1.3. The History of Paradigms: a Questioning of Reality

Only through ideas do human beings come in contact with 'true reality' - Plato

The world view of our world is uncertain and in argument; with it, it is the nature of the human... Paradigms are historical, they form and change in the course of history. - Günter Dux

As reality is the basis for living but also for any kind of science, there are many sciences which are concerned with the question of reality, from ontology, metaphysics, epistemology to cosmology and physics and as I try to show during this work also mediatheory. They all try to create world-views or paradigms, which put the human in its natural surrounding. A very rough division is often made between the subjectivist or primitive paradigm and the objectivist or science paradigm.The subjectivist paradigm postulates behind the world and its phenomenons an acting entity: God etc. Along with that went for a long time a cosmology with a geocentric worldview.

With Galileo, Copernicus and Columbus and the beginning of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment God became replaced through the laws of nature which became synonym with the laws of mechanics. In Philosophy this step was taken by Réne Descartes. Starting with doubting everything he established himself as the basic presupposition: 'cogito ergo sum.' He therefore suggested to split reality into two kinds of realities or substances. 1. res cogitans: thought or mind: consciousness and 2. res extensa: Matter or extension: space. These two substances had for him no contact with each other and were therefore easy to separate. "The dualism which was created this way, was however the appropriate mean to face the dilemma, not to be able to fit mind and matter together. It became the way out for centuries." (Dux 1982: 292 -transl. S.J.) Within this dualistic view of reality, man was a perfect machine which consisted out of the mind and the extended body. For Descartes the reason had to take command over the body. Therefore this kind of philosophy became known as rationalism.

This world-view was pretty much true until our century. Now it becomes challenged again, within the exact sciences for example in mathematics with Goedel's theorem of logical indecisiveness and within physics by the introduction of quantamechanics, in a cultural sense with the shift from modernism to postmodernism, in a religious sense with the 'turn to the self' or the rise of the New Age. As I try to argue this shift can be understood as a shift of the concept of reality. In philosophy maybe taken by Radical Constructivism or Nelson Goodman's Irrealism. A development where this paradigm-shift becomes very obvious is the field of media-technology, esp. the field of 'new media'. "In the second media age 'reality' becomes multiple." (Poster 1995: 85) Therefore I try to analyse the accompanying science of mediatheory as a resource for understanding this shift. Within this shift pretty much everything becomes challenged up to the whole western concept of linear time. "The new technological environments of virtual reality and cyberspace confuse the boundaries between internal and external worlds, creating the illusion that internal and external realities are one and the same." (Robins 1995: 144)