6533b823fe1ef96bd127fcee

RESEARCH PRODUCT

LE RÉEL : ONTOLOGIE PLASTIQUE D'UN MONDE FLOTTANT

subject

description

The notion of the real is without a doubt one of the key-concepts of modern Western thinking. It serves as a master standard of all things, thoughts, actions, for its capacity to tell the essence of existence. However, the notion itself has never really seen its history properly written, or its definition truly clarified. Invented during the 13th century, by scholastic theologian John Duns Scot, the “reality”, first created to talk about the essences of things, then took different faces: the invention of perspective, printing, the Copernican revolution, the works of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant defined a real alternately objective, possible, intrinsic, unknowable. This plastic possibility of the real, that got its confirmation in art and literature as in the significant rise of social sciences through the 19th and 20th centuries, considerably ossified in the second-half of the last century, and the advent of Postmodernity. The defeat of totalizations, the end of “grand narratives” as described by Adorno and Lyotard, let postmodern human beings in a great ontological disarray, with a last left tool called efficiency. If honorably designed to prevent from further blindness towards any overlooking thought system, the practice of efficiency nonetheless led to a reduction of the real to a techno-scientific ontology where facts, concrete things and figures reign. However, numerous works, such as Markus Gabriel’s philosophy, Philippe Descola’s anthropology, or David Hockney and Bertrand Lavier’s artworks, refute this unicity of the real and offer much enriched views. This article aims to put a historical perspective on the notion of the real, and to provide, thanks to the newest approaches of the term, an enhanced and an anthropological redefinition of it, whether considering the Western perspective reversal, the revised relationship between fiction and reality; between virtuality and reality, and to call for a multiplication of the voices that could define the real.