The Real Emerging Beyond the Corner: How Reality Becomes Intelligible

This study examines how “reality” emerges through perception and memory, taking as its point of departure the experience of encountering a landscape beyond a corner. Memory is not the past experience itself; it is already abstracted and reconstructed through the process of recollection. What we experience as memory, therefore, is not the past itself but a reality generated in the present. Likewise, the perceived world does not simply arise through the passive reception of an already completed reality.

When we approach a corner, the landscape beyond it is not yet visible. Nevertheless, we anticipate that the world continues beyond what we can currently perceive. At the moment of turning the corner, however, the landscape that appears is not simply the disclosure of a pre-existing world that had been temporarily hidden from view. Rather, a continuous “reality” emerges through the connection of anticipation, memory, and present perception, including the discrepancies among them.

This study considers this generative process through the relationship between reality, as ordinarily constituted and experienced, and the Lacanian Real, which disrupts that constitution while simultaneously participating in its generation. The Real is understood here not as another reality concealed behind phenomena, but as something that emerges through the discrepancy between the anticipated world and the world that actually appears, destabilizing the apparent continuity of reality. Such discrepancy is not merely a lack to be eliminated; rather, it can become the condition for the emergence of a new reality.

The practice of Japanese painting, particularly the spatial structure of Kakiwari, provides a practical mode of investigating this process. In a Kakiwari-like landscape, spatially and temporally heterogeneous fragments and discontinuities can coexist within a single pictorial field. Painting, in this sense, does not merely represent an already unified world. It can make perceptible the conditions through which heterogeneous fragments and intervals are nevertheless experienced as one reality.

This problem also leads to a more fundamental philosophical question: what does it mean to understand the phenomenal world? Understanding here does not refer only to assigning meaning to an already given world or interpreting it through language and semantics. Prior to such interpretation, there is a more fundamental process through which discontinuous elements of perception, memory, and anticipation come to constitute a phenomenal world that can be experienced as reality. From this perspective, an “understanding of understanding” requires us to ask not only how we interpret reality, but how something becomes intelligible as reality in the first place. Through the concrete experience of turning a corner and the practice of Japanese painting, this study proposes that understanding is not merely an operation performed upon an already constituted reality, but may participate in the very process through which reality itself emerges.