Realität  , realitas  , realidade, réalité, realidad, reality

Reality is the kind of being of the occurrent. Heidegger’s employment of the language of “the real” and its “reality” (from the Latin realis, which calls to mind the thing, res, in contrast to actuality, which suggests the “being-at-work” of something) is likely to remind the reader of Being and Time   of the well-known critique of the epistemological problem of the existence of the external world, developed in §43. In light of Heidegger’s tendency in SZ to associate reality with the being of the occurrent, it comes as no surprise that the term tends to drop out of the later work, making only casual appearances after 1930, bereft of any deep and abiding philosophical import. The most interesting remarks are confined to the period between 1919 and 1927, when Heidegger is struggling to formulate a phenomenological science of being that avoids the pitfalls of objectification and a corresponding concept of reality tailored to the being of objectively present entities.

Although the concept of reality plays an important role in the earliest available writings, the conception that deserves the closest attention comes clearly into focus in the War Emergency Semester (Kriegsnotsemester  , hereafter KNS) of 1919 (GA56-57  ), where it is already harnessed to the (pseudo  -problem) of the brute existence of the external world, which Heidegger attacks for the first time in §16 of the course. The details of the argument are less important here than the concept of reality deployed in it, which can be compressed into three propositions: (1) In terms of the human being who relates to what exists, reality is the correlate of a detached epistemological subject, invested in the mere being (what Heidegger will later call Vorhandenheit  ) of anything that can possibly be said to be. (2) In terms of the object intended as real, the concept means to capture the existence of something insofar as it fails to mean or no longer means. (3) The counter-concept of the real is the environmental, the surrounding world of things that signify or show up in the light of our ongoing efforts to live a meaningful life in certain privileged practices. All three strands come together in the following representative passage: “reality is . . . not   an environmental characteristic, but lies in the essence of thingliness. It is a specifically theoretical characteristic. The meaningful is de-interpreted [or stripped of its significance] into this residue of being-real. Experience of the environment is no longer living, and the residue of this unliving is recognized as something real” (GA56/57:89). In this sense, the real is what remains when nothing more can be said about something save that it is (in a sense Heidegger will come to associate with the medieval doctrine of existentia  ), without regard for the various ways in which things can be said to be, in a way that reveals a certain blindness to what we might call ontological diversity.

---

REAL E CORRELATOS

realidade
réalité [ETEM]
reality [BTJS]

NT: real, Realität : réel, réalité. — C’est ici le concept « ordinaire », c’est-à-dire le nom « métaphysique » de l’être en tant que sous-la-main, non pas précisément la realitas en tant que quiddité. V. surtout le § 43, et n.p.c. Wirklichkeit, ainsi que Bestand  , Sachhaltigkeit  . [ETEM]

---

NT: Reality (Realität), 7, 47 n. 2, 68, 94 (Kant  ), 106-107, 128, 170, 177, 183-184, 200-212 (§ 43), 216-218, 230, 303, 313-314, 318, 329 (Kant), 324, 368, 400 (Yorck), 420, 437; in the later marginal remarks (=fn), 94fn, 201fn, 209fn [BTJS]

---

Realität é apenas um modo de ser [Seinsart  ] entre os outros — manualidade [Zuhandenheit], existencialidade [Existentialität  ], subsistência (Bestehen), que aplica-se sobretudo a entes abstratos tais como os da aritmética e os da geometria (GA24  , 73) — sem possuir prioridade especial (SZ, 211). Heidegger explica a suposta prioridade da Realität a partir da DECADÊNCIA [Verfallen  ] de Dasein   e da interpretação do ser [Seinsauslegung  ] em função dos entes intramundanos [Innerweltlichkeit]. [DH  :157]

---

Realität (die): «realidad». Véase la entrada Wirklichkeit (die). [GA56/57, pp. 91, 98; GA20  , pp. 89, 155, 157 (conciencia), 263 (originaria), 292-306 (realidad del mundo exterior); GA21  , pp. 387-390 (sensación como esquema de la realidad [Kant]); GA24, pp. 45 (realidad, ser, Kant), 61,108 (realidad en sentido kantiano); SZ, pp. 200-212 (Dasein, realidad efectiva), 209.] [LHDF]

---