Talk:The Real

One of you guys or gals maintaining this page ought have a go over the article on the Symbolic and Imaginary Orders. The Imaginary Order article is absent, and the Symbolic article is terrible. I'm not really knowledgable enough to do it myself and would just make an ass of it. 58.170.142.31 (talk) 19:54, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Disambiguation
No offence to Tracy Bonham, but it seems kind of trivial to have a disambiguation link for a mere song: presumably we could dig up song titles to just about every page on wiki! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.177.212.90 (talk) 15:44, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Reality
Is there the slightest reason why this page should be separate from Reality? 1Z (talk) 17:42, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

In particular, are Lacan and Euken talking about the same thing (as the page suggests), and are either or both talking about something different from reality? 1Z (talk) 19:35, 18 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Lacan is definitely not talking about Reality (the main article on Lacanian psychoanalysis even says so), but something more like "experience which cannot be made into symbols or language". The other quotations seem to me about mystical or religious ideas of a "higher" reality. NeilK (talk) 19:18, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

If the above is correct, then this entry should be changed so as to make it clear that this is about a niche concept in Lacan, rather that the ordinary concept of the real. Perhaps it should just be a section of the entry on Lacan? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.172.197.217 (talk) 21:58, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Deletion/merging/cleanup/renaming?
As it stands this article ought to be deleted. We have several competing traditions that are giving incompatible interpretations of the same two words.

The article could perhaps stand as "The Real (Lacanian psychoanalysis)" with the other sections removed. Or, the entire article should be deleted and the relevant info merged back into the main article about Lacanian psychoanalysis, which actually already has a pretty significant section on Lacan's notion of "The Real".

NeilK (talk) 19:13, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Lead
The lead appears to be describing something called "The Real" from the perspective of a particular philosophy or movement but without either naming this school of thought or even making it clear that it stems from one. Which is to say that "The Real" (at least here) appears to be something other than / more than "what is real" or "reality", but the lead does not make this clear. Later on, it appears that there are a number of schools of thought with a view on what "The Real" means. Would it be an idea to instead open the article with something like "In contemporary philosophy, The Real ..." or "In Lacanian psychoanalysis, The Real ..."? A disambiguation link at the head of the article to Reality - or Reality (disambiguation) - seems in order at the very least. --P LUMBAGO 07:37, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Philosophy
Although referring to Eucken in her text, the quote was taken from Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.195.81.208 (talk) 15:54, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Evelyn Underhill and John van Ruysbroeck (Ruysbroeck also referenced by Roland Barthes), for anyone interested Eating Ideas Off Of An Anvil (talk) 01:28, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Plagiarism
The paragraph on Lacan is virutally a 1:1 copy of the entry on the Real in "Routledge - An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996)" from page 162 and should therefore be removed quickly. Especially as this book is neither cited in a footnote nor even appears in the "Literature" section.

"Unlike the symbolic, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as "presence" and "absence", there is no absence in the real. The symbolic opposition between "presence" and "absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the symbolic, the real is "always in its place: it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from there." If the symbolic is a set of differentiated signifiers, the real is in itself undifferentiated: "it is without fissure." The symbolic introduces "a cut in the real," in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things." Thus the real emerges as that which is outside language: "it is that which resists symbolization absolutely." The real is impossible because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order. This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the real its traumatic quality." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.12.205.180 (talk) 11:59, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Cleaning up and rewording
Known Issue I have had to clean a lot of this up because much of it initially read like a Nick Land knockoff. Citations are great, no context whatsoever to indicate that these ideas are from certain authors is not good TreeLethargy (talk) 05:38, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Still worried about accessibility. Eating Ideas Off Of An Anvil's massive upheaval of the page content with all this terminology and all these authors outside of Lacanianism is interesting but it needs to be professionally checked TreeLethargy (talk) 22:32, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

"See also" section
How many of these actually have to do with the Real? TreeLethargy (talk) 19:17, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Risking the essay-like template
Beginning to worry that the writing style and formatting of this article may eventually warrant the "This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay" template. TreeLethargy (talk) 06:07, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

Discussion Suggested for 2007 Section on Édouard Récéjac "Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique"
Google search of blockquote renders related text, Dialectics and the Sublime in Underhill's Mysticism pp 219–224 by Peter Chong-Beng Gan (2015):

Deleted section:

"Preempting the use of the term "the Real" by several decades, French mystic Édouard Récéjac wrote in Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique that:"

"If the mind penetrates deeply into the facts of aesthetics, it will find more and more, that these facts are based upon an ideal identity between the mind itself and things. At a certain point the harmony becomes so complete, and the finality so close that it gives us actual emotion. The Beautiful then becomes the sublime; brief apparition, by which the soul is caught up into the true mystic state, and touches the Absolute, the Real. It is scarcely possible to persist in this Esthetic perception without feeling lifted up by it above things and above ourselves, in an ontological vision which closely resembles the Absolute of the Mystics."

Récéjac, Édouard (1897) Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique. p. 74.

Eating Ideas Off Of An Anvil (talk) 01:14, 26 September 2022 (UTC)