Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/272

 else" is that particular reality of which that particular phaenomenon is the appearance — this fact enables us to describe the reality just as completely as the appearance of it. The description of the appearance is at the same time, a description of that which appears.

The phaenomenon can be called an appearance of some reality only in so far as there is some correspondence between them, they must have the same multiplicity; to every diversity in the phaenomenon there must be a corresponding diversity in the appearing things, otherwise the particular diversity would not form part of the phaenomenon qua phaenomenon, nothing would "appear" in it. But if this is so, it means that the "appearance" and the "appearing reality" have identically the same structure (this was pointed out with perfect clarity by Bertrand Russell-Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, p. 61 sq.). These two could be different only in content, and as content cannot possibly occur in any description we conclude that everything which can be asserted of the one, must be true for the other also. The distinction between appearance and reality collapses, there is no sense in it.

To repeat the same argument in a little different form: either a certain complex is called a phaenomenon of something else — in this case they must have the same structure; or they differ in their structure — in that case the diversities of the one do not point to diversities of the other and we have no right to say that the relation of appearance and reality holds between them. We might assume all kinds of relation between them, simultaneity, causality, and what not, but evidently this is not what we mean when we speak of phaenomenon or appearances.

These considerations would suffice to show — even if it were not obvious for a simpler and more fundamental reason — that the distinction between reality and appearance with all its philosophical implications is altogether unjustified. There are no phaenomena or appearances in the metaphysical sense of these words; there are no different degrees of reality — a genuine kind — and a "merely" phaenomenal kind, a metaphysical and empirical reality: there is just one sort of reality, and all our propositions deal with nothing else. Every proposition is either true or false, it either does or does not communicate the structure of a real fact; it is nonsense to say that it is "partly" true, or true "only for phaenomena and not for reality".