cases, the students were astonished that there could be so many seemingly insurmountable discrepancies among thinking, writing, reading, and narrating. Some of the more perceptive students then began to suspect—quite rightly—that thinking, writing, reading, and narrating do not necessarily bring us closer to reality.

As Kant might put it, the “thing in itself” remains beyond our reach because the conditions that make the objects of experience possible are the same conditions that make our experience of those objects possible. In other words, we do not experience reality itself, but rather what we are capable of perceiving of reality.

And we can go one step further. Some of the students who truly took the time to reflect on these questions discovered that, in writing, reading, and narrating, we were in fact playing with language, without that necessarily meaning that, through language, we were describing anything about “real reality” or moving any closer to it.

Here we have to turn to Wittgenstein and his preoccupation with the difficulties of language. His famous “beetle in the box” thought experiment, presented in his 1953 Philosophical Investigations, questions the idea of a private language and the way we understand inner experiences such as pain—or, in the case of the exercise described above, our own dreams.

Ultimately, whether we like it or not, reality remains beyond our reach. It escapes us; it evaporates. Even as it reveals itself, it conceals more than it reveals. But now, in our hypertechnologized and hyperconnected age, we face yet another level of separation from reality: the omnipresent screens.

The walls covered with shadows in Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave have now become screens filled with memes that, like the prisoners in the cave, have chained us to seeing the “reality” presented to us as though it were the whole of reality. The reduction of reality has become so extreme that we no longer dream, write, read, or narrate.

“We are servants or vassals: techno-vassals, techno-servants,” warned Spanish philosopher Javier Echeverría during a recent conference in Montevideo, emphasizing that our idea of reality “no longer corresponds” to reality itself. “I call this ‘mental techno-colonialism,’” he explained.

The reality that was once unreachable has now become invisible.