Abstract
The systematic importance of the eidetic account of phantasy for Husserlian phenomenology in general is undisputed, but whether this account can be relevant for Aesthetics has often been put into question. In this paper I argue that Husserl’s rich phenomenology of phantasy, and in particular his account of perceptual phantasy, can nevertheless significantly enhance our understanding of how we recognize and imaginatively participate in artistic fictions. Moreover, I show how Husserl’s peculiar formulation of a non-intuitive phantasy at stake in artistic representation anticipates some uses of the imagination in Aesthetics suggested by Ernst Gombrich and Kendall Walton.
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Notes
Aristotle claims, for example, that there is no imagination without sensation, and that when sensation is present, imagination, too, is present. The simultaneity of sensation and imagination may imply that the imagination operates in sensation to such an extent that without this interpretative work all that is left to sensation is merely a passive affection (Turnbull 1994; Ross 1923).
As Husserl himself tells us, “the first suggestions to occupy myself with these problems [sc. concerning perception, sensation, imaginative presentation, image presentation, remembrance] I owe to my genial professor Brentano, who already in the middle of the 1980s at the Viennese University gave an unforgettable seminar on ‘Selected Psychological and Aesthetic Questions’ and in which (running weekly for 2 h) he toiled nearly exhaustively with the analytical clarification of imaginative presentations in comparison with perceptual presentations” (Hua XXXVIII, p. 4; my translation).
On one side of the spectrum we have Jansen’s “minimalistic” thesis that whoever looks for aesthetic insights in Husserl’s texts will be sorely disappointed: “The crucial question is how what we ‘see’ in phantasy applies to our experience in general and thus can be more than a mere construction of the mind. In this sense, we might want to state the obvious and say that Husserl is more a geometrician than an artist” (Jansen 2005, pp. 236–237). On the other side of the spectrum we have the “maximalistic” thesis of Nuki, who claims that Husserl’s comments on the theater alone do justice to the twentieth-century invention of post-dramatic theater—a form of theater that Husserl, in all likelihood, did not anticipate (Nuki 2010). More towards the center, and closer to our own position, is Pierre Rodrigo’s claim that there is an important, albeit implicit, debate between Husserl’s and Sartre’s approaches to the aesthetic phenomenon of the theater given their diverging conceptions of the imagination (Rodrigo 2009).
I suggest that we take these points into account because critics of Husserlian image consciousness such as Lotz (2007) have, perhaps prematurely, condemned his focus on depiction while failing to do justice to Husserl’s stakes in inaugurating a phenomenology of image consciousness.
That the image-subject is irreducible to the image-object does not mean, however, that the image-subject is something altogether separable from the image. The wife of Gioccondo is an other encountered in actual life, but the Sujet of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is a moment of image-consciousness.
The term Vergegenwärtigung is usually rendered into English as “representation” or “presentification” but neither rendition makes a snug fit. “Representation” is evidently less awkward than the neologism of “presentification,” but it may trigger the wrong sort of associations. For example, “representation” is redolent of the Empiricist representative theories of consciousness (such as Hume’s) which Husserl has rejected in the Logische Untersuchungen and in Hua X (Text N. 39) and Hua XXIII (Text N. 8). “Representation” also brings to mind the paradigm according to which there is nothing in the imagination that has not been first perceived, whereas Husserl’s new concept of phantasy precisely breaks free of such a requirement. A pure phantasy corresponds to a possible pure perception and reproductively entails an original perception of the object which was never originally lived.
Of course a theatrical representation is a highly complex image, one that requires a more elaborate accomplishment of phantasy than mere depiction. But in one sense a theatrical representation is simpler than mere depiction, namely, it lacks the dual set of conflicts and the trio of objective moments that characterize depiction as a mediate intentionality.
See Hua XIII (Text Nr. 10) especially, where Husserl says that the spectator of an artwork carries out acts “for the sake of fiction” (p. 292) leading to a doubling and displacement of Ego and animate corporeality in phantasy: “As an appearance refers to the I or the Ego, and the kinesthetic data refers to ocular movements, and exhibiting data to the fields of sensation and of appearing (the visual fields, the tactual fields), the Ego and the egoical animate corporeality are equally necessarily implicated in pictorialization” (p. 302; my translation).
One reason for this primacy is that both depictive image consciousness and immediate perceptual phantasy entail the doubling and displacement of the self which pure reproductive phantasy carries out to the fullest extent. Pure reproductive phantasy offers the pinnacle of our awareness of what is absent or fictive. Another reason is that both depictive image consciousness and immediate perceptual phantasy entail the accomplishment of a corresponding reproductive phantasy: “Something not present (something that in other circumstances would be intuitive and even be presented in a reproduction or else in perception) is pictorialized and rendered perceptible [perzeptiv] to the senses for me in the perceptual figment. The figment masks from me the presentifying (reproductive) presentation, coincides with it: what is presentified slides into what is present, coincides with it” (Hua XXIII, pp. 383–384/456).
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Acknowledgments
Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at a graduate seminar at the Husserl Archives of the Catholic University of Leuven, and at the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America. I would like to thank Dr. Rudolf Bernet and Dr. Roland Breeur of the K. U. Leuven, as well as Dr. John McCarthy and Msgr. Robert Sokolowski of CUA, for the respective invitations to speak, as well as for their helpful comments. Finally, my thanks to the reviewer of this article for his illuminating remarks.
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Carreño Cobos, J.E. The Many Senses of Imagination and the Manifestation of Fiction: A View from Husserl’s Phenomenology of Phantasy. Husserl Stud 29, 143–162 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-012-9117-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-012-9117-2