The article examines illusionism, the view that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, and focuses on the "illusion problem"—explaining why the illusion of phenomenal consciousness arises. A key part of this problem is determining the function of the illusion. Some authors suggest it is a by-product of introspection with no particular function, while others argue it played an important role in the evolution of consciousness. The article emphasizes Nicholas Humphrey's evolutionary theory of consciousness, "phenomenal surrealism," to highlight this aspect of the illusionist program.
Early 20th-century irrationalist and vitalist philosophy finds a liminal proposal in María Zambrano, who argues for an archaizing renewal of a philosophy saturated with formulas and lacking experiential content. She reads Plato to show that the birth of philosophy is methodologically congruent with mystical experience: both are models of soul-liberation in search of truth as transcendent reality, both move from the multiplicity of being to the unity of the permanent, and both are sources of knowledge for the common person approaching the divine through decision and will. Her texts recover lost spirituality and access the sacred through poetic reason.
Dissatisfaction with Hegel's prioritization of spirit over nature led nineteenth-century materialists (Karl Marx) and panpsychists (Gustav Fechner, Eduard von Hartmann) to develop alternative accounts of human-nature relations. Marx analyzed the political-economic and metabolic entanglement of humans and nature, while German panpsychists elucidated the bio-psychological interconnectedness of human and natural life. Both approaches express forms of relation that remain inadequately addressed in recognition theory and contemporary critical social theory. Hegelian thinkers such as Axel Honneth continue to overly prioritize social second nature and reciprocal human recognition, marginalizing asymmetrical relations crucial to humans living within animal, environmental, and material life.