What is Real?

(or, "Le Real is a Kind of Sturgeon")

Revised 5-21 in the cold light of dawn

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When the word “real” first appeared in English, it meant “royal” (1350) or “a royal individual” (1399). The meaning “landed property” was first seen in 1448. The philosophical and commonsense meanings of the word appeared later: “real” as opposed to “nominal” (1519); the “real presence” in the sacrament (1559); “genuine, sincere, loyal” (1559);  “actually existing” (1597); and finally, “a Spanish coin, the real” (1612).

In Spanish and especially Portuguese, the concrete physical meanings and the royal meanings which are obsolete in English still survive. In Portuguese these are the definitions of “real”: “1. A silver coin;  2. Campground, village, royal festivity; 3. Royal, splendid, etc; 4. Real, true, honest.”  In these two  languages realista still means both “royalist” and “realist”.  In medieval Spanish, real meant “albergue de regale”, or “royal protection”, whereas realme”, somewhat like “realm”, means a line of hereditary succession to a domain. (Both of these, as well as the Portuguese “campground, village”, and the modern Spanish “king’s tent” seem to have to do with “real property” or land). In Portuguese realçar means “to elevate or make conspicuous”,  and realce means “distinction, splendor” etc. (as it does in Spanish, but there the word is seemingly restricted to fairly mundane contexts).

So what about French? In Old French, le real meant a kind of sturgeon, whereas reale meant either a kind of royal coin, or a ship designated for the use of royalty, but neither of these terms apparently survived into modern French. In Old French, from the XIIc on reel and reelité referred to “real property”, as in English, and in modern French, the word réel now has all the meanings that “real” has in modern English, but not the royal meanings found in Middle English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Ultimately the words real and réel trace back to Latin, and it seems that there are two derivations: one from rex “king” + al, “kingly”, and one from res “thing” + al “thinglike” (whence the renominalized realis, “a thinglike entity”). Presumably the first of these was developed in law and government, with special reference to property and royalty, whereas the second was developed philosophically during the realist-nominalist controversies in the universities (where the word appeared in Latin before it did in the vernacular languages.) When the two words merged, the two kinds of meanings became partly confused, and “real” confusedly came to mean both “actual” (as in “a real nightmare”), and “great or good” (as in “a real man”, which means something much more than “an actual man”.) 

Now, if the "real" is thing-ish,  what does “thing” mean? In Old English, “thing” originally most often meant “assembly” and “cases treated at assemblies” -- the Icelandic Allthing did not mean “a collection of things”, but “a place where cases of all kinds are discussed”. (There was even a verb thingen, meaning “to discuss or negotiate”.) From the beginning, however, the word also meant “a material substance”, or “a particular object”, and “things” could mean either real or movable property. So while "thing" tends to mean something material and concrete, it also means anything that can be thought about, talked about, or dealt with, and again there is is the connection with property.

So we could paraphrase Kant, “A hundred real reals do not contain a centavo more than a hundred possible reals.” Seemingly, The Real is the cash value -- the kingly, the important, the inherited realm, landed property, and the gold and silver coins. Philosophical realism is the philosophy for which Ideas or Forms are important because they are royal, and real because they are thinglike – which seems to destroy the purpose of the Ideas, which supposedly gain their power via their distinction from mere physical objects. And in Spain and Portugal, royalty remains "real" to this day, whereas in France since 1789, even the word real itself has been banished from the language. (What does Lacan have to say about all this? “The Real is impossible.” Thanks a lot, Jacques!)

Ultimately, Le Real is a kind of sturgeon. Something to think about.

Sources: OED, Merriam-Webster, Oxford-Hachette, Dauzet, Godefroy, Cassell’s Spanish-English, Cejador y Frauca, and Michaelis (more here).

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First Update:

Commentator R. Mutt passes on this bit of information: "Als Meister Eckhart das Wort im 13.Jahrhundert aus dem lateinischen "actualitas" (="Wirksamkeit") übersetzte, dachte der Mystiker nicht an den heutigen Wortgebrauch und den Begriff Realität, der seit dem 18.Jahrhundert underen Sprachalltag beherrscht. Er dachte vielmehr an die Geschehnisse, die aus dem Wirken oder aus dem Handeln resultieren."

I did look at the German cognates of real and reél when I wrote this, but they didn't seem to add anything to my point. I didn't think to look at wirklichkeit, echt, etc. A whole different story.

Commentator L. Hat points out that realçar and realçe are not really derived from real, but were derived from alçar by prefixing re. But why let the facts ruin a good story?

Second Update:

It turns out that Le Real is not, in fact, a sturgeon. That is only the exoteric, symbolic version of Le Real. Behind the superficial "Real" lies something deeper (but not more "real"): the Al, to which the the Re-al has the same kind of re-lationship that re-production has to production, re-presentation has to presentation, and re-connaissance has to connaissance. This is be made clear in the piece below.

Third Update:

Note: This update isn't at all funny, just a little curious.

I recently chanced to read the Noah story in Genesis. In the King James version, Jehovah's threat reads

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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