The Sense of Reality, Time, and Creative Inspiration

“What is pure art according to our modern conception? It is the creation of a suggestive magic containing at once the object and the subject, the world outside the artist and the artist himself.”

1. The sense of reality. The problem of how we obtain our knowledge of reality is a very old one in philosophy. The recent work of logical positivists has indicated that the problem is no longer simply one of metaphysics in the classical speculative sense. Logical positivism has shown that the old method of describing “reality” in terms of deduction from percepts to metapercepts is nonsense. Yet everyone is intuitively convinced of the sense of a reality “out there”. Dr. Johnson answers the metaphysical question by kicking the stone. Bertrand Russell answers the question by talking rather vaguely about “physiological” and psychological “inference” (19). Recent application of neurological studies to philosophical problems has indicated increasingly that our ultimate perception of reality is ruled to a tremendous extent by the “configurational state” of the nervous system (4) or the equivalent emotional state of the organism at the time of the perception (3).

Thus, there seems to be a growing awareness on the part of thinkers in a number of disciplines that the problem of our “knowledge” of reality is somehow related to problems of metapsychology. There is, so to speak, a psychological-physiological inference of reality “out there”. The application of psychoanalytic concepts to this problem offers