SummaryThis essay concerns the concept of reality, considered in the perspective of physics. It tries to reconstruct the process of thought by which this concept is constituted. In this process, reality is transferred from the lived experience of existence, apprehended in the simple consciousness of oneself, to what gives itself, in experience, as an independent source of givenness, and finally to the world, as ultimate condition of the phenomena. In physics, we have to do with an approach of reality which is in terms of representation and no more in terms of lived experience. But in contemporary physics the representation (as theoretical construction) is intimately connected with our praxis. What is really described is not the manifest as such, but the manifestation (as process). The discourse of representation is no more about the phenomena themselves but about the conditions in which the phenomenon constitutes itself as phenomenon. The discourse of physics becomes thus more and more transcendental. But it integrates the transcendental discourse in the representation, giving a concrete appresentation (in a mathematical construction) of the non‐representable process of the becoming manifest of realit