ABSTRACT
Phenomenology adheres faithfully to the analysis of the first-person account of experience. In just this way, its methods and strategies may well enable us to restrain or “overcome” the metaphysics of representation, before it can take over and domesticate the conceptual ground on which experience is built. To achieve a strong critique of the metaphysics of representation from a theological/spiritual point of view is nearly impossible without recourse to specifically “phenomenological” vocabularies of experience. The metaphysics of representation holds tightly to the basic sense data theory that, “perception is nothing but the acquiring of knowledge of particular facts about the world, by means of the senses.” According to the metaphysics of representation, there remains a strict division between brain and world. The metaphysics of representation, however many philosophical problems it involves, exhibits a chief structural problem that makes it irreparable as a paradigm of knowledge.
