Perception and the production of exteriority: vision, body, and being-in-the-world

Abstract

This article examines the problem of the exteriority of the perceived world through a conceptual trajectory that articulates contributions from neuroscience, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Drawing on the formulations of Hume, Bergson, Thomas Nagel, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Lacan, the study investigates how perceptual experience sustains the presence of the world as an external reality. Hume allows the stability of the world to be understood as an effect of perceptual habits; Bergson emphasizes perception as action-oriented selection; Nagel highlights the limits of the scientific objectification of subjective experience; Merleau-Ponty situates the body as the primordial operator of the relation with the world; Freud and Lacan demonstrate that the differentiation between interiority and exteriority depends on an ongoing psychic process. In dialogue with contemporary neuroscientific models, the article argues that vision does not constitute a mirroring of reality nor a subjective projection, but rather an operation that produces exteriority while simultaneously obscuring the conditions of its own genesis. The study proposes understanding perception as a historical, bodily, and psychic process in the constitution of the lived world