Thought and Reality

Abstract

Trying to understand how thinking works cannot be separated from trying to understand how reality works. A recent approach to understanding how reality actually “takes place” postulates two complementary aspects. There is a “factual aspect of reality” which is characterized by well-defined predications, causal closure, and local spacetime. But there is a complementary, “statu-nascendi” aspect of reality which addresses how facts, and with them local spacetime, come into being in the first place. This aspect of reality is inherently constellatory, i.e. the constellations of components are the most basic phenomena - somewhat similar to Gestalt phenomena in the visual domain. Human thinking is interpreted as a highly advanced cognitive adaptation to this irreducible Janus-headedness of reality. In parts it can be well defined, in parts it just cannot - because it must leave room for the on-going self-unfolding of meaning. This self-unfolding of meaning is interpreted as the most accurate semantic approximation to the ongoing self-unfolding of reality. It is, thus, not a bug but a crucial feature of complex thinking. Unlike formal languages, which structurally correspond to the factual aspect of reality, natural language is capable of dealing with both aspects of reality: its facticity and its coming into being.