Around two and half millennia ago, something remarkable happened in the history of thought. In various parts of the world, a number of individuals started to ask a fundamental question: what is real?
For hundreds of thousands of years, humans had been too busy surviving to bother with such questions. For them it was clear what was ‘real’: food, shelter, reproduction, the basic necessities of life. Religion (see here and here ) had been around for a long time, but by and large the world of gods and spirits was inseparable from people’s everyday lives. The two realms intersected and interacted.
In India from around 800 BCE there emerged the Hindu concept of samsara , or reincarnation – the idea that all creatures follow a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Relief from the endless wheel of suffering in the material world was possible only for those individuals who had freed themselves from desire for earthly things, enabling them to achieve union with the divine. Samsara contrasts with the views of the monotheistic religions, in which each individual is born only once and dies only once, death being followed by a perpetual afterlife.
Samsara became key to the teachings of the Indian prince Gautama Buddha, who developed his ideas around 500 BCE . As in Hinduism, enlightenment is possible only if individuals recognize the illusory nature of the material world and free themselves from desire, whether for goods or persons or pleasure.
That the material world is illusory was also insisted upon by the Greek philosopher Plato (c . 427–347 BCE ). He held that ultimate reality consists of ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’, of which individual material manifestations are poor copies. Natural things and virtues have perfect forms. In a famous parable, Plato describes some prisoners who have been chained in a cave, and can see only the wall in front of them. On this wall they can see the shadows of various objects cast by a fire, and take these shadows to be real. We are like these prisoners, Plato says, taking shadows for reality.
Later philosophers developed Plato’s ideas, holding that reality does not exist independently of the mind. This position is known as idealism. Other philosophers – both in ancient Greece and later – have taken a very different view: materialism. Materialists hold that matter is the only reality, and that mind, ideas, emotions, and so on, arise out of the workings of matter. An early example was the atomic theory proposed by the Greek philosopher Democritus (see here ).
A third strand in Western philosophy is that of the dualists, who hold that mind and matter are both real, but are different in kind. A very different kind of dualism appears in Daoism, which emerged in China in the 4th century BCE . Daoism holds that the ultimate reality is the Dao (‘the way’). The Dao underlies all events, and is also the flow of those events. It combines opposites: stillness and motion, good and evil, light and dark. The Dao has no being, is unfathomable and indescribable, and yet everything depends on it.
Change and motion
A question that exercised some ancient Greek philosophers was whether change and motion are real or illusory. Some held that reality is single and unchanging, while others insisted that reality is never fixed, but always in a state of flux.