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Review of:
Introduction to New Realism
M AURIZIO F ERRARIS
[Bloomsbury, London, 2014
pp. 144, ISBN 9781472595942, C14,99 £.]

Keywords:
Fintan Neylan
Pages: 183–190
Memorial University of Newfoundland
fintan.neylan@gmail.com

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At the opening of his 1907 lecture series, entitled “Pragmatism,” William James
commented on the growing disparity between academic philosophy and a philoso-
phy whose relevance people would feel in their lives. Not obsessed with technicali-
ties, this latter philosophy would be one which truly mattered to us, James claimed,
because it would deal with ‘our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total
push and pressure of the cosmos.’1 Yet while “technical” philosophy is found to be
wanting in this regard, James had no intention of presenting pragmatism as sunde-
red from it, for he proposes it as a middle road between the two demands. Indeed
the expanded title given to the published version made clear an aspiration to meet
these demands of the then nascent philosophy: Pragmatism: A New Name for Some
Old Ways of Thinking. What James determined was new about pragmatism was not
the content per se, but that it presented an alternate access point to discussing quite
ancient theses, or, rather, a new way to return to them.
It is in this spirit of the new that we may assess Maurizio Ferraris’s recently
published Introduction to New Realism. This review will focus precisely on that
which New Realism allows us to return, namely, a way to deal with perception in
ontological terms.
A brief comment first on the style and presentation of the book: as the title
suggests, the text aims to initiate readers into Ferraris own position which he tells
us has been developing for well over 20 years. What is quite interesting is that
the book takes a series of aesthetic decisions in presenting its content, especially in
framing his philosophical opponents (more on this later). Combined with Sarah
De Sanctis’s translation of the text from Italian, which renders Ferraris prose in
a way which preserves the brisk pace of the book, the aim of this text is clearly
to introduce more people—especially those with an aesthetic stake—to the realist
movements which are taking root in the 21st century. Such initiates are greatly
helped by two extra elements. First is the foreword authored by Iain Hamilton
Grant, which charts the rise of “transcendentalism” in philosophy, the outcome of
which has been one that ‘undercuts any claim to “being,” “fact,” or “really existing
state of affairs”’ (ix). This orients the reader to know the challenges faced by any
realism emerging today. Paired with the second element, the afterword De Sanctis
authored with Vincenzo Santarcangelo, the reader is easily able to locate Ferraris’s
position in relation to Harman and Meillassoux, each of whose positions are clearly
sketched.
At the beginning of the book, Ferraris sets out a number of elements of new
realism, all of which are led by the fact that it is a ‘critique of constructivism’ (10).
Constructivism is the thesis that denies ontological status to anything beyond the
fabrication of the human mind or the social, because it holds that all knowledge
1
James, W. (1975) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1975 9

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ultimately has a subjective or intersubjective origin. Ferraris sees it as the result

of the modern period’s uncertainty of the world given by the senses. As such the
modern period, with its turn to conceptuality, sees its task as one to ‘re-found,
through construction, a world that no longer has stability’ (26).
Along with allying itself with attempts closure the linguistic turn and overcome
the “analytic/continental divide”, new realism aims to be a ‘return to perception’
(8) and engages in a ‘relaunch of ontology as the science of being and of the mul-
tiplicity of objects’ (8-9). Perhaps controversially, Ferraris claims that the work of
new realism ‘perform[s] an intimately deconstructive act’ (10)—this is a claim we
shall return to below. These elements are framed against what Ferraris sees as the
prevailing tendencies in contemporary thought, which he explores in “Negativity,”
the first section of the book.
At the centre of “Negativity” are two philosophical figures, named Foukant
and Deskant. These are not historical figures but rather are amalgamations of
viewpoints which one finds in the modern period and which cluster around De-
scartes, Kant, and Foucault (or, more precisely, the reception of them). Given that
this is an introduction to his position, to understand what Ferraris is up to with
these characters, I believe they must be considered first philosophically and then at
the end of the review in aesthetic terms.
In essence, both Foukant and Deskant serve as intellectual foils to Ferraris’s
own position. The figure of Foukant occupies the dominant position of postmo-
dernism and is the outcome of fusing the representing “I” (via Kant) with a power
ontology (via Foucault). This figure proceeds from the following syllogism: ‘rea-
lity is constructed by knowledge, knowledge is constructed by power, and ergo
reality is constructed by power’ (24).The problem with this is that Foukant locks
himself out of being able to discuss a mind-independent reality, in part because he
believes knowledge of the world is of the form of social construction. In itself, this
would be an unremarkable form of idealism, but it does not stop there. Not only is
it constructed, but, in this position, knowledge is always compromised politically,
for ‘behind any form of knowledge there hides a power experienced as negative’
(25). On Foukant’s account, when we happen upon knowledge which claims to
refer to a mind-independent reality, what is really going on is an exertion of power
by reigning dominating forces.
This suspicion of knowledge is not limited to postmodernity; indeed, it goes
back centuries. On Ferraris’s account, it has its origins in a much older set of
philosophical tendencies, which he collects under the figure of Deskant. Deskant
combines the Cartesian subject, which is isolated from the world, with the Kantian
subject, which frames the world but is not a part of it. The key result of Deskant
is the thesis that ‘our conceptual schemes and perceptual apparatuses play a role
in the constitution of reality’ (26). Deskant formulated this position in response

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to the uncertainty of the world, as opened up by early modern scepticism, with

the resulting thesis that the structure humans see only comes from the side of the
subject, i.e., what humans themselves have put there via their conceptual apparati,
and is not present in reality itself.
As such, the emergence of Deskant marks the point where conceptual kno-
wledge unquestionably trumps sensible knowledge. There is a trade-off here: to
elevate conceptuality, as in Kant’s pure concepts of the understanding, affords one
a site shielded from uncertainty, but at the price of there being ‘no longer any diffe-
rence between the fact that there is an object X and the fact that we know the object
X’ (27). Thus we enter an age where it is asked ‘not how things are in themselves,
but how they should be made in order to be known by us’ (26). The main issue
with Deskant and Foukant is that, in this absconding from dealing with reality
in itself, they cannot but conflate of the knowledge of an entity with the entity
itself. Ferraris names this collapse of ontology into epistemology as the ‘fallacy of
being-knowledge’ (24).
Having charted the various vestiges and discontents of “Negativity,” Ferraris
turns in “Positivity” to singling out his position with the following remark:

[I]f the realist is the one who claims that there are parts of the world
that are not dependent on the subjects, the new realist asserts some-
thing more challenging. Not only are there large parts of the world
independent of the cogito, but those parts are inherently structured,
and thus orientate the behaviour and thought of humans as well as
animals. (37)

Ferraris’s move here is twofold. He first agrees with Foukant and Deskant that
knowledge is a human construction, but rejects their collapse of knowledge of the
world with the world itself. For Ferraris, despite its artifice, he claims knowledge
may still point to reality which is inherently structured. There is not only the
structure of the knowledge we have of the world (i.e. the conceptual schemes we
have developed, named “epistemological reality”) but also the actual structures of
the world, whether it is perceived or not (“ontological reality”) (41). Thus his own
account presents the reader with two strands of reality, or, as he puts it ‘two layers
of reality that fade into each other’ (41).
With the formulation of these two layers, it becomes clear that an attempt
to portray Ferraris as occupying a tired realist position falters; this becomes even
more apparent once one comes to his formulation of his position being a “naïve
physics” (40). Guided by the principle that ‘the world presents itself to us as real
without necessarily claiming on that account to be scientifically true’ (40) naïve
physics identifies a niche area in which philosophy can get to work giving full
justice to the world as it is manifest while making no claim to arbitrate the work

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of the sciences. As naïve physics, new realism takes seriously ‘the philosophical
importance of sensibility’ (39). It does so by not treating perception as something
to be explained by the principles of a darkened world of non-sensibility or as mere
something to be reduced to the mechanics of neurophysiological operation; rather,
it delves into the world to express the reality of it as it is manifest. In a sense
it is a response to William James’s demand, for what distinguishes Ferrais’s New
Realism is that it not only attempts to take into account this “push and pressure”
of the universe that we all see and feel, but locates it as philosophically central to
his enterprise. Unlike philosophies which hold that one may only seek out what is
ontological by cutting beneath or beyond perception, in the guise of naïve physics,
we may consider the ontological aspects of perception itself.
What we get in the rest of “Positivity” is Ferraris’s picture of the world and,
continuing into “Normativity” the essential elements of this ontology of percep-
tion. At its core is a feature called “unamendability” which Ferraris describes as
that aspect of the real which serves as ‘a stumbling block to set against our con-
structivist expectations’ (39). According to Ferraris, unamendability belongs to
ontological reality and manifests itself in terms of a resistance to our knowled-
ge of the world, opposing what he refers to as “refusals” to the epistemological
scaffolding we have constructed; the function of refusals is that they always ma-
ke it clear that reality is not quite what we think it is (39). It is in this sense we
may understand Ferraris thesis that New Realism is ‘intrinsically deconstructive’
(10). As noted above, this may raise an eyebrow from those schooled in the de-
constructive method, especially since Ferraris claims his project involves that of
‘reconstructing deconstruction’ (10). However, we can make sense of this claim
if we read Ferraris as making DeMan’s statement that ‘the text deconstructs itself,
is self-deconstructive’ a constituent feature of reality itself.2 That is, reality is self-
constructive because howsoever we attempt to fix reality in a formulated phrase,
unamendability will (or always possesses the capacity to) eventually shatter our
epistemological cast we have crafted on it.
The unamendable does not just have a negative role of providing refusals. The
resistance of unamendability forms a dyad with what Ferrais calls the positive “af-
fordance” of objects and the environment of the world. That is, the very aspect
which may break down our conceptual schemes is also that which affords us new
possibilities (47). These possibilities cannot be deduced a priori, but can only be
discovered through interaction with the world: for example, a lemon can be used
as a piece of food, but with the rise of electrical technology, it may also afford itself
as a battery with certain metal electrodes (zinc and copper, respectively) but, at the
same time, resists being so with other metals.
The worldview offered to us by Ferraris is thus one of objects and their envi-
2
DeMan, P. (1986) The Resistance to Theory Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 118

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ronments, each resisting and affording each other in different ways. While it seems
intuitive to think of the natural in these terms, Ferraris holds that this is to apply
to the social, too. Yet here Ferraris encounters a problem: given that he wishes to
advance a realist position, he runs into the issue of how to grant same ontological
status to both the social and the natural.
Generally to grant reality to one side resolves itself in the expense of the other:
as we saw, by privileging the social as real, social constructivists like Foukant de-
termined the reality of the natural as little more than an exercise in power. Equally
there is the issue of scientific reductionists that, if the natural is real, then the social
must be considered an illusion. For Ferraris, what is required is a way to hold on-
to the social as constructed, while still maintaining its ontological status as a real,
causally effective domain.
Through what he calls “documentality,” Ferraris proposes a theory of the so-
cial which he claims can take into account a conception of the social as fully real,
thus ontologically independent, while still remaining mind-dependent (89). Docu-
mentality arises out of Ferraris’s analysis of objects, which he breaks down into
four distinct classes: natural objects, ideal objects, artefacts, and social objects (49).
The first two types are posed as ontologically (i.e., mind) independent without any
further qualification. For example, if one was to consider a rock and the number
one as a respective instance of each class, it is clear how both objects will continue
to persist without the existence of any mind contemplating it. It is with the lat-
ter two objects that matters become interesting. What Ferraris has in mind when
he discusses social objects is events like commemorations, holidays, corporations,
TV shows, etc. Such objects are fully mind-dependent and cannot exist without
humans. While at first blush it may seem counter-intuitive to think these as objec-
ts, Ferraris rightly points out that they have causal efficacy upon “natural” objects
(a corporation, for example, can determine the flow of raw materials and labour
across the globe in a way hitherto unimaginable 300 years ago). Most intriguingly
is the account of what Ferraris names as “artefacts”: they are composed of natural
objects, but one can only understand them with reference to the social. Though
it is made up of physical materials, an artefact like a computer had its genesis as a
computer in a specific socially constructed context. In many cases artefacts afford
themselves as a means of storing information, which we shall see is an enabling
condition of social objects (65).
This dynamic of artefacts and social objects comes to force in the “Norma-
tivity,” final section of the book. Ferraris makes clear his aim is to show that
meaning is to be located in the environment, and that humans are but a receptor
of meaning—and not the only receptor, but one amongst many (61). In short, it
proposes an alternative to the idea that meaning is “all in the head.” Documenta-
lity offers an account of how meaning may emerge from merely natural objects,

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Ferraris defines it as ‘the environment in which social objects are generated’ (63).
What follows are a series of ambitious claims on the extent to which documen-
tality precisely conditions and constitutes the social. Essentially Ferraris sees the
social as emerging with the capacity to record, i.e., the capacity to receive and
store an inscription. The extent to which documentality is imbricated with the
social, Ferraris claims that all social objects may be considered documents (65).
The development of civilization would be mirrored by a development in recor-
ding technology: while the social must have first only existed only in the minds
of prehistoric sentient beings, with the advent of writing artefacts came a further
expansion of the possibility for novel social objects.
So that he may account for the social and the natural in one ontology, Ferraris
names his position as one of a “weak textualism” or “weak constructivism” (65).
This may seem odd, for New Realism was initally said to be a critique of construc-
tivism; however, just as James’s design was not to disregard the philosophies against
which pragmatism distinguished itself, neither does Ferraris wish to sunder him-
self completely with late 20th century thought. New Realism distinguishes it from
“strong” textualism of certain linguistic turn philosophers, whose thesis was that
social and linguistic acts—which he labels “inscriptions”—constitute all of reality.
Rather, the “weak textualism” of New Realism means that it limits its construc-
tivism to the social in an attempt not to collapse ontological and epistemological
reality (66). As he claims, New Realism’s constructivism is ‘[w]eak because it as-
sumes that inscriptions are decisive in the construction of social reality, but [. . . ]
it excludes that inscriptions may be constitutive of reality in general’ (65).
This “decisive” character of inscriptions leads Ferraris to the thesis that inten-
tionality derives from documentality, and not the other way around (78). As we
saw, for Ferraris it is only with the emergence of recording that one finds any-
thing like the social. So as to emphasize this point, he claims that thought ‘[i]n
the perspective of documentality, it is through the sharing of documents and tradi-
tions that a “we” is constituted’ (82). This line of thinking culminates in Ferraris’s
thought that it is documentality that makes us responsible, for he sees the capa-
city to receive inscriptions as the basis of being able to make an obligation, the
fundament of any social relation (86).
To recall James’s comment, Ferraris’s claim that New Realism allows a return
to perception and to ontology as the science of being holds up. Via his conception
of a “naïve physics,” the picture he offers us is one we may conceive as a ‘long chain
of being that, through interaction, gradually leads to the emergence of everything’
(80). This is ambitious stuff, and while the reader at times feels a need for further
detail or exploration of the content, it must be borne in mind that the book is an
introduction, and not a tome.
By keeping this in mind, the somewhat unorthodox move of using fictional

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philosophical figures becomes clear. This aesthetic decision recommends itself if

only in that it gets around having to labour the point between how a philosopher
was received versus what he or she actually wrote. For anyone who has worked in
academic—and especially continental academic—philosophy, there is the all too fa-
miliar experience of working through large multi-volume works whose painstaking
task is to rescue a philosopher from the single charge of, say, ontotheology.
While no one would deny that this is a hermeneutic necessity, it can also be
quite tiring on a reader who has not been schooled in the history of philosophy, or
who is simply (and understandably) not interested in such minutiae. The book as
a whole aims to fully equip a reader unfamiliar to the current wave of speculative
and realist philosophical positions. Given that such positions themselves are a work
in progress, it will be interesting to see how Ferraris’s thought influences further
discussions over the next few years.
For now though, we may explore the realist philosophy of perception that
Ferraris’s thought opens up. Through it being a naïve physics, this is a philosophy
which is adequate to dealing with the push and pressure of the cosmos; that is, in
returning to perception on its own ontological terms, it opens up a philosophy
that matter to us.

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