There is a question that few have the courage to ask themselves, and yet it is the most important of all. The reality in which you live, that which you take for granted every morning when you open your eyes, that which you share with those around you, that which seems so solid, so objective, so indisputable—is it truly the only possible one?
Or is it only one of the infinite versions of the world, one of many, one of millions, each different, each unique, each true for whoever inhabits it? Perhaps every human being lives in a private world, inaccessible to others, made of perceptions, memories, emotions, thoughts that no one else can experience in the same way. And if this were so, if reality differed from person to person, what would become of our certainty of being in contact with the true world? What would become of our claim to judge that of others?
Science, today, tells us something that resembles this closely. Neurobiology explains that the brain is not a camera that faithfully reproduces external reality. It is rather a world-builder. Starting from sensory stimuli, which are always fragmentary and ambiguous, the brain elaborates hypotheses, makes predictions, constructs models. And the world we experience, that which we call reality, is the result of this construction process. Not a copy, but an interpretation. Not a datum, but a creation.
And since every brain is different, because past experiences are different, expectations are different, neuronal connections are different, the worlds that each of us inhabits are also different.
This does not mean that an objective reality does not exist, an external world independent of us. It means that our access to that reality is always mediated, always interpreted, always personal. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant said, we do not know things in themselves, but phenomena, that is, things as they appear to us through the structures of our mind. And these structures, although universal in the human species, decline in a unique way in every individual.
What you see when you look at a sunset is not exactly what I see. What you feel when you listen to music is not what I feel. What you think when you read a poem is not what I think. We are close, we share words, gestures, emotions. But our inner worlds remain irreducibly separate.
If things are this way, then the problem of truth becomes enormously complicated. Can we still speak of a singular reality, or must we instead speak of plural realities? And if plural realities exist, are some truer, more real, more authentic than others? Who decides? With what criterion? And who assures us that our criterion is not itself the product of our particular reality, and therefore relative, partial, incapable of judging others?
Let us take the extreme case, that which disturbs and questions us most: the world of the schizophrenic. For him, those voices he hears are real. Those presences that threaten him are real. Those connections he sees between apparently random events are real. We say he is sick, that he has lost contact with reality. But perhaps we should say, more honestly, that his reality is so different from ours that we can no longer communicate. He cannot explain his to us, we cannot explain ours to him.
There is a rupture, an abyss, an incommunicability that we call illness, but that perhaps is simply the extreme outcome of that pluralism of worlds that characterizes every human existence.
This is not a comfortable position. It does not allow us to feel on the side of reason, on the side of truth, on the side of normality. It forces us to reckon with our own partiality, with the limits of our perspective, with the impossibility of exiting our world to judge others from the outside. It forces us to recognize that what we call madness could be only a difference too great to be bridged, a distance too wide to be traversed, a language too different to be translated.
Psychopathology, moreover, offers us many examples of this difficulty. The schizophrenic is not simply someone who is wrong, who sees things that are not there, who believes false things. He is someone who inhabits a different world, with different rules, with different meanings, with different evidences. And in that world, his experiences are perfectly coherent, perfectly sensible, perfectly real.
The problem arises when the two worlds collide, when whoever inhabits one tries to impose their rules on whoever inhabits the other, when communication breaks down and only conflict remains.
There is a famous passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the character Ivan says: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” We could paraphrase: if reality is plural, if there is no true world against which to measure all others, then is every world legitimate? Is every experience valid? Is every conviction respectable?
It is not so simple. Because pluralism does not mean absolute relativism. It does not mean that all realities are equivalent, that all are equally true, that all deserve the same respect. It means instead that we must reckon with our partiality, that we must accept the limit of our perspective, that we must learn to dialogue with whoever sees the world differently from us, without claiming to have the last word.
The phenomenological tradition, from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, has taught us that consciousness is always intentional, it is always consciousness of something. But that something is not a raw datum, it is a correlate of consciousness itself. There is no world in itself, separate from the experience we make of it. There exists the world-as-it-appears-to-us, and this appearing is always situated, always perspectival, always embodied in a body, in a history, in a culture.
Truth, then, is not something one possesses, but something one seeks together, in confrontation, in dialogue, in the patient construction of common ground.
Perhaps this is the true meaning of mental illness. Not error, not deviation, not loss of contact with reality. But the rupture of communication. The impossibility of finding a common language, of building a bridge between worlds too distant.
And so the task of cure is not so much to bring the sick person back to our reality, to make them see things as we see them, to convince them that their experiences are false. Rather, it is to try to understand their world, to come into contact with their experience, to find a meeting ground, however small, however fragile, from which to start again together.
Therapy, in this perspective, becomes an exercise in translation. An attempt to throw bridges between different worlds. A listening that does not judge, but seeks to understand. A presence that does not impose, but offers itself.
And perhaps, in this listening, in this openness, in this availability to let oneself be questioned by the other, we can discover something new about ourselves too. We can discover that our world too, that which seems so solid, so real, so indisputable, is only one perspective among many. Not less true, not less valid, but not the only possible one either.
This awareness can be frightening, certainly. It can make our deepest certainties waver. But it can also be liberating. It can open us to the encounter with the other not as enemy or as sick person, but as bearer of a different world, of a different perspective, of a different truth. It can teach us the humility of whoever knows they do not possess truth, but only seek it, together, step by step, dialogue after dialogue, encounter after encounter.
In the end, perhaps, what we call reality is not something one has, but something one makes. Not a datum, but a construction. Not a starting point, but an endpoint. And it is only in the encounter with the other, in the clash and fusion of our worlds, that we can hope to approach something resembling truth.
A plural truth, certainly. A multiple truth, certainly.
But also a richer truth, more complex, more alive than any solitary certainty.
RVSCB
