(1974)
Real is what is not unreal. I am aware that this sentence must strike a logician as disastrous. But as a tautology, it is not supposed to be a definition but rather serves the function of a methodical rule. After all, for the concept of reality [Wirklichkeitsbegriff], we cannot use the etymology of the words “real” and “reality” as a guiding thread for its conceptual history. Only by heeding this fact can we avoid the fate that befell the “concept of being” [Seinsbegriff]. From the hypostatization of a grammatical element—the copula—and with the help of the possibilities language afforded to the participle and the infinitive with an article, “being” set itself up to gain a special position in metaphysics that thrives on this element’s ambiguities, which Aristotle was the first to point out.1
The concept of reality does not permit us to choose any linguistic equivalents from the lexical arsenal as easily as we could if, for instance, we were to write the conceptual history of the “urge for knowledge,” where we could be on the lookout for terms like “curiosity,” “striving for wisdom,” “natural disposition for truth,” “wanting to know,” or “knowledge drive.” The concept of reality is an “implicative predicate.” The reason for this is its predominantly pragmatic function. The guiding thread toward the concept of reality is any form of “realism,” albeit not chiefly that realism, which calls itself so. The rule that real is what is not unreal urges us to take a detour via that which in each case is deemed unreal and is rejected as such. The concept of reality’s indeterminacy and historicity is based on the very fact that the ways of being unreal prove to be inexhaustible. To expose what is illusionary never guarantees that the “remainder” of what is not exposed in this way is the permanently and reliably real. Put theoretically, falsification is the nonattainable par excellence.
This explains why every realism can itself be instrumentalized. The label “reality,” attached to what is to be designated as authoritative, authenticates the positive proposition as that which is meant to be thought of as possible. This implies that the concept of reality becomes ambiguous exactly at that point where its implicative function can be studied in the greatest detail—in aesthetics.
The more general the object we discuss, the less we can discuss it by trying to grasp the object itself and keep it fixed in our regard. Quite the contrary: one can speak best of the most general by “disregarding” it, by regarding something else or that which is completely different. It is not only the Platonic and mystic tradition that has spoken of the highest principle by consistently looking at what it is not, and then according a negative value to all it found. Already in the didactic poem of Parmenides, philosophy begins by declaring its topic to be what is [das Seiende] but having almost nothing to say about it, while a lot more could probably have been said about the sphere of appearances, understood as that which is not [das Nichtseiende]. If we want to state a minimally meaningful proposition about such general things as the “world” or “life,” we likewise can do so only by disregarding the overwhelming topic and choosing a guiding schema. There may be something arbitrary about this choice unless we can show that we dare to approach the discussion of such generalities only because we already possess our orientation. Metaphor is not the retrospective illustration of the overly abstract but the initial encouragement to engage with it in the first place. It opens up access to the highest degrees of abstraction. Let me mention an instructive example of this method. In 1900, Georg Simmel published his Philosophy of Money.2 The very topic served him as a detour by which to speak of the more abstract topic of “value.” But not until two decades later, at the end of his path, did it become clear to what degree of abstraction he was able to raise the insights of this early investigation into the concept of “life as transcendence.”3 Money, it turns out, is the primary metaphor for the expression “life,” which otherwise seems completely lacking in content. With a view to the problem of time, “life” is the contrasting concept for a whole register of cultural criticism with its stigmata of petrification, overinstitutionalization, anachronistic vestiges, and ritualized immobility. Life is the epitome of the very counterdynamic to the liquidity of all values that Simmel had discovered in his earlier Philosophy of Money.
It is imperative to clear the path toward such primary intuitiveness in a methodical way, if discussion of the implicative concept of reality is not to lapse into the same sterility that, despite all the efforts of Heidegger’s successors, we must ascribe to the history of the concept of being—and, in its wake, even to the supposed “history of being” itself. Intuitiveness has the reputation of being merely illustrative and elaborative only because, by virtue of its belonging to the discipline of rhetoric—for instance, in the form of metaphor and simile—it seems as though it was added after the fact and is thus genetically dispensable. This is a false appearance that the author unavoidably creates by reversing the sequence of his presentation.
Reality is not only, in the traditional sense, the actualization of a thing in relation to its pure possibility, but, additionally, its actuality in consciousness. This can mean reliability as well as urgency, depending on what seems to be at risk or what is demanded. From the direction of given reality, the alternative to reliability and meaning also intrudes into the theoretical attitude and engulfs it in a dilemma that only the entire process of modern science has completely brought to the surface: if the need for reliability becomes absolute, our receptiveness to meaning, relevance, and urgency tends toward zero.
Descartes intensified his doubt about the existence of the world as it appears to us to the point of considering it a deception by a genius malignus [evil spirit]. He turned the reliability of the great metaphysical guarantee for human life in the world—“to go forward with confidence in this life”4—into the thorn in the side of modern philosophy; admittedly, it soon exchanged transcendent for transcendental presuppositions. What is crucial, however, is that the medieval guarantee had replaced the loss of the ancient assumption that you can tell simply by looking that reality is not unreal, provided that one is not only confronted with unreality, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave facing their shadows.5 In search of a guarantee for reality, Descartes is still wholly entangled in the Middle Ages, although he can no longer share its trust in the indubitability of this guarantee.
The great deception, which Descartes introduces only as the boundary value of his doubt, presupposes two things: first, the implication of the real’s claim to be what it appears to be; and second, the possibility that all features of the real may be imitated or simulated, without the production of these features yielding the objective equivalent of reality.
It was only Leibniz who saw, against Descartes, that the complete simulation of reality would no longer be a deception, since it would lack both the implied claim about the nonexisting as well as the harm of disappointment for whoever is affected by it.6 Put differently: the great Baroque idea of life as a dream is, for Leibniz, not only without any horrors but the expression of a new concept of reality in which the internal consistency of everything given is identical to the possible solidity of reality. Reality is no longer like an assertion whose credibility depends on the quality of the speaker.
On the other hand: unreality now menaces any reality as an irrevocable reservation, just as even the longest chain of inductive verification is theoretically exposed to the ever-present possibility of falsification. We understand what we mean by the expression “real” not in regard to a disjunction that is available at any given moment but in relation to the possibilities that lie within this process.
The belief that there is such a thing as a stigma of “noninventability” constitutes, if I may say so, the anachronism that haunts modern aesthetic realisms. We need only think of the ambiguous relationship it has to probability [Wahrscheinlichkeit]: for an event to appear realistic, it must be improbable to the extent that no one could have possibly invented it—and so one may take a piece of information from a newspaper. Another case: the protagonist of a modern novel “reads a novel in which too much happens” and confirms the realism of the author who created him with the words: “In reality, it is not like this at all.”7 The result is the inversion of the argument: because little happens in reality, it is enough to write a novel in which nothing much transpires to give it the mark of noninventedness.
The difference to antiquity’s concept of reality is that in modernity there is nothing for us that could dispel all illusions and prove itself to be the definitely real. On this assumption rested the faith common to both Greeks and Hebrews that a god, if he were to appear, would remove any doubt in the reality of his presence precisely because such an ideal value of indubitability incarnate was possible. Modernity’s attack on miracles elucidates the concept of reality based on immanent consistency not so much by uncovering its contradictions, but, more radically, by establishing that there can be no such thing as the instantaneous self-evidence of reality. To sidestep a thing so as not to collide with it is the most elementary form of deeming it real. But to trace this detour around the thing—a pragmatic and completed gesture—does nothing to indicate whether it was in fact real; it only makes what had been important in this process appear indifferent now. The presupposition of antiquity was that one would stop in front of the thing if one could rely on standing before the pure and final reality, not leaving open a comparison of realities—put Platonically: if one had arrived at the idea itself.
The traditional concept of being is not something like the abstract remainder of a more complete concept of reality; it is an utterly different construction. This can be illustrated by way of the “modalities.” As regards the concept of being, the necessary (ens necessarium) is the exemplary, and in fact, exhaustive “case.” The real is only its dependent and contingent residual state. The possible belongs to its character insofar as it allows the factual to be determined a “case” of the possible: because different things and different ways would be possible, it is not the necessary.
For the concept of reality, the same approach leads to a completely different set of characters. The ens necessarium, if it existed among us, would be that which is indifferent, autarkic, and thus ineffective. This showpiece of the metaphysical tradition would not be able to sustain itself in our consciousness; our attention would lose it the same way one drops a pebble when one no longer knows why one picked it up in the first place. Metaphysicians of all stripes had to discover with horror that their proofs of an ens necessarium, which they often thought successful, were unable to affect the presence of what had thus been proved in consciousness. And it was not by chance that the very same tradition has had the greatest difficulties to ascribe any effectiveness to the found ens necessarium—and why should it? Why should we care about it, and why it about us? Pascal rightly noted in his famous Mémorial that his god had nothing in common with the “god of the philosophers.”8
Likewise, the factual affects us only insofar as it offers possibilities. For this reason, matter—this futile substrate for idea and form, the hyle [matter] of antiquity—becomes for the modern concept of reality the point of convergence of the theoretical and the practical attitude. It is therefore only consistent that it ultimately reveals itself to be the equivalent of energy.
This can be shown even more distinctly in the transformation of the concept of space. For antiquity, space—the pure possibility of the simultaneous—is not a reality. It becomes reality as soon as the fact enters into consciousness that space is the great consumer of time, that even light itself does not traverse it instantly. As soon as the finite speed of light was not only discovered but had also turned out to be a value that was small in relation to the size of the world, space could become a determining, powerful, consciousness-worrying reality. The man of the modern age who tries to increase the natural speed of movement for himself to gain the time that is his definitely finite potential discovers the reality of space by realizing that to conquer it, he has to exert the greatest part of his own energy and the energy he has at his disposal.
For the modern age, it is highly significant that reality discovers itself only in the moment in which it steps out of the sheer unavailability of mere resistance—without becoming pure availability, however. What is effortlessly and automatically available sinks back into the obviousness of something that is nothing at all, as does the necessary, as soon as it exists. What is or becomes unreal is that which does not imply any possibilities.
It is, however, not enough to trace back the changes in the concept of reality—from antiquity to the Middle Ages and to the modern age—to certain historical causalities, events, or discoveries, such as the discovery of the finite speed of light. There is a logic to this change that is much more elemental. Embedded in antiquity’s concept of reality was that the world corresponds to man’s capacity for understanding. Aristotle’s dictum that, in a way, the soul is everything, was the maximally reduced formula that was still prevalent in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. To this formula corresponds the expectation that experience is, in principle, finite and can be reduced to a catalog of distinct Gestalten, each of which communicates its reality in the instantaneous self-evidence of a confirmed ought-to-be. The Platonic theory of ideas and the notion of anamnesis [recollection] are merely consistent interpretations of the basic fact that such instantaneous self-evidence, such confirmation in propria persona [Leibhaftigkeit], might exist. Even Husserl tried to rediscover this self-evidence in his phenomenology by choosing the metaphor of an experience in propria persona for the original impression.9
It is easy to see that an excess of the given—a genuine disproportion between world and consciousness, against which the latter, as it were, has to defend and shield itself—has remained unknown to this concept of reality. Even the all-ruling randomness of the atomists kept on producing the same worlds.
Only the Middle Ages destroyed the “fit” between world and consciousness in favor of the omnipotence of the creation principle and at the expense of human confidence in the world, of course without quite permitting the ultimate conclusion: the suspicion that without any regard for man, the world could be the epitome of an infinite manifold of phenomena never to be fully grasped by experience. The finite typicality of always already achieved experiences is not a reliable arsenal for the experiences that are still to come. The consciousness of reality depends on an economy that might be its own but is not that of the given. Man in the modern age is the inundated creature; his concept of reality aims at avoiding the unexpected, at containment, at producing consistency against the case of inconsistency. His experience is reduced to categories whose scope, on the one hand, a priori excludes the boundary case of the perfectly irregular, and on the other, has to set a very high threshold for allowing the purely singular.
Here, an ambiguity becomes possible that could perhaps express itself in the anxious question of whether the real in the strict sense might be precisely that which could break through the consistency of the consciousness of reality. The theoretical attitude of the scientist cannot make much of this ambiguity, because it is the methodically developed expression of that effort of economy and its capacity. It is the aesthetic attitude that works with this ambiguity. The fiction of the classical realisms consists in the assumption that in the compression of descriptive means—in the precision of unlocking what before had already become commonplace and thus unreal—reality can be grasped. Against this realism, there is another that breaks open the immunization of consciousness through consistency by means of paradox, contradiction, and the absurd. “Real reality is always unrealistic,” as Kafka put it;10 and this conception is directed against the disappointment that finds in successful consistency only the dull “and so on” of the always already given. From this perspective, the aesthetic sensibility does not tolerate the successful performance of the theoretical attitude. To the pragmatic concept of reality as an actuality in consciousness, only that is valid which cannot be rejected, suppressed, and leveled to the status of a theoretical object. The quotidian—which cannot be of interest to the theoretician, because it is already incorporated into the consistency of the ordinary—must seem like the enormity that does not require any distracting events to be restored to that kind of reality with which man is engaged in such a way that he has always already retracted his attention from it. This turn of the aesthetic interest can only be understood if one conceives of it as running counter to the capacity of theory, which long ago successfully took on what is out of the ordinary.
One last remark must address the claim that modern age’s concept of reality as immanent consistency has a high affinity to simulation. It is to be expected that in a crowded world, authentic dealings with reality must be replaced more and more by simulators. Already a decade ago, an intelligent misprint turned an “outer-space simulator” [Weltraumsimulator] into a “world simulator” [Weltsimulator]; this last is the boundary idea of the convergence of reality and unreality. Similar to Leibniz’s defense of the ideal dream against the radical doubt of Descartes, we cannot even say that putting an end to the conflict between everybody’s claim to reality by the inexhaustibility of simulation would be lacking a human perspective.
Translated by Hannes Bajohr
Originally published as “Vorbemerkungen zum Wirklichkeitsbegriff,” in Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur in Mainz. Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 4 (1974): 3–10.
1. [Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 92b14, Metaphysics Β.3, 998b22.]
2. [Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1990). Blumenberg elaborates on his reading of Simmel’s work in “Money or Life: Metaphors of Georg Simmel’s Philosophy,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 7–8 (2013): 249–62.]
3. [Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, ed. John A. Y. Andrews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), chap. 1.]
4. [René Descartes, Discourse on Method (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 6.]
5. [Blumenberg discusses Plato’s cave with regard to the concept of reality in “The Life-World and the Concept of Reality,” in Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 425–444.]
6. [Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Critical Thoughts on the General Part of the Principles of Descartes,” Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer), 383–412.]
7. [Walter Helmut Fritz, Die Beschaffenheit solcher Tage (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1972), 127.]
8. [Blaise Pascal, “Memorial,” Great Shorter Works of Pascal, trans. Emile Cailliet and John C. Blankenagel (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1948), 117.]
9. [Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 2:86. Findlay translates Husserl’s leibhaftig (bodily, personified) as “in propria persona,” which I have adopted here.]
10. [Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981), 91.]