Dialogues

---

Comments

Luis Rodríguez

I find the essay particularly valuable for the clarity with which it introduces an enormously complex problem: our tendency to confuse the representations we construct of reality with reality itself. The journey from Korzybski, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein to Eastern thought and, finally, Zen allows us to consider the same problem from very different perspectives without, I believe, suggesting that they are all saying exactly the same thing.

The idea that “the map is not the territory” works very well as a guiding thread. We need maps: concepts, words, theories, metaphors. As the essay itself points out, a map is not false simply because it is not the territory; precisely because it simplifies reality, it can help us find our way through it. The problem begins when we forget that we are using a map.

However, this very distinction raises a question for me: are our maps not also part of reality?

I agree that a representation is not what it represents. The word is not the thing, and no description can exhaust what it describes. But our words, thoughts and interpretations also occur in the world and have consequences within it. Language does not merely allow us to interpret reality; it also intervenes in it and transforms it. Concepts such as money, nation, property, borders or law depend on shared human representations, and yet their effects are undeniably real. The map is not the territory, but we are capable of altering the territory by following our maps.

This question connects directly with one of the questions in the introduction that interested me most: “Could this forgetting lie at the root of a significant part of human conflict?”.

The essay offers a very thought-provoking answer: when we cease to experience our ideas as representations, someone who thinks differently is no longer simply someone with a different interpretation, but someone who is wrong. Yet I think this opens up an enormous field that might deserve an essay of its own. To what extent does this mechanism really explain human conflict? What happens in conflicts involving power, material interests, fear or competition? And if we cease to absolutize our representations, does tolerance, compassion or a particular form of ethical behaviour necessarily follow??

This is why I think the question of ethics, which appears even in the title, could be explored much further. I do not necessarily see this as a shortcoming. On the contrary, perhaps it is a consequence of the fruitfulness of the proposal: once we provisionally accept its hypothesis, new questions begin to emerge that inevitably go beyond the scope of the essay.

Something similar happens with other issues that the essay only begins to open up: if all knowledge involves representation, what then do we mean by truth? Are some representations better than others? What place does science occupy as a method for constructing and correcting our maps? What happens if we also regard the “self” as a representation? And what implications would follow if we took the essay’s suggestion about time to its ultimate consequences and regarded “before” and “after” as constructions of thought?

In this context, I find the essay’s arrival at Zen particularly interesting. I would not draw a sharp opposition between West and East, but there does seem to be a difference in emphasis. The Western thinkers presented in the text primarily help us to understand the problem of representation. Zen seems to point towards something different: not so much understanding the relationship between representation and reality more clearly as transforming the way we experience it.

And here, for me, satori takes on fundamental importance. We can understand perfectly well the phrase “the map is not the territory” and, a few minutes later, argue with someone as though our interpretation were reality itself. It is one thing to know intellectually that our thoughts are representations and quite another to experience them consistently as such.

As I understand the essay’s proposal, satori would point precisely towards this transformation: thought does not disappear, maps remain necessary, but they cease to be confused with the territory.

Perhaps this is what interested me most about the text. The essay develops its central reflection convincingly, while at the same time opening doors onto problems that it cannot and does not seek to resolve: ethics, conflict, identity, truth, science and time. And I regard this as more of a virtue than a limitation. A good philosophical essay need not provide us with definitive answers; it may be far more interesting if, after reading it, we find ourselves asking questions that had never occurred to us before.

---

Author’s Response to Luis R

Thank you very much for your comment. I found it particularly interesting because it captures the trajectory of the essay quite well while, at the same time, raising questions that allow me to clarify more precisely what I am trying to say and inviting new perspectives that may broaden the scope of the essay through the contributions of its readers.

As to the question of whether our maps are also part of reality, the answer is, of course, yes. The essay does not seek to place representations outside reality. A thought, a word, an interpretation, or a map are also facts that happen. The question is to distinguish between what happens and the representation we make of it. When I use the word “fact” in the essay, I mean what happens, prior to any description, evaluation, or judgment we may make of it. Naturally, the moment I try to express that event in words—for example, by saying “one person has injured another”—I am already constructing a representation: I have distinguished persons, actions, and relationships and organized them through concepts. The fact is what happened; the sentence is already a map of that event. But that representation also happens: it can be thought, spoken, shared, and can produce consequences. Its representational character does not make it unreal; it simply means that we should not confuse its reality as a thought, word, or interpretation with that to which it refers. There is, therefore, no intention to deny the reality of representations or their capacity to intervene in other events.

The problem arises when we forget this difference. The fact that a representation is real and produces real consequences does not mean that it is what it represents. We can act upon the world by following our maps, but the map is still not the territory.

This seems particularly important to me in relation to the ethical question you raise. Recognizing that our evaluations are representations does not mean that we must abandon them, nor that all forms of conduct become equivalent, since the absence of an absolute foundation does not imply the absence of criteria. We can establish criteria, discuss them, modify them, and regard some actions as more appropriate than others without having to turn those criteria into absolute properties of reality.

I think that some of the questions you raise—what we mean by truth, whether some representations are better than others, what place science occupies in the construction of our maps, or how language intervenes in what happens—arise at a later stage than the problem the essay is trying to address. They are interesting questions, but before asking what we do with our representations, how we correct them, or what consequences they produce, my question is more elementary: how does a representation become so transparent that we cease to experience it as a representation and begin to experience it as what happens?

A simple example would be the process through which a child learns to recognize and name the fact that they “have five fingers.” Imagine that process for a moment: it is long and laborious, but once it has been learned, it becomes completely invisible. The representation “five fingers” becomes so transparent that it seems to be directly present in the fact itself. We no longer experience ourselves as conceptually organizing what we see; we simply experience that we have five fingers. But no one has “five fingers”—you have what you see when you look at your hand!

Something similar can happen when I regard someone as my adversary. Certain situations occur between that person and me, but “my adversary” is already a representation through which I organize and interpret them. That representation can become so transparent that I cease to experience that it is I who am interpreting what happens in this way: I no longer experience “I regard him as my adversary,” but simply “he is my adversary.” From that point on, I can fight him, try to persuade him, discredit him, or attempt to “bring him down.” The essay seeks to position itself precisely a little before all this, at that almost imperceptible moment when a representation ceases to be recognized as a representation and begins to be experienced as what happens.

From this point of view, the problem is not simply that some representations may contribute to what we call “conflict.” The very idea of conflict is already constructed through representations: “self” versus “other,” “mine” versus “yours,” “what I want” versus “what the other wants,” “what threatens me” versus “what I must defend.” When we forget that these distinctions are representations, we begin to experience them as though they belonged directly to the structure of reality, rather than recognizing them as representations that also occur within it.

Perhaps it is here that the question of representation acquires its ethical dimension, for the point is not to eliminate these distinctions, to renounce our criteria, or to cease acting, but to be able to use them without forgetting their representational nature: distinguishing between self and other, speaking of justice or injustice, regarding something as one’s own or another’s, and even recognizing someone as an adversary, without thereby turning those representations into properties of what happens.

And I agree with you that it is precisely at this point that the question posed by the essay remains open. If we ceased to experience our representations as what happens, what would remain of so much of what sets us against one another?

---

Comment by José Bestilleiro

First of all, congratulations on the hard work you have put into the essay and on the result.

Do you and I exist? Do before and after exist? When I read the essay, I understand it as taking for granted that individual existence and time do not exist. I truly believe that these questions could only be answered by someone who has reached that supposed state of satori. Leaving this aside, from the arguments developed in the essay, it is not clear to me how we arrive at the point where there is no separation between “you and me” and where there is no “before and after.” Of course, this may simply be my own interpretation, and the essay may not actually be saying what I understood it to say. If that is the case, I ask anyone reading this to be indulgent with me.

With that said, I will give my opinion.

An arrow flies through the air at great speed and embeds itself in a tree. This is a description of several events—one might even say an infinite number of events, depending on how exhaustive the description is. But that sentence is sufficient for what follows. The sentence above is a map, with everything that entails, and it is not reality. But at what point in the essay is the step justified from this to the claim that, in pure reality, without a map, there is no arrow separate from a tree? And there is another question: how do we move from one moment/event, in which the arrow is in the air and the trunk of the tree is undamaged (before), to another moment/event in which the arrow is embedded in the tree (after), if there is no before and after?

Of course, the distinction between the arrow and the tree is a map, but does this invalidate the existence of two different “somethings”? The same would apply to temporal succession: “before and after” are a map, but there is one event and another event, and the transition from one to the other. We place this succession within a framework and use the words “before and after.”

It is one thing to say that we are connected and interdependent in life, and another to say that we are not “somethings” with boundaries separating us from other “somethings.” A baby discovers its hand, gazing at it over and over again in fascination, but has no awareness that it is connected to them; nevertheless, if the baby hurts their hand, they cry and feel the pain, even though they do not know that they have been struck or that they have a limb ending in a hand. We give names and descriptions to everything that happens, but I believe that what happens does so in relation to distinct, separate “somethings.”

At the same time, there are events and objects that change; transformations take place. In a past “now” we had a different body; in another “now” the body has changed. We give this becoming between different “nows” a temporal context: before and after. Another example of transformation or change over time would be a before-and-after photograph. Although the only thing that is real is the instant, there are successive instants that the photograph or memory identifies as an instant before and an instant after because they allow us to see the change that has taken place. What we call the photograph and memory are there, even though we only know them through the map. But is transformation itself not also an event that, just like the photograph and memory, we can only perceive through the map?

At present, in my “now,” I am unable to imagine the disappearance of the distinction between “you and me” and between “before and after.”

---

Author’s Response to José B

Thank you very much for your comment. I find it particularly interesting because it takes some of the essay’s questions beyond the point at which the essay leaves them, and that is precisely one of the reasons why I decided to publish it and open this space for dialogue, so that others might continue exploring the questions it raises from their own perspectives. In that sense, your reading has particular value for me, as it shows how, starting from those questions, the reader also constructs their own maps.

I think, however, that there is an initial point worth clarifying. The essay does not take for granted the nonexistence of individuals or the nonexistence of time; it points out that “I,” “you,” “before,” and “after” are part of our representations, without taking the further step of claiming that, beyond them, there are no individuals, differences, or succession. To say “the self does not exist,” “separate things do not exist,” or “time does not exist” would also be to construct a representation of what happens.

The example of the arrow and the tree seems particularly well suited to exploring this question. You write, “An arrow flies through the air at great speed and embeds itself in a tree,” and you point out that this description is a map; you then ask whether recognizing that the distinction between the arrow and the tree is a map invalidates the existence of two different “somethings.” I do not think it does, although it is interesting to observe what happens when we try to go a little beyond the initial map: we stop speaking of an “arrow” and a “tree” and instead speak of “two different somethings,” and yet “something,” “two,” “different,” and “separate” remain ways in which we organize and express what happens.

Nor does this imply that such representations are false or that we should dispense with them. The question that interests me arises a little earlier, when this way of organizing what happens acquires such a character of self-evidence that we cease to experience ourselves as representing and, conversely, when we begin to notice that representation while it is operating.

The example of the photographs allows us to consider the question from another angle. When looking at two photographs, we can speak of the “same body” at two different moments and of the transformation that has occurred between them, although in doing so we have already introduced “identity,” “two moments,” “change,” or “transformation” to organize what the photographs show us. It is significant that you say that “the only thing that is real is the instant” and then go on to speak of “successive instants,” since, if we try to set aside our representations here as well, an “instant” can hardly be retained as a kind of unit that repeats itself, accumulates, and can be ordered alongside others; speaking of “this instant,” “another instant,” and the transition from one to the other already introduces the temporal structure that we were trying to find beyond the map. This does not demonstrate that succession or transformation do not exist either, but it does allow us to notice the difficulty that arises when we try to explain what the photographs show without introducing another representation.

Something similar occurs with the example of the baby and their hand. The fact that the baby does not yet have concepts such as “my hand” or “a blow” does not prevent the pain from occurring, but to infer from this that the pain occurs “in relation to distinct, separate somethings” already introduces several concepts that we take for granted in interpreting what has happened. This does not demonstrate that there is no separation, but neither does it allow us to establish separation independently of our representations.

our comment also brings to light something that, to a greater or lesser extent, we all do: when we notice that a particular way of understanding what happens is a representation, we tend almost immediately to replace it with another that seems more elementary, more precise, or closer to what is really there. In your case, once “arrow” and “tree” are recognized as representations, two different “somethings” appear; when “before” and “after” are recognized as representations, “successive instants” and the transformation between them appear; and when the question concerns “I” and “you,” there remain “somethings” with separate boundaries. This movement is part of our usual way of knowing, as we construct representations, compare them, correct them, and replace some with others, and much of our knowledge develops precisely in this way. The question raised by the essay reappears when, after recognizing one representation and replacing it with another that we consider more accurate, we once again forget that the latter is also a representation and begin to experience it as what happens; in this way, we can continue constructing representations that are more elementary, precise, or explanatory, but none of them thereby ceases to belong to the realm of representation. Rather than trying to resolve whether there are ultimately “two somethings,” “successive instants,” or separate individuals, what interests me, then, is what happens while we search for those answers.

At this point, even “the map is not the territory” reveals its own limitation, since we can understand the phrase, discuss it, and construct new representations from it, but knowing that we construct maps is still another map. The entire essay is also a map, as are these reflections we are sharing. What happens does not require a final explanation to replace the previous ones; the question is whether we can notice what we add when we represent it and, perhaps more difficult still, the new representations we construct when we believe we have left the previous ones behind.