The Self-Chasing Instrument: Idealism, Vision, and Judgement

While much phenomenology, particularly in its more theological variants, has made various cases for how we can supposedly perceive the imperceivable, or the invisible, this is often done despite, or in direct confrontation with, the claims of the natural sciences. Some inherent human capacity to perceive (often via a transcendental ego or more general account of givenness) is set against the purported limitations and dangers of the scopic or, more generally, of the very function of representation.

In the following I hope to address how vision, or representation generically construed, can benefit from a conjoined idealist skepticism and a naturalist materialization by way of F.W.J. von Schelling work. Schelling's Naturphilosophie, rather than being a reductionist naturalism, or an idealism about nature, attempts to articulate how we conceive of a nature which philosophizes through us. In this regard, the various senses of the human body, the natural capacities for sensation which phenomenology attempts to de-materialize, function as nature attempting to access itself through the production of experiences, cognitions, and representations.