"All things are wronged by representation"—Appearance versus Reality from Thales to Newton

Part 1 of 10 on the history of philosophy

Photo by Dana Katharina on Unsplash

“All things are wronged by representation,” writes Mark Strand in his poem, “A Suite of Appearances.” It is a familiar thought that the world cannot be captured by our means of representing it. Our concepts, our language—indeed any paradigm for understanding you might imagine—are all projected onto things by us. We see only a veil of perception, a texture of concepts stitched by ourselves alone. Strand’s poem says that when we represent the world in our terms, we do violence to the world or “wrong” it. And we’re also wrong about it. The world, the idea goes, is essentially unrepresentable without violence because it is, at its fundament, alien to our categories of understanding. We are constantly trying to jam reality into the Procrustean bed of our conceptual scheme.

Embedded in Strand’s poetic trope is the distinction between appearance and reality. At its most basic this distinction allows us to compare over time what was taken as real at first a…