Virtuality (philosophy)

Virtuality is a concept with a long history in philosophy, its most notable recent version being that developed by French thinker Gilles Deleuze.

Overview

Deleuze used the term virtual to refer to an aspect of reality that is ideal, but nonetheless real. An example of this is the meaning, or sense, of a proposition that is not a material aspect of that proposition (whether written or spoken) but is nonetheless an attribute of that proposition. In Bergsonism, Deleuze writes that "virtual" is not opposed to "real" but opposed to "actual", whereas "real" is opposed to "possible". Deleuze identifies the virtual, considered as a continuous multiplicity, with Bergson's "duration": "it is the virtual insofar as it is actualized, in the course of being actualized, it is inseparable from the movement of its actualization."

Deleuze argues that Henri Bergson developed "the notion of the virtual to its highest degree" and that he based his entire philosophy on it. Both Henri Bergson, and Deleuze himself build their conception of the virtual in reference to a quotation in which writer Marcel Proust defines a virtuality, memory as "real but not actual, ideal but not abstract".

Reception

Another core meaning has been elicited by Denis Berthier, in his 2004 book Méditations sur le réel et le virtuel ("Meditations on the real and the virtual"), based on uses in science (virtual image), technology (virtual world), and etymology (derivation from virtue—Latin virtus). At the same ontological level as "the possible" (i.e. ideally-possible) abstractions, representations, or imagined "fictions", the actually-real "material", or the actually-possible "probable", the "virtual" is "ideal-real". It is what is not real, but displays the full qualities of the real—in a plainly actual (i.e., not potential)—way.