Difference between reality in the common understanding and in modern teleology

Today, reality is something that everyone thinks they know, but very few would actually be able to define it. It is essentially a referent, and this referent implicitly is undisputable. Whereas in modern teleology, reality is what is fundamentally disputable, and even where the very of the dispute itself has its origins.

In the common understanding, reality presents itself as a positive object, perfectly cut out. Even though reality can encompass objects as different as a fact, a thing or a judgement, it appears as a positive basis on which we can rely; reality, at least in the common thought, behaves like atomists’s atom: solid and certain, undividable and founding, infallible and effective. And we could almost say that, on these specific points, the same goes for reality as understood by modern teleology.

Almost, though, because our contemporaries’s reality is confused, through a hypostasis, with what it is supposed to cover. And so a historical event or a factual situation is considered as “reality”; or a table, a flower, a tool; as well as a choice, a decision. By extending reality to include the objects where it manifests itself, we give it space and time, an apparently clear contour and content, the contour and content of the object as we represent it to ourselves. As a result, in today’s representations, reality consists in acts and things. But things, especially, are perennial, remain independently from our imagination and our idea. Thus, contemporary thought gives material substance to reality.

Once this material substance is accepted, reality can become a basis, a given. It is original and imperative. It is a truth, static since it is already there, and will be there after us. And the critique of this reality, or more precisely the complaint against this reality, is to show that it is constraining, stubborn and narrow-minded, that its arrogant and undisputable truth impedes the imagination, this poetic human need, which allows us to breathe, through the absurd or through dreams. This opposition dates back to the “realism” professed by the Marxist counter-revolution, opposed to surrealism, which was also stemming from the Russian counter-revolution.
The difference between reality as it is usually understood today and reality as it is theorized in modern teleology is clearly visible in relation to the category of truth. In both cases, reality has a truth value. In the current view, this truth is a given, a priori: reality is there, undisputable, and so its truth is undisputable. What is subsumed in reality is truth by definition, so to speak. This truth is practical, but it validates entire sets of theoretical truths, and particularly categories of thought which, in teleology, are only hypotheses, useful in time, as tools for action in relation to the circumstances. In modern teleology, reality is also the truth, but it is a truth as the completion of a verification. In the current view, thought verifies reality, and so the truth carried by reality is a proposition of consistency with the hypothetical constructions, a theoretical truth. In modern teleology, reality verifies thought, makes thought true by ending it, by destroying it, by completing it. Truth is the result of a practical verification.

For modern teleology, reality is a result. There is reality when a a thought ends, is destroyed. Now, this end, this destruction itself has no contour or content, and that is why it is intangible, imperceptible. Reality forces thought to reconstitute, to interpret, to load the end of a thought with a content that it generally does not have. In this way of seeing reality, there is not any real thing or real fact – things and facts are only categories in which thought divides itself. Reality is what ends, what destroys thought, and as a result we cannot see, touch or rely on it. So we cannot say that a fact, a thing or a judgement are real, we should say that there is reality in a fact, a thing, a judgement. This means that there is an actual destruction, which modifies fact, thing and judgement, and which is irreversible, and as such undisputable.

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

Modern teleology continued this reflection by summing it up as such: reality is a break, the limit of thought. Thought is the contradiction to reality. The phenomenon of thought (the phenomenology of spirit is important because it very precisely is the undecided movement of totality) is the negation of reality. But this very negation’s object and aim are what it negates, reality. Thought is only unrealised, incomplete reality. And there is nothing other than thought, than unrealised, incomplete reality.

Whether it is in the acting or what is “realised”, as is wrongly said, so what is done, as should rather be said, reality manifests itself both as what ends and destroys; but its negation, what is neither ended nor destroyed, and so attempts to negate this and this destruction, also manifests itself. Thought is what builds and rebuilds from the fragmentary character of reality. As long as reality is not the totality (which can also be phrased: as long as the totality is not realised), thought is its precursory alienation, which can also be phrased: as long as the totality is not realised, the totality is the thought whose movement is determined by the breaks, the breaches and the partial completions of reality.

The preliminary question for the end of humanity is: will thought and reality split? Can a break or a breach defeat thought? In this case, the end of humanity will be what we call the catastrophe. Or can humans control thought to the point of completing it, to find the reality of totality by making the content of every thought coincide with the end of every thought? In that case, the debate of humanity on itself may begin: it is about the content of the completion and the forms of its realisation, and that is the end recommended by modern teleology.

Text from 2009

www.teleologie.org/TO/teleologie/09_realite.htm