#1 13-09-2024 17:08

TO

2009 – Difference Between Reality…

…in Common Thought and Reality in Modern Teleology

 

Today, reality is something that everyone thinks they know, but that very few contemporaries would be able to define. It is essentially a referent, and this referent is implicitly undisputable. Whereas in modern teleology, reality is not only what is fundamentally disputable, but even what is the origin of the dispute itself.

In the common understanding, reality presents itself as a positive object, perfectly cut out. Despite the fact that reality can cover objects as different as a fact, a thing or a judgement, it appears as a positive basis on which one can rely; reality, at least in the current thought, behaves like the atom of the atomists: solid and sure, indivisible and foundational, infallible and endowed with effectiveness. And it would almost be possible to say that, on these specific points, the same goes for reality as seen by modern teleology.

Almost, though, because our contemporaries’ reality is confused, by hypostasis, with what it is supposed to cover. Thus a historical event or a factual situation will be considered as “reality”; or else a table, a flower, a tool; or even a choice, a decision. By extending reality to the objects where it manifests itself, one gives it space and duration, an apparently clear contour and a content, the contour and content of the object as one represents it to oneself. As a result, in today’s imagination, reality consists in acts and things. But things, in particular, are perennial, remain independently of our imagination and our conception. Thus, contemporary thought gives a body to reality.

Once this body is accepted, reality can become a basis, a given. It is original and imperative. It is a truth, static, since it is already there, and will be there after us. And the critique against this reality, or more precisely the complaint against this reality, is to show that it is constraining, stubborn and narrow-minded, that its arrogant and undisputable truth impedes the imagination, this poetic need of the human, which allows it to breathe, through the absurd or the dream. This opposition dates from the “realism” displayed by the Marxist counter-revolution, opposed to surrealism equally issued from the Russian counter-revolution.

The difference between reality as it is usually understood today and reality as it is theorized in modern teleology is clearly visible in relation to the category of truth. In both cases, reality has a truth value. In the current vision, this truth is an a priori: reality is already there, undisputable, and so its truth is undisputable. What is subsumed under reality is true, so to speak, by definition. This truth is practical, but it validates entire sets of theoretical truths, and particularly categories of thought which, in teleology, are only hypotheses, useful in their time, and therefore tools for action relative to circumstances. In modern teleology, reality is also the truth, but it is a truth as the completion of a verification. In the current vision, thought verifies reality, and so the truth carried by reality is a proposition of consistency with hypothetical constructions, a theoretical truth. In modern teleology, reality verifies thought, makes thought true by ending it, by destroying it, by accomplishing it. Truth is the result of a practical verification.

For modern teleology, reality is a result. There is reality when a thought ends, is destroyed. Now, this end, this destruction itself has no contour or content, and that is why it is ungraspable. Reality forces thought to reconstitute, to interpret, to load the end of a thought with a content that it generally does not have. In this way of seeing reality, there is no real thing, there is no real fact–thing and fact are only categories in which thought divides itself. Reality is what ends, what destroys thought, and as a result one can neither see it, touch it, nor rely on it. One cannot therefore say that a fact, a thing or a judgment are real, one should say that there is reality in a fact, a thing, a judgment. This means that there is a destruction, effective, which modifies fact, thing and judgement, and which is irreversible, and as such undisputable.

When reality is only what signals such a break, breach or accomplishment, but is itself ungraspable because it has no content (one can only grasp what has content, even if it is empty), it cannot be the positive basis of the totality. That is why, in the teleological hypothesis, reality is an original reference only in the old dialectical idea of the progress towards the origin. Reality is the end of things, and the end of things reveals their meaning to us.

Modern teleology continued this reflection by reducing it to this: reality is a break, the limit of thought. Thought is the contradiction to reality. The phenomenon of thought (the phenomenology of spirit is important because it is very precisely the undecided movement of the totality) is the negation of reality. But this negation itself has for object and for goal what it negates, reality. Thought is only unrealized, unaccomplished reality. And there is nothing other than thought, than unrealized, unaccomplished reality.

Whether it is in the acting or in what is “realized” as it is wrongly said, therefore in what is done, as it would be more correct to say, reality manifests itself both as what ends and destroys; but also its negation manifests itself, that which is neither ended nor destroyed, that which therefore tries to negate this end and this destruction. Thought is what builds and rebuilds from what reality has of fragmentary. As long as reality is not the totality (which can also be said thus: as long as the totality is not realized), thought is its precursory alienation, which can be said thus: as long as the totality is not realized, the totality is the thought whose movement is determined by the breaks, the breaches and the partial accomplishments of reality.

The preliminary question to the end of humanity is: will thought and reality divorce, can a break or a breach defeat thought? In this case the end of humanity will be what is called the catastrophe. Or can the human master the thought to the point of accomplishing it, of finding the reality of the totality by making the content of the whole thought coincide with the end of all thought? In that case, the debate of humanity on itself can open: it relates to the content of the accomplishment and the modalities of its realization, and that is the end recommended by modern teleology.

(téléologie ouverte, 2009)