Beyond Words (scribbled thoughts on realism, relativism and reality)

The truth isn't hidden.
It's not the case that the way things really are, and how they relate, is a secret masked from view.

Source: Tragic Comedy Masks

The congruence between how we understand things, and how they exist in relation to our understanding, is perhaps only a puzzle because of our lack of understanding. We often assume that there is one holistic truth, a correct way of describing things, as if things are singular, specific, essential, predefined, and absolute.
We sometimes call this the 'Truth'.
Yet there is no reason why anything has to have an absolute essence, a secret hidden singular truth, which we hypothesize as one particular reality.
And because we can't always pin it down we assume that the truth is out there, hidden from view, and that we haven't found the one correct description.
We usually assume that there is always one correct description.

Yet, there is no reason why the existence of things can't have more than one description, or many properties, which can all be equally true.
There is no reason why opposing theories or descriptions can't interact with what is to illustrate different truths, and there is no reason why the World has to exist in a predetermined specific singular unknown or undiscovered pattern, which can be described, and which hasn't yet been found.
Existence can be multifarious, and layered, and it can have many features overlaid which conform to no specific design.

This is not to suggest that there is no such thing as truth.
It is not to say that some ideas or descriptions aren't better than others, and it is not to suggest that there is no external real World.
It is instead an acknowledgment that this existence doesn't have to always conform to absolutes.
It is to suggest that the World can be far more mysterious then we can ever possibly hope to describe and yet it's not hiding anything.
It simply is what it is, and it is beyond us, for it never came to be with a mandate of having to fit into a description we can understand.
It never had to conform to any specific description at all.

Yet, of course, we can make sense of it in many ways for we interact with the same existence that isn't really hiding anything at all.
There is no secret truth.
There are simply descriptions, some of which relate to what is in ways better able to illustrate how things work, and what they are. Yet there is no reason why things can't be described in many ways, and yet they are still just what they are.

Sometimes the best understanding of how things really are is to remember that they exist beyond any description at all.