We must begin with something extremely simple, almost trivial, and yet massively rejected by modern thought: reality is there before we think anything about it.

This principle is not yet theological. It is not even properly philosophical in the technical sense. It is more basic than that. It amounts to an almost childlike affirmation: there is something rather than nothing, and this something does not depend on my intellectual whims.

To think is not to produce being. To think is to be constrained by something that gives itself. Thought is response before it is initiative. It is reception before it is construction. Every attempt to reverse this order—to make the mind the constitutive principle of reality—inevitably leads to conceptual dead ends, then to increasingly sophisticated rhetorical contortions to mask a very simple initial error.

For indeed, if reality is only a construction of the mind, a projection, a model without ontological grounding, then it becomes impossible to distinguish between understanding and inventing, discovering and decreeing, truth and mere internal coherence.

Yet everyone practices this distinction. Even those who claim to deny it.

The skeptic who asserts that "everything is interpretation" interprets something. The relativist who denies all universal truth affirms at least the universal truth of his denial. The constructivist who explains that reality is socially produced presupposes a world stable enough for this production to make sense.

In other words: realism is always presupposed, even by those who fight against it.

Realist philosophy therefore begins with a minimal but non-negotiable intellectual decision:

There exists a reality independent of the mind, and the mind is ordered toward this reality.

This reality may be poorly known, partially known, difficultly known—no one denies mediation, error, complexity. But it cannot be fabricated by the very act of knowing without knowledge collapsing upon itself.

Down to earth: what this concretely means

Let us now take things without jargon, without grand words, and see what this principle means in ordinary life.

First example: the wall. I can think very hard that the wall does not exist, that it is a social construction, a perceptual convention, or an illusion maintained by my brain. If I walk straight ahead without caution, the wall will not debate. It will impose itself. The eventual pain will not be an opinion. It is not my interpretation that makes the wall; it is the wall that brutally corrects my interpretation.

Second example: error. If reality depended on my mind, I could never be wrong. Yet I am constantly wrong. I confuse, I predict poorly, I get surprised. Error only makes sense because something resists my thought. To be wrong is precisely to discover that reality did not obey my mental model.

Third example: learning. Learning is not arbitrarily inventing rules; it is adjusting to something that is already there. A child learns that fire burns, that water wets, that falling hurts. He does not decide this. He observes. And this observation precedes all theory, all ideology, all scientific explanation.

Fourth example: discussing. Why do we discuss? Why argue, convince, explain? Because we assume there is something true to reach, and that not everything is equal. If reality were only a subjective construction, all discussion would be a language game without stakes. Yet no one discusses that way. Even the relativist gets upset when seriously contradicted.

Fifth example: technology and science. A bridge holds or collapses. A plane flies or crashes. A medicine heals or kills. No serious engineer takes refuge in constructivism when reality decides. Models are useful precisely because they do not make the law for reality, but try to conform to it.

In all these cases, the same lesson returns: reality is not negotiable.

It is possible to ignore it, deny it, temporarily disguise it under seductive discourses. But sooner or later, it reminds us of itself. Always.

Realism is therefore not one intellectual posture among others. It is the recognition of a brute fact: we are not at the origin of being, but exposed to it.

From there, philosophy can begin. Before that, it only turns around itself.