If Transcendental Realism were a Chinese flower, it would be born in the Daoist soil of Laozi,
but it would blossom under the direct gaze of Chan;
because Chan brings the metaphysical intuition of the Dao to the living immediacy of consciousness,
placing Realism at the center of reflexivity, without God or ideology.
Transcendental Realism is rooted in an aesthetic that does not seek to represent the world, but to understand it; and this as an active and immanent form, as a function, not symbolic or representational in any way. This influence finds its intuition in the Pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, due to its aesthetic foundation; because truth does not correspond to an adequacy to the object, but to an experience whose beauty lies in its relational logic.
This is the intuition of the American transcendentalists, merging spirituality and immediate nature; but it is in José Lezama Lima that this aesthetic experience reaches its maximum ontological value, as relational. Lezama is not a poet who represents reality, but an architect who understands it and unfolds it as drama; his world is not composed of objects, but of intensive relationships that, as they unfold, dissolve all dialectics. Faced with the dualistic structure—as expressed by Herman Hesse—Lezama proposes a trichotomous form, in which every opposition generates a third instance of integration, which reverses it into a trialectic realization.
Thus, in El juego de abalorios, Joseph Knecht embodies a rational tension between contemplation and commitment; and Plinio Designori could have resolved this dichotomy, but the work opts for a tragic ending, and Knecht drowns because the contradiction finds no way of synthesis and is frustrated in its own power. In contrast, in Paradiso and Oppiano Licario, Lezama offers an ontological solution, not narrative but reflective; Cemí, the archetype of consciousness, is resolved in Fronesis when he welcomes Phocion, his opposite as his complement.
This is not an impossible Hegelian synthesis, but a trialectic realization, based on its trichotomous determination; not A versus B equals C, but A in B as a relational function, which includes and transfigures them in this relationship. This is the aesthetic epiphany that founds Transcendental Realism, understanding the real as a dramatic structure, in which each opposition is already the threshold of a function, not representation but emergence, not ideology but experience.
This is not constructed on binary logic, which structures both classical metaphysics and its modern reactions; proposing a trichotomous function, as intelligibility in which all opposition is resolved relationally; subsuming contradiction, but without canceling it, respecting its own nature, as functional. This structure does not mediate between opposites, it operates them dramatically, without the difference being overcome; rather, it is experienced as transfiguration, in the transition from Potency to Act in which Being is realized.
This principle is inherited by Lezama Lima’s Transcendental Realism, whose novels do not narrate events, but epiphanies; describing integration, in which each poetic figure unfolds a network of ontological relationships. In this ontology, there is no individual and world, nor spirit and matter, but phenomena that mutually configure each other, as in Cemí’s acceptance of Focion, which neither denies nor nullifies him, but integrates him into Fronesis as a possibility.
This transcends Peirce in his “thirdness,” for there is not only the “firstness” of the qualitative and the “secondness” of the reactive, but also a relational instance that generates meaning, without ever being reducible to its components, because it occurs in the relationship. What in Peirce is a semiotic intuition, in Lezama is ontology, because the image is already the presence of that tertiary relationship; not as a symbol, but as a dramatic body, and in this sense real and sufficient, in the consistency of its relationality.
In another example, Hesse’s tension between Sinclair and Demian remains open, mediated by Eva as a third symbol; but without real ontological integration, because reality—which is Eva—is secondary, and is always frustrated in its potency. In contrast, in Lezama Lima, the father, the son, and language (Oppiano) do not form a theological triad, but rather a mutuality that reconfigures itself as creative drama, and thus reverts to the potential of Cemí, which is the tension between Fronesis and Foción.
