The reality of fact and reality of fiction:Jug Suraiya:The Times Of India: The Speaking Tree

In an interview a few months ago, when asked why he chose to write fiction in an age when there was so much misinformation being propagated both in mainstream as well as social media, Salman Rushdie replied, in effect, that the art form called literature, at its best, creates not falsity but a reality that is truer than many ‘facts’ which dominate present-day discourse, fissured as it is by ideological antagonisms of all kinds. Apart from the virus of fake news that has infected public life, could there be a philosophical underpinning to fiction’s impudent claim to be ‘realer’ than ‘reality’?

The British Empiricists of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as John Locke and David Hume, laid the foundations of modern scientific enquiry by saying that any hypothesis about the nature of reality had to be based on experiment.

However, in the same breath, they also said that our experience of reality was founded on our senses, on our individual sense perception.

So, the colour blue, say, that I experience might be very different from that which you experience, and both may be quite different from what is ‘really’ blue, what is blue in reality. As the contemporary science writer Gary Zukor puts it: “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our percepts. What we perceive is what we look for. What we look for depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”

Round and round the mulberry bush. If we are enmeshed in this circularity of thought do we need even more windmills of the mind as represented by quixotic fiction?

Certainly not, proclaimed Plato, the most draconian of censors who wanted to banish all art, starting with poetry and poets, from his ideal Republic. In Plato’s view human life was a pilgrimage from being trapped in the world of false sense perception into the clear light of transcendent knowledge.

To illustrate this, he used the metaphor of a cave in which we are all held as prisoners, chained and facing a wall. Behind us is a fire which casts our shadows on the wall. We perceive this game of shadows to be reality. If we realise the illusory nature of sense perception we can emerge from the cave and bask in the sun of the immutable Idea of the Good. Poets and artists, by luring us with imitations of the Real distract us from this quest, which is why they should be expelled from society.

In her book The Fire and the Sun, the novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, examines Plato’s critique of art and presents an eloquent defence of aesthetic creativity.

The creation and appreciation of art, far from being a form of escapism, creates a bond of empathy between the writer and the reader, the painter and the viewer. “Art,” she concludes,” is a great hall of reflection where we can all meet and where everything under the sun can be examined and considered.”

Which could include the ambiguous irony of Plato using the artistic metaphor of the Fire and the Cave to justify his repudiation of art, which in its limitless freedom of spirit can encompass its own negation.