Renata Calabresi conducted laboratory research in the 1920s and 1930s on the nature, extensity, and quality of the psychic present, drawing on the Central European tradition of descriptive psychology. Her work, largely unrecognized due to the decline of that paradigm and historical events, demonstrated that perceptual events in subjective time are at least partially independent from those in objective time. Subjective and objective time do not flow in unison, and the continuum of perceptive sequences has different modalities of existence from physical sequences.
Seeing cannot be reduced to separate parts like stimuli, brain activity, or objective methods because subjective experience is an undivided whole. Traditional neuroscience and Gestalt psychology have studied visual perception by focusing on the percept—the object seen—while avoiding the question of what it means to be conscious as self-referentiality. This creates a logical trap similar to Baron Munchausen pulling himself from quicksand by his own hair. The paper proposes an experimental phenomenological approach that analyzes seeing as a unified whole, reversing the usual mindset. This reversal clarifies how phenomenology, psychophysics, and neuroscience relate to and depend on each other.