Render or Reality? Virtuality and the Crysis of Distinction in Contemporary Philosophy

Abstract

Modern philosophy tends to consider human reality in more and more interdisciplinary contexts. Thanks to that, at first traditional, and now new media as well as IT, attract philosophers’ attention and provide material for thinking over a lot of so-called “eternal philosophical questions”. Among them, there are some of the broadest questions: a) catching the margins of the real; b) understanding, which phenomena and objects to constitute human might be called real. The key goal of this article is to research one of the crucial concepts, which brings us to understanding reality, – the notion of virtuality. The author of this paper outlines background of this notion, describes its characteristics and usage in modern philosophical discourse. First of all, virtual is described in its connotations to all three dimensions of time being: past, present, and future. It is argued that the notion of virtuality at first used to be “rediscovered” by Gilles Deleuze, but then it has experienced crucial changes in philosophy of the XXth and XXIst centuries. By means of that, virtual is discussed as a counterpart of the concept of reality. In particular, this article touches upon a variety of connotations between the notions of virtuality, reality and actuality. It also shows the context of juxtaposition of the aforementioned notions. What is more, this paper reveals moral aspects of virtuality both in transcendental and as immanent senses. This article shows the background of indistinguishability for “real” and “virtual”. Finally, it is stated that in the situation of so-called “substituted reality” the multiplicity of connotations of the notion of virtuality ought to be used to rediscover the notion of reality itself.