On Representation in Western Thought
Part I — On Representation as the Supposed Fundamental Structure of Knowledge
The representation is the way by which an individual acquires knowledge: it is the basic cognitive structure—the transformation, by the brain, of the material impulses that come from the senses into mental images.
Neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, the various philosophies, the exact sciences and the human sciences, religions, art, symbolism—every manifestation of thought, every movement of the human mind—rests upon representation.
This is known to the neurosurgeon, who theoretically understands representation even though he cannot see it at work, since cerebral images are by definition inaccessible to observation; and it is indeed known to anyone who reflects upon it. It is a given for Western thought that man knows reality through representation: the whole of anyone’s life, at every instant, rests upon representation. Everything else in the mind—thoughts, emotions, sentiments, reasoning, calculation, superstition, mathematics, faith, even football enthusiasm—has as its basic foundation the fact that the brain processes electrochemical particles into mental images.
(Incidentally, how this conversion from matter to non-matter occurs is unknown; neuroscience is precisely the attempt to study how it might occur, in the hope of stumbling upon its true mode of happening. Yet the ultimate hope that animates neuroscience is double-edged: should it prove how matter becomes immaterial, it would at the same time have demonstrated a violation of the principle of reason itself.)
It is not merely a matter of observing that if human beings had no eyes reality would be black and invisible, or that microscopes and telescopes are simply extensions of the senses—just as artificial intelligence is an extension of rationalizing representation—or that there may exist planes of reality which, while perfectly physical, are called “nonexistent” because they elude contact. The basic point of representation lies elsewhere: it divides reality into a “who represents” on one side and “what is represented” on the other.
To reflect upon the essence of representation is not, primarily, to inquire what the “who” that thinks (that is, the “who” that represents) may be, nor what the “things” experienced through the senses (that is, the “what” represented) may be—whether “I” and the objects are indeed as they appear or not. Rather, it is to admit that representation already in itself presupposes the dichotomy between subject and object.
Representation brings external phenomena back to a thinking I. But whence comes the structuring of reality into subject on the one hand and objects on the other? Is it biologically intrinsic to the mind? Or is the mind that believes itself to be the I and takes the external things as objects only one dimension of mind, coexisting with other dimensions?
Western thought—and discursive thought in general—holds that the division of reality into a thinking subject and external objects is inherent to the mind itself. Other views, however, maintain that this division is a minus, a limitation with respect to the true nature of consciousness; hence the mind that believes in subject and objects is called the “ordinary mind,” that is, the mind that lives within representation.
The not-few philosophers who have inquired into representation have confined themselves to considering the nature and essence of the “who represents” and the “things represented,” without realizing that representation itself may be precisely what creates entities—subjects and objects alike. This fundamental and ultimate alternative concerning representation in Western thought has been explicitly treated by very few.
From this perspective, representation is not merely the substitution of physicochemical particles by immaterial images—although it is that too—but is that very transformation insofar as it is what first confers legitimacy upon both the represented objects and the representing subject, and thus upon the material particles “outside” and the mental images “within.”
Speaking of representation therefore implies three distinct planes.
As for its essence—something everyone knows and cannot but know—representation is a “mechanism” that enables the mind to apprehend the world external to itself; and this mechanism consists in the substitution of physical and material elements with mental and immaterial images.
The second plane concerns the object of representation: to what extent there can be any guarantee that mental images correspond to the actual reality that lies outside the mind. On this point—aside from doubts that, upon closer view, are little more than presuppositions—all Western thought takes it for granted that representation must in any case be considered trustworthy: that what appears to be is in fact being, or at least must be regarded as such, precisely because representation is believed to be the one and only way in which the mind relates to reality. (How this relation actually occurs, or can occur, remains and will remain unknown, because, as said, to know it would imply a violation of “knowing” itself—of epistēmē.)
Then there is a third, far deeper level, which involves the very legitimacy of representation.
This standpoint does not doubt that representation is a mode of knowledge, and it is essentially unconcerned with the question of correspondence between what is seen and what is believed—precisely because, being a mode of knowledge, representation remains subject to the limits that constitute it.
This third level calls into question the legitimacy of representation insofar as it holds that representation deforms reality on a structural level—not merely because it fails to reproduce within the mind the phenomena external to it with exact conformity, but because the very mechanism of representation is in error: there exist, in themselves, neither “objects to be represented” nor a “subject who represents.” Rather, the very act of believing that there exist a subject—the I—and objects, phenomena external to that I, is already the primordial error engendered by representation itself.
In other words, subject and object are categories created by representation, which isolates portions of the whole and entifies them, creating the forms of “I” and “things.”
Whoever perceives that representation itself is what ab origine creates both subject and object does not thereby wish to deny that, according to representation, the names “subject” and “object” are legitimate; rather, he affirms that the notions of “I” and “things” are valid only within the very point of view that created them. This does not mean “denying” representation as a way of knowing reality established within the mind, but recognizing that it is already and only a mode—an interface—that generates structures in a self-referential way.
The difficulty in admitting this point of view—that subject and object are categories created by the mind alone—lies in the fact that, even though it is theoretically easy to ascertain the self-referential nature of representation, everyone nevertheless lives within representation; that is, each one lives believing himself to be the I and believing that there exist objects outside his own mind.
He who lives within representation cannot perceive that the I is, in itself, an illusory structure, for the I is obviously incapable of denying itself: one cannot think oneself not to be the I, for what thinks is already the I. Indeed, the proponents of a pre-representative noetic mode say what they say about representation and the I precisely because they find themselves on this side of the I—which, according to them, allows one to see “from outside” both the representational mode and the I itself—while he who is the I cannot see himself directly, just as the eyes cannot directly see themselves.
According to this view, representation is a self-deception, though not because mental images might or might not correspond to phenomena, but because the domain of what representation can make the mind know is delimited by the boundaries of what the body can know.
This view affirms that such a limit is not quantitative—as if one might add further senses beyond the usual five—but that there exists a mode of knowledge altogether different and higher than that of substituting so-called “things” with so-called “mental images”.
It holds that the mind can be permeated by knowledge independently of sensory contact, independently of the body; indeed, that it is precisely the mind’s confinement within a body which engenders the belief that representation is the only mode of knowing reality.
According to these doctrines, the mind is something different from the body; it is not merely an emanation or an emergence of the body, but of another nature altogether; and it is the body alone that limits the mind to itself.
(The dogma of neuroscience, by contrast, is that the immaterial mind emerges from the material body, and the aim of that field is precisely to demonstrate the metamorphosis of matter into non-matter.)
Thus, even according to this view, representation is not wrong in itself; what is deemed mistaken is the belief that it is the only mode of knowing. And if universally it is believed to be the only one, this is merely because one of the flaws of calculative reason is to deem nonexistent that which it does not know.
The ante-representation at the “third level” is therefore something entirely different from those notions which certain exponents of Western representational thought—philosophers, psychologists, or scientists—sometimes present as non-representational modes.
For the very moment one refers to a knowing or an experiencing of an object by a subject, that experience is already wholly internal to representation.
Can this third level of representation be defined as mystical knowledge?
The answer depends entirely on what is meant by the word mystical.
If one takes it in the common Western sense—according to the Treccani Dictionary, “the capacity of certain individuals to apprehend a being or a reality mysterious and other than themselves, beyond the ordinary forms of empirical or rational knowledge”—then this is not the third level of representation.
Such “mysticism” still presupposes a subject that knows and objects—beings or portions of reality—that are known: it remains wholly internal to representation.
One might reply that other authoritative sources offer a loftier account.
The Oxford English Dictionary speaks of “union or absorption into God (or the divine) through contemplation and self-surrender,” and of the “spiritual apprehension of truths beyond normal intellect”.
Yet even this is conceptually imprisoned within representation.
Union, absorption, contemplation, “spiritual apprehension”—each term surreptitiously reinstates the very subject–object structure it claims to transcend, merely thinning the boundary.
Within Sacred Science, or sanātana dharma, both these Western exegetical readings reduce mysticism to a single yogic mode: bhakti-yoga, the devotional path.
But authentic mysticism is not confined to devotion or surrender.
Equally mystical—though the West rarely recognizes them—are jñāna-yoga, the yoga of knowledge, and karma-yoga, the yoga of action.
These paths—which are indeed difficult to explain to the Western “ordinary” mind, but which certainly do not involve abandonment at all—are active, luminous, creative modalities of realization, based not on surrender but on seeing and acting in truth.
They stand entirely at odds with the Western reduction of mysticism to an emotional or devotional state.
Thus both Treccani and the OED capture only a single devotional fragment of the mystical domain, mistaking a part for the whole.
And not only do they reduce mysticism to one of its forms; they interpret even this single form from within the representational gnoseology that generates the very subject–object polarity they presuppose.
Their “mysticism” is doubly limited: reduced to devotion, and conceived solely within the ordinary mind’s framework of a subject that surrenders and an object—“mysterious reality” or “the divine”—to which it surrenders.
It is therefore a spirituality articulated after representation, not beyond it: a refinement of representation’s polarity, never its overcoming.
If, however, one were to use the word mysticism correctly and technically—to designate a mode of knowledge alien to representation, one that does not arise from the subject–object structure—then the term could be used, but only in this aseptic, a-representational sense.
Yet since the ordinary mind invariably reduces every such mode to representation, drawing it back into its schema, it is wiser to refrain from labels: whatever name one gives is immediately absorbed into the very representational framework it was meant to transcend.
If one admits that representation is the mental modality that brings into being the subject and the many objects, it follows that no one who is a subject can see it.
And indeed, within Western thought this third level of representation has been, save for a few exceptions—unique and immense—almost entirely unconsidered.
No one doubts, nor has anyone ever doubted, that the mind knows external reality by substituting material elements with immaterial images—whether those images correspond truthfully to the represented phenomena or not.
These are the two levels of representation within which Western thought moves, and it is precisely this thought that holds representation to be the only mode of knowing reality.
A different view, however, while retaining these two observations, clarifies the nature of representation by saying that it modifies the reality in which it operates, dividing it into simulacra of abstract categories—subject and object.
This different view implies—or, rather, proceeds from the experiential realization—that representation is not the sole mode of knowing reality, but that there exists another mode anterior to representation itself, that is, anterior to the dichotomy between subject and object.
Thus, to summarize: representation is, for everyone and anyone, a mode of knowing reality in which—no one knows how—immaterial and conscious elements are substituted for the chemical and electrical particles generated through the mechanical interaction between phenomena external to the body and an individual’s body (or arising from physical phenomena within the body but still external to the mind).
The outcomes of this mechanical interaction—physically and objectively measurable—enter the central nervous system and at a certain point generate phantasmata: that is to say, poetically, the transformation of matter into thought occurs.
This is the platform of discursive thought as a whole.
By discursive thought one must understand thought itself—that is, the interweaving of ideas, reasonings, and connections born from those mental images that arise in consciousness through organic stimuli.
Discursive thought is thus the continuation of representation within consciousness.
Reason, in turn, is that portion of discursive thought which excludes from itself those thoughts that lack the requisites that reason, as a cultural phenomenon, from time to time imposes—ranging from causal nexus to the conformity of particular thoughts to higher formal super-thoughts.
How reason operates has been exhaustively shown—from within reason itself—by Aristotle.
For discursive thought, and for Western thought as such, representation is the only mode of knowing reality, precisely because discursive thought is already nothing but the mirror of representation: knowing nothing beyond representation, it asserts that only representation exists.
According to other, rarer but convergent views, however, representation is indeed the principal and “normal” mode of knowing reality, yet not the only one. According to this “third-level” view, representation is precisely that mode of knowing reality which functions through the presupposition of the categories of subject and object.
Continue in Part II
Created with ChatGPT-5 — concept by Antonio Viglino