Reality (and UFOs)

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

I’m struggling with a book review of The Rise of Realism by Manuel Delanda and Graham Harman [Polity Press, Cambridge, UK/Malden MA, 2017].

It’s a book (160 pages) cheering the supposed ascension of realist philosophy in the continental tradition as opposed to a number of anti-realist philosophies.

Right off the bat, the two authored philosophers present “Lacan’s elimination of the Freudian unconscious as a hidden psychic force in favor of the unconscious as an immanent disruption of consciousness.” [Page 4]

In discussing materialism without realism, they quote Slavoj Žižek’s adventurous take: “The true formula of materialism is not that there is some noumenal reality beyond our distorting perception of it. The only consistent materialist position is that the world does not exist.” [ibid.]

Earlier (on Page 3) Harman mentions “Karen Barad, a materialist who also argues that objects have no reality apart from their interactions with the mind; she bases this on Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory.”

The Barad position would be supported by UFO researchers or writers such as Jacques Vallee and Jose Antonio Caravaca I think.

While my review is pending for an online book site, I find that the book mentioned is one that should be read by (some) UFO buffs, as there is a dearth of discussion or writings about reality and the UFO phenomenon in the philosophical and/or theoretical physics sense.

Ufologists (and skeptics) hint at the reality issue in the UFO literature and witness accounts but there has been no in-depth scrutiny of how UFOs are impacted by the ramifications of consciousness and reality. At least I haven’t seen any.

Of course, I don’t expect that the insipid range of UFO thinking, past and present, will be altered nor do I expect ufologists to cope with the vicissitudes of philosophical thinking in order to get a handle on the enigmatic phenomenon.

But it’s worth a shot, so that’s why I mention such books (and thinking) as that noted above, even though I find it as difficult as many of you to drape it over UFO accounts.

RR