I Can’t See the “Sense” in This

One possible description of Markus Gabriel’s ‘New Realism’ is that this realism integrates meaning: things are only ‘in a field of sense’, therefore have intrinsically sense. This picture should of course be contrasted with any kind of philosophical perspective that emphasizes the meaninglessness of being. However, it seems to be based on an overgeneralization of the notion of ‘sense’ that raises some issues. Markus Gabriel tries to appropriate the Fregean concept of sense and to interpret it in an ontological way by making it a part of the object itself. We may see in this an ontologization of the optical perspectival metaphor on which modern epistemology is based, piggybacking on the Fregean semanticization of the same metaphor. However, the real conditions to be met for this metaphor itself to work should be investigated in the first place.