Title and subtitle: Seeing-with-the-heart: the cosmovisions that inhabit our conflicts

Chapter One: Introductory considerations

1. The weak frame

2. Defining essential concepts intuitively

2.1. Blurry violence

3. My conflictive experience with cosmovisions

3.1. Thanatos drive vs heartful flow

4. Methodological considerations

5. Literature review

Chapter Two: From cosmovisions to (cosmo)visions

1. What is a cosmo-vision?

1.1. Etymology

1.2. Weltanschauungen

2. What is the (cosmo)vision?

2.1. Technological vision

2.2. Watching from the panopticon

2.3. Imperfect eyes: embodied vision

Chapter Three: Seeing-with-the-heart

1. Learning to see again

1
1.1. Transpersonal approach

1.2. Transrational approach

1.3. Elicitive Conflict Transformation

2. Fieldwork from the heart: vision-oriented approaches

Chapter Four: Conclusions and new paths

Chapter One: Introductory considerations

1. The weak frame

2
As a researcher in Transrational Peace Philosophy and Conflict Transformation, I feel

committed to introduce myself to my reader and to not take my personal connection to

my thesis topic for granted. However, drawing a realistic portrait of myself is an

endeavour bound to fail: there are thousands of nodes that connect my life with the topic,

some of them even unconsciously; and many different interpretations upon the same

experiences and facts which made me as I am nowadays. I consider relevant,

nevertheless, to point out to some general aspects that will provide a weak frame, as

Gianni Vattimo could call it1.

It is worthy to note that I was born in 1989 and I have grown up in Leganes, a

suburb-like city surrounding the capital of Spain, Madrid. I am the oldest brother of a

family of four members. My dad engaged himself and subsequently his family in

historical achievements of rights for people with disabilities in Spain. My mum, a

scientist mind, also inculcated me ideas of social justice through political songs

resignified as lullabies. And my sister is still a ravishing mystery to me, due to my

decision of beginning the journey which has taken me out of home, my city and my

country when she was still a pre-adolescent.

Both my Spanish culture and my family have been important topics in my life.

Finding my place both within Spanish traditions and family expectations has been one of

my biggest challenges: to find a right distance, so to say, in which I could still be myself

in harmony. I admit that it is very difficult for me to break the connections with them,

even when I let them go, even when I leave; I rather struggle until I find the distance,

either aloofness or closeness, in which we can live in a sort of communion. Contrary to

1
“Weak is a form of thinking which is aware of its own situatedness and contingency, takes into account
the historical background against which and within which it is formed […] and thus, per definition ‘cannot
occur according to a logic of verification and of rigorous demonstration, but only by means of that old,
eminently aesthetic instrument called intuition’ ([Vattimo] 2006; 237)” (Koppensteiner 2009: 19)
3
an exercise of cutting the threads, I tend to build bridges, or in other words, finding the

nourishing apartness within which individuals and communities flourish in a sort of

togetherness.

I began this self-journey with my adolescence, a time in which I started to build

my persona and respect my own decisions besides the external critiques and aggressions

of two years of bulling. One of those decisions was to live by the passion -intensity and

chaos- that my chest was asking me for, whose consequences provoked many

confrontations with these two essential figures of order and serenity, both my culture and

my family. As an adolescent I really went through a painful process, at all human levels

(from the material to the spiritual), to reach that aim of togetherness that I was looking

for. I still carry with me some consequences of that period such as the anxiety disorder

that affects me every day, and whose effects are similar to a heart attack that chases me

wherever I go.

I could find a proper distance, in the end, by merging passion (chaos) with formal

work (order) when I got a job in a jail for young people. However, this decision of

balancing the intense chaos that characterises me, the same that made it almost

impossible to live with my family, has deeply affected my life since then. The biggest

consequence of this process is the reduction of my life to my career. Everything that

belongs to my personal life -hobbies, partners, home and so forth- and my passion are so

regarding to my professional aims and duties. In the backstage of this decision of

focusing all my attention on my career was the expectation of receiving the respect of my

family and my society, but it was not enough, neither for them nor for me. Therefore, I

kept this process to other areas of my intimate life, for example the mere act of thinking.

Within philosophy I found both, on the one hand, a technical, highly complex and

4
ordered work and, on the other hand, a soil to grow intense and spontaneous ideas and

spirituality. Philosophy allows me so to change my mind constantly, to not fixate on any

one idea, although the transitions and transformations become possible thanks to a

meditated and sophisticated way of looking at philosophical issues/conflicts. Studying

philosophy was one of my biggest passions, but I took it into the same direction that I did

with my job: just as peace work has a negative effect expressed through the reduction of

life to professional career, so is true for philosophy where life is reduced to a discourse, a

concept.

In order to build the bridge that connects me with my family and my culture I made

the decision of focusing on my career and making my life almost an argument.

Nowadays, I am in the journey of freeing life from those chains which imprison the

passion, and increase my anxiety disorder. And yet, besides all its imbalances, I cannot

imagine my life without philosophy or peace work. I still can appreciate the beauty when

philosophy and conflict work come together in motion: philosophy is a process of

wearing new glasses to look at conflicts while peace work means to inhabit the conflicts

themselves. Freeing myself from the career and the concept must be achieved through

them, because both philosophy and conflicts make my heart beat.

2. Defining essential concepts intuitively

In sum, my theoretical perspective is very influenced by all these aspects which fuel each

other in various forms. They create the horizon, without exhausting it, from where I

5
breathe, think and write this thesis. They delineate my conflict: highlighting the passion

needed to regain spaces for living. Taking heed of those features, and how they bring me

closer to both philosophy and conflict research and work, my thesis topic has taken the

shape of the practice and systemic process of seeing-with-the-heart, as a crystallization of

them.

By seeing-with-the-heart I understand a way of going beyond the meta-narratives

of the world in which I live, the so-called cosmovisions, in order to resonate, to feel the

passion that moves the conflict and conflicting parties’ heart. I deem appropriate to define

already what I understand by cosmovision, the core concept from which I will begin this

thesis process. For that, I will use the wise words of Felix Duque Pajuelo, an important

and relevant contemporary Spanish philosopher and my teacher during my Bachelor's

studies. He describes cosmovision as: “un modo de ver y estar en el mundo, con la

pretensión además de modificarlo y justificarlo teórica y prácticamente en torno a un eje

ideal […]”2 (Youtube 2016; 00:06-00:24). In sum, seeing-with-the-heart has the

pretension of breaking through both the formal practices of conflict work, and philosophy

as both sides of the same coin.

It is the task of this thesis to raise awareness of how the idealistic cosmovisions

shape our realistic vision as conflict workers or conflict parties, and the other way

around. For instance, I think it is this visionary drive to transform the reality which makes

us, conflict workers, to work towards peace. Thus, from the awareness of this dialectical

interdependency trying to introduce the heart; that is, to insert life -liberated from

discourses and expectations- to our vision with the aim of facilitating a process of conflict

transformation.

2
“It is a way of seeing and being in the world, with the further aspiration of theoretically and practically
changing and justifying it around an ideal axis” (Translated by the author)
6
 I use the heart as the core metaphor for the irruption of passion in our worldly life.

As Lederach says:

The heart is the center of life in the human body. Physically, it generates the pulse that
sustains life. Figuratively, it is the center of our emotions, intuitions, and spiritual life.
This is the place from which we go out and to which we return for guidance, sustenance,
and direction. (2003; 17)

Altogether, pulse, emotions, intuitions and spiritual life conform to what I call the

passion depicted by the heart. Intuitively, when in Spanish we refer to the heart to qualify

our actions, indeed, we mean to do something with passion. It is where the life of

conflicts goes out and comes back, as the blood in our bodies. The coagulation of this

blood at any point triggers -following the metaphor- a heart attack and the death of the

hosting body as I do everyday through the anxiety or, in other words, the violence.

Before I move forward, I deem necessary to say something else about one of the

biggest concepts of this thesis, cosmovision, and its relationship with conflict work. At

this preliminary state, though, I still want to speak from my intuitions about those terms

and its relations. Further, and before leaving definitely the personal considerations aside,

I deem necessary to explain a bit more in detail how this relationship is rooted in my life.

2.1. Blurry violence

It seems clear to me that reflecting upon the axioms that structure the way of living and

thinking of a historically and geographically determined society can open the possibility

to really transform it. In other words, if we gather the essential information about how

people perceive their world and live it, we will be a step closer to build a holistic

understanding of their conflicts. However, this statement also implies to accept that we all

7
have -in a societal and individual level- different ways of seeing and being in the world;

our body and its relations with the world and other bodies can represent the

‘untransferable’ cardinal spot from which we create our hi/story and our territory. Hence,

cosmovisions become: on the one hand, a sign of diversity and the cornerstone of a

flourishing relativism for some; while, on the other side, can be used for others as an

argument to give up our endeavours for mutual understanding, and supporting

anthropological pessimism instead, which accepts violence as our most authentic fate 3.

This paradox, that I will call the conflict paradox of cosmovisions, by which diversity and

anthropological pessimism, which in a first sight could seem repelling to each other,

finally come together under the concept of cosmovisions. Both traditions accept the

existence of pluralism, though each of them assumes it very differently. For relativism

there is any thinkable way to support the predominance of one cosmovision over another,

the aim is to reach a balance between all of them. By contrast, the Hobbesian thesis

assumes that some of those cosmovisions will try to destroy the others (homo homini

lupus) so the aim is to violently impose a unique vision which could prevent further

confrontations.

The underlying hypothesis is that each of them, Hobbesian’s thesis and relativism,

is a cosmovision in-and-of-itself, and in their plurality, react violently in different ways

and against different things. For me, this hypothesis pivots around questions that point

directly to the deep core of conflicts. These questions include: Why and how does this

happen? Why and how do we identify certain aspects of our life as violent? Following

Hobbesian’s thesis and relativism, why and how do different people and communities can

identify what is violent and peaceful for themselves? It is this paradox that makes

3
See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power, of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and
Civill (1651).
8
cosmovisions so appealing to me for conflict studies, the blurry condition of violence that

they reveal.

Johan Galtung, one of the most important fathers of the contemporary peace

studies, developed a very sophisticated theory around violence describing its types and

features. In the beginning, his theory differentiated just between direct violence and

structural violence; that is, aggressions in the form of events or processes, respectively 4.

But, few years afterwards, his theory became whole with a third component: cultural

violence. This type of violence is defined as “any aspect of a culture that can be used to

legitimize violence in its direct or structural form.” (1990; 291). For me, the interesting

part of this classification of different forms of cultural violence is the common feature of

invisibility, in relation to the visual aspect involved within the concept cosmo-vision. As

Galtung says: “[c]ultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, and even

feel, right -or at least not wrong-” (1990; 291); cultural legitimization of violence can

make us see, for instance, “exploitation and/or repression as normal and natural, or into

not seeing them […] at all” (1990; 295). The concept of cultural violence explains the

conflict paradox of cosmovisions pointing out to the culture as responsible and capable of

making “reality opaque, so that we do not see the violent act or fact, or at least not that

violent” (1990; 292).

It is necessary, nevertheless, to set a limit to the accusations towards culture: no

one can justifiably affirm that an entire culture is violent, nor culture itself; however,

within each culture there are some violent elements. In other words, there is a clear line

between cultural violence and violent cultures. However, even Galtung accepts that there

are some general positions within a culture that make it violent in a holistic sense. An

example of this, in the author’s perspective, is the Occidental culture. Galtung even says
4
See Galtung, Johan, “Cultural Violence” in Journal of Peace Research Vol.27, No. 3. (1990), pp. 291-305.
9
that any act of peace emanating from the Occidental culture is closer to a miracle than

anything else. Galtung names this holistic analysis of cultures as cosmology; in the same

line of what I have named cosmovision 5. The study of this cultural violence tries to

analyse the “roots of the roots, so to speak: the cultural genetic code that generates

cultural elements and reproduce itself through them” (1990; 301). The challenges of

transforming such a type of violence are, Galtung says, at least “as difficult as changing

the biological genetic code. Moreover, even if it were possible, ‘cultural engineer’ might

be a form of violence as problematic as genetic engineering is proving” (1990; 301). Far

from giving up to this risk, I want to face it within this thesis. Taking Galtung’s words,

“[t]his is a very difficult and important field for future peace research” (1990; 301). And,

I trust the capability of transrational and elecitive approaches to peacefully assume this

risk. What lies underneath is the challenge of working with an opaque reality and a blurry

violence; in the end, the reality in which us, human beings, live into.

For me, this violence of cosmovisions remains as the incapacity to see our daily

conflicts beyond the meta-narratives, and the inability to take consideration of the

feelings. The contrary would be to see with the heart; that is, emphatically, beyond words,

concepts or expectations, accepting conflicts as “life-giving opportunities” for “human

relationships” (2003; 17), as Lederach would say speaking about the heart. Based on the

conflict paradox, the actors and actresses who have clashed can felt legitimized for

violence in the same extent: either they will try to violently impose a unique vision, or

violently encourage counter-cosmovisions to create a new balance. In general terms, we

will always perceive the other as an aggressor and ourselves as victims, when our

conflicts are analysed by cosmovisions. This means that our aggressions will always be

supported enough by qualified reasons, while the other’s attacks will always come from
5
It is important for me and this thesis to use the term cosmovision, instead of cosmology, for the main
visual feature which I identify with this type of violence: the invisibility.
10
irrational feelings of anger, greed, cruelty or evilness. Given this frame, the risk of any

cosmovision is to make violence appearing as a movement towards peace (either peace

out of harmony, justice, security, or truth); it also contains the potential for making

invisible the accuracy of the feelings that move other people to commit aggression.

Paraphrasing Guy Debord’s sentence: any cosmovision, as an ordered way of seeing the

world, immanently embeds the potential for making appear ‘the truth just a moment of

the false’ (1995; 10). We, thus, live in the darkness of the cosmovisions which allow us to

visualise a cosmos while they disallow us to see life beyond the veil of Maya.

John Paul Lederach, whom I cited his work earlier, is one of the most renowned

fathers and a stirring author of the conflict transformation school. For him, “conflict

transformation is more than a set of specific techniques; it is a way of looking as well as

seeing. So conflict transformation suggests a set of lenses through which we view social

conflict” (2003; 9). Based on the lens metaphor, conflict transformation approach seems

to have been born to work with the blurry condition of violence. Lederach uses the

metaphor to explain the importance of using several intertwined lenses to look at any

conflict: there is always “out-of-focus layers of reality […]” and because of that “[w]e

cannot expect a single lens to do more than it was intended to do, and we cannot assume

that what it brings into focus is the whole picture” (2003; 10). What I try to show is the

tendency for the meta-narratives of any cosmovision to act so: as if the lens provided by

it would be the only one, or the only valid. As consequence of this, the rest of the reality

that remains present becomes invisible. In order to become visible, any party within the

conflict requires moving into the light of the only one lens provided for the hegemony

discourse. Here is where the violent core of cosmovisions lives blurring other aspects,

individuals, societies and, in general terms, phenomena of our existence: we might not

11
see certain things, and the things that we do see could have been forced to take a fake

shape to please our mindsets. Therefore, it is clear how uncertainty turns violence in the

hands of blind beings like us.

My question or research puzzle is thus, paraphrasing Lederach’s words: how do

we create spaces and processes that encourage people to address and articulate a

positive sense of cosmovision in relationship to other people and groups, but not

invisibilizing them? (2003; 56). *(aclarar que esto es una influencia, no mi pregunta)

With this question I am also trying to answer to myself whether or not it is possible for

conflict workers to facilitate any conflict transformation process by directly working with

the blindness of themselves and the conflict; that is, working with their heart. Notice that,

working with the blindness is also working with their visions of the world that they want

to create through their actions. For that, I will pose several sub-questions that should

support the research journey. They include: What is a cosmovision? How to move for

cosmovisions to (cosmo)vision? What is seeing-with-the-heart as an elicitive conflict

transformation?

3. My conflictive experience with cosmovisions

As I previously mentioned, this approach is intuitively rooted into my life and the

experiences I made. So before diving into the thesis content, I would like to fill the weak

framework provided at the beginning with more colours and tones about how both my

country -in terms of culture, institutions, national identity and so on- and my family’s

expectations have influenced my personal cosmovision.

12
 The first thing that I cannot forget is that Spain lived forty years of Christian

dictatorship from 1939 to 1978. This historical fact has been deeply embedded in my

family: all my grandparents supported that regime in different ways. For example, my

great grandfather was murdered during the civil war by republicans 6, giving a narrow

space to my grandfather to decide which party he would support. A time after this

traumatic event, my grandfather decided to enlist in the army during the dictatorship. My

other grandfather was a mayor of a small town in Andalucia for a short period of time,

therefore one of the politicians of the fascist regime. Nevertheless, my parents were

always secretly against the Spanish dictatorship, passing their ideas against fascism and

their love for the new coined Spanish democracy to me and my sister. Although, in my

perception we all -my grandparents, parents and my sister and me- belong not just to

different generations but also to different worlds. I belong to the first generation that was

born in democracy, a decade after the transition from the dictatorship to the new regime

was publicly signed in referendum. Maybe due to that I have never been interested in the

old-fashioned stories of war and Spain under the fascist regime. In the same line, Spain

became part of the European Union three years before I was born, so it always looked

natural to me the link between democracy in Spain and European values and institutions,

not so the fascist ideologies that occupied the Spanish government. For instance, I always

thought about the Nazi’s regime as a more important event for the construction of my

collective identity than the Spanish civil war.

However, in my family I am also part of the generation that was forced to

emigrate abroad looking for better opportunities due to the economic crisis of 2008. On

the one hand, this destroyed the small hope I still contained towards Europe. On the other

hand, this did not happen since my great grandparents, and thus it put even more distance
6
The two main parties within the civil war were republicans who supported the current democratic
regime and the Christian fascists who committed the coup d’état.
13
regarding my grandparents and parents’ world and mine. In consequence, I have

struggled with the clash of expectations that these different experiences of the world have

shaped, which I felt at many levels: material, emotional, social, political, spiritual and so

forth. The lack of understanding with all those actors and actresses, either my family or

my fellow citizens, even though we spoke the same language, we share a history and a

culture, it constantly provoked a feeling of despair in my chest. It really made me feel

excluded and invisible regarding not just my opinion about that shared world, but also my

personal decisions. For a very long time, I could not find a single person in my

environment who expressed a minimum of resonance towards me, what directly made me

doubt about myself and my perceptions and senses.

During my Bachelor in philosophy I started to look at the thinkers and the

intellectual atmosphere before and during the civil war in Spain. It was the first time I

developed a minimum interest in this issue. I began to understand many aspects of how

and why people in Spain, and me included, think in the way we still do. Knowing who

won the war and ruled the country with a frightening repression became essential to

familiarise myself with our current behaviour and conflicts. Simultaneously with this

process of understanding the cosmovision I was born into, it also disappeared the feeling

of invisibleness. Finally, I saw the other world that my family and friends were talking

about.

3.1. Thanatos drive vs heartful flow

Among all the expressions of my Spanish culture I would like to highlight one that I can

really find in my surroundings and myself and it was determinant to make me aware

about the strength of cosmovisions. To exemplify it, I will refer to a sentence that the
14
victorious fascists used to scream with a nuance of pride and in a heroic tone: “¡Mueran

los intelectuales! ¡Viva la muerte!”7 (Núñez Florencio 2014; 37). In many ways, that

sentence sets a cosmovision in which Thanatos needs to defeat Eros, in which one does

not have to love nor understand life, but to worship death.

This idea became a feeling in my chest even before knowing about the exact

sentence and its historical background. However, my restless mind and chest, full of this

amount of rage and hate against life, found a calm pond in Miguel de Unamuno, the

biggest discourse for the claim of life that I have encountered in Spanish. In his well-

known speech in the opening ceremony of the university course of 1936 -the first year of

the civil war-, he aptly proclaimed: “Acabo de oír el grito de ¡viva la muerte! Esto suena

lo mismo que ¡muera la vida! […] Venceréis pero no convenceréis” (Núñez Florencio

2014; 37)8. This deathly desire denounced by Unamuno is indeed the hallmark of the

fascist regime that has conquered the Spanish cosmovision, and it has protracted until

now in different forms and events. Many of my fellow citizens would not agree. They can

say that I am taking a very negative as well as personal interpretation of our history, and I

can agree with them thereof. This is just an opinion expressed out of my personal and, at

times, very critical perspective of Spain; or what I consider my particular cosmovision.

Yet, this perspective matters within this paper inasmuch as it was at the bottom of my

decision of leaving my country and living in Mexico: I needed to take some distance

from such a Thanatos driven atmosphere. I was also myself embedded within the Spanish

bleakness, carrying the fetters of its thanatology while longing for a heartful flowing with

life.

7
The intellectuals die! Let death live! (Translated by the author)
8
I just heard the scream of let death live! This sounds the same than let life die! You will win but not
convince. (Translated by the author)
15
 During my time in Mexico I was surprised of finding different aspects of my

Spanish culture that were yet unknown to me. I learned by then that the Spanish

cosmovision grows up even thousands of kilometres away from our nation-state’s

borders. This is so given the fact that both countries developed together for several

centuries, also it was the geographical spot where the Republican government was set up

until the international community recognised the fascist government of the peninsula. As

professor Felix Duque says, any cosmovision “se resiste con razón a ser encerrada en las

estrecheces de una época limitada por dos fechas, más o menos arbitrarias” 9 (Youtube

2016; 00:26-00:37), and I will add, also by random and narrowed geographical limits.

Beyond anything else, in Mexico I found a Spanish culture which claims for life.

In Mexico, people worship life up to the point of celebrating its energy in graves during

the so-called ‘national festivity of deaths’. This showed me that the people from a

different geographical spot or an epoch can see the world from the perspective of life

regardless the mere bloody facts that flood its territory, while the apparent peaceful

nation-states are stuck in thoughts of death and destruction. Thus, thanks to my

experiences living in different countries I have become aware of the importance of the

cosmovisions to shape our experiences.

Moreover, during the time I was living in Mexico I started to write a possible PhD

drawn on John Paul Ricoeur and Jorge Manrique. Not by coincidence, the topic was

precisely death, based on these new experiences I was encountering. What I discovered

by then was that already in 149610, in Spain there was a firm belief in what Ricoeur will

called five centuries later (in 1990’s) narrative identity 11; that is, life is much more than
9
“It resists, of course, against being enclosure to the narrow space of epochs bounded by two dates,
randomly specify” (Translated by the author)
10
Approximate date of the publication of Jorge Manrique’s ‘Coplas a la muerte de Don Rodrigo Manrique,
su padre’ (1996) [Coplas to the death of Don Rodrigo Manrique, his father].
11
See Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Identity’ (1991; 73-81) in Philosophy Today, 35:1.
16
bios, life is a tale which deserves to be told. Closer to any spiritual cosmovision than to

any scientist modern Occidental approach, for Jorge Manrique -as well as Paul Ricoeur-

death is also part of life. If something can limit life, it is not the extinction of our human

body, but the oblivion that follows the silence upon our hi/story; that is, a sort of

invisibleness that covers certain realities. Here appears again the idea that opened this

paper: cosmovisions contain a high potentiality for this sort of aggression that I call now

invisibility. Also, this approach towards life and death finally broke in my mind the

habitus of the Spanish thanatology. There is no worship of Death without worshipping

Life. I witnessed within me a powerful catharsis when I realised I focused for too long on

one aspect of life, death. With this I also broke down the biggest symbol of dichotomies

in the Spanish tradition: Death and Life. Removing dichotomous thinking allow the

blossoming of endless possibilities for peace and visibility. In many ways, the circular

thinking bears the energetical flowing to our lives; while other binary thinking always

tries to build up walls where to get stuck and protect behind.

4. Methodological considerations

There are two key points in all of this: on the one hand, I am aware that the

transformation of a conflict driven, for instance, by the compulsory instinct of death, like

the Spanish one, requires modifying the way we look at life itself; that is, to transform the

cosmovision that is structuring our stories about how we dwell this world. In this line,

this exercise involves an ontological transformation, or philosophical exercise which

likely could generate a foreseeable increment of phenomena that inhabit our very

individual but also communal tales. It is, in certain way, the metaphorical exercise of

opening our eyes to appreciate more stories that deserve to be told or be lived. For

17
instance, in the Spanish context from where I come from, this is as well the chance for

me to witness a catharsis from the geometrical world rule by the square and the straight

line, typical of rational mindsets, to enter another one governed by the circle and the

curved lines, represented by spiritual traditions beyond the morality. Whereas the first

ones are just capable of unidirectional ways of observing the reality, the second ones try

to inhabit the reality from a phenomenological perspective, giving room to the world to

look back. Remembering a beautiful poem of the anarchist Catalan poet Jesus Lizano, I

can say with him that:

A mi me gustan las personas curvas,/ las ideas curvas,/ los caminos curvos,/ porque el
mundo es curvo/ y la tierra es curva/ y el movimiento es curvo/[…]/ los sentimientos
curvos;/ […]/ las palabras curvas,/ el amor es curvo;/ ¡el vientre es curvo!;/ lo diverso es
curvo./ A mí me gustan los mundos curvos.[…]12 (1989; 33-34)

On the other hand, this particular transformation goes beyond the theoretical debate

about life, and it requires to embrace life by itself. In other words, I believe that our

conflicts do not transform by thinking about the transformation that is needed, but by

living within the conflict and actively witnessing the transformation that is embedded in

life itself. Beholding life empowers our experiences and our capacity for transformation.

These are the basic points of the definition of Conflict Transformation, as a whole school

of thought, as defined by Martínez Guzmán13: witnessing/acknowledging and

empowering.

It is worthwhile noticing, for methodological purposes, that this thesis faces different

challenges such as: it criticises cosmovisions’ violence while being aware of the author’s

affiliation to several cosmovisions; tries to explore passion without concepts while

12
“I like curved people, / curved ideas, / curved paths, / because the world is curved / and the earth is
curved / and the movement is curved / [...] / feelings, curved / [...] / the words, curved, / the love is
curved, / the belly is curved, / the diverse is curved. / I like the curved worlds [...]” (Translated by the
author)
13
See Martínez Guzmán Filosofía para hacer las paces (2009; 197ss.).
18
working theoretically, and so forth. There are, nevertheless, some pioneers on this kind of

exercises like those authors of the Transpersonal and Transrational School, the spiritual

traditions as well as Innsbruck’s Conflict Transformation approach. Thus, I will follow

closely to all of them through this intellectual but also life exercise in order to not get

stuck into these apparent contradictions. Taking heed of those previous efforts on this

field and its internal contradictions, the path proposed by this thesis consist in: Firstly,

posing that cosmovision is, as I mentioned above, an idealistic way of seeing and being in

the world, moved by ideas of a perfect world. Secondly, introducing the need of an

imperfect vision that remains human, as Francisco Muñoz could call it; that is, to remove

the cosmological (perfect) expectation from our vision. Thirdly, it can still be achieved a

further position by which one can really works beyond the ego, in which the seer is also

part of the seen14. Thereby the shift that this position needs is towards the seeing and

being in the world itself. Taking this position seriously, one needs to come back to the

body where I will highlight the heart as the benchmark. Hence, I can finally state that my

main puzzle research is to develop a theory and a practice of seeing-with-the-heart. From

here I will try to build up a vision-oriented approach for conflict transformation in which

witnessing -taking into account the circularity of a new phenomenological and embodied

way of seeing- will become a core way for empowering life in its transformative

capability, to flood life with a different passion than the one promoted by hegemony

world-views.

In consequence, there is a remarkable effort and desire to facilitate a safe process in

which the actors and actresses of a given conflict could test themselves in transforming

their cultural genes, as the counterpart of changing the genetics of their world. Conflicts
14
The idea here is not to destroy the individuality of the Self in the form of an ego, “but the philosophical
and ethical question of an understanding of the self beyond individuality and the distinctive way of life
that might ensue from such a conception; as well as in general terms of the questions of being and
becoming” (Koppensteiner 2009: 23).
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have been a gift for me, in so far as they contained the potentiality to actualize, test and

change old, idealistic and stuck ideas that conditioned my way of seeing, being and

becoming in the world. These different conflicts have been a chance to unfold my

potentialities through modifying my conceptions about the world. Likely, many would

agree with me that changing our mind is a very prominent indicator that a conflict can

transform. Nevertheless, I am not trying to write a prescriptive intervention to modify the

belief system of people as if I will try to manipulate their cultural genetics, as Galtung

was saying. Rather, this is a way of constructing a method in which people can increment

their capacity to imagine different worlds, by supporting them in the tough process of

opening their eyes towards new phenomena as well as seeing old processes from radical

new perspectives. Beyond anything else, this is a work of providing a safe environment

for the very unsecure, risky and frightening process of regaining passion to look at our

conflicts, and thus, transforming our way of seeing and inhabiting them *(frase muy

clara). This work could just end as soon as a safe space is provided. Whether or not

people decide to go further into the process is still a question that they shall answer by

themselves. The new cosmovisions that will appear after this process is not the aim or the

interest neither of me nor of this thesis.

In sum, my main aim is to develop a whole new frame in terms of methods for

conflict transformation, following the work already started by Wolfgang Dietrich in his

second volume of Many Peaces (2013). The first volume (Dietrich 2012) sets the basics

of his model of transrational conflict transformation and throughout this book the author

traverses the main historical cosmovisions from spiritual traditions to the postmodernity,

passing through moral and modern ones. His second volume, taking heed of these

cosmovisions, sets the division of methods for conflict transformation into three

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categories: breath, movement and voice. This selection is not random, it rather lays on the

sacred triad of the human life in many energetic traditions (Koppenstainer 2017). That is

why Wolfgang Dietrich decided to gather all the methods of elicitive conflict

transformation around them15. Drawing on the vocabulary used by Dietrich, I decided to

name my contribution to his astonishing work as vision-oriented approaches. This thesis

tries to shed the light on the limits, as well as potentialities and first definitions of such a

new frame. I also feel the commitment to acknowledge that, despite of not having its own

space in Dietrich’s division of elicitive methods, the vision is very present all over its

work and the facilitation tools present in his oeuvre.

5. Literature review

This section is dedicated to explain the main literature works that this thesis will draw

from. Thus, the first author who shall be analysed is the German philosopher Wilhelm

Dilthey who took, as a cornerstone of his own work, the word Weltanschauung (World-

view; Cosmovision) from Gillermo von Humboldt. In his Geisteswissenschaften (The

human sciences) the author explains how our human experiences and feelings are

constructed by the principles of the culture in which we have born into. In the same

sense, any human production in the cultural world endlessly depicts these principles

closing what it could be called a virtuous circle. Essential for this thesis will be the

Volume I (1989), Volume II (2010), Volume III (2002) and Volume IV (1996) of the

selection of Dilthey’s work made by Rudolf A. Markkreel and Frithjof Rodi, and the

article “The Types of World-view and their Development in the Metaphysical Systems”

15
See second volume of Dietrich’s work Many Peaces (2013).
21
(1976). Altogether, they will inform my knowledge about what cosmovision means

(Weltanschauung).

In order to understand how he uses the concept of World-view, it is important to

see the connection of Dilthey’s thought with the hermeneutical school to which he

belonged. The history and the story of the concept will be the link to this school of

thought for several years. One of its most famous representative is Martin Heidegger,

who strongly critics the concept of world-view. The phenomenological and hermeneutical

analysis that Heidegger develops in ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question

Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977; 115-54) explains clearly the history and

the territory in which cosmovisions were born. Cosmovision itself appears then

fundamental for human sciences within the modern metaphysics, whose beginning

Heidegger dated with Plato’s oeuvre.

After Heidegger’s work we can appreciate that in modernity the way in which we

look at the world is through the scientific observation; not seeing, not looking, but

observing. In short, the gap between subject and object inaugurated by Plato, constitutes

the time of cosmovisions and observation. This will imply the introduction of technology

in the human capacity of seeing as if the body, by its radical separation from the world,

would be incapable of seeing the Self of things. When the human stops to see and begins

to observe, the era of the technological visions starts. The implications of this statement

are crystal clear with Descartes’ Meditations on first philosophy (1641). Descartes

encourage a strong scepticism towards the body and, within it, the eyes which give us

incorrect information about the world. Instead, he poses that only science can show the

world as it is. Therefore, with Descartes the world transformed itself to something new:

heartless information or data.

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 However, this modern approach has faced already a huge crash in the past century.

What philosophy has taught us is that this way of looking at the world was not as pure

and heartless as it self-claimed to be. Moreover, what the postmodernity and the so-called

continental philosophy pointed out during the twentieth century was that science has

manipulated our way of seeing the human being and the world and has built a

claustrophobic reality in which some subjects were excluded from or using the synonym:

remained invisibles. One of the most important authors of this critique to the modern eye

is Michael Foucault. His thesis claims for a new endeavour to understand how the reality

is politically constructed and how we cannot separate our desires and prejudices from our

way of seeing the otherness. This could be understood as a new beginning of the human

responsibility with the modern cosmovision and its effects. In general terms, one could

see this attitude of responsibility towards the violent consequences of modernity through

the whole contemporary thinking. Books that are relevant for this thesis are The order of

things (1994) and Discipline and Punish (2013). Yet, there is the most radical text of

Foucault that will be very present for my endeavour: The order of discourse (1981; 48-

79). Within this last work of the French philosopher, the cosmovision becomes discourse;

a very specific one, a discourse of domination. Having Nietzsche very present in his

mind, Foucault develops the genealogy of different principles of Western culture to prove

the domination strive that moves us. Hand in hand with this analysis, we will be reaching

the definition, above cited, of cosmology provided by Galtung in his theory about cultural

violence.

It is important to understand the line which separates cosmovision and discourse

from ideology. Taking heed of its character of domination, this link seems very present

and almost necessary. In his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1999)

23
Karl Marx explains the term ideology in a very close sense as I have done here with

cosmovisions. However, for me, there are two crucial differences between them: the

structure and the falsehood. In the Marxist theory, ideologies are a consequence of the

capitalist structure, and created to maintain the same social hierarchy. In this sense, the

term ideology carries a falsehood halo that is not necessarily present with cosmovisions.

Moreover, for Foucault and other post-structuralist thinkers, cosmologies and discourses

are an entity by themselves and do not serve to any structural purpose or external entity

beyond the individual or the community in which they have appeared. Cosmovisions are

not false capitalistic constructions about the reality, but partial ways of seeing it.

Nevertheless, cosmovision still remains as an independent entity in our

argumentation; therefore, the separation from the subject and the object, or subject and

discourse will still be a handicap for the circular becoming of life. Thus, it is necessary to

bring not just the cosmovision nor discourse but our vision to the body, again. For that,

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology will be of high relevance, like his works

Phenomenology of Perception (2002) and The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by

Working Notes (1968).

Throughout the post-structuralist revision, our main concept will be twisted: I will

start to speak about an embodied (cosmo)vision. However, as my reader has noticed, the

concept wears a line-through. This line, for me, clearly exemplifies the way in which

Postmodernity looks at life. In order to introduce this new shape, I will support my

research using Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984). As this author sustained, we

live the end of the meta-narratives’ era in which cosmological thinking could still be

assumed by people. However, postmodernity is fighting back and for with these meta-

narratives to really conclude this process. Cosmovisions will not disappear, then, for the

24
postmodern condition, rather it will appear as a researchable topic. Also, it is important to

remember that cosmos means perfection, purity, finished, within the classic Greek. Here

the question that follows is: can the human world be perfect, pure, finished? The Spanish

thinker, Francisco Muñoz, developed his theory on the field of conflict studies around his

concept paz imperfecta (imperfect peace) (2006; 241-282). His homonymous text

encourages the term imperfect as a critique of any expectation of perfectionism in the

human world. Thus, he sustains that we are more able to see violence because it is a

finished action, already committed by someone, somewhere and at some time, than to see

the imperfect condition of peace, always unfinished and always a task to-be-done. The

line-through is also a symbol of the imperfection that will rule the postmodernity vision

which could be called, in other terms, imperfect vision.

However, it is important to notice that, even though postmodernity develops this

new golden age of imperfection, it remains as a modern construct. The Innsbruck’s school

of conflict transformation sustains that postmodernity is a continuation of modernity for

other means, and they still feed the monsters produced by the rationality’s dreams, as

Goya could say. In its own way, postmodernity is incapable of breaking the concept to

reach life; that is, it still supports its critiques with a rational point of view. In

consequence, for postmodernity there is no end of cosmovisions -which doubly justifies

me to leave the word cosmo-, but it exists as a reaction towards them. This is a key point

to understand the way in which postmodernity built its vision: as a counter-observation

or, as Paul Ricoeur has called it, “suspicion” (1978; 213).

At this point, it will be necessary to revisit Beyond Postmodernity: Living and

Thinking. A Nietzschean Journey (Koppensteiner 2009). Within this text, there are the

foundations of the transition from postmodernity towards transrationality, not without

25
specifying the limitations of postmodern arguments for approaching conflicts. Here the

key point is to dissolve the unpeaceful separation between the subject and the object that

modernity once installed. The Art of the Transpersonal Self (Koppensteiner 2009) will

introduce the school of transpersonality by which there is not such a separation and opens

a whole new world of phenomena such as spiritual as well as transrational ones. Also, in

order to search in depth about this key twist of our theory I will use Paths Beyond Ego:

The Transpersonal Vision (Walsh, Vaughan 1993). Finally, vision will not be counter-

observing nor suspicion but seeing; that is, a trustworthy movement in which the seer

becomes the seen and both the action of seeing in itself.

With this last movement, finally I could start to talk about seeing-with-the-heart

and not just (cosmo)vision. As I will show, cosmovisions are still important in the

transrational perspective. For example, in Interpretations of Peace in History and Culture

(2012) professor Dietrich explores the main historical cosmovisions regarding peace:

spiritual, moral, modern and postmodern16. Based on it, he further explores in Elicitive

Conflict Transformation and the Transrational Shift in Peace Politics (2013) the methods

of elicitive conflict transformation that could be used in each situation regarding the

principles that rule each conflictive relationship. Not by coincidence, the tool of Elicitive

Conflict Mapping (ECM) created by this school shows clearly the link with the idea of

cosmovision in order to analyse an episode of a conflict as Josefina Echavarría explains

in ‘Elicitive Conflict Mapping: A Practical Tool for Peace-work’ (2014). However, as I

will also try to demonstrate, the door opened by the elicitive, transrational and

transpersonal approaches twist cosmovisions in a completely new direction where the

heart, in fact, matters. As if we would come back to the beginning of this chapter to

Lederach’s words on conflict transformation, here it is relevant again to speak about

16
The same idea pivots behind The Palgrave International Handbook of Peace Studies (Dietrich,
Echavarría, Esteva, Ingruber, Koppensteiner 2014)
26
different sets of lenses to look at and see conflict and conflictive parties with the heart

and the relevance of seeing gains a new meaning for conflict transformation, as Lederach

says:

Compassion begins when we notice […] I think this has something to do with
actually seeing; I think it has something deeper to do with respect. […] Respect
[re-back and specere-look at] means that you look once and then you turn and
look again and then in the looking again you see something that you did not notice
initially. To look again […] opens the space of awareness […] mindfulness.
(Youtube 2012; 00:29:16-00:30:34)

Around these authors many others should be attached as secondary literature, for

instance, The Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003) in

which it is explained in detail how the way in which we think and speak about our world

-as cosmovisions- affect us in an embodied manner. Through this chapter I have pointed

out to some of them, however, some others have remained as the ‘invisible’ contributors

and donors of this theoretical effort to see with my heart. Also, it is worthwhile noticing

that I did not include any practical literature but, again, this thesis may end with the

theory, setting the first lines of the visual methods which could support the transformation

of the cosmovisions in which I am stuck.

List of references:

Debord, Guy. 1995 [1967]. La sociedad del espectáculo. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones
Naufragio. http://criticasocial.cl/pdflibro/sociedadespec.pdf

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Descartes, Rene. 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy. Last modified April 2007. Accessed
4 November 2017. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1641.pdf.

Dietrich, Wolfgang. 2012. Interpretations of Peace in History and Culture. London, Palgrave
Macmillan.

––2013. Elicitive Conflict Transformation and the Transrational Shift in Peace Politics.
Palgrave Macmillan: London.

Dietrich, Wolfgang; Echavarría, Josefina Álvarez; Esteva, Gustavo; Ingruber, Daniela;

Koppensteiner, Norbert (ed.). 2014 [2011]. The Palgrave International Handbook of Peace
Studies. Palgrave Macmillan: New York.

Dilthey, Whilhem. 1976. ‘The Type of World-view and their Development in the
Metaphysical Systems’ Dilthey: Selected Writings. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

––1989 [1914] Select Works, Volume I: Introduction to the Human Sciences. Princeton
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––1996 Selected Works, Volume IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History. Princeton
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––2010. Select Works, Volume II: Understanding the Human World. Princeton University
Press: New Yersey.

––2002. Select Works, Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human
Sciences. Princeton University Press: New Yersey.

Echavarría Álvarez, Josephina. 2014. ‘Elicitive Conflict Mapping: A Practical Tool for
Peace-work’. Journal of Conflictology 5. 58-71. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: online.
http://journal-of-conflictology.uoc.edu/joc/en/index.php/journal-of-
conflictology/article/download/vol5iss2-echavarria/1986-8686-1-PB.pdf

Foucault, Michel. 1981 [1970]. ‘The order of Dicourse’. Untying the Text: A Post-
Structuralist Reader. 48-79. Routledge and Kegan Paul: Boston, London and Henley.
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%20Discourse.pdf

─1994 [1966]. The order of things. New York: Random House. Accessed 2 June 2017.
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%20The%20Order%20of%20Things%20-%20An%20Archaeology%20of%20the
%20Human%20Sciences.pdf.

─2013 [1975]. Discipline and Punish 2013. New York: Random House. Accessed 2 June
2017. https://zulfahmed.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/disciplineandpunish.pdf.

Galtung, Johan. 1990. ‘Cultural Violence’. Journal of Peace Research. Vol. 27, no. 3.
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Guzmán, Martínez. 2009 [2001]. Filosofía para hacer las paces. Icaria: Barcelona.

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Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power, of a Common-Wealth
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Koppensteiner, Norbert. 2009. Beyond Postmodernity: Living and Thinking. A Nietzschean

Journey. University of Innsbruck: online.
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––2009. The art of the Transpersonal Self. Atropos Press: Dresden.

Walsh, Roger; Vaughan, Frances. 1993. Paths beyond ego: The Transpersonal Vision.
Penguin Group: New York.

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Lederach, Paul. 2003. The Little Book of Conflict Transformation. Good Book’s: United
States of America.

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Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York:

Routledge Classics. Accessed 2 June 2017.
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─1968. Visible and Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. United States of America:
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––1991. ‘Narrative Identity’. Philosophy Today, 35:1. 73-81. DePaul University: Illinois.
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Vattimo, Gianni. 2006 [1984]. ‘Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought’. Key Texts of
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Walsh, Roger; Vaughan, Frances (ed.). 1993. Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision.
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with John Paul Lederach. Submitted by University of California Television, published on 28
March 2012.
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––2016. ‘Idealismo501x_2016_s2_ss1_u1_p1_v1’. Submitted by Idealismo501x, on 23

February 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caqP_LhZfjQ&feature=youtu.be

PONER AUTOR

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