“Presence comes before the representation”, the sociologist Boaventura De Sousa Santos said to me in an interview in 2022. He was referring to the way in which the priests in the favelas of Brazil relate to people who are suffering. Before people’s identity is even known, regardless of their religion or way of life, they are always related to as someone of worth—a dignified person.
So, what does ‘representation’ mean exactly in this context?
Representation here refers to the way in which we categorise the so-called objective world—people, as well as all other ‘things’, almost immediately, as we perceive them.
I remember walking in the hills of Maharashtra in India with a close Indian friend of mine some years ago. On seeing a bird fly over us I immediately asked, “What bird is that?” My friends’ response was, why be so quick to label everything?
Presence comes before the representation.
I think this is a beautiful way of expressing something we are in danger of losing altogether, that is—how to be in direct relationship with the world. What is our experience of something or someone—the presence of something before we put it in a box, and then find only the box remaining?
As Vanessa Andreotti has commented, because of the way we have been educated to make sense of the world, as critically important as this is—because we need categories to make sense of the world—the world has become only a ‘thing’ to be known. As a result, there is a significant imbalance between what might be called our form of calculated knowledge and a living participatory one. So, why exactly is this a problem?
It’s a problem because without even realising it, we end up living in a world that we experience almost entirely through our ideas about it—ideas that are not necessarily even our own or deeply considered. This is something Daniel Pinchbeck has called “consensus trance”. Many of our ideas we unconsciously adopt from our education and the countless influences around us. When questioned we might find our ideas have little or nothing whatever to do with what it is we are perceiving. At worst, we can end up in a cocoon of our own creation, entirely separate from the living world that we are in reality, an integral and inseparable part of.
Perhaps we need to find ways to counter the speed with which we represent the ‘other’ before we know anything about them, in order to recognise them.
“In order to recognise you”, Boaventura continued in our interview, “I need to understand that my culture and my understanding is incomplete”. He is talking here about recognition—re-cognising – before cognition, before we conclude that we already know.
A long time ago, in different parts of the world, this recognition of ‘incompleteness’—not as a lack but as an expression of our inherent relational curiosity, was extraordinarily alive. As William McNeil observes, “For about 2000 years, between 500 B.C. and 1500 A.D., no single centre of civilised life enjoyed definite preponderance in the world”. During this period across the Indian Ocean, the unprecedented expansion of trade was not merely economic. The Indian Ocean was a relational field, where languages, religious ideas, cosmologies, architecture, food, music and stories were shared and travelled across continents from Africa to China. Cultural translation was a civilisational practice. Travellers met each other before they defined each other—at least more or less.
There have been other examples in different historical periods of the acceptance and even celebration of plurality and difference, even if power asymmetries still existed and co-existence was not always peaceful. In this same period in Iberia, Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisted, and intellectual, scientific, and philosophical exchange flourished between them. In 18th century North America, there was a long-standing confederation of Indigenous nations, in which each nation, although retaining its own autonomy, participated in shared governance and in decisions that were grounded in lived relational knowledge.
In China, multiple philosophical and spiritual traditions co-existed for centuries. Then more recently, there was the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Mexico, in which communities were grounded in local traditions, anti-capitalist politics, and the refusal of a single universal model, with the motto, “a world where many worlds fit.”
The World Social Forum which was founded in the early 2000’s, and of which Boaventura De Sousa Santos was a founding member, was also a non-centralised global gathering place of activists and scholars, with the emphasis on epistemological diversity. And then there is the Quaker Movement which began in the 17th century, where differences are held and respected and truth is allowed to emerge from the relational field itself, rather than from any authority.
So, where did this compulsion to ‘represent’ and ‘know’ the world come from?
According to the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, it has characterised the development of Western philosophy since the Greeks —in particular from Plato. But it was in 17th century Europe, with the triumph of science and reason, that the world and everything in it became to be seen as an object—a thing to be known. Liberalism, empiricism, rationalism, and objectivity became an interrelated, universal doctrine and ideology. This form of knowledge produced hitherto unimaginable material and technological progress, the justification for the entire universalist colonial and capitalist enterprise, and modernity itself. We no longer felt ourselves, not just as a culture but as a civilisation, in the West, to be ‘incomplete’. On the contrary, we thought that we were literally, “the end of history.”
As the German-Turkish writer, Kübra Gümüşay puts it, “It’s the illusion of sovereignty that makes cages of categories, i.e. the presumptive notion that our own narrow, limited world, is complete, entire and universal, and the arrogant belief that we can wholly comprehend another person in all their complexity, that we can even wholly understand an entire constructed category of people. More than 70 million people become the refugee, 1.9 billion people become the Muslim, and half of the world’s population becomes the woman, the black man, the woman with a disability, the homosexual, the migrant worker, the non-binary person”.
Today, we have so internalised this form of knowledge and way of relating to the world, this hubris grounded in a subject/object division, that separation, and its prodigy—mistrust and polarisation – pervade our social and political institutions, our workplaces and even our families. Representing the world through our own ideas and conclusions about it has tragically become almost our only way of relating to it. This has led to a form of extreme individualism, alienation, cultural fragmentation, the collapse of community—and the existential experience that we are more or less an atomised cell, even if in reality we never were.
As the famous Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau already intuited in the 18th century, subjectivity only finds its flowering in the ability to transcend the merely subjective (and I would add the merely objective!) and recognise the self as part of a greater whole.
Another result of this fragmentation and division is that so often our communities and the organisations we belong to are siloed entirely from each other. It’s something that without being aware of, we easily take for granted, even when these communities or organisations share a common concern for the state of the world. Unfortunately, because of our acculturated experience of separation, we often cling to our identities in the particular community we belong to. Perhaps it feels too intimidating, or we simply don’t even consider stepping beyond our particular communities, or our own imagined boundaries, except for purely transactional reasons, which feel safer.
It’s a challenge to come out of our communities and meet the diversity of the world directly these days, often because it simply doesn’t feel safe to do so. We find safety and identity in belonging, which is understandable. But what can be sacrificed in the process is the possibility of discovering that in reality we are not separate at all— the discovery of what Heidegger calls “homeland”—the profound existential return to being and a true way of “dwelling” on the earth, where we know from our own experience that we are an integral part of a much greater whole that cannot be encapsulated by the knowing mind. Perhaps this is why the Buddha said that of the three jewels of Buddhism—Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, Sangha, the community of like-minded, was the most important.
The project of individual and cultural recovery, of finding the courage to come out of our siloes, and their imagined frontiers of separation, to meet each other directly again where presence comes before representation, is an enormous shift that will not happen for us collectively in a single generation. But a relational space where we can be both alone and together begins in simple ways. As the great Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti, would often say: “The first step is the everlasting step”.
We need to create safe spaces to meet each other directly again, before our ideas and all the insecurities they generate, can come between us. A group of us created a retreat recently on this basis. A space of safety and trust, where we were able to experience life and the world first hand, through simply paying attention and letting everything be. Through letting go of our need to know, and through cultivating what it means to listen. We need spaces where we can relax and truly think and inquire. Listening and participating in conscious dialogue with ourselves, and with each other.
The Japanese philosopher Takeuchi Yoshimi wrote something that calls for ongoing contemplation:
“Thinking is formed by expression and communication, from which it develops. Man does not think of things in isolation. To think is to think socially, it is what takes place in the relation between people…In order to properly think thinking, one must begin at the very point at which the self is originally opened up by others. Such crucial distinctions as inside and outside, self and other, unity and difference, knowledge and non-knowledge…come inevitably to be loosened (without however, disappearing)in this process. And with this loosening, words or concepts are no longer able to pose themselves in strict opposition to that which they are not”.
Through making room for each other, and for life in all its beautiful diversity, perhaps we can begin to experience the world again that somewhere our heart knows is possible.
For this is where life happens—in the in-between.
