The transformation of reality in the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard

The article analyzes the interpretation of the meaning of reality in the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard. Since the early 1970s, the original system of understanding reality was formed in his works in terms of “simulacrum” and “hyperreality”, serving as the basis of Baudrillard’s criticism of postmodern culture. The concept of “simulacrum”, taken from the dictionary of Greek stoics, is a correlate of reality as the characteristic of non-authenticity, surrogate, absence and substitution of reality by its copies. “Hyper”, as a form of bodily expansion, means an “excess” of reality. The terminology helps Baudrillard to express the principle of “realized nothingness”, and is a form of criticism of civilization reduced to simplified models of anthropology. For example, his later work, “America”, shows how these concepts work with specific material describing Baudrillard’s travels in the New World. The philosophical perspectives in this work have served as the key to the description of particular phenomena, thus, as the “real”, which Baudrillard aims to exhaustively describe.