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Research Journal of the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka- Rohana 12, 2020

Santos talks about the lines drawn by dominant Western thinking of our time
(abyssal thinking) through which human and non-human realities on the other side

are made invisible. This line divides social reality profoundly. This division
affected by abyssal line into metropolitan and colonial societies is such that the

‘other side of the line’ vanishes as reality, becomes non-existent. ‘Whatever is
produced as non-existent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of

what the accepted conception of inclusion considers it to be its other’ (Santos 2014:

118). ‘Modern knowledge and modern law represent the most accomplished
manifestations of abyssal thinking. They are mutually interdependent’ (Santos 2014:

118). He describes ‘(t)he logics and processes through which modern reason
produces the non-existence of what does not fit its totality and linear time are

various’ (Santos 2014: 172). In the way Santos describes it, the sociology of
absences focuses on ‘the social experience that has not been fully colonized by

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modern reason’ (Santos 2014: 172) .

Importantly, ‘abyssal thinking consists in granting to modern science the monopoly

of the universal distinction between true and false, to the detriment of two
alternative bodies of knowledge: philosophy and theology’ (Santos 2014:119). ‘This

monopoly is at the core of the modern epistemological disputes between scientific

and non-scientific forms of truth’ (Santos 2014:119). According to this logic, what
exists on the other side of the line ‘are beliefs, opinions, intuitions, and subjective

understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for

4 He describes five forms of non-existence i.e., 1. Monoculture and rigor of
knowledge, 2. monoculture of linear time, 3. logic of social classification that
distributes populations according to categories that naturalizes hierarchies, e.g.,
capital-labour, 4. Logic of dominant scale (universal and global), and 5. Logic of
capitalist productivity according to which ‘capitalist economic growth is
unquestionably rational objective’ (Santos 2014:172-174).

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