DE Weekly: Perception, Baudrillard, & Simulacra
Below is an archived email originally sent on December 15, 2025.
Perception, Baudrillard, & Simulacra
In existentialism, the role perception plays in our lives is as important to understanding the philosophy as anything else. This is because in existentialism, perception is much more than “seeing” the world with your senses; perception is about our being-in-the-world.
How do we experience the world? How do we experience our own existence? How do we know the things we perceive are true reality, that we can believe our perception?
In existentialism, perception is deeply tied to our very existence. Since, in a world devoid of inherent, universal meaning, we are not passive observers but active drivers of our own meaning in the world, the way we perceive the world (and the way the world perceives us) is hugely important.
It can be said that there is an initial perception which must be made in order for us to begin to perceive the world for ourselves: the perception of the absurd.
Perceiving the absurd––that is, the inherent lack of meaning and the burden of responsibility to create our own meaning––allows us to perceive the rest of the world in a way unique to us and our being-in-the-world.
After perceiving the absurd, however, we must ask ourselves a question: is the way we perceive the world perceived only by us, or are we perceiving pre-set perceptions of others without thinking of it? Furthermore, is what we are perceiving really true––the truest reality? Or is it something else?
Allow me to introduce you to a French philosopher often associated with existentialism: Jean Baudrillard.
Baudrillard has to his name an extremely influential work of philosophy, the 1981 Simulacra and Simulation.
In Simulacra and Simulation (I’ll shorten from hereon out to the Simulacra), Baudrillard argues the idea that modern perception is dominated by “simulacra,” what he describes as “copies without originals.”
Perception being dominated by copies leads to “hyperreality,” wherein simulations of things replace the things themselves. This blurs the lines between truth and fiction, with signs referencing other signs and not authentic reality as it truly is.
What’s more, this world dominated by simulacra can come to feel more real than reality itself.
This is because, when we allow our perceptions to be influenced by others, the signs that they create to signal our perception of it does not only reflect reality, it actually replaces it. This is what allows the copy (simulacra) to become more real than the original.
Baudrillard uses the example of an empire who creates a map so detailed it covers the entire territory in perfect detail. Eventually, the map wears out, and the empire falls, the territory it held turning to desert. The only real experience of the empire left, then, is the tattered map.
We can experience this by looking at a map of the Roman Empire at its greatest expanse (I’m sure you’ve seen a similar image before). We imagine this map to be reality, when the real experience of the Roman Empire was something entirely different.
What Baudrillard is suggesting, in essence, is that our perception of the world––as frightening as it may be to realize––is not a stable reflection of a true, external reality, but rather of a world dominated by signs, simulacra, and self-referential simulation.
Another example comes to mind while I’m writing this. You might have heard someone comment on a modern political event and remark, “Wow, this is exactly like in Star Wars when…”
The trouble is, Star Wars never really happened. But due to its entrenchment in the popular psyche, it has become very real in a self-referential, simulatory way. For some people, the events of that movie are as real as anything else; it’s something they use to perceive the world.
McDonald’s chicken nuggets aren’t really chicken. Pumpkin spice creamer has no trace of pumpkin in it. Tupac hasn’t held a concert this century even though his hologram was on stage a few years ago. Despite some depictions of it in pop culture, no one really knows what Heaven and Hell look like.
All of the above are examples of modern simulacra. Copies of nothing that have lost all connection to a real thing, becoming self-referential; they reference only themselves.
This is precisely what leads to simulacra becoming more real than reality itself. When reality is dominated by such simulacra, is anything we perceive of the world true to real reality?
Not being able to distinguish between reality and simulation can be disconcerting. It can make you feel a profound loss of authenticity. After all, how do we tell what’s real and what’s not? The distinction between the real and the imaginary has collapsed.
Nevertheless, facing the circumstances, I contend there is a silver lining to simulacra and simulation. It may sound trite, but in this indistinguishable reality lies opportunity.
Our perception of one thing in such a world remains: that of our own existence. This is the Cartesian cogito: I perceive that I exist, so I exist. Of that I can be sure.
Our existential perception manifests itself in our lives in spite of everything I’ve written about so far. It enters our perception and makes us remember our life’s purpose, our meaning, so that we might confront it.
That is the existential silver lining behind Baudrillard: perception is not merely a reflection of things, but a creation of things. Perception is less about mirroring reality and more about shaping it.
You create meaning. If the world has none, then it is up to you to create it. Active involvement in your choices helps you perceive reality better. That is exactly how to move beyond the anxiety created by simulacra and find meaning and truth in reality.
“If you don’t understand the thought of great philosophers, you have no idea that you think the way you do, why you think the way you do, or what the consequences of that might be. What is the idea that we’re all unconscious exponents of some dead philosopher or some combination of dead philosophers? Although we don’t understand it, we live within not only the conceptual universe these people have established but the perceptual universe they have established––they have shaped the way that we see the world on a very profound level.” –– Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Simulacra and Simulation is a tough one, but key, I think, to understanding other postmodern thinkers like Sartre better. It lends itself to existentialism in quite a significant way. Hopefully it wasn’t too dense a newsletter… stay tuned next week for some concrete conclusions building off of this.
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