The Establishment of Reality

Abstract

The paper is, formally, a fragment of the soon-to-be-published book Forms of Reality. But in fact, it is an introduction to the author study into the fundamental theme of anthropology of form. First, it considers a form as an appearance— the image of phenomena. The author briefly describes the significance of the so-understood form for the existence of animals and people, human communities. And second, it is precisely anthropology of the form that is at the centre of the analysis: the form, its phenomenality and organization, differentiated integrity as derivatives from the interaction of consciousness with objects, a kind of its synthesizing ordering projection on the external reality. The paper preliminary examines the most essential, in the author’s view, anthropological foundations of the formal plan of reality that is opening up to people and, at the same time, is being generated with the involvement of their consciousness. The concept of reality, along with form, is the second key concept of the paper. The concept forwarded in the article rests on the philosophical and anthropological ideas of several philosophers (I. Kant, J. Bataille, M. Heidegger, J. Deleuze and F. Guattari, and especially E. Souriau), present-day natural science concepts, and, especially, the experience of art and the reflection of artists (F. Pessoa, Renaissance painters, C.D. Friedrich, E. Degas). For the author, the work of art and the relationship of consciousness with it act as a typological model of anthropology of the form. The paper analyzes the most significant factors and aspects of form and the resulting reality. It is the existential context of the subject-object relationship; their immediate and pre-unconscious nature. It is a visual distance in its dynamics and gestaltazation; it is a generation of meaning as morphogenesis of form. Distinguishing, following D. Lapoujade, between existence and reality, the author relies on E. Souriau’s concept of different modes of reality, in which the term l’instauration takes on the key meaning: the establishment as the self-affirmation of reality, equal to the birth of form at the intersection of human subjectivity and independent in-being (works of art). The reality, in the end, is the result of the constitution through a system of forms that is complex in its metamorphosis, in which “immanence” — preand beyond-subjective consciousness, a transcendental field that precedes concrete consciousness — occupies an important place. The author shows the complex (paradoxical, heterogeneous and, at the same time, unified/holistic) nature of so-understood forms of reality on the example of the evolution and dialectics of perspective in painting and through the analysis of C.D. Friedrich’s paintings.