Space and Time as a Matter of Light and Death

Argues that our lived experiences of light, the body, and mortality fundamentally shape how we understand vision, space, time, and knowledge, offering a philosophically grounded realism that goes beyond scientific explanation.

This book deals with the perception and essence of space and time from an unorthodox angle. It engages with current debates in the philosophy of perception, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, and the philosophy of time. But it is fundamentally an existential text, with strong affinities to what Gabriel Marcel calls “experiential philosophy.” The starting point is a deceptively simple question: how can one, situated here, see the moon that is there? The book argues that, contrary to conventional views, this simple fact cannot be exhaustively accounted for by science. Photons and their interaction with retinal receptors, or the neurology of the primary visual cortex, do not explain the experience of seeing the moon—the multilayered, normatively charged, rich relationship that vision establishes between the seer and the seen. Moreover, scientific discussions of vision often introduce intermediaries between the perceiver and the perceived that are foreign to our perceptual experiences.

These intermediaries render the moon merely an indirect object of vision—which is to say, not an object of vision at all. Attempts to evade this consequence by claiming that representations facilitate direct perception rather than stand between perceiver and perceived are unconvincing. This book is not anti-scientific—on the contrary, it is written from a standpoint of immense appreciation for science and its achievements. But it is premised on the view that there are important aspects of vision, and of space and time, whose analysis requires going beyond the domain of science. I propose taking one’s primal relationship to one’s body as the basis for investigating one’s visual relation to distant objects. This leads to a novel, existential deliberation over the essence of distance and to a new outlook on both space and time. From this perspective, they emerge as derivatives of more fundamental elements of experience: our ordinary, mundane experience of light, and the unassailable certainty of our own death. Pre-reflectively, we regard space and time as they figure in science and daily life as more or less familiar givens. However, space and time do not figure among the essential constituents that emerge from examining our relation to our bodies. On this foundation, the book develops a novel experiential/existential understanding of space and time as derivatives of light and death. I argue that this experiential conception underpins space and time as we encounter them in scientific investigations and everyday life. These are further developed through discussions of the non-visual senses and mathematical perception. The truism that the world we know is inevitably the world as it is given to us in our experience underlies the book’s methodology.

Nevertheless, the book defends realism—albeit a unique form that emerges from recognizing the constitutive role of human finitude in shaping what we take to be objective knowledge. This experiential realism offers a third way between naive scientific objectivism and anti-realist skepticism about the external world.