Toward an Ontological Proof for the Existence of the World

One of the questions that philosophy is ardently committed to solving, although no one else is in need of an answer, is whether reality exists. Thus, philosophy often seems to oscillate between great triviality and utter incomprehensibility, giving the impression of being an exercise in splitting hairs. When hearing philosophical arguments, ordinary people sometimes react by saying at once “But we already know that” and “I do not follow,” for the greatest speculative efforts must be employed to prove the existence of something which is self-evident to anyone except the philosophers.

Now, imagine sitting on a beach with a friend, who in our presence caught some of this philosophical malady, while a boat comes sliding by across the sea. The friend asks: “You are a philosopher. Tell me, is this boat real or not?” One way of answering would be to say, “Save your doubts for when they are more called for and make more sense. You are fully justified to utter them when confronted with mirages in the desert or vague perceptions in the dark, but not here.” This is something Wittgenstein, and perhaps Kant and Heidegger, would say to the everyday skeptic: doubt is only possible after we have already known how to use the world in its (potential) entirety. Our response is thus based on a prior assumption of far greater magnitude. We can point to doubt making more sense elsewhere only in a world which is presupposed to make sense everywhere. And this “presupposition of meaning” will, sooner or later, take its toll. It comes as no surprise that this method of referring doubt to its proper place opens another dilemma on a totally different level. If our friend takes the lesson of not questioning the existence of a boat driving by seriously, it may very well happen that later, as the night falls, he will look up into the starry sky and wonder: “Why, do you think, is there Being instead of nothing?” For in order to downplay our doubts as practices with limited applicability, the world itself has to be hyperbolized in a thoroughly meaningful whole, and suddenly it is Being as such that begins to justify itself in the face of nothingness. Small doubts seem to lose their grip only in a world that itself becomes a grand mystery. Descartes’s method presumed that this or that thing might be a complete and exhaustive maker of truth; hence, he doubted its existence. Heidegger, however, to take the most pointed counterexample, shifted the frame of verification from a single object of doubt to a “totality of involvements”; but, as if by way of compensation, he placed the world within the interplay of concealment and unconcealment and ended by repeating the famous “Leibnizean question.” In other words, the Seinsfrage always seems to be posed against the background of the assumption that this world is somehow predestined or even obliged to make our lives meaningful, that there is an almost transcendent guarantee of things in it making sense.

Now, our task is not only to invalidate Cartesian doubt, but also to suspend the existential kitsch of the Heideggerian question of Being, not only to surpass the pretension of clarity and distinctness, but also to overcome the pretension of meaning. If Heidegger claims that it is “a scandal of philosophy” that proofs for the existence of things outside of us “are expected and attempted again and again” (SuZ 249), then we might hazard a guess as to whether it is not also a scandal of philosophy that it still poses the question of Being—if it really does so. And if Heidegger says that we understand the hammer most adequately if we grab it and use it to hit a nail, we could claim that the world is most adequately comprehended when the question of Being is no longer asked at all. It is perhaps high time to aim at a theory of truth that strives to reach a point of indifference to the total alternative of being and nothing and thus achieve complete resistance to the sublime miracle of Being. Our realism will no longer gaze at the stars with awe and wonder; instead, it will aspire to bereave our immediate world of meaning and truth. Therefore, a far more elegant answer to the first question might be proposed. “The issue is not,” we could reply to the friend, “whether we are sure about the existence of this boat or not. However, if we were to doubt it, we would already project truth in it and reveal ourselves as those who expect from reality nothing less than being true.” As we will try to show in this chapter, it is precisely this argument which avoids the antinomies and the mystifying consequences of previous solutions to the existence of the world: for it never considers Being as something that is only questioned in order to be marveled at. The existence of the boat becomes even more “common-place” than in the worlds of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, but with the catch that it exists merely for the purpose of not assuming a truth. Being, it might well be said, is not there because it is rather than nothing, because it nurtures a desire to be and needs an additional boost of cosmogonic energy to appear; there is no rather, no plutôt or lieber in Being. It is there, because only as existent can it occupy the space of least meaning and express the state of least truth. Or, in other words, Being is not a cosmic credit that must be repaid by meaning and awe; it is an untruth that should be endured with indifference.

Thus, in this chapter we shall try to elucidate why the “question of reality” is so persistent, and to define the operations which make it into an object of a certain (almost existential) capriciousness and instability. Our aim will be to analyze the somewhat hazardous and ambiguous relation between truth and reality and to place it on new ground. The first impetus of our examination is the detection of a certain inherent impasse, which arises when the concepts of truth and reality cross paths and collide. The issue could be addressed in all clarity and bluntness: Why is it that reality starts feeling bad about itself the moment truth gazes upon it? What happens that, to Descartes, even his hands and feet suddenly forfeit their clarity and distinctness? And why should we first suffer the vexations of everyday life and then, in addition, wonder at the gift of Being? As we will hopefully succeed in demonstrating, these deadlocks of reality assuming ever more enigmatic qualities and of truth being preferably expressed in the form of questions rather than answers are a consequence of a certain intrinsic fallacy of the concept of truth and its philosophical appropriation.

Already the pre-philosophical mind, living in a world full of meaning and holding it together only by means of this presupposed significance, seems to believe in some sort of natural affinity between truth and reality. And this is the first apple of discord. By putting reality under the strain of needing to represent truth, by reason of this truth expectation alone, even the everyday world always motivates and provokes a certain lack of reality. An enigma of Being is a constant threat unfolding at the verge of common sense. But it is philosophy which overvalues this predicament into conveying the impression as if reality was in itself nothing but a primordial craving to become true and as if truth had no other ambition but to correspond to a given a reality and be affirmed and verified by it. However, the necessary outcome of this assumption is that, when being suspected of truth, reality, in return, begins to elude our grasp, be it in any of the variations of Cartesian doubt or in any of the versions of Kantian transcendental ideas. Philosophy hence elevates the slightest unevenness of common sense into the ultimate criterion of its method, thereby completely reversing its original value; it takes hold of two ordinary concepts and brings them ad absurdum. Paradoxically, truth, instead of making things and facts feel more real, tends to function as an instrument of doubting whether reality exists in the first place and, at the extreme, even of rendering Being miraculous. Only by having had the concept of truth applied to it too strictly and straightforwardly does the previously self-evident and taken-for-granted world forfeit all its natural solidity. So now, it must be considered if it were not preferable to finally alleviate reality of all compulsions and presumptions of truth.

To overcome these philosophically induced idiosyncrasies, the question is long overdue by what means, what powers and warrants, the institute of truth enters the guileless world, which in itself never seems to harbor a desire to be the carrier of some distinct “truth.” Here, the first contours of a new definition of truth will slowly begin to take shape—an endeavor we will continue in the final chapter. As the analyses might show, truth will appear to be a supplemental entity, which sets in by virtue of the spontaneous processes of idealization within consciousness and language, that is, an entity which, being suddenly faced with these unanticipated ideal surpluses, first reacts by “suturing” them back to reality in order to cultivate and neutralize them then and there. Truth is a disposition provoked by ideas striving to be incarnated, and, failing to do so, it renders its intended object, reality, itself precarious. When truth expects to be verified by real things or states of affairs, this only means that it is incapable of acknowledging its irreducibly ideal nature, which can never be fully absorbed and compensated by the given world. Thus, we will embark on a quest for a new concept of truth, whose aspiration will be to finally detach itself from reality, to cast off the values and constraints imposed upon it, and to establish itself as a realm of ideas, insofar as they operate precisely as safeguards against their own immediate and adequate incarnation. Perhaps the possibility might be touched upon whether truth could not elude the paradoxes of its impositions and pretenses better when it no longer relied on being verified by reality, but rather conceived of itself as a process of revealing its untruth.

In the first two of the three ontologies we have differentiated, the enigma of reality arises exactly at the spot where a “truth constraint” is applied, where the idea is, so to say, supposed to be embodied. The unstable element in the first one, the ontology of adequacy, is therefore the immediate thing, which, alternately, becomes an object of doubt, needs to be closed off within the boundaries of a monad, or vanishes behind our backs. The existence of this immediate thing, however, becomes much less opaque if we assume the perspective of a totality, which precedes it. The essentially indirect and mediate proof of the existence of things could well be performed by the shift of emphasis from this individual thing to the framework of experience, which encompasses a multitude and, potentially, the entirety of things. This operation, this method of “outplaying the partialities from the vantage point of totality,” forms the basis of what are probably the three most famous, and structurally very similar, proofs for “the existence of things outside us”: Kant’s proof in the Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger’s proof in Being and Time, and Wittgenstein’s proof in his short treatise On Certainty. Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein all asked the question of how to step out of ourselves in order to grasp the world; and they answered it by showing that it is always already done: we are within-the-world before we can even start inquiring about its existence. Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s arguments explicitly advocated a regression from the philosophical approach of questioning reality to the pre-philosophical attitude of never having needed to do so. But even this second ontology is not free from its logical compulsions and impossibilities. In its utmost consequences, it 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. The reason for these “transcendental illusions” is, of course, quite clear: the ideal surplus holding the world together is now called “conditions of possibility,” “significance,” and “meaning,” so the correlate of the “idea” striving to be incarnated is no longer an immediate object but, instead, a mediation of the totality. The operation of totalization can only be performed if it transforms the world into a place of full meaning and places it under the constraint of uniform sense. The things are now firm and real, but the world becomes unreal and illusive under the ideal supposition of meaning—and the enigma of reality persists. Thus, in order to transcend the impasses of the ontology of totalization, we will consider the contrary possibility, a reality which resists any ideal over-determination and offers no ground for ideas to be incarnated within it. While Heidegger and Wittgenstein endeavored to suppress the effects of specifically “philosophical” idealization by regressing to the always already functioning, essentially pre-philosophical ordinary language and everyday world, we will rather pursue a progressive method, a method which will acknowledge the value of ideal surpluses and simultaneously regard the impulses of idealization as irreducible to and unredeemable within reality. There are perhaps two fallacies to be diagnosed and overcome, the pre-philosophical and the philosophical. Already the pre-philosophical grasp of reality revolves around its necessary idealist claim. But it is philosophy which turns this ideal surplus decidedly against reality and makes reality seem unreal, as, most notably, in Cartesian doubt. Now, we should pinpoint the fallacy of this philosophical operation as well. We must realize that reality proves enigmatic only because something too ideal is expected from it. Thus, instead of using idealities in order to scrutinize, restrain, and unsettle reality, they must be recognized as primary instruments of revealing the world beyond any ideal constraints.

We will try to show that the existence of the world cannot be proved as an object of totalization but only as an object of release, thereby dissolving the “self-evident realism” of totalization toward an “indifferent realism” of a de-totalized world. In other words, we will try to prove the world from the spirit of its untruth.

The Ontological Argument for
the Existence of the World in
Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein

It is frequently the case that the most eminent philosophical questions, questions concerning the existence of the world, God, the meaning of Being, and so forth, are not resolved by a direct answer, but by a shift of emphasis that displaces the issue itself from the domain of truth and renders it impertinent. Even the greatest questions eventually become stale and lose their previous charge. As we have shown in the previous chapter, the aporias of the rationalists and the empiricists became Scheinprobleme in Kant—so-called pseudo-problems, as Kant referred to the dilemma of body and soul. In this vein precisely, the horizon of Cartesian doubt was most often broken and outweighed.

To this day, our thinking is somewhat spontaneously governed by the idea that Cartesian doubt represents a paradigm of the beginning of philosophy, a philosophical opening gesture par excellence. In our instinctive, perhaps immature minds, we still believe that the first and most fundamental philosophical question is whether the outer world exists or not. It seems as if doubt itself cannot be doubted. It may be that previously we led a fairly comfortable and efficient practical life, but once we enter the domain of philosophy, we are filled with a pretentiousness of a sort, so that even the most common objects of use are suddenly beset with an aura of untruthfulness and falsity. The instantaneous philosophemes start sounding like platitudes: “Everything is an illusion,” “Nothing is what it seems,” or “The truth does not exist.”

Even though (Cartesian) doubt represents some kind of “rite of passage” to the path of truth, in itself, like any method, it combines a number of prejudices and presumptions. It tacitly implies, first, that clear and distinct representations are a full truth by themselves; second, that the “I” assumes a preliminary, isolated, extramundane position from where the world can be subjected to doubt in the first place; third, that the outer world is the primary object of seeking truth; fourth, that the boundary between the “I” and the outside world is previously defined, and so on. For instance, if one finds the things perceived to be false, then one presupposes at least one truth: that one knows where exactly the line is to be drawn between the otherwise potentially true, yet structurally inaccessible reality and the subject of knowledge, equipped with imperfect, unreliable, and deceptive senses.

Nevertheless, we can now imagine a different approach to reality by posing the following alternative. To believe that the outside world exists and is approximately the same as the senses reproduce it, is admittedly presumptuous, since an irrefutable proof for it is missing; strictly speaking, this kind of proof is most probably unthinkable. Yet to believe that the outside world is different from what the senses reproduce, that our representation of it is in fact false, is even more pretentious, since this alleged falsity, first, by default assumes that we are in full possession of a truth criterion that could disqualify the content of sense perceptions, second, it automatically ascribes to the outside world a distinctive, unattainable existence of a “truth-maker,” and, finally, it also presumes that we know exactly where to draw the line between the outside and the inside, which the truth is then incapable of trespassing. In this new alternative, the truth is not decided by comparing the reality of the outside world and the content of our inner representations of it, but by weighing the two pretentiousnesses and deciding that the one is more aloof and superfluous than the other. Thus, it is an act of choosing between the assumption that the world can never be known adequately and the assumption that we don’t have any discriminative criterion at our disposal according to which the ego and the world should a priori be unattainable to each other.

Let us then look at the two famous “proofs for the existence of the world” within the ontology of totalization, Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s.^[1] Heidegger’s Being and Time is perhaps the most famous document of the “method” of choosing the least presumptuous stance from the selection of many (the Leibnizean, Berkeleyean, Humean, the scientific, inductive, experimental, quantifiable). The terms of Dasein’s concern, Besorgen (or, in a broader sense, care, Sorge) and the “tool-character” of things stand precisely for the fall of the modern boundary between inside and outside. If the primary relation to the world was once expressed by the “theoretical” coordinates of representation, perception, induction, abstraction, and so forth, it can now be conceived through life-world concepts such as “average everydayness,” “ready-to-handedness,” “proximally and for the most part,” and the like. Heidegger’s “practization” of the theoretical world, his normalization of objectivity, does certainly not function as a “direct proof of the existence of the world,” but can only be defined as a choice of a lesser pretentiousness. It is therefore not the case that Heidegger’s world was in any way truer than that of Descartes, the point is rather that the Cartesian method and all its skeptic variations are more presumptuous, which is precisely the pivotal point of the argument.

Thus, Heidegger’s “proof” of the existence of the world is even more mediate than that of Kant, expressly relying on a shift-of-emphasis argument. If, in Kant, “the scandal of philosophy” was the fact that the proof of the world is missing (see KrV B xl), in Heidegger, the need alone, the mere claim to such a proof is scandalous, since it relies on a fundamental incomprehension of the nature of the entity which does the proving (see SuZ 249). Heidegger does not answer the question of the existence of the world directly (despite the many neologisms and neographisms he does not invent any kind of new, even more immediate index, through which the thing would fall out from his book), but only relativizes the question itself with regard to its suppositions:

The point is that the very question of the existence of the world has no point to begin with. It can only be posed because Heidegger’s subject is always already a “Being-in-the-world.” Consequently, when this subject inquires about the world, he does not realize that he inquires about something which requires no inquiry and, thus, he undercuts his own preconditions. Heidegger’s method neutralizes these seemingly primary and essential philosophical questions (Is this thing true? Does the world exist?) within the realm of a prior self-evidence: worldhood, average everydayness, care. Along with the Being of Dasein, the world is always already there.

Heidegger’s ontology is situated in a fine equilibrium between un-totality (as expressed by the concepts of facticity, the thrownness of Dasein, its natality) and the attempt to define the point from which totality could be achieved. His so-called “fundamental ontology” is thus an ontology of cosmic un-totality as a condition of possibility of the totality of (human, mortal) existence.^[2] Seen from this perspective, Heidegger’s extravagant concepts, such as his apriorisches Perfekt, the “perfect tense a priori,” Je-schon-haben-bewenden-lassen, “having already something be involved,” Sich-vorweg-sein, “Being-ahead of itself,” and so forth, should all be interpreted as matrices of a prior and presupposed totality. From the standpoint of Dasein as the “Being-in-the-world,” everything automatically undergoes totalization; the entities are vorerschlossen, “disclosed beforehand,” and the world exists only within the “totality of Dasein’s involvements”: “As the Being of something ready-to-hand, an involvement is itself discovered only on the basis of the prior discovery of a totality of involvements” (SuZ 118).

With respect to this or that thing, Heidegger is therefore a “realist”;^[3] things do exist, but not as things. They exist as taken-for-granted equipment:

Here, Cartesian doubt no longer applies, because we seize hold of and use the hammer before we have had a chance to doubt it. What Heidegger wants is to prevent us from using the idea of the “hammer” to scrutinize this hammer. Within the world working like clockwork any ideal impulse must be strictly inhibited. On the front between ideas and things, the relation of absolute correspondence should never constitute itself, which is why the hammers of this world start existing beyond any ideally induced doubt. However, if Descartes was satisfied with the “winter dressing-gown” or the “fireplace” separately, in the case of the hammer, Dasein must suddenly take into account all other pragmata as well: “Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is” (SuZ 97).

Wittgenstein’s “proof for the existence of the world” does not differ significantly from Heidegger’s, since both are grounded in the premise of “the world” as a self-evident background of our practical attitudes. His famous text On Certainty could arguably be read as a response to Descartes’s Meditations^[4] and his method of doubting the existence of “this hand.” But he did explicate a turn which in Kant and Heidegger was implicit at best. He showed consistently that the shift of emphasis from an individual thing to the “totality of involvements” can only be performed within the prior assumption of the constitutive ontological function of language. As we have already seen, in Kant, substances are replaced by relations, the static thing translates into dynamic causality, and every analytic entity always already presupposes the act of synthesis. And it could be shown that these inversions of hierarchy between substantiality and relationality, the static and the dynamic, analysis and synthesis, the part and the whole, are possible only against the background of one specific operation: beneath the manifest argument of “real causality,” which connects all phenomena, lies a latent process of the total languaging, Versprachlichung, of the world. Kant’s categorical apparatus bears connotations of linguistic operations in a much more straightforward manner than the innate ideas of the rationalists’ or the empiricists’ acts of the mind. Experience is constituted via the concepts as functions of the spontaneity of understanding and, more specifically, via the categories (i.e., the pure concepts of understanding) which stem from judgments as connections of representations. While Aristotle’s categories may be oblique renditions of the grammatical rules of language, Kant’s categories translate the table of judgments forthrightly and collaterally. Thus, the things of reality acquire their existence only by means of an array of judgments applicable to them (i.e., by way of the forms of general, particular, individual, categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive judgments, etc). Indeed, Kant himself did not yet venture to indicate the essential linguistic nature of these “concepts” and “judgments,”^[5] which he considered to be only basic forms of human thought, immune to variations of historical consciousness and cultural relativism. Herder, however, when criticizing Kant’s Sprachvergessenheit, his ignorance of language, seems to have already suspected that transcendentalism constituted an implicit linguistic turn. It was only with Hamann, and even more so with Humboldt, that the transcendental dimension of language was finally identified, perhaps even bringing Kant’s suppressed linguistic turn to completion. Kant thus stands at the beginning of a movement that was reinforced in Hegel, continued, although with critical emphasis, in Nietzsche, and reached its peak in Heidegger’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Derrida’s philosophies of language. Whereas Kant entered this universe only soft-footedly, language soon became an increasingly pronounced means of the totalization of the world. The Heidegger of Being and Time hinted at this argument and perhaps even partially formulated it, but never with the forcefulness and clarity it deserves. Only his later philosophy will think the true “ontology of language,”^[6] while the move of positioning reality within the explicit horizon of language will finally be brought to completion by Wittgenstein.

To return to his proof, Wittgenstein’s argument shifts focus from the partial object of doubt (i.e., the hand) to the totality of language practices, which are a prerequisite for “doubt” to exist and have a point at all:

The question of the (pseudo-Cartesian) doubter is thus transferred to the level of language use, where it becomes nonsensical. Wittgenstein poses a question that Descartes had not thought of yet: “Can I be making a mistake, for example, in thinking that the words of which this sentence is composed are English words whose meaning I know?” (OC 158) Thus, while Descartes still lived in a world of things being represented by ideas for me, Wittgenstein finds himself in a world of words being usable in the context of other words for all of us—a world with a radically altered ontological structure. In the world of things, Descartes could still seize hold of “one thing after another,” since the ideas isolated and separated them from one another. He did not yet have the concept of, to paraphrase Heidegger, the linguistic totality of involvements at his disposal. Within this totality, however, it is no longer possible to seize one word after another, each separate from the next, and thereby sequester the things these words refer to. In order for the words to mean, other words must mean too. Words are no longer Platonic models with a propensity to be incarnated, but signs, signals, or indications, which make reality more utilizable and exploitable. In Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning, all effects of idealization of words are thoroughly and principally obviated; there is no “hand in itself,” but only a word “hand,” which, in most situations, means this or that hand. And suddenly one cannot doubt the existence of this thing without the whole system of words meaning things falling apart. The world is now always already constituted within a language practice, and the Cartesian retreat from the common belief in the existence of the world into private doubt is not possible without also destroying the possibility of language use itself:

Since we use the word “hand” within the same system of language in which we also use the words “doubt,” “I,” and “think,” to doubt “this hand” would render meaningless the method of doubt itself, which, after all, operates within the same set of language games that are in use when we buy bread or order a cup of coffee. Doubting a self-evident fact, such as the existence of “this hand,” would invalidate the word “doubt” as well, which must nevertheless play a certain role in the totality of language games: for example, “doubt” falls into place when facing the questions of the existence of extraterrestrials, the yeti, the meaning of Being, and so forth. Or, if we prefer to take Wittgenstein’s own example, doubting this hand would devalue the concept of “mistake”:

The argument thus performs a series of shifts of emphases: from the hand as an object of theoretical inquiry to the hand as an instrument of a certain practical activity, from the archetypal idea of the “hand” to the word “hand,” which we know how to use; from the method of doubt, which parcels out things, to language games, which automatically totalize the world; from the Cartesian solitary “I,” who inquires about the truth of things, to the Wittgensteinian “us,” who try to comprehend a certain statement.

In Wittgenstein, “the world” as a foundation of any and all certainty therefore requires no proof, because it exists in a declaratively anti-Cartesian fashion, in a demonstrative antithesis to all the requirements of la méthode:

The “foundation of reality” is thus an inter-subjectively shared, conventional background of a set of beliefs, only as part of which individual doubts, or even optical illusions, make any sense at all. “In order to make a mistake, a man must already judge in conformity with mankind” (OC 156). Together with the language games of the community into which we are born, we adopt an entire system of propositions which we never submit to the Cartesian method of doubt—in fact, the application of any kind of doubt is possible only on the basis of their taken-for-grantedness.

So while Descartes retreats from the colorful world into the darkness of his own room, from “long-standing opinions” to the immediate queries of certainty and uncertainty, Wittgenstein’s method chooses the opposite route, leading from the secluded, private space of partial doubts out into the public sphere of prejudices and opinions. It is a regression from the philosophical world of idealities scrutinizing realities to the pre-philosophical world of reality preventing any ideality from arising and stabilizing in the first place. This method positions the game of “doubt” into a wider social web of language games, thereby placing “this hand” among the manifold certainties of the world. The entire argumentation of On certainty could be summarized as an anti-Cartesian path of leaving the enclosure of doubt and entering the world of prejudice. Descartes’s “long-standing opinions” now become the very safety net that captures the partial doubt in the existence of the fireplace, the dressing gown, or this piece of paper, overrules it, and consoles it in the bosom of a more total self-evidence. That is why Wittgenstein does not answer the question of doubt into the existence of one’s own hand by formulating a clearer and more distinct notion of this hand (“It’s not a matter of Moore’s knowing that there’s a hand there”), but precisely by bereaving the word “hand” of all its idealist veneer, of its clear and distinct notion. The operation is emphatically not performed on the side of reality, but on the side of ideality. For reality is already all right; we must only relieve it from the need to embody or represent an idea and thus finally release it into its unquestionable presence. In other words, instead of establishing an indubitable bond between the idea of the “hand” and this hand, Wittgenstein rather assumes a broader perspective, which totalizes the world as a silent, self-evident presupposition of all language games, including those of doubt and mistake.

Therefore, in Heidegger and Wittgenstein, as well as in Kant, the existence of things can only be proved at the expense of the entire world. It seems as if we only tried to prove the existence of the dressing gown and the fireplace, but in turn we took hold of the whole universe; instead of this or that thing, we are now dealing with “everything.” However, in the process of bestowing its existence with self-evidence, we also made the thing lose its epistemological autonomy. Kant said that “it is not the existence of things (substances) but of their state of which alone we can cognize the necessity,” Heidegger claimed that to “the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment,” and Wittgenstein remarked in Philosophical Investigations, “Suppose that, instead of telling someone ‘Bring me the broom!’, you said ‘Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it!’—Isn’t the answer: ‘Do you want the broom? Why do you put it so oddly?’” (PI 60),^[8] or, before that, in Tractatus, “It is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs” (TLP 2.011).^[9] Ergo, there are no singular entities to be found in these worlds, since the things disintegrate into a web of causal conditions, the totality of equipment, and states of affairs. What is can only appear within syntheses, involvements, and relations. It comes as no surprise, then, that Heidegger and Wittgenstein adopt the semantics of tools and equipment: what once were simply things, now become hammers, brooms, nails, saws, and boards. We have thus proved the existence of the world, gained Kant’s causal relations and the weight of bodies, Heidegger’s usefulness of the hammer, Wittgenstein’s self-evidence of the hand, but we have lost “the thing as thing,” the thing that would mean nothing, that would not partake in the totality of the syntheses of understanding, concern, or language games. It is perhaps the “things of indifference” that have lost the right of domicile in this world of total meaning.^[10]

Kant may have pursued the “de-humanizing” propensity of the conceptual totalization of the world, as we have already pointed out, but Heidegger and Wittgenstein seem then to have brought the transcendental structure back to ordinary language, thereby “re-humanizing” the Kantian totalizing operation. The ideal constraint of pre-Kantian philosophy, operating between the idea and the thing, the concept and the monad, the perception and the object, is imposed upon a totality, and now a certain “grand human” must stand behind the whole world in order to infuse it with meaning and sense. Thus, the argument can now be put as a paradox. By warranting the independent existence of the world, we have lost the existence of the world outside man. Heidegger’s care and Wittgenstein’s life-form did “prove” the independent existence of things, which now escape doubts, persist behind our backs, will survive our deaths, and existed before we were ever born. However, this “proof” receives its liability only in the assumption of an a priori pre-understanding or an inherited background. The world exists outside the gaze of man only insofar as the horizon of its totalization is always already human. Things actually exist “outside us,” but only in a world that is assumed or expected to exist within us.^[11]

However, while the perspective of totality prevented the ideas from needing to incarnate at the spot and thus procured us a self-evident certainty and even normality of things in the outside world, it concurrently drew a new unsurpassable boundary: transcendental forms, linguistic structures, cultural practices, and social conventions. Here, perhaps, the “argument of language” gains some necessity. It is precisely language that is usually construed as the paradoxical operator of the realism of things and the idealism of the world. It wants things to exist outside of us, but at the same time it can only ensure their stability within the horizon of the world that exists inside of us. Only within the linguistic perspective can inhuman things be merely a partial effect of the always already human world. Language is arguably the most important means of totalization of reality after God. Yet, if God guaranteed the meaning of every entity individually, language performs a subtle and ingenious turn: it a priori seizes hold of the “world” in which things are still unclaimed and in want of a master. Therefore, if within the ontology of adequacy the truth front was constituted between the “I” and the world, so that it was impossible for the subject to step out of his body in order to touch the thing, within the ontology of totalization the truth front is situated between conceptuality and reality or, in the last instance, between language and the world. In the final instance, it is language which sets the limits of our world, and the consequence is the impossibility of egressing its domain.

Irrespective of whether the philosophies of Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein are intrinsically linguistic or not, they could be brought together under the common heading “ontologies of normalization.” Following the peculiar worlds of rationalism and empiricism, Kant enabled us to live in the usual world again, while Heidegger and Wittgenstein went even further in this respect and explicitly made use of the arguments of normality and ordinariness, of “average everydayness” and “conformity with mankind.” However, as shown in the previous chapter, the perpetual “abnormal” interventions in the philosophies between Descartes and Hume eroded every quantum of reality, whereas in Kant the indeterminacy of being and nothing was transferred to the level of totality. The Cartesian idea makes pieces of paper, hands, and feet tremble, while the Kantian idea unsettles the universe. In its greatest scope, the world had become “antinomic,” the self-evidence of the “I” “paralogical,” and the existence of God impervious to proof. In Kant, things outside us might exist more normally and commonsensically than before, but the world as a whole moves to hover above the abyss of nothingness. And it could perhaps be shown that this final negative edge is a necessary outcome of all “ontologies of totalization,” of the totalizing operation itself, as embodied in the credit of language, in the assumptions of meaning, significance, and sense. For some sort of Kantian “transcendental dialectic” is precisely the malady which, à grande échelle, befalls the otherwise normal, pragmatic, ordinary, and disenchanting worldviews of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. While these two did everything in their power to diminish the effects of idealization at the frontline between words and things, the ideal imposition began to menace the world. In their philosophies, the facts may have gained considerable certainty, but only against the backdrop of a totality that is never verifiable or present and can never become an object that could be perceived, explained, or proved, but remains a concept necessarily lacking intuition. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that Heidegger and Wittgenstein could not express the “ultimate domain” other than by means of antinomies in the Kantian sense of the word. Heidegger, for instance, claimed that “[i]nsofar as being essentially comes to be as ground/reason, it has no ground/reason. [. . .] Being qua being remains groundless.”^[12] And Wittgenstein: “At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded” (OC 253).

Let us define this thesis more precisely. As soon as Heidegger shifts focus from individual equipment to its context, from the part to the whole, so to speak, the latter starts assuming contradictory predicates. “The world” is a condition of possibility of the accessibility of things as equipment, but is itself, as a totality, inaccessible. It discloses itself to Dasein only within a dialectic of revealing and concealing: “If it is to be possible for the ready-to-hand not to emerge from its inconspicuousness, the world must not announce itself” (SuZ 106). In Heidegger, the broader and the more “generalized” the frame of verification of a particular object becomes, the more it can only be described by means of negative predicates, such as “inconspicuousness,” “unobtrusiveness,” “non-obstinacy” (see, for instance, SuZ 106).^[13] Again, the things are highly normal, but the horizon of their whole is necessarily dialectical.

A structurally very similar dialectic opens up on the final frontier of the otherwise firm, self-evident, and essentially ordinary world of Wittgenstein. Sure enough, “this hand” exists because doubting its existence would suspend the differentiation between the true and the false. The totality of all things, however, does not exist in the mode of self-evident presence—it exists only by virtue of our decision and belief:

Thus, the existence of things is certain, normal, and naïve; however, this dull normality of things can only be ensured within the horizon of presupposed meaning, which has the ontological status of a presumption, a credit, as it were. For this reason, Wittgenstein’s a priori marriage of language and reality will always be tantamount to a somewhat uneasy, almost conceited amalgam of partial realism and total mysticism.^[14]

In short, although Heidegger and Wittgenstein restored the full and indubitable self-evidence of useful things, effectively freeing this or that thing from being gnawed on by doubt, the undecidability of being and nothing now afflicts the whole, which suddenly requires a different, pathetic verification. The world may be “inaccessible,” “inconspicuous,” “groundless,” “unfounded,” but as such, as an object of “negative ontology,” being fathomed by negative predicates alone, it also becomes worthy of mystical veneration. The pathos of Heidegger, conceptualizing Being by means of the categories of Gabe, Geheimnis, Geschick, Sage, and so forth, might be an expression of the attempt to finally picture this both necessary and impossible, dire but intangible whole. It seems to be the very method of the pragmatic “self-evident realism” to expose the old procedures of falsification as “presumptuous,” but then, somewhat automatically and as if unwittingly, to transpose this same “pretentiousness” to the level of totality. In Heidegger, it is considered scandalous to doubt the existence of the hammer, the nail or the slab, but it is apparently not scandalous to ask, “Why is there Being instead of nothing?” The mere form this question takes suggests that Being must be justified in the face of nothing, undergoing the very procedure which was out of bounds when considering the hammer. While we instinctively grab the hammer without even looking at it first, the only thing we are left with when confronted with Being is to stare in awe. Although we should never glare at the hammer but use it to hit a nail, Heidegger was evidently not capable of applying this pragmatic sanity and sobriety to the whole of beings. The hammer-Thing should not be stared at, while the Being-Thing must be. Or, in other words, while the word “hammer” is never allowed to pose as an ideal constraint of the hammer we grab, the idea of “Being” may well be used for weighing the world. We can guarantee the existence of a thing only as part of a whole that subsequently eschews self-evidence and instead assumes the aura of gift, mystery, or fate. The fascination with reality that the occasionalists, monadologists, immaterialists, and agnostics felt when looking at one thing or another moves from the level of finite modes, monads, objects of perception, and causes and effects onto the level of the cosmic and the existential. From diurnal things, it shifts right beneath the nocturnal starry heavens. The thoroughly pragmatic human being, who totalized things in their usability, suddenly becomes the subject of a grand revelation: “Of all beings only man, called by the voice of Being, experiences the wonder of all wonders: that Being is.”^[15]

This correlation between the brute reality of things and the epiphany of their whole seems to coincide with Wittgenstein’s stance to the letter. His Tractatus is perhaps the greatest hereto known document of demystification, claiming, for example, that “The riddle does not exist. / If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it” (TLP 6.5). But one line prior he nevertheless says, “Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical” (TLP 6.45). Wittgenstein never omitted ascribing an “oracular” verge to the whole of being, and though he spoke of it increasingly less toward the end of life, it is by this very silence that he truly paid its tributes. In his A Lecture on Ethics, he described the “ethical value” as an experience that “when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.’”^[16] Of course, logically speaking, this wondering only indicates a misuse of language, for “it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.”^[17] And yet, Wittgenstein preserved and even nurtured precisely this sense of half devoted and half incredulous fascination, this interplay of gratitude and fear that the whole of being actually quivers at the edge of nothingness and must at all times be wrested from it only by means of the greatest cosmic reverence.^[18]

Sometimes it occurs that a vast cloudiness gathers in the sky and rises slightly, so that the entire edge of the horizon is ablaze with sunlight. Then, the things beneath our feet look dark and heavy, while the whole world seems to hang in the air with lightness. This is how we can picture the ontological plight that Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s subject finds himself in. On the one hand, he lives the bitter life of hopelessly fragmentary daily efforts, and on the other, the more wholesome spheres of existence present themselves to him as a cosmic mystery, inspiring in him wonder and appreciation. But beautiful images may not also be the most intelligent. Therefore, we should finally point out the limits of “the ontology of totalization.”

As we have already demonstrated, being finds itself above the abyss of nothing precisely at the point where the “front of truth value” runs, where the idea aspires to be incarnated. In the “ontology of adequation,” where the frontline ran between idea and thing, Descartes inquired whether this thing was true, and Berkeley asked what happened to it behind our backs. In contrast, the “ontology of totalization” did not prove the existence of things directly—it certainly did not cause a pencil or a chair to emerge from the book—but it did relativize, restrict the jurisdiction of, and dispose of the methods of partial falsification employed by rationalism and empiricism. Doing so, however, it merely shifted the front of truth, which now extends between transcendental consciousness, significance, or the practices of a language community on one side, and the whole of the world on the other. The “ideal surplus” now demands the entire reality to be a meaningful whole, so it is no longer the thing (i.e., Descartes’s dressing-gown or Berkeley’s table) but “being qua being” which requires justification in the face of nothing and can only be vouchsafed by means of pathetic verification. This correlation can, of course, also be read as a double-bind. Viewed from the opposite perspective, the point at which the indeterminacy of being and nothing arises is likewise the point which defines and fixates the form of truth and inhibits all other possible truth values. With Descartes and Berkeley, where nothingness eroded this piece of paper or this table before me, truth was bound to take the form of adequation and was limited to this immediate correspondence, whereas with Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, where the world becomes antinomic and mystical in its entirety, truth is bound to the form of totalization (i.e., the form of enclosing the whole of reality in an epistemic or pragmatic praxis of a judging and speaking subject). Now, all the time lags, deferrals, sweeping evaluations, imprecisions, and inattentions of the practical orientation toward the world are allowed, but one is, in compensation, caught within another ideal constraint, the grand and all-encompassing horizon of meaning and sense. Just as the rationalists and the empiricists could not break the tight frame of their conscious, perceptive attention, now, a new unsurpassable boundary is outlined, the boundary of the spontaneous conceptuality of reason, of pragmatic significance, and, most of all, of linguistic meaning. The totalizing operation tends to tie three themes into a single knot: first, the natural, self-evident, taken-for-granted realism of things; second, the wonder of being; and third, the unsurpassable horizon of a certain significative structure—that is, most evidently, of language itself. It is here, perhaps, that we encounter the major trauma of philosophy of the past two hundred years: at the expense of the realism of things—(i.e., since they could not be proved directly but only from their background, which can in turn only be guaranteed linguistically)—suddenly, it no longer seems to be possible to egress from language.

To return to the beginning, our ultimate goal is to open possibilities of surpassing the restrictive horizons both of attentive consciousness and of linguistic meaning. In order to do that, we should identify the impasses of both ontologies, their inner fallacies and pretenses, and, perhaps, bring them to collapse. As we can see, both ontologies exhibit certain similarities when unfolding their own metaphysical illusions. At one point, the ideal constraint of adequation as well as the ideal constraint of totalization produce a structurally analogous instability of their real, intended correlates. In simple terms, the truth form of adequation makes singular things into objects of parallel idealization and commits them to doubt, while the truth form of totalization transforms the entire world into an object of meaning and commits it to antinomy. Where clarity and distinctness is expected from a thing, this thing proves doubtful and, as a consequence, seeks its authentication in God; on the other hand, where meaning is expected from the world, the whole world shows itself to be impalpable and, as a consequence, demands a transcendent, almost mystical affirmation. It seems that the predicaments and dilemmas of both truth forms could be brought under the same denominator. In both cases, it is the intrusion of the truth value which turns its own object into an ontologically unstable entity. Where an idea strives to be incarnated, its real correlate starts throwing the dice of being and nothing. In other words, on the basis of bringing the forms of adequation and totalization ad absurdum, one could realize that it is the very imposition of the truth form which makes reality precarious. Hence, in order to free ourselves from the constraints of both ontologies, a broader approach is now needed, which must endeavor to define the relation between truth and reality anew.

To make a long story short, the deadlock of both adequational and totalizing truth forms may be an impasse inherent to the concept of truth itself and its relation to reality. It is only after the institute of truth intervenes in reality that reality begins to draw back, appear mysterious, and become the carrier of pretentious predicates. Thus, the concept of truth must itself be put in question. In the next subchapter, we will investigate specific symptoms that the philosophical application of truth has a great tendency to develop.

A Certain Symptomatology of Truth

Cartesian doubt is arguably the best, most textbook case of how it is the constraint of truth which makes reality feel unreal. When facing the “great unanswerables” of philosophy, one should always keep in mind that our primary, pre-philosophical existence hardly provides any ground to doubt the existence of things or, more precisely, to elevate the occasional vagueness of sense perceptions into a negative criterion of truth. For this operation, some sort of “philosophical supplement” is needed. In Descartes, the argument why reality as depicted by the senses may lack any realness is set in motion by the thinking subject himself. For this subject can have no knowledge of the outside world except by way of the ideas he has within him. It is not reality which acts erratic, it is rather the mind that produces a surplus against which reality shows itself to be less than it was before. Because truth sets in from the vantage point of the ideal surplus over reality, the argument selects and hinges on the phenomena which precisely lack any real correlate: optical illusions, prejudices, or, most notably, dreams:

The reason for reality to be doubted lies not in itself but in our own too proliferous mind. It is only after the mind compares its own parallel worlds with reality, and not before, that the immediate world proves inadequate. Suddenly, something is expected from reality which it is not meant or willing to give. It would almost appear as if, because we feel remorse for dreaming too much, we now consider ourselves compelled to open our eyes and extort from the presence of reality some sort of double, intensified trueness. But this is our own mistake. For the world never wanted to be true; it only wanted to be real. This piece of paper and this fireplace had no desire to “flare up” in some additional “clarity and distinctness,” isolated from other things and beheld in their imposed ideality. All they ever hoped for was not to be stared at under the auspices of truth.

In brief, reality appears unreal only because a truth too exacting, too ambitious was projected upon it. The modern subject is capable of creating new worlds out of ideas alone. Out of guilty conscience for his reveries, he now devises a concept of truth which downright urges its own immediate embodiment within reality. Consequently, under the Cartesian gaze, reality finds itself under the strain of too great expectations. Here, the paradox of the very concept of truth may come to light most vividly: it is as if the Cartesian subject was an idealist who, for some reason, peered at reality too eagerly. He dreamt too much, and all of a sudden he is too awake. First he closed his eyes, now he stares. In other words, because he looked away, he now insists that reality redeems his sin of having looked away. And between truth and reality, nothing is as it used to be.

It is the ideas that defined the form of truth to which reality never gave any occasion and was never meant to conform. And since the truth form fails to be incarnated then and there, it condemns the world to doubt.^[20] One of the consequences of this operation is, of course, the differentiation of two substances, the spiritual and the material, of which the latter is of a distinctly lesser value. The course of the argument shows that, first, the mind indulged in too many fantasies, then, it invented a concept of truth which misses the point of reality, and, as a result, the world starts feeling unreal or, in an act of false reconciliation, becomes the site of a second, inferior substance.

This was a typical reproach to Descartes by the likes of Heidegger or, indirectly, Wittgenstein. To a skeptic who raises his hand and asks, “Is this a hand?” an everyday pragmatist could always answer, “Why do you stare at it? If you stop looking at it and instead grab a cup of coffee with it, then, yes, it is a hand. The moment you cease to expect an incarnation of truth from this or that thing, the world regains all the reality it has ever hoped for.” Thus, the message is clear: reality is always all right; it is our concept of truth which is usually pretentious.

But Heidegger and Wittgenstein themselves do not seem to have learned the lesson they taught others so resolutely. In the end, what they expected from reality were precisely the epiphanies of truth, although on a level much more elevated and sublime. Heidegger in his admirable intellectual force was capable of taking truth to the very heights where it became interchangeable with untruth. He demonstrated, probably more explicitly than any thinker before him, that it is the truth form which provokes its own experiences of untruth and creates them in the first place. In his philosophy, the reality of this or that thing can, of course, only be “cashed in” within the “totality of involvements” of the caring Dasein. The primary object of truth is thus no longer a particular thing, but the central subject himself. He is unambiguous about it: “What is primarily ‘true’—that is, uncovering—is Dasein” (SuZ 263). However, by suspecting Dasein to be true, by transposing “truth” to the modes of disclosedness, discoveredness, clearedness of Dasein, to its holistic openness toward the world, the Pandora’s box of untruth opens and, at the apogee of this totalization, the dialectics of truth and untruth unfolds:

The battle of truth and untruth, once fought along the frontline between thoughts and things, now spreads over the entire world, which begins to fade away and feel unreal, but this time not partially, as with Descartes, but as a whole. Truth “is something that must always first be wrested from entities” (SuZ 265), from their primordial hiddenness, and only when the whole world becomes a stage for the reciprocation of concealment and unconcealment, can we speak of truth. Later, Heidegger will even claim that “Truth, in its essence, is untruth.”^[21] And it is in this final indeterminacy of truth and untruth that reality begins not to be just as much as to be, to unfold its nonbeing along with its being. Or, as Heidegger himself puts it, “the clearing center itself encircles all that is, as does the nothing, which we scarcely know.”^[22]

Heidegger could resolve and outplay the fallacy of the Cartesian truth form only within the horizon of presupposed “significance,” Bedeutsamkeit, as the apparatus that discovers, discloses, clears, and structures the world. But because it is a credit bestowed upon the world on the part of Dasein, because it is an (intentional, projective, perhaps even normative) ideal surplus to no avail to reality itself, it can also quickly turn into the very instrument of reducing the world to nothingness. Just like Descartes inserted doubt between idea and thing, in Heidegger a structurally similar phenomenon can be found, of course operating on a larger scale: what doubt was to this piece of paper, Heidegger’s anxiety, Angst, is to the world. Because the “frontline of truth” has been transposed to more total horizons, all of a sudden we are facing the “nothingness of the world.” Das Wovor der Angst (see SuZ 230) (i.e., what one feels anxiety about) is not any of the beings in the world, but the being-in-the-world as such. In doubt, a piece of paper quivers over nothingness. In anxiety, however, the totality of involvements “collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance” (SuZ 231). But the logic behind this twilight of the world is the same as in Descartes: it is the truth form itself, the idea striving to be incarnated, which induces reality to become something potentially unreal.

Wittgenstein, without directly referring to Descartes, took Heidegger’s resolution a step further. The argument of Heidegger’s “significance,” which some interpret as pre-discursive and others as always already linguistic, becomes expressly an argument of language in Wittgenstein. He demonstrated, circumlocutorily, that the (pseudo-Cartesian) consciousness directing its gaze at a thing and doubting its existence can only do so if it lives in a linguistically structured, uniformly meaningful world. Before the simple correlation “idea—thing” crystallizes, the entirety of language must have already been functioning. Or, as Wittgenstein puts it, “When one says ‘He gave a name to his sensation,’ one forgets that much must be prepared in the language for mere naming to make sense” (PI 257). However, as we have seen, Wittgenstein’s presumed meaning of everything, this totalization of the world by means of language, develops in its grandest scope unequivocally dialectical qualities. In Tractatus, where Wittgenstein could still dare to write out the “ontological” consequences of his linguistic moves before sacrificing them to silence, there unfolds the dialectic of the sayable, das Sagbare, and the unsayable, das Unsagbare, on the logical level (see TLP 4.115), the dialectic of the expressible, Aussprechliches, and the inexpressible, Unaussprechliches, on the ontological level, touching upon the mystical (see TLP 6.522), and, finally the dialectic of speaking and silence on a level which is arguably ethical (see TLP 7). Somewhat ironically, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the work on the complete and exhaustive describability of the world, ends with an appeal to silence. It is a dialectic that governs Wittgenstein’s thought throughout his life: in order to make everything within the world sayable, the whole world must withhold being put to words. His theoretical program was to thoroughly demystify truth and utterly disenchant reality, a program construed precisely for the purpose of ideas not being able to be incarnated within the world. “God does not reveal himself in the world” (TLP 6.432), “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen” (TLP 6.41); however, at the extreme verge of this endeavor, truth seems to become aware of its own credit, its own unworldly value, and reality as a whole starts appearing more and more as a wondrous, fateful, perhaps even God-given entity. Truth, in its attempts to differentiate itself from falsity, gravitates toward the final frontier where senselessness is indiscernible from sense, facticity from value, indifference from meaning, and, perhaps, being from nothingness. Thus, what Wittgenstein was capable of holding together between the single object and its particular meaning now falls apart between the world and its sense.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein seem to have suspected that it is the ideal surplus, or what we call truth, which represents the “original sin” of our troubles with reality. Descartes subjugated the world to a certain scrutiny of truth. As a result, reality became doubtful, which, in turn, made the concept of truth itself somewhat dubious. As Heidegger and Wittgenstein showed, things by themselves do not tend to arouse doubts in us; only our various concepts of truth^[23] can make them look obscure. Therefore, it was their endeavor to downplay the abstract, unnatural Cartesian incision of truth into the guileless field of reality by replacing the theoretical subject of posing philosophical questions with the pre-philosophical subject living a concrete life of his practical meaning. Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, although the latter more explicitly within the perspective of language, seem to have attempted to return the modern, Cartesian truth form back to the world before the question of truth was asked at all. They leveled down the presumed “true world” of Descartes to the “pre-true world” of everyday life.^[24] But this method of “drowning” the theoretical method of doubt in the practices of caring and speaking takes out another credit, the giant credit of meaning. If language (or, more modestly, significance) is to remedy the wounds of truth and reality, a “silent” totalization has already been performed. Because meaning would mean nothing if everything did not mean something,^[25] it is, at the outer limits of its sense, forced to recognize its ontological mortgage, which pushes the world to the verge of nothingness, of cosmic mystery and pathos, where reality forfeits its normal, indifferent realness once again. Heidegger and Wittgenstein did everything to suppress and dissolve the Cartesian unworldly “incision of truth,” but they only succeeded in transferring this ideal surplus to the outermost brinks of being in an almost poetic attempt to reconcile truth and reality on the grandest possible scale. It is there that the antinomies became visible. The phantom of truth, stifled in the midst of the world, returned as the greatest incision of all: as a gift, a mystery, a “hypothec” of this world itself. In the end, truth became either interchangeable with untruth or started revealing itself in silence, and reality, again, became the tremulous puppet on its string.

Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s moves, as well as, indirectly, Kant’s before them, did teach us an important lesson. On one hand, they manifested clearly that if the world shows itself to be enigmatic, it is because something has been expected from it which surpasses its authentic role. The world becomes an illusion only after the institute of truth with its ideal impositions enters the scene. On the other hand, Heidegger’s dialectic of truth and untruth and, to some extent, Wittgenstein’s dialectic of speaking and silence are only the most extreme escalations of a paradox which seems to be inherent to the very notion of truth. Perhaps, at this point, a slightly broader, more general discussion on the misgivings between truth and reality may be permitted. What will be practiced here is not a theory of truth, but only a certain symptomatology of the concept of truth. We will not address and differentiate the vast numbers of these theories, but merely outline a particular impasse that arises when the process of truth is carried to its end.

There is an incongruence of truth and reality, which, at one level or another, tends to befall many (if not all) doctrines of truth. Originally, the concept of “truth” may have been devised in order to ascertain reality, to make it more evident and actual, to render its foundations more sound, its processes more regular, its laws more repeatable, its promises more satisfiable, its credits more repayable. And yet, the moment the abstract question, “What is true?” is asked, nothing seems or feels real anymore. It almost appears as if we only possessed the concept of truth so that reality would be one step ahead of us eternally, persisting in its intangibility. Is it not a matter of some irony that “reality” (i.e., the concept which should manifest the greatest self-evidence of all) becomes the beacon of an almost existential unattainability? Before the “pretense” of truth comes into play, everything is at its proper place, but once we throw the coin of truth in the pool of reality, neither truth nor reality seem to know what they really mean. And if truth is there only to produce the experiences of untruth, and reality is only there to provoke the feelings of being unreal, then the reason for this “infinite delay of truth” and this “infinite lack of reality” cannot lie elsewhere than in a certain inherent fallacy of the concept of truth itself.

How, then, to define the fallacy of truth? The issue is too universal, too extensive, and too abstract to allow anything but humble guesses. Here, we limit ourselves to one particular tendency in the heterogeneous uses of this concept, whose history alone already exhibits all its intrinsic pretenses and paradoxes. In Ancient Greece, before and outside philosophy, truth was a predicate of the verbs of speech and probably only possessed the meaning of inter-subjective nonconcealment, of not deceiving someone else, as in the Homeric ἀληθείη; hence, the alpha privativum, the negative prefix. But the first consequence of philosophy seizing the term was the emergence of an insurmountable gap between the aspirations of truth and the actual reality at hand. In Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Plato, the truth of logos, Being, and ideas was set against the opinions of ordinary people and the appearances of the sensible world. Truth became something essentially disappointed with reality, thus withdrawing from it and making reality withdraw from its grasp. In other words, the concept of truth was used (and abused) by philosophy to debase reality, but, vice versa, some concept of reality or other was also used (and abused) to make truth exalted, esoteric, and, by the same token, suspended and deferred to regions unknown.

Here, perhaps, ancient history teaches us something about the nature of truth, and its first historical appearance may only be a stark exaggeration of certain tensions in its function. It is safe to say that the common sense definition of truth is usually based on the correspondence form or one of its variations. In the beginning, the purpose of truth is most certainly not to doubt reality; reality is a given, it is a starting point from which truth can make sense at all. What truth must do is to correspond to it, to reproduce it, and to approximate it. But, at one point and for no apparent reason, the direction of this correspondence reverses. Truth seems to be unable to conform to reality without creating an ideal surplus, against which it suddenly begins to measure reality. At first, reality was the original value of truth and truth only its secondary reproduction; now, truth becomes its own value, which devalues reality itself. Truth only wanted not to lag behind reality too much; but, in the end, it made reality lag behind the ideals of truth. Thus, reality becomes the object of Greek doxa, Cartesian doubt, Kantian transcendental dialectics, or even Heideggerian anxiety. So, if we were to define the one symptom of truth, it would be this: a change of direction of the correspondence form due to spontaneous, unsolicited idealization.

Presumably, the institute of truth has always had this quality of an incision in a previously smoothly functioning reality; truth stood for a surplus that reality never needed, an inter-subjective divergence of someone knowing something more than someone else, of withholding something, and so forth. And when philosophy took hold of the concept of truth, paradoxes ensued. Wittgenstein was never inclined to face them, so he claimed that in the world “no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value” (TLP 6.41). But truth is precisely this: it is a value incarnated, a scandal entering the order of being and seeking to be remedied by reality itself. Truth is a wound inflicted upon the world hoping to be obliterated by real things, which, in addition to being real, must now express truth as well. And things rather sacrifice their reality than their claim to truth. As a consequence, neither truth nor reality are ever really “there.” In the most extreme case, truth becomes an object of almost godly inspiration, sometimes even transposed to pre-birth and postmortem experiences, and reality begins to wane before our eyes.

This primordial divergence has, of course, lost its excessive idealist edge throughout the millennia, but it still governs even the most current discourse on truth. One of the most average, most general, most overarching notions of “truth” conceives it as an ideal point of the total correspondence with reality. Here, truth seems to stand on two grounds. It is fatally tied to reality, which alone can fill it with truth value. And it preserves the ideal status of never being definitely filled. Truth thus sways between its normative aspiration and its correspondence form. It condemns reality to being true, but it always withholds its final verification in order to maintain its regulating momentum. Because of this inherent divergence between norm and correspondence, reality is never real enough, and truth never as true as it could be.

To put this point in another way, it seems to lie in the very nature of truth to finally assume an ideal, regulative, sometimes imaginary function of a process that was either accomplished in the absolute past of our lives, as in Plato’s anamnesis and a large part of medieval philosophy, or, as principally in modern times, a process to be accomplished in the absolute, constantly deferring future of our cognitive effort. The “spontaneous ideology” of truth presents it as something continually suspended and postponed, a focus imaginarius of our endeavors, which are usually so exhaustive that they are no longer individual but collective. Even the consensus theories of truth, where the possibility of achieving the final stage should not be logically contradictory, where finality should even be promoted and required, always warn us: “There is no such thing as the ultimate truth!” And absurdly enough, because the concept of truth is conceived as never being satisfied with reality here and now, reality itself, solely by being suspected of truth, becomes a dialectical entity, perpetually seeping down in the process of its cognition.

In brief, the common symptom of truth theories is that, in the furthermost horizon, truth is defined as an infinite task of grasping and cognizing reality, and reality as the object of an infinite, asymptotic approach on the part of truth. On the one hand, what poses as a truth here and now is never truth itself but, at best, a step toward the final, yet never reachable truth. Thus, every instantiated truth is in fact, by its very definition, untrue. On the other hand, what feels real here and now, is only a provisory screen of illusion gradually disappearing before the ultimate, yet eternally elusive reality. Hence, every reality is, by its very definition, unreal. Or, to put the impasses of truth under a common denominator, the following rule might apply: When truth is expected from reality and when reality is supposed to fill out the value of truth, truth becomes untrue and reality unreal.

And yet, when we look back at the history of knowledge, a completely other life of truth imposes itself, not that of infinite tasks and asymptotic approaches but, instead, a life of definite creations of truth and ultimate revelations of reality. Truths of the most definite form are in abundance, and there is no point in overlooking them anymore. Perhaps they even deserve a new theory. There are great events throughout history, the Greek pre-Socratic revolution, Plato’s idealism, the Copernican revolution, the Cartesian inauguration of the modern cogito, Kant’s institution of the transcendental ego or Hegel’s institution of Spirit, Nietzsche’s invention of the Übermensch and Heidegger’s of Dasein, to name but a few. In philosophy, a number of concepts have been established as precedents that operate as discursive events of the greatest consequence and open a new space of possible “truth values” without offering either a “program of falsifiability” or any room for gradual improvement. For their most essential hallmark is precisely the fact that they were construed in order to maintain a distance to their full incarnability: the Cartesian ego, for instance, remains a methodic effort, the transcendental subjectivity is a logical and Spirit a self-reflexive entity, the Übermensch is an ideal and Dasein an existential project, and so forth. Hence, they are irreducible and indelible artifacts of history, carved out of a single stone, as it were, and not caught within any process of infinite approach to something lying beyond or behind them. As “absolute creations,” they cannot be in any way optimized or progressively adjusted with respect to the given world, because there is nothing out there to which they should correspond or approximate in the first place. Nevertheless, as ideal surpluses with no substantial equivalents or material representatives within the field of real things, they were only conceived in order to rattle and undercut the conventional structures and discriminations of reality and allow a new perspective on the world. For the history of knowledge is also brimming with events where reality suddenly consolidates before our eyes in the form of previously inconceivable realness, as the ultimate screen of a uniform facticity behind which there is nothing left to which one could still protrude or approach. There is the pre-Socratic release of a no longer mythically structured empiricity, the Augustinian suspension of the Manichean dualism of good and evil, the Copernican fall of the boundary between heaven and earth, the Darwinian biological or the Nietzschean philosophical fall of the distinction between man and animal. Revolutions in knowledge tend to perform a breakthrough of the symbolic barrier, thereby releasing the established frames of meaning into a de-symbolized world. When, for instance, Copernicus suspended the Aristotelian separation between the supralunar and the sublunar realms, reality was all there at once, and all of it was at the forefront, with nothing lingering behind. It is in these sudden events of condensation and concretion that the concept of reality achieves its most pertinent, definite, and nontrivial meaning. Therefore, against the presumptuous metaphysics of delayed truth and ethereal reality, one could always observe that realism is already happening; it is only a theory of its processes that is missing. In order to do them justice, a new relation between truth and reality might be conceived.

And here, we must turn to philosophy. The first inkling of how to overcome the fallacy of truth remaining permanently empty and unsatisfied, and reality forever eluding our grasp, was given by the insight that it was only the institute of truth that made reality seem unreal, and that if it hadn’t been for truth expecting to be saturated with reality, reality would be just as real as it ever could be. In the past, as we have shown, philosophy gave us some clues on how to, in a way, renormalize these abnormalities induced by truth constraints themselves. The lesson it taught us, mostly between the lines, was that when truth is projected directly onto reality, reality withdraws; when, however, the truth constraint is relieved, reality focalizes and solidifies again. However, Heidegger and Wittgenstein could override the pretenses of the abstract, Cartesian, theoretical concept of truth only by regressing to a universally meaningful world, which still preserved truth and reality in a relation of “saturation,”^[26] thereby rendering reality unreal, so to speak, on the level of totality. Thus, in order to break the spell that truth cast over reality, even this totalizing truth constraint must now be alleviated. In other words, for the purpose of relieving reality from the pathos of wonder and nothingness, an attempt should be made to prove the world disclosing itself outside the constraints of signification, that is, to prove it from the spirit of untruth. It is our thesis that only by defining truth as and uncalled-for incision into reality, as a surplus which emancipates itself from all attempts of being “verified” and cannot be remedied by being grounded in reality, that is, only by producing something which is truer than reality, can reality relinquish its doubtful, enigmatic aura. Just like a substance, an impression, a monad became a state in Kant, an involvement in Heidegger, and a state of affairs in Wittgenstein, another “shift of emphasis” could be performed, which will release the thing from being the substantial support of empirical syntheses, concerns, and practices into an insignificant facticity, where it will be the bearer of no other meaning but its own meaninglessness. Against regressive arguments, we will pursue progression toward a world beyond meaning and sense disclosing itself in discursive creations no longer directly verifiable by reality.

Thus, from the impasses of truth and reality, a redefinition of these two concepts can be proposed. On the grounds of an anticipated new relation, two tasks will be set. The first task will be to prove the existence of reality as an object of untruth. It will be shown that reality stabilizes in its uncircumventable realness when it loses the ambition of embodying truth. Only as untrue can reality become indubitably real. The second task will be to investigate the relation between the creation of ideas, which function precisely as safeguards against their own incarnations in reality, and reality, which is thereby released from the previous conceptual constraints; in other words, to pursue the processes of the de-symbolization of reality. Thus, truth will not be conceived as a redundant supplement to reality, which must simply be eliminated in order to make reality reveal itself, but as the very process of idealization revealing reality in its untruth. The first task will be the topic of the next subchapter, and the second will be approached in the final chapter.

Ontological Proof for the Existence of
the World as an Object of Untruth

As long as reality lives under the watchful eyes of truth, it must fear for its existence. When, however, truth produces something so new that it no longer lays claim to being verified by the given reality, the latter is released to the inertia of its indubitable presence. As an object of truth, reality is problematic; as an object of untruth, it becomes unquestionable again.

As a matter of fact, this argument has been intuitively, somewhat underhandedly tried and performed many a time throughout the history of philosophy. But it was Hegel’s thought which had at least an obscure, hardly elaborate hunch of the relation between emerging idealities and released facticities. Because, in Hegel, truth is not a form of correspondence to the given world, but rather an explication of ideas, on the side of reality the typical Cartesian and Kantian predicaments of doubt and dialectics go out of style. At first glance, one would expect that the Hegelian “greater truthfulness” of language will “bury the reality in nullity,” but in fact the opposite happens. Reality (of day and night, for instance) is no longer the content of a concept’s truth, a phenomenon partaking in the whole of experience, an entity fulfilling the meaning of a Dasein, a state of affairs of the complete description of the world. Instead, it is an indifferent external, which, in its untruth, provides a contrasting background against which truth can emerge in the first place. But as the background to this emergence it must precisely exist. The claim of this new proof for the existence of the world is thus to think a world that exists solely for the purpose of being untrue. It is a world to which a “realistic” existence is ascribed because its nonexistence would lay too large a claim to truth. What will be proved is the positive existence of reality as a negative condition of possibility for the emergence of truth.

Certainly, proofs for the existence of the world are only logical expressions of the theories of truth values that stand behind them. Within the “ontology of adequation,” the thing must be verified in the immediacy of its presence. Hence, its existence can be vouched for by the direct act of consciousness, while, in the grand scheme of things, the world tends to be created by God. The “ontology of totalization” shifts the entire landscape of truth values. Just like Kant did not put eyes on the back of Berkeley’s subject, Heidegger never experienced an epiphany of the “hammer,” and Wittgenstein not of “this hand.” Wittgenstein could warrant its existence only from the point of view of the fact that language games are useful and exhibit certain regularities. He, in a way, claims, because language works so well, things must exist. The center of gravity of the proof lies not in the thing itself but in the utility of language. Yet, for the existence of the whole of reality a transcendent argument is still needed, or even, if we could hazard a guess, an unspeakable god. By contrast, the original incentive of our proof was, first, a detection of a certain impasse of both ontologies, manifesting itself in the (either partial or total) antinomies of being and nothing, which, in our view, expose the fallacy of the concept of truth itself. If our thesis, according to which the precarious status of reality is induced by the claims of truth, is correct, then the conclusion is to be drawn that reality can only be proved as an essentially secondary object, that is, no longer as an object of either immediate attention or totalizing usage, but only in the process of being relieved from all impositions of truth. In the proposed proof, there will be no staring at the hammer-thing, but there will also be no gazing into the sky. It is our intention to display that the world is secure in its existence only inasmuch as it ceases to be attended to by our consciousness or involved in our practices—if it discards the claim to embody anything ideal.

There is another aspect which might perhaps be addressed here. By and large, every truth form is only operative within its metaphysical setting. The adequation form expresses the world being, in a way, pre-packaged in truth quanta by God. The totalization form manifests itself in the world being posited and held together by a synthetic, pragmatic, speaking subject, by the original spontaneity of reason, Dasein, or life form. The truth form of idealization and release, however, expresses the world as an indifferent outside of the creations of truth, which reveal it as an object of untruth. Our tacit “metaphysics” thus points to a neglected side of Western philosophy, in which realism is always already happening at the outermost, most excessive edges of our language use—something which we will perhaps be able to substantiate in the final chapter. The intuition behind our endeavor assumes that realism is already there, we only need to learn how to recognize its results and, most of all, how to underpin it with a theory. Again, the first, implied premise of Descartes’s argument was the clarity and distinctness of an idea. The underlying assumption of Wittgenstein’s proof was language already functioning and meaning already inhabiting the world. The tacit premise of our proof is, however, the existence of emergent truths, truths that cannot be deduced from and reduced to any particular reality. Heidegger and Wittgenstein demonstrated to the skeptics that we are living our everyday lives before we ask philosophical questions at all. This was indeed an important, sorely needed shift, but there is perhaps another “before” to be taken into consideration, another procedure, which precedes even these seemingly primary “normality horizons” of phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy. If the inhabitation of the world by means of significance and language is to be successful and pervasive, there are two boundary conditions of this “languaging” of reality, which have been somewhat unusually left unaccounted for: on the one hand, the emergent truths and, on the other, the processes of de-symbolization of reality activated by those truths precisely. Common sense without science, life without philosophy, language use without creations, average everydayness without revolutions—without their excessive surpluses, all these normalizing agendas would most likely never be able to render reality as measurable, calculable, observable, knowable, and, finally, conquerable to the extent that they did. Here, it could be hinted at the fact that Heidegger and Wittgenstein provided only logical forms for cultivating the proximate environment and inhabiting the everyday world; this explains the regressive, at times provincial imagery of their thought. What is lacking are the logical forms of language itself providing means and stimuli to shatter its structures and opening the view that extends beyond its own limits, of a culture suddenly acquiring the capacity to expand the confines of its habitat, of a discourse provoking revolutions in thought and imagination, and so forth. Just like staring at the hammer is only possible after we have settled in a certain life form and occupied a particular environment of equipment, so, presumably, the pragmatic occupation of the world by means of language can only be facilitated and expanded after discursive processes have already allowed surplus events to emerge, release reality from the conceptual grasp of language, surpass the constraints and boundaries of traditions, mores, and habits of respective communities, and make the world into an indiscriminate field of new utilizations. By structuring reality into discreet unities of meaning, language certainly increased our capability of adopting, handling, and populating the world; however, by allowing truth to emancipate itself from reality and let reality be seen outside the constraints of language, it increased the cognizability and cultivability of the world even more. Undoubtedly, language must have previously been invented in order to enable the creations of truth; however, truth creations must have already been occurring in order to make language into a tool of world appropriation as spectacularly potent as it has proved to be. And it is precisely this essentially nonordinary, unconventional, and extravagant life of truth that remains, as far as we know, underexposed, perhaps even completely ignored in all current theories of truth, and to which this treatise is dedicated.

Thus, our proof is a consequence of the landscape of truth values having fundamentally shifted again. In pre-Kantian philosophies, the subject assumed a theoretical, abstract position, from where it could make judgments, such as “The hammer is heavy.” With Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the subject becomes entangled in his work, his involvements, standing in the middle of an “environment of the ready-to-hand equipment” and uttering propositions such as “‘Hand me a slab,’ ‘Bring him a slab,’ ‘Bring two slabs’” (PI 20), or “Hand me the other hammer!’” (SuZ 200).^[27] Our starting point, however, are utterances that are irreducible to these practical and pragmatic uses of language. Instead, we are interested in the emergence of the new in discourse, the rare and memorable truths of the most far-reaching discursive consequence and impact; it will be the task of the final chapter to at least open the door to the possibility of analyzing these higher, emergent truth values, which no traditional theory of truth could define or explain. Thus, the pragmatic utterances of Heidegger and Wittgenstein will be replaced with higher “truths,” that is, with historically unique, pivotal, influential theorems, definitions, and aphorisms. And it is their decidedly different relation to outside reality which is of our interest. If hearing the exclamation “Give me a hand!,” Wittgenstein needed the existence of a real hand in order to fit this proposition into the language game of a life-form and have it mean something, Hegel’s infinite judgment “The Spirit is a bone,” to take only one example, requires the existence of a bone for an entirely different reason: it needs it to represent the untruth of facticity, against which the Spirit has yet to constitute itself as an ideal truth that cannot be derived from and is irreducible to the inert thingness of the bone. The constructed “truth” of Hegel’s Spirit does not provide a direct proof of the existence of its outside, to which it refers to, it only refrains from submitting it to doubt and involving it in the precarious totalities of meaning. By placing the outside world in the second row, so to say, it allows it to show itself as what it realistically is: an indifferent, untrue facticity.^[28] The need for external reality is thus purely negative and relies on the requirement not to embed it in the horizon of (epistemic or pragmatic) significance, but to mark with it the difference to truth.

Now, let us proceed to the proof itself. To repeat, one of Wittgenstein’s decidedly indirect “proofs” of the world outside of us goes as follows: “32. It’s not a matter of Moore’s knowing that there’s a hand there, but rather we should not understand him if he were to say ‘Of course I may be wrong about this.’” (OC 32) Here, the hand does not exist by virtue of being itself. Rather, it is only from the perspective of language use that we realize how a sentence employing the word “hand” would be incomprehensible if this hand did not in fact exist. The thing is an entity “positively deduced” from the meaning of an utterance, and this meaning is dependent on and integrated in the comprehension of all other utterances. The world is thus nothing but the horizon of explication of the pragmatic form of truth. Wittgenstein could perform this proof only in a thoroughly rearranged universe, where the Cartesian question “What if this hand does not exist?” is replaced by forthright imperatives, such as “Give me your hand,” while Descartes’s somewhat abstruse retreat into his room in a snowy Neuburg an der Donau gives way to toiling hammers across workshops and construction sites. The argument could be summed up as follows: If we doubted the existence of this hand, we would subvert the more general process of truth, which makes doubt possible in the first place. It is not about considering “this hand” to be the ultimate truth-maker—as did Moore and, figuratively, Descartes—but about transposing the measure of truth to a higher level, where “this hand” is only one among a plethora of eventualities. A hand is thus not a “truth value” too large to be captured by the certainty of our ideas; it is rather too small to warrant any kind of special attention—and herein lies the proof of its existence. This hand, as the place of a lesser truth, must exist in order not to disturb the broader truth process, that is all.

Now, a somewhat different argument for the existence of “this hand” might be formulated. The first premise is the realization that doubting this hand only expresses and fixates the idea of the “hand” as an entity striving to be embodied. Wittgenstein could outplay this doubt because, in his view, the words of our language never achieve any definite ideality and, as such, harbor no ambition whatsoever to be incarnated, which is why their referents may begin to exist beyond the need to match any ideal claims, that is, beyond doubt. Nevertheless, by proving the existence of the hand from the higher vantage point of language, he only shifted the “ideal constraint” from the ideas of the mind to the compulsory significance of the world. And if we recognize the greatest fallacy of truth to consist in the claim of ideas being incarnated, we must transcend even this ultimate ideal horizon of meaning. Thus, the existence of the hand should no longer be proved from language being useful and the world being meaningful, but, more strictly, from the mere possibility of not giving any ground to ideas to gain a foothold in reality. And the argument could claim: If the word “hand” did NOT name the real hand, the process of truth would be brought to a halt at that exact point, where it would present us with a riddle, thus condemning truth to the form of its solution. The moment we succumb to the enigma whether this hand exists or not, we have already monopolized a certain very specific truth form and, arguably, presupposed that there is no other truth than that which is dependent on the reality of a thing, such as this hand. If we doubted the adequation “hand”—hand, we would have to assume that this is the frontline that is, so to speak, invested with truth. And we would have to believe that for truth to emerge, the existence of a reality alone would already suffice. In other words, as long as we assume the possibility of the nonexistence of reality, as long as we doubt its existence, as long as it fills us with reverence, a sense of wonder and mystery, we already presuppose that its potential existence is in itself some kind of truth.^[29] Thus, for the very reason of salvaging some other, higher form of truth, this hand here should now no longer be doubted; and for this reason alone it exists.

To illustrate, let us suppose that upon hearing Hegel’s proposition “Now it is night,” we questioned our senses and doubted whether it was really night. This doubt would only initiate a search for an adequate content to fill this sentence form; it would bind it to the correspondence with some other sensible reality which would make it true: for instance, with “day,” “evening,” “morning,” or “noon.” But Hegel wants to show something else: “the greater truth” of this sentence does not reside in the immediacy of the night, but in the conceptual structure of the sentence inasmuch as it is capable of emancipating itself from the possible content of this immediate day or this immediate night. Doubting the reality of the “night” would condemn the “now” to a search for the final adequation with some other part of the day, thus preventing it from using the interplay of day and night as an opportunity to start producing new truths within discourse independently of intuition. Only by recognizing this night as both beyond doubt and beyond relevance, hence, both real and untrue, may the succession of judgments using “now,” “day,” and “night” become a speculative truth. The real, immediate day and night are now released from the conceptual field and begin to exist factually, but only insofar as they in themselves do not represent a truth.

At first sight, it may seem that our argument is only that of Wittgenstein thought through to its conclusion. But the crucial point of our proof is that it accrues to reality an entirely different status. Although Wittgenstein did perform a shift of focus from a single, individual thing to its inclusion in the totality of language practices, he finally nevertheless posited a firm, existing thing as a partial “value” of a totalizing truth. If the hand was not where we named it, truth would lose its function and crumble as a system of all other statements; propositions would become unintelligible. Our argument, however, relies on an inverted ground. If the hand was not where we named it, truth would fixate its process at the site of the hand’s absence and saturate it at this point precisely. In this case, truth would still remain tied to the inherently fallacious form of an ideal surplus needing to be incarnated in situ. While Wittgenstein succeeded in somehow “snatching away” this hand from the constraint of its ideal representation, vouched for by the word “hand,” he still held it hostage within the broader scope of the ideality of the practices of meaning. This hand existed at the cost of still needing to signify something. And it is in order to relieve it even from this most general, mediate, and diffuse compulsion that we have devised our own proof. Now, the hand does not exist because some broader process of signification is dependent on its nonideal “inconspicuousness,” its less-true “normality,” but for the sole reason of not pampering whims and fancies of any of the ideal impositions whatsoever. In other words, if it did not exist, it would still mean too much and thus play into the hands of ideas; therefore, it exists because only as existent does it offer no grounds for their incarnation.

To make the same point in a different way, Heidegger and Wittgenstein did not prove the existence of external reality directly, but only through a “shift of emphasis.” Their argument could be called the argument of self-evidence, or, perhaps more precisely, even the argument of taken-for-grantedness. Here, however, an additional “shift of emphasis” is made, transposing the proof into what could be called the argument of unpretentiousness. The “grip” of the proof does decidedly not rely on making reality more clear or distinct, more pragmatically usable or linguistically or existentially meaningful. The whole proof is based on a “less-argument”: its purpose is to render reality less problematic, less elusive, less cryptic, and, finally, less pertinent to the issues of truth. The proof is not about inventing instruments of turning to reality, but about gaining the right to turn away at any moment. Similar to Heidegger and Wittgenstein’s “hand,” our proof also does not make “this hand” any more certain or firm, but whereas with them the hand becomes more taken for granted, with us it becomes less presumptuous—and there is a difference between the two. Whereas they desired to make the proximate reality more significant, convenient, consumable, palpable, inhabitable, we only want to render it less worthy of posing as an object of any ideal scrutiny, that is, of meaning something and being true. Hence, the proof itself is expressly negative: the crux of the matter lies precisely not in claiming that things do exist outside us, but rather in claiming that in case they did not exist, they would “cement” the very truth form that would make them look true if they did exist. It is worth repeating that our proof does not straightforwardly make any affirmative judgment about the existence of the world. Its starting point is emphatically conditional and negative: if this hand did not exist, the ideal constraint of “this-ness” and “hand-ness” would still hold reality hostage. Or, in other words, reality is essentially an object of double negation; one should never claim that it exists, but merely that it should never be assumed that it doesn’t. If Wittgenstein expected the hand to make his utterances meaningful, we want to earn the right to look past it, because we only expect from it not to appropriate truth, enclose it within the boundaries of its limited form, and thus inhibit it. From the formal point of view, the argument is very simple: the hand can accomplish the assignment of not fixating the truth form and of not indulging its ideal constraint only in the state of least pretension, that is, by simply existing.

Thus, our proof is essentially not an answer to the question whether the world exists; instead, it relies on the possibility of this question never having arisen in the first place. Why is it important not to doubt this hand? In order for the existence of the hand to be questioned, it must have previously been made into an object of truth. A hand must first be singled out, named, its boundaries must be delineated, and only subsequently can its existence prove questionable. Doubt is a symptom of an ideal surplus overstepping its discretion and descending to the real world. The ideas of the mind and the meanings of words determine the limits and the range of the truth form, which then awaits verification from real things and makes them tremble under its gaze. The idea of the hand, in addition to being a simple depiction of a sense impression, also idealizes “hand-ness” itself (or, at least, “this-hand-ness”). The word “hand,” along with posing as a useful verbal tool in utterances, automatically develops its ideal meaning. And, suddenly, the real hands of this world pale in comparison with their ideal equivalents. It is therefore not the impossibility of an answer to the question of the existence of this hand, but this question itself, which is antirealist. Hence, realism must not look for an answer, but for a means to undercut the question. On this ground, a new kind of realism can be conceived, a realism which does not consist in finding new ways to directly approach, examine, muster reality, but which is practiced as a technique of eliminating the methods of questioning reality.

Therefore, it is the very gist of our argument that it strictly and on principle never addresses reality but only unhooks truth from its fallacious expectations. We have detected a certain coalition between the instability of reality and the demands of truth. It almost seems as if the enigma of reality has only been invented in order to counterbalance the ideal form of its scrutiny. Reality must withdraw to an obscure background, because only as such can it hold a candle to the ideal pretenses of truth. In this view, Cartesian doubt may no longer be regarded as a mere accidental inconvenience of our imperfect cognitive capacity, but rather shows itself as a necessary correlate of truth being an imposition to no avail to reality itself: the uncertainty of reality is something we must place upon the aloof altar of truth. And, vice versa, by experiencing the existence of this hand as uncertain, we also confirm and fortify the very truth form that elevated this hand into an object of truth.^[30] By doubting the existence of this hand, we involuntarily corroborate that the ideal form of the “hand” precedes and over-determines its reality. This is why Heidegger advised us not to stare at the hammer but rather use it, because only by hitting a nail can we dissolve the abstract ideality of the “hammer-ness.” However, by urging us to pose the question of the meaning of Being, to wonder at its miracle, he exploited the very same presumptuous precariousness of reality for the purpose of buttressing the most ideal constraint of all, the totalizing truth form of meaning and sense. Hence, Heidegger’s argument must be carried to its utmost consequences: in order to bring the alliance between the enigma of reality and the constraint of truth to its definite collapse, one must shift the “burden of proof” from focusing on immediate reality to engaging in the processes of truth.

It is thus not for the sake of reality, but for the sake of not confining truth to the forms of adequation and totalization, that we presume the unquestionable existence of the world. Reality, in itself, is not interesting; it is untrue, as it were. Only the processes of its becoming untrue might be of interest. The first incentive for elaborating this proof was therefore the realization that doubting the existence of things and imbuing them with an aura of mystery has always been abused for the purpose of inaugurating and instituting ideal measures of reality, which, as a quid pro quo, reciprocally restricted ideas to seeking fulfillment only in reality. Doubt and wonder put reality under the constraint of truth, but, vice versa, they also freight truth with the burden of reality. Ideas seeking embodiment likewise need reality to ground and justify their emergence. Thus, we behold a hand as objectified by the idea of our consciousness and as named by the word of our language. And if we now abstain from doubting or wondering at its existence, from fearing its possible withdrawal into nothingness, we are undermining the very power of the truth form that singled it out to begin with. Only by sustaining reality in its least enigmatic state can we make truth forms, which expect reality to be true, start losing their grip on the world. If the absence of a thing strengthens and fixates the idea of its scrutiny, its indifferent, indubitable presence will, on the contrary, reveal a certain impotence of the idea to further scrutinize reality. In other words, when reality starts existing beyond any possible doubt or illusion, the ideas will be inhibited in their desire to be incarnated. Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s horizons of normality and “taken-for-grantedness” maintained reality as a value of truth and thus still designed it as an inventory of usefully namable things. It was a world structured by significance, a world waiting to be named by words and sorted out by their meanings. For this reason, it was nevertheless streaked with a residue of nothingness, with a constant threat of falling into utter insignificance, as in Heidegger’s anxiety. In our “horizon of the least pretense,” however, the existence of the hand must remain undoubted in order to lose meaning, for only as meaninglessly existent will it no longer offer its surfaces to the grasp of ideal entities of consciousness and language. In other words, because truth is a constraint imposed upon the world by the spontaneous idealizations of representations and linguistic entities, and because it is these idealities which compel reality to feel unreal, the first step to detract reality from the forms of consciousness and language is to grant its indifferent existence.

In short, reality is proved in its principal distance to truth. The world can become an object of realism only where issues of its truth no longer emerge: where it can neither become discriminated into unities of meaning nor totalized into a unity of sense. If a realist inquired, “How can I prove your existence?” reality could answer, “By not asking me this.” And if he continued, “But how can I know that you are real?” reality might reply, “By making me assume the least amount of ideality and the least amount of meaning. Perhaps, you should learn to look past any parts of me that could be named by you.” It seems, thus, that a realist never stares at reality but only renders it less worthy of being stared at. He realizes that reality is only real because there is no instance left to question it, no ideal measure to comb and probe it, and no meaning striving to manifest itself within it. In other words, this hand does not exist by virtue of being there more poignantly or intensely than before. It exists by virtue of the question of its existence being prevented from arising. To put it succinctly, reality is an answer to the question of reality not being posed at all. This might, in fact, be one of its least trivial definitions.

As we have shown, Kant’s “realist move” secured the stability of the things behind our back beyond the need of being perceived. We have ventured a step toward another “nontrivial” shift, a step toward learning to perceive the objects before our very eyes without regarding them as embodiments of truth. “I behold you, my hand,” an accomplished realist might say, “but I refuse to elevate you into an experience of truth!” And this, arguably, requires an even greater discipline in relation to reality; realism is a stance of a unique intellectual effort. Let us suppose, from the opposing angle, that, in order to solve Moore’s riddle, an angel descended from the sky and demonstrated to us clearly and distinctly that with the word “hand” we really do name this real hand. Let us imagine that he would grant us an out-of-body experience of the intuition of the hand’s reality. What is to be gained by that? What would be the benefit? Of course, nothing more than a hand—a thing in its singular, banal presence, in what we might call its untruth. We would finally step outside of ourselves, but only to witness an ordinary piece of reality. Would we, by this sudden infallible intuition, realize something new about the world? Would we know reality any better? Would this be a realist experience? Should we define realism as a stance of securing and proving the existence of things, or rather as an instrument of increasing the knowledge of the world? For the real dilemma might lie elsewhere. The question is not whether this hand exists or not, but rather how to prepare, consolidate, and unify reality as an object of knowledge. And, to settle reality into a field of possible cognition, we should rather contemplate how to relieve it from being discriminated upon the form of our doubts (i.e., the form of our straightforward acts of attention and significance directed at it). Thus, the issue of realism is not the existence of a hand, but precisely the process of surpassing the boundaries the question of this existence draws. This is why our realism does not advocate a return from the specific “philosophical antirealism” of doubt and illusions to the “pre-philosophical naïve realism” of the indubitable and meaningful givenness of reality. It is rather interested in progressing toward a “philosophical realism” that strives to organize truths into trespassing the horizons of the thinkable and revealing a reality behind which there is no residue of possible approximation left. This realism does not consist in focusing upon reality, but in redefining the status of truth, that is, in shifting focus to the processes in which the possibilities of knowing the world increase.

Of course, whichever way we turn, we live in a reality tainted with the expectation of representing more than it bargained for, that is, of being true. This is the burden of our pre-philosophical existence, which philosophy, instead of alleviating it, only deepened and intensified. The drab inertia of simple presence is always already marked, permeated, and traversed with the ideas of our minds and the meanings of our languages. One is caught within the habits of perceiving, naming, using, and inhabiting reality, and cannot simply step out of oneself and subtract this ideal supplement from reality. The only thing left to do is to think through the impasses of truth and reality to their utmost consequences and set the relations and the balances between the two upon a new ground. It is by this operation that the possibilities of rendering the very forms of perceiving, naming, using, and inhabiting inoperative will emerge. What we can do is liberate reality expected to be true into a reality revealing itself as untrue in the processes of truth. The disengagement is, by all means, reciprocal. As reality is relieved from the constraints of truth by assuming the state of least pretense, the ideal truth forms are themselves detached from referring to and meaning any part of the given reality, and are thus freed from the compulsion of being incarnated within it. In a word, our effort is not to grant a new kind of truth to reality, but to pave the way for an unfolding of reality that would allow the emergences of truth in its midst, a reality no longer vegetating under the suspicion of truth and dragging truth along under its weight, but affording to be untrue in the face of the emerging truth, which is truer than itself. It is a double release. By not making an enigma out of the existence of the outside world, by sustaining it in this lesser state, we can allow truth to assume the form of surplus, event, emergence, and the new. And, in reverse, as soon as we presume that truth is yet to be produced and created, its outside (i.e., the reality “out there,” in hindsight casts off its enigmatic aura and automatically ceases to be a possible illusion). Or, in still other words, reality can only be placed beyond any doubt and mystery as a counterpart of something which is truer, something which, since it cannot rely on anything pertaining to reality, can only exist as a surplus, a creation of truth.^[31]

A new kind of reality emerges in front of our eyes, a reality that is real only insofar as it never inhibits the creation of truth. In order to recognize and appreciate truth in its creative and eventful excess, reality must “subsist” in the state of not violating the truth’s turf. And the only way to subsist outside of truth is to exist. Reality can signify its untruth only if it simply is, and only things that really are can become objects of our indifference. This “indifferent realism” could therefore also be referred to as the position of the untruth of reality (i.e., of a being that does not have to not exist in order to be untrue).

The Argument of Unpretentiousness

If this argument of unpretentiousness and indifference still appears confusing, it can be illustrated quite intelligibly with an example taken from the functioning of legal systems.

It could be shown, for instance, that the judicial process of assigning guilt and pronouncing sentences does not posit the real and factual existence of the accused and the victims in the same way as Wittgenstein presupposes the existence of the hand to make the proposition “Give me your hand!” comprehensible. Instead, the argument is more complex and the status of reality in it more precise. The legal system possesses its own “truth” insofar as it attains a certain internal systemic solidity and self-referentiality, from which point on the empirical existence of legal persons becomes irrelevant, so that it essentially does not matter whether we are factually solipsists or social beings, monads or real interactors, occasionally or autonomically motivated subjects.

One could argue that the legal system works if, for example, upon being summoned, a person in fact makes an appearance in court. The occasionalist as well as the causalist, the monadologist as well as the interactionist, the solipsist as well as the realist would all have an equal opportunity to do this. The occasionalist would be transported to the courtroom by God, the monadologist would derive his presence from his eternal concept, the solipsist would attend the trial within the inner world of his mind, and the realist would take the material paths of this world. The legal system itself is, of course, indifferent to the factual status and immediate reality of legal persons and could also pass judgment on monads, bodiless minds, or via occasional causes. But perhaps the problem of the occasionalist, the monadologist, or the solipsist arises in the fact that every “ontic” de-normalization is always already accompanied by some kind of “ontological” presumptuousness. The fact that they have chosen a reality that deviates from normalcy usually prompts the feeling of complacency, which leads them to believe that the immediate reality of their existence is already a legally relevant “truth.”^[32] Suppose somebody is on trial for murder. If that person was an occasionalist, he might argue that he did not really pull the trigger, since it is God that commits all acts; if he was a monadologist, he would claim that his action against another monad was derivable from his own concept as much as from the concept of the other monad; and the solipsist might take solace in the knowledge that the other, whom he had killed, never existed in the first place. Such concerns would effectively bring the operation of the legal system to a halt and interrupt the performance of its “truth.” The courtroom might actually remain empty, even if only within God, a monad, or one’s own exclusive mind.

In response to the “abnormal ontologies of immediacy,” the taken-for-granted realism of “normalizing ontologies of totalization” might be expected to solve these issues of participation in legal procedures. But the doctrine of totalization still fatally ties truth to reality, even though their final “correspondence” has shifted from single entities to their totality. In Kant, reality is a totality of natural causality; in the Heidegger of Being and Time, it is a totality of involvements; in the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, it is “all that is the case” (TLP 1). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that, in these totalized worlds, legal concepts assume a highly precarious position. Immediate reality may have become taken for granted, but, in the worlds of Kant, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, it is far from clear where to find a place for concepts such as “freedom,” “guilt,” or “responsibility.” Kant, for instance, could not prove the existence of freedom within the impermeable causal chains of nature, so he derived it from the transcendent factum of the moral law. In Being and Time, Heidegger advocated some sort of fatalism of moral concepts; freedom is not freedom to commit this or that act, but a form of totalization of Dasein, its authentic potentiality for being, its primordial choice of authenticity; ethics, if there is one, is only thinkable as an existential project, fraught with the ballast of being-toward-death, that is, with the pathos of totality. And, finally, Wittgenstein considers any ethical, any value judgment a priori meaningless, but instead of abolishing it, he transfers ethics to the realm of the unspeakable, which we must remain silent about but nevertheless, in our moral rectitude, devote our lives to; hence, only ethical transcendentalism remains possible. Consequently, the moral philosophies of Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, as opposed to that of Hegel, tend to gravitate outside the area of social institutions. From the outset, they are conceived in opposition to the very possibility of legal formalization. The subject is thus utterly submerged in the environment of his immediacy (i.e., natural causality in Kant, everyday life in Heidegger, habits, customs, institutions, and practices in Wittgenstein) and is unable to step out of it. If, for example, the Kantian subject were to appear in court, he could perhaps still defend himself by claiming that his action was a consequence of causal chains that precede him and reach back to the beginnings of the world. Dasein could perhaps still pass the buck and blame its destiny. And, as a consequence, the subject of “the ontology of totalization” is less committed to defending himself before legal, social authorities than before the absolute, almost cosmic tribunal: before the moral law, before the meaning of being in the face of his own death, or even before the obscure demands of the mystical ethics of the unspeakable.

Thus, to the two ontologies one could ascribe two typical “false defenses” before the court respectively, both signs of a realism that is in itself insufficient. We are familiar with the case of the defendant first denying all the accusations, but, when factually proven guilty, claiming something along the lines of “I do not remember the deed itself, I wasn’t myself when it happened, and if I pulled the trigger, it most certainly wasn’t with the intention of killing anyone.” Presumably, this defense would be consistent with the position of an “adequational realist,” who might admit to using the gun, but never take responsibility for its true reason, namely the intention to kill. “Temporary insanity” is a typical defense of this type of “realism,” confessing only to a reality so immediately idealized and so directly assigned to truth (“True, I pulled the trigger”), so that there is still room for an idealist doubt (“I have no recollection of it”) in order to undercut the ideal truth itself (the intent to kill). The other classic “false defense” is the enumeration of a number of mitigating circumstances, all irrelevant to the determination of guilt: “True, I did it, but I had an unhappy childhood, then I got in trouble, which eventually led to where I am today.” This defense shows some affinity to the position of the “totalizing realist,” who shifts the blame for the act onto a net of circumstances that is as wide as possible. He delegates the responsibility from one element of reality to its whole (“Killing the victim was an expression of my unhappy life”), thereby placing reality beyond his area of accountability (“I cannot be held responsible for everything that happened to me”), while still reserving the right to distance himself from it (“Deep down, I am still a good person”).

Now, in order to break the deadlock of false defenses, a “third realism” could be engaged. For only the position of “indifferent realism” enables a way out of this predicament between the “truth” of a committed act and its (untrue) “reality.” One is never convicted for “pulling the trigger,” but for “committing a murder,” and only the realism of indifference is able to distinguish strictly between the two levels. On the one hand, the indifferent realist admits to the existence of his body, the body of another, the gun, and the moment the trigger was pulled, but on the other hand, he never makes the mistake of considering the admittance of these realist existences already legally relevant. He does not, in a way, translate realities into truth. In his defense in court, he does not embed the pull of the trigger into a broader and more sophisticated structure of immediate reality; he neither delegates his act to an “occasional cause” (in the sense of temporary insanity) nor attempts to reconstruct the chain of all causes and effects preceding the act. The indifferent realist is not allowed to resort to additional excuses and has to take responsibility for what is legally speaking true and not just real. He might have had a difficult childhood, and maybe he did stumble into an unfortunate situation, but although this is factually correct, the indifferent realist knows that within the scope of the judicial process it is simply untrue. Even the pull of the trigger is only correct, but not also true. Before the court, there is merely the truth of the fact that the person committed a premeditated murder. And in this truth, which is essentially irreducible to its reality, lies the true argument of realism: only once we admit to the event of pulling the trigger in its full realist extension will we be able to transfer truth to its actual domain, where our deed acquires the status of an act of free will. The first and the second realist falsely believe that there is a truth to pulling the trigger, so the deed itself must somehow be neutralized or explained away; because the act of pulling is a potential “truth-maker,” a distance to its reality is always maintained by means of temporary insanity or mitigating circumstances. Since reality is suspected to be true, it must necessarily keep open the possibility of being disavowed. But the third realist knows that the only truth here is the intent to kill. Because the mere act of pulling the trigger is effectively untrue, it cannot be robbed of its immediate reality as well, and it manifests itself as what it is: an indifferent facticity of the act committed.

Ergo, the ultimate realism is achieved solely by the ability to make reality untrue. In a word, this third realism never professes straightforwardly that there is a reality and it is thus and thus. Rather, it maintains reality in the state of least meaning (i.e., a reality which in itself is so far from being translatable into truth that it, nolens volens, must exist).

The Truth Creation and
the Untruth of the World

Perhaps, the concept of truth as exemplified in this chapter could be read against one development in modern philosophy in particular, namely the movement riding under the banner of “speculative realism.” After decades of reign of the linguistic turn and poststructuralism, as well as their offshoots in the form of postmodernism, deconstruction, semiology, and cultural studies, philosophy now demands a breaking out of the realm of language games, out of the endless text with no outside, consisting merely of a constant flux of referrals, the metaphorization of notions, and shifts and displacements of the signified, a breaking out into a reality that is not linguistically mediated and is not part of the representational world of the subject of cognition. One specific, not entirely generalizable tendency of this movement is an attempt to secure the contact with the “Great Outdoors” through a reduction of discursive forms and a regression into an abundance of what we might call “new positive ontologies.” According to Quentin Meillassoux, for instance, the primary qualities can only be grasped mathematically; mathematics is now the only theory of being of the nonhuman world.^[33] Even further go the so-called “flat,” nonhierarchized object-oriented ontologies (OOO), which include Graham Harman’s “metaphysics of objects,”^[34] Levi Bryant’s “onticology” or even “onto-cartography,”^[35] Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects,”^[36] or Ian Bogost’s “alien phenomenology.”^[37] Since reestablishing contact with reality is a nigh impossible task, ever more extravagant theories of being must be invented in order to break through the post-Kantian barrier of consciousness and language. However, this sudden thriving of spectacular designs of reality may not be an indication of a new and original philosophy, but is most probably a symptom of a crisis of philosophy, which lacks a revolution in precisely the field that it is authorized to grasp, that is, in discourse.

Against this development, an entirely different point could be made. It seems that speculative realism is trying to restore and reassure us with a reality that is already there. Science, for instance, upholds its own concept of reality taken for granted within everyday research work, and scientific realism is viable on its own. Thus, the task of philosophy is not to direct its gaze straight to reality, but to shift focus to the processes of truth. What we can do, is to investigate the methods and procedures that reveal reality in new dimensions, to detect and examine the historical junctures and occasions in which the logical space for thoroughly new appropriations of reality has been opened or released. What is lacking in contemporary philosophy is an investigation of the processes of de-symbolization that triggered the formation of the greatest mind shifts, cultural changes, and scientific revolutions. Instead of inventing spectacular and extravagant theories of immediacy, it might be better to define the conditions of possibility of truth performing the breakthrough of the symbolic barrier. The thesis proposed in this book is that there exist discursive creations in which the symbolic function collapses, thereby releasing the established structure of meaning into a de-symbolized field of fresh and increased availability. In the final chapter, we will try to hint at some still utterly humble and rudimentary possibilities of how to think these “truth creations,” insofar as they are capable of naming reality in the moment of its egress from the linguistic horizon of totalization (i.e., in the moment of being released into the absolute periphery of being).

In the steps of our proof, the “argument of truth” categorically preceded any experience or intuition of reality. It was our intention to prepare the ground for demonstrating that the original object of philosophy is never reality but only truth. Hence, reality must be made to be seen as an “essentially secondary object.” Along with it, our claim was to establish the logical space of being which evades the forms of adequation and totalization and can no longer be embedded in the traditional horizons of epistemic or pragmatic meaning. However, with the theorem of “the untruth of reality,” we have merely deduced the negative condition for the emergence of truths. Now, we are obligated to define a concept of “truth” capable of validating and, in a way, realizing this “untruth of reality” and thus making it a feasible, valuable, and comprehensible notion. Reality has been proved as an object of not offering any surface and adhesion for the embodiment of ideas, but the sole purpose of this proof was to liberate ideas from the unholy compulsion of being exemplified, incorporated, and tied to the weight of things. Now, we have to shift focus to the processes of truth insofar as they keep ideas from being incarnated within reality.

NOTES

The presentation of Kant’s proof will be omitted. It is based on the temporal aspect of the consciousness of my existence, which must presuppose something persistent in perception (i.e., a thing outside me) (see KrV B 275–79). The proof itself is commonly regarded as slightly unfortunate, but it is worth stressing that it is embedded in the chapter “The postulates of empirical thinking in general,” the argument of which ultimately hinges on the shift of leverage from the reality of an individual thing onto the totality of all things.

The ultimate lever of totalization is, of course, the phenomenon of “death.” First experienced as the death of the other, it is the only way “of getting a whole Dasein into our grasp” (SuZ 281), so Heidegger uses the terms “Being-a-whole” and “Being-towards-death” almost synonymously. Death is some sort of vanishing point which stitches together two correlations, the un-totality of the world, its fragmentation and cosmic futility, which bestows us with mortality, and the anticipation of death, which in advance guarantees the totality of our existence. Only in a world that does not anticipate our arrival can we truly possess our own death, and solely a thrown existence can complete its Being by the consciousness of its mortality—this is arguably the great wager of Heidegger’s existential philosophy.

Except that Heidegger would never call himself by this name. As he claims, the Being-in-the-world “agrees—doxographically, as it were—with the thesis of realism in its results. But it differs in principle from every kind of realism; for realism holds that the Reality of the ‘world’ not only needs to be proved but also is capable of proof” (SuZ 251). So, he is, in a way, a pre-realist who believes in reality only insofar as it is essentially unprovable.

In the most direct sense, On Certainty was written as a response to two treatises on the existence of the external world by Moore. Wittgenstein, being considerably ignorant of the philosophical tradition, probably did not have Descartes in mind at all.

He did so ten years before the publication of the Critique of pure Reason but then abstained from pursuing this presumably “romantic” line of thought.

Language is an implicitly central, but explicitly only marginally considered existential, a sort of “guilty conscience” of Being and Time: “The fact that language now becomes our theme for the first time will indicate that this phenomenon has its roots in the existential constitution of Dasein’s disclosedness” (SuZ 203). This is also how Albrecht Wellmer interprets Heidegger: “We can assume that language is always already included as a constitutive characteristic of what Heidegger calls disclosedness and understanding.” Albrecht Wellmer, Sprachphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 323 (translation mine).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), (hereafter cited in text as OC by paragraph number).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), (hereafter cited in text as PI by paragraph number).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), (hereafter cited in text as TLP by paragraph number).

10.

The typical consequence of this adopting the pragmatic common-sense realism usually lies in downgrading scientific realism. Although pragmatism did provide us with the self-evident existence of things, it did so only within the framework of a practical tribunal, before which things must constantly justify themselves. Philosophers, such as Husserl or Habermas, consistently advocated the need for science to defend its “meaning” before the authority of our everyday life-world or our pragmatic interest. Husserl deplores the modern development, claiming that science “excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 6. And Habermas claims that “The constitution of the scientific object range could well be conceived as a continuation of the objectifications, which were already undertaken in our life praxis. [. . .] Above all, we are now facing the task to analyze how the measuring procedures which regulate the conversion of experience into data will ensure that the basic notions of the theories remain interpretable within the limits of the pre-scientifically executed objectifications of experiencable occurrences.” Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 397 (translation mine).

11.

This argument is not some extravagance of ours, but has, in a more or less similar fashion, been written out before, at least by Kant and Heidegger. Kant claims: “Every outer perception therefore immediately proves something real in space, or rather is itself the real; [. . .]. Of course space itself with all its appearances, as representations, is only in me; but in this space the real, or the material of all objects of outer intuition is nevertheless really given, independently of all invention” (KrV A 375). And Heidegger: “The independence of things at hand from humans is not altered through the fact that this very independence as such is possible only if humans exist. The being in themselves of things not only becomes unexplainable without the existence of humans, it becomes utterly meaningless; but this does not mean that the things themselves are dependent upon humans.” Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” Θ 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 173–74.

12.

Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 111.

13.

The second part of Being and Time passes from the spatial analyses of ready-to-handedness over to the temporal aspect of existence. But, again, the ultimate horizon of Being, its “wholeness,” becomes antinomic. Dasein is constantly uncompleted, there is always something standing outside and before it (see, for instance, SuZ 279), and, as such, it is caught in the perpetual search of the lever that will be able to totalize its existence. Yet, this point of absolute incision can only be occupied by an element which is by definition always absent—“death.” If one finally reached it, one would be Dasein no more (see SuZ 281). Death is, so to speak, a moment of the Kantian “absolute totality in the synthesis of phenomena,” which, however, can become the object of intuition only when subjectivity itself dissolves.

14.

This is perhaps what Wittgenstein suggests in a somewhat cryptic remark: “Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in The Philosophical Review, vol. 74, no. 1. (Jan., 1965), 8.

15.

Martin Heidegger, “Was ist Metaphysik?,” in Wegmarken, GA 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 307 (translation mine).

16.

Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” 8.

17.

Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” 9.

18.

Likewise, believing that ethics is completely nonsensical and cannot be meaningfully put to words did not prevent him from being an exaggerated moralist, but even facilitated his rigorism. Wittgenstein’s entire philosophy of language seems to be a breeding ground for the proliferation of the unsayable—this is the usual impasse of assuming that “everything is language.”

19.

René Descartes, “The Search for Truth by Means of the Natural Light,” 409.

20.

Interestingly, Descartes defined bodies only by their extension, and consequently distinctions between individual things cannot even be drawn. After the existence of the material world has been secured, there are presumably no pieces of paper, fireplaces, hands, and feet in his universe, but only the continuum of length, breadth, and depth. And yet, the method of his doubt isolated and individuated the very things that his ontology will finally not support. This means that the method of doubt can only set off by seizing the ideal entities which, in the process of its application, will lose its grip upon the world: precisely the ideas, which will prove untrue in the end, pose as the instruments of making reality feel unreal in the beginning.

21.

Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, trans. D. F. Krell, (London: Routledge, 1993), 179.

22.

Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 178.

23.

We use the term “truth” here indistinctly, as a collective designation for all ideal correlates of reality, including the semantics of meaning, sense, value, and the like. Wittgenstein used “truth” much more narrowly and sharply. Hence, we do not refer to his concept directly, but rather, in this case, to a certain irreducibly ideal, normative dimension of his thought.

24.

What is more, especially within the Wittgensteinian perspective, it could be shown consistently that the abstract truth procedure of singling out a thing and submitting it to doubt is only possible after we have lived within a linguistically constituted world. A thing can become an object of doubt only because language cut reality into pieces by means of words. Doubt is thus already a logical consequence of a world streaked with significance and symbolic structures.

25.

Even Lévi-Strauss described the birth of language as a shift “from a stage when nothing had a meaning to another stage when everything had meaning.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 60.

26.

Within the operation of totalization, as, for instance, performed by language, external things in their positivity still pose as partial carriers of a truth value. In Heidegger, the grand meaning, the meaning of everything, so to speak, depends unequivocally on the being of little things: “Dasein only ‘has’ meaning, so far as the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world can be ‘filled in’ by the entities discoverable in that disclosedness” (SuZ 193; emphasis added). Thus, there is a continuity between their “real” existence and the existential meaning of Being, which ultimately means that truth can still be conceived as some sort of “deferred correspondence,” that is, as adequation shifted toward totalization. A truth form is still advocated in which the reality of particular things is only a partial element of the “absolute totality in the synthesis of phenomena” (Kant), the “totality of involvements” (Heidegger), the “totality of facts” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus), “the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven” (PI 7). Truth remains bound to the “value range” of the realism of things, while the thing’s sole function is to represent a piece in the mosaic of the established systems of totalization.

27.

Heidegger insists that, within the scope of “concernful circumspection,” practical imperatives are more primary than theoretical judgments. Thus, “This Thing—a hammer—has the property of heaviness,” is replaced with “‘The hammer is too heavy,’ or rather just ‘Too heavy! Hand me the other hammer!’” (SuZ 200).

28.

For a more detailed analysis of this type of statements, see the final chapter, which focuses precisely on this relation between the operations of idealization emerging in discourse and the release of facticity from the differential systems of language.

29.

Even if we claim that the whole world is but an illusion, we implicitly already admit that we at least expected reality to provide us with truth. The concept of truth thus remains bound to the form of correspondence, even though it boils down to a correspondence with nothing. This may be the impasse of solipsists, immaterialists, skepticists, or even constructivists. They rather settle for the idea that reality is an illusion than renounce the truth in the form of correspondence. If a solipsist or an immaterialist idealist went to psychoanalysis, the analyst would probably conclude: “You seem to have sacrificed all the possible content in order to save the form! Because once, in your unconscious past, you expected too much truth from the world, now you would rather have it nonexistent than just plainly untrue. You buried it in nullity, because you prefer having no world at all than come to terms with the fact that, by acknowledging its reality, you would have to start enduring its untruth.” So, in order to hold on to this common-sense form of truth, the solipsists, idealists, or constructivists hazard the consequences of seeing the world vanish in front of their very eyes. However, if we liberate reality from all claims to truth, a world beyond mysteries and illusions comes to light.

30.

So, if, on the one hand, the nothingness of a being downright haunts, strains, and exalts its truth form, it, on the other hand, sometimes happens that an entity must exist for the sole purpose of representing its own untruth. To illustrate, let us imagine that a distant colleague passes away. Perhaps we were not close and feel no particular emotional need to pay him our last respects. We cannot decide whether to attend his funeral or not. But then it crosses our mind that if we do not show up, all the other colleagues there will wonder whether we hold a grudge against the deceased, had perchance a row shortly before his death, or resented his success. We realize that our absence would trigger speculations and would actually operate as a sign bearing a specific meaning. In short, the mere not being there would already lay claim to truth. And that is the reason why we decide to attend anyway. This decision, however, seems not to be an expression of mourning the deceased or respecting the rules of social decorum; rather, it simply occupies the least amount of meaning in the given situation. We choose to attend the funeral because our absence would mean too much. In other words, our factual attendance merely designates the meaninglessness of our presence. It is a presence that does not represent truth but untruth (i.e., the fact that failing to show up would lay a greater claim to truth than a simple appearance). When we thus walk behind the casket and stand next to the open grave, we are only a reality wishing to be untrue.

31.

If the syntagm “truth event” did not connote Badiou’s altogether diverse theory, “truth creations” could perhaps also be called “truth events.” However, it must be stressed that these creations are strictly discursive products and represent neither sudden intuitions nor intense experiences nor some (ethical) ideas falling from the sky.

32.

To take another example, the problem of a solipsist is certainly not that he is in any way “wrong” about reality. His predicament rather lies in his attitude, which somehow overvalues his positions on reality into an absolute, universally relevant truth. It is a typical symptom of a solipsist to seek recognition and even appreciation for his heroic stance from others. Regrettably, solipsists tend to advertise their outlook on life and put it on display. So, a solipsist is not wrong straightforwardly, and there is nothing within reality itself that could disprove his belief. His issue is rather that he is constantly tempted to mistake his worldview for a truth. Thus, in order not to do that, in order not to bore other people with one’s own convictions and opinions, one must abstain from abnormalities, for only the assumption of a certain indifferent normality will prevent one from elevating realities into truths.

33.

“[A]ll those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself” (Meillassoux, After Finitude, 10).

34.

See Graham Harman, Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), and Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, Washington: Zero Books, 2011).

35.

See for instance Levi Bryant, Onto-Cartographies. An Ontology of Machines and Media, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

36.

See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

37.

See Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

Toward an Ontological Proof for the Existence of the World

The Ontological Argument for the Existence of the World in Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein

A Certain Symptomatology of Truth

Ontological Proof for the Existence of the World as an Object of Untruth

The Argument of Unpretentiousness

The Truth Creation and the Untruth of the World

NOTES

Toward an Ontological Proof for
the Existence of the World

The Ontological Argument for
the Existence of the World in
Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein

Ontological Proof for the Existence of
the World as an Object of Untruth

The Truth Creation and
the Untruth of the World