THE REAL

The observer happens in the praxis of living in language, and he or she finds him or herself in the experience of happening as such as a matter of fact, prior to any reflection or explanation. The observer is in the experience of observing as a constitutive a priori starting condition in the moment of reflecting, explaining or talking. Therefore, the observer and observing as experiences need not be explained or justified to happen, even though we may want to explain them as we may want to explain any other experience. Indeed, all experiences happen as a matter of fact, and as such they cannot be disputed; they can only be disbelieved, or one can claim that they are not properly distinguished. It is in the domain of explanations where conflicts may arise. Explanations take place in the praxis of living of the observer, and they are experiences also. Yet explanations as experiences are second-order experiences in the sense that they are reflections of the observer in his or her praxis of living in language about his or her praxis of living. In this context, reality is not an experience, it is an argument in an explanation. In other words, reality arises as an explanatory proposition of our experience of operational coherences in our daily and technical life as we live our daily and technical life. Yet, in these circumstances, reality can arise as an explanatory argument or proposition of one kind or another according to whether the observer accepts or rejects the question about the biological origin of his or her properties as such.

Thus, if the observer follows the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis, he or she accepts a priori an objective independent reality as a source of validation of his or her explanations of the praxis of living in terms of entities that ultimately do not depend on what he or she does. In the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis, the observer sees reality as that which is, not as an explanatory proposition. If, on the contrary, the observer follows the explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis, he or she accepts that reality is what he or she does in validating his or her explanations of the praxis of living, and that in doing this he or she brings forth many different domains of reality as many different domains of entities that are constituted in his or her explaining. In other words, in following this explanatory path the observer becomes aware that each domain of reality is a domain of entities constituted in the explanation of his or her praxis of living with the operational coherences of his or her praxis of living. Furthermore, in following this explanatory path the observer can also realise a) that in the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis reality is also an explanatory proposition, b) that, in it, reality is necessarily constituted as a domain of entities that are assumed to exist independently of what the observer does, and c) that this is unavoidably so because in such an explanatory path the cognitive abilities of the observer are assumed to be his or her constitutive properties, and in it there is no enquiry about their biological origin.

Indeed, from the perspective of objectivity-without-parenthesis, none of these two explanatory paths exist because, in the absence of a full reflection about the biology of the observer, there is no operational domain in which they may arise. Or, in other words, whenever the observer operates with the implicit assumption of objectivity, he or she operationally accepts his or her properties as observer as constitutively given, and denies for him or herself any effective subsequent reflection upon their origin. It is only when the observer accepts the question about observing as biological phenomena that the explanatory paths of objectivity-in-parenthesis and without-parenthesis appear, and it is only then that it is possible for the observer to reflect upon their epistemological and ontological implications. Whether the observer follows one explanatory path or the other, however, does not depend on a rational argument - it depends on his or her preferences, on his or her inner disposition to implicitly or explicitly accept and take one or the other of these two possible starting conditions: a) the properties of the observer as given, for objectivity-without-parenthesis, and b) the happening of the living of the observer in language both as the instrument of enquiry and a phenomenon to be explained, for objectivity-in-parenthesis. In daily life, we normally move unconsciously from one explanatory path to the other in the manner we argue to validate our statements and explanations, and we do this according to the flow of our emotioning in our interpersonal relations and desires. Thus, if in a discussion we accept our interlocutor totally, and we are not in the mood for imposing our views on him or her, we de facto operate treating the other as if he or she were in a domain of reality different to our own but equally legitimate. When we do this, we accept that the other is in a different position from ours, but we do not claim that he or she is mistaken or arbitrary. We may even say that the position of the other is inadequate under certain conditions (that, without our awareness, in fact specify a particular domain of reality), but we do not claim that he or she is blind to how things really are. On the other hand, if we do not accept our interlocutor totally, or we want to assert our position, or we are certain that we are right, or we want to force the other to perform certain actions, we explicitly or implicitly claim that what we say is valid because it is objective (that, founded on the objective reality, that we know how things really are, that our argument is rational, and that the other is objectively wrong and cannot ignore it.

From all this, it follows that the reality we live depends on the explanatory path we adopt, and that this in turn depends on the emotional domain in which we enter at the moment of explaining. Thus, if we are in an assertive mood, and we want to impose our views on the other without reflection, de facto negating him or her, or if we are directly in an emotion that negates him or her, we find ourselves operating in the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis. If, on the contrary, we are in the emotion of acceptance of the other and in the mood of reflection, we find ourselves operationally in the explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis. It follows, then, that the kind of reality that we live as a domain of explanatory propositions, reflects at any moment the flow of our interpersonal relations and what sort of co-ordinations of actions we expect to take place in them. Finally, from the perspective of the explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis, this is so regardless of whether we are aware of it or not because it is constitutive of our operation in the human biology of observing.