Virtuous Reality
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What is the nature of reality?
Is it physical, experiential, illusionary, subjective, objective, relative, intentional, functional, dualistic, simple, or infinitely complex?
Also, what is the reason for it, and why does anything at all exist?
Some things have reasons for existing and some do not. Some things simply are. Question it all you like, but it won’t change. Most things are subject to cause and effect. they result from other things. Reality isn’t like that. Reality isn’t subject to reason. One can ask why a flag is red and know that there is a reason, but one cannot ask why a flag is a flag. A flag is a flag. There’s no why, beyond the fact that a flag isn’t a banana or anything else other than a flag. Reality is reality… because reality isn’t not reality.
One must understand this much about reality to understand its nature, in a significant sense, there is nothing to understand. Reality is fundamentally not subject to reason. There’s no reason for reality and it just is. Some things are that way.
The same cannot be said for most things. Things, may be real, but they are not reality itself. There are reasons most things happen, and reasons things are the way they are. Most things can potentially be figured out, but one must remember that the backdrop for things is reality, which cannot be figured out.
Reality is one boundary of reason, where the downward extension of why bottoms out at “just because”. Perhaps paradox is the stop sign at this boundary of reason, but reason remains unbounded in another dimension. The upward extension of why is “why not”, and this dimension seems to have no bounds, or rather a temporal state boundary which can expand and contract with no potential known limit. There is also a lateral dimension along which reason may continue to expand and contract perpetually.
So it stands to whatever reason we have that it is not reality which is physical, experiential, illusionary, subjective, objective, relative, intentional, functional, dualistic, simple, infinitely complex, or what have you, but the things which exist within reality. Real things have these qualities. Real things can have meaning and purpose, and virtue, and real things can loose these qualities. Real things like you and I.
Reality just is. Some pursuits are pointless. Maybe some questions are stupid, I don’t know. I am glad that I have the capacity to ask any question I can form, although I know that I often waste energy which would be better spent pursuing more practical goals than scraping the bottom of the reality barrel for purpose, satisfaction, and meaning which are not down there, but all around us.
