Presence and totality

Presence, openness to the unexpected, seemingly opposes organized totality. Yet, an authentic presence to oneself and others can generate a living totality that transforms itself.

Two Radically Opposed Intentions

Presence is, a priori, an intention that stands in stark opposition to the intention of totality. I speak of intention because my focus here lies in questions about our development as human beings and our degree of freedom. Totality, in my view, concerns an organized system—or one we wish to organize. Totality is a vision, an ideal, a utopia. It is not the same as the whole, which represents the sum of all elements.

Thus, presence—the cultivation of an openness to life and all its unpredictability, to welcome what helps us grow—is philosophically and dynamically a concept that operates in opposition to totality. Presence is openness. Totality, in a way, is closure: analysis, coherence, a system of organization. Presence, on the other hand, aims at the multiplication of life itself.

Moving Beyond Romanticism

It is striking that among mammals, including humans, the moment of procreation is almost an absolute moment of presence—one that every human, even the greatest ascetics, holds in perspective: physical pleasure as the climax of presence, that instant of intense, absolutely overwhelming emotion where one almost merges with pure presence.

This vision of presence peaking in pleasure is somewhat simplistic and romantic, I admit, but I present it this way deliberately. The romanticized view of love paradoxically frames things in an extremely individualistic way: “Everyone must have their pleasure,” “Men experience more pleasure than women,” and other such clichés. This is not the focus of this article, but within this injunction toward absolute presence in pleasure lies a deeply cultural dimension—one that seems natural but is anything but. It involves a solitary self-forgetting, one that can align with the destruction of the other in abuse, rape, etc. Those who commit such acts do so, blinded by this overwhelming absolute presence that drives them to inflict the worst destruction just to experience those moments of absolute presence within themselves. This is a grave subject, not the topic of this article, but one that raises many questions about representations and how the culture of pleasure produces absolutely terrible relations of domination—though not exclusively, fortunately. Still, there is much to deconstruct here.

So I return to this anarchic presence, which must also be generous—hence my mention of sexual matters. Presence is not just for oneself. True presence is the encounter between a fully invested self and an otherness that helps it grow. This is why presence is so worth cultivating: it allows us to receive far more and thus grow in presence. It’s the paradox of being present-absent to oneself—the more absent we are (in the sense of being receptive), the more present we become, able to receive in our presence more strongly, more articulately, in alignment with who we are. Listening to oneself is listening to the world, because we are part of the world.

An Example from Documentary Filming

Right now, I’m filming a documentary about an alternative school (with progressive pedagogies). I often film there, focusing on the theme of children’s right to speech.

My initial idea was to have moments of filming—perhaps with a sound engineer—and participatory moments where I’d invite teachers or children to draw what speech means to them, or to film things themselves, etc.

Then one day, I brought several small cameras, similar to the one I use. I had three, plus a standalone audio recorder. After filming a kindergarten council meeting, some children who were heading out to play asked to look through the camera, to see and understand. Immediately, I handed two of them cameras and told them to go film. To a third, I gave the recorder and tasked them with recording others on the subject of speech. I entrusted them with the tools without further instructions, relying solely on their desire to act. And they filmed many fascinating things among themselves—interactions full of freedom and trust. I filmed too. When I edit, I’ll combine these two types of footage, shot with the same camera.

The teacher, somewhat surprised, asked if I wasn’t worried about my expensive equipment. I replied that no, I wasn’t. If I feared the cameras might break, I’d unintentionally forbid something. I’ve overcome this fear because I’ve experimented with this approach for years in various forms. Handing tools to others and trusting them has, through experience, emptied me of fear—and I’ve seen its effects on others.

My presence, my attentiveness to these children while filming them (before giving them cameras, which I hadn’t planned), meant I was present both to the images I was making and to the broader situation. I was present to my wish for the film’s subject—the right to speech—to align with its making. If only I decide what is said, shown, or recorded, the process itself contradicts its subject. Being present to all this expanded the capacity for producing images and sounds exponentially.

The children, entrusted with confidence, were fully present in what they did because it came from their own desire. Others wanted to film too. They organized how they shared the camera—but only because they wanted to, because they were fully present. I asked nothing. They came to me. I sensed my presence had to extend only to an optional proposal.

And so presence is an intention: I made a proposal in my presence, responding to theirs, which manifested in their curiosity about the camera. These presences met—because we are not alone in being present; we are present with others. When the level of intentional presence is high enough, these presences meet and multiply in their mutual intensities and capacities to build connections—or in this case, a film, or anything else. Thus, presence constructs a totality—one that emerges from presence.

Presence Gives Birth to Totality

Here, totality is not something external, like a sociological analysis of how things function. No, I consider presence and totality as philosophical concepts, as questions we pose to our representations of the world. We are not in analysis but in the creation of concepts—the creation of the world within us, a living world where we can act. This, to me, is the very object of philosophy.

Thus, presence produces a totality—a set of structured, organized things that structure and organize themselves through a high-quality presence, which becomes the source of a living, transforming totality.

The totality I speak of aligns more with Bergson’s or Sartre’s thought—a reality in the making—than with Hegel’s closed totality. But my approach differs in linking presence and totality, where one cannot exist without the other.

I used the filmmaking example to concretely illustrate how, without presence—or rather, the intention of presence—the totality of the experience shared by several people, the transformations it sparked in them, and even the film’s creation (with its process altered by the effectiveness of presence as a constructor of totality) would not have emerged. It shows their entanglement when we invest our intentions.

I am not analyzing but creating concepts—lives invested by our humanity, our singular thought as humans who profoundly alter the world. This is not at all abstract.

And this presence, which nourishes and gives birth to totality, receives in turn a validation of its meaning through the existence of that totality. Thus, presence is further invested as the source of other totalities. There is a kind of multiplicative feedback loop, a validating iteration with lived stages—something I experience in filming, as situations like this encourage me to go even further. After this, I presented the project to hundreds of high schoolers, telling them I’d bring cameras and they could film with me if they wished. This produces effects. They ask for the camera, I give it—all thanks to that first totality born from presence.

So there is an almost exponential potential in both presence and totality when they are intrinsically connected.