On Recovering Realism

A few years ago, while I was living on the island of La Palma, in the Canary archipelago, the Tajogaite Under the Volcano

A few years ago, while I was living on the island of La Palma, in the Canary archipelago, the Tajogaite volcano erupted. The images were colossal; I am not exaggerating. Yet none of them was sufficient to reproduce the bodily experience of being in situ before the “event,” using the term here in a philosophical sense.

What impressed me most was the continuous movement of the earth beneath my feet. At night, I would wake up again and again and watch the house sway gently, as though we were sailing across a lake. I was also struck by the volcano’s persistent roar. Together with the enormous plume that rose above the island and seemed to extend into the stratosphere—as we were later able to see in satellite images—that roar gave the eruption an almost stellar dimension, something out of science fiction.

What interests me here, however, is something else. There stood the volcano, in all its metaphorical majesty, in its immense indifference toward us, oblivious to our fears and trembling. The volcano did not debate its existence with us. It required neither our interpretation nor our consent in order to have occurred and to continue occurring, while we remained incapable of doing anything to stop it.

Nor could it be reduced to the spectacular images captured by our cameras or to the data obtained through our technological devices. The volcano obeyed processes and laws for which we did not even constitute a significant exteriority. From its perspective—if I may be allowed the metaphor—we were less than nothing.

From a philosophical point of view, the volcano thus became the culmination of a turn toward realism that had begun several years earlier and on which I had been working while writing my third major research project, later published under the title Mind and Politics: Dialectics and Realism from the Perspective of Liberation.

That turn entailed recognizing that the world is not a docile colony of our conceptual schemes. We think about, classify, interpret, and narrate reality, but this does not mean that we sovereignly produce it through those acts. There is something that confronts us, limits us, surprises us, and disrupts our expectations; something on which we depend and which, in the final analysis, will destroy us.

This recognition is elementary. Yet much of modern and contemporary philosophy appears to have turned the relationship between thought and reality into a practically insoluble problem. After Descartes and Kant, philosophy learned to distrust not only the possibility of perceptually accessing things as they are in themselves, but also—under the spell of idealism—the possibility that they might exist in complete independence from the subjective conditions of their appearance. The subject, its categories, its language, and its historical determinations moved to the center of philosophical reflection. The question of what exists was progressively displaced by the question of how we know, categorize, or articulate that whose existence we affirm.

Undoubtedly, this displacement was intellectually fruitful and politically effective. It allowed us to understand that no knowledge is entirely neutral, that all our perceptions must be understood from situated perspectives, and that representations are constructions emerging within historically constituted relations of power. Yet it also succumbed to a temptation: that of confusing the impossibility of perceptually accessing reality without mediation with the nonexistence of a reality independent of those mediations.

The volcano was a reminder that something decisive is lost when we forget what is elementary: the material conditions of possibility of our existence as embodied and finite beings.

The Real Is Not a Representation

An eruption can be described in many ways. The volcanologist speaks of magma, pressure, gases, and geological structure. The journalist reconstructs events and gathers testimony. Politicians assess the damage and organize evacuations. Victims express their pain in the face of dispossession and the loss of their memories. Tourists contemplate the spectacle with a mixture of fascination and fear.

These are different perspectives, each relative to the standpoint from which it is articulated. Yet it does not follow that the volcano is merely the result of those perspectives, even though we may have no access to an absolute perspective from which all the others could be derived.

There is a decisive difference between claiming, on the one hand, that the volcano is known through multiple interpretations, often contradictory among themselves, and maintaining, on the other, that the volcano is nothing more than the sum of those interpretations. The first expresses a form of epistemological caution. The second, by contrast, advances a much more radical ontological thesis, one that is considerably more difficult to defend.

With all the necessary precautions, and fully aware of the unavoidable difficulties of language, we can say that there is something we call a volcano that erupts, roars, expels lava, and transforms the territory. From this perspective, the island itself emerged over millions of years as the result of volcanic processes predating the presence of human beings on Earth. The volcano is not an invention of our imagination, even though we project countless imaginaries onto what we call the volcano. It is a concrete reality that imposes conditions by virtue of its own consistency.

Quentin Meillassoux uses the concept of “ancestrality” to refer to a reality prior to the emergence of human beings capable of knowing it. The planet’s remote past poses a challenge to philosophies that make being dependent on the correlation between subject and object. The Earth existed before us. Volcanoes erupted before there were eyes to contemplate them, languages to name them, or scientific communities to reconstruct their history and “natural lawfulness.”

Ancestrality does not eliminate the problem of knowledge. We know about the past through traces, measurements, hypotheses, and models. But those mediations make sense only because they refer to something that does not depend entirely on them. A trace is a trace because something happened.

The Alterity of the Volcano

The object-oriented ontology of the philosopher Graham Harman is suggestive at this point because it insists that no “object” is exhausted by the relations that other objects maintain with it. Things are not merely what they represent to us, nor are they simply the sum of the functions they perform within a system or a relative totality. In assessing Harman’s proposal, we must bear in mind that it is formulated as a response to antirealism, while also acknowledging the aporias generated by his own presentation.

That said, let us consider the volcano. It may become a scientific object, a tourist resource, a territorial threat, a political symbol, or a television image. Yet it cannot be reduced to any of those inscriptions. In each relation, it appears partially and, at the same time, withdraws. This idea of the object’s withdrawal from any particular relation is crucial.

We may walk around a coin, but we can never contemplate all its sides simultaneously from a single perspective. Harman’s thesis, however, goes beyond this perceptual limitation. He does not merely maintain that the object can never be seen in its entirety, but that it is not exhausted by the totality of its appearances, uses, effects, or relations. Every appearance reveals and conceals. The object presents itself, but never appears exhaustively.

This concealment should not be transformed into a new mysterious substance. It does not mean that behind appearances there is an absolute thing completely separated from its relations. It means, more modestly, that no particular relation—not even the hypothetical sum of all relations—can claim exhaustive possession of the object.

The volcano is a geological reality, but it is not merely geology. It has social consequences, but it cannot be reduced to them. It gives rise to an aesthetic experience, but it does not exist in order to astonish us. It is the object of representations, but it is not identical to those representations.

Metaphorically, we may say that the volcano possesses a “self.” Not in an absolute or self-subsistent sense. Nor does this mean that the volcano is a person or that we should attribute to it a consciousness similar to our own, as occurs in some contemporary proposals for the “reenchantment” of the world. The metaphor indicates irreducibility. The volcano expresses itself in its appearance, imposes its presence, and manifests an alterity that our categories cannot completely absorb.

Andreas Weber, whose book Enlivenment I translated for Kairós, moves in a related direction when he attempts to think of nature not as an aggregate of inert objects but as a domain of expressivity, creativity, and meaning. His proposal does not coincide with Harman’s ontology, but it shares with it the attempt to rescue the real from instrumental reduction and to recognize in beings a dimension that exceeds the functions we assign to them.

Reality Turned into Spectacle

Media coverage of the eruption revealed another aspect of the problem.

At first, the volcano produced astonishment, scientific interest, and aesthetic fascination. Cameras sought the most impressive images of lava and explosions. Shortly afterward, attention shifted toward human losses, destroyed homes, animals, crops, and evacuations.

The proliferation of images and testimony also produced contradictory interpretations, rumors, and misinformation. Experts and public authorities had to intervene to refute or correct them. Later, the cameras began to turn back upon themselves: journalists described how they were experiencing the eruption, what emotions it produced in them, and what difficulties they encountered in carrying out their work.

Gradually, the event risked being transformed into a television series. The volcano became an occasion for the deployment of the media apparatus. The subject reporting on the event acquired as much prominence as that on which the subject was reporting.

This is not an indictment of journalistic practice. The problem is structural. In the age of permanent representation, events tend to be valued according to their ability to produce images, emotions, and circulation. When the images cease to surprise us and the testimony loses its novelty, the event disappears from public space.

But the volcano does not disappear. Nor do those who have lost their homes, their livelihoods, or their territories. What disappears is attention.

Realism acquires an ethical significance here. It reminds us that suffering does not cease when we stop looking at it. Victims are not characters in a media narrative whose existence depends on public interest. Reality continues to impose its consequences after the cameras have left.

The Moral Argument for Realism

The recovery of realism is not merely a theoretical dispute. It points directly to the moral and political implications that may follow from the most radical versions of antirealism.

If reality could be reduced entirely to our interpretations, it would be difficult to explain in whose name or on what grounds we could challenge a dominant interpretation. Every critique presupposes some difference between what is said and what occurs, between the official representation of a situation and the actual experience of those who suffer its consequences.

Injustice is not merely an alternative description within a discursive struggle. There are damaged bodies, impoverished lives, destroyed territories, and excluded people. These facts may be interpreted in different ways, but they are not sovereignly created by our interpretations.

This does not mean that facts speak for themselves. Facts must be named, contextualized, and understood. Situated epistemology and the critique of power remain indispensable. But they can fulfill their task only if they recognize that something exceeds discourse and can resist it.

Justice cannot be entirely deconstructed by referring it back to its causes, parts, or designations, precisely because there is a world that does not completely bend to our volitions. A causal explanation, a deconstructive analysis, or a hermeneutic reconstruction does not make the injustice committed or the harm suffered disappear. A victim may be silenced, discredited, or turned into the guilty party, but those operations do not annul what happened to them.

The decisive argument for realism is therefore moral. Without facts and without beings capable of being harmed, responsibility dissolves into a competition among narratives.

From Aesthetics to Liberation

Aesthetics occupies a privileged place in this recovery of the world.

Aesthetic experience is neither a purely subjective projection nor simply a physical property of things. It arises from the encounter between real beings and embodied subjects within a shared world. Beauty belongs to the cosmos, but it appears meaningfully within human experience.

The volcano may appear sublime, glorious, or terrifying to us. That experience does not exhaust the reality of the volcano, but neither is it a completely arbitrary addition. Something in the phenomenon’s form, magnitude, movement, and power elicits our response.

Aesthetics can interrupt the narcissistic enclosure of the subject because it exposes us to something that is not ourselves. Beauty, fear, and astonishment indicate that the world can affect us before it has been domesticated by our concepts.

Enrique Dussel allows us to extend this reflection toward an aesthetics of liberation. Ethics judges whether common life is just or unjust; politics administers the practical mediations of that life; economics produces and distributes its material conditions. Aesthetics, for its part, concerns the joyful experience of living: joy, happiness, and beauty as ends of human existence.

Liberation cannot consist solely in correcting unjust institutions. It must create the conditions for a life worth living and enjoying. Joy is not a frivolous distraction from political struggle. It is one of its ultimate criteria.

A just society is not only one that distributes goods equitably. It is also one that allows people to contemplate, create, celebrate, inhabit, and relate to the world without every dimension of existence being subjected to accumulation, consumption, and survival.

Recovering the World

The realism we need is not a naive restoration of traditional metaphysics. It does not consist in imagining that we can observe reality from nowhere, free from language, history, embodiment, or perspective.

Nor does it require us to abandon the lessons of Kant, hermeneutics, phenomenology, poststructuralism, or Buddhist philosophy. From all of them, we have learned that our access to the world is mediated and that claims to neutrality may conceal positions of power.

But recognizing mediation does not require us to turn it into a wall.

The alternative to naive realism is not confinement within representation. We can acknowledge that every experience is situated while also affirming that situations are situated within a world that exceeds them. We can recognize that every truth is articulated through historical languages without concluding that truth is merely a creation of language. We can understand that phenomena are empty of inherent existence without turning them into spectral appearances.

Recovering realism means recovering the world after critique.

The volcano arises dependently. Its existence is neither absolute nor self-sufficient. It depends on geological processes, atmospheric conditions, territorial relations, and temporal scales that exceed our imagination. But precisely for that reason, it is real. Its dependence does not diminish its reality; it constitutes its way of existing.

Under the volcano, the modern subject discovers its limits. It understands that it is neither the center of the cosmos nor the sovereign of appearances. It also discovers that this loss of centrality is not a humiliation but a liberation.

There is a world outside us. We can know it without exhausting it, interpret it without inventing it, inhabit it without possessing it, and transform it without making ourselves its masters.

Realist aesthetics returns that world to us so that we may contemplate and enjoy it. Ethics obliges us to respond to its wounds. Politics requires us to construct shared forms of life that do not reduce beings to instruments. And the philosophy of liberation reminds us that joy must become the ultimate tone of our efforts to create more equal and just societies.

The volcanic eruption was not a mirror. Perhaps that is why it was able to teach us how to see again.

Bibliography

CINCUNEGUI, Juan Manuel. Mente y política. Dialéctica y realismo desde la perspectiva de la liberación. Madrid: Dado Ediciones, 2024.

DREYFUS, Hubert, and Charles TAYLOR. Retrieving Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

DUSSEL, Enrique. Siete ensayos de filosofía de la liberación. Hacia una fundamentación del giro decolonial. Madrid: Trotta, 2020.

FERRARIS, Maurizio. Manifiesto del nuevo realismo. Edited by Francisco José Martín. Translated by José Blanco Jiménez, with the collaboration of Alessandro Santoni. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2013.

GARFIELD, Jay L. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

HARMAN, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books, 2018.

MEILLASSOUX, Quentin. Después de la finitud. Ensayo sobre la necesidad de la contingencia. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2015.

MORTON, Timothy. “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology.” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 163–190.

NĀGĀRJUNA. Versos sobre los fundamentos del camino medio (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā). Various editions and translations.

OPPENHEIMER, Clive. Eruptions That Shook the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

TSONGKHAPA, Losang Drakpa. Ocean of Reasoning: A Great Commentary on Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Translated by Geshe Ngawang Samten and Jay L. Garfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

WEBER, Andreas. Vivificar. Una poética para el Antropoceno. Translated by Juan Manuel Cincunegui. Barcelona: Kairós, 2022.