The Untruth of Reality : The Unacknowledged Realism of Modern Philosophy

Some scholars claim that we live in a time of many 'new realisms', that with Kant, any contact to the outside world was lost. In this book, Jure Simoniti sets out to retrace another tendency in Western philosophy, arguing that the possibility of realism has always been there. Paradoxically, it is precisely Kant's practical subject, who, at the moment of becoming aware of the moral law within him, fixes his gaze upon the starry heavens and from the point of view of this immensity of "worlds upon worlds" appears to himself not as a monster of anthropomorphism, but as an "animal creature." Simoniti argues that the epistemological self-inauguration of the subject goes hand in hand with its anthropological dethronement, and the god-like centrality of the ego is constantly outbalanced with its creatural marginality, becoming a vanishing point at the edge of a foreign universe. It seems that the subject only assumes the role of ratio essendi for the whole of reality, the role of... The common feature of many present-day “new realisms” is a general diagnosis according to which, with Kant, Western philosophy lost any contact with the outside world. In The Untruth of Reality, Jure Simoniti, in contrast, points out the necessary realist side of modern philosophy, arguing that the possibility of realism has always been there. The epistemological self-inauguration of the subject goes hand in hand with his anthropological dethronement, the god-like centrality of the “ego” is constantly counterbalanced with his creatural marginality, the activity of the constitutive subject is juxtaposed with the growing indifference of the world, and the linguistic appropriation of the world simultaneously performs operations of the de-symbolization of reality. However, with these precarious equilibria, the conditions of possibility of realism have become more complex and intricate. It is therefore the goal of this book to demonstrate how the paradigms of consciousness and language are not necessarily incompatible with realism, but rather open new and broader possibilities for the world behind and beyond consciousness and language to disclose itself. This book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars in the fields of German idealism, continental philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. As an alternative to speculative realism, this book claims that realism is not a stance that became impossible with Kant but instead represents a concomitant phenomenon of modern reason, however obscure. The realist stance can be claimed only at the precarious pinnacle of the dialectic of totalization and release, where the overarching activity of the subject switches into a mode of de-totalizing release of the world from the constraints of consciousness and language. Introduction: Truth and Reality1. Three Ontologies: Three Variations on the Possibility of Realism2. Towards and Ontological Proof for the Existence of the World3. Sententious Realism: Or the Non-Incarnability of Ideas