It’s somewhat ironic that the period of history from the late 17th century to the early 19th century is known as the Enlightenment. For surely light is something which enables us to see all the vibrant colours of the natural world. But according to the “enlightened” mind, this is not so. Rather, we live in a world without any colour. What we perceive as colour is nothing more than a psychological phenomenon – it would be as ridiculous to attribute any objective reality to the colours we perceive as it would be to attribute the quality of ticklishness to a feather. By letting go of naïve beliefs such as the belief that the things around us have inherent qualities such as colour, texture and smell, we become free to see the true nature of reality, a reality in which everything can be understood in mathematical and mechanistic terms.
But this way of thinking comes at a terrible cost. For it means that everything we once took for granted is called into question. Did your mother or spouse hug you because they loved you, or was it just that the laws of physics determined that they should make a hugging motion? For that matter, can we even see and touch the people we love? We intuit their existence from the sense data our minds create, but this is not the same as knowing they exist. With such lines of thinking, it is little wonder that so many people suffer from existential angst – they are among the many victims of the Enlightenment.
It is just as well that in the Catholic Church, there are certain dogmas that are not called into question. Take the doctrine of transubstantiation for instance. As Catholics, we believe that bread and wine are substances, that is, they are the subject of various qualities such as colour, taste and smell. Yet, at the moment of consecration, the bread becomes the Body of Christ, and the wine becomes the Blood of Christ. The qualities remain exactly the same, but now they signify Christ’s real presence. To the modern mind this will sound very weird, but to the Catholic mind, it is not half as weird as the belief that we live in a world without colour.
There are nevertheless several objections the colour realist must face. For instance, if colours really exist, how does one explain the fact that the same object can appear to be a different colour when seen from different angles such as when one looks at a soap bubble? And what about those optical illusions where a grey square might appear to be yellow against one background and blue against another background?
Well, perhaps we can go some way to responding to these objections by distinguishing between how things appear to be and how things are seen to be. For it is one thing to say that a soap bubble appears to be purple, but quite another thing to say that the soap bubble is purple. But sometimes we don’t just say something appears to be a certain colour, but that it is seen to be a certain colour such as when we see that strawberries are red. This suggests that there is more to colour than mere appearance. And in the case of optical illusions, just because there are situations in which we find it difficult to classify colours correctly, it requires a huge leap of inference to conclude that colours do not exist at all.
But even if colour anti-realists remain unconvinced by these brief responses, they also need to address some objections themselves. For instance, consider a scientist looking at an LCD display reporting the result of some experiment. Is there any qualitative difference at all between a digit that is being shown on the display and the display background? Is it really inconceivable that the digit is black and the background is grey? On the other hand, if there is no qualitative difference, how is it possible for the scientist to say there is any digital readout at all? It is hard not to conclude that colour anti-realism leads to radical scepticism, and this conclusion seems to undermine the very possibility of doing science.
There are of course many good things that have come out of the Enlightenment. There is so much hidden beauty in the laws of physics that the Enlightenment has helped to uncover. And we have the Enlightenment to thank for all the modern technology that surrounds us. But for all its successes, the Enlightenment picture of reality is not the whole picture. To see the whole picture, we need something more, and the Catholic vision of reality can help us to see what is missing.
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