All that is out there

It is often said that philosophical thinking touches on reality in the full spectrum of its manifestations, in other words, that everything that is manifest is reducible to the philosophical and critical vision of the world.

This statement must be understood already within the relationship between the mind and the world, that is, already in the very representation of the world in thought. The objection about the futility of some manifest events, whether those whose irrelevance defies admitting their contribution to the spirit, those of pure practical utility, or those concerning the impurity of acts or bodies, stems from an almost total emphasis on the sensory or emotional reception of these events, rather than on a representation, which is characterized by the transformation of the sensory data into a concept, a symbol or a value.

In this relationship between the critical, thinking self, and the world, the first image that is formed is that of a separation and, with it, that of a dialectic. By establishing that there is the thinking self and the world outside it, we are separating the two spheres, and at the same time creating a relationship between them, producing an inner space and an outer space, forming two worlds that spread out in their regions: one that is human thought, the other that is the world outside it.

This is one of the foundations of all Western thought, which constitutes the paradigm on which centuries of philosophy have been produced. From Plato to Aristotle, through much of medieval theology to the foundations of modern thought – the central axis of which is the distinction between subject and object -.

Two aspects need to be mentioned first, and these help to understand even the Western paradigm itself:

Firstly, non-Western thought, especially Eastern philosophies (but not only), are not founded on this distinction, and regard with suspicion a dialectical conception of reality.. Non-western philosophies promote the continuity between perceiving and the perceived and propose the world’s insubmission to the inevitable formalization that thought performs on it.

Secondly, the relational and separatist nature of philosophy has a lot to do with pre-positioning the outside world as something already given, already created and, it could be said, passively available to the philosophical approach.

These objections – themselves the result of criticism – act as master keys to access other areas of philosophy in which, for example, the outside world is not seen as  “passive offer”, or, correlatively, in which both the subject, in some cases, and the outside world itself, in others, are deprived of substantial reality.

Therefore, when it is said that any manifestation can be philosophically “perceived”, it must be borne in mind that the two fields, that of the subject and that of what is external and manifest to it, are in a relationship which, within the general framework of the species, produces the intention of finding answers to the philosophical quest. It is on this first plane, the relational one, that philosophy is born, because without it philosophy would have no content with which to present itself as an activity of the mind.