ABSTRACT

Hardly any other philosopher in the history of philosophy has paid as much detailed attention to the nature of imagining and to the distinct characteristics of imagined objects as Husserl. Yet, Husserl’s lectures on imagination have been translated into English only relatively recently (Husserl 2005), and even in the German original they have been available in print only since 1980 (Husserl 1980). Scattered discussions of imagination can be found throughout Husserl’s oeuvre, from the Logical Investigations (1900-1) to the posthumously published Experience and Judgment (1939) – evidence of the significance it had for him. This is not surprising, given that Husserl himself stresses the central importance of imagination, famously referring to it as a “vital element” of phenomenology (Husserl 1983, 160)1. In particular, Husserl exploits our ability to “vary” examples of experiential types (e.g., examples of perception, examples of judging, etc.) for the purpose of identifying their “essential” features. Thus, imagination is indispensable for the phenomenological method Husserl calls “eidetic analysis” (Husserl 1973, §§86-88; Mohanty 1997; Sokolowski 1974). Far from being a marginal topic of “special interest” – for fiction, pretense, or “mind-reading,” for example – imagination is, for Husserl, a crucial key to answering fundamental questions concerning consciousness. The picture that emerges from his in-depth investigations differs significantly from classical philosophical accounts of imagination: Imagination is neither reducible to waning after-images, derivative of perception – a view dominating modern philosophy at least from Hobbes to Hume; nor is it a basic mental capacity for synthesis – another dominant idea, finding its most systematic formulation in Kant’s account of imagination (see “Kant” and “Hume,” Chapters 4 and 3 in this volume). Rather than inferring the nature of imagination from certain functions ascribed to it in an

overall theory of mind and cognition, Husserl’s phenomenological method delivers descriptions of concrete acts of imagining in an attempt to identify its essential characteristics. In these descriptions, Husserl distances his account clearly from available philosophical “constructions” of imagination and connects it more obviously to how imagining is actually experienced “in real life.” He thus avoids the standard philosophical term for imagination, Einbildungskraft, and instead speaks of Phantasie, which is the more widely used and less technical term for imagination in German. Moreover, Phantasie has the advantage of lacking any suggestion that imagination operates by means of mental images (Bilder) – an inevitable connotation of Einbildungskraft. According to Husserl, imagining is a distinct and nonderivative act of

consciousness that constitutes a direct sensory awareness of objects, i.e., an awareness that is unmediated by images. Imagining thereby resembles perception and differs from another distinct act of consciousness that Husserl identifies: “image consciousness [Bildbewusstsein],” the awareness of an image qua image. However, imagining also differs from perception insofar as its objects are not experienced as real, or actually perceived, and insofar as the activity of imagining is itself experienced as a simulation of a possible perception, or as a “quasi perception.” Husserl’s views have influenced several generations of philosophical treatments of the

imagination. However, these influences remain largely unacknowledged, most likely due to prevalent preconceptions about Husserl’s general philosophical position, which tend to motivate a certain skepticism concerning the value and significance of his account of imagination for current debate. In particular, Husserl’s reputation in some circles (Føllesdal’s 1969, 1990; Smith and McIntyre 1984) as an idealist representationalist, who is stuck in a post-Cartesiansubject philosophy, tends to obstruct the view on his profound and original systematic work on the imagination. This representationalist interpretation considers Husserl’s notion of intentionality to rely on separate intensional entities (representations) that mediate the relation of the mental event or state to the world. The very fact that Husserl attributes such importance to the imagination may then be taken only to corroborate this interpretation, especially if one assumes that cases of imagination are paradigmatic cases of such representational mediation. This leads one to expect a rather conventional story from Husserl, which may be safely ignored. What’s more, the imagination’s declared “vital” methodological function for phenomenology only ties Husserl’s account of imagination to one of the most contested notions in his work overall, namely, the notion of “eidetic analysis” understood as a search for “essences” of experience. Suspicions regarding the latter easily slide into suspicions regarding the former. However, the standard picture of Husserlian idealism is now slowly being replaced by a

new interpretation – one that is based on a far more comprehensive view of his oeuvre and that takes the ways in which Husserl radically reappropriates idealist, as well as empiricist, currents of philosophy within his original phenomenological framework far more seriously. This development has enabled a fresh and open look at Husserl’s original account of imagination, which, upon close examination, lends further support to the view that Husserl’s transcendental idealism is inextricably linked to a strong antirepresentationalist realism – a view that is increasingly gaining currency in the scholarship (Drummond 2012; Zahavi 2003). This puts Husserl in much closer proximity to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty than to Descartes and Hume and renders questionable any quick dismissal of his idea of “essence” (or eidos) as indicative of a laughable neo-Platonic antirealism. Insofar as Husserl’s investigations into imagination span over thirty years of work and are

found mainly either in the form of lectures and research manuscripts, or scattered throughout his published books in the midst of discussions concerning other topics, he never supplied one explicit and definitive treatise on the matter. Moreover, he significantly and fundamentally changed his views in the course of his investigations, which begin in seriousness around 1904 and stabilize around ten years later with what we might call his “mature” account. In what follows, I attempt a careful reconstruction of his mature view with some references, for the sake of contrast, to positions Husserl held during earlier phases of his work on imagination.