Abstract
This paper seeks to integrate analytic philosophy and phenomenology. It does so through an approach generated, specifically, in relation to imagination and its cognitive significance. As an Introduction, some reservations about existing phenomenological approaches to imagination—in the work of Sartre and Edward S. Casey—are considered. It is argued that their introspective psychological approach needs to be qualified through a more analytic orientation that determines essence, initially, on the basis of public discourse concerning the term ‘imagination.’ Part One then articulates this orientation through an ‘analytic reduction’ that identifies imagination’s essence in public discourse as thought in its quasi-sensory mode. Part Two offers a sustained phenomenological investigation of this essence, and identifies four major intrinsic features. On the basis of this, Part Three shows how imagination is implicated, centrally, in the capacity to acquire language. In Conclusion the proceeding arguments are defended against possible objections, and a final key summarizing argument is formulated to show that imagination must be regarded, also, as necessary to perception and its capacity to articulate a world. The paper ends with a few thoughts on the further potential of post-analytic phenomenology.
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Notes
Kant (1998, p. 271).
Johnson is influenced especially by Kant’s notion of the “schema.” On the basis of this, he formulates a theory of “image-schemata.” These are “gestalt structures” that emerge from more basic levels of bodily interaction with the world. They give an orientation to cognition, without which the acquisitions of language and concepts would not be possible. Johnson provides a very detailed and impressive justification of this, but does not, I think, deal effectively with that feature (quoted in the body of my text) by which Kant himself defines the imagination. By missing out on Kant’s own defining factor, Johnson is left, in effect, with image-schemata that can just as well define animal experience as they can human. This means that imagination’s relation to time as an horizon is not explained. Johnson’s approach is restricted further through not offering any significant explanation of the distinctive cognitive significance of that “information rich” quasi-sensory imagination which is the focus of the present paper. In the absence of these features, there are grounds for claiming that Johnson’s schemata could be regarded as sui generis with no conceptually compelling connection to imagination in a broader sense (see Johnson 1990, especially Chap. 6). It should be acknowledged that Johnson’s book—like the present paper—is a sustained attempt to link phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Johnson’s widespread use of experimental data, however, means that his descriptions are formulated rather distantly from the phenomena as experienced.
See Sartre (2004). Sartre also wrote a less comprehensive study, namely Imagination: A Psychological Critique (see Sartre 1962). Casey’s major work is Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (see Casey 2000). The topic is explored in his other writings, also. (See especially Casey 1991). Edmund Husserl’s volume Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), is extremely relevant (see Husserl 2005). However, it is a large collection of short writings stretched over a long period of time, and which very much presents ideas in progress, and involves a great deal of repetition. So many interpretative issues arise from this, that it is hard to comprehend a basic theory that might be put to use. And Husserl’s general approach raises, also, all the difficulties noted in relation to Sartre and Casey, and more besides. For example, his emphasis on how the intentional character of “phantasy” objects differ radically from the physical reality of the objects we perceive, leads him to interpret the relation between the two as a conflict. In Part 4, I will show that this is very far from being the case, and that the logical difference involved, is the basis of a deep complementarity between perception and imagination. In terms of analytic philosophy, imagination figures far less frequently as a topic of interest. Mary Warnock, however, has written one key text, namely Imagination (see Warnock 1976). Her approach, however, tends—like the phenomenological interpretations—to focus on the diversity of imagination.
Casey (2000, p. 9).
Casey (2000, p. 24). Sartre commits himself to the same broad approach. In his words, “The method is simple: produce images in ourselves, reflect on these images, describe them, which is to say, try to determine and classify their distinctive characteristics” (2004, p. 5).
Casey (2000, p. 19).
I use this phrase, because, whilst a term may have a logically distinctive central meaning, other factors can be involved in how that meaning is embodied, phenomenally. This may involve an empirical overlap with other terms; or, it may even be that the nodal core of one term contains a factor that makes it dependent on the nodal core of another. In this respect, for example, this paper will argue that language directs imagination, empirically speaking in adult life, but that the ontogenesis of language presupposes the role of imagination.
Casey posits a mode of relational “imagining-that” where “what we imagine as constituting a state of affairs does not have to assume a sensuous disguise.” But if we remove the sensuous character, here, there are no logical grounds for separating imagining-that from merely thinking-that (see Casey 2000, pp. 42–43).
Sartre and Husserl have a sense of the quasi-sensory essence of the imaginary, but without duly emphasizing it in such terms. Indeed, their articulations of it are scattered across all the various other features they ascribe to the image. There is slight evasiveness in Sartre’s and Husserl’s approaches, insofar as their (shared) real interest is in emphasizing that in the image’s existence as a mode of consciousness that is different from sensory perception. For Sartre’s characteristically tangential approach to the quasi-sensory (see Sartre 2004, pp. 14–16); for Husserl’s more focussed notion of the quasi-sensory aspect of “phantasy” (see Husserl 2005, pp. 639–643). Casey understands the quasi-sensory aspect as a feature of only one kind of imagining—namely “imaging” where the representation is generated with reference to at least one sensory modality. However, to reiterate, unless we see this as an essential feature of imagination, all the other factors that Casey describes so effectively amount to no more than idioms of thought, per se (see Casey 2000, pp. 41–42).
The phrase “subject to the will” is much associated with Wittgenstein’s account of “seeing-as,” but I intend it only in the sense of being able to choose. Sartre and Casey both use the notion of “spontaneity” in relation to this (see, for example, Sartre 2004, p. 14). But again, spontaneity is a much broader notion—incorporating thought as such; and one can, of course, choose to exercise imagination in a tightly directed and thence non-spontaneous way (as, for example, when using it in trying to solve a problem). The notion of “spontaneity” in other words distracts from the real point at issue.
It is, of course, through such formulation that our capacity to describe what we have imagined to others, or to recall what we imagined after the event, is made possible.
It should be emphasized that these features are the ones which articulate the intrinsic component features of imagination’s quasi-sensory/subject-to-the-will nodal core. Sartre and Casey emphasize other factors but loose track of the way these constellate around those which are intrinsic to the core.
Casey (2000, p. 36).
Casey touches on this feature through analyzing the image in terms of its “indeterminacy.” However, whilst images may have this character psychologically speaking, its connotations of faintness, do not bring out the unstable relation between the elements in the image’s manifold that I am emphasizing. As we shall see in Part Four, this instability has an important role in separating the immediate perceptual field from the “elsewhere” of the non-immediate. It is much harder to see how the “indeterminacy” of the image could have such an effect (see Casey 2000, pp. 36–37). It should be noted, also, that Husserl offers, initially, a rather better approach to this topic, by emphasizing the “protean” character of the image (see Husserl 2005, pp. 65–67). However, he later thinks of this in very much the same “indeterminacy” terms as Sartre and Casey (see Husserl 2005, pp. 665–666). In Sartre’s The Imaginary…, he relates indeterminacy to the image’s schematic character, but again there is significant difference between an image being faint and its being schematic (see Sartre 2004, p. 27). A schematic image (even allowing for its radical instability) can sometimes be highly determinate—especially if its contours are simple and easy to imagine.
Gallagher (2006, pp. 164–165).
Johnson (1990). See especially Chapt. 2–5.
Casey (2000, p. 14).
Casey (2000, p. 172).
Kant holds a similar position—articulated throughout his “Transcendental Deduction” and “Schematism” (see Kant 1998, pp. 219–266, 271–277). However, the justification of Kant’s position would require both reconstruction of his arguments, and the supplementation of them with a phenomenology of the ontogenesis of experience, on lines similar to the one offered here. I have done this at some length in Chapter 2 of my book The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (see Crowther 2010).
References
Casey, Edward. 1991. Spirit and soul: Essays in philosophical psychology. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications.
Casey, Edward. 2000. Imagining: A phenomenological study, Second Edition ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Crowther, Paul. 2010. The Kantian Aesthetic: From knowledge to the avant-garde. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2006. How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 2005. Phantasy, image consciousness, and memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer.
Johnson, Mark. 1990. The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning and imagination. London: University of Chicago Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. The critique of pure reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1962. Imagination: A psychological critique, trans. Forrest Williams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004. The imaginary: A Phenomenological psychology of the imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber. London and New York: Routledge.
Warnock, Mary. 1976. Imagination. London: Faber and Faber.
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Versions of this paper were read at the Philosophy Departmental Seminar at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2010, and at the Institute for Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven in May 2011. I am grateful to participants in those audiences for their critical comments. A question from Russell Friedman was especially important in helping me further clarify the relation between imagination and memory.
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Crowther, P. Imagination, language, and the perceptual world: a post-analytic phenomenology. Cont Philos Rev 46, 37–56 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9247-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9247-z