On Representation in Western Thought
Part II — From Representation to Its Eclipse
Given this wide premise, one may now discern what Western thought has held, and continues to hold, concerning representation.
The first and second notions of representation have always been present—first implicitly, then explicitly—throughout Western thought, and indeed could not be otherwise, since representation constitutes the very platform of discursive thinking.
The third notion, however, lies a priori outside Western thought itself. Philosophy is, by definition, the attempt to achieve rational knowledge of reality; and science is the rational explanation of portions of reality. Reason is a qualified manifestation of representation; pre-representative knowing, on the contrary, is anterior to reason. For this reason, reason can know nothing but representation.
If the pre-representative knowledge has been anticipated as a “third premise,” it is in order that the reader might perceive it as it appears in the words of those thinkers who will be mentioned below as exceptions to philosophy.
For every form of thought in the Western world, representation is not only the basic and obvious method of knowledge, but—again—is considered to be the only one; one must therefore say that representation is the very foundation of human nature (and, one might add, of animals and sentient beings in general: the human brain merely “elaborates” more, and the mind is, at least in part, self-aware).
This general notion of representation is structural and cognitive. Some contemporary thinkers contrast the classical conception of representation with such notions as direct experience or intuition; yet in these pages “representation” is meant in the strictly philosophical and elementary sense—namely, as the substitution of mental images for physical impulses—so that it naturally includes both direct experience (for it is acquired by the mind through the brain’s synthesis, not as a physical entity that “enters” consciousness, which is not a physical entity at all) and intuition (which is nothing other than cerebral images generated from previous cerebral images). Likewise, the progressive specialization of disciplines has created labels that appear distinct from sensory apprehension, such as proprioception or interoception, but from the basic cognitive standpoint sensations like feeling one’s own body, or feeling hunger or thirst, insofar as they are “knowledge”, are still representation—reactions of the nervous system to organic mechanisms.
For the Western world—thus, for every science and every philosophy—representation is human nature, and so it is: it hardly makes sense to think otherwise. Man is a living being who knows by substituting for roughly material elements, of chemical or electrical nature, images created by the brain; and then elaborates, still by means of the brain, the mental images he has created, constructing for himself a global image of reality in its totality.
This is the pedestal of Western thought: representation as the creator of being.
Reality is made of things that are—as Homer already named them: the things that are, the things that were, the things that will be.
To say that reality consists of beings is already the consequence of representation, of the act of substituting material elements with mental images.
This substitutive mechanism would be made explicit only with modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes; yet it is already implicit in Aristotle, for Aristotle too speaks of reality as composed of singular things that are.
The I as subject would be named by Descartes, yet the very act of saying that any determinate thing is a being presupposes considering each phenomenon as an “object” (in the modern philosophical sense) apprehended by the mind—that is, by the “subject” that contemplates it (which is always already the cogitating I)—just as the water that Aristotle drank was made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms even though he did not know their structure.
Hence the question of being, the question for the sake of which philosophy developed, is itself only a consequence of taking representation to be the sole mechanism of knowing reality: only if one believes that there exist entities—things that are—can one inquire into their being.
And from this perspective one may even hold that if, for twenty-five centuries, Western philosophy has sought to answer this single question, the question of being—offering every conceivable kind of answer, from one extreme of thought to the other, through all intermediate shades—until today, when scarcely anyone even finds the strength to ask about being (although it is impossible, even obtorto collo, not to regard it as the inconcussive foundation), and when one admits, surreptitiously, that truth—that is, truth about being—is weak in itself, then the doubt arises, legitimate and profound, that the error lies not so much in the answers as in the question itself. And this, in effect, is what Heidegger observed.
Representation is thus truly the platform of Western thought.
Among philosophers, some great thinkers did inquire into representation as an original structure of the mind—before accepting it as biological essence.
After all, the great philosophers are those who, to use Heraclitus’ words, investigate their own mind and expound how they see it functioning.
Descartes was the one who asked what guarantee there is that what the senses apprehend and the brain elaborates is truly reality—whether there is any assurance that what one believes to be living is not instead a dream.
He concluded that the only guarantee lies in the goodness of God: being good, God could not allow so brutal a deception.
This is the presupposition of Descartes’ thought; all the rest of his Copernican dissertations follow from it.
He first asked directly about representation—not at its third, essential level, but about its operation.
He understood that reality is known by the mind insofar as it experiences it, that each one is a subject amid objects, and he concluded that the only thing that can be said truly to “be” is the mind itself as subject.
He perceived that the (ordinary) mind can only know according to representation.
He believed representation to be the only mode of knowing reality: he was inside representation (he did not “see” it).
He posed the simple questions that representation itself poses—questions over which later philosophers would labour in an ever more self-referential crescendo.
For Descartes, reality might not at all be as it appears, since objects are represented to the subject; yet he chose to accept it as true as it appears, and resolved to entrust himself to the elaborations of reason, justifying his choice through belief in the existence of (a) God.
Kant was subtler, to be sure, but the practical outcome remained unchanged: what reality and things are in themselves cannot be known, precisely because representation operates; nevertheless, one must follow reason, which is itself a consequence of representation, and therefore live reality as it appears—for the simple reason that man lives within representation, and cannot think or act otherwise.
Kant was perfectly aware that representation is a veil between mind and world, yet he held that this veil is intrinsic to human nature.
Fichte, seeking to overcome Kant’s doubt, proposed this: since what the thing in itself is cannot be known, therefore reality is as it appears to the mind.
Hegel followed Fichte, asserting that therefore what appears to the I is necessarily true—therefore what reason (his, mine, yours?) believes to know is truth—therefore everything is comprehensible to reason.
From the gnoseological and practical standpoint, Hegel thus shows himself identical to Aristotle, differing only in the nominal presupposition of idealism over against the realism of the Greek: reality is as it appears.
Schopenhauer—whom some consider more a philosophical writer than a philosopher—did nothing other than accept representation as cognitive structure, merely placing beside it the will, without realizing that his Wille was itself a moment of representation.
In our own time, analytic philosophy overseas proposes refutations or defences of Putnam’s “brain in a vat”.
To affirm or deny the possibility that reality is simulated—at least as the human brain apprehends it—is in both cases to rest upon the same dogma: that the brain, in a para-normal way, creates the mind through the transmutation of material elements into thoughts; in other words, both positions rest upon the belief that representation is the only mode of knowledge.
In other words, Western philosophy has, for two millennia, first investigated only the being of objects—the product of representation—without realizing that representation lay at the base of being itself.
Then, from the “modern turn” onward, philosophy has continued to investigate being, now aware that it is representational, yet still without questioning the essence of representation itself—always asking only about the being of things that are, and of the *I *among them.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, broke the game of representation.
From his youthful essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense onward, he repeatedly wrote that subject and object are self-referential fictions, that being is a prejudice, that logic is an opinion.
After him, Heidegger declared with the utmost clarity that representation, as a human mode of knowing, guarantees no knowledge of anything beyond what one already, before wanting to know, believes one knows.
For Heidegger, certainly, representation is the ordinary mode of knowing reality; yet, equally certainly, it is a self-referential mode.
It is not, for Heidegger, the structure of the human mind as such, but only of the mind that rests upon it.
The stunning rupture between Western philosophy as such—founded upon representation—and the words of Nietzsche and Heidegger lies entirely in this: in the opposite conception of the mind’s basic structures.
For reason, there must, and cannot but, be a subject representing obviously existing phenomenal objects; for the pre-theoretical vision, subject and object are in themselves illusory, fictive forms created by representation itself.
The difference between philosophy and pre-philosophy is thus abysmal.
And indeed Heidegger often wrote that the pre-theoretical disposition is another beginning, another mode of mind distinct from representation and, therefore, from discursive thought.
Heidegger showed, in theory, not only that representational knowledge is in itself non-veridical (and that all Western thought, insofar as representational, is merely metaphysical—that is, a “believing oneself to know”), but that beneath it there lies, and can only lie, a dimension of pure, pre-representative mind, anterior to the ordinary transformation of phenomena into mental images.
Heidegger, of course, did not claim that this pre-theoretical knowing is a cognition of objective reality by a subject prior to representation; rather, he said that the very division of reality into the categories of subject and object is the delusion engendered by representation.
How could he say this?
There are two movements in Heidegger’s essential thought: one that proceeds from reason—that is, from representation—toward its own limits, which in showing themselves prove self-referential; and another, which abides in the cleared openness (Lichtung), allowing a knowing free of categories.
The difficulty in understanding Heidegger lies precisely here: only this abiding makes it possible to find oneself on this side of representation, while the first movement remains within it.
Heidegger expressed all this in the 1930s and ’40s.
Have other philosophers said similar things, besides Nietzsche?
(Others have said even worse things; yet no one would think of calling them philosophers.)
Let one take the central books of Plato’s Republic, unanimously regarded as the summa of his thought: there one reads in close sequence that ordinary men live as if in a cave, seeing only shadows of things, while certain souls emerge into the light of the sun; that, given knowledge as a divided line in four parts, reason is only the third, limited and unfit to truly know reality; and finally that his own dialectical philosophy is the opening of the eye of the mind (psyche) as it rises from the mud where it lies.
Likewise, in other dialogues, Plato says that the senses guarantee no true knowledge of reality but deceive—this being, of course, a condemnation of representation’s operation, without the exculpations later devised by Descartes and Kant—that true knowledge cannot be transmitted like other forms of learning, cannot be acquired by reading or disputing, but must ignite within the mind as light flashing from a spark: and this is identical to Heidegger’s Lichtung.
Naturally, these are only hints, citations of passages; to understand Plato one would have to rethink him, guided by the unequivocal points he himself sets down—not by the prejudices beloved of his readers, who, if not all, at least those enshrined in the history of philosophy, hold that these Platonic passages are mere poetic metaphors, and that Plato was the first and most convinced rationalist of Western thought.
(This extra-literal interpretation is itself a consequence of reason’s genetic tendency to reduce whatever it encounters to its own limits—as Plato himself notes in the Theaetetus.)
Plato, if one actually reads what he writes, says the same as Heidegger.
The first and the last of the greatest philosophers say, without circumlocution, that representation is a deforming structure in itself—and, above all, that true knowledge lies in the opening of a certain light.
Of course, these are words that say nothing more than what they say.
Neither Plato nor Heidegger “explain” what the pre-theoretical is—they allude to it, but, as they themselves warn, in theoretical language, with words that each will understand as he will.
Plato and Heidegger, but also Parmenides and Nietzsche, stand as dissonant voices—the first always misread, the second now swept under the rug—who declare that representation is not human nature, but at most the nature of the ordinary human mind.
Whoever does not enjoy the light they speak of lives in the bubble of representation, as did Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Gadamer, as do the neuroscientists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and the like.
Clearly, if a motionless swamp produces two ripples different from the rest, how could one hope to sweep away millennia of mental habit by means of a few shrill vibrations?
And indeed Plato and Heidegger say nothing, in practice, beyond what has been synthesized above: that representation is declared to be what everyone already knows it to be—an aliud pro alio, one thing standing in place of another.
Created with ChatGPT-5 — concept by Antonio Viglino