Definition
A recurring theme in literature, the distinction between what appears to be and what is has taken on a wide variety of forms. Its classical statement occurs in the Myth of the Cave in Plato's Republic: Plato's parable pictures people chained in a cave and facing a wall. They can see only shadows cast by objects in the light of a fire within the cave. Most people remain within the cave, but a few venture outside where they finally look up to see the sun, the true source of light. This movement from appearance to reality is based on a philosophy of idealism, the belief that ultimate reality resides in ideas, not in matter. Plato's views exerted a strong influence in the literature of the Renaissance; in Shakespeare's tragedies, for example, appearance is the outer "clothing" that disguises the inner reality. In the first act of Hamlet, the prince's mother rebukes him for continuing to wear black in mourning for his father: "Why seems it so particular with thee?" Hamlet casts his reply in terms of inner reality versus outer show:
Seems, madam? Nay it is. I know not "seems."'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,Nor customary suits of solemn black. . . . These indeed seem,For they are actions that a man might play;But I have that within which passes showThese but the trappings and the suits of woe.
In later periods the alternative view—that the sum of appearances is reality—begins to emerge in such works as the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza and the poetry of William Wordsworth, who locates the principle of reality in the experience of nature. Other Romantic poets, notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge, adhere to the principle that the imagination shapes and defines reality.In the 20th century, the doctrine of phenomenology asks that the question of "the real" be bracketed (set aside) in order to provide a precise description of experience. One extreme reaction to this concept is the view of the absurd which, in the words of John Yolton, is the "denial of reality to the only reality left, the reality of lived human experience."
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