David Hume argued famously that when we survey our multitude of experiences, we never find among them an impression of our own selves. The idea of a self, he concluded, is simply a “fiction.”1

Immanuel Kant agreed with Hume that the self is not found in experience, but he did not conclude from this that the self is a fiction. Instead, he advanced a transcendental argument for the existence of a metaphysical self. Although we do not have an experience of our own selves, the self, he argued, is a necessary condition for the possibility of any experience. This self—what Kant called the “transcendental apperception”—is the necessary logical subject of any thought, perception, or feeling.2

Wittgenstein’s Perspective

Along the same lines, Ludwig Wittgenstein holds that there is no such thing as a subject that thinks and contains ideas. However, he adds:

5.632 The subject does not belong to the world; rather it is the limit of the world.

5.633 Where in the world is the metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye.

And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.

5.6331 For the form of the visual field is surely not like this.3

Sartre’s Claim

Following the phenomenological tradition, Jean Paul Sartre claimed to have discovered that:

“Consciousness implies in its being a non-conscious and transphenomenal being.”4

The Counter-Argument: Detecting the Self in Experience

Against these views—and specifically against the view shared by Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein that the self (or metaphysical subject5) cannot be found in experience—I shall argue, in effect, that we can detect the presence of our own selves in experience.

My claim sounds outlandishly self-contradictory:

• If the self is indeed metaphysical, it would seem to follow by definition that it cannot be found in experience.
• If it is found in experience, it seems obvious that it is not metaphysical.

Yet a careful and comprehensive analysis of our visual world will reveal that we are both present in, and absent from, our visual world.

We shall find that a phenomenological examination of our all-encompassing human visual field discloses the presence of a metaphysical self in that visual space.

The above apparent contradiction is avoided because the metaphysical self is present not as an object among other visual objects but rather as a localized absence. What an observer perceptually detects in her visual world is her own presence as a localized and irremovable blind spot whence she perceives the world.

In other words, with the aid of a phenomenology of vision, we shall find visual evidence for Wittgenstein’s claim that the metaphysical subject is “the limit of the visual world.”

We shall see that the presence of this irremovable blind spot in the fabric of visual space renders it—the visual world—necessarily incomplete, signaling the presence of a meta-visual, metaphysical self.

What I recognize as here—the location from which I perceive the world—is a location that I can find inside and, paradoxically, altogether outside the visual world.

Two Grounds for Evidence

The evidence marshaled in this paper for the conclusion that the visual world is incomplete rests on two independent grounds:

1. Phenomenological
   • A phenomenological examination of our visual space—particularly aided by two experiments—reveals the presence of an absence: an irremovable blind spot in the fabric of any visual world.
   • This shows that visual space is necessarily incomplete and discontinuous.
   • This evidence is purely phenomenological and hence independent from any visual illustration.
2. Pictorial
   • Efforts made to create a complete and faithful map of surrounding visual space reveal that a complete depiction of the surrounding visual world is impossible in principle.
   • This impossibility is due to the presence in visual space of an inescapable absence—a blind spot created in the very location the observer occupies.
   • The representational system used is Linear Perspective. After becoming aware of some of its limitations, I transformed the system into Spherical Perspective to expand its representational capacity.

Linear Perspective

I do not see the need any longer to argue for the validity of linear convergent perspective. That it is the most faithful system of spatial representation—and not just one among several possible “conventional” systems, as once claimed by scholars such as Nelson Goodman6—is something finally established by Anthony A. Derksen in his paper Linear Perspective as a Realist Constraint.

In it he argues that linear perspective is:

“an objective, realist device to organize three-dimensional pictorial space…”7

Linear perspective, he shows, is more “faithful” to the depicted world than other conventional systems. By faithful he means a depiction of pictorial space that we experience as closely resembling the depicted world. Henceforth I shall use the term in this same sense.

Spherical Perspective

Unlike linear perspective, the validity of Spherical Perspective needs to be demonstrated.

In Section III, I shall argue:

1. The visual world is a surrounding reality and not just a window-like scene.
2. This surrounding visual reality—the visual world—can be captured fully and faithfully by extending the window-like linear perspective into a full spherical system: a six-point, non-Euclidean perspective system called Spherical Perspective.8

Aided with this system of visual mapping, I shall be able to show that the visual world is necessarily incomplete—i.e., it exhibits as a necessary feature of the depiction an absence in the position occupied by the seeing subject.

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