Appearance vs. Reality

Often humans largely hold archetypes over reality. There is no absolute appearance but the

presence of archetypes makes the appearance absolute suppressing the very idea of reality.

This is not only confined to movies with a climax and tragic end or a book with elements of

horror and revenge but is primarily present in our very lives. It all starts from a very young age

when a mother warns her child to not talk to a stranger explaining that he might be a kidnapper

or engaged in child trafficking. Even though if that particular man is full of virtue and good

morals, we cannot really convince our minds to escape out from that evil thought. Our minds

are woven in such a way that we cannot really distinguished between the good and evil or more

precisely in context of the subject ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’. The two terms which might appear

same has a thin line of difference. We can represent it in terms of two constructs: how

something appears on the surface is the “ Appearance” and what it is underneath is the

“Reality”. For example, a sponge of a rock shaped might appear as a rock but is a soft sponge in

reality. The cosmologies that predominated in Asia Minor in 6 th century bce , distinguished

between sensible appearance and a reality accessible only to reason. Similarly , Plato identified

appearance with opinion and reality with truth. Even Russell asserted that appearance is what

we gather from our senses, while reality is something we can never really know until dwell

upon. The concept of appearance and reality is not only peculiar to metaphysics, philosophy or

literature but also quite concerning in today’s world.

Now the question is, how is it relevant in today’s scenario. Our lives are affected in such brutal

ways through various horrifying situations that our minds have involuntarily accepted the false

appearance as reality. Appearance now has a lion’s share in human minds and this is all

regulated by various technological and other external factors. We as individuals tend to accept

rather follow what we see without analysing it to its depth. This is very much prominent in the

young minds. The new found extension of our body i.e. the cell phones have predominantly

settled the idea of following masked appearance over reality. Although there is no concept of

absolute reality but in today’s world there is large spread of the idea of absolute appearance.

This has terribly led to horrific massacres like suicides to murders and etc. in the given time.

Reality is completely overlooked in the presence of appearance. What looks like might not be

the truth and what appears to be false might be real in its case.