What Is Real?
The question sounds like an abstraction. It is not. It is the most immediate question you can ask, because every decision you make rests on assumptions about what is actually there. If those assumptions are wrong, the decisions built on them are built on air. What you call real shapes everything else you think and do.
The thinkers here came to this question from directions that seem, at first, to have nothing to do with each other. Heraclitus watched a river and concluded that nothing stays the same. Camus watched human life and concluded that it refuses to stay meaningful. Nagarjuna argued that nothing possesses the kind of independent existence we assume it has. What they share is not an answer. It is the seriousness with which they took the question.
These essays do not arrive at a settled picture of reality. They are attempts to see more clearly what asking this question actually involves, and why it will not stop presenting itself.
The Absurd and the River
Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. Camus said the world refuses to give back what we reach for. Two thinkers, two millennia apart, naming the same thing.
What Sartre Saw in the Cafe
Sartre watched a waiter playing the role of waiter and saw it as a philosophical problem. The question of what is real begins with the question of whether you are being real yourself.
The Map That Ate the Territory
Alan Watts spent much of his life pointing at the difference between the finger and the moon. The concepts we use to describe reality are not the reality they describe. This is harder to remember than it sounds.
Camus and Nagarjuna on What Happens When Nothing Holds Still
Camus called the confrontation between human longing and the world's silence the absurd, and refused to resolve it. Nagarjuna argued that nothing possesses inherent, stable existence, not the world, not the self, not even the concept of emptiness itself. Both refused the consolation of false resolution. The essays here explore what remains when that consolation is removed.
Sartre and Watts on Whether There Is a Self to Be Authentic To
Sartre insisted on the terrible freedom of having no fixed nature, that existence precedes essence, and that bad faith is the refusal to face this. Watts argued that the self whose authenticity Sartre demanded was itself a kind of fiction, a construction rather than a foundation. The disagreement is not only philosophical. It changes how you live.
Inquiry Log is a space for sustained inquiry into questions that do not resolve quickly, including this one.
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