Reality

Use in the book

The explicit distinction at II.674 calls reality the fact, while truth lies in a just understanding of the fact’s nature, moral character, and essence. An earlier statement makes illusion integral to reality as effect is bound to cause, not merely its deceptive opposite. For the purely imagined, appearance itself becomes existence and reality.

These claims require careful local reading. They do not give a blanket warrant to replace truth with imagination. The argument about art’s room makes the real diminish place: actual filling can reduce imaginative spaciousness. Reality, truth, actuality of presence, and significance thus cannot be collapsed into one English label.

Places to read

1. II, p. 674, entry 7, ¶1Reality as fact is explicitly distinguished from truth of understanding.
2. I, p. 127, entry 1, ¶1Illusion is treated as an integral part of reality.
3. II, p. 572, entry 2, ¶2Appearance constitutes the reality of the purely imagined.
4. II, p. 487, entry begun p. 486, no. 14, ¶3The real diminishes place in an account of poetic space.

Translation in this edition

The English translation keeps reality and truth separate and retains the anomalous “immaterial” in II.572. The English “real” in the poetic passage translates réel, not a supplied philosophical category.

Concretion

French: concrétion.

Human ideas are described as abstracted from individual existences, whereas our realities are called a concretion of divine ideas that existed first. The direction is reversed: separating a nature from a given object differs from realities taking form from an antecedent idea. The English translation keeps the material word concretion, rather than converting it into a fixed named doctrine or a geological definition.

Places to read: I, p. 210, entry 5, ¶1.