Crisis in our perception of reality

Virtual reality, augmented reality, alternative reality… Isn’t it surprising to see such a proliferation of terms used to describe reality? It’s as if reality is no longer enough on its own, or rather, as if it is no longer enough for us. Has reality become so boring that we are no longer interested in it and need to enhance it or invent new ones? Have we already exhausted this limited natural resource, not knowing how to take care of it? While philosophers are rightly criticised for being detached from reality, it must be said that they are not the only ones who have a difficult relationship with it. In fact, reality is not usually a highly prized commodity, and human beings seem to be the animals par excellence who find it difficult to face up to it, preferring to purify it, ignore it or mistreat it by cutting it into pieces. While all other animals seem to spread out naturally across the surface of the earth, we humans – clumsy great apes with our glasses, scooters and phones – seem completely out of place, not to say ‘alien to the world’, to quote Günther Anders.

A close study of Western thought, from antiquity to the present day, reveals three successive ways of approaching reality: humanism, anthropocentrism and transhumanism. The pre-Socratics, then Plato, Aristotle and others sought to explain and understand reality by gradually building up the sciences. Causes and consequences of events were discovered; this was the advent of humanism, which brought human beings into the history of the world.

Then, in modern times, explaining reality was no longer enough; we now had to master it, to become its ‘masters and possessors’, as the philosopher René Descartes wrote. In this unprecedented anthropocentrism, the unpredictable began to be repressed, not as negligible, but as insignificant. A desire for immense mastery of reality sprang forth.

A desire that, in our contemporary world, has become even more acute: we are no longer content with wanting to explain or dominate reality, we intend to recreate it from scratch. In this desire to recreate the universe, human beings intend to deny reality any possibility of escaping them. The alternative realities offered to us by new technologies appear

as an unprecedented opportunity to create realities entirely of our own making, as if to seal our final victory over reality…

Thus, the crisis we are going through is not economic, financial, social, ecological, institutional, territorial or political; what we are experiencing is above all a crisis in our relationship with reality. This crisis, with its enormous implications, is a burning issue for each and every one of us. For centuries, at best, we have missed out on a large part of reality; at worst, we have mistreated it through our desire for totalitarian domination over it.

Yet this overlooks the fact that, as Cesare Pavese wrote in his diary The Business of Living, ‘human imagination is immensely poorer than reality’… Isn’t it time we learned to reconcile ourselves with it?