He has a ‘presence’ you cannot ignore – and the absence of substance?

The tomb of Nicholas of Cusa (Image by Miguel Hermoso Cuesta, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Some political leaders, chief executives of corporations, and mystics frequently share the ability to project a sense of something larger than themselves. Their followers feel the presence of something transcendent, larger than life itself. They stand at the edge of a hidden realm. They invite you to join them.

Presence is the magnetism that attracts so many people to Donald Trump. And to Barak Obama. Just as opposites attract, the radiantly similar repel. It’s why those two men find it difficult to be in the same room, and why the brains of their followers find it hard to contemplate both at once.

It’s what Joe Biden didn’t have in the debate with Trump in June, what Kamala Harris had in her debate with Trump a few weeks ago, even when she wasn’t speaking. Thanks to more than a little help from the broadcaster’s frequent use of split-screen presentation.

Presence is something you can’t ignore, and yet …

Ignorance is important, something you shouldn’t dismiss without careful consideration. Let’s take a little excursion through contemporary training of actors to the writings of a 15^th century thinker to see how presence and ignorance might help us deepen our understanding of how to govern.

Presence is what actors often have. The BBC Maestro service, a training offshoot of the broadcaster, describes one sort of it this way:

Stage presence is a combination of different things. It’s an energy on stage that makes their performance unforgettable; a charm and charisma that draws you in. Having a strong stage presence doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is larger than life – you can draw people in if you’re a more understated performer, too. It’s all about how you conduct yourself during your live performances, and how you engage with the audience through eye contact and body language. 

Presence is one aspect of the “varieties of religious experience” that William James (1902/2003) examined. I was reminded of this when listening to a podcast[1] about James and his third lecture on “The Reality of the Unseen”. As a philosopher, he was someone who seemed unable to shake off his religious upbringing and accept the material and sceptical intellectual world he did so much to advance. The experience of presence, he explained, changed the actions of those would have that lived experience. But as experience, that “sense of presence” might have been a psychological effect, not a spiritual cause. But the fact that change happened meant the “hidden” was, in some sense, real.

That reminded me of another series of podcasts about ignorance.[2] Here we learn of the 15^th century scholastic and early humanist thinker Nicholas of Cusa (1440/1985a,b,c), who argued that ignorance and knowledge are not opposites, but instead two sides of the same coin. As we deepen our understanding, we also deepen our ignorance. Paul Sigmund (1963) describes it this way:

To the fundamental concept of the coincidence of opposites—all things, even opposites, are in God—there is added an emphasis upon the radical dependence of every being in God and His simultaneous presence in everything which He has created (p. 250).

Presence is also what makes a con-man so convincing. Like the guy who fools you into thinking that he’s seized control of your computer and then poses as a man from Microsoft who can save you from your transgression.

BBC Maestro gives the following instructions about creating presence, which is also a handy guide to detecting when your revelation is guided by a charlatan.

• Be vulnerable: People warm to others who show their vulnerabilities

• Develop a unique image: Carefully consider what you wear on stage

• Think about your stage persona: You don’t need to be entirely yourself; on stage, adopt a a version of yourself the audience can relate to

• Connect: Build a strong bond through eye contact and body language

• Be in the moment: Comedians are aware not of themselves, but of the ideas that they’re communicating

The last point is perhaps the most important. It divides the Messiah from the merely messianic. It suggests that we should:

• Be conscious of this advice as you listen to political activities, on television in an interview, at a rally in a sports stadium, on a picket line outside the big employer in town whose business involves creating stuff that contributes to climate change.

• Then you’ll be able to set the aura they create aside and consider the ideas themselves.

• What ideas are they really discussing?

• Who benefits from what they communicate?

• And in their hidden realms, what are they hiding?

Deepen your understanding so you can deepen your ignorance. We’ll revisit this theme in future posts.

James, W. (1902/2003). The Varieties of Religious Experience. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.

Nicholas of Cusa. (1440/1985a). On  Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia), Volume 1. Retrieved from https://wlym.com/archive/pdf/cusa_learned01.pdf

Nicholas of Cusa. (1440/1985b). On  Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia), Volume 2. Retrieved from https://wlym.com/archive/pdf/cusa_learned02.pdf

Nicholas of Cusa. (1440/1985c). On  Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia), Volume 3. Retrieved from https://wlym.com/archive/pdf/cusa_learned03.pdf

Sigmund, P. E. (1963). Learned Ignorance. In Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought (pp. 244-260). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

---

[1] Partially Examined Life, episode 345, https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2024/07/15/ep345-2-william-james-religious-experience/.

[2] Rory Stewart’s “Long History of Ignorance”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0j93ry8.