What is New Realism?

Maurizio Ferraris

From Postmodernism to Realism

New Realism is perhaps the only philosophical movement whose date of birth can be
exactly determined: it was the 23rd of June 2011, at 13:30 in the restaurant ‘al Vinacciolo’, 29
Via Gennaro Serra, Naples. I can so precisely prove it for we ourselves met there – myself,
Markus Gabriel, and one of his Italian collaborators, Simone Maestrone – on the fringes of a
seminar at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici. Markus was then about to found an
international centre of philosophy at Bonn and hoped to inaugurate it with a conference. I had
said to them at that moment that the most appropriate title would certainly be ‘New Realism’,
because it conveys what for me is the fundamental character of contemporary philosophy,
namely, a pronounced weariness for a certain postmodernism sustained on the conviction that
everything is constructed by language, by conceptual schemas, by media. No, something
exists, and even more, something which we are not disposed to admit, and which is not
constructed. And this is good. Without this we could hardly distinguish dream from reality.
Some weeks after, I announced the conference in an article appearing in La Repubblica on
the 8th of August 2011, and ever since the debate has never stopped, in Italy and abroad, with
contributions notably comprising Gabriel’s book, as well as books by Mauricio Beuchot and
Jose Luiz Jerez.

Realism, entirely like idealism, empiricism, or scepticism, is a constant theme of

philosophy. New Realism on the contrary is a recurrent function, and as such is the reaction
to a pre-existing antirealist hegemony. Thus it was with the American New Realism of the
last century, with the Brazilian New Realism of some thirty five years ago, and thus it is with
the New Realism launched by my manifesto on the 8th of August 2011, which, moreover,
synthesised twenty years of my work. That this took place in Europe, where postmodernism
has been so influential, doesn’t seem to be a product of circumstances. The ‘new realists’
come from continental philosophy, where the influence of antirealism has largely been more
important than in analytic philosophy. The two traditions share a presupposition: there is no
thing in itself, but only phenomena necessitating the mediation of our conceptual schemas (or
phenomena created by these last) and our perceptive apparatus. It is in this sense that the two
traditions have been affected by a ‘linguistic turn’. Yet the linguistic turn was the result of a
conceptual turn characterised by a prevalence of the concept in the construction of experience
(and not, like it would seem in any way reasonable, in the reconstruction of experience, in
scientific or philosophical description).

If for the analytics nevertheless, the problem was of the epistemological order (‘To
what degree do conceptual schemas and linguistic uses intervene in our vision of the
world?’), for the continentals on the other hand, the problem was political. Following what I
have proposed to call the fallacious collusion of knowledge-power, the idea is that reality is
constructed by power for purposes of domination and that knowledge is not a way to
emancipation, but rather an instrument of power. I baptise Foukant the philosophical function
which is situated at the heart of this approach: in the sense where Kant holds that we do not
have, in a direct way, access to knowledge, and that the thinking self must necessarily
accompany our representations; and where Foucault (in the first phase of his thought) holds
that the thinking self and conceptual schemas are ways to the affirmation of the will to power.
Thus, in radical postmodernism, the logical passage for which reality reveals itself to be a
construction of power is put to work. This renders power both detestable (if by ‘power’ one
understands the Power which dominates us) and malleable (if by ‘power’ one understands:
‘in our power’).

Yet, it is politics which has especially contributed to the weakening and grounding
down of the postmodernists’ emancipatory hopes. The advent of mediatic populisms has
supplied the example of a farewell to reality which emancipates us from nothing, without
speaking of the usage, devoid of any compunction of truth, of ideological construction which,
with the existence of armies of massive destruction, has lead to a true war on the basis of
false proofs. In the media and in political programmes, we have thus seen the rule of
Nietzsche’s principle: ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’, which, some years ago, was
proposed by philosophers as the way to emancipation and which is in fact presented as
justification for speaking of and making whatever one wants. And one could then, in effect,
discover the true meaning of Nietzsche’s assertion: ‘The strongest reason is always the best’.
These adventures explain the slight chronological offset existing between antirealism in the

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analytic world and the end of antirealism in the continental world. Even if, in the course of
seventy or eighty years, we could have taken note of a strong presence of analytic
antirealism, continental antirealism had even spread to departments of comparative literature.

Analytic antirealism, as with continental antirealism, found however a powerful

theoretical justification in constructivism, i.e., in the position incarnating the mainstream of
modern philosophy, which consists in supporting the fact that our conceptual schemas and
perceptive apparatus play a constitutive role in relation to reality. This is a position which
begins with Descartes and culminates with Kant, thereafter being radicalised in a nihilist
sense in Nietzsche, or being specialised in epistemological, hermeneutic, or psychological
senses. The fundamental postulate of this function of thought, that I have proposed to call
Deskant, consists of two assertions. The first is that we have a direct relation with our cogito
and, by mediation of the latter, with the world; the second is that the mediations conveyed by
thought and by meaning will ensure that all reality is revealed in some mind-dependent way.

When the constructivists illustrate this second thesis, they seem to refer to
incontestable evidences and to recognisable actions. Nietzsche, for example, affirms that it is
our needs, our yes and our no, that dissolve facts in interpretations. But if ‘there are no facts,
only interpretations’ constitutes the maximalist slogan stipulating a causal and conceptual
dependence of the world in relation to thought, the simple fact that a sentence like ‘There are
no cats, only interpretations’ reveals itself to be insensible, renders extremely dubious the
possibility of a strong dependence (causal: concepts cause objects; conceptual: our relations
with objects, whatever they are, impose a conceptual mediation whatever the outcome). For
this reason, constructivism falls back on a weak dependence, that is to say, representational
dependence: no, we are not creatures of the universe, but we are its constructors by way of
this amorphous hyle, a type of cookie dough to which form will be given with the stencils of
concepts. Thus one accepts the separated existence of a world which nevertheless, as such,
has no structural and morphological autonomy that we know of.

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Ontology and Epistemology

This is where New Realism first intervenes, which is primarily an attempt at

conceptual clarification. For if we seek in effect to give a concrete form to representational
dependence, we ourselves justify that the technical term conceals a conceptual confusion
between ontology (what there is, that is independent of our representations) and epistemology
(what we believe we know, that can be dependent on our representations, but only as
representations refer to, and regardless of whether they verify, assertions). We treat any
being, for instance the Tyrannosaurus Rex (understood as biological organism), as if it was a
linguistic and zoological notion. Can one conclude, when in the absence of the human species
the designation ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’ didn’t exist, that the Tyrannosaurus Rex
‘representationally’ depended on the men who thus designated it? This is nothing but a truism
(if by ‘representationally’ one understands something like ‘linguistically’) or a perfect
absurdity (if by ‘representationally’ one understands something more than this – or even
less). Because that would in effect mean that the existence of the Tyrannosaurus Rex would
depend on us. So, when there was Tyrannosaurus Rex, we were not; and that is to say, when
there was Tyrannosaurus Rex, there was no Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The ontological hypothesis underlying the distinction between ontology and

epistemology is then the hypothesis – indicated by the positive philosophy of Schelling –
according to which being is not something constructed by thought, but rather something
given before thought began. Not only because we have at our disposal evidence for
interminable epochs when there was the world, and when on the other hand man was not, but
also because everything that initially manifests itself as thought comes to us from the
exterior: the words of our mother, myths and rules, totems and taboos, which we fall into in
everyday life. In this way, New Realism propounds its distinctions, schematisable as follows:

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 EPISTEMOLOGY ONTOLOGY

Amendable Unamendable

Science Experience

Linguistic Not necessarily linguistic

Historical Non historical
Unrestricted Necessary
Infinite Finite
Teleological Not necessarily teleological

Truth Reality

It is not born from experience, but is It is not naturally oriented towards

teleologically oriented towards it. science.

Interior/Internal World Exterior/External World

(= interior/internal to the conceptual (= exterior/external to

schemas) the conceptual schemas)

I will not enter here into a detailed explication, which would occupy the rest of this
article; I limit myself to suggesting the causes of the confusion (in my fatal sense) between
ontology and epistemology. This confusion is the work of Deskant, as it is a matter of
grounding, in construction, a world which no longer has stability because nature as such is
presupposed as contingent. Doing this, what I propose to call transcendental dupery (fallacy)
is accomplished: if all knowledge begins with experience, but if this last (as the empiricists
suggest) is structurally uncertain, it will be necessary to ground experience in science,
imposing on it a priori structures which stabilise its uncertain structure. To obtain this result,
it is necessary to effect a reversal of perspective: of subjects rather than objects, and to ask –
with the one who is the master of all subsequent constructivisms – not how things are in
themselves, but how they must be made to be known by us, according to the model of
physicists who interrogate nature not as schoolchildren, but as judges, availing of schemas

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and theorems. Deskant then adopts an a priori epistemology, mathematics, in order to
ground ontology: thus the possibility of making a priori synthetic judgements allows him to
fix an otherwise fluid and contingent reality through a definite knowledge. In this way,
transcendental philosophy transfers the constructivism of the domain of mathematics to the
domain of ontology. The laws of physics are laws of mathematics applied to reality and,
always according to Deskant’s hypothesis, they don’t represent the cogitation of a group of
scientists, but rather the way in which our mind and our senses function. Our knowledge, at
this level, will no longer be menaced by the unreliability of the senses or the incertitude of
induction; but the price to pay will then be that there is no difference between the fact that
there was an object X and the fact that we could know the object X (which precisely
constitutes the identification between ontology and epistemology, which is particularly
conserved, in Kant, with the hypothesis of the noumenon, which the Post-Kantians however
will abandon without hesitation).

To make perceptive experience (and not, as we will see, social experience) depend on
conceptual experience means to fall into what psychologists call the error of stimulus,
indicating by that the naturalness with which we replace an observation for an explanation.
This is the ease with which, eyes closed, we answer the question: ‘what do you see?’, with
‘nothing’ or ‘blackness’, even though we see in fact phosphenes and glimmers, which we
nevertheless take no account of on the descriptive level. For what we speak of is in practice
something else: a theory of vision according to which the eye is like a black chamber, and
when the diaphragm is closed, the eye is a place where absolute blackness rules. When one
maintains that observers provide different theories seeing the reality under observation
differently, one thus confers a philosophical dignity to a psychological error and above all
one commits a consistent categorical error; in the case in point, confusing seeing with
knowing. For example, if I read: ‘representational dependence’, I think ‘representational
dependence’, but I see ‘representational dependence’.

Yet it is perfectly sensible to say that there is an action of the conceptual when I
recognise a constellation, or when in regarding three objects I believe, like Leśniewski, that
there is one more which constitutes their sum, thus multiplying the number of objects. But
this conflict can be cut off by simple considering that we see neither constellations, nor
Leśniewski’s objects, but only the stars and three objects of common sense. This is not a
matter of maintaining that the constellations are not real, but rather of establishing a
difference (resulting surely from the difference between ontology and epistemology) between

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two layers intertwining and colouring each other. The first is the one that I will call ε-reality,
understanding by that ‘epistemological reality’, which the Germans call Realität. This is the
reality linking what we believe we know to what there is (that’s why we call it
‘epistemological’), the reality to which will be referred (substantially equivalent) assertions
like: ‘the thinking self must be able to accompany my representations’ or ‘to be is to be the
value of a variable’. Yet alongside that, or rather, below ε-reality, I also set ω-reality (in the
sense of ὄντως ; the omega is only adopted to make a distinction): ontological reality, that the
Germans call Werlichkeit, which refers to what there is, independently of our knowledge of
what there is, and which manifests itself as resistance and as positivity. ω-reality is the
external world, an expression by which, as we have seen in the schema above, I designate the
world that remains exterior to conceptual schemas.

At this point it’s appropriate, alongside the difference between ontology and
epistemology, to also introduce a difference between ontological independence and
epistemological independence. The manner in which the problem of realism has been posed
in the analytic field defines realism as the independence of truth in relation to the knowledge
that we have of it. For New Realism on the other hand, it is the independence of reality in
relation to the knowledge that we have of it (for certain types of object, it is different). This
aspect is, according to me, pertinent, because truth remains, whatever happens, an
epistemological function which presupposes minds: a sentence like ‘on the 17th of September
1873, Bismarck caught a cold’, is causally independent of minds, but it presupposes minds.
And therefore (we will come back to this) the formula of the independence of truth in relation
to minds lends itself well to certain aspects of social reality. In relation to reality, in its most
general sense, I will define realism in the following terms: realism is the opinion that natural
objects (and possibly other types of objects to be specified case by case) exist independently
of the means by which we know them: they are existent or inexistent by virtue of a reality
which exists independently of us.

Unamendability

The second step of New Realism, after the conceptual clarification, consists in an
empirical observation. There is a class of representations that the thinking self can never
accompany, in this case infinite things which have existed before the existence of the
thinking self; I call this argument pre-existence: the world is given before all cogito. There

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are moreover classes of representations which, even if they have accompanied the thinking
self, seem to resist it, in no way concerning themselves with ‘representational dependence’; I
call this argument resistance: reality can oppose and refuse our conceptual schemas. And yet
it often happens that the thinking self can successfully interact with beings presumably
lacking a thinking self, for example with animals; I call this argument interaction: beings
endowed with different conceptual schemas can interact in the same world.

I group these empirical circumstances – which have, however, a transcendental role

the moment they define, even though they are ultimately a posteriori, our possibilities of
knowledge – under the title of unamendability: the fundamental character of which resides in
the fact that it trumps epistemology, because in effect it doesn’t let itself be amended or
corrected, and this, in the final analysis, is a necessity infinitely more powerful than any
logical necessity. Unamendability is a non-conceptual content, and, justly, a contrastive
principle which manifests the real as non-self. It concerns that sphere of experience which
takes place outside of the concept, and which defines an external world foreign to knowledge.
Non-conceptual content is a contrast (precisely, a resistance) which cannot be effaced or set
at zero. At the same time, it can also become an autonomous organisation of experience (by
interaction), reducing the weight of the structuration of the world attributed to conceptual
schemas. In relation to these observations, I have bestowed a particular ontological bearing
on repappropriating the value of aesthetics as theory of sensibility: not because it is primarily
a source of knowledge, but precisely on the contrary, because it can occasionally erect itself
as an obstacle in relation to the conceptual schemas. At least three consequences result from
this.

The first concerns the prevalence of ontology over epistemology. In its resistance, the
real is the extreme negative of knowledge, because it is inexplicable and incorrigible, but it is
also the extreme positive of being, because it is that which gives itself, which insists upon and
resists interpretation, and at the same time renders it true, distinguishing it from an imagining
or a wishful thinking. Furthermore, it’s important here to not forget that in domains
dependent on conceptual schemas, like for example historical events, we are concerned with
a very clear manifestation of unamendability, in this case the irrevocability of events from
which the interpretations of historians are constructed. Yet interpretations are based on facts
and facts are verified in a world of objects. If this is the case, the verification of factual givens
in the physical world (like, for example, the snow is white) arises at a perfectly sustainable
level in relation to the verification of factual givens in the historical and moral world.

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 Second consequence: in any case this doesn’t mean that reality coincides with
sensible experience, nor that unamendability is reduced to the perceptive. It simply means
that unamendability deconstructs the pretension of an ontological action constitutive of the
conceptual schemas. In the case of perception, we have nothing but a domain of particular
evidence, when we sometimes test an aesthetic antimony in relation to the conceptual
schemas. Here, the argument doesn’t at all consist in maintaining that the rod submerged in
water is truly bent because it seems bent, but in drawing attention to the fact that,
notwithstanding that we know the rod submerged in water is not bent, we cannot do
otherwise than to see it bent.

Third consequence: nevertheless, a more general thesis is extracted from the aesthetic
antimony, which concerns the ontological autonomy of the world in relation to conceptual
schemas and perceptual apparatuses. Reality has a structured nature which precedes
conceptual schemas and can resist them. There is therefore no need to have recourse to an a
priori epistemology in order to stabilise contingency. One of our most common experiences
resides in the fact of interacting with beings equipped with conceptual schemas and
perceptive apparatuses different from ours (or maybe deprived of some perceptive apparatus,
whatever it is), like dogs, cats, flies, viruses, plants... And in fact, if this interaction depends
on conceptual schemas and knowledge, it would be miraculous. As we do not wish to resort
to the hypothesis of a miracle or a pre-established harmony, we are in this case constrained to
accept that the interaction is rendered possible by the sharing of a common and homogenous
space, and the sharing of objects which are endowed with positivity and are independent of
our conceptual schemas.

I have illustrated this elsewhere, by showing how the interaction between beings
equipped with conceptual schemas, perceptual apparatuses, figures and extensions of
profoundly different life, is a most common experience. In the same way the capacity of
super-organisms (for example, a termite mound) to structure complex articulations in the total
absence of a central regulatory system, is largely studied by zoologists. It should be
understood here that I have never thought that myself, a dog, or a constructivist, sees the
world in the same way. I say rather that we can interact in spite of the fact that our conceptual
schemas and perceptive apparatuses are different.

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Invitation

Here the third thesis of New Realism is affirmed. If things are established in these
terms, the real is not manifested only as resistance and as negativity. There is in every
negation a determination and a possibility. The world exercises an invitation through objects
and the environment, which is qualified as a positive realism. Robust, independent, obstinate,
the world of objects which surrounds us comprises these other objects that are the subjects
with which we interact; it is not limited to saying no, for it opposes resistance in order to say:
‘I am here, I remain here’. It also constitutes maximal ontological positivity, because it is
precisely resistance, opacity, the will to not too easily come to terms with concepts and with
thought, which assures us that the world of objects with which we are made is not a dream.

Already at the pre-linguistic age, children are able to segment reality into objects,
which for Deskant, considering the question in a rigorous manner, would not be possible,
since they probably don’t possess the schema of substance as being the permanence of
something in time. The thesis that I defend through the argument of invitation is that it is
opportune to begin with objects (including also cognitive subjects) in order to reduce the
difference between our theories and our experience of the world. Not to become addicted to a
futile cult of objectivity – which is a priority of knowledge, not of being – but in order to
force the recognition of a positivity on which we all count, but apropos of that which we
rarely reflect upon. And this doesn’t value only physical experiences: the way in which moral
value or non-value present themselves, beauty or ugliness, is clearly something which arrives
to us from the outside, which surprises us, which hits us, which amazes us but is above all
provided from the exterior, without which all would be a product of the imagination. This is
why, on the contrary to what is often said, the value cannot be distinguished from the fact:
banally, because the fact is in itself a value, the highest: namely, positivity, which in its turn,
is the condition for the possibility of all knowledge.

An ethical version of the brain in a vat experiment allows us to better comprehend this
point. The idea is the following: imagine (as in Putnam’s Gedankenexperiment) that a mad
scientist has placed brains in a vat and feeds them in an artificial way. Through electrical
stimulations, the brains have the impression of living in a real world, but this in fact proves to
be only a consequence of simple electrical stimulations. Imagine the recurrent situations of
moral positions in these stimulations: one organises a genocide, the other sacrifices itself for
freedom; one commits malpractice, the other accomplishes acts of saintliness. Can one truly

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maintain that moral acts take place in these circumstances? In my sense, no. Even in the best
of these cases, representations are devoid of moral content. Without the positivity of objects,
there is no possible morality.

Everything, consequently – understanding corporations, symbolist poems, categorical

imperatives, etc. – finds its origin in the invitation offered by the environment. A cave invites
different types of beings, and functions as shelter because it responds to certain
characteristics and not to others. Ecosystems, governmental organisations, interpersonal
relations: in each of these structures infinitely more articulated than a cave, is repeated the
structure of resistance and invitation. I define as environment every sphere in which these
interactions take place, from the ecological niche to the social world, each responding surely
to its own characteristics. In the environment, meaning ‘gives itself’, it is not entirely at our
disposition. Meaning is a modality of organisation according to which something presents
itself in a certain way. But, rightly, it doesn’t depend on subjects in the last instance.

And it is on this point that I have considered it necessary to oppose to Gabriel’s

ontological thesis ‘to exist is to exist in a field of sense’, the thesis ‘to exist is to resist in a
defined environment’. The ‘field of sense’, as it is brilliantly argued for by Gabriel, risks in
effect making existence depend on the possession of a sense or meaning. Yet, the fact that
one doesn’t succeed in finding meaning, in a general manner, in an event or an object – from
the Shoah to Kafka’s Ordradek –, doesn’t mean that this event has not taken place. The
simple fact that, more often than we want, we do not succeed in finding a meaning, whatever
it is, in our life, doesn’t mean that we are not existent. The perspective suggested by: ‘To
exist is to exist in an environment’, is on the contrary one of a structurally opaque existence
which is especially manifest in its capacity to endure in an environment, without always
acquiring ulterior qualifications. In other words, the field of sense is in the environment, not
in concepts. Thus, objects and the opacity of being surely imply that consciousness can never
totally give itself, and even more, that our relation to the world rests on a difficult and
sometimes confused equilibrium between ontology and epistemology. However, this doesn’t
mean that the positivity of objects is excluded. It is, on the contrary, precisely this positivity
which allows us to be in the world in spite of the fact that our notions of it are only
occasionally clear and distinct.

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 It is in the environment that emergence of thought from being is verified, a process
which can be conceived as the development of (intelligent) epistemology on the basis of a
non-intelligent ontology, the fruit of a competence which precedes comprehension. If the
thesis of constructivism is that a disincarnated thought constitutes the real, we have here a
very clear reversal: thought rises with sun of the real; it is a highly specialised product of
evolution and it is precisely this situation which explains why epistemology can successfully
refer to ontology, as the history of science demonstrates. What follows from this is not only
the thesis of dependence (of which we have spoken), but the thesis of the derivation of
epistemology from ontology. All the essential differences which regulate our thought – and
which tend to be forgotten in thought, even though they are directive in the domain of
practice – derive from the real and not from thought: this is the difference between ontology
and epistemology, the difference between experience and science, between exterior world
and interior world, between objects and events, between reality and fiction. Once affirmed,
this metaphysical realism (assuming that such a position has never existed in the terms that
the realists use to represent it) presupposes a full reflection on two distinct entities, thought
and reality:

(1) Thought ↔ Reality

Assuming that constructivism, having found the relation between two distinct entities
inexplicable, suggests a constitutive role of thought in relation to reality:

(2) Thought ⇒ Reality

Positive realism sees in thought an emergent given in relation to reality, exactly like
the laws of gravity, photosynthesis and digestion.

(3) Thought ⇐ Reality

At this point it becomes possible to articulate the characteristics of the environment,

by introducing the categories of natural objects, which exist in space and time independent of
subjects; the categories of ideal objects, which exist outside of space and time, and
independently of subjects; the categories of artefacts, which exist in space and time, but do

12
not depend on subjects for their genesis; and finally, the categories of social objects, which
exist in space and time and depend on subjects for their genesis and their capacity to endure.
From this point of view it is totally legitimate to affirm that the stock exchange or democracy
has a representational dependence in relation to our collective beliefs (below, I will attempt to
clarify this expression, which, as we will see, is obscure). That is not to say, nevertheless, that
dinosaurs have some dependence in relation to our collective beliefs. Or perhaps, if
necessary, the dependence concerns the existence of professors of palaeontology? Yet
professors of palaeontology will not make dinosaurs exist, whereas declarations of ratings
agencies will increase or diminish ‘the spread’. I affirm in this sense, in supporting a form of
contextualism, that one is never realist in everything, nor antirealist in everything. There are
spheres of being, more or less close to the focal sense of existence which coincides with the
resistance in an environment.
These spheres are reconstituted as things in themselves and not as phenomena. Take
natural objects. For Deskant, these are phenomena par excellence: they are situated within
space and time, without being things which give themselves in natura. They are in our head,
conjoined with the categories by which we give an order to the world, to the point that if men
didn’t exist, neither space nor time would exist. One should then conclude that before the
appearance of men, there were no objects (in the strictest sense), at least as we know them;
but clearly, as we have seen, this is not the case. Examined closely, social objects, which
depend on subjects (though they are not subjective), are also things in themselves, not
phenomena. This can seem complicated at first, because if social objects depend on
conceptual schemas, it then seems evident that they constitute phenomena. But this is not the
case. Nothing has to depend on the existence of conceptual schemas in order to be a
phenomenon. For that, it is necessary to oppose things in themselves to reality. Take a legal
fine. What would this be in itself? To say that a fine is an apparent fine amounts to simply
saying that it is not one. Above all, it is persons that we say are things in themselves; persons
who, from the perspective of Deskant, are transformed into phantoms, being only shadowy
projections of thought. We now come to events such as hurricanes and car crashes, which are
often unforeseeable. The irregularity of their occurrence, which thwarts or frustrates our
expectations, is the clearest demonstration of the fact that the world is much more vast and
unpredictable than our thought.

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Documentality

I would like to draw attention to a fourth thematic of New Realism, as least as it

concerns the supposed realism of social objects. A theory of mind-dependence intrinsically
entails obscure aspects because it doesn’t result from a simple causal dependence. In order
for there to be social objects, it is necessary that there are at least minds, and normally, minds
are much more numerous, for they are complex phenomena. Among them, there are many
who in no way think of the object, but nevertheless interfere with the process, as there are
many others who think it, without however successfully interfering (think of a financial crisis
or a war). In appearance, we find ourselves faced with a puzzle: social objects are dependent
on the mind, but are independent of knowledge (that is to say, also independent of
consciousness). A marriage of which no one no knows anything, has however well and truly
taken place; and in the same way, there can be a recession, even if no one knows of its
existence. How is this possible? Would this only be to say that social objects are at the same
time dependent on and independent of the mind? No. The contradiction exists when
‘dependence on the mind’ is understood as being unilateral dependence on a mind, as if
anyone could determine by themselves alone the course of the social world. Yet this
hypothesis is belied by any experience of the social world (my mind does not make laws, or
prices; at most, it writes this article), but also by the fact that in many circumstances our mind
seems to be independent of itself, when for example we develop obsessive thoughts that we
would not wish to have.

If we no longer have a contradiction between ‘dependence on the mind’ and

‘independence from knowledge’, nevertheless we must explain how social objects can exist,
even when we have no consciousness or knowledge of them. I have proposed to clarify this
through the hypothesis according to which the foundation of the social environment is
documentality (the aggregate of documents and records, and not of individual and collective
intentions). We have not given social objects a reality by making a series of intentionalities
which hold the object in life in a conscious manner, as if everything is thought
simultaneously to its constitution. No, its constitution is inscribed in it, to the point that it
remains the same if no one thinks of it any more (which, alas, happens all too often). Thus,
from the perspective of documentality, the law constitutive for social objects is for me
formulable as: object = inscribed act. This amounts to saying that a social object is the result
of a social act (an act which is capable of implying at least two people, or a representative
machine and a person) and is characterised by the fact of being recorded, on a sheet of paper,

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in a computer file, or also and only in the head of the persons implied in the act. Once
recorded, the social object, dependent on minds in respect of its genesis, becomes
independent in respect of its existence – precisely like artefacts, for which the only
fundamental difference is that an artefact can offer its own invitation in the absence of minds
to acknowledge it (a table can be a shelter for an animal), whereas this is not the case for a
document. And the fact that meaning is not in the head, but in the world, is a principle,
according to me, very well illustrated by the relation between invitation and documentality.

Beyond the resolution of the puzzle of mind-dependence/independence from

consciousness, documentality can also provide a more solid basis to the constitutive rule
proposed by the most influential theorist of social objects, John Searle: namely, the rule that
X counts as Y in context C (the physical object X counts as the social object Y in a context
C). The limit of this proposition is double. It doesn’t seem, on the one hand, to be able to
account for complex social objects, like for example businesses, or objects of negative
entities, like debts, for which it seems at first difficult to find a physical object predisposed to
be transformed into social object. On the other hand, it makes all social reality depend on the
action of an entity in all ways mysterious (unlike documents); in this case, the collective
intentionality which takes charge of the transformation of the physical into the social.
According to the version that I propose, it is very simple to take account of the totality of
social objects, since informal promises in person pass through the societary structures of
business to become negative entities, such as debts. In all cases, we find a minimal structure,
guaranteed by the presence of at least two persons who accomplish an act (which can consist
in a gesture, in a word, or in a written act), presenting the possibility of being recorded in any
format, even if it was only in human memory. Beyond the fact of taking account of the
physical basis of the social object – which is not an X available for the action of collective
intentionality, but a recording which can take place in multiple formats – the rule that I
propose (and that I call the ‘rule of documentality’ in opposition to the ‘rule of
intentionality’) has the advantage of not making social reality depend on a function, namely,
collective intentionality, dangerously similar to a purely mental process, that Searle could
only have imagined in an anti-realist framework: that is to say, the economic crisis, to believe
Searle, is to a large extent imaginary. Being a form of documentality, money is entirely other
than imaginary, and it is precisely this occasion which allows us to establish a distinction
between the social (which records the acts of at least two persons, understood when this
recording has taken place in the head of two persons and not on external documents) and the

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mental (which can take place in the head of an individual alone).

A penultimate word on hermeneutics, of which postmodernism, in some singular way,

assumes the monopoly without right. In this framework, I in no way maintain that there are
no determinations in the social world. For the first and fundamental interpretation consists in
determining what can be interpreted and what cannot be interpreted, what links exist between
ontology and epistemology and what relevance these links have in relation to natural, social,
and ideal objects. In the social world, without doubt, epistemology counts enormously as it is
constitutive in relation to ontology (whereas in the natural world it is only reconstructive: it
finds something which exists independently of knowledge): what we think, what we say, our
interactions, are decisive. And it is decisive that these interactions are recorded and
documented. For this reason the social world is saturated with documents, in archives, in
drawers, in our portfolios, and henceforth also on our smartphones. In this sense it becomes
possible to account for both intuitions, the constructivist and the realist: 1. Natural objects are
independent of epistemology and verify the natural sciences. 2. Ontology is independent of
epistemology. 3. Social objects are dependent on epistemology, without being subjective. 4.
The assertion ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’, is especially relevant for social objects
(where it has a constructive value), and in a subordinated way for the epistemological
approach to the natural world (where it has a reconstructive value). 5. The realist intuition
and the constructivist intuition therefore have a legitimate identity, in their respective sectors
of application.

My conclusive thesis, finally, is that intentionality derives from documentality. The

postmoderns had insisted on the fact that the subject should not be considered as a
fundamental given, but their position in no way offered a path beyond the critique of an
agreed target, ‘the Cartesian subject’ and the pure hypothesis that the subject was conditioned
by culture. The perspective of documentality, in my opinion, allows on the contrary a positive
development that begins with the theory which – from the ancients to the moderns –
conceives the mind as a tabula on which inscriptions are made. In effect, as we have seen,
inscriptions have a powerful action in social reality: social behaviours are determined by
laws, rites, norms; social structures and education also preform our intentions. Imagine an
arch Robinson Crusoe who is the first and last man on earth. Could he really be consumed
with the ambition of becoming rear-admiral, billionaire, or poet of courtly love? Certainly
not, in the same way that he could in no way hope to follow fashion, to collect football cards
or even still-lifes. And if, making this hypothesis, he seeks to fabricate a document, he enters

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into an impossible enterprise, because in order to make a document at least two agents are
necessary, one who writes and one who reads. In reality, our arch-Robinson would not even
have a language and it would be hard to say that he ‘thinks’ in the current sense of the word.
It would seem moreover nothing short of impossible to maintain that he could be over-proud,
arrogant, or amorous, for nearly the same reason that it would seem absurd to pretend that he
had friends or enemies. We thus have two circumstances revealing the social structure of the
mind. On the one hand, the mind cannot emerge if it is not first submerged in the social:
made of education, language, of the transmission and recording of behaviours. On the other
hand, we have at our disposal enormous categories of social objects. Rather than trace a
world which would be at the total disposition of the subject, the sphere of social objects
reveals to us the inconsistency of solipsism: the fact that there are others in the world as well,
beyond us, is precisely demonstrated for us by the existence of these objects which would
have no reason for being in a world in which only a solipsist lived. If it was not possible to
leave traces, there would be no mind, and this is probably why the mind is traditionally
represented as a tabula rasa, a format on which impressions and thoughts are inscribed. In
sum, without the possibility of inscription, there would be no social objects, which consist
precisely in the recording of social acts, from the act, fundamental, of the promise. And, if
this is the case, perhaps it is henceforth necessary to translate Aristotle’s phrase, according to
which man is a zoon logon echon, as: man is an animal endowed with inscriptions, or better
still (seeing that one of the two meanings of ‘logos’ in Greek is rightly ‘promise’, ‘given
word’) as: man is an animal who promises.

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*
Maurizio Ferraris, ‘Qu’est-ce que le Nouveau Réalism?’ (2013). Written in French by Ferraris, published on
the Seminaire de Metaphysique website < http://semaihp.blogspot.ie/2014/06/maurizio-ferraris-quest-ce-que-
le.html >. Trans. Kris Pender.

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