Reality, realness, and the natural attitude

Abstract

Varga offers us an impressive account of the work phenomenological psychopathology has generated in linking experience of realness with intersubjectivity and goes further in relating this work to depersonalization and derealization. There are two points in this excellent paper that I would like to explore a little. First, how essential is a strong sense of reality for rationality and communication, or rather, can total suspension of the natural attitude be commensurate with communication? Second, and more clinically, should we interpret what those with depersonalization say literally? A uniting theme in these comments is the thought that, although patients complain of a change in their sense of reality, it should not be assumed that there is a loss of contact with reality. Rather, as Varga writes Reports of DP patients who communicate experiences of unreality must be understood as referring to an altered pre-intentional background, a changed relatedness to the world, which in turn diminishes the basic sense of realness that gives us a sense of what it is for something to be. Instead of merely being propositional attitudes, such reports are first and foremost expressions of the (diminished) sense of realness—the background sense of certainty. (2012, 108) If it was the case that the content of the experience was propositional, it would either be incommunicable or delusional and hence, we would either not know about it or it would cease to be depersonalization/derealization.