Manifesto of New Realism

SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
MANIFESTO OF
NEW REALISM

Maurizio Ferraris

Translated by Sarah De Sanctis

Foreword by Graham Harman
 Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

Copyright © 2012, Gius. Laterza & Figli, All rights reserved

Manifesto del nuovo realism

© 2014 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferraris, Maurizio, 1956-

[Manifesto del nuovo realismo. English]
Manifesto of new realism / Maurizio Ferraris ; translated by Sarah De
Sanctis ; foreword by Graham Harman.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5377-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5379-8 (ebook) 1. Realism. 2. Philosophy,
Modern—21st century. 3. Postmodernism. I. Title.
B835.F4713 2014
149'.2—dc23
2014002036

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Suppose there is a black rock on an island, and
that its inhabitants have come to believe—through
elaborated experiences and an intensive use of per-
suasion—that the rock is white. Yet the rock would
be black, and the inhabitants nothing but idiots.
—Paolo Bozzi (1930–2003)
 CONTENTS

Foreword by Graham Harman ix

Prologue xiii

Author’s Note xvii

1. Realitism: The Postmodern Attack on Reality 1

2. Realism: Things That Have Existed Since

the Beginning of the World 23

3. Reconstruction: Why Criticism Starts from Reality 45

4. Emancipation: Unexamined Life Has No Value 65

Notes 85

Index 101

vii
 FOREWORD
GRAHAM HARMAN

I n the book now before you, Maurizio Ferraris makes a lucid

and sophisticated call for a realist turn in continental philos-
ophy. Until lately, the word “realism” was almost never spoken
aloud in the continental tradition. Or as Manuel DeLanda once
put it, “for decades admitting that one was a realist was equiv-
alent to admitting [that] one was a child molester.”1 Analytic
philosophers have always had the option of bluntly defending
the existence of a reality lying outside society, language, or the
mind. But among continentals, to adopt an explicitly realist (or
even antirealist) position was always to mark oneself as intel-
lectually awkward. Beginning with phenomenology, and con-
tinuing in its ultra-hip French successors, the usual method was
to treat the realism/antirealism problem as a “pseudo-prob-
lem.” The mind was always already outside itself in intending
objects, or Dasein was always already thrown into a world,
even though this world and its objects were said to exist only
as correlates of human beings.2 Such maneuvers reputedly took
us beyond realism and idealism alike, pointing to a new “third
way,” as in Merleau-Ponty’s talk of an in-itself-for-us.3 Only
in 2007 did Lee Braver finally call a spade a spade with his

ix
x Foreword

blatantly antirealist account of the history of continental phi-

losophy.4 The fact that Braver’s book has not prompted similar
candor among his fellow antirealists suggests that continental
philosophy is not yet willing to give up its traditional game of
pretending to be neither realist nor antirealist. Even as formi-
dable a thinker as Slavoj Žižek tells us with a straight face that
materialism means the external world does not exist—and that
he is not an idealist!5
Until recently, it often seemed to me that the initial realist
turn in continental philosophy came in 2002, with the pub-
lication of DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philoso-
phy and my own debut book, Tool-Being.6 But in saying so, I
did inadvertent injustice to Maurizio Ferraris, whose works in
Italian were unknown to me. Ferraris not only made the real-
ist turn at an earlier and lonelier date than DeLanda and the
speculative realists but took some personal risk in doing so.
Born in Turin in 1956, Ferraris was a student of Gianni Vat-
timo and coauthor of Jacques Derrida,7 two thinkers of a con-
spicuous antirealist stripe (despite various revisionist attempts
to portray Derrida as a realist). In March 1992 Ferraris sat in
Naples, listening to Hans-Georg Gadamer say that “being is
language.”8 In a flash he realized that this was false, and the
realist turn of Maurizio Ferraris commenced. Without success
he urged Derrida to adopt a weaker textualist position, based
on the principle that there is nothing social outside the text. In
later years, as Italy sank into the mire of Silvio Berlusconi, it
seemed to Ferraris that postmodern relativism had reached its
logical outcome in right-wing populism, providing new politi-
cal grounds for Ferraris to reject his former relativist position.
Unsurprisingly, this led to dispute with his former teacher Vat-
timo, a vehement political opponent of Berlusconi but also one
of the leading champions of postmodernist relativism.
In the new atmosphere of Anglophone continental thought,
realism is not just a viable option but is arguably home to the
 Foreword xi

most promising innovations of our time. Ferraris will serve as a

welcome new influence. After years of being relatively unknown
to the reader of English, he now has four books in our language:
the present manifesto, the wonderful Documentality,9 Where
Are You?10 and his bluntly titled Goodbye, Kant!11 Ferraris
once gave a brazen lecture under that title in Heidelberg, one
of the citadels of classic German thought. While presumably
he was most worried about how Gadamer might react, a more
important listener for Ferraris that day was the young student
Markus Gabriel, destined to be his future new realist colleague.
Gabriel has described that Heidelberg lecture as having awak-
ened him from something like an antirealist slumber.12 Perhaps
you, too, dear reader, will be awakened from slumber by the
gentle harangues and urbane precision of Maurizio Ferraris.

Notes

1. Manuel DeLanda, personal communication, January 30,

2007.
2. Thus, Quentin Meillassoux famously defines recent con-
tinental philosophy as “correlationism.” See Meillassoux,
After Finitude, trans. R. Brassier (London: Continuum,
2008).
3. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Percep-
tion, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 82–83.
4. Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continen-
tal Anti-Realism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2007).
5. The first claim can be found on page 97 of Slavoj Žižek
and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press, 2004). The second comes from page 36 of
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of
Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).
xii Foreword

6. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philoso-

phy (London: Continuum, 2002); Graham Harman, Tool-
Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago:
Open Court, 2002).
7. See Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the
Secret (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001).
8. Maurizio Ferraris, personal communication, August 5,
2013.
9. Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to
Leave Traces, trans. R. Davies (Bronx, NY: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2012).
10. Maurizio Ferraris, Where Are You? An Ontology of the
Cell Phone, trans. S. De Sanctis (Bronx, NY: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2014).
10. Maurizio Ferraris, Goodbye, Kant! (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 2013).
11. Markus Gabriel, personal communication, November 6,
2013.
 PROLOGUE

I n June 2012, at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies

in Naples, I met a young German colleague, Markus Gabriel,
who was planning an international conference on the funda-
mental character of contemporary philosophy. Markus asked
what I thought could be the right title for such an event, and
I replied to him, “New realism.” It was a commonsensical
consideration: the pendulum of thought that, in the twentieth
century, oscillated toward antirealism in its various versions
(hermeneutics, postmodernism, “linguistic turn,” etc.) had
moved, with the entry into the new century, toward realism
(once again, in its many aspects: ontology, cognitive science,
aesthetics as theory of perception, etc.).
To be precise, it was 1:30 p.m. on the 23rd of June when
I coined the neologism. Yet it should not be taken as the inau-
guration of a new kind of theory: it was simply the title of
a conference. “New realism,” in fact, is not at all “my own
theory,” nor is it a specific philosophical current,1 and it is
not even a koiné of thought. It is simply a photograph (which
I deem realistic indeed) of a state of affairs, as I believe was
demonstrated several times by the vast debate that took place
over the past few years.2 With precisely the aim of underlining

xiii
xiv Prologue

this circumstance, in the article in which I announced the con-

ference on the matter,3 I adopted the form of a manifesto or,
rather, of that manifesto: “a spectre is haunting Europe.” When
Marx and Engels wrote this, it was not to announce urbi et
orbi that they had discovered communism but rather to ascer-
tain that communists were many. If, on the other hand, Kant
had opened his Critique of Pure Reason stating “a spectre is
haunting Europe: transcendental philosophy,” they would
have taken him for a madman, given that he was proposing a
theory that, at that stage, only existed in his book.
The part of this work that does aspire to some kind of
originality, or that at least I regard as a personal elaboration, is
made up of the reflections I developed in the past twenty years
and that I here summarize. The elaboration of realism, in fact,
has been the main thread of my philosophical work ever since
the turn that, at the beginning of the nineties, led me to aban-
don hermeneutics and to propose aesthetics as the theory of
sensibility, a natural ontology as the theory of unamendability,
and, finally, a social ontology as the theory of documentality.4
Therefore, to me the reference to realism has not been a
means to boast of a laughable philosophical monopoly over the
real, in a way that would not be too different from the claim of
privatizing water. It has rather meant the affirmation that water
is not socially constructed; that the sacrosanct deconstructive
vocation lying at the core of any philosophy worthy of its name
has to come to terms with reality, otherwise it will turn into a
futile game; and that any deconstruction without reconstruc-
tion is irresponsibility.5
But, as I was saying, we must not forget the context in
which I develop my considerations, which originate from a
reflection upon the outcomes of postmodernism. What I call
“new realism,” in fact, is first of all the acknowledgment of
a turn. The historical experience of media populisms, of post-
9/11 wars, and of the recent credit crunch led to a severe denial
 Prologue xv

of what I regard as the two dogmas of postmodernism: namely,

that all reality is socially constructed and infinitely manipu-
lable, and that truth is a useless notion because solidarity is
more important than objectivity. Real needs, real lives and
deaths, not bearing to be reduced to mere interpretations, have
asserted their rights confirming the idea that realism (just like
its opposite) not only has implications for knowledge but also
for ethics and politics. Of course, this turn has not only a his-
tory but also—and first of all—a geography, circumscribed to
what Husserl called “European spirit”: that is, the West that
Spengler prophesized the decline of ninety years ago. One can
hardly imagine postmodernism in China or India. In any case,
the part of the world I live in (which I believe I can claim to be
a bit wider than the circle of my friends and acquaintances),
namely, the West that experienced postmodernism, now seems
to have abandoned it. How did this happen?
 AUTHOR’S NOTE

I n this short book, which was born out of the remains of

many of my works taken up and elaborated here, I hope
to have provided a clear—or at least concise—presentation
of the reasons for my realism. I was able to test some of my
arguments in two recent conferences: On the Ashes of Post-
Modernism: A New Realism? (New York, Istituto Italiano di
Cultura, November 7, 2011) and Nuovo realismo: una discus-
sione aperta (Turin, Fondazione Rosselli, December 5, 2011).
So I thank my colleagues who took part in them: Akeel Bil-
grami, Ned Block, Paul Boghossian, Petar Bojaniü, Mario De
Caro, Roberta De Monticelli, Massimo Dell’Utri, Umberto Eco,
Costantino Esposito, Paolo Flores d’Arcais, Markus Gabriel,
Miguel Gotor, Andrea Lavazza, Diego Marconi, Armando
Massarenti, Massimo Mori, Hilary Putnam, Stefano Rodotà,
Riccardo Viale, Alberto Voltolini. I also thank my friends who
read this text and helped me make it better: Tiziana Andina,
Carola Barbero, Elena Casetta, Anna Donise, Daniela Padoan,
Vincenzo Santarcangelo, Raffaella Scarpa, Enrico Terrone.
Finally, a special thanks to Valentina Desalvo, to whom I owe
the minting of a key term for my discourse: “realitism.”

xvii
 ONE

REALITISM
The Postmodern Attack on Reality

From Postmodernism to Populism

P ostmodernism came into philosophy with a short book (109

pages) by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard,
titled The Postmodern Condition, published in September
1979.1 It was about the end of ideologies, that is, what Lyotard
called “grand narratives”: Enlightenment, Idealism, Marxism.
These narratives were worn out; people no longer believed
in them; they had ceased to move people’s consciousness and
justify knowledge and scientific research. It was a crisis, but
(apparently) it was experienced with no tragedies, far from
the dramas and guillotines of modernity, in an age that could
not foresee what was soon going to happen from the Balkans
to the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Manhattan. The ease
with which the pandemic spread depended not only on what is
so obscurely called “the spirit of the time” but precisely on the
fact that postmodernism was carrying along a cosmopolitical
crowd of forefathers:2 the English historian Arnold Toynbee,
1
2 Manifesto of New Realism

who spoke about it in the forties; the German anthropologist

Arnold Gehlen, who theorized “post-theory” in the fifties; the
American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who mixed black humor
and science fiction in the sixties; the American architect Robert
Venturi, who reinstated Las Vegas’s Disney style at the begin-
ning of the seventies. At the very beginning, in the thirties,
there was even the Spanish literary critic Federico de Onís, who
dubbed a poetic trend with that name.
The least common denominator of all these forerunners lies
in the end of the idea of progress: the projection toward an infi-
nite and undetermined future is followed by a retreat. Maybe
the future is already here, and it is the sum of all pasts: we have
a great future behind our backs. Yet, in the specific field of
philosophy, we found a peculiar element, which we will tackle
over and over in this book. Given that, in philosophy (and in
knowledge in general), progress requires a trust in truth, the
postmodern distrust in progress entailed the adoption of the
idea—which finds its paradigmatic expression in Nietzsche—
that truth can be evil and illusion good, and that this is the
destiny of the modern world. The core of the matter is not to
be found so much in the assertion “God is dead” (as Hegel
claimed before Nietzsche) but rather in the sentence “there are
no facts, only interpretations,”3 because the real world ended
up being a tale. A tale that reoccurs, according to the cyclic
character of the eternal return instead of the linear becoming
of universal history as the progress of civilization.
Thus far I have mentioned the strictly philosophical ideas.
Nevertheless, unlike other trends and sects, and infinitely more
than Plato’s attempts in Syracuse—but also more than Marx-
ism—postmodernism found a full political and social realiza-
tion. The past few years, in fact, have taught us a bitter truth.
That is, the primacy of interpretations over facts and the over-
coming of the myth of objectivity took place, but they did not
 Realitism 3

have the emancipative outcomes prophesized by professors.

The “real world” never “became a tale”; there was no libera-
tion from the constraints of reality—which is just too mono-
lithic, compact, peremptory—nor was there a multiplication
and a deconstruction of perspectives that seemed to reproduce,
in the social world, the multiplication and radical liberaliza-
tion of TV channels (as was believed in the seventies). The
real world has certainly become a tale or, rather—as we shall
see—it became a reality show; but the outcome was media pop-
ulism, namely, a system in which (if one has such power) one
can claim to make people believe anything. In news broadcasts
and talk shows we did witness the realm of the “no facts, only
interpretations” that—in what unfortunately is a fact and not
an interpretation—then showed its true meaning: “the argu-
ment of the strongest is always the best.”
Therefore, we now deal with a peculiar circumstance. Post-
modernism is retreating, both philosophically and ideologically,
not because it missed its goals but, on the contrary, precisely
because it hit them all too well. The massive phenomenon—
and, I would say, the main cause of the turn—was precisely this
full and perverse realization that now seems close to implosion.
The postmodernists’ dreams were realized by populists, and
in the passage from dream to reality, we truly realized what it
was all about. So, the damage did not come straight from post-
modernism—which was mostly animated by admirable eman-
cipative aspirations—but by populism, which benefited from a
powerful (although largely unaware) ideological support on the
part of postmodernism. This had consequences that strongly
affected not only the more or less vast elites that might be
interested in philosophy but most of all a mass of people that
never heard of postmodernism and that underwent the effects
of media populism, including first and foremost the conviction
that it is a system with no possible alternatives.
4 Manifesto of New Realism

For this reason it is worth having a closer look at this real-

ized and then overturned utopia by retracing the three crucial
points in which I propose we summarize the postmodern koiné.
First, ironization, according to which taking a theory seriously
shows a form of dogmatism, and we should therefore main-
tain an ironical detachment toward our statements—expressed
typographically by inverted commas4 and even physically by
flexing fingers to denote quotes in oral speech. Second, desub-
limation, namely, the idea that desire constitutes as such a form
of emancipation, because reason and intellect are forms of
dominion, and liberation must be looked for through feelings
and the body, which are revolutionary per se.5 And, most of all,
deobjectification, that is, the assumption—whose catastrophic
centrality will be shown throughout the book—that there are
no facts but only interpretations, as well as its corollary for
which friendly solidarity should prevail over an indifferent and
violent objectivity.6

Ironization

Postmodernism marks the entry of inverted commas in phi-

losophy: reality becomes “reality,” truth “truth,” objectivity
“objectivity,” justice “justice,” gender “gender,” and so forth.
At the base of this new quotation-marking of the world lay the
thesis according to which the “grand narratives” (rigorously
between quotation marks) of modernity or, even worse, ancient
objectivism were the cause of the worst kind of dogmatism.7
Rather than being fanatics, it is better to turn into “ironic
theoreticians” who suspend the peremptoriness of any state-
ment they make, seeing in facts, norms, and rules an evil per
se. (Roland Barthes well represented the Zeitgeist when—only
half-jokingly—he said that language is “quite simply fascist”8
because it has semantics, syntax, and grammar.) The quotation
 Realitism 5

mark, in its typographical variations, signifies a distancing that

can also manifest lexical approximation, that is, inattentive-
ness, or an actual citation, that is, parasitism:9 there is a reality
built by others and we, as deconstructors, ironize on it, think-
ing we have thus done our job.
Quotation-marking is, in fact, a gesture similar to Hus-
serl’s epoché, to the suspension of judgment, to putting aside
the existence of the objects under examination so as to grasp
them in their phenomenic dimension. But compared to putting
in brackets, putting between inverted commas is a very dif-
ferent strategy. Something that in Husserl was a philosophical
exercise turns into a protocol of political correctness by which
one proclaims that whoever dared remove the inverted commas
would be performing an act of inacceptable violence or child-
ish naïveté, claiming to be treating as real something that, in
the best hypothesis, is only ‘real’ or “real.”10 This thesis, which
implicitly turned into a fanatic whoever—although with full
legitimacy—believed to possess some kind of truth, impeded
(at least in the intentions) progress in philosophy, transform-
ing it into a programmatically parasitic doctrine referring to
science for any claim of truth and reality and limiting itself to
quotation-marking. If then from the skies of theory we descend
to the concrete realization of an “ironic theory” as the for-
ever partial adhesion to our statements and beliefs, the con-
sequences of ironization can be intuited by asking ourselves,
for instance, what “an ironic postmodern witness” could be
in a court where, instead of “equal justice under law,” there
was written “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Leaving
thought experiments aside and getting to real events, how little
ironization entails emancipation is vastly demonstrated by the
abuse of laughter, facetiousness, and farce in media populism,
which instead provided a further confirmation of the ethological
hypothesis that the facial expression of laughter is a legacy of
the act of showing teeth—that, in animals, precedes aggression.
6 Manifesto of New Realism

But what does the postmodern inclination for irony depend

on? In a book that was very important to postmodernism, Dif-
ference and Repetition,11 Gilles Deleuze claimed that one had
to do for philosophy the same thing Duchamp did for art and
propose a “philosophically bearded” Hegel just as Duchamp
had drawn a moustache and a beard on the Mona Lisa. In his
review of the book, Foucault went even further (he later took
it back in extremis, as we shall see in chapter 4) affirming that
thought had to become a masquerade.12
At a closer look, the ironic drive demonstrates that post-
modernism has an ancient heart. Just as a star exploded long
ago keeps irradiating its light, when postmodernism entered
philosophy, at the end of the seventies, its cycle was coming to
an end—a cycle that had its origin in Nietzsche’s desperate rad-
icalism, in the rebellion against systematic philosophy and in
the various waves of philosophical avant-gardes that came one
after the other in the twentieth century, and, even before that
(as we shall see extensively in chapter 2), in Kant’s Copernican
revolution13 (which truly was a Ptolemaic revolution, since it
placed man at the center of the universe as a constructor of
worlds through concepts). In this sense, postmodernism was
not philosophical trash. It was the outcome of a cultural turn
that largely coincided with modernity, namely, the prevalence
of conceptual schemes over the external world. This explains
the recourse to inverted commas as a means for distancing: we
never deal with things in themselves but forever and only with
mediated, distorted, improper phenomena that are therefore
placeable between quotation marks. Nevertheless, what specifi-
cally characterizes postmodernism with respect to its predeces-
sors and forefathers is that it is a programmatically parasitic
movement. In art there is a venerable work of tradition and you
draw moustaches on it, or you take a urinal or a soap pad box
and declare it a work of art. In philosophy you take Plato and
say he was antifeminist, or you take a TV series and say that it
 Realitism 7

contains more philosophy than Schopenhauer’s thought. More

generally (thus completing a tendency that was already very
well represented in much twentieth century philosophy), you
proclaim that philosophy is dead, and that, at most, it consists
of a kind of conversation or a writing genre that has nothing
to do with truth or progress.
You might object that I am reducing postmodern theses,
most especially its Ur-Thesis, “There are no facts, only inter-
pretations,” to a caricature. Yet, in the final analysis, this is
the fundamental character of postmodernism, given that one
is tempted to ask oneself: what if the thesis consisted essen-
tially of its own caricature? If—in accordance with Duchamp’s
spirit—it consisted exclusively in emptying any argument out
by turning thought into a masquerade? From this point of
view, the genesis of weak thought (Pensiero debole)14—which
I feel particularly entitled to talk about, as I have partly been
involved in it and an eyewitness of it—seems paradigmatic.
Scholars of different orientation and generations gather under
a title of great evocative efficaciousness, but that is not truly
constraining for anyone. What is being presented is not a the-
ory but, indeed, an anthology with some valuable proposals
that are nonetheless strongly dissonant. It manages to cap-
ture exactly the spirit of the time, which is that of impatience
toward old academic stagnation and of the advance of media
in public consideration. This perfect tuning is not limited to
the national field, but it determines the international success of
the homonymous book, so that little by little the very debate
about Weak Thought leads to the persuasion that there is such
a thing as “weak thought”—namely, a recognizable theoretical
nucleus, or at least a “weak thought,” a gust of the spirit of the
time. The intimately ironic aspect of the proposal would have
been even more evident had the volume carried a band say-
ing “Ceci n’est pas une théorie.” Yet, just like laughter, irony
is not only detachment and nonviolence. In fact, the specific
8 Manifesto of New Realism

ironic theory of weak thought, as was precociously noted,15

reproposed in more than one case the characteristics of a long
period of Italian philosophy: suspicion toward science and
technology, traditionalism, idealism. That is, suspicion toward
realism (and the idea of progress in philosophy), always seen
as a penalizing mistake with respect to the flights of thought.
The ideal enemy of weak thought, then, was not the declared
one (namely, dogmatism) but rather Enlightenment, that is, the
claim of reasoning with one’s own mind, as we shall better see
in the last chapter of this book. De Maistre described the prot-
estants’ spirit as: “a spirit of cavil, envious to death of being
in the right—quite natural, indeed, in every dissenter, but in
Catholics wholly inexplicable.”16 In retrospect, weak thought
shows the reappearance of the Catholic polemic against the
esprits forts, against those who bring forward the absurd claim
of being right. At the same time, there is deep skepticism and
radical distrust toward mankind, which is seen as being in need
of salvation and redemption, as well as incapable of following
Rousseau’s principle used by Kant as the epigraph of his work
on Enlightenment:17 “Wake up, my friend, and leave childish
things behind!”
It is in this anti-Enlightenment climate that—with the com-
plicity of irony and quotation marks—the misunderstanding
takes place for which right-wing thinkers become left-wing
ideologues, with a symmetric inverted phenomenon to the one
for which rock music (initially perceived as left-wing) was eas-
ily adopted also by the far Right. The case of Heidegger as
an antimetaphysical resistant, whose organic membership to
Nazism is often forgotten or underestimated, is paradigmatic in
this sense. Let me offer one example out of the many possible
ones. Opening his contribution to the booklet Ragione filoso-
fica e fede religiosa nell’era postmoderna [Philosophical reason
and religious faith in the postmodern era],18 Vattimo writes that
Heidegger “also made a series of ‘political mistakes,’ such as
 Realitism 9

his adhesion to Nazism.” Now, one wonders why Heidegger’s

adhesion to Nazism is a political mistake between inverted
commas, as if it were a weak mistake, perhaps not even a mis-
take and only a “stupidity”—eine Dummheit, as Heidegger
described his adhesion to Nazism in his interview for the Spie-
gel in 1966.19 The removal of his Nazism is due to many rea-
sons, some of which are undoubtedly accidental or confused:
for instance, the fact that Heidegger’s philosophy was adopted,
in France, also by thinkers very close to the left-wing, and that
in general people were willing to trust the image of Heidegger’s
relation to Nazism that Heidegger himself had offered in his
defense.
Among the numerous de-Nazification strategies,20 in any
case, none equals the plastic evidence of the a priori absolu-
tion (in which, once again, quotation marks play a central role)
that can be found in the curator’s note in the Italian edition of
Heidegger’s Political Writings that refers to the closing lines
of the allocution dated May 17, 1933 where Heidegger wrote:
“to our great Führer Adolf Hitler a German Sieg Heil.” The
curator’s comment is: “Today the expression ‘Ski Heil’ is still
used—with no political connotation whatsoever—by skiers to
wish one another a good ski.”21 But, leaving the folklore aside,
what was not seen (and provoked a semi-blindness about Hei-
degger’s ideological tendencies) was that Heidegger’s thought
as a whole is hyper-hierarchic, and that the plea to nihilism
and to the will to power, as well as the insistence on Deci-
sion and the abandonment of the traditional notion of “truth”
constitute a deep and non-opportunistic adhesion to the
Führerprinzip.
The condemnation of truth and objectivity as forms of vio-
lence and the consequent plea to an ironic pop theory thus
elevate as their hero (with an undoubtedly objective irony) a
philosopher that is certainly pop but utterly devoid of irony
and very convinced of himself and his own “destinality.”
10 Manifesto of New Realism

Desublimation

The dialectics that manifests itself in ironization is also at

work in the idea that desire can constitute an emancipative
element per se. If Heideggerism is a right-wing movement that
is adopted by the left-wing, with the desiring revolution we
find a movement that—at least in the sixties and seventies—
was primarily left-wing but that turned into an instrumentum
regni for the Right. In fact, the history of populisms taught
us how it is possible to develop a politics that is desiring and
reactionary at the same time—after all, in line with significant
precedents during the Ancien Régime, such as, for instance, the
French aristocracy represented in Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses
and censored by the Jacobins. There are therefore reasons to
believe that, in its return to the Right, the desiring revolution
rediscovered its genuine roots. Of course, the Nietzschean plea
to the body and its “great reasons,” or the critique of morals
as a repressive and resentful structure, could be presented, for
a while, as left-wing. Nonetheless, these elements were formed,
in Nietzsche, within the frame of the theorization (that ani-
mates his entire thought) of a Dionysian revolution, where the
“tragic man,” antithetic to the rational man represented by
Socrates, is first of all a desiring man.22 The very recognition
of the political role of the body, which is part of the theoretical
horizon of the radical Left of the twentieth century, finds a full
realization, but, again, in a reversed way: here it is the body of
the leader that becomes an intensely political element.23 Now,
even without calling Nietzsche into question, it would have
been enough to read Wagner’s Art and Revolution24—written
by a Wagner that seems to anticipate Marcuse—to understand
that there may be a desiring revolution, but that it will still be a
conservative revolution, given that desire, unlike reason, refers
back to the archaic, to childhood, and to mothers.
 Realitism 11

In particular, in populism the conservative revolution mani-

fests itself through the mechanism that was already extensively
studied by Horkheimer and Adorno:25 that of “repressive
desublimation.” The king concedes sexual freedom to the peo-
ple and, in exchange, he keeps for himself not only the sexual
freedom he gave to everyone else but also all the other kinds of
freedom that he takes on as his exclusive privilege. The twist
between body and desire is accompanied (in accordance with
the anti-Socratism of the Dionysian revolution) by a diffused
anti-intellectualism, which fosters the mirroring between the
people and the king that constitutes the fundamental trait of
populism. In other words, where at the dawn of postmodern-
ism there was talk of the possibility of a desiring revolution,
there takes place a desiring restoration, in the sense that desire
is confirmed to be an element of social control. And it is not
by chance that Foucault’s change of mind that will lead him
to take an antithetic position with regard to postmodernism
started precisely from the issue of emancipative desire: four
years after the Anti-Oedipus, with which in 1972 Deleuze and
Guattari reaffirmed the link between desire and revolution,
Foucault published The Will to Knowledge,26 the first volume
of the unfinished History of Sexuality, which substitutes the
paradigm of emancipative desire for the thesis according to
which sex is principally an instrument of control and exercise
of authority, that is, the first and fundamental manifestation of
“biopolitics”—which will be at the center of Foucault’s reflec-
tions to follow.
Another aspect of the repressive desublimation is the
authoritative use of the Nietzschean critique of morals. Under
this profile, we discover that relativism, theorized by progres-
sives and reproached by conservatives, was in fact much more
practiced by the latter, in accordance with the paradoxes of the
postmodernism-populism relation we are tackling. Consider, for
12 Manifesto of New Realism

instance, the apparently hyper-relativist argument of “what’s

wrong with it?”—which was often used as the standard answer
to the criticisms toward the twists between sex and power.
Now, in “what’s wrong with it?” there intervenes a dispositive
that hits the heart of a fundamental category of Enlightenment:
that is, public opinion, which was born precisely as the place
where the criticism of power would count as a means of control
and guarantee of people’s rights. Habermas27 already described
the transformation of public opinion, in the media world, from
a place of debate to a place of manipulation of opinions on
the part of mass media owners. But “what’s wrong with it?”
defines a third stage: namely, the fact that any surviving critical
instance of public opinion is emptied a priori through the cat-
egory of “moralism.” Thus, “what’s wrong with it?” presents
itself as an incredibly efficacious instrument of repression of
dissent and reaches its perfection when criticism is declassed to
gossip. Here, too, there is an interesting mechanism. In fact, on
the one hand, the charismatic personalization of power leads
to the fact that all the attention is focused on the leader, his
sphere and his behaviors—and this is so not due to a deci-
sion of public opinion but to a deliberate political choice typi-
cal of media populism. On the other hand, reciprocally, every
criticism and dissent can now be reduced to gossip, and public
opinion regresses to its pre-Enlightenment phase: that of resent-
ful gossip on the bad costumes of the neighbors and the vices
of the powerful.

Deobjectification

If, nevertheless, we look for the sufficient reason and the politi-
cal engine of ironization and desublimation we find deobjecti-
fication: that is, the idea that objectivity, reality, and truth are
a bad thing and even that ignorance is a good thing. Also in
 Realitism 13

this case, postmodernism gathers at least three orientations of

great cultural importance.
First of all, a Nietzschean tradition that offers multiple
variations of the thesis according to which truth is nothing but
an ancient metaphor, namely, a sort of myth or the manifes-
tation of the will to power; that knowledge does not possess
an autonomous emancipative value but rather constitutes an
instrument of dominion or deceit, and, more radically, that
there exists no such thing as “truth” but only a relationship
of forces and struggles.28 Then, the disappearance of the dif-
ference between myth and logos, or between real world and
apparent world, produces a second effect: the recourse to myth,
which traditionally was a right-wing patrimony, is recovered
by the Nietzschean-Heideggerian Left, through the project of
a “new mythology.”29 But the element that was by far the most
ubiquitous (as it also involves a great part of twentieth-century
analytic philosophy) was the one that proclaimed, with a radi-
calization of Kantism, that there is no access to the world if
not through the mediation (which, in postmodernism, is radi-
calized and becomes construction) of conceptual schemes and
representation.
We have a real case study on the perverse effects of deob-
jectification. In the mid-seventies, the epistemologist Paul K.
Feyerabend affirmed that there is no privileged method for
science, because in the confrontation between different scien-
tific theories there are largely incommensurable worldviews
set one against the other. In this frame, it is far from obvious
that Galileo was right; rather, Bellarmine had all the rights to
condemn Galileo’s doctrine, which would have had negative
repercussions on the asset of a society that found its order-
ing principle in the Church.30 It is evident that, with such a
statement, Feyerabend wanted to reject a strictly positivistic
conception of physics, namely, the idea that knowledge con-
sists of a mere collection of data needless of interpretations or
14 Manifesto of New Realism

conceptual schemes—and let us not forget that the context in

which he expressed his position was intentionally provocative,
since it was the pars destruens of For and Against Method, a
book planned with Imre Lakatos and published posthumously
in 1999. The outcome was that, twenty years later, Feyera-
bend’s argument was used, in all seriousness, by Benedict XVI
in order to affirm that epistemologists themselves claim that
Galileo was not ultimately right, and most of all in order to
articulate a discourse on the bases of which human knowledge
leads to antinomies (like the one setting Galileo against Bel-
larmine), which can only find a solution in a superior form of
rationality.31
This is postmodern dialectics at work. Deobjectification,
while formulated with emancipative intentions, turns into the
delegitimation of human knowledge and into the reference to
a transcendent foundation. So, on the one hand, postmodern
philosophers adhere to skepticism and have no ultimate rea-
sons to justify Copernicus’s superiority with respect to Ptolemy
or Pasteur’s with respect to Asclepius, because these are, any-
how, confrontations between conceptual schemes, as there is no
“outside” reality. On the other hand—beyond the equivalence
of things in the world and overcoming the inanity of learned
quarrels—there opens up space for transcendence. Underlin-
ing “how deep the self-doubt of the modern age, of science
and of technology goes today,” the former pope easily recov-
ers the prestige that the Church had lost when its worldview
was contested by science. Once he is done with the defense, he
can go on the attack by reproposing a Weltanschauung that is
now doubly justified, both as a legitimate worldview like any
other and therefore nonrejectable, and as a more true world-
view, because it is founded “by its inscription into a greater
reasonableness” and is therefore better compared to relativistic
worldviews.
 Realitism 15

But the area where skepticism and the farewell to truth have
shown their most aggressive side is politics.32 Here, postmodern
deobjectification was, exemplarily, the underlying philosophy
of the Bush government, which theorized that reality was sim-
ply the belief of “reality-based communities”—that is, unwary
people who do not know how things go. This praxis found
its most concise expression in the response by one of Bush’s
consultants to the journalist Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire
now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too.”33
An arrogant absurdity, of course. Yet, eight years before that
the philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard had claimed
that the Gulf War was nothing but a TV fiction,34 playing (like
Feyerabend) the role of the useful skeptic in favor of a cause
that was certainly not his own.

From Realitism to Realism

The final outcome of the joint action of ironization, desubli-

mation, and deobjectification can be called “realitism”:35 an
entirely contingent name (as it refers to TV reality shows) that,
nonetheless, captures the substance of that “world well lost”36
in which postmodern thinkers saw the bright side of the age.
Any authoritativeness of the real is cancelled, and, in its place, a
quasi-reality is arranged with strong fictional elements, resting
on three fundamental mechanisms. The first one is juxtaposi-
tion, for instance, in TV programs in which a report on atomic
fission can be followed or preceded by one on reincarnation.
The second is dramatization: you take something real and dra-
matize it with actors, turning it into a piece of semi-fiction.
The third could be called dreamization: what is life in a reality
16 Manifesto of New Realism

show? Dream or reality? With this strategy, a fully realized

postmodernism manifests itself as a violent and inverted uto-
pianism. Instead of recognizing the real and imagining another
world to realize instead of it, postmodernism regards the real
as a tale and assumes that this is the only possible liberation:
since there is nothing to realize and, after all, there is noth-
ing to imagine, it is a matter of believing that reality is like
a dream—harmless and fulfilling. Obviously, these three pro-
cedures can be combined with huge outcomes, exploiting the
reality effect deriving from the use of the television medium and
especially of news and reportages (“it must be true, TV said
so”). Thucydides already put in historical characters’ mouths
discourses largely made up by him, but in the society of com-
munication and recording there seems to be a change in status,
due to the quantity of material online. The overall effect is to
blur the dividing lines not only between reality and fiction but
also between science, religion, and superstition.
As such, realitism is therefore not a simple postmodern
product. It has an ancient heart, as old as mankind’s desire
for illusion, as well as the taste for mystification and its conve-
nience. Thus, realitism appears in our mind in childhood, when
we wonder whether things around us are real or whether we
are dreaming, and it is developed in the tales through which
we hope to change the world. Per se, realitism is merely a vari-
ant of solipsism: that is, of the idea that the external world
does not exist, that it is a mere representation, perhaps even
at our disposal. At first it seems like a moment of great libera-
tion: the weight of the real is lifted and we can be the mak-
ers of our own world. Nietzsche saw in it the most beautiful
liberation, the “bacchanal of free spirits,” but it is hard to
agree. If there is no external world, if there is no difference
between reality and representation, then the prevailing mood
will be melancholy or rather what we could define as a bipolar
 Realitism 17

syndrome oscillating between a sense of omnipotence and the

feeling of the pointlessness of everything. In the end, one feels
lonely. The outside world does not exist; we are simply dream-
ing our dream or even someone else’s dream: a programmed
and almost expired one. In the eighteenth century, the Scottish
philosopher Thomas Reid explained this with calm irony. If
everything is a representation, then “the whole universe about
me, bodies and spirits, sun, moon, stars, and earth, friends and
relations, all things without exception, which I imagined to
have a permanent existence, whether I thought of them or not,
vanish at once.”37 And then the dream turns into a nightmare,
like in The Truman Show.
What to do? Postmodernists have not been blind to the
Golem they created—or at least philosophically sanctioned—
precisely because, at the origin of their stance, there was a
sincere emancipative desire and not a project of domination
and mystification. But most of the time they adopted Wagner’s
strategy that “only the weapon that cast the wound can heal
the wound”38—a sentence that is almost as risky as Hölderlin’s
“where danger grows, so does that which saves.” Which is
after all (let us note this) the fundamental principle of magi-
cal thought, according to which like cures like. Upon closer
examination, and notwithstanding its insistence on irony and
disillusion, postmodernism turns out to be a magical antireal-
ism: a doctrine attributing to the spirit an uncontested domin-
ion over the world. It is against this spirit that, with the turn
of the century, realism came to the fore. It was a matter of
relegitimizing—in philosophy, politics, and everyday life—a
notion that, at the peak of postmodernism, was considered
a philosophical naïveté as well as the manifestation of politi-
cal conservatism, given that the appeal to reality, in ages still
tied to the fatal slogan “all power to the imagination,” seemed
like the wish for nothing to change and the acceptation of
18 Manifesto of New Realism

the world for what it is. Thirty years of history taught us the
opposite.
As I mentioned in the prologue, what I call “new realism”
is therefore the common name of a transformation that hit
contemporary philosophical culture and that was developed in
many directions. First of all, the end of the linguistic turn and
the stronger realist inclination of philosophers that, while not
adhering to postmodernist positions, had previously been more
sensitive to the reasons of constructivism and the modeling
role of conceptual schemes upon experience. Think of Hilary
Putnam’s passage from “internal realism” to “commonsense
realism,”39 or of the claim of the importance of experience
with respect to conceptual schemes in Umberto Eco,40 or again
of the development of a “speculative realism” by the younger
generations of philosophers.41 Another way in which the turn
took place is the return to perception, which was traditionally
neglected by philosophical transcendentalism culminating in
postmodernism. Typically, the fact that aesthetics returned to be
considered not as a philosophy of illusion but as a philosophy
of perception42 revealed a new openness toward the external
world, namely, a real that lies beyond conceptual schemes and
that is independent from them—just as it is impossible for us to
correct optical illusions or change the color of the objects sur-
rounding us by mere reflection. A third significant element of
the realistic transformation is what I would call the ontological
turn, namely, the fact that both in analytic and in continental
philosophy there has been an increasing recovery of ontology as
the science of being43 and of the multiplicity of objects, which—
from perception to society—constitute a research area that is
not necessarily subordinated to natural science. With the return
of ontology, therefore, there is the overcoming of the prevailing
philosophical attitude ever since Kant, who had bid ontology
farewell by claiming that philosophy had to cease dealing with
 Realitism 19

objects (now pertinent to science) and give up the “proud name

of an ontology” so as to merely investigate—under “the modest
title of analytic of the pure understanding”44—the conditions of
possibility of knowing these objects (namely, it had to set itself
in favor of or against science).
Thus, this is the roughly sketched portrait of contemporary
philosophy, which seems profoundly changed with respect to
the situation we still found at the end of the last century. Nev-
ertheless, as I anticipated in the prologue, what I will propose
in the next three chapters is my personal conception of real-
ism as I developed it in the past twenty years. I sum it up in
three key words—Ontology, Criticism, Enlightenment—which
react to the respective fallacies of postmodernism: the fallacy
of being-knowledge, the fallacy of ascertainment-acceptance,
and the fallacy of knowledge-power.
Ontology simply means: the world has its laws and imposes
them, namely, it is not the docile colony on which to exer-
cise the constructive action of conceptual schemes. The mis-
take made here by postmodern thinkers was due to the fallacy
of being-knowledge, that is, the confusion between ontology
and epistemology: between what there is and what we know
about what there is. It is clear that in order to know that
water is H2O I need language, schemes, and categories. But
that water is H2O is utterly independent from any knowledge
of mine—so much so that water was H2O even before the birth
of chemistry, and it would still be if we all disappeared from
the earth. Mostly, as regards nonscientific experience, water
wets and fire burns whether I know it or not, independently
from languages, schemes, and categories. At a certain point,
something resists us. It is what I call “unamendability”: the
salient character of the real. This can certainly be a limita-
tion but, at the same time, provides us with the support that
allows us to distinguish dreams from reality and science from
20 Manifesto of New Realism

magic. This is why I entitled the chapter dedicated to ontology

“Realism.”
Criticism, then, means this. With what I define as the “fal-
lacy of ascertainment-acceptance,” postmodernists assumed
that ascertaining reality consists in accepting the existing state
of affairs and that, inversely (although with a logical gap), irre-
alism is emancipative per se. Yet, it is clearly not so. Realism
is the premise of criticism, while irrealism is at one with acqui-
escence, the tale we tell children so they fall asleep. Baudelaire
noted that a dandy could have only spoken to the crowd in
order to mock it.45 Let alone an irrealist, incapable, for his
own theories, of establishing whether he is really transform-
ing himself and the world or whether, vice versa, he is simply
imagining or dreaming about doing something of that kind.
The realist, instead, has the possibility to criticize (if she wants
to) and transform (if she can) by the virtue of the same banal
reason why the diagnosis is the premise of therapy. And given
that any deconstruction that is an end to itself is irresponsibil-
ity, I decided to entitle the third chapter “Reconstruction.”
Finally, let us come to Enlightenment. Recent history con-
firmed Habermas’s diagnosis that, thirty years ago, saw post-
modernism as an anti-Enlightenment groundswell,46 which finds
its legitimacy in what I define “fallacy of knowledge-power,”
according to which behind any form of knowledge there hides
a power experienced as negative. As a consequence, instead of
mainly linking itself to emancipation, knowledge becomes an
instrument of enslavement. This anti-Enlightenment is the heart
of darkness of modernity: namely, the rejection of the idea of
progress and of the trust in the link between knowledge and
emancipation in great thinkers such as de Maistre, Donoso
Cortés, Nietzsche, which is summarized in Baudelaire’s idea
that “Throne and altar” is a revolutionary maxim.47 It is they
that the postmodernism-populism time lapse seems to have
proven right. Now, in order to exit this deep obscurity and to
 Realitism 21

obtain the “Emancipation” that lends its name to the last chap-
ter, it will thus be necessary to resort to Enlightenment, which,
as Kant put it, is “sapere aude!” and marks “man’s emergence
from his self-incurred immaturity.”48 Enlightenment, today, still
requires a stand and faith in mankind, which is not a fallen race
in need of redemption but an animal species that evolves and
that, in its progress, was endowed with reason.
 TWO

REALISM
Things That Have Existed
Since the Beginning of the World

The Fallacy of Being-Knowledge

L et us start with ontology and with the criticism of the fal-

lacy of being-knowledge, because here lies the core of the
whole debate on realism. Diego Marconi has characterized the
opposition between realists and antirealists as an antithesis
between two intuitions.1 The first, the realist one, posits that
there are things (for instance, the fact that there are moun-
tains over four thousand meters tall on the moon) that do not
depend on our conceptual schemes. The second (that Marconi
calls “hermeneutical” or “Kantian”) believes instead that the
fact that there are over four thousand meter tall mountains on
the moon is also dependent on our conceptual schemes or even
simply on the words we use (“Could we truly say that there are
mountains on the moon if we did not have the concept or word
for ‘mountain,’ ‘moon,’ etc.?”) I propose we call this intuition

23
24 Manifesto of New Realism

“constructionist” or “constructivist,” as it assumes that rela-

tively large parts of reality are constructed by our conceptual
schemes and perceptual apparatuses.* In the next two chapters,
which constitute the theoretical core of the book, I intend to
discuss the genesis and the limits of the constructivist intuition,
to compare it with the realist intuition, to determine the areas
in which the constructivist intuition can be lawfully applied,
and finally to propose a “treaty of perpetual peace” between
constructivism and realism.
The fundamental argument of the constructivist intuition—
namely, the fact that “somehow” (an expression that, not by
chance, is very dear to constructivists) the existence of over
four thousand meter tall mountains on the moon also depends
on our conceptual schemes (or our language)—is clearly Kan-
tian, constituting an application of the principle that “intu-
itions without concepts are blind.” 2 Kant’s statement has
nothing inherently problematic per se, since there are many
circumstances in which it can be easily applied, appearing fully
justified: it is difficult to act meaningfully in scientific research
or in political or social interaction if you are not equipped
with concepts. The problem, though, is that Kant meant that
concepts are necessary in order to have any experience, so that
we need a concept even to slip on a patch of ice.3 Which is not
only false in itself, but also starts a process that leads to an
absolute constructivism. Because if we assume that conceptual
schemes have a constitutive value for any kind of experience,
then, going one step further, we will be able to claim that they
have a constitutive value for reality (at least if, following Kant,
we assume there is a phenomenic reality in the world that coin-
cides with the experience we have of it). At this point, with a
full realization of the fallacy of being-knowledge, what there is
seems to be determined by what we know of it.

*TN: These terms are used interchangeably throughout the chapter.

 Realism 25

First of all, it is worth asking what has led philosophers to

take such a risky and laborious path. The explanation can eas-
ily be found in one of the turns of modern philosophy, between
Descartes and Kant, and this is why, elsewhere,4 I have pro-
posed we call the confusion between being and knowledge
“transcendental fallacy.” It is therefore reasonable to trace the
fallacy back to the transcendental turn that has its remote ori-
gin in Descartes: “it is prudent never to rely entirely on things
which have once deceived us.”5 Thus indeed spoke Descartes,
in order to teach us to distrust the senses, those unreliable ser-
vants that have occasionally deceived us and of which then
we shall systematically be wary. In line with this assumption,
Descartes argues that certainty is not to be sought outside, in a
world that is a forest of sense deceits, but inside, in the cogito:
the home of clear and distinct ideas. In this choice there is
something that—it is really appropriate to say this—hits the
eye, namely, the abandonment of the natural attitude. We nor-
mally trust the senses, and if we happen to doubt them it is in
special circumstances, for example, when we demand a 100
percent certainty. That is, when we submit nature to an experi-
mentum crucis, and we invite it to say yes or no unequivocally,
since according to Descartes we (as scholars, of course) must
only deal with the objects we have a certain and indubitable
knowledge of.
This hyperbolic request of knowledge, if transferred
to experience, nevertheless turns into its opposite. We lose
natural certainty and cannot replace it with a reliable scien-
tific certainty, precisely because, by its own nature, science
is progressive (and therefore never definitive). Being equally
demanding in ordinary experience is thus not necessarily the
right move, because instead of certainty we get irremediable
doubts: if we ask of experience the same standard of certainty
we require of science, we will end up being certain of nothing.
The counterproof of this is provided by Hume, who became
26 Manifesto of New Realism

a skeptic precisely considering, just like Descartes, that induc-

tive reasoning based on experience can never be 100 percent
certain. And given that, for Hume, all knowledge comes from
experience, and the real abyss is not between a 100 percent and
1 percent likelihood but between a 100 percent and 99 percent
probability, then all the knowledge we have lies on a friable
ground that offers no guarantee.
It is at this point that the Kantian moment takes place,
with a move destined to mark all philosophy to follow: if every
knowledge starts with experience, but if the latter is structur-
ally uncertain, then it will be necessary to found experience
upon science, finding a priori structures that can stabilize its
uncertainty. To achieve this, we need a change of perspective:
we have to start from the subjects rather than the objects and
ask ourselves—in accordance with the matrix of all subsequent
constructionism—not how things are in themselves but how
they should be made in order to be known by us, following the
model of physicists who question nature not as scholars but as
judges: that is, using schemes and theorems. Kant then adopts
an a priori epistemology, that is, mathematics, to found ontol-
ogy: the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments allows us
to fixate an otherwise fluid reality through certain knowledge.
In this way, transcendental philosophy moved constructionism
from the sphere of mathematics to that of ontology.6 The laws
of physics are mathematics applied to reality, and, in Kant’s
hypothesis, they are not the contrivance of a group of scientists,
but they are the way in which our minds and senses work. Our
knowledge, at this point, will no longer be threatened by the
unreliability of the senses and the uncertainty of induction,
but the price we have to pay is that there is no longer any dif-
ference between the fact that there is an object X and the fact
that we know the object X. And since knowledge is inherently
construction, there is no difference in principle between the fact
that we know the object X and the fact that we construct it—
just as in mathematics, where knowing 7 + 5 = 12 is equivalent
 Realism 27

to constructing the addition 7 + 5 = 12. Of course, Kant invites

us to think that behind the phenomenal object X there is a nou-
menal object Y, a thing in itself inaccessible to us; but the fact
remains that the sphere of being coincides to a very large extent
with that of the knowable, and that the knowable is essentially
equivalent to the constructible.
At the origin of the fallacy of being-knowledge there is
therefore an interweaving of topics: 1) the senses deceive (they
are not 100 percent certain); 2) induction is uncertain (it is not
100 percent certain); 3) science is safer than experience, because
it has mathematical principles independent from the deceptions
of the senses and the uncertainties of induction; 4) experience
must then be resolved in science (it must be founded by science,
or at worst, it must be unmasked by it as a misleading “mani-
fest image”); 5) since science is the construction of paradigms,
at this point experience will be construction too, namely, it will
shape the world starting from conceptual schemes.
Here is the origin of postmodernism. Following and radical-
izing Kant, constructionists will confuse, without residues (i.e.,
also abolishing the noumenon), ontology with epistemology:
what there is (and is not dependent on conceptual schemes)
and what we know (and depends on conceptual schemes). The
two things, of course, are not the same, because the fact of
knowing that this key lets me open the front door (epistemol-
ogy) does not allow me to open the door if I have lost the
key in question (ontology). Yet, as Alessandro Manzoni put
it, these are “metaphysical subtleties, which never enter the
mind of the multitude,” or at least circumstances we do not
mind if we take it as an undisputed dogma that the world “out
there” (because of what we said in chapter 1, quotation marks
are de rigueur) is a chimera and that the relationship with the
world passes necessarily through conceptual schemes. De facto,
with the combined action of this and the other two fallacies
of postmodernism, the one of ascertainment-acceptance (for
which knowledge is resignation) and that of knowledge-power
28 Manifesto of New Realism

(whereby knowledge is instead manipulation), we come to a

complete discrediting of knowledge—a discrediting that has
the ironical peculiarity of being caused and nurtured by pro-
fessors who have made of it the subject of courses, books, and
seminars.

The Slipper Experiment

But is this hyperbole really so inevitable? Of course not; and

it is not hard to shout “the real is naked,” that is, the real
is not at all dressed with the dense network of conceptual
schemes that constructionists wrap it up with. I can illustrate
this through what I called “the slipper experiment,” which I
shall now report in the terms in which I presented it ten years
ago as an anticonstructivist argument.
1. People. Take a man looking at a carpet with a slipper
on it; he asks another to pass him the slipper, and the other,
usually, does so without significant difficulty. It is a trivial phe-
nomenon of interaction, but it shows very well how, if indeed
the outside world depended even slightly not so much on inter-
pretations and conceptual schemes but on neurons, then the
fact that the two do not possess the same neurons should make
the sharing of the slipper impossible. It might be objected that
neurons do not have to be exactly identical in number, position,
or connections; this, however, not only weakens the argument,
but it contradicts evidence that is difficult to refute: the fact
that differences in past experiences, culture, conformations,
and brain equipment may lead to significant divergences at a
certain level (does the Spirit proceed from the Father and the
Son, or only from the Father? What do we mean by “free-
dom”?) is common knowledge, and it is the reason why there
are disputes between different opinions. But the slipper on the
carpet is another thing: it is external and separate from us and
 Realism 29

our opinions, and it is therefore provided with an existence that

is qualitatively different from the kind that we tackle, say, in
discussing the status of issues such as euthanasia or preventive
war. In other words, the sphere of facts is not so inextrica-
bly interwoven with that of interpretations. Dialogue can be
important when there is a normative element at stake: in order
to determine whether something is legitimate or not, it is bet-
ter to have a look at what people think and debate the issue.
But to determine whether the slipper is on the carpet, I merely
have to look at it or touch it. In any case, discussing it would
be of little help.
2. Dogs. Now let’s take a dog that has been trained. He
is told, “Bring me the slipper.” And, again, he does so with-
out encountering any difficulties, just like the man above, even
though the differences between his brain and the man’s are
enormous and his understanding of “Bring me the slipper” may
not seem comparable to that of a human. In fact, the dog does
not ask himself whether the man is really asking him to bring
the slipper or if he is quoting the sentence or using it in an
ironic sense—while it is likely that at least some people would.
3. Worms. Now let’s take a worm. It has no brain, nor ears;
it has no eyes, it is far smaller than the slipper and only has the
sense of touch, whatever such an obscure sense may mean. So
we cannot say to it, “Bring me the slipper.” However, crawl-
ing on the carpet, if it meets the slipper, it can choose between
two strategies: either to turn around it or to climb over it. In
both cases, it encounters7 the slipper, although not quite like I
encounter it.
4. Ivy. Then let’s take ivy. It has no eyes, it has nothing
whatsoever, but it climbs (or at least thus we express ourselves,
treating it as an animal and attributing a deliberate strategy
to it) up the walls as if it were seeing them or moves slowly
away if it finds sources of heat that annoy it. The ivy will either
bypass the slipper, or it will climb over it, not too unlike the
30 Manifesto of New Realism

way a man would do in front of an obstacle of larger size, but

with neither eyes nor conceptual schemes.
5. Slipper. Finally, take a slipper. It is even more insensi-
tive than the ivy. But if we throw the slipper onto the other, it
encounters it, much like it happens to the ivy, the worm, the
dog, and the man. So it is really hard to understand in what
sense even the most reasonable and minimalist thesis about
the intervention of the perceiver upon the perceived can make
some kind of ontological claim, let alone the strong ones. Also
because one could very well not take another slipper but simply
imagine that the first one is there, in the absence of any animal
observer or without a vegetable or another slipper interact-
ing with it. Would there be no slipper on the carpet, then?
If the slipper is really there, then it must be there even if no
one sees it, as is logically implied by the sentence “There is a
slipper”—otherwise one could say, “It seems to me that there
is a slipper” or, even more correctly, “I have in me the repre-
sentation of a slipper,” if not even, “I have the impression that
I have in me the representation of a slipper.” Consider that
making the existence of things depend on the resources of my
sense organs is per se not at all different from having them
depend on my imagination, and when I argue that there is a
slipper only because I see it I am actually confessing to having
a hallucination.
These are the obvious circumstances hidden behind the fal-
lacy of being-knowledge, for which we are all little physicists
and chemists intent on constructing our own experiences just
as we construct experiments in the laboratory. This fallacy
opens a path taken by the vast majority of philosophers of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Calling one’s revolu-
tion by the name of Copernicus, that is the scholar who—at
least for modern consciousness—has taught us that the sun
never really sets, is certainly misleading (since, indeed, Kant’s
revolution is rather Ptolemaic), but it means electing as a point
 Realism 31

of observation not what we see but what we know, and it espe-

cially means concluding that encountering a thing is basically
the same as knowing it. The consequences are manifold and
define the scene in which the modern and postmodern con-
structionist operates: what we see is made to depend on what
we know; it is postulated that the mediation of conceptual
schemes operates everywhere; and, finally, it is asserted that we
never enter a relationship with things in themselves but always
and only with phenomena.

Ontology and Epistemology

Unlike ancient skeptics, postmodern constructionists do not

doubt the existence of the world; they claim it is constructed
by conceptual schemes and that it is therefore amorphous and
indeterminate in itself. This move seems much less binding, but
since the constructionist (unlike the skeptic) identifies being and
knowledge, then the outcome is just as powerful, although with
sociologically different outcomes. The purpose of the skeptic,
in fact, is to expose the vanity of human knowledge: his semi-
nal text is the Adversus mathematicos by Sextus Empiricus,
which could be translated as “against professors,” given that it
targets not only mathematicians but also grammarians, rhetori-
cians, surveyors, astrologers, and musicians—in short, all the
arts of the trivium and the quadrivium. The constructivist opts
for a diametrically opposite strategy, instead, exalting the func-
tion of the professor in the construction of reality: his seminal
text is The Order of Things by Foucault, in which you can read
that man is constructed by human sciences and might disap-
pear with them.8 If the skeptic aims at not being surprised by
anything, the constructionist’s end is wonder, and his crucial
move is the removal of the obvious, that is, the formulation of
fashionable nonsense,9 of surprising claims that demonstrate
32 Manifesto of New Realism

the role played in the construction of experience by conceptual

schemes and culture—that is, in the final analysis, precisely
by professors.10 Hence the claims that, following the fallacy
of being-knowledge, give an exorbitant power to science, as
has happened with the sociologist of knowledge Bruno Latour
when he stated that Ramses II could not have died of tubercu-
losis because the bacilli responsible for the disease were only
discovered in 1882.11 This bizarre claim does not take into
account that if the birth of a disease truly coincided with its
discovery, we should immediately suspend all medical research,
as we already have more than enough diseases: the true cause
of the world’s evils would turn out to be no longer Pandora
(as we thought) but Asclepius. Then, the fact that professors
do not love one another, and that—after attributing the con-
struction of reality to knowledge—they claim (according to the
fallacy of being-knowledge) that knowledge is an instrument of
the will to power, is, after all, part of the way human things go.
The ultimate outcome of constructivism is that of skepticism:
the discrediting of knowledge.
It is not surprising, at this point, that the constructionist
might also argue, both polemically and in partial good faith,
that the only content of realism is the thesis: “reality exists.”
It is a bit exuberant as an argumentative move, not unlike that
of someone who claimed that the only content of idealism is
“there are ideas,” the only content of nihilism “there is noth-
ing,” and perhaps the only content of communism “there are
commons.” In any case, however, the realist does not merely
say that reality exists. She supports a thesis that construction-
ists deny, namely, that it is not true that being and knowing are
the same, and that indeed between ontology and epistemology
there exist several essential differences to which the construc-
tionist does not pay attention. The constructionist claims that
if fire burns, water is wet, and the slipper is on the carpet, it
 Realism 33

all depends on conceptual schemes.12 It is clearly not so. It

depends on the fact that fire burns, water is wet, and the slipper
is on the carpet: these characters are ontological, not episte-
mological. In fact (think of the slipper experiment), there is no
doubt that we relate to the world through conceptual schemes
(whoever reads these lines must have learned the alphabet and
must speak English), but this does not mean that the world is
determined by our conceptual schemes. I can know (or ignore)
all I want; the world is what it is.
It is extremely important not to confuse ontology and epis-
temology. Otherwise there will be the realm of “there are no
facts, only interpretations,” a principle according to which—as
we have seen talking about “deobjectification” in chapter 1—it
can be argued that Bellarmine and Galileo were both right, or
even that Bellarmine was more right than Galileo, who there-
fore got what he deserved. This is clear proof of the fact that
if we abandon the reference to an external world that is stable
and independent of schemes, then everything is possible, since
this decision comes to interfere with practical decisions (politi-
cal and moral) and not only with theoretical observations. It
certainly can be argued that ontology is not what there is, but
it is the discourse on what there is. So there is always an epis-
temological remnant in ontology and an ontological residue in
epistemology. This is indisputable: ontology is never without
epistemology, just as one cannot live without knowledge. How-
ever, if ontology is also a discourse, it is a discourse that must
mark the difference with respect to epistemology and not insist
on the continuity with it, as often happens favoring the fallacy
of being-knowledge.13 This is why, as trivial as it might be to
confuse ontology and epistemology, the theoretically interesting
maneuver cannot consist in saying that ontology and episte-
mology merge but precisely in emphasizing in which and how
many ways ontology and epistemology are distinguished. I will
34 Manifesto of New Realism

try to summarize them in this scheme, and then I shall articu-

late them later in this chapter.

Epistemology Ontology

Amendable Unamendable
What can be corrected What cannot be corrected
Internal World External World
(= internal to conceptual schemes) (= external to conceptual schemes)
Science Experience
Linguistic Not necessarily linguistic
Historical Not historical
Free Unamendable
Infinite Finite
Teleological Not necessarily teleological

Amendable and Unamendable

Let us come to the first essential distinction neglected by con-

structionists and by those who think that data are a myth: that
between amendable and unamendable. I may or may not know
that water is H2O; I will get wet anyway, and I will not be able
to dry up by means of the thought that hydrogen and oxygen
as such are not wet. And this—in accordance with the slip-
per experiment—would also happen to a dog, with conceptual
schemes different from mine, or to a worm, or even an inani-
mate being such as my computer (which, although unaware of
the chemical composition of water, could undergo irreparable
damage in the unfortunate case where a glass of water capsized
on the keyboard).
As I said, I propose we define this fundamental character
of reality’s “unamendability”: the fact that what we face can-
not be corrected or changed by the mere use of conceptual
schemes, unlike what happens in the hypothesis of construc-
tivism. This, however, is not only a limit, it is also a resource.
 Realism 35

Unamendability, in fact, informs us about the existence of an

external world, not in relation to our body (which is part of
the external world) but in relation to our minds and more spe-
cifically with respect to the conceptual schemes with which we
try to explain and interpret the world. As we have seen (and
we will return to this in chapter 3, when talking about “fric-
tion”), unamendability manifests itself primarily as a phenom-
enon of resistance and contrast. I can embrace all the theories
of knowledge in this world, I can be atomistic or Berkeleyan,
postmodernist or cognitivist, I can think, with naïve realism,
that what is perceived is the true world, or I can think, with
the Vedanta doctrine, that what is perceived is the false world.
The fact remains that what we perceive is unamendable, it can-
not be corrected: sunlight is blinding if the sun is up, and the
handle of the coffee pot is hot if we leave it on the fire. There is
no interpretation to be opposed to these facts: the only alterna-
tives are sunglasses and potholders.
If the notion of reality as a “background” has been widely
theorized by philosophers,14 I would rather draw attention to a
much less stressed aspect, namely, that this background is often
at odds with our theories, that is, it does not constitute their
obvious presupposition, since experience can be disharmoni-
ous or surprising. This point is more important than it may
seem. Science is (following Aristotle) a way to grasp regulari-
ties and (empirically) iterability in experiments. A part of these
features is found in experience, which, however, has to deal
first of all with the surprise. Something unexpected can always
happen and break the regularity. To what extent this condi-
tion can impact the image of science as a regularity was very
well understood by empiricists, who, as we have said, found
precisely in surprise and in the unexpectedness of experience
an insuperable obstacle with respect to the reliability of induc-
tion. And yet if something new did not occasionally happen,
something that breaks the series of our predictions, we would
36 Manifesto of New Realism

have no way to distinguish reality from imagination. But the

surprise would be little useful if it could be immediately cor-
rected. Now, one of the characteristics of experience is the fact
that in many cases the surprise is there and cannot be cor-
rected, there is nothing we can do, it is there and does not pass
nor change. This characteristic is precisely unamendability, and
it presents itself as a fundamental trait—as a persistent and
nontransient character—of reality. The basic idea is essentially
this: if we admit that a fundamental requirement of objectivity
(also scientific) is invariance under transformation,15 we must
all the more assume that the independence of the object with
respect to the subject’s conceptual schemes (or epistemology in
general) constitutes an even stronger criterion of objectivity.
“Unamendability” is precisely this: looking at the fire, I can
think that it is a phenomenon of oxidation or the action of
phlogiston and caloric, but (unless I am provided with asbestos
gloves) I cannot but burn myself if I put my hand in the fire.
In short, unamendability is the sphere to which Wittgenstein
refers in a famous passage of his: “If I have exhausted the
justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned.
Then I am inclined to say: ‘this is simply what I do.’”16 From
this point of view, it is not surprising that a prominent mani-
festation of unamendability is exactly the framework of per-
ception. From the ancient skeptics to Descartes, up to Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, the disregard of sensible experience
took place according to a confusion between epistemology and
ontology: the senses can be deceiving, therefore any author-
ity, even ontological, of sensible experience, was denied. This,
after all, would be like saying that since there may be sensible
deceptions, then it is not possible to get burned in contact with
fire—a circumstance that is actually evoked, ironically, in the
refutation of skepticism proposed by Locke.17 It is in view of
these circumstances that I have given a peculiar ontological
value to the recovery of aesthetics as a theory of sensibility,18
 Realism 37

developing the theory of unamendability closely with what

Wolfgang Metzger and Gestalt psychology had elaborated
under the category of “encountered reality,” namely, the reality
that gives itself while also contradicting our conceptual expec-
tations,19 thus antagonizing the “represented reality” dear to
constructivists. This “encountered reality,” in agreement with
what Paolo Bozzi proposed under the category of “naïve phys-
ics,”20 appears to be impermeable to knowledge and provides
a patent case of a gap between knowledge of the world and
experience of the world that helps one avoid the transcen-
dental fallacy. Against a more or less openly constructionist
perspective—from transcendentalism to the empiricist view
of perception as an aggregation of “sense data”—unamend-
ability, in fact, reveals how perceptive experience possesses an
admirable stability and refractoriness compared to conceptual
action and suggests that this stability should be ascribed more
deeply (since, as in the slipper experiment, there is an interac-
tion between beings with very different perceptual apparatuses)
to the stability of the encountered world, prior to the action of
our perceptual apparatuses and conceptual schemes, which I
shall illustrate specifically by distinguishing between “internal
world” and “external world.”

Internal world and External World

In general, the “external world” is external to conceptual

schemes, and, from this point of view, its paradigm lies in the
unamendability of perception. However, we must not forget
that there is a sphere of nonperceptive unamendables, as we
shall see in the next chapter when talking about “irrevoca-
bility.”21 The case of perception, therefore, only constitutes
an area of particular evidence, where unamendability can be
found as 1) autonomy of aesthetics with respect to logic; 2)
38 Manifesto of New Realism

antinomy of aesthetics with respect to logic; 3) autonomy of

the world with respect to our conceptual schemes and percep-
tive apparatuses.22 Let us examine in detail these three points.
Autonomy of aesthetics with respect to logic. Let us return
once again to the formulation of Descartes’s condemnation of
the senses: the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to rely on
things that have once deceived us. Now, the senses have neither
intentions nor character; if anything, they reveal a tendency to
disappoint us, not to give us what we hoped for, and this is the
opposite of the intention to deceive. Here we note the inde-
pendence of perception from conceptual schemes or, in posi-
tive, the existence of nonconceptual contents. These contents
manifest themselves precisely in the traditional discontent with
perception, considered as a source of knowledge both necessary
and unreliable.
Antinomy of aesthetics with respect to logic. If it were true
that thought is constitutive of reality, unless we were masoch-
ists, not only would we see what we want but also and only
what we like, and we would never be surprised. Instead, no
matter what we do, we cannot help but see things we would
rather not or could not see, or even things we have reason to
believe do not exist or that are not as they appear, as indeed
happens in optical illusions (which are called “illusions” only
because we think that the eye is a support for science and
truth). I can have all the philosophical beliefs of this world
(or, which is more significant, I can be completely ignorant of
philosophy), but the senses will continue to have it their way.
From the perspective I propose, therefore, the appeal to sensi-
bility turns out to be antithetical to sensism: whereas the sensist
enhances the senses from the epistemological point of view,
that is, as cognitive tools, I appreciate them from the ontologi-
cal point of view, that is, precisely for the resistance they set
against our conceptual schemes. It is from this antinomy that
 Realism 39

the autonomy of the world arises, that is, its transcendence

with respect to thought.
Autonomy of the world with respect to our concep-
tual schemes and perceptive apparatuses. Reality possesses a
structural (and structured) link that not only resists concep-
tual schemes and perceptive apparatuses (and unamendability
consists of this resistance) but precedes them. For this reason,
the concept of “external world” is to be understood primarily
in the sense of “external to our conceptual schemes and per-
ceptive apparatuses.” Such a world exists; otherwise all our
knowledge would be indistinguishable from a dream.23 I can
(and in certain circumstances I must) doubt the veracity of even
all of my experiences but without doubting the fact that there
is something in general.

Science and Experience

Third and final distinction. What the fallacy of being-knowl-

edge does not consider is the crucial difference between expe-
riencing something, talking about our experience, and doing
science (for example, between having a headache, describing
it to someone, and making a diagnosis). In the case of talking
about an experience, and even more so in doing science, we
are confronted with a linguistic activity (scientists talk) that
is also historical (their activity is cumulative), free (one is able
not to do science), infinite (science never ends), and teleological
(it has a purpose). It is not so in the case of experience. Let us
examine these elements, aware of the fact that it is precisely by
neglecting the difference between science and experience that
postmodernists have been able to argue that there is nothing
outside the text, language, or some form of knowledge.
1. The importance of language and writing in science, as
an inherently social fact, seems hardly contestable. There is no
40 Manifesto of New Realism

doubt that scientificity has to do with documentality—which

I shall discuss in chapter 3—namely, with a system of com-
munication, inscription, acknowledgment, coding, filing, and
patents. We can well imagine experiences that occur without
language and without writing, conversely, to communicate the
discoveries and to record them is a necessary condition for
science: “publish or perish” is perhaps an academic aberra-
tion with regard to individual researchers, but it is a categori-
cal imperative for science that, as a collective and progressive
work, necessarily requires the communicative exchange (oral
or written), the storage and the traditionalization of discover-
ies. None of this applies to experience, which can take place
without any communication, recording, or need for linguistic
rendering.
2. The intrinsic historicity of science is nothing but a corol-
lary to the previous consideration. Science exists precisely inso-
far as each generation can capitalize on the discoveries made
by previous generations. And it is for this reason that one can
speak of relatively young sciences, indicating by this a biog-
raphy, a growth, and a development, which derive precisely
from the possibility of inscription and documentation. On the
contrary, an expression like “young experience” appears com-
pletely meaningless or purely metaphorical: at most, we can
have youthful experiences, that is, things that happen to us
when we are young.
3. As for freedom, it is clear that science is a deliberate
activity. At some point in the intellectual history of some civi-
lizations, scientific activities began and then evolved freely,
although in many cases responding to the pressure of practi-
cal needs. This genesis could also have not taken place: this
is proved by the fact that other civilizations have not had a
scientific development, while others have developed a science
significantly different from ours. Here, again, the comparison
with experience is illuminating, because experiences manifest
 Realism 41

an intercultural constancy and do not appear as the result of

a deliberate choice. I am not speaking only of perception, if
we abandon the legends according to which the Inuit see more
shades of white than we do. I am speaking of strongly struc-
tured elements, such as myths. In short, what is universal in
humanity is not science (which is simply universalizable) but
rather experience.
4. Coming to infinity, the most prestigious sciences are
those that have a long history and a very long future ahead of
them, namely, those that best respond to the idea of knowledge
as infinite development. None of this can be said of experience,
which not only is not designed as infinite (its period, in any
case, cannot be longer than that of human life) but is not con-
ceived as progressive either. This does not simply mean that the
project to sharpen the senses faces objective limits (at most we
can try to remedy their weakening with glasses or hearing aids),
but that even in the area of common practices and techniques
in life, progress is not necessarily an ideal. Everyone would
surely prefer to be treated by a doctor of 2212 rather than by a
doctor of 2012, and we would all dread the idea of resorting to
a doctor of 1812, but the prospect of eating bread like it used
to be or of getting our hands on a pre-globalization fabric may
seem very tempting. Also, while the idea of the infinite progress
of science is completely reasonable, thinking that there could be
an infinite development of techniques such as how to tie one’s
shoes or one’s tie is little more than a joke.
5. Finally, with regard to teleology, the point is very simple.
Science is a deliberate activity, just like many techniques that,
from this point of view, represent a middle way between science
and experience: making the bed appears not to be an activity
subject to an infinite progress (at most one can invent sheets
with elastic gussets), but it is certainly a deliberate activity. This
is even truer for science. If someone went to the laboratory
for no reason, they would not be doing science, but someone
42 Manifesto of New Realism

who, for no reason, felt heat, saw a color, or suffered from a

toothache would have no reason to rule out the fact that they
would be having those experiences. And although the history
of science loves the serendipity of those who had fundamental
insights in the bathtub or under an apple tree, when we move
from folklore to assessments, intentionality, that is, teleological
finality, counts and how. Typically, the discovery of penicillin
by Fleming, which had a high degree of randomness (it was
mold that accidentally developed in a refrigerator left open),
appears as a less meritorious discovery than others, precisely
because it is less deliberate.

Positivism?

A final consideration. As I believe I have shown through the

differences listed so far, the realism I propose is presented as
antithetical to positivism. Yet, it happens sometimes that when
we speak of “reality,” some see in it an appeal to some form
of scientism. Now, positivism is a theory dating back to two
centuries ago, and when interpretation-friendly thinkers speak
of the threat of positivism to express their impatience with
facts, they remind one of the Italian populists that evoke the
specter of communism even decades after the fall of the Wall.
If, however, in my proposal of realism, I insist so much on the
difference between ontology (what there is) and epistemology
(what we know) it is because I completely reject this view. So,
there is no “return to positivism.” Rather, against positivism
that enhances science and against postmodernism that boils
it down to a struggle between interests (but at the same time
brings it even into the most minute details of experience and
nature), I propose a rebirth of philosophy as a bridge between
the world of common sense, moral values, and opinions and
 Realism 43

the world of knowledge in general (because there is not only

physics; there are also law, history, economics).
This is not at all to say that all truths are in the hands of
science. In this case, philosophy would likely appear to be a
parasitic knowledge exactly as in postmodern dreams: science
does the real work, philosophers follow, as stewards, and either
are silent or rattle. Now, the error made by postmodernists
(and it is an error that comes from far away, think of Hei-
degger’s claims on the fact that science does not think) was to
want to build a knowledge alternative to science, a para- or
super- or meta-science, or, more modestly but equally parasiti-
cally, a deconstructive knowledge with respect to science. In the
end, however, the basic assumption was precisely that science
is the only source of knowledge. However, the right question,
which postmodernists rarely asked themselves, is: what are the
areas in which science is really an instance of final appeal?
Important pieces of nature, in a very advanced form in the
case of the study of matter, in a rather advanced form in the
case of the study of human physiology, and in a promising but
embryonic form in the case of the study of the mind.
But if one scrolls through the pages of a newspaper, for
example, one will realize that the percentage of problems on
which science can say something is very low. The pages on
politics, the comments, those on culture and economy are little
enlightened by physics and medicine (the pages on sports are
already better, because of doping). It is not science that we can
turn to for the organization of that Library of Babel that is the
Web or to satisfy the need that humans often have to exam-
ine their lives. Now, I am convinced that philosophy can give
some answers, and that this is much easier if we leave aside
the philosophical refrain of the last century: the superiority
of the question over the answer, the fact that philosophy is
structurally incapable of constructing something, that it does
44 Manifesto of New Realism

not have access to reality, and that indeed it is the doctrine

whose mission consists in saying that the real world does not
exist. In short, bridging knowledge and beliefs is not a cushy
job. For this, however, a reconstructive philosophy is required.
In the next chapter I would like to suggest some proposals in
this direction.
 THREE

RECONSTRUCTION
Why Criticism Starts from Reality

The Fallacy of Ascertainment-Acceptance

R ecall the objection according to which the only purpose

of realism is to affirm the existence of reality. An ethical-
political variant of it lies in claiming that realism implies the
acceptance of the existing state of things (which is to say that
ontology accepts reality and oncology accepts tumors). But of
course it is not so: realism, as I propose it, is a critical doc-
trine in two ways: in the Kantian sense of judging what is real
and what is not, and in the Marxian sense of transforming
what is not right. That this dual dimension may not seem obvi-
ous to some depends precisely on what I suggest we call the
“fallacy of ascertainment-acceptance,” that is, the dogma for
which ascertaining reality is equated to accepting it. Just like
Chance, the gardener of Being There, tries to get rid of what he
has in front of him by fiddling with a TV remote control, the
postmodernist believes that it is enough to say that everything

45
46 Manifesto of New Realism

is socially constructed to immunize himself from the friction

of reality. As such, the fallacy of ascertainment-acceptance is
a direct consequence of the fallacy of being-knowledge. The
world is my construction: can I not change it whenever I want?
Or maybe it is a construction of others: a further reason to
decree its unreality. But this is a perspective that is hard not
only to share but also to understand. Think of doctors: they
want to learn about diseases certainly not so as to accept them
but to treat them. Conversely, Chance’s strategy involves an
extreme quietism: if it rains, we can say that rain is socially
constructed, but our profession of faith will not make the rain
stop. It will thus reveal itself for what it is: a vain complaint
like that of “it’s raining, damn the government!”1 One cannot
break free from reality (assuming it makes sense to break free
from reality instead of pursuing a critical action over it) with a
mere act of skepticism, precisely because being is independent
of knowledge. Reciprocally, realism is the first step on the path
of criticism and emancipation (or at least of nonmystification).
Those who do not accept the unamendability of reality do
not accept it—understandably—in order to escape from frus-
trations ranging from the relatively trivial loss of objects to the
shame for the sins committed, up to extreme forms of unamend-
ability—as when, in the Recherche, Françoise announces to the
Narrator that “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone,” or when
in War and Peace the princesses who witnessed Bolkonsky’s
death wonder “Where has he gone? Where is he now?” But
precisely in this unamendability lies the foundation of moral-
ity. Derrida has claimed that justice is the undeconstructable,2
meaning by this that the desire for justice underlies deconstruc-
tion itself and cannot in turn be subjected to deconstruction. I
would suggest that justice is the undeconstructable not because
it has nothing to do with ontology, but precisely because ontol-
ogy is the unamendable. Precisely because there is a real world
whose laws are indifferent to our volitions and cogitations it is
 Reconstruction 47

possible that, in such a world, there is science and there is jus-

tice. Criticism is therefore incorporated in realism, while acqui-
escence is inherent to antirealism—which, from the prisoners of
Plato’s cave, brings us up to the illusions of the postmodernists.
Thus, the decisive argument for realism is not theoretical but
moral, because it is not possible to imagine moral behavior in
a world without facts and without objects.

Experiment of the Ethical Brain

This can be better understood with a thought experiment that

is an ethical version of the Gedankenexperiment of the brain
in a vat.3 The idea is this: imagine that a mad scientist has put
some brains in a vat and is feeding them artificially. By means
of electrical stimulation, these brains have the impression of
living in a real world, but in fact what they feel is the result of
simple electrical stimulations. Imagine that those stimulations
depict situations that require moral stances: some snitch and
some sacrifice themselves for freedom, some commit embezzle-
ment, and some commit acts of holiness. Can we really say that
in those circumstances there are moral acts?
In my opinion, we cannot: these are, in the best-case sce-
nario, representations with moral content, but they do not
take place in the outside world—so much so that they can
be amended at will, for example, through other stimulations.
Here we can test the validity of the saying according to which
you cannot judge someone on mere intent: imposing a prison
sentence on a brain that thought—or rather, that in this case
was made to think—of stealing, is no less unjust (or more
exactly, nonsensical) than sanctifying a brain that has thought
about making holy actions. This experiment simply shows that
thought alone is not enough for there to be morals, and that
the latter begins when there is an external world that provokes
48 Manifesto of New Realism

us and allows us to perform actions, and not simply to imagine

them.
So, instead of imposing on us how we should act (this,
hopefully, is suggested to us by our consciousness), ontology
tells us that there is a world in which our actions are real and
not mere dreams or imaginations. Through the appeal to the
distinction between ontology and epistemology proposed in
chapter 2, I therefore declare myself a supporter of a modest
or minimalist realism for which ontology serves as an opposi-
tion, as a limit.4 This obviously has nothing to do with the
appeal to some law of nature. And in this respect, we might
ask ourselves whether natural rights (which are mostly natural
duties) are not a joke invented to allow one to write postmod-
ern books on the fact that nature does not exist. It is obvious
that from nature one cannot obtain any rights or duties. How-
ever, the fact remains that nature exists, involving constraints
(for example, the duration of life or the laws of physics), and
these constraints are not constructed by people. In short, there
is an essential difference between the laws on pensions and
the laws of thermodynamics, which in fact are never called
into question by even the most reckless financial acts. In this
framework “living according to nature” means “do not throw
yourself off the plane without a parachute, because you do not
have wings” and not “the heterosexual family is ordained by
nature and is the basis of society.” Far from yearning for a law
of nature, it is, therefore, a matter of starting from what I call
the “friction of reality”:5 an ethical version of unamendability
echoing Kant’s observation that in the absence of the resistance
of air even the dove, moral symbol of absoluteness, could not
fly. Even in more radically idealistic systems, like that proposed
by Fichte, the presence of a real independent of the subject (and
therefore marking the difference between what exists and what
is merely thought of) is offered by a backlash, by the action of
a non-I who is opposed to the I. For this reason unamendability
 Reconstruction 49

as a fundamental ontological character is central, precisely to

the extent that it is not a normative order (as claimed by its
enemies, who consider the appeal to ontology as a submission
to the law of nature, or even to human arrogance) but simply
a line of resistance against falsifications and denials.

“Very-Differentism” and Irrevocability

To the ethical brain experiment and the friction of the real,

antirealists could reply with an argumentative move dear to
them, the very-differentism, which consists in claiming that we
may all agree on the (trivial) existence of tables and chairs, but
that philosophically important things are “very different.” But
is it really so? Primo Levi wrote of the “shame the Germans
did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s
crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that
it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of
things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved
too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.”6
In chapter 2, I spoke about “unamendability,” which is mani-
fested with particular clarity in the sphere of perceptive experi-
ence: I have no way to correct an optical illusion, although I am
aware of its illusory nature, and the same goes for heat, weight,
or the dimensions of a body. However, the sphere of unamend-
ability does not simply concern the area of perception and is
rather manifested, in a macroscopic form, in the irrevocability
of past events.
Take for example the case of dinosaurs: they existed mil-
lions of years ago; then they disappeared and fossils remain of
them. This is clear evidence of the fact that there can be whole
forms of organized life that develop fully independently of our
language, our knowledge, and our conceptual schemes. 7 It is
also, if you will, the manifestation of an ontology that existed
50 Manifesto of New Realism

millions of years before any possible epistemology. Now, even

in areas that depend on conceptual schemes, such as historical
events, we deal with a clear manifestation of unamendability,
which is the irrevocability of past events on which historians
construct their interpretations.8 For example, it is a fact that in
1813, in Leipzig, the Saxons abandoned Napoleon and sided
with the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and Swedes; it is an
event that can be assessed in different ways, but it is a fact, and
someone who claimed that it did not take place would not give
a better interpretation of what happened but would merely say
something false. Acknowledging the fact that there have been
dinosaurs and that in Leipzig the Saxons changed alliances can
hardly be considered an uncritical attitude toward the real. It
is a neutral attitude, which has to be assumed in any criticism.
The question of whether the Saxons have done well or not in
changing alliances, for example, is a legitimate question, but
you can only ask it insofar as the Saxons did actually change
alliances.
Claiming (as the very-differentists do) that there is a gap
between perceptions and facts, and then between facts and
judgments, would perhaps be possible—however, only if one
were able to indicate the point of discontinuity in which one
passes from the unamendable and irrevocable to the interpre-
table. Now, it is precisely this discontinuity that seems unob-
tainable: assessments are made on facts and facts take place in
a world of objects. If this is so, it is not true that the ascertain-
ment of facts in the physical world (for instance, that snow is
white)9 lies at a radically distinct level from the ascertainment
of facts in the historical world and, in general, in a higher
sphere where, according to the very-differentists, the decisive
matches are played and interpretations have emancipative func-
tions. There is an unbroken thread that leads from the fact that
snow is white if and only if snow is white to the fact that, in
the same snow, on January 27, 1945, the soldiers of the Red
 Reconstruction 51

Army entered Auschwitz and saw the “shame the Germans did
not know.” Sure, you may decide to introduce a discontinuity,
but the price would be very high, because if you cut at any
point the wire that leads from the snow to the Holocaust, then
any denial becomes possible. If this is the case, the “very dif-
ferent” something appealed to by those who argue that tables
and chairs are devoid of philosophical relevance is connected
to the world of tables and chairs by a robust and continuous
wire, which cannot be broken—otherwise one will fall into
meaninglessness or irresponsibility.

Deconstruction

Therefore, the point is not to claim that there is a discontinu-

ity between facts and interpretations but rather to understand
what objects are constructed and what are not, by means of
a process of deconstruction opposite to the all-encompassing
thesis that everything is socially constructed. On this point we
should make a preliminary consideration. A decade ago the
historian of science Ian Hacking proposed, at the beginning
of his book,10 a list of objects that, according to postmodern-
ists, are socially constructed: the notion of “authorship,” that
of “brotherhood,” the child viewer of television, danger, emo-
tions, facts, gender, homosexual culture, illness, knowledge,
literacy, the medicalized immigrant, nature, oral history, post-
modernism, quarks, reality, serial homicides, technological sys-
tems, urban schooling, vital statistics, women refugees, youth
homelessness, Zulu nationalism, mind, panic, the eighties. And
he added that, during a workshop on underage motherhood,
a Catholic agent declared: “and, obviously, I am a social con-
struction myself; we all are.” Apart from the vaguely comic and
vertiginous effect à la Borges’s encyclopedia, the feeling we get
is that of a mess. In fact, it is difficult to doubt that the notion
52 Manifesto of New Realism

of copyright is socially constructed, just as it is indisputable

that there are whole categories, for example, that of “Oriental-
ism,” object of an admirable analysis by Edward Said,11 that
are not only constructed but inconsistent. But is it the same for
reality or nature? And is it really critical and deconstructive to
formulate such massive theses on reality?
In my opinion, no. Stating that everything is socially con-
structed and that there are no facts, only interpretations, is not
deconstructing but, on the contrary, means formulating a the-
sis—the more accommodating in reality the more it is critical
in imagination—that leaves everything as it is. There is indeed
a great conceptual work that interpretation-friendly thinkers
withdraw from when they say that everything is socially con-
structed—which, nota bene, implies that tables and chairs do
not have a separate existence, that is, to put it more bluntly,
that they do not really exist in the mode of existence that com-
mon sense usually attributes to tables and chairs.
This work consists in distinguishing carefully between the
existence of things that exist only for us, that is, things that
only exist if there is a humanity, and things that would exist
even if humanity had never been there. That is why, in my
opinion, the real deconstruction must commit to distinguishing
between regions of being that are socially constructed and oth-
ers that are not, to establishing for each region of being some
specific modes of existence, and finally to ascribing individual
objects to one of these regions of being, proceeding case by
case.12
In order to respond to this need, elsewhere13 I proposed to
divide objects into three classes: natural objects that exist in
space and time independently of subjects, social objects that
exist in space and time dependently on subjects, and ideal
objects that exist outside of space and time independently of
subjects. It is at this point that controversies can begin. Recall
the three differences that derived from the distinction between
 Reconstruction 53

ontology and epistemology that I presented in chapter 2. They

aimed at demonstrating what the fundamental misunderstand-
ing of constructivism was: the belief that reality has no form
without the action of a conceptual construction and that data
are a myth. But at this point, of course, a commonsensical
objection arises: are you trying to deny that VAT is socially
constructed? Or worse, do you believe that VAT is unamend-
able in the relevant fora? Of course not. The distinctions I
have proposed are designed precisely to avoid the two com-
plementary absurdities of saying that there is nothing socially
constructed, not even VAT, or that everything is socially con-
structed, including tuberculosis. This is because the target of
the realist is constructionism, not some kind of Berkeleyan
idealism. In fact, no realist would deny that VAT depends on
conceptual schemes (which still does not mean to claim that
they are purely subjective: VAT is applied—in principle—to all
those who shop in the United States). What the realist asks is
how far the action of conceptual schemes gets, and it is here
that the conflict between realists and postmodernists manifests
itself. The latter are much more generous in the list of parts of
reality they deem socially constructed, to the point of saying, in
extreme cases, that we do not ever have access to a world “out
there,” and that what we come in contact with is constructed
by our conceptual schemes.
That is why the distinction is especially critical between
social objects and natural objects. The first, in fact, unlike
the latter, constitutively undergo the action of epistemology
because things like marriages or debts exist only insofar as
there are people who know that they exist. There is an essen-
tial difference between being ill and not knowing it (we do not
know it, but the disease runs its course) and being married and
not knowing it (we do not know it and, if others do not know
it either, it is just as if we were not). Consider, therefore, these
two statements: 1) “Mountains, lakes, beavers, and asteroids
54 Manifesto of New Realism

depend on our conceptual schemes”; 2) “Banknotes, qualifica-

tions, debts, rewards, and punishments depend on our concep-
tual schemes.”
It takes a lot of courage to argue that mountains and rivers
are what they are because there are people whose senses work
in a certain way and because there are categories of a certain
type. In fact, mountains and rivers are what they are on their
own; if anything, they are known by us through the specific
forms of our senses and our intellect. But now let us look at
social objects.
Here we could really say that marriages and divorces,
mortgages and chess games, debts and parliament seats, years
in prison and Nobel prizes are so and so because our senses
and our intellect are made in a certain way. It is an unsurpris-
ing thesis. For a beaver—we can have reasonable certainty of
this—mortgages and divorces do not exist, while mountains
and lakes certainly exist. Once we recognize and explain the
distinction between ontology and epistemology, as well as
between the classes of objects, the way is open for a rehabili-
tation of the Kantian insight into a different sphere from that
in which it was born, that is no longer in reference to natural
objects but indeed in relation to social objects. The basic idea
is that a thesis like “intuitions without concepts are blind,”
which we recognized as difficult to apply to the natural world,
explains very well our relationship with the social world, which
is made up of objects such as money, roles, institutions that
exist only because we believe they exist.
So, I do not at all mean to argue that there are no inter-
pretations in the social world. Of course there are interpreta-
tions, and of course deconstructions are needed. But the most
important thing, for philosophers and non-philosophers, is not
to confuse natural objects (such as Mont Blanc or a hurricane,
which are there whether there are people and their interpreta-
tions or not) with social objects such as promises, bets, and
 Reconstruction 55

marriages, which only exist if there are people equipped with

certain conceptual schemes. If by hypothesis a believer, an
agnostic, and the Indian of Mato Grosso photographed a few
years ago, who belongs to a tribe that has remained Neolithic,
were in front of the Shroud, they would all see the same natu-
ral object; then the believer would think that he is seeing the
shroud of Christ and the agnostic would regard it as a sheet of
medieval origin. Yet, they would see the same physical object
as that seen by the Indian, who has no notion of our cultural
world. In the social world, then, what we know counts indeed,
that is, epistemology is determining in relation to ontology:
what we think, what we say, our interactions are crucial, and it
is crucial that these interactions are recorded and documented.
This is why the social world is full of documents, in archives,
in our drawers, in our wallets, and now even in our mobile
phones.

Criticism

To indicate the paradigm of the political commitment of a phi-

losopher, people always quote Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuer-
bach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” What people
forget to mention is the first thesis: “Feuerbach wants sensu-
ous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he
does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity.”
Now, in my proposal, the constitutive law of social objects is
Object = Inscribed Act. That is to say that a social object is
the result of a social act (such as to involve at least two people,
or a delegated machine and a person) that is characterized by
being recorded, on a piece of paper, on a computer file, or
even only in the mind of the people involved in the act. What
I propose under the title of “documentality” is thus a “weak
56 Manifesto of New Realism

textualism” (that is, also a “weak constructionism”): weak

because it assumes that inscriptions are decisive in the con-
struction of social reality, but—contrary to what we may define
“strong textualism,” practiced by postmodernists—it excludes
that inscriptions may be constitutive of reality in general. Weak
textualism is therefore such since it results from the weaken-
ing of Derrida’s thesis that “there is nothing outside the text,”
which is transformed into “there is nothing social outside the
text.”14 It admits a kind of constructionism but, indeed, a mod-
erate constructionism, which does not clash with the realis-
tic intuition. In addition to recognizing a positive ontological
sphere, this move allows us to avoid the inconsistencies that
derive from the lack of distinction between objects and from
the collapse between ontology and epistemology, saving us a
lot of “fashionable nonsense.”
But, above all, the reference to social objects has an inher-
ently critical value. Postmodernists not only argued that nature
is socially constructed, a thesis that has more or less the effect
of a joke. More seriously, they have supported a form of
irrealism of social objects, which is what lies at the basis of
the argument that postmodernity is a liquid and evanescent
reality. Through the analysis of the specific characteristics of
social objects, it emerges instead that society is anything but
liquid: it is made of objects such as promises and bets, money
and passports, which can often be more solid than tables and
chairs, and which all the happiness and unhappiness of our
lives depend on. Unfortunately, those who have variable-rate
mortgages or lost their savings on the stock market know this
very well. The illusion that these objects are an infinitely inter-
pretable phantasmagoria makes us blind, and therefore help-
less, in front of the world in which we live. So I formulated a
definition of social objects as “inscriptions of acts,” that is, as
the establishment of relationships that access the dimension of
objectivity through recording.
 Reconstruction 57

Now, next to the positive side of the construction of a class

of objects, we also have the revelation of the fallacy of the
link between derealization and emancipation that was formed
by postmodernism. This link would find its typical representa-
tion in the Web: the world where we are all given back our
time, working where we want and when we want, and social
networks take us away from loneliness and subrogate the old
forms of social organization. And yet it is not so, in two senses.
First of all, it is not true that, from the political and ideologi-
cal point of view, all this fluidity is emancipation. As we saw
in chapter 1, all the promised emancipation in postmodernism
has turned into a form of subordination (often voluntary, but
this is not the point).
Also, and this time from an ontological perspective, (that
is what exists independently of what we think or hope), liquid
postmodernity showed another face, which is not that of a
floating world but rather that of a total mobilization. Jünger’s
idea of the militarized worker15 is realized, in an unexpected
form, and it is realized not in the world of storms of steel and
factories but in that of silicon and mobile phones—the same
mobile phones that give us the impression that we have the
world in our hands while we are in the hands of the world,
always available for its impositions and demands. If this mobi-
lization is possible, it is because of the fundamental nature of
new technologies, namely, recording and inscription: the fact
that in every moment, every act and every said thing can be
fixated and count as an obligation, demand, blackmail, respon-
sibility.16 In this case, recognizing recording and inscription as a
characteristic proper of social objects allows precisely for that
critical realism that was impossible to postmodernism, which
saw, wrongly, the new world as a soft fairy tale and a light-
ening process. Far from being fluid, modernity is the era in
which words are stones and in which the nightmare of verba
manent is realized. Thus, from the ontological point of view,
58 Manifesto of New Realism

we have a multiplication of social objects, and then, exactly to

the opposite of what postmodernists thought, an increase of
realia rather than a derealization.

Reconstruction

Beyond the analyses and the criticism, the distinctions pro-

posed here allow for a reconstruction17 that the nucleus of
positive realism consists of. I shall try to summarize its funda-
mental steps. First, as regards the distinction between ontology
and epistemology (and the distinctions that follow, between
external world and internal world, and between science and
experience), it seems to me that it responds to the necessity
to preserve two essential needs for realism, so as to overcome
the fallacy of being-knowledge, that is, the collapse between
objects and the knowledge we have of them that began with
transcendental philosophy and culminated with postmodern-
ism. On the one hand, we should stick to the fact that there is
an unamendable core of being and experience that gives itself
in complete independence from conceptual schemes and knowl-
edge. On the other hand, we must leave open the possibility
of constructing, upon this layer, knowledge as a conceptual,
linguistic, deliberate, and above all emancipative activity. If,
instead, we saw knowledge as a simple game of conceptual
schemes that are all equivalent as per their truth content, we
should resign ourselves to considering science not as a search
for truth (with the emancipation that goes with it) but as a
conflict between different wills to power—which is actually
what is alleged by the fallacy of knowledge-power on which I
will focus in the next chapter.
Second, as to the distinction between natural objects and
social objects, it seems to be a decisive element to circumvent the
fallacy of ascertainment-acceptance and to make social reality
 Reconstruction 59

into a concrete ground of analysis and transformation. On the

one hand, in fact, it allows us to recognize the natural world
as independent of human construction, avoiding the nihilistic
and skeptical outcome that is reached when trying to dialectize
the distinction between nature and culture. On the other hand,
it allows us to see in the social world the work of human con-
struction, which however—precisely to the extent to which it
is a social interaction—does not constitute a purely subjective
production. In this way, the sphere of natural objects, as well as
that of social objects, becomes the field of a possible and legiti-
mate knowledge, that is, of an epistemology that undoubtedly
involves hermeneutics (since in many cases knowledge requires
varying degrees of interpretation). Nevertheless, this epistemol-
ogy has a very different value depending on whether it refers
to natural objects or social objects. In respect of the former,
in fact, epistemology exerts a purely reconstructive function,
merely acknowledging something that exists independently of
knowledge. In respect of social objects, however, epistemology
has a constitutive value, both in the sense that a certain amount
of knowledge is necessary to live in any social world and in the
sense in which it is obvious that in the social world new objects
are produced (for example, through legislative activity) with
an operation that is not purely of acknowledgment (as is the
reference to natural objects) but is performative.
Turning now to the choice of the constitutive rule Object =
Inscribed Act, it arises from the need to provide an alternative
to the constitutive rule proposed by the most influential theorist
of social objects, John Searle, that is, the rule “X counts as Y in
C” (the physical object X counts as the social object Y in a con-
text C). The limit of this proposal is twofold. On the one hand,
it does not seem able to account for complex social objects such
as businesses, or negative entities such as debts, in which at
first it seems difficult to find a physical object to be turned into
a social object. On the other hand, it makes the entire social
60 Manifesto of New Realism

reality depend on the action of a rather mysterious entity, that

is, collective intentionality, which allegedly manages the trans-
formation of the physical into the social.18 According to the
version I propose, on the contrary, it is very easy to account
for the totality of social objects, from informal promises to
the corporate architectures of businesses, to negative entities
such as, indeed, debts. In all these cases there is a minimal
structure, which is guaranteed by the presence of at least two
people who commit an act (which may consist of a gesture, a
word, or writing) that can be recorded on some support, even
if it were only human memory. In addition to accounting for
the physical basis of the social object—which is not an X gen-
erally available for the action of collective intentionality but a
recording that can take place on multiple supports—the rule I
propose (and that I call the “rule of documentality” as opposed
to the “rule of intentionality” with which we could designate
Searle’s option) has the advantage of not making social reality
depend on a function, that is, collective intentionality. This
notion, in fact, is dangerously close to a purely mental process
and led Searle to make an affirmation that was anything but
realistic: namely, that the economic crisis is largely the result
of imagination.19 Being a form of documentality, money is far
from imaginary, and this very circumstance allows us to draw
a distinction between the social (which records the acts of at
least two people, even if the recording takes place in people’s
minds and not on external documents) and the mental (which
can take place even only in the mind of a single individual).
In this sense, the argument against Searle (who, in defining
money as a result of imagination, acts like a postmodernist)
comes from the elaboration of Derrida’s theory on the role of
writing in the construction of social reality. In short, once we
circumscribe, as I proposed, the “there is nothing outside the
text” to a more limited “there is nothing social outside the
text,” there is a good argument—I believe—to counter Searle’s
 Reconstruction 61

thesis on collective intentionality—which in hindsight sounds

like a “there is nothing social outside the mind,” making the
distinction between social objects and mental objects collapse.
There remains one last point, which concerns precisely
the mental. One may legitimately wonder what the origin of
documentality is, that is, where the intentions that underlie the
inscriptions constituting social reality come from. Postmodern
thinkers much insisted on the fact that the subject is not to be
regarded as a fundamental datum, but their position, usually,
did not go much beyond the criticism of a chosen target—the
“Cartesian subject”—and the mere hypothesis that the sub-
ject is influenced by culture. The prospect of documentality, in
my opinion, allows instead for a positive development, which
begins with the theory that—from the ancients to the mod-
erns—conceives the mind as a tabula on which inscriptions are
imprinted. In fact, as we have seen, inscriptions have a power-
ful action in social reality: social behaviors are determined by
laws, rituals, norms, and social structures, and education forms
our intentions. Imagine some Crusoe figure who was the first
and last man on the face of the earth. Could he ever be eaten
away by the ambition to become an admiral, a billionaire, or a
court poet? Certainly not, just like he could not sensibly aspire
to follow fashions, or to collect baseball cards, or still lives.
And if, say, he tried to fabricate a document, he would be
undertaking an impossible task, because to make a document
there must be at least two people, the writer and the reader. In
fact, our arch Robinson would not even have a language, and
one could hardly say that he would “think” in the usual sense
of the term. And it would seem difficult to argue that he was
proud, arrogant, or in love, for roughly the same reason why it
would be absurd to claim he had friends or enemies.
We thus have two circumstances that reveal the social struc-
ture of the mind.20 On the one hand, the mind cannot arise
unless it is immersed in a social bath, made up of education,
62 Manifesto of New Realism

language, transmission, and recording of behaviors. On the

other hand, there is the huge category of social objects that
could not exist if there were not people who think that they
exist. Instead of portraying a world at the total disposal of the
subject, the sphere of social objects reveals the inconsistency
of solipsism: the fact that in the world there are also others
in addition to us is proven precisely by the existence of these
objects, which would not serve any purpose in a world where
there was only one subject. If it was not possible to keep traces,
there would be no mind, and it is not by chance that the mind
was traditionally depicted as a tabula rasa, a surface on which
impressions and thoughts are inscribed. But without the pos-
sibility of inscription, there would not even be social objects,
which consist in the recording of social acts, starting from the
fundamental one of the promise. And, if this is the case, per-
haps we should translate Aristotle’s sentence that man is a zoon
logon echon as: man is an animal endowed with inscriptions,
or rather (since one of the meanings of logos in Greek is pre-
cisely “promise,” “given word”) as “man is an animal that
promises.”21
In analyses I recently carried out,22 I propose, therefore, to
see intentionality (as the hallmark of the mental) as a result
of documentality. The mental, in accordance with the picture
of the mind as a tabula, is a surface for inscriptions (which in
terms of contemporary neurophysiology correspond to neuro-
nal discharges). These inscriptions are not forms of thought
nor do they require thought, just as computer operations do
not require knowledge of arithmetic. And yet the result of
inscriptions, progressing in complexity, is thought, just as the
result of computer operations is an arithmetical calculation.
Both in artificial intelligence and in the natural one the same
process occurs, for which organization precedes and produces
understanding,23 and documentality precedes and produces
intentionality.
 Reconstruction 63

The result of the reconstruction I propose is, as announced

in chapter 2, a “treaty of perpetual peace” between the real-
ist insight and the constructionist one. It is simply a matter of
assigning each one to its field of competence: 1) Natural objects
are independent of epistemology and make natural science true.
2) Experience is independent of science. 3) Social objects are
dependent on epistemology, without being subjective. 4) “Intu-
itions without concepts are blind” applies primarily to social
objects (where it has a constructive value) and less to the episte-
mological approach to the natural world (where it has a recon-
structive value). 5) The realist intuition and the constructionist
insight have therefore equal legitimacy in their respective fields
of application. We can obviously dispute on questions such as:
Are there subatomic entities? What kind of existence do prom-
ises have? Are species and genders a part of nature or culture?
This is the real debate, and it is here that the philosophical,
political, and scientific discussion takes place. Conversely, the
best way to nip all dialogue and comparison in the bud is that
of embracing pan-constructionism, because of an implacable
law of politics that, incidentally, shows that even in the field of
human things we deal with admirable regularities.
 FOUR

EMANCIPATION
Unexamined Life Has No Value

The Fallacy of Knowledge-Power

A ll that is left now is the third fallacy, that of knowl-

edge-power: that is, the main argument through which
postmodernism committed to knock Enlightenment out. If
Enlightenment linked knowledge to emancipation, in post-
modernism the Nietzschean view prevailed according to which
knowledge is an instrument of domination and a manifestation
of the will to power. At this point, the only critical knowledge
is a form of counterpower that is committed to systematically
doubting knowledge itself, exercising a deconstruction with-
out reconstruction—something that, besides, is consistent with
the assumption that philosophy has no autonomous cognitive
value. This fallacy has its origin in a philosophical critique
of science that comes, paradoxically, from an almost supersti-
tious overestimation of it on the part of its critics. I say “crit-
ics” and not “supporters” because it is especially the first that

65
66 Manifesto of New Realism

developed the idea (which, as we saw in chapter 2, has no

raison d’être) that there is a science for everything, and that
everywhere science undermines philosophy, which thus loses
any constructive value and gathers in the foyer of criticism.
Hence, with an accusation of co-responsibility, the insistence
on the idea that, just like the belles lettres, science also makes
use of words, words, words and is never in direct contact with
the world “out there.” The treatment given to science is also
applied to metaphysics, suspected of conniving with science at
the level of truth and reality; to the point that the overcoming
of metaphysics has become the partisan struggle of those who
had amnestied Heidegger’s Nazism.
A first version of knowledge-power is that which, by radi-
calizing the connection between knowledge and interest, simply
aims at calling into question the idea that there are disinter-
ested reasons at the basis of knowledge. This weak form cannot
even be properly defined a fallacy, as it recognizes something
true. Undoubtedly, knowledge can be animated by the will
to power or, in a completely trivial sense, by career interests.
From this, however, it does not follow that we should doubt
the results of knowledge, because even if it were true that (as
Rousseau suggested)1 astronomy was born out of superstition;
eloquence out of ambition, hatred, or flattery; geometry out of
greed; physics out of a vain curiosity; and morals itself out of
pride, there would still be no reason to doubt the fact that the
earth revolves around the sun, or that the sum of the interior
angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. Strictly speaking, therefore,
here we are not dealing with a fallacy but merely with a rule
of prudence that does not prevent us from holding on to the
Enlightenment idea of knowledge as emancipation.2
A second, more classical, version of the fallacy comes from
Foucault’s analyses and is consubstantial with the genesis of the
first part of his thought.3 The basic idea is that the organiza-
tion of knowledge is strictly determined by motives of power:
 Emancipation 67

it is not a mere statement of fact that determined that mad-

ness should cease to have a relationship with divine inspira-
tion and be delivered to the sphere of pathology;4 the fractures
that caused changes in knowledge about man in modern times
meet power’s needs.5 Inversely, the organizations of power are
always able to develop knowledge, to the point that even the
prison structure, which should be the least interested in knowl-
edge, may manifest an ideal of control, which is represented
in the emblematic form of the Panopticon designed by Ben-
tham, that is, an apparatus that allows for total control over
the prisoners.6 Also in this case, the theory had a raison d’être
and yet came to unlikely outcomes. Of course madness was
segregated, but should the antipsychiatric movement be con-
sidered as a manifestation of the will to power as well? And
what about the struggles by Foucault himself in favor of pris-
oners? Will to power even in that case? And when the Church
acknowledged that Galileo was right, was it a manifestation of
power or truth? But even apart from these aporias, the great-
est weakness of this thesis revealed itself in the mechanical and
monotone applications of the equivalence between knowledge
and power that turned into an antiscientific and superstitious
dogma.7
Then we have a third version of the fallacy of knowledge-
power, an amplified one, wherein lies the basis of the ideal of
a “weak thought.” Here the argument of knowledge-power
sounds like this: those who think they possess the truth tend to
be dogmatic or even violent. It is a problematic thesis, because
it does not account for at least three circumstances: first, that
it is a matter of understanding what is meant by “truth,” if
that of the possessed mystical or that of the reasonable scholar
(and therefore hardly violent, by the virtue of her doctrine
and rationality); second, that you can have truth without vio-
lence and violence without truth, and that consequently the
abandonment of truth does not lead to the abandonment of
68 Manifesto of New Realism

violence and universal peace but only to superstition; third,

that, just as in “there are no facts, only interpretations,” one
can always hold against weak thought the argument that, if the
explanation of the link between violence and truth is a truth,
then weak thought is guilty of the same violence it condemns.
Retaliations aside, there remain some considerations of com-
mon sense. The right response to those who manifest a wish to
kill in the name of truth would not lie in attacking truth and
pointing the finger at its social dangers, but, if anything, in
observing that certainties not grounded in facts can have disas-
trous results—which is not at all an argument against truth but,
on the contrary, the strongest argument in favor of truth and
reality. If someone fights against the windmills, the best thing
is to make him see the truth, namely, that they are windmills
and not giants spinning their arms. Finally, everyday there is
the case of someone (for example, an anti-Mafia magistrate)
who fights for the truth, and such truth is objectively true. The
objections that weak thought makes to truth as violence are,
even under cursory examination, objections to violence, not to
truth, and are therefore based on a misunderstanding. Omitting
these circumstances leads us to situations without a way out:
power is always right, or, conversely, counterpower is always
wrong; and even, in a rather perverse form, counterpower and
counterknowledge—even if they were proposed by criminals or
by witches—are always right.

Experiment of the Farewell to Truth

Finally, there is an extreme outcome, which consists in consid-

ering truth as such as negative and in an appeal to say goodbye
to truth.8 This outcome is so paradoxical that it lends itself to
a thought experiment against the fallacy of knowledge-power,
that is, to try to put into practice the farewell to truth. Here
 Emancipation 69

are some propositions that would become possible after this

farewell: “The sun revolves around the earth”, “2 + 2 = 5”;
“Foucault is the author of The Betrothed,” “Naomi’s dad was
Craxi’s driver.” And, passing from farce to tragedy: “The Holo-
caust is an invention of the Jews.” Since these sentences fol-
low quite naturally from the acceptance of the argument that
there are no facts, only interpretations—of which the farewell
to truth is the nihilistic extreme—we wonder how it is pos-
sible that someone might calmly assert that to claim that snow
is white if and only if snow is white is a triviality unworthy
of discussion. A banality that, at the same time, would not
entail any consequence from the ethical, political, and human
solidarity standpoint, that is, from the point of view dear to
interpretation-friendly thinkers. No, there are consequences
indeed. Not only—as we saw in chapter 3 when talking about
very-differentism and irrevocability—is there an uninterrupted
path leading from perception to morals, but this path can also
be taken in the other direction: a little bit like what happens to
Bouvard and Pécuchet, who, after pointing out discrepancies in
the dates of the Olympics and the birth of Christ, come to the
point of disdaining facts and conclude that the only important
thing is the philosophy of history. What in them is farce can
always result in tragedy, following the slippery slope that leads
from the criticism of knowledge to skepticism and hence to
negationism.
There is still a point to consider, passing from the extrem-
ism of the farewell to truth to more temperate and less nihil-
istic versions. Rorty’s idea that truth is of no use and that it is
maybe a beautiful but useless thing, being a sort of compliment
or pat on the shoulder,9 was the reversal of a no less objection-
able idea proposed by William James, according to whom true
propositions are those that enhance life. In both cases the argu-
ments were set out with the best intentions, but if James’s one
could be seductive though false, Rorty’s seemed problematic
70 Manifesto of New Realism

even under superficial examination, since it did not consider

how important truth is in our daily practices, and how truth
is intimately connected with reality. After all, it is not useless
to know if the mushroom we are about to eat is poisonous,
and this does not depend on our discursive practices or on our
theories about mushrooms but on the mushroom. Now, let’s
say that, by applying the theory of the irrelevance of truth, I eat
a poisonous mushroom. The first thing I would feel the need of
is a doctor: not a supportive doctor but an objective doctor, one
that would be able, if possible, to cure me. And if the poisoning
proved to be beyond remedy (with mushrooms, it is unfortu-
nate but true—it can happen) then I would perhaps be happy
to have a supportive doctor, but it does not seem appropriate
to mistake the fallback for the ideal.
In short, the farewell to reality and truth is not a painless
event. The thesis of truth as an “effect of power” does not seem
to consider the fact that it had already been represented in com-
mon sense, millennia before postmodernism, by the fable of the
wolf and the lamb; the thesis of the primacy of solidarity over
objectivity does not seem to take into account that solidarity
can be what keeps a criminal association together, or worse. In
fact, we cannot ignore, for example, the strong evidence that
the primacy of people’s solidarity against the objectivity of facts
was the guiding principle of the Nazi courts after the attack on
Hitler on July 20, 1944—and in general the Nazi regime is the
glaring example of a society characterized by a strong internal
solidarity, which remitted the management of truth to the care
of Dr. Goebbels. In short, those who enounce the theory of the
superiority of solidarity over objectivity—which is summed up
in a paradoxical “Amica veritas magis amicus Plato,” that is,
a principle of authority—neglect the fact that this superiority
can be used (as in fact happened) for the worst harassments
and falsifications. Is the activity of so-called “Manufacturing
Consent,” for example, not a manufacturing of solidarity? One
 Emancipation 71

could conclusively note that there is no will to power more vio-

lent than that which comes from the acceptance of the fallacy
of knowledge-power. Consider the two fundamental equations
of postmodernism: 1) being = knowledge and 2) knowledge
= power. For the transitive property we have: being = knowl-
edge = power, and therefore: being = power.10 In fact, the most
extreme postmodernism brings about the logical step for which
the combination of constructivism (reality is constructed by
knowledge) and nihilism (knowledge is constructed by power)
makes reality into a construction of power, which makes it
both detestable (if by “power” one means the Moloch that
dominates us) and malleable (if by “power” one means: “in our
power”). This final outcome of postmodernism, which reduces
being to power, recalls the destruction of reason: namely, the
delegitimization of Enlightenment that Lukács11 recognized as
the essence of the arch that, starting from Romanticism and the
late Schelling (a theoretician of being as power), culminates in
Nietzsche,12 in agreement with the final pseudo-aphorism of
The Will to Power:

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall

I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a mon-
ster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm,
iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or
smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms
itself [. . .] this, my Dionysian world of the eternally
self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery
world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond
good and evil,” [. . .] do you want a name for this
world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you,
too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most
midnightly men?—This world is the will to power—
and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this
will to power—and nothing besides!13
72 Manifesto of New Realism

If, then—with a radical postmodernism—we say that the

so-called “truth” is a matter of power, we must also add that
the true truth, the one without quotation marks, is not a matter
of power. Otherwise we get into a vicious circle from which it
is impossible to escape. In its manifestation prima facie, that
of the truth as pure power is a very resigned, almost desperate
statement: “the reason of the strongest is always the best.” And
yet we should be more hopeful: reality—for example, the fact
that it is true that the wolf is upstream and the lamb is down-
stream, so it cannot muddy the water—is the very basis for
reestablishing justice. For, contrary to what many postmodern
thinkers believe, there are reasonable grounds to think, first of
all on the basis of the teachings of history, that reality and truth
have always constituted the protection of the weak against the
oppression of the strong. If, however, a philosopher says that
“the so-called ‘truth’ is a matter of power,” then why is he a
philosopher rather than a magician?

Dialectic

In the fallacy of knowledge-power we are able to measure how

influential Nietzsche’s philosophy has been; in particular how
it managed to ferry elements proper of the romantic reaction
to the contemporary world, constituting, as Habermas wrote,14
a sort of “turning point” that leads from the archaic to the
postmodern. Nietzsche’s target, from The Birth of Tragedy on,
was Socrates: the one who, dying, argued that there is an insti-
tutive connection between knowledge, virtue, and happiness.
And Nietzsche sets against Socrates—a philosopher-scientist,
scholar, rationalist, very remote ancestor of the learned posi-
tivists of his time—the idea of the tragic philosopher, or of a
kind of music-loving Socrates: that is, Wagner. Philosophy must
return to the myth, the happiness promised to the scholar must
 Emancipation 73

be replaced by tragedy. Here, so to speak, Nietzsche addresses

“mother-in-law Socrates” in order to blame “daughter-in-law
Enlightenment,” because it is precisely Enlightenment that sup-
ported the interdependent relationship between knowledge,
progress, and happiness. Because the artist-philosopher who
loves the veil and the illusion belongs to the same world as
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and shares with him the project
of giving humanity what it really needs. And, going back, he
also belongs to the world of de Maistre, brilliant slanderer of
Enlightenment about what, in his opinion, was most wrong in
it, that is, the claim to help people by teaching them to think
for themselves, whereas happiness lies in obeying authority
and being tied to it with the sweet chains of ignorance and
tradition.
With The Birth of Tragedy—a really (it must be said)
“epoch-making” text, released just over a hundred years
before Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition—begins the path
that leads us to recognize in postmodernism the end of the
“great narratives” of Enlightenment, Idealism, and Marxism,
which were united by their common acknowledgment of the
central role of knowledge in the welfare of humanity. Either
because, as in the case of Enlightenment—which remains the
paradigmatic element—knowledge leads to emancipation; or
because, as in the case of Idealism, knowledge is fully disin-
terested and disengaged from whatever mundane purpose; or
again, as in the case of Marxism, because Enlightenment and
Idealism, emancipation and disinterest, are combined in a pro-
cess of practical transformation of the society. These are the
elements questioned by Nietzsche and by the deriving post-
modernism. Enlightenment is refuted by the ideal of the tragic
philosopher that, as we said, is committed to blowing up every
bridge between happiness and knowledge. Idealism is delegiti-
mized by the consideration, fully developed in On the Gene-
alogy of Morals, for which knowledge is nothing more than
74 Manifesto of New Realism

interest, hatred among the learned, and rivalry. The critique of

socialism, in Nietzsche, appears as a secondary phenomenon
compared to the radical anti-Enlightenment stances, and the
argument that “there are no facts, only interpretations” finds
its origin exactly in this theoretical horizon: it is important
that knowledge is transformed into a series of interpretations
that do not match the facts, since one has to follow the model
of the artistic thinker, who looks for other masks behind the
mask, and not that of the scholar, who seeks the truth behind
the veil. The background of the fundamental principle of philo-
sophical postmodernism must therefore be sought in this pas-
sage of The Birth of Tragedy: “if the artist in every unveiling
of truth always cleaves with raptured eyes only to that which
still remains veiled after the unveiling, the theoretical man, on
the other hand, enjoys and contents himself with the cast-off
veil.”15
It is this passage that echoes in a famous scene in The
Matrix: “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when
I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is
juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
Ignorance is bliss.” Ignorance is bliss because knowledge and
unveiling do not give happiness: it can only come from myth.
In Nietzsche echoes the question posed by the Romantics at the
beginning of the nineteenth century: how, after two thousand
years have passed, have we not even been able to come up with
a new God? We have to change everything and give life to a
revolution of the heart and of the spirit. As a result (of course,
without their direct responsibility), a crowd of charismatic fig-
ures came out of it, a new mythology that has long weighed on
the last two centuries. Concretely, the colorful, noisy, and espe-
cially fake world around us is the heir to the romantic dream of
a revival of the myth, to the fact that reason must be replaced
by the dream. Rather than rationalistic as it is often depicted,
modernity—at least from Romanticism onward—was largely
 Emancipation 75

mythological and anti-Enlightenment, and the outcome of post-

modernism arises, in full coherence, in this line of development.
It is the theoretical man that must be beaten, but he has
to be beaten, mind you (here is the essential dialectic of post-
modernism), in the name of truth, which is denied and geared
toward myth for the sake of truth itself. Here is the noble
origin of the fallacy of knowledge-power. If we look at the
philosophical heart of postmodernism, we are faced with an
institutive paradox. The basic idea was that of a great emanci-
patory instance: the request for emancipation, which relies on
the forces of reason, knowledge, and truth that are opposed
to myth, miracle, and tradition, comes to a point of extreme
radicalization and turns against itself.16 After using the logos
to criticize myth and knowledge to expose faith, the decon-
structive forces of reason turn against the logos and knowledge
themselves: thus begins the long process of the genealogy of
morals, which exposes knowledge as the action of the will to
power. The result is exactly the fallacy of knowledge-power:
every form of knowledge should be viewed with suspicion, as
an expression of some form of power. Hence the impasse: if
knowledge is power, then what has to produce emancipation
(i.e., knowledge) is at the same time the instance that pro-
duces subordination and domination. And that is why, with
yet another somersault, the radical emancipation can only be
found in nonknowledge, in the return to myth and fables. Thus
emancipation went around in circles. For the sake of truth and
reality, truth and reality themselves were given up: that is the
meaning of the “crisis of the great narratives” of legitimation
of knowledge. The problem with this dialectic, however, is sim-
ply that it leaves all the initiative to other instances and that
emancipation turns into its opposite, as is shown by what hap-
pened after.
This dialectic, in fact, has not simply a historical-ideal side,
but involves the practical actualizations that we have reviewed
76 Manifesto of New Realism

in chapter 1. It begins exactly with deconstructive statements,

typically with theses that cast doubt on the possibility of an
access to the real that is not culturally mediated and that, at the
same time, relativize the cognitive value of science, following a
thread that leads from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Feyerabend
and Foucault. Apart from the case of Heidegger, where the
conservative and traditionalist element is widely prevalent, the
deconstruction of science and the affirmation of the relativism
of conceptual schemes are part of the emancipative baggage
that underlies the original postmodern impulse, but their result
is diametrically opposed. In particular, as we have seen, the
criticism of science as an apparatus of power and as the free
play of conceptual schemes generated a conservative postmod-
ernism, one that draws from the dialectic of Enlightenment
and from the struggle of truth against itself its argument for
the appeal to a higher truth or (and it is the same) to bid truth
farewell. This stalemate seems to be a constant outcome of
the dialectic of postmodernism:17 skepticism and deconstruc-
tion dismantle philosophical certainties, and the original scene
of the Descartes-Kant-Nietzsche arch drawn in chapter 2 is
regularly repeated. In this context, it is entirely understandable
that there should be a philosophical proposal18 to offer a way
out of the dialectic of postmodernism and the impasse in which
finds itself, by acknowledging the positive values of certainty
and of a pretheoretical trust that would remedy the syndrome
of suspicion, the lacerations of modernism and the nihilism of
postmodernism.

Certainty

The prospect of certainty roughly goes like this. We live in a

state of uncertainty, which, paradoxically, has been increased,
and not diminished, by technical-scientific progress. Modernity,
 Emancipation 77

which is the age of the highest knowledge, is also the era of

the utmost concern. And this anxiety reached its peak in the
second half of the twentieth century, that is, with postmod-
ernism. In order to find security, it is therefore necessary to
follow a different path. We should not think that peace will
come from objectivity and knowledge (which moreover nail
us to our biological dimension and therefore, as the friends of
certainty say, to despair). On the contrary, we should focus on
certainty and confidence, on relying on others with the trust
that a child has toward his mother. It is a discourse that can be
lucid, honest, open and deep, but it must be confronted with
four perplexities.
Does modernity bring uncertainty? Are we sure? Here is
the first question. Think of the lives of our distant ancestors in
the savannas: their life lasted roughly twenty years, barely the
time to consume their two sets of teeth and then their wisdom
teeth as a last resort, and then they faced death from hunger
and rheumatism—unless they had been eaten by lions before
that. Thus, our ancestors were much more exposed than us,
and their life was infinitely shorter and much more cruel, bru-
tal, and senseless than ours. It is in this perspective that faith
and knowledge find their very remote origin. In tombs we find
technical tools, weapons, and ornaments, as well as religious
objects such as statues of gods. These two types of items have
evolved in parallel, not to enhance but to decrease uncertainty.
However, if we now live in an incomparably safer world and
if—trivially but decisively—our lifetime is vastly longer, this
does not depend on faith but on knowledge, that therefore,
to all purposes, has increased our certainties. And if we are so
sensitive to uncertainty it is not due to some failure in moder-
nity, but rather because we have become more civilized and
demanding, in a process similar to that for which today we
would not bear the surgeries undergone by our ancestors with-
out anesthesia.
78 Manifesto of New Realism

Emotional security or objective certainty? The second ques-

tion is: are we sure that (as the friends of certainty claim) the
first certainty we have is not objectivity but the fact of our
dependence on our mother for affection? Some people have
never met their mother, while objects are known by all, and
the relationship of trust between the child and the mother is
itself primarily established as an objectual relationship. That
said, it is true that certainty is something that—like courage
according to Don Abbondio—one does not give oneself but
that is received. But, again, we continuously receive it from the
world, which is stable and reliable in front of us. The observa-
tion that we are the more certain the less we have set reasoning
in motion is sacrosanct.19 But such a remark is intimately con-
nected with objective experience, because otherwise we would
be expressing the credo quia absurdum, or even a blind submis-
sion to authority.
Certainty or hope? The third question is: are we certain
that certainty is the highest good? In the final analysis, depres-
sion is the closest human experience to eternal peace and abso-
lute certainty. This is what makes even the representation of
eternal life unsatisfactory and unexplainable, when we try to
fixate it in a more definite way. Something much stronger and
much more decisive than certainty is hope (which always has
an internal element of uncertainty), as is intuitively clear if we
compare the different severity of their opposites, that is, uncer-
tainty and despair. There is no reason to believe that a human
being, if she renounces a transcendent order, must necessarily
surrender to despair. In fact, hope precedes every religious rev-
elation and may evolve to become a rational hope valid for all
people, that is, a hope that does not contradict what we know
of our natural being, unlike what happens for the hope, valid
only for believers, of resurrection.20
Certainty or truth? And here we come to a crucial fourth
uncertainty. Are we certain that we can be certain of certainty?
 Emancipation 79

Should we trust it? There are bad mothers, both in the literal
sense and figuratively; there are deceivers and manipulators,
both in the name of reason and in the name of faith. Moreover,
certainty (and sensible experience itself proves it) can be deceit-
ful. So, I can have hallucinations, or my mother might not be
my mother, or even—as happened to the boys of the Hitler-
jugend—my certainty and my fundamental reliance could be
named Adolf Hitler. So, certainty alone is not enough: it needs
truth, that is, knowledge. Here, rather than with the experience
of the reliance on the mother, we are confronted with a differ-
ent movement, namely, with man’s emergence from childhood
and with the “dare to know” brought forward by Enlighten-
ment. In fact, no one denies that in the light of reliance, cer-
tainty, and dependence, one can live and die—maybe even very
well. And of course Oedipus would have lived better had he
not found out the truth. Yet, these practical or rather “eude-
monistic” motives (to use an old-fashioned expression) do not
exempt us from a consideration: living in certainty, for what we
have said so far, is not living in truth. And we should note that
it is in the name of truth that the promise of certainty—maybe
the ‘‘worship, rejoice, be silent” with which a great philoso-
pher, Antonio Rosmini, ended his earthly life—gives peace. But
it is also true that peace, as Kafka said, “would be of a kind
desirable only for one’s ashes.”21

Enlightenment

So let us come to the alternative to Enlightenment. We have

seen a possible outcome of the dialectic of postmodernism—
the one leading to the fallacy of knowledge-power and hence
to antifoundationalism and then again to a non-theoretical
neofoundationalism—in order to circumvent the objection of
knowledge-power. But there is one aspect of the recent history
80 Manifesto of New Realism

of postmodernism on which I would like to bring attention: in

the early eighties—and in front of the turn postmodernism was
taking—three philosophers who were systematically associated
with postmodernism (namely, Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard)
expressed the need for a return to Enlightenment. It is typically
the case of Lyotard, who in 1983, with an open disassociation
from the path taken by postmodernism, proposed a return to
Kant:22 this was the main theme of his last works, in which, for
example, he focused on the sublime as opposed to the cultural
industry.23 The same passage may be noted in Derrida, who (in
1980, at the conference in Cerisy-la-Salle in his honor) entitled
his speech, where he targeted the signs of the “end of an era”
that accompanied the debate on postmodernism, Of an Apoca-
lyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.24 Over the years
he would increase his interventions in favor of an “Enlighten-
ment to come” and the “Enlightenment of the XXI century.”25
“The currents that call themselves ‘postmodern’”—wrote Der-
rida—“do so as if they had passed the age of Enlightenment,
and I do not think it is so. It is a matter of reviving the idea
of Enlightenment, not as it manifested itself in the eighteenth
century in Europe, but by making it contemporary, situating it
in the progress of reason.”26
But in this respect, the most emblematic case is that of Fou-
cault, who from February 1 to March 28, 1984 held his last
course at the Collège de France, The Courage of the Truth,27
and then entered the terminal stage of AIDS that would take
him away on June 25. Foucault was tired; the course began with
weeks of delay because of a strong flu due to his immunodefi-
ciency, but he wanted to complete the task that was assigned to
him the year before: to carry out a history of parrhesia, that is,
telling the truth at the cost of one’s life, from its birth in Greece
to its developments in the Middle Ages (the sermon and the
university) up to modern times, where the parrhesiast seems to
turn into the figure of the revolutionary. For the philosopher
 Emancipation 81

who had linked his name to the doctrine of knowledge-power,

that is, to the idea that one has to look at knowledge with sus-
picion because it is a vehicle for power, this project—just like
the rehabilitation of asceticism and self-care in The History of
Sexuality that is Foucault’s great unfinished work—is the sign
of a profound change of direction. From the very first lesson
Foucault states that interpreting his research “as an attempt to
reduce knowledge (savoir) to power [. . .] is purely and simply
a caricature.”28 Yet, the dramatic interplay between power and
knowledge was the first motive of Foucault’s thought, as is once
again restated in “The Order of Discourse,”29 the lecture with
which, in 1970, he inaugurated his teaching at the Collège de
France. And it is still so in the synthesis of the “Microphysics
of Power”: “the exercise of power perpetually creates knowl-
edge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of
power.”30
As we have seen, the theory of knowledge-power harbored
a reincarnation of On the Genealogy of Morals and established
a paradox that lies at the heart of Foucault’s thought as well
as Nietzsche’s: truth is criticized not for the sake of mystifica-
tion but for the opposite reason, namely, for a love for truth
that wants to unmask everything, including truth itself, thus
restoring myth. A dangerous game, because seeing truth as an
effect of power means delegitimizing the tradition culminating
in Enlightenment, for which knowledge and truth are vehicles
of emancipation, tools of counterpower and virtue. And an
unpredictable game, too, like Russian roulette, because one
cannot know when it ends. For Nietzsche, the outcome is the
myth, the idea that truth must give way to illusion and the
unfolding of power. For Foucault, the outcome is antithetical.
In fact, it is no coincidence that, along with this apology of
truth as a critique of, and an opposition to, power, a truth that
costs one’s life or that is embodied by cynics as opponents of
power, Foucault engages in an apology of Enlightenment, as
82 Manifesto of New Realism

happens in a lecture at the Collège de France in 1983, “What

Is Enlightenment?”31
This is the path that was completed in the lectures of the
last winter of Foucault’s life, where the terminal hero is the
dying Socrates, that is, the antihero in Nietzsche, who regarded
him as the man who, dying, had imposed the false equation
between knowledge, virtue, and happiness. For Foucault,
instead, Socrates is the parrhesiast par excellence, unlike the
scientist who does not speak in the first person, unlike the
sophist who wants to win the argument and convince, unlike
the prophet who speaks in the name of God, and unlike the
wise man who says the truth in secluded places. Socrates wants
to tell the truth, as a personal testimony, in public and at the
cost of his own life.
The climax of the course is the lecture of February 22, dedi-
cated to the death of Socrates, which ends with these words:
“As a philosophy professor one really must have lectured on
Socrates and the death of Socrates at least once in one’s life.
It’s done. Salvate animam meam.”32 Save my soul. The invoca-
tion is ironic, as always in Foucault, who even in these lectures
could make jokes leaving us a glimpse of his dazed laughter, but
the theme is not at all ironic. Because Socrates, for Foucault,
is the one for whom the unexamined life is worthless,33 and
who now represents the quintessence of the risk of a truth that
makes us free and not slaves.
I believe that at least one lesson can be drawn from this
intellectual story. As dissimilar from one another as they are,
thinkers such as Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault—precisely
those that come to mind when one thinks of the philosophi-
cal fathers of postmodernism (although the first one was more
like its Baptist in philosophy, and the other two never declared
themselves postmodernists)—are the expression of a radical
Enlightenment or, if you wish, of a dialectic of Enlightenment,
namely, of the paradox that I set out earlier in this chapter.
 Emancipation 83

This is why, without contradictions, they could be the

inspiration for a movement that has evolved in conservative
and anti-Enlightenment terms while, at the same time, end-
ing up legitimately defending the Enlightenment emancipative
instance. It is obvious that one can continue, if one wishes, to
repeat even today the watchwords of the hyper-deconstruction-
ist Derrida who in the seventies claimed that nothing exists out-
side the text; or that one can insist, this time with the Foucault
anterior to the rethinking of The Will to Knowledge, that the
world is merely the outcome of our conceptual schemes. But
perhaps, at least if we keep the emancipative spirit that ani-
mated the work of these authors, it is better to try not to close
our eyes to the regressive outcome of the dialectic of postmod-
ernism and renew its teaching in the sense of a new Enlighten-
ment rather than that of an old obscurantism.

Liberation

So we return to where we started, to The Postmodern Condi-

tion. Lyotard’s analysis, which was not at all a defense of the
postmodern Brave New World, had the merit of identifying the
risks of this ideological collapse loaded with practical conse-
quences, from the severe cuts to university funding wanted by
Margaret Thatcher in England to the globalization of the free
market, which became truly global after 1989. The result, in
the nineties, was that the “IE” of Idealism and Enlightenment
was transformed into the “IEB” of Internet, English, and Busi-
ness, with an attitude that was shared not only by center-right
governments that wanted cuts to culture and basic research but
also by many intellectuals, who became skeptics of their own
mission and were probably influenced (or, rather, justified) by
the fallacy of knowledge-power. We also examined the two
possible reactions to the fallacy: the one that relies on certainty
84 Manifesto of New Realism

and the one that focuses on emancipation. I think it is best

to live up to what was important and alive in postmodern-
ism, that is, the demand for emancipation, which starts from
Socrates’s ideal of the moral value of knowledge and is stated
more precisely in Kant’s discourse on Enlightenment—perhaps
the most maligned among the categories of thought,34 deserving
a new voice in the contemporary intellectual scene in front of
the consequences of the fallacy of knowledge-power.
We learn from our mistakes, or at least others learn. Bid-
ding truth farewell is not only a gift we give to “Power” with-
out a countergift but mostly the withdrawal of the only chance
of emancipation that is given to humankind, that is, realism,
against illusion and sorcery. Here is the importance of knowl-
edge: here lies the correction—always possible and therefore
dutiful—of the “crooked timber of humanity” and the choice
not to resign to be minors (regardless of our chronological age);
even though, as Kant wrote, it is so comfortable to be minors.
Rejecting man’s emergence from childhood, perhaps under the
pretense of revealing the collusion between knowledge and
power, is certainly possible, but it means choosing the always
open alternative proposed by the Grand Inquisitor: that of tak-
ing the path of miracles, mystery, and authority.
 NOTES

Prologue

1. Unlike, for instance, an earlier “new realism” that was a

post-idealist current at the start of the twentieth century
(see Edwin B. Holt, Walter T. Marvin, William Pepper-
rell Montague, Ralph Barton Perry, and Edward Gleason
Spaulding, The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Phi-
losophy [New York: Macmillan, 1912]). For a program-
matic presentation, see “The Program and First Platform
of Six Realists,” in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychol-
ogy and Scientific Methods 7, 18 (1910): 393–401. For the
contemporary uses of the term “realism,” see “Realism”
in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stan-
ford.edu/entries/realism/.
2. For a comment on this I refer the reader back to my arti-
cle “Nuovo realismo FAQ,” in Noema: Rivista online di
filosofia, http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/noema/article/
view/1403. The full press review on new realism can be
found on http://nuovorealismo.wordpress.com/.

85
86 Notes to Chapter 1

3. La Repubblica, 8 August 2011.

4. For a general overview, see my “Autopresentazione,” in
Dario Antiseri and Silvano Tagliagambe, eds., Filosofi ital-
iani contemporanei (Milan: Bompiani, 2009), 226–235.
5. Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992), 133.

Chapter 1. Realitism

1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A

Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1984 [1979]).
2. For the origins and the development of postmodernism I
refer the reader back to the analyses I proposed in Tracce:
Nichilismo moderno postmoderno (Milan: Mimesis, 2006
[1983]), with a new afterword, “Postmoderno vent’anni
dopo,” 165–171.
3. “Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—‘There
are only facts’—I would say: No, facts are precisely what
there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any
fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.
‘Everything is subjective,’ you say; but even this is interpre-
tation. The ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something
added and invented and projected behind what there is.—
Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the
interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis. Insofar
as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is
knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no mean-
ing behind it, but countless meanings.—‘Perspectivism.’ It
is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their
For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each
one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the
 Notes to Chapter 1 87

other drives to accept as a norm.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The

Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), §481.
4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capital-
ism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1983 [1972]).
6. Richard Rorty, Solidarity or Objectivity? (1984), in Michael
Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
7. These are the two common assumptions of the two found-
ing texts of philosophical postmodernism, namely, the
already mentioned Postmodern Condition by Lyotard
and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
8. Roland Barthes, Leçon (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978).
9. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing” (1978),
in Richard Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 90–109.
10. After all, irony, in rhetoric, is an allusive proceeding for
reducing to mockery real data, by mystifying them: in fact,
both in ancient Greek (eironéia) and in Latin (simulatio),
the terms designating the trope mean “fiction,” “deceit.”
11. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995 [1968]).
12. In Theatrum Philosophicum, the review of Difference and
Repetition originally appeared in “Critique” and was later
published as a foreword to the Italian edition.
13. I have analyzed this aspect in Goodbye Kant! What Still
Stands of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” translated by
Richard Davies (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2013).
14. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, eds., Il pensiero
88 Notes to Chapter 1

debole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983); English translation: Weak

Thought, trans. and with an introduction by Peter Carra-
vetta (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012).
15. Carlo Augusto Viano, Va’ pensiero: Il carattere della filoso-
fia italiana contemporanea (Turin: Einaudi, 1985).
16. Joseph Marie comte de Maistre, The Pope: Considered in
His Relations with the Church, Temporal Sovereignties,
Separated Churches, and the Cause of Civilization (Lon-
don: C. Dolman, 1850), 79.
17. Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What Is
Enlightenment?” (London: Penguin, 2010).
18. Dario Antiseri and Gianni Vattimo, Ragione filosofica e
fede religiosa nell’era postmoderna (Soveria Mannelli:
Rubbettino, 2008).
19. Martin Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,”
Spiegel 30 (May 1976): 193–219, trans. William Richard-
son as “Only a God Can Save Us,” in Thomas Sheehan,
ed., Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Prec-
edent, 1981), 45–67.
20. In this prevailing version, the adhesion to Nazism was pre-
sented as “one of those things,” which was already over
by 1934 (precisely in accordance with Heidegger’s self-
defense), and the Heideggerian texts circulating among
left-wingers were certainly not the Rectorial Address but
seemingly more innocuous texts in which he stated that
language is the home of being and that poetically man
dwells. Of course, there too were some disquieting bits,
for instance, in a 1940 course on Nietzsche, there is praise
of the ongoing Blitzkrieg or, again in the Spiegel interview,
the thesis according to which the Shoah had to be placed
on the same level as the mechanization of agriculture.
21. Martin Heidegger, Scritti politici (1933–1936) (Casale
Monferrato: Piemme, 1998), 329.
22. “Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and
 Notes to Chapter 1 89

in the re-birth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic man

is past: crown yourselves with ivy, take in your hands the
thyrsus, and do not marvel if tigers and panthers lie down
fawning at your feet. Dare now to be tragic men, for ye are
to be redeemed! Ye are to accompany the Dionysian fes-
tive procession from India to Greece! Equip yourselves for
severe conflict, but believe in the wonders of your god!”
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in The Com-
plete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (Lon-
don: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), 157.
23. Marco Belpoliti, Il corpo del capo (Parma: Guanda, 2009).
24. Richard Wagner, Art and Revolution (Whitefish, MO: Kes-
singer, 2010 [1849]).
25. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2002 [1947]).
26. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge (London: Pen-
guin, 1991 [1976]).
27. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991 [1962]).
28. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1984), 87–90.
29. Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über
die Neue Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1982).
30. Paul K. Feyerabend, Wider den Methodenzwang (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 206: “The church at the time
of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Gali-
leo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical
and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict
against Galileo was rational and just, and revisionism can
be legitimized solely for motives of political opportunism.”
90 Notes to Chapter 1

31. Joseph Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe? (San Fran-

cisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 101–105.
32. This thesis, which I presented in “Dal postmoderno al
populismo,” in Alfabeta2 2 (September 2010) and in Rico-
struire la decostruzione: Cinque saggi a partire da Jacques
Derrida (Milan: Bompiani, 2010), can also be found in
Valerio Magrelli, Il Sessantotto realizzato da Mediaset
(Turin: Einaudi, 2011) and in Mario Perniola, Berlusconi
o il ‘68 realizzato (Milan: Mimesis, 2011).
33. Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of
George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine (17 October
2004).
34. Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact (London: Sage, 1997).
35. Maurizio Ferraris, “Benvenuti nel realitysmo,” La Repub-
blica (29 January 2011), to which I here partly refer.
36. Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” Journal of Philoso-
phy 69, 19 (1972): 649–665. Moreover, the title of Rorty’s
article was taken from a sci-fi short story by Theodore
Sturgeon.
37. Thomas Reid, The Works of Thomas Reid, vol.1 (Charles-
town: Samuel Etheridge, 1813), 169.
38. Which Žižek repeats twice in Living in the End Times
(London: Verso, 2010). See my discussion “Il segno di
Žižek,” Alfalibri, supplement of Alfabeta2 12 (September
2011): 2–3.
39. The turn from metaphysical realism to internal realism
(which is much more open to relativism) happened in
Putnam precisely in the years of postmodernism, that is,
between Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) and Reason, Truth, and His-
tory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); the
new realistic perspectives can be seen in Renewing Philoso-
phy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
 Notes to Chapter 1 91

For an excellent presentation of Putnam’s path through

realism, see Mario De Caro, “Il lungo viaggio di Hilary
Putnam: Realismo metafisico, antirealismo e realismo natu-
rale,” Lingua e stile 4 (1996): 527–545.
40. Umberto Eco, Kant e l’ornitorinco (Milan: Bompiani,
1997), but already Umberto Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione
(Milan: Bompiani, 1990).
41. See Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essai sur la
nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Seuil, 2006); Ray Brassier,
Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Markus Gabriel, Transcen-
dental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (New York,
London: Continuum, 2011), Markus Gabriel, Il senso
dell’esistenza: Disegno di un’ontologia iperrealista (Rome:
Carrocci, 2012). See also Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and
Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011).
42. I refer the reader to my Estetica razionale (Milan: Raffa-
ello Cortina, 2011 [1997]); but for an overall analysis, see
Paolo D’Angelo, Estetica (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2011).
43. A vast treatise on this turn can be found in my edited col-
lection Storia dell’ontologia (Milan: Bompiani, 2008).
44. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781–1787)
(Edinburgh: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), A 247/B 303.
45. Charles Baudelaire, Mon coeur mis à nu, XIII: “Vous fig-
urez-vous un Dandy parlant au peuple, excepté pour le
bafouer?”
46. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Moderne / ein unvollendetes Pro-
jekt,” in KleinePolitische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1981), 444–464.
47. Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, II.
48. Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlighten-
ment?” §1.
92 Notes to Chapter 2

Chapter 2. Realism

1. Diego Marconi, “Il postmoderno ucciso dalle sue carica-

ture,” La Repubblica (3 December 2011). On the subject
of realism and antirealism, see also his Per la verità: Rela-
tivismo e filosofia (Turin: Einaudi, 2007).
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781–1787)
(Edinburgh: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), A 51/B 75: “Thoughts
without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are
blind.”
3. For a deeper analysis, I refer the reader to my Goodbye
Kant! What Still Stands of the “Critique of Pure Reason,”
translated by Richard Davies (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2013).
4. See ibid., 43–48.
5. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Metaphysical
Meditations, trans. G. B. Rawlings (London and Felling-
On-Tyne: The Walter Scott Publishing Co.,1901 [1641]),
First meditation, §§3–4.
6. Alfredo Ferrarin, “Construction and Mathematical Sche-
matism: Kant on the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition,”
Kant-Studien 86 (1995): 131–174.
7. The meaning of this nonconceptual “encounter” is clari-
fied in the section “Amendable and Unamendable” of this
chapter.
8. “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an
invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared,
if some event of which we can at the moment do no more
than sense the possibility—without knowing either what
its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them
to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the
end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager
that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the
 Notes to Chapter 2 93

edge of the sea.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

(London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2005), 422.
9. See Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impos-
tures (London: Profile Books, 2003 [1997]). More on
sophisticated fashionable nonsense can be found in Paul
Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and
Constructivism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006).
10. I describe this academic skepticism in Una Ikea di univer-
sità (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2009 [2001]).
11. Bruno Latour, “Ramses II est-il mort de la tuberculose?”
Recherche 307 (March 1998): 84–85. Latour has also had
the merit of thoroughly revising his positions, as well as
hyper-constructionist positions in general, in an admirable
article: “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Mat-
ters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30
(Autumn 2004): 225–248.
12. I have articulated the distinction between ontology and
epistemology in Il mondo esterno (Milan: Bompiani, 2001)
and in Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), to which I
refer the reader.
13. See typically John McDowell, Mind and World (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). For a cri-
tique, I refer the reader to my “Mente e mondo o scienza
ed esperienza?” Rivista di estetica n.s., 12 (2000): 3–77.
14. For instance John Searle, The Construction of Social Real-
ity (New York: Free Press, 1995), especially 127ff.
15. Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective
World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2010), §217.
17. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(London: Buffet, 1689), IV.2.14.
94 Notes to Chapter 2

18. From this point of view, as for my research, the text to start
from is Analogon rationis (Milan: Pratica filosofica, 1994).
For a comprehensive presentation of the role of perception
in my perspective, I refer the reader to the afterword of
the new edition of my Estetica razionale (Milan: Raffaello
Cortina, 2011 [1997]), 573–586.
19. Maurizio Ferraris, “Metzger, Kant, and the Perception of
Causality,” in Johan C. Marek and Maria E. Reicher, eds.,
Erfahrung und Analyse (Wien: ÖBV & HPT, 2005), 297–
309. The closeness of Metzger’s concept of “encountered”
and my concept of “unamendable” has been underlined by
Giovanni Bruno Vicario, Psicologia generale: I fondamenti
(Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2001), 101. I also refer the reader
to Vicario’s analyses for a presentation of the concept of
“reality” in psychology.
20. See Paolo Bozzi, Fisica ingenua (Milan: Garzanti, 1990);
Paolo Bozzi, Scritti sul realismo (Milan: Mimesis, 2007) (I
argue more extensively what I am saying here in the intro-
duction to that volume, 11–20; for the ontological impli-
cations, I refer the reader to my “Ontologia come Fisica
ingenua,” Rivista di estetica n.s., 6 [1998]: 133–143).
21. And as I articulated in Il mondo esterno, 198–201.
22. See ibid., 89 ff., to which I refer the reader for a complete
phenomenology.
23. For a more detailed analysis, see ibid., 193–201.

Chapter 3. Reconstruction

1. TN: Typical Italian expression, which some say dates back

to Roman times, that is paradigmatic of the attitude that
blames the government for everything, even natural events.
2. Jacques Derrida, Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 35 ff.
3. It was proposed and developed in Ricostruire la
 Notes to Chapter 3 95

decostruzione; the model of the experiment is, obviously,

Hilary Putnam, “Brains in a Vat,” in Reason, Truth, and
History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 1– 22.
4. This is the difference between my perspective and the
approach of Bozzi, Moore, and all naïve realists. Of “mod-
erate realism” spoke Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and
Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
5. See Aldo Giorgio Gargani, “L’attrito del pensiero,” in
Gianni Vattimo, ed., Filosofia ’86 (Rome and Bari: Lat-
erza, 1987), 5–22. The metaphor comes from Wittgenstein:
“We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction
and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also,
just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to
walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Black-
well, 2010), §107.
6. Primo Levi, “If This Is a Man” and “The Truce” (London:
Penguin, 1979), 188.
7. Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essai sur la néces-
sité de la contingence (Paris: Seuil, 2006).
8. On this topic I refer the reader to my “Necessità mate-
riale,” in Le parole dell’Essere (Milan: Bruno Mondadori,
2005), 231–257.
9. In accordance with the so-called Tarskian biconditional:
“‘The snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.”
10. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999),
1.
11. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1977).
12. On the need to discuss this case-by-case (which is precisely
the opposite of a maximalist solution like “everything is
socially constructed”), I refer the reader to my dialogue
with Achille C. Varzi, “Che cosa c’è e che cos’è,” Nous
96 Notes to Chapter 3

(2004): 81–101, later reelaborated in Achille C. Varzi,

Il mondo messo a fuoco: Storie di allucinazioni e miopie
filosofiche (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2010).
13. On the thematization of social objects and social ontology
as a whole, I refer the reader to my Where Are You? An
Ontology of the Cell Phone (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2014), Documentality: Why It Is Necessary
to Leave Traces (New York: Fordham University Press,
2012), and Anima e iPad (Parma: Guanda, 2011).
14. “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” literally (and asemantically),
“there is no outside-text,” see Jacques Derrida, Of Gram-
matology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998), 58.
15. Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilization,” in Richard Wolin,
ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1993), 119–129.
16. Once again, I refer the reader to Anima e iPad, 59–84.
17. Explained in Maurizio Ferraris, Ricostruire la decostru-
zione: Cinque saggi a partire da Jacques Derrida (Milan:
Bompiani, 2010), 79–97.
18. The role of collective intentionality in Searle’s social ontol-
ogy has grown over the years. I have discussed this prob-
lematic evolution in Anima e iPad, 96–101.
19. “It is, for example, a mistake to treat money and other
such instruments as if they were natural phenomena like
the phenomena studied in physics, chemistry, and biol-
ogy. The recent economic crisis makes it clear that they
are products of massive fantasy.” John Searle, Making
the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 201.
20. For an elaboration, see Documentality, parts 4 and 5.
21. “The breeding of an animal that can promise—is not this
just the very paradox of a task which nature has set itself
 Notes to Chapter 4 97

in regard to man?” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of

Morals (Minneola: Courier Dover Publications, 2003), 34.
22. I developed this aspect in Anima e iPad, 144ff.; see also
Giuliano Torrengo, “Documenti e intenzioni: La documen-
talità nel dibattito contemporaneo sull’ontologia sociale,”
Rivista di estetica n.s., 42 (2009): 157–188.
23. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Pen-
guin, 1991). Similar insights can be found in the notion of
“superorganism” (for example, a family of termites, which
exhibits a rational behavior even if none of its compo-
nents is able to think), see Bert Hölldobler and Edward
O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and
Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: W. W. Norton,
2009).

Chapter 4. Emancipation

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours (. . .) Si le rétablissement

des Sciences et desArts a contribué à épurer les moeurs
(1750), in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–
1995), III: 19.
2. On this, see Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human
Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971 [1968]).
3. For a presentation of this aspect, I refer the reader to the
analysis proposed in my Storia dell’ermeneutica (Milan:
Bompiani, 2008 [1988]), 185–203.
4. Michel Foucault, History of Madness (London and New
York: Routledge, 2006 [1961]).
5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences (London and New York, Routledge,
2002).
6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (London and New York: Vintage, 1977).
98 Notes to Chapter 4

7. Widely and usefully illustrated by Paolo Rossi, Paragone

degli ingegni moderni e postmoderni (Bologna: il Mulino,
1989) (new expanded edition, with other examples of this
mechanical application of knowledge-power, Bologna: il
Mulino, 2009). In fact, even just by observing the univer-
sity departments in which the theorists of knowledge-power
worked (no need to look for exotic worlds), it should be
noted there are frequent cases of wise and completely pow-
erless people, as well as powerful people that are far from
omniscient.
8. Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2011).
9. Pascal Engel and Richard Rorty, What’s the Use of Truth?
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
10. I owe this observation to my friend Enrico Terrone.
11. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Mer-
lin Press, 1980 [1954]).
12. I analyzed Nietzsche’s ontology in Guida a Nietzsche: Etica,
politica, filologia, musica, teoria dell’interpretazione, onto-
logia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2004 [1999]), 199–275.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Ran-
dom House, 2011 [1906]), 550.
14. Jürgen Habermas, “The Entry into Postmodernity:
Nietzsche as a Turning Point,” in The Philosophical Dis-
course of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991 [1985]).
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and
Pessimism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1909), 115.
16. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2002 [1947]), 11: “Enlightenment,
understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought,
has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and
installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth
is radiant with triumphant calamity.”
 Notes to Chapter 4 99

17. I analyzed these dynamics in more detail in “Il pensiero

debole e i suoi rischi,” in Elisabetta Ambrosi, ed., Il bello
del relativismo: Quel che resta della filosofia nel XXI sec-
olo (Venice: Marsilio, 2005), 49–57.
18. Costantino Esposito, “E l’esistenza diventa una immensa
certezza,” in Emanuela Belloni and Alberto Savorana, eds.,
Una certezza per l’esistenza (Milan: Rizzoli, 2011), 42–66.
19. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of
Assent (London: Forgotten Books, 2010 [1870]).
20. I extensively discuss this topic in Babbo Natale, Gesù
adulto: In cosa crede chi crede? (Milan: Bompiani, 2006).
21. Franz Kafka, “16 October 1917,” in Letters to Felice (Lon-
don: Secker & Warburg, 1967), 547.
22. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1988 [1983]).
23. As in Jean-François Lyotard, “Intervento italiano,” Alfa-
beta 32 (January 1982), republished in Alfabeta2 14
(November 2011): 9–11.
24. Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently
Adopted in Philosophy,” in Peter Fenves, ed., Raising
the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant,
Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 117–171.
25. On Enlightenment in Derrida, I refer the reader to my
Introduzione a Derrida (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2003),
in particular 95 ff., and Jackie Derrida, Ritratto a memoria
(Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006), 71 ff..
26. “La Jornada,” Mexico City, May 3, 2002, my emphasis.
27. Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1982– 1983 (London: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2011).
28. Ibid., 8–9.
29. Foucault, The Order of Things.
30. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
100 Notes to Chapter 4

and Other Writings by Michel Foucault, 1972–1977 (New

York: Pantheon Books), 52.
31. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. Cath-
erine Porter, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50.
32. Foucault, The Courage of the Truth, 153.
33. “And if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily
to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which
you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life
which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still
less likely to believe. And yet what I say is true, although
a thing of which it is hard for me to persuade you.” Plato,
Apology of Socrates, 38a. It is this passage that echoes in
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1989).
34. Vincenzo Ferrone, Lezioni illuministiche (Rome and Bari:
Laterza, 2010). On the rebirth, also theoretical, of Enlight-
enment, see Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind:
Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of
Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009).
 INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 11, 89n25, Baudrillard, Jean, 15, 90n34

98n16. See also “repressive Being There, 45–46
desublimation” Birth of Tragedy, The, (Freder-
Adversus mathematicos (Sextus ick Nietzsche), 72, 73, 74,
Empiricus), 31 88n22
amendability. See Bozzi, Paolo, v, 37, 94n20, 95n4
unamendability Braver, Lee, ix–x, xi
amendable and unamend-
able (distinctions between certainty (prospect of), 76–77
epistemology and ontology), and modernity, 77
34–35, 92n7 and emotional security, hope,
and Metzger’s concept of and truth, 78–79
“encountered reality,” constructionists (postmodern),
94n19 24, 27, 28
and sense perceptions, 38–39 and Michel Foucault, 31
anticonstructivist, 20 and neglect of unamendability,
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism 34, 37
and Schizophrenia (Gilles and “the slipper experiment,”
Deleuze and Félix Guattari), 28–31
11, 87n5 versus realists, 32–33, 63,
antirealism, ix, xiii, 17, 47, 92n1 93n11
Art and Revolution (Richard See also fallacy of
Wagner), 10 being-knowledge
constructivist intuition, 24–25
Barthes, Roland, 4, 87n8 constructivists, 31–32, 37
Baudelaire, Charles, 20, 91n45, Critique of Pure Reason
91n47 (Immanuel Kant), xiv
101
102 Index

criticism Enlightenment, 1, 8, 79, 98n16

and ascertainment-acceptance and knowledge-power fal-
fallacy of postmodernism, lacy of postmodernism, 19,
19, 20, 46–47 20–21, 65, 66, 79
of power, 12 postmodern and Nietzschean
and reference to social objects, delegitimization of, 71,
55–56 73–75
prospects for a new Enlighten-
Dasein, ix ment, 82–83
DeLanda, Manuel, ix, x, xi, xii and public opinion, 12
Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 11, 87n5, emancipation, 4, 5
87n11 and Enlightenment, 65, 66,
de Maistre, Joseph Marie, 8, 73, 73, 75, 81, 84
88n16 and postmodernism, 20–21,
Derrida, Jacques 57
antirealist, x, xiin7 and realism, 46,
deconstruction of justice, 46 and science, 58
postmodernism, 80, 82, 83, epistemology. See ontology
90n32, 94n2, 96n14, 99n24 Examined Life, The (Robert
and return to Enlightenment, Nozick), 100n33
80, 99n25
and role of writing, 60 fallacy of ascertainment-accep-
and textualism, 56, 96n14 tance, 19, 20, 27
Descartes, Rene, 25 and fallacy of being-knowl-
and disregard of sensible per- edge, 45–46
ception, 36, 38, 92n5 and natural and social objects,
Difference and Repetition 58–59
(Gilles Deleuze), 6, 87n11 and unamendability of ontol-
Documentality (Maurizio Fer- ogy, 47
raris), xi, xiin9, 93n12, fallacy of being-knowledge, 19,
96n13, 96n20 23–31
documentality, xiv, 40 and confusion of ontology
and intentionality. 62–63 and epistemology, 33
origin of, 61–62 and distinction between sci-
and social objects, 60–61 ence and experience, 39–40
and weak textualism and and origin of postmodernism,
moderate constructionism, 27–28
55–56 and will to power, 32
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 73 See also ontology; internal
world and external world;
Eco, Umberto, 18, 91n40 science and experience
“encountered reality” of Gestalt fallacy of knowledge-power,
psychology, 37 65–66, 98n7
 Index 103

and anti-Enlightenment atti- Horkheimer, Max, 11, 89n25,

tudes, 74–75, 83 98n16
and antifoundationalism and Hume, David, 25–26
neofoundationalism, 79 Husserl, Edmund, xv, 5
and destruction of reason, 71
and Foucault’s analyses, internal world and exterior world
66–67 (distinctions between episte-
and Nietzschean philosophy, mology and ontology), 37
72–74 antinomy of aesthetics with
and saying “farewell to respect to logic, 38–39
truth,” 68–70, 75,76 autonomy of aesthetics with
and truth and violence link, respect to logic, 38
67–68 autonomy of the world with
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 55 respect to our conceptual
Ferraris, Maurizio, ix–xi schemes and perceptive
Ferrone, Vincenzo, 100n34 apparatuses, 39
Feyerabend, Paul K., 13–14, 15, Intensive Science and Vir-
76, 89n30 tual Philosophy (Manuel
For and Against Method (Paul DeLanda), x
K. Feyerabend and Imre
Lakatos), 14 James, William, 69
Foucault, Michel, 6, 11, 31, 66, Jünger, Ernst, 57, 96n15
67, 89n26, 89n28, 92–93n8
Courage of the Truth, The, Kafka, Franz, 79, 99n21
(lecture), 80, 99n27 Kant, Immanuel, xiv, 6, 8, 18,
and Enlightenment, 80–82, 26–28, 30, 48, 80, 84,
83, 97nn4–6, 100nn31–32 88n17, 91n44, 91n48, 92n2

Gabriel, Markus, xi, xiin11, xiii, Latour, Bruno 32, 93n11

91 n41 Levi, Primo, 49, 95n6
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, x, xi Locke, John, 36, 93n17
Gehlen, Arnold, 2 Lukács, Georg, 71, 98n11
Goodbye, Kant! (Maurizio Fer- Lyotard, Jean-François, 1, 73,
raris), xi, xiin10, 87n13 80, 82, 86n1, 87n7, 99n22

Habermas, Jürgen, 12, 20, 72, Manzoni, Alessandro, 27

89n27, 91n46, 97n2, 98n14 Marconi, Diego, 23, 92n1
Hacking, Ian, 52, 95n10 Matrix, The, 74
Harmon, Graham, ix–xi Marx, Karl, 55
Heidegger, Martin, 8–9, 43, 66, Meillassoux, Quentin, xin2,
76, 88nn19–21, 96n15 91n41, 95n7
History of Sexuality (Michel Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, ix, xi
Foucault), 11, 81 Metzger, Wolfgang, 37
104 Index

“new realism,” xiii–xv, positivism (as antithesis of real-

85nn1–2, ism) 42–43, 86n3,
and contemporary philosophi- Postmodern Condition, The,
cal culture, 18–19 (Jean-François Lyotard), 1,
and ontology, criticism, and 73, 83, 86n1
Enlightenment,19–21 postmodernism, x, xiii, xiv
Nietzsche, Frederick, 10 abandonment of, xv, 3–4
and realitism, 16 anti-Enlightenment effects of,
and rise of postmodernism, 8–9, 20, 65, 71
72–74 deconstruction in, 52–53
and The Will to Power, 71, and deobjectification, 12–15
73 derealization-emancipation
Nuovo realismo: una discussion link, 57
aperta (Conference, Decem- and desublimation, 10–12
ber 5, 2011), xvii fallacies of. See fallacy of
being-knowledge, fallacy of
Of an Apocalyptic Tone ascertainment-acceptance
Recently Adopted in Phi- and fallacy of
losophy (Lecture, Jacques knowledge-power
Derrida), 80, 99n24 and irony, 4–9, 87n10
On the Ashes of Post-Mod- as magical anti-realism, 17–18
ernism: A New Realism? and Nietzschean critique of
(Conference, November 7, morals, 11–12, 71
2011), xvii origins of, 1–3, 27–28, 58,
On the Genealogy of Morals 86n2
(Frederick Nietzsche), 73 and “truth” as power, 72
ontology, xiii, xiv, 18 and science, 42–44
and aesthetics, 36–37 “weak thought” in, 7–8,
and being-knowledge fallacy 87n14
of postmodernism, 19–20, Putnam, Hillary, 18, 86n5,
23, 26, 27 90–91n39, 95n3
differences from epistemology,
31–34, 36, 42, 53, 54, 55, realism, ix–xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii,
56, 58, 93n12 8, 15, 17, 18, 19, 85n1
and law of nature, 38–49 and conflict with postmodern-
and unamendabilty, 34–37, 46 ism, 52–53
See also amendable and and constructivism, 32–33
unamendable; internal and criticism of the being-
world and exterior world; knowledge fallacy, 23–24
science and experience and irrevocability of past
Order of Things, The, (Michel events, 49–50
Foucault), 31 limits set by ontology, 48–49
 Index 105

reconstruction of realism, 24, social objects, 56, 57–58,

58, 63, 72 59–60, 96n13
and social objects and physi- Socrates, 10, 72, 82, 84, 100n33
cal objects, 53–55, 58 Suskind, Ron, 15, 90n33
“very differentism” argument
for antirealism, 49, 50, 51 Tool-Being (Graham Harmon),
“realitism,” xvii x, xiin6
and “new realism,” 18–20 Toynbee, Arnold, 1
underlying mechanisms of, transcendentalism, 18, 37
15–17
Reid, Thomas, 15 unamendability (of reality), 19,
“repressive desublimation,” 34–36
11–12 and “encountered reality” of
Romanticism, 70–71, 74–75 Gestalt psychology, 37, 39
Rorty, Richard, 69, 87n4, 87n6, and foundation of morality,
87n7, 87n9, 90n36, 98n9 46, 48
Rosmini, Antonio, 79 and irrevocability of past
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 66, events, 49–50
97n1 See also amendable and
unamendable
Said, Edward, 52, 95n11
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Vattimo, Gianni, x, 8–9, 87, 88,
Joseph, 71 95, 98
science and experience (distinc- Venturi, Robert, 2
tions between epistemology Vonnegut, Kurt, 2
and ontology), 39
freedom and historicity of sci- Wagner, Richard, 10, 17, 72,
ence, 40 89n24
infinity of science, 41 Where Are You? (Maurizio Fer-
language and writing in sci- raris), xi, xiin10, 96n13
ence, 39–40 Will to Knowledge, The (Michel
teleology, 41–42 Foucault), 11, 83
Searle, John, 59, 60, 93n14, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36,
96nn18–19 93n16, 95n5
“slipper experiment, the,” (anti-
constructivist experiment), Žižek, Slavoj, x, xin5, 90n38
28–30