"What Hegel is saying is that this Kantian opposition between phenomena and the thing in itself is absolutely immanent to phenomena in the sense that the thing in itself is something that appears as such in our phenomenal experience. The big enigma is not can we step out of our phenomenal experience, and see how things are in themselves. The big problem is why do things appear. How can in the middle of positive being something like appearance arise?
He says in the famous passage in his forward to Phenomenology that the greatest strength of human spirit is the ability to tear apart what is in reality always together. This is the Hegelian speculative moment. Which means to introduce appearances. And to fall into an illusion, and to take an illusion seriously.
It's not our isolated consciousness. It is something that is formed through collective symbolic interaction, and through collective practice, and so on, and so on. This is how I read that nature is a historical category. Whenever we imagine nature, and precisely the way you mentioned it now - if I disappear, what remains, and so on, - that is always a historical product. It's overdetermined by our historical practice.
In medieval times reality was perceived as something which has some type of deeper meaning inscribed into it. It's only with modernity that this clear opposition emerged. This vast silent universe, no meaning in it; and meaning is something that we humans bestow on it. This is a typical modern phenomenon.
All natural visions of reality are socially overdetermined. I'm not saying that this means that they are simply not true, and that they are our collective idealist dream, and so on. All I'm saying is that if you want to ask radically the question so how are things in themselves, do not ask the question in this way.
And that's for me the limit of correlationism. This is where Kant... They share this presupposition: we are here, reality is out there; the point is can we get at it, or not. I reject this alternative not in some stupid Hegelian way: that everything is created by Our mind, and so on, and so on.
I think the problem is not how is reality without us, but how we are part of reality. And I don't mean this as an evolutionary question: how did human mind emerged out of... I mean it in a more radical sense, like how could something like self-awareness, and like this very transcendental horizon, and so on: how could this have happened in what we can vaguely can call objective reality.
Mystery is not out there: that you try to erase yourself from the picture, and the imagined reality in itself, how it is. This is typical human procedure. Because the whole image is already structured through the paradoxes of your mind, and so on, and so on.
But the problem is the old problem of German idealism: how the real is structured so that something like human consciousness, and something like our symbolic universe of illusions, and so on, can emerge in it. The mystery is here. The true mystery is not reality in itself. The true mystery is ourselves: how are we part of reality."
Slavoj Žižek in "The Žižek Times", YouTube, Jan 10, 2026 (link).
Someone's comment: "The point is we can't stand ourselves as mere flesh. Even the most 'sex-positive' discourse smuggles in a sacred layer - love, authenticity, the 'value' of intimacy - to domesticate the obscene Real of the body. The illusion isn't optional, it's the condition for enduring it."
In empathy, or in desolation: so my body as a punct of reality.
Jan 11, 2026.
P.S. "Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky. But Crom is your god. Crom, and he lives in the earth. Once, giants lived in the earth, Conan. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Crom was angered. And the earth shook. And fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters. But in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel, and left it on the battlefield. We, who found it, are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men. And the secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts... This you can trust! (The sword.)" - "Conan the Barbarian" (1982 film), William Smith (the actor). Link.
