Abstract
The phenomenal character of dreaming has long been a matter of philosophical debates. Most of the time, dreaming is either likened to perception or likened to imagination, in order to decide whether it gets closer to normal or abnormal states of consciousness. This line of debates extends from the traditional dream argument to the contemporary movement of phenomenology. This article presents what specific contributions phenomenology has made to the millennial investigations of dreaming. Its structure is twofold. Firstly, we introduce how pioneering phenomenologists, including Edmund Husserl, Jan Patočka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugen Fink, and Jean Héring, analyse the lived characters of dreaming respectively. Secondly, we show that those pioneering phenomenologists, by engaging with the traditional dream argument, have laid out the worldliness of dreams as a crucial criterion for deciding how similar dreams and reality can be.
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Notes
The list of authors by no means exhausts all contributors to the phenomenology of dreaming. For the current purpose, we only focus on a couple of pioneers who shed light on the worldliness of dreams.
“Notre but, plus modeste, est de donner des éléments de solution à un problème qui divise les phénoménologies. Il s’agit de savoir si le rêve peut être rangé parmi les « perceptions » ou parmi les « représentations »” (Héring, 1946: 198).
“La vision du rêveur est une réussite parfaite” (Héring, 1946: 203).
“[C]’est la différence que dans le rêve même nous sommes obligés de faire entre les représentations et les visions. Cette dernière joue dans le rêve exactement le même rôle que la perception à l’état de veille” (Héring, 1946 : 198).
In “Concerning Image, Idea, and Dream,” Héring stresses that despite the perceptual character of dreams, there are remarkable traits which distinguish dream-perceptions from wakeful-perceptions. Therefore, it is worth asking to what extent perceptions are modified in the oneiric contexts: “It should be asked, above all, whether or not dream-perception as such shows itself to be a special modification of perception. Does the dream-vision not always perhaps have something of the character of the more passive, vacant gaze (as one can often observe in animals) which excludes a genuine focusing upon objects?” (Héring, 1947: 204).
His correspondence with Héring is only one of the several occasions where he talks about dreams. Nicola Zippel has listed four works where we find Husserl’s accounts of dreaming. Saulius Geniušas has pointed out the same and has added that the presentations in the four different frameworks do not compose a coherent conception of dreaming. See Zippel (2016) and Geniušas (2021).
“Das Traumweltich träumt nicht, es nimmt wahr” (Husserl, 1994: 119).
Another remarkable phenomenologist who affirms the perceptual character of dream-vision is Theodor Conrad. For he says: “Doch kann man unter Traumvisionen […] eine wahrnehmungsartige Schau verstehen. Und gewiss hat solche Schau den Charakter von Wahrnehmungen, wie wir solche aus dem Wachzustand kennen. Zieht man nur diesen Charakter in Betracht, so stellt die Frage, ob Traumvisionen Wahrnehmungen oder Vorstellungen seien, überhaupt kein Problem dar. Sie gehören offenbar zu den Wahrnehmungen.” (Conrad, 1968: 62).
“Das Einschlafen ist keineswegs ein »Erwachen in den Traum«” (Patočka, 1991: 55).
Patočka remarks that dreams, essentially characterized by their fleetingness, are not completely disordered, even though not far from that: “[D]ie Flüchtigkeit hat es nicht weit zum Ungeordnetsein, auch wenn sie mit diesem nicht identisch ist – es gibt ja auch Träume, die sich durch Einfachheit und eine gewisse Logik auszeichnen” (Patočka, 1991: 57).
Sartre refers to Spinoza’s expression “index sui” to characterize perception. (Sartre, 1940: 314)
Sartre has remarked that Descartes does not render perception doubtful directly, but only address the deceptive character of dreams. (Sartre, 1940: 310)
Thereby Sartre undermines Husserl’s claim that one could exercise the Cartesian meditation when dreaming and still assert the dreamworld as indubitably real.
It is worth noticing that in the first part of The Imaginary Sartre identifies the act of belief as a positional act (Sartre, 1940: 32), a statement which will be contradicted by his analyses of fascination as a non-positional belief.
Sartre reminds us that the expression “dreamworld” should not be accepted without reserve: “Mais pour plus de commodité nous userons de l’expression « monde du rêve », puisqu’elle est couramment adoptée, en avertissant simplement de ne pas la prendre sans réserves” (Sartre, 1940: 323).
Although Sartre classifies dreaming as imaginary without hesitation, the fatality of dreaming conflicts with the spontaneous character of imaginary under his pen: “Pour qu’une conscience puisse imaginer il faut qu’elle échappe au monde par sa nature même, il faut qu’elle puisse tirer d’elle-même une position de recul par rapport au monde. En un mot il faut qu’elle soit libre” (Sartre, 1940: 353).
Sartre also alludes to the concept of “being-in-the-world” from Martin Heidegger for elaborating the non-thetic consciousness of dreaming: “Certes, ma conscience, en temps de veille, est caractérisée par son « être-dans-le-monde », mais précisément parce que cet « être-dans-le-monde » caractérise le rapport de la conscience avec la réalité, il ne saurait s’appliquer à la conscience qui rêve. […] A vrai dire, une conscience qui rêve est toujours conscience non-thétique d’elle-même en tant qu’elle est fascinée par le rêve, mais elle a perdu son être-dans-le-monde et ne le retrouvera qu’au réveil” (Sartre, 1940: 329). He clearly points out that when dreaming one does not live in a genuine world and therefore loses the character of being-in-a-world. Yet, provided that the dreamer is still haunted by an atmosphere of world, Sartre finds it acceptable to characterize dreaming by being-in-a-world in a metaphorical sense: “La question est, à vrai dire, beaucoup plus compliquée et la conscience’ conserve même dans le rêve son « être-dans-le-monde » au moins d’une certaine façon. Mais nous pouvons garder cette idée d’un « être-dans-le-monde » perdu, au moins à titre d’indication métaphorique” (Sartre, 1940: 329).
We should take note of the distinction Fink carefully makes between presentification and image-consciousness, as highlighted by the title “Presentification and Image”.
While the German term “Versunkenheit” captures the centrifugal movement of an ego “sinking” in a phantastic space, its English counterpart “absorption” stresses the centripetal movement of the presentified world attracting the ego to its land.
There are comparable analyses in Conrad’s book On the Essential Doctrine of Psychic Life and Living. And the descriptions of Conrad are more sophisticated, since he distinguishes terminologically “being-displaced” (Versetztsein) from “being-absorbed” (Versunkensein). While being-displaced designates the splitting of ego into a “here” and a “there,” being-absorbed refers specifically to the extreme mode of being-displaced, where the “there” fully dominates our life and replaces the original “here” (see Conrad 1968).
Fink, following Husserl, calls the interrupted phrases of wakeful life “pauses”.
“Während das träumende Ich schläft, ist das Traumweltich wesensmäßig immer ein waches Ich, das in seine „wirkliche Welt“ hineinlebt, hineinerfährt. Diese Erfahrung braucht keineswegs eine einheitliche zu sein. In der Zusammenhanglosigkeit eines wirren Traumweltgeschehens offenbart sich der Zusammenhang einer chaotischen Welt” (Fink, 1966: 65).
For an extensive presentation of Fink’s analysis of countersense, see Sect.4.3 of Chu (2020).
“Jamais l’objet du rêve n’est donné comme absent, comme celui de la représentation” (Héring, 1946: 203).
In our opinion, it is problematic for Héring to have grouped Fink and Sartre together in contrast to Conrad: “Or, tandis que Th. Conrad (loc. cit., S. 55, note 1) voyait dans le rêve une perception, le contraire est évident pour Eugène Fink (1966: §26). ainsi que pour Jean-Paul Sartre (1940 205–215). Ce dernier est d’ailleurs le seul qui ait étudié le phénomène d’un peu plus près, mais sans réussir à nous convaincre” (Héring, 1946: 198) While Sartre firmly rejects dream-perception as hallucinatory, Fink discloses instead the intrinsic ambiguity of dreaming. Even though Fink repeatedly highlights the structure of presentification in dreaming, we have also learned that dreaming is for Fink a borderline case of phantasy, which is prone to complete confusion with perception. If Héring has longed for a future phenomenology of dream which distances itself from the framework of Sartre’s The Imaginary, Fink ought to be a great ally he could have looked for.
“[N]ous semblent avoir démontré la faiblesse de la thèse du caractère représentatif du rêve, sans pour cela effacer les différences ontologiques et transcendantales entre le rêve et la veille : quoi qu’en pense Prospéro, la veille n’est pas faite de la même étoffe que le rêve” (Héring, 1946: 205).
Husserl, following the notorious thread of world-annihilation, has alluded to the distinction between empirical and transcendental illusion for explicating the presumptive nature of our world. Accordingly, while we have no right to doubt arbitrarily the existence of our world, the world-thesis is not unconditionally certain. The givenness of our world, albeit its apodictic certainty, is all in all a contingent fact. Its nonexistence is hypothetically conceivable and compatible with its apodictic certainty. In consequence, so Husserl claims, even though we can safely reject the possibility of our world as an empirical illusion, we cannot rule out the possibility of our world as a transcendental illusion. Husserl further specifies that the hypothesis of the nonexistence of our world is of great interest to the beginning philosophers, because it indicates a way to disclose the field of transcendental experience. For details, see especially Lecture 33 to Lecture 38 of Husserl (1956). Since Husserl does not adopt the Cartesian method of hyperbolic doubt to begin his meditations, the dream argument plays no central role in his thoughts. Yet, his idea of our current world as a transcendental illusion is well applicable to the phenomenological analysis of dreaming.
Jennifer Windt coins the difficulty of describing dreaming in terms commonly used for describing standard wakeful states the “conceptualization problem of dreaming”. See the “General Introduction” of Windt (2015).
Here we are in line with Windt’s criticism against what she terms the “armchair fallacy,” which means “the practice of deriving (implausible) phenomenological claims from purely conceptual arguments” (Windt, 2015: 29) Thereby she calls for a “contrast-neutral description of dreaming” which “describes dreaming in its own right rather than modeling it on waking experience” (Windt, 2015: 253f.).
Similar exigencies emerge in recent phenomenological studies. For instance, Hans Rainer Sepp urges for overcoming the “unsatisfactory alternative whereby dreaming is held to be (more or less) imaginative or perceptive” (Sepp, 2010: 78); in the words of Julia Iribarne, dreaming consciousness expresses itself by means of a code radically foreign, “a code free from the principle of identity logic,” hence the necessity to distinguish perception in dream from that of the standard wakeful state (Iribarne, 2003: 4f., 7); Nicolas de Warren has nicely identified dreaming as a “third life of subjectivity” in contradistinction to both perception and imagination (De Warren, 2012: 479).
Windt fairly comments that the phenomenological tradition shifts the philosophical interest in dreams from epistemology to “claims about subjective experience in their own right” (Windt, 2015: 220).
Fink’s expression of a “chaotic world” is in line with his passing remark about the pathological states of consciousness: “[J]e größer die Versunkenheit, um so mehr entsteht der Anschein des Gegenwärtigens (z. B. eine pathologische Phantasie, Zwangsvorstellungen, Triebphantasien usw.)” (Fink, 1966: 55).
In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, the protagonist Prospero once said: “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep”. Héring corrects Prospero’s lines for highlighting the heterogeneous laws of our dreamworlds.
Thomas Metzinger suggests that the phenomenon of dreaming can provide an innovative entry point for disclosing the fundamental layers of self-consciousness. This excellent idea underlies most scholarly works on the phenomenology of dreaming, for example Iribarne (2003), Popa (2005), de Warren (2012), Thompson (2015), and Geniušas (2021). The present work adopts a similar strategy, suggesting that a phenomenology of dreaming can also enrich our understanding of world-consciousness (see Metzinger 2013).
“Le rêve ce n’est point la fiction prise pour la réalité, c’est l’odyssée d’une conscience vouée par elle-même, et en dépit d’elle-même, à ne constituer qu’un monde irréel. Le rêve est une expérience privilégiée qui peut nous aider à concevoir ce que serait une conscience qui aurait perdu son « être-dans-le-monde » et qui serait privée, du même coup, de la catégorie du réel” (Sartre, 1940: 339).
It is interesting to learn that some sceptics like Daniel Dennett claim the opposite. He defends for a “cassette-library theory,” according to which dream episodes, “precognitive” in nature, are only recalled and organized into narrative forms on waking (see Dennett 2017).
An earlier draft of the current article is presented in the conference Varieties of Self-Awareness, organized by Professor Saulius Geniušas at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2022. I thank for his invitation and for the attendants’ feedbacks. I also thank Professor Hans Rainer Sepp for sending to me copies of his own works, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and critical comments.
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Chu, MH. Dream and Worldliness. Hum Stud 45, 777–792 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09647-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09647-1