"If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"
The origin of this question is uncertain, but it is often associated with George Berkeley because it illustrates well the principle he studied, esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived"). Both the question and Berkeley's studies investigate the correlation between existence and perception. Berkeley does not claim that things cease to exist when there are no human beings to observe them: their reality is guaranteed by the fact that God, as an infinite mind, perceives them constantly. For an atheist or an agnostic, what guarantees their reality is the dense network of satellites orbiting the earth.
If Berkeley's philosophy teaches us that existence depends on perception, everyday life shows how social and technological memory also defines the reality we experience. The embarrassment of tripping on a step grows when the action is observed or shared, because it becomes part of social reality. There are different levels of "shared reality": maybe someone filmed my fall and the video ends up among Instagram reels. But if I were able to forget the event completely, would I have annulled it? Changing perspective, one could say that an action risks being "lost" if it is not somehow perceived or documented.
Moving further and further away from Berkeley's thought: for a city dweller almost every action is subject to more or less explicit reality checks. What remains available are our living burrows, once soundproofed and with tape over the laptop webcam… The farther one gets from urban agglomerations, the more our reality is shaped by our own perception alone. For this to hold, we must rely exclusively on our own species, excluding non-human eyes as observers or archivists. I defer to the individual perceptions of each reader, but moving away from the validating perceptions of others creates a free space in which to wallow, in which to create lost actions. Obviously I am not talking about microscopic actions, like a hidden grimace, but about actions that exploit space itself, even on a large scale: running in circles, brandishing enormous logs, disappearing, performing a sound composition.
A lost action is therefore a gesture, a behavior or a sound that is perceived solely by the person performing it, and thus does not enter shared reality. This does not mean that the action does not exist, but that its social or symbolic efficacy is nil, because the confirmation of others' perceptions is missing. Such an action reaches the highest degree of loss if even the person performing it retains no memory of it. The lost action is a pure act, a sound that disperses as if it never found a surface to bounce off, or like a ray of sunlight that is not reflected. These actions happen continuously, invisible, perhaps not even very far from us, voluntary or accidental, suspended at the edge of existence.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →