How Real Is Real? by Paul Watzlawick

Author:Paul Watzlawick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1976-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

14

The Two Realities

Having arrived at the end of Part II, it seems useful to put some order into the kaleidoscopic diversity of the preceding examples and to show that they have an important common denominator.

The reader will have noticed that I have been unable to avoid the use of terms like “really,” “actually,” “in actual fact,” and thus have apparently contradicted the main thesis of the book: that there is no absolute reality but only subjective and often contradictory conceptions of reality.

Very frequently, especially in psychiatry where the degree of an individual’s “reality adaptation” plays a special role as the indicator of his normalcy, there is a confusion between two very different aspects of what we call reality. The first has to do with the purely physical, objectively discernible properties of things and is intimately linked with correct sensory perception, with questions of so-called common sense or with objective, repeatable, scientific verification. The second aspect is the attribution of meaning and value to these things and is based on communication.

For example, before the advent of space travel there was heated disagreement among astronomers as to whether the surface of the moon was solid enough to support the weight of a space probe or whether it was covered by a thick layer of dust that would completely swallow the craft. We now know that the first hypothesis is really the case and that some scientists were therefore objectively right and others wrong. Or, to use a much simpler example, the question of whether a whale is a fish or a mammal can be answered objectively, as long as there is agreement on the definitions of “fish” and “mammal.” Let us, therefore, use the term first-order reality whenever we mean those aspects which are accessible to perceptual consensus and especially to experimental, repeatable and verifiable proof (or refutation).

This domain of reality, however, says nothing about the meaning and value of its contents. A small child may perceive a red traffic light just as clearly as an adult, but may not know that it means “do not cross the street now.” The first-order reality of gold—that is, its physical properties—is known and can be verified at any time. But the role that gold has played since the dawn of human history, especially the fact that its value is determined twice daily by five men in a small office in the City of London and that this ascription of value profoundly influences many other aspects of our everyday reality, has very little, if anything, to do with the physical properties of gold. But it is this second reality of gold which may turn us into millionaires or lead us into bankruptcy.

The interpersonal conflicts mentioned in preceding chapters, those caused by the discrepancy of cultural roles and norms, show the difference between the two orders of reality even more sharply. Quite obviously, there is no such thing as an objectively “correct” distance between two people, and depending

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