Abstract
In this essay I deal with Hegel and Husserl on imagination. I show both the unsuspected centrality of this notion for their relative philosophies and the intrinsic merits of their positions which, though quite far apart in their conclusions, turn around very similar aspects, such as the relation between imagination and perception, presence and absence, universality and particularity, signitive and intuitive reference, negation and distance, layers of consciousness.
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Notes
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- 2.
When I say that Husserl rejects the model of Hume’s imagination, I do not want to suggest that he decidedly rejects Hume’s language throughout. Strikingly, at Husserl (1980, 81), Husserl calls the difference between sensation and phantasma a difference between impressions and ideas, and later (1910–1912: Husserl 1980, 322) he renews his own opposition between original Erlebnis and reproduction in terms of impressions and ideas.
- 3.
See Ferrarin (2001, 295 ff).
- 4.
For example, if representation needs an intuition we are at the level of imaginative subsumption and recognition, while if I reflect on symbols we are at the level of symbolic phantasy.
- 5.
See Ferrarin (2007, 135–58), from which I am here drawing several considerations.
- 6.
This general thesis finds recurrent applications throughout his sytem. For example, in the Phenomenology language is spirit’s Dasein (Hegel 1807, 376, 1977, 308–9). Or, time is the Dasein of the concept (Hegel 1807, 584, 1977, 487). In the Encyclopaedia, nature is “die Idee als Sein, seiende Idee” (Hegel 1830a, 393). The soul is an existence among others that spirit gives itself (Hegel 1830b, § 403 A). For a fuller treatment, see Ferrarin (2016, 2019, chapter 3).
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As Fink puts it in in Vergegenwärtigung und Bild, in the Scheinkonstitution I neutralize or nullify the material bearer and only concentrate on the image.
- 8.
Husserl (1980, 478 (ital. mine)): “die qualifizierte Erscheinung hat den Charakter der Unstimmigkeit, der hinweist auf den weiteren Erinnerungsgang, in dem die Qualität ‘Aufhebung’ erfährt, d.i. nicht in nichts, in keine Qualität übergeht, sondern die qualifizierte Erscheinung ihre Aufhebung erfährt im Widerstreit mit einer anderen, sich mit ihr durchsetzenden qualifizierten Erscheinung... und ihr ‘nicht’, Vernichtung erfährt”.
Hans Jonas illustrates this point with the example of a scarecrow in the perception of a human being and of a bird. The bird either is scared by the scarecrow or has realized it is a fake: to it, the object is either identical to its appearance or different. For humans the negated perception that lives on implicitly in me shows I have simultaneously identity and difference. The human being does not merely replace the misperception with the correct one: for us, the ‘wrong’ perception “survives to be confronted as falsified with the right one” (Jonas 1966, 178). Jonas draws the lesson that human beings are vitally concerned with something other animals do not have: an interest in likeness and image per se, which they tend to separate from appearance and regard as such.
- 9.
And it shows that Husserl is not simply thinking of material images, i.e., pictures, for image-consciousness—for example there are beautiful pages on theatrical illusion: Husserl (1980, 490 ff).
- 10.
For example, a page like Husserl (1980, 21) could have been written verbatim by Sartre.
- 11.
- 12.
Husserl (1980, 455–6): there is a “moment” of positionality in this phantasy.
- 13.
I have defended dialectic’s imaginative core in the Introduction to Ferrarin (2019).
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Ferrarin, A. (2019). Hegel, Husserl and Imagination. In: Ferrarin, A., Moran, D., Magrì, E., Manca, D. (eds) Hegel and Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 102. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_7
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