The real world is what comes to us via perception. Being as being. All things belonging together. Anything that can ever be "known", that is divided into the familiar categories of subject and object, is and can have as its basis only what is perception. Exempt from causal thinking, from space, time and all judgement.
Most of this is not subject to conscious thought. Self consciousness attributes to "the world" essentially what is beyond its control, its will. And yet always this self has some sort of notion of what these objects are. In reality, self-consciousness divides itself. For this knowing subject exists in a knowing relation with these objects, and itself takes an object for its existence to be real (the meaning of the cogito).
If this is true, that at all times we stand in relation to everything and in some way distance ourselves from everything, then why don't we think this way more often?
The answer is that we don't live in the real world. The self emerged from the nothingness produced by the vicissitudes of the struggle for life.
For the perpetuation of existence in its myriad animal modes, the transient individual is in a constant struggle with the world by its very nature. Being individuated in space and time, realizing this as the species gains conscious awareness, and gaining recollection of the past through memory, the individual's realization is only possible because of their impending death. This is because the individual separates from the world by its own praxis, preserving itself from a return to its undifferentiated state or a transformation into something else. This is what is common all animal life, the instinct to live.
Yet even this is not enough. Thought eventually develops to the realization of its estrangement from the world and transience. The only escape, while continuing to live, is to somehow end this alienation from the world. By either transforming it, or subverting to its "will". In either case, motivated by a desire to see itself in the world.
It is quite hard and in the end futile for the individual to transform the world in their image, so the other route is more common. To submit to the will of another (more like an-other). This necessitates on the part of who submits to identity with the master, otherwise it would pointless and death would be a more definite way of ending the alienation of individuated existence.
Thus begin the lies which inform the content of our lives. To convince ourselves and each other that our individual station in life relates to the world in a meaningful way. Using words, we can make the lesser appear the stronger and vice versa.
Philosophy can free us from the lies, but can't in my opinion give us anything positive. That is the problem. Thought takes us away from the real world of direct perception. That is the point.
The developed individual self-conscious cannot forever resist the return.
This is the real world: pain, pleasure, and the will.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
General Remarks Transcendental Doctrine of Elements II.
"In confirmation of this theory of the ideality of the external as well as internal sense, consequently of all objects of sense, as mere phenomena, we may especially remark, that all in our cognition that belongs to intuition contains nothing more than relations. The feelings of pain and pleasure, and the will, which are not cognitions, are excepted"
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