''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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stantly, depending on the light, on the point of
view, or on the spectator; and as all the colours
seem equally real he concludes "... to avoid favour-
itism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the
table has any one particular colour. "65 In this case,
however, if the table has no colour, and if all the
same we perceive some colour all the time, 'the table
"cannot... be identical with what we see. "66 This
applies to its shape as well, and Russell in fact
concludes: "The real table, if there is one, is not
immediately known to us... "67, and Ayer states it
even more bluntly: "In fact, the upshot is that we know
relatively little about the real table. "68
Kant comes to a similar conclusion. Rejecting
the assumption of rationalist philosophers "that they
could discover the nature of things merely by the
exercise of reason", because "reason [is] bound to
lose itself in contradictions if it [ventures] beyond
the limits of possible experience"69, he decides that
...
the world that we know is partly our
own creation. We can infer that there is
a raw material upon which we go to work.
But what things are in themselves, independently
of our processing them is
something that we can never know. 76
Nabokov does not operate with many philosophical
terms and never enters into a detailed abstract dis-
cussion of the problem, but the distinction he makes
between "average reality" and "true reality" is to a
degree the same as that between Russell's "sense-data"
or. "percepts" and "sensibilia", and that between Kant's
"world that we know" and "things as they are in them-
selves". He also applies the terms to persons, to the