Everyday Philosophy: Are rainbows, farts, and emotions “real”?

There are two ways I could approach Lizz’s question. At first, I thought she wanted me to explain the nature of reality to a six-year-old. Not quite an “explain it like I’m five” approach, but also not that much different. Big Think is an intelligent publication for curious and mature individuals. Heck, we even have a product called Explain It Like I’m Smart, deliberately intended to push back against the incessant dumbing down of online content. So, I’m sorry, Lizz, today I’m going to explain it like you’re smart and leave the talking to your daughter in your hands.

After all, this isn’t an especially easy topic. It gets to the heart of an entire area of philosophy — one of the oldest, in fact: metaphysics. Metaphysics is a broad category. On the one hand, it’s about God and religion. Poltergeists, jinn, and the Ghost of Christmas Past all count as metaphysical entities. But, for our purposes today, metaphysics is also about the substance that may or may not underpin perception. It’s about what lies behind the veil of sensation and what makes something “real” or not.

To answer the question more fully, I reached out to the philosopher Graham Harman at the Southern California Institute of Architecture for his thoughts. Harman is somewhat of a philosophical bigwig when it comes to “realness,” and so I hope his ideas give Lizz something fun to pass on to her daughter.

What realness isn’t

I suspect that if you asked most people “What is real?” their first answer would be based on some variation of materialism. They would say it occupies space (as Descartes thought) or is made up of physical particles. We could say that a rainbow is defined by light refraction. An emotion is neurochemicals interacting in the brain at a certain time in response to a stimulus. But Harman thinks this definition is too narrow.

“There are some problems with materialism, and one of the obvious ones is mathematical objects,” he tells Big Think. “Because in some sense they’re real, and real even before the dawn of the human species. [We can] list a few exceptions that are not material, but that are still real. Some people believe in God. That’s a non-material, real thing. Fictional characters, as well. If I say ‘Hamlet,’ then everyone knows what I’m talking about, and everyone who’s read the play has some notion of what that character signifies.”

Another common way to define real is by its impact. Something is real if it affects other things or other people. God changes the lives of believers. Mathematical objects change calculations, predictions, and models. Hamlet changes how some people view the world. A rainbow causes us to smile. A fart causes us to recoil. Here, too, we have a problem.

“I think there can also be real things that don’t affect anything else right now but that might be activated by certain circumstances. So, this is about potentials. I remember during the [Balkan Wars], before the stuff got really bad, I saw a little news magazine profile of Ratko Mladić, and it called him a ‘potential war criminal’ due to his reputation for ferocity. But the war was still very early, and he hadn’t had a chance to do any of that stuff yet. And of course, later he became an actual war criminal. And so, I would say the war criminal in Mladić was there. It was just not yet activated by the opportunity presented to him by that war.”

This is where we might depart from Harman’s own position. Not everyone will agree with the idea that all potentials of an object are “real” right now. You could one day be a murderer. Is the murderer in you “real”? A raindrop might one day meet light in a certain position to create a rainbow, but does that mean the rainbow is real within the raindrops?

Irreducible Reality

There are no easy answers to all this (but if you like trying, perhaps you should consider studying philosophy at university). And it’s also at risk of losing our curious six-year-old staring at rainbows. I doubt Lizz will be sitting her daughter down to talk about the nuances of potentiality.

So, what is real? Harman defined real as “something that is not reducible to its parts. A real object would be something like water, which combines hydrogen and oxygen but adds properties that neither of those has. We call this emergence.”

For Harman, something is real if all the parts of that object work together to create something new or “emergent” that cannot be accounted for in the individual parts. A rainbow is a good example, as well. A rainbow is real because it is the emergent phenomenon of water, light, and the human eye. The human eye is not a rainbow. Water is not a rainbow. But when you put all the ingredients together, you get something real.

Harman’s definition is not about knowledge — it’s not about what we know is real or not. It’s also not a linguistic claim. It’s a metaphysical one. Rainbows might depend on the human eye, for example, to know that they’re there, but, as Harman said, “the rainbow is still not totally dependent on the mind because I can’t just say anything about it that I want. There are accurate and inaccurate descriptions of a rainbow.” In other words, there is a true or false way to describe a rainbow.