‘Philosophy is an act of illuminating the invisible’: Sundar Sarukkai on human perception

While perception is the starting point of our engagement with the world, it is ironic that the human description of the world is populated with all kinds of unperceivable things. It is the invisible, untouched, unheard, and unfelt things that are the most important building blocks of the world. Ontology is the term used by philosophers to describe the set of things, both perceived and unperceived, that are seen to be “real” in some sense.

Ontology is not merely of philosophical interest; our everyday life is filled with belief in entities that are not perceivable by the five senses. These include soul, god, self, mind, consciousness, space, time, concepts like justice, beauty and goodness, atoms, fields, matter.

Not only are these and many such entities part of our everyday world, but even the perception of a physical object – like a chair – is filled with assumptions about entities that are not physical. For example, to see a chair, we need light. We say that it exists in space. We assume that light is real. But can we see light by itself? We see an object because light bounces off the object and falls on our eyes. In this process, we are not seeing...

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