For some of us, at some point in our lives, we experience the privilege of wondering about the mysteries of life. What is the point of going through all of this, day in and day out? Does it really all just come to an end? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? To what do our hearts cry out in longing for? Really? And so forth.

But in the course of being pursued by such questions as these, we forget that we are even in the position of having to ask them in the first place. What a curious little detail, overlooked so often it’d never occur to you.

But in what sort of world do creatures like us start out with no idea about anything? Start out in the position of having to figure anything out if it is ever to be figured out at all?

Even more curious, while we wonder at such mysteries as our own existence, or the passage of time, certain things will have to carry on in the meantime. We shall need rest, for example, eventually. And food. Water, shelter, perhaps company.

In short, nothing stops for us while we behold things as if for the first time. The world will keep turning, and life will go on, with or without us.

This fact of the matter imposes on us practical necessities that undergird and override our quests into the depths of reality. It does not matter what the ultimate constitution of things turns out to be, for example, whether physical or mental, we will in either case continue our daily lives in the meantime regardless.

Suppose whilst sitting at your desk, buried in books, you discover at last some sure-fire proof of Idealism, or of Physicalism. You will in either case still go to dinner that evening, sleep that night, and continue your life the very next day. And you will do this, no matter what, until you die.

The real world lies in the in between. It’s a place so close to the eye that you’d never see it. Especially for us philosophy types. But it is there that is hidden a land beyond criticism, speculation, and skeptical reproach, because we will return to it, so long as we live, no matter what, even should we somehow manage to doubt in one breath the very means to do so in the next.

This is The Given, the real world, whatever that looks like to each person. This is how we look upon things, whatever we end up deciding to call them.

What we call pre-philosophical, naïve, or innocent, is really just the pillow we can’t wait to rest our heads against after a long day, or the conference of people we can’t wait to present our new solipsist findings to.

But somehow, at some point, we get lost along the way, caught up in our soaring above the clouds, and forget to account for the fact that we are even in the position of having to figure out any of this in the first place.

But by getting back to this, and reversing the standard image, a way forward opens up unlike any other.

For example, I know that no matter what pipedream I come up with, at the end of the day, in the real world, there is a profound sense in which we are very much left to our own devices here: no superhuman figure is “out there” who is coming to stop that tsunami, or to multiply loaves until no child is fading out of existence because they’re starving to death, or to locate that missing family member. This is a “fact” of The Given. Of the real world. No matter what the theodicies tell you. So I shouldn’t expect there to be such a figure!

And so forth for all the other facts of The Given, some of which I have found to be that there is something it is to be me, that we were not meant for loneliness, and that we experience the ‘wrongness’ of losing someone as missing them.

The real world is brimming with facts of the matter, whatever those look like to each person.

Start at the beginning. Explore The Given. Take stock of all the things that will be true here in the real world no matter what else turns out to be, what we might call Practica.

Then start to look at “worldviews” and “descriptions” of reality. Can or will you take them with you back into the real world? If they’re impractical or unlivable, then what remains for them to be but flights of fancy?

This is the way.