Truth and Reality
This book investigates the historical and logical bonds between the notion of truth conceived as “creation” and the revelation of the world beyond any constraints of truth, beyond meaning and sense, ultimately the world of indifference toward man. In the twentieth century, the century of the linguistic turn, language began to disintegrate and lose its center in order to still be able to enclose and permeate every joint of reality; it was designed as a means of everyday concerns, the practices of life forms, social customs, information transfers, communications, and metaphorical and metonymical shifts. For the purpose of undercutting any impulses of idealization of linguistic signs, it exhibited a tendency to become an essentially ordinary language. The price to be paid for allowing no reality outside language was that language was also not permitted to surpass the weight of reality, to create events of truth, posit contextually immune ideas, and produce more truth than the situations of this world have given reason to. In contrast, the object of this treatise is precisely the fundamentally nonordinary, excessive life of language and its unrecognized relation to realism. It is our aspiration to establish a correlation between the emergences of truth and the revelations of the untruth of reality, between the operations of idealization and the processes of desymbolization.
We live in a time of many new realisms. The otherwise highly heterogeneous philosophical movement known as speculative realism seems to share one basic diagnosis in particular, from which everything else is derived: with Kant, Western philosophy lost any contact with the outside world—an interpretation that could be considered one-sided, to put it mildly. It is supposed that ever since Kant encapsulated the whole of reality within the borders of transcendental subjectivity, the modern, post-Kantian subject is incapable of stepping outside the totalizing horizons of consciousness and language. As a consequence, the philosophy of and after Kant has become almost synonymous with antirealism. Contrary to this simple equation, we would like to point out the necessary realist side of the philosophical endeavors of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and others. This book sets out to retrace another tendency in Western philosophy, according to which the possibility of realism has always been there, and to locate the subtle eventualities in which realism is provoked, facilitated, and harbored by philosophy itself, and where it no longer represents a threat to the philosophical grasp of reality. After all, today one is hardly aware of the fact that the original opponents against whom the philosophies of consciousness and linguistic turn were conceived were not realists but antirealists. Kant explicitly developed his stance against Berkeley’s idealist immaterialism and Hume’s agnosticism, the confrontation with Schulze’s skepticism provided an important incentive for the formation of German Idealism, large parts of Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s arguments are a result of the opposition to solipsism or skepticism, and so forth.
The history of modern philosophy exhibits a certain paradox. On the one hand, it seems undeniable that Kant opened the door to antirealism, and philosophy after Kant only deepened this tendency and even lost its way in the labyrinths of subjective idealism, perspectivity, existential projects, language games, and discourses. As Graham Harman puts it: “Inspired ultimately by Immanuel Kant, correlationists are devoted to the human-world correlate as the sole topic of philosophy, and this has become the unspoken central dogma of all continental and much analytic philosophy.”[1] But there is a side to Kantian and post-Kantian thought that remains somewhat overlooked and unaccounted for: philosophy after Kant began increasingly to emphasize the smallness of man and downright relish in his contingency and cosmic insignificance, and, in small but continuous steps, elaborated the notion of the world lacking any signs of human or divine reason. The question might be raised: Is reality as thought by modern philosophy now all-too-human, or is it rather basically inhuman? Does the modern subject enclose the world in his mind, or is he vanishing at the edge of a foreign universe? This impasse perhaps demands another concept of truth—in other words, the paradox must be recognized as a necessary equilibrium.
Thus, to accuse post-Kantian philosophy of antirealism is rash and inaccurate, to say the least, and we only have to read in the texts of modern philosophy with a trace of subtlety and nuance to find that in them the epistemological self-inauguration of the subject goes hand in hand with his anthropological dethronement, that the god-like centrality of the “ego” is constantly counterbalanced with his creatural marginality, that the activity of the constitutive subject is juxtaposed with the growing indifference of the world, and that the linguistic appropriation of the world simultaneously performs operations of the de-symbolization of reality. However, with these precarious equilibria, the conditions of possibility of realism have become more complex and intricate. It is therefore the goal of this treatise to demonstrate how the paradigms of consciousness and language are not necessarily incompatible with realism, but rather open new and broader possibilities for the world behind and beyond consciousness and language to disclose itself.
The book’s thesis that realism is a necessary possibility and an unacknowledged companion of modern reason is based on three main argumentative complexes, which could be titled shortly as (1) alleviation of the truth constraint from reality and the invention of indifference toward the world, (2) the possibility of proving the existence of the world from the spirit of its untruth, and (3) the revelation of the world beyond the limits of language. We discuss each of these points in a separate chapter.
The first chapter will offer a new reading of the development of philosophy from rationalism and empiricism to Kant and Hegel—not as a one-way road toward antirealism, but as a movement of allowing and releasing new dimensions of realism unthinkable in the ontologies of pre-Kantian philosophy. Based on three possible forms of truth value, three possible relations of knowledge to its outside, we will distinguish three ontologies within the progress from early modern to contemporary philosophy. The first is the “ontology of adequation,” extending from Descartes’s dualism, Malebranche’s occasionalism, Spinoza’s monism, and Leibniz’s monadology, to Berkeley’s immaterialism and Hume’s agnosticism. Second is the “ontology of totalization,” which originates from Kant’s transcendental philosophy of the conditions of possibility, but whose traces can later be found in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, Wittgenstein’s pragmatic life form, or Derrida’s text. And, finally, the third is the “ontology of release” or the “ontology of de-totalization,” whose first rudiments may have been provided by Hegel and his concept of Gleichgültigkeit, indifference. This operation of release is, in our view, one of the underestimated and unnoticed maneuvers in the history of philosophy; even Hegel did not recognize it as a “method.” And it is this operation that offers the best prospects for realism.
First, the neglected realist side of Kant’s transcendental turn will be indicated. We claim that there is such a thing as Kant’s “realism,” and that it does not consist in the possibility of directly touching the thing-in-itself, but must instead be understood historically and relatively to the philosophies of the rationalists and the empiricists. Kant’s theoretical move was to retract the forms of reason to the realm of transcendental conditions in order to liberate reality from the compulsion of directly representing ideas and to detach ideas from being directly perceivable in the immediate reality. Bluntly put, Kant constructed a philosophy that would secure the normal and necessary existence of the world behind our backs. As opposed to Descartes’s piece of paper being doubted in its existence, as opposed to Malebranche’s occasional cause being invariably induced by God, as opposed to Leibniz’s substance or monad being an immediate embodiment of its individual concept or idea, as opposed to Berkeley’s table vanishing when not perceived, and as opposed to Hume’s game of billiards lacking causal necessity, Kant in a way philosophically warranted a world that does not have to be perpetually verified and can therefore exist devoid of God’s ideas and outside the intensive constancy of the human gaze.
Second, against the common understanding according to which Hegelian absolute idealism is merely an intensification of Kant’s antirealism, we will, again, point out the ignored realist side of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel was one of the rare philosophers capable of thinking the radical meaninglessness of immediate reality, the nonanthropomorphism of the world; he even considered nature to be the realm of a “lost God.” Thus, instead of flatly accusing him of antirealism, we should examine which counterweight he deployed in the balances of truth in order to be able to afford such a disillusioned, antihumanist, effectively realist outlook on reality. A re-reading of “Sense certainty” from the Phenomenology of Spirit will reveal that Hegel’s new conceptualization of truth which is first conceived of as a representation of the given, but then, in its tenacity, exhibits a certain enduring surplus of truth, logically justifies the indifferent stance toward the immediate reality originally referred to. Behind these seemingly trivial operations there is a method at work, a somewhat overlooked method of indifference not fully recognized and developed by Hegel himself, although it is operative at every level of his thought, from epistemology to social theory and the philosophy of history. The crucial acquirement of this “indifference” is the possibility of releasing the world into a state of untruth without bereaving it of its existence. If there is such a thing as Hegel’s “realism,” it lies in the ability to consider reality as existing without also being the carrier of any truth. The gist of Hegel’s move consists in establishing an emergent realm of a higher standing, from where the facticity which was once under its jurisdiction is “released” into a periphery beyond any claims of truth. The self-reflexivity of Hegel’s concept can only be realized if it simultaneously points to its necessary outside, which is not conceptually pre-determined. This balance between self-positing entities and their outside losing the stamp of human forms, this basic equation in all its many variations, is the main logical form around which our treatise is built.
The second chapter will further elucidate the stance of the “untruth of reality.” The correlation will be investigated between reality subsisting in “a state of least pretension” and truth assuming the form of surplus, creation, emergence, and the new. It is our intention to discern and expose a certain inherent fallacy of the concept of truth inasmuch as it derives its “value” from reality and demands to be verified by it. Following in the footsteps of the three famous “ontological proofs” of Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, we will show that the possibilities of proving the existence of the world arise when the frame is first set up in which the truth constraint can finally be alleviated from reality, that is, when reality no longer needs to represent and embody an idea. These “ontologies of totalization” all made use of the same method of a shift of emphasis from this individual thing to the framework of experience that encompasses a multitude and, potentially, the entirety of things: Kant’s context of experience, Heidegger’s totality of involvements, and Wittgenstein’s life form. Now, this method of the alleviation of truth must be carried out to its utmost consequences. The enigma of reality unfolds where the “truth constraint” is applied, where the idea is supposed to be incarnated. To put it simply, where truth is expected from reality, reality becomes precarious. Within the frame of the “ontology of adequation,” it is the immediate thing to which the imposition of embodying an idea is applied, so the thing becomes an object of doubt, needs to be closed off within the boundaries of a monad, or vanishes behind our backs. The existence of the singular thing, however, becomes less opaque if the perspective of a totality preceding it is assumed. Nonetheless, the “ontologies of totalization” could outplay the impasses of the “ontologies of adequation” only by assuming another “ideal surplus” holding the world together, a surplus called “conditions of possibility,” “significance,” “meaning.” The correlate of the “idea” striving to be incarnated is now no longer a singular object but a mediation of totality. And, by extension, the operation of presupposed totalization produces its own illusions, which, instead of unsettling singular things, befall the whole of being and end up in Kantian dialectic, Heidegger’s wonder of Being, or Wittgenstein’s mysticism of the fact that the world is. Thus, in order to transcend the impasses of this second ontology, we will go even further in severing the bond between truth and reality; we will consider the possibility of a reality resisting any ideal over-determination and offering no ground for ideas to be incarnated within it. As an object of truth, reality is problematic; as an object of untruth, it becomes unquestionable again. Hence, a new proof for the existence of the world will be proposed, an attempt to prove it by first making it untrue. We are aiming at a new concept of truth, which will ascribe a different status to reality and disclose an entirely other dimension of being whereby something exists while at the same time not being true, and whereby it represents its own untruth only by the fact that it simply exists.
By maintaining the irreducible duality of truth and reality, the third chapter will pursue the truth processes not insofar as there is a reality that they refer to directly, but only insofar as truth must first emerge in order to reveal reality beyond the constraints of meaning and sense. We have grown accustomed to regarding language as a “prison house,” “a limit to our world,” “an obligatory rubric,” but, again, the other, realist side of the possibilities offered by language must finally be acknowledged and explored. It could be shown how discourses themselves trigger and motivate the processes of de-symbolization that enable an egress from the culturally adopted, socially mediated, pragmatically embedded, linguistically structured world. And it is our view that only these processes, which take place throughout the history of philosophy, can lay the foundations for a long-term and viable realism. A series of examples will demonstrate that philosophy has always known how to force discourse into disclosing the world beyond human forms, the world without man, and to exceed the limits of language by means of language itself.
To this purpose, a new relation between idealism and realism must be devised. Interestingly, although Kant is now considered an enemy of realism, he at other times faced accusations that were exactly the opposite. Hegel criticized him less for positing the inaccessible thing-in-itself than for the fact that he robbed the German people of metaphysics. In Kant, we are not only incapable of stepping out of ourselves, we are also prohibited from going beyond the limits of possible knowledge; things-in-themselves escape us as much as ideas do. And the same could be said about the various “language philosophies” of the twentieth century and the linguistic turn in particular. The brute, nonanthropomorphic reality outside of the human gaze is not the only casualty of the linguistic usurpation of reality; any kind of idealist production of language, irreducible to Heidegger’s locus of truth, Wittgenstein’s pragmatic point of the situation, or Derrida’s differential context, falls victim to it as well. Perhaps the far more elegant, accurate, and effective approach to surpassing the horizon of language and breaking free from the constraints of conceptual meaning consists of first realizing that all the implicitly or explicitly “linguistic” ontologies repressed the possibilities of realism as much as they did the possibilities of idealism. It is this idealist side which, in present-day realism, remains underexposed. Therefore, an attack from both the realist and the idealist side may be needed. While the philosophies of the twentieth century were consumed by an incessant effort to restrict any spontaneous idealism of language and abolish the arising idealities in concrete, pragmatic, contextual, and metaphorical uses, it is our belief that only idealist productions of language emerging in diachronic, historical speech acts, deemed truth creations, are capable of bringing the symbolic function to its collapse, thus releasing the gaze to a de-symbolized periphery of being and finally to a world that no longer needs to presuppose the existence of man.
Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), vii.