What does concrete reality mean?
Concrete: con– ‘together’ + crescere ‘grow.’
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The seeming solidity of reality rests on the concretization of experience.
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The noumena of experience (noumenon: Greek, literally ‘(something) conceived,’ from noien ‘conceive, apprehend.’) — the idea of entities being in themselves apart from what they are to us — is what metaphysics attempts to understand. There exist many varieties of metaphysics, ranging from the crudest — positive objectification of metaphysical entities that stand in parallel existence to the mundane physical world (“objects” lacking normal properties of objects such as materiality) — to negative skepticism (reveling in the certainty that one can always and easily free oneself from the bonds of any unpleasant determinate knowledge,), to more sophisticated relational approaches.
Metaphysics is based on the experience of exophany. Phenomena (Greek phainomenon ‘thing appearing to view,’ based on phainein ‘to show’) are experienced as showing us something (noumena) beyond what appears. In the end, what we “have” is what appears and the feeling of exophany.
We cannot doubt exophany. As Charles Peirce said: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”
And here’s something else that’s important. Love is essentially exophanic. Love always draws us beyond or beneath what is experienced, beyond experience. And love is what makes us prefer life to death. What would make us want to reject exophany in general, or deny some particular dimension or pole of it?
The distinction of noumena from phenomena points to another concept: the Transcendent. There is also that which might one day manifest to us phenomenally but has not, and there is also that which never will.
Only the tiniest bit of the Transcendent concerns us, but that doesn’t matter. There is no practical difference to us between the Transcendent and noumena and exophany. To us it is all one, and in itself it is all one.
Our job is to make things concrete with as little exclusion or reduction as possible, and this means we must occasionally get a little abstract. We have quite a few noumenal human beings around us who are still invalidated as enemies who still have something to show us around whom we must extend our community with whom we can grow together in concrete life.