UFOs: Reality & Reason

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

I’m taking a title from a book I have that confronts various philosophical musings about reality. The author is Sean Sayers:

The book’s full title is Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge [Basil Blackwell, 1985].

To get at an explanation of UFOs one has to know what reality they are dealing with, and there are kinds of reality, according to philosophers, and now neurologists, among others.

My Canadian, academic pal (teacher and poet) Bryan Sentes dismissed Dr. Sayers’ book when I told him I had bought it.

I think he did so because Professor Sayers dismisses Kant, whom Bryan idolizes I believe.

Dr. Sayers opens his almost pithy book with a presentation of “Traditional Form of Realism” [Part 1, Realism an its Critics: The Empiricist Argument] offering the views of Locke and Berkeley.

Setting up a take down of Locke, Dr. Sayers writes this, which applies (or can) to UFOs:

“In many cases … there seems to be a discrepancy between the way things appear and the way they really are, between our subjective view … and what is objectively the case. We are subject to errors and illusions: what is manifest to us is not real … what is real is often not immediately apparent or manifest, but can be discovered and known only as the result of a process of investigation and thought. In short, there seems to be a real distinction between appearance and reality, between what is subjective and what is objective.” [Page 4]

“We [according to Locke] are immediately aware of ideas not things, of subjective appearances not objective reality; we are aware of things only as phenomena and not as they are in themselves …

“ … the mind for Locke is like a camera which, when acted upon by external objects, registers impressions and ideas that reflect and resemble those objects …

“ .. the mind, again, like a camera, is thus passive in the reception of experience, merely recording ideas and images impressed upon it by the senses …” {Page 6]

But Berkeley argues “experience gives us no access to the world as it is in itself; it informs us only of how the world appears to us.” [Page 7]

“Berkeley arrives at pure subjective idealism: things are nothing in themselves, they are mere ‘collections of ideas’, ‘constructions’ of appearances …

“Our knowledge is confined to ideas – we are trapped within the realm of appearances and can never know anything beyond them.” [Page 8]

Sayers then allows that the arch criminal communist Lenin provides a dialectical and materialist approach as a response to Berkeley: “there is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no difference.” [Page 10]

Sayers writes “Locke’s dualist realism and Berkeley’s idealism has the effect of ‘fencing off’ the way things appear to us from the way they are in themselves.” [Page 10]

For ufologists (UFO buffs) this has posed problems for an explanation of what the UFO phenomenon is (or may be).

In Part 2 Dr, Sayers offers Kant’s views, which he writes are so fashionable, “enjoying an enormous vogue and influence.”

“The senses by themselves, in Kant’s words, give us a mere ‘manifold’ of impressions – a chaotic collection, an unrelated series, of impressions.” Knowledge begins only when this manifold [of impressions] is given form and order, only when it is brought under concepts and interpreted. This is the work of thought and reason. As Descartes says, neither our imagination nor our senses can ever assure us of anything at all … “ [Page 19]

Kant’s reality is circumscribed by what he called things-in-themselves [das Ding an sich].

(For this posting, that “das Ding an sich” would be UFOs.)

Kant’s view is this: “A gulf is … created between the thing-in-itself, the ‘real object’ … and the thing as it is grasped and known by us …Our knowledge, Kant … argues, is necessarily confined to appearances, and we can never gain knowledge of things-in-themselves [UFOs for this presentation].

Hegel differs with Kant: “thought does not … as at first appears, cut us off from the thing-in-itself. Rather, it helps us to grasp and to understand reality more fully and completely.” [Page 25]

So, we UFO buffs can’t throw up our hands in despair and agree with Kant that UFOs [the things-in-themselves] cannot be known.

We have to accept the Hegelian view that thought (conjecture and contemplation) are tools which will possibly bring us to a full knowledge as to what UFOs are, what the phenomenon is, not just what it represents.

I know this is a crusty way to get to my point above, but it is necessary to approach the matter (the core item for study in “ufology”) with the idea that it is amenable to understanding, if thought is applied rigorously, which is something that few, if any, UFO people I know do or have done.

RR