‘A Living Charade’. Empiricism, Occultism and the Limits of Vision in August Strindberg’s 1890s Texts

Sight is, according to John Locke, ‘the most comprehensive of all our senses’, establishing a direct connection between the mind and the outside world. The Enlightenment contributed to spreading the belief that seeing is knowing; at the same time, though, new discoveries in the physiology of vision and the development of new technologies for the production and reproduction of images raised doubts about the objectivity of human vision. August Strindberg’s writings from the 1890s (especially his scientific texts and those sprung from the so-called ‘Inferno crisis’) show a similar preoccupation with the limits, the blind zones, the errors of human vision. The writings from this period are filled with potentially misleading sensory perceptions with reflections on the laws of optics and the nature of light and descriptions of experiments with photography. While always trying to apply a scientific gaze to the phenomena he discusses, Strindberg’s writings chronicle a growing awareness of the difficulty of establishing a relation of complete correspondence between things and their images, and the impossibility for the observer to fully trust their gaze. The purpose of this contribution will thus be to investigate how Strindberg’s reflections on sight and vision can help reconstruct, from a philosophy of science point of view, his reception and critique of the empiricist tradition, which parallels his moving away from naturalism towards an expressionist and modernist aesthetic.