Abstract
This paper examines the phenomenological considerations which govern an important transition in the thought of Edmund Husserl, namely his gradual disenchantment with the view that acts of the imagination are given to consciousness in the manner of a semblance, and his decision to replace it with the view that they should more accurately be understood to be reproductions of non-posited perceptions. The central conclusion of this paper will be that the logic of Husserl’s own analysis points to a further phenomenological discovery that Husserl himself does not fully articulate, but which helps to explain his initial attraction toward an imagistic account of imagining. This is the finding that a structure homologous to picture-consciousness is liable to arise in the context of nested reproductions, and in particular that acts of remembering imagining bear the act-character of pictoriality.
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Notes
It is not within the scope of the present article to provide a complete account of the development of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. This is to say that certain texts relevant to Husserl’s transition to a genetic account of intentionality, such as Hua XI, Hua XXXI, and Hua XXXIII, may not receive direct scrutiny in this paper.
No complete English translation of Hua VIII has been published. The English translation I provide comes from Bernet, Kern & Marbach (1995, p. 154).
No complete English translation of Hua VIII has been published. The English translation I provide comes from Bernet, Kern & Marbach (1995, p. 153).
Throughout this paper, the term “phantasy” (so spelt) will be used in the Husserlian sense of Phantasie.
In general I shall favour the use of the term “image-object” rather than “picture-object” for two reasons. Firstly, “picture-object” seems rather too close to “picture-thing”, potentially giving rise to confusion. Secondly, I think “image-object” helps to convey the notion of resemblance more effectively than “picture-object”.
On occasion Husserl uses the term “irreal” to describe entities that are constituted by consciousness but which do not exist. E.g. Hua XXIII, p. 77; 2005c, p. 84.
Husserl discusses the concept of the “fullness” of a presentation in Hua XIX, pp. 606-614; 2005b, pp. 233-238. Fullness in this context is characterised by three dimensions that he calls “extent” (completeness of scope), “liveliness” (fidelity), and “reality-level […], the greater or less number of its strictly presentative contents” (which I take to mean richness of detail, vividness, or what we might perhaps call “resolution”).
For this reason it seems to me to be misleading when phenomenologists speak of the experience or awareness of a lived experience rather than simply of having a lived experience.
Cited in Brough’s introduction to the English translation of Hua XXIII, 2005c, p. LXII.
Some readers may welcome some further elaboration on my stance with respect to Gurwitsch and Drummond on this matter. My elaboration is as follows. I shall consider first Gurwitsch, then Drummond. Gurwitsch endorses the Gestaltist critique of the Husserlian schematic model’s dualism of sensuous content and interpreting apprehension, on the grounds that this schematic model falsifies the descriptive facts about perceptual experience (Gurwitsch 1966, pp. 253-6). In support of this view, Gurwitsch argues that the procedure of eidetic variation in which Husserl purports to isolate hyletic data is invalid because it presupposes a version of the constancy hypothesis which belongs to the psychologism that Husserl has already rejected (Gurwitsch 1966, pp. 101-6, 242). Gurwitsch goes on to argue that the faulty schematic model should be replaced by an interpretation of Husserl’s noesis-noema model, according to which sense-data disappears from the account (Gurwitsch 1966, pp. 256-67). My comments on Gurwitsch’s position are as follows. Firstly, it does not follow from the fact that there are problems with the schematic model that hyletic data must be completely expunged from the account. Husserl recognises that the schematic model has problems, but retains hyletic data in the noesis-noema model, as evidenced by his remark in Ideas I §36 that “[o]ne easily sees […] that not every really inherent moment in the concrete unity of an intentive mental process itself has the fundamental characteristic, intentionality, thus the property of being ‘consciousness of something’. That concerns, for example, all data of sensation which play so great a role in perceptual intuitions of physical things” (Hua III, p. 65; 1998, p. 75). This view from 1913 comes after Husserl’s transcendental turn, but prior to the full elaboration of the temporal constitution of sensation. Even after the subsequent development of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, there is nothing to preclude one from retaining the data of sensation as a moment of the noesis, capable of being attended to as an intentional object in its own right through an alteration in the direction of one’s introspective attention. Secondly, Gurwitsch is certainly entitled to his own view on how the noesis-noema model should be interpreted if it is to succeed, and thereby implicitly move beyond a strictly Husserlian position. But Gurwitsch’s Gestaltist motivations, and the resulting version of the noesis-noema model that he arrives at, have problems of their own. The debatability of Gurwitsch’s position is exemplified in Drummond (1990), Chapter 4. We are not obliged to accept Gurwitsch’s position in order to make sense of the evolution of Husserl’s thought, which is the primary concern of this paper. I turn now to Drummond. Drummond also thinks there is a problem (a different one from the one that Gurwitsch identifies) with the method of eidetic variation in which Husserl attempts to isolate and bring to consciousness hyletic data. As Drummond points out, Husserl isolates intentional essence (the conjunction of act-matter and act-quality) and sensuous content through two different types of imaginative variation, namely variation of sensuous content while intentional essence remains constant, and vice-versa (Drummond 1990, pp. 63-4). Drummond’s objection here is that Husserl ends up isolating not hyletic data but medial conditionality, including physiological and psychophysical conditionality (Drummond 1990, pp. 144-8). In support of ultimately incorporating this view into an Husserlian mature position, Drummond appeals to Husserl’s view in Ideas I that the noesis comprises those moments of the act which “bear in themselves the specific trait of intentionality” (Hua III, p. 172; 1998, p. 203; see Drummond 1990, p. 56). But it is far from certain that this latter view of Husserl’s should be taken to conflict with his very clear retention of noetic sense-data earlier on in Ideas I (Hua III, p. 65; 1998, p. 75). The key Husserlian thought here, I would suggest, is that hyletic data (or, in the later Husserl, the temporal flow of hyletic data) is always in some sense available to consciousness through an alteration in the direction of one’s introspective attention. It is certainly true that after Ideas I (1913), the development of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology has some significant way to go. But nowhere in the Husserlian corpus is there an argument in favour of the complete elimination of hyletic data from the phenomenological account of perceptual experience. Drummond’s case for discarding hyletic data from the phenomenological account, and attributing his own account to Husserl, is therefore not one that I necessarily need to commit myself to for the purposes of this paper.
On many occasions Marbach refers to acts of intuitional presentiation as involving perceiving an object “in the mode of non-actuality” (e.g. 1993, pp. 60, 72, 73, 79, 126, 148, 179). But this seems to me somewhat misleading. In these cases the implied act of perception itself may or may not be posited, depending, for example, on whether we are considering an act of memory or an act of phantasy. The act’s intentional object is given inauthentically but may or may not be posited.
The possibility that I am raising here is that moments of a phantasy experience may on reflection carry a buried act-quality of remembrance. But there is a danger here of allowing psychologistic reasoning to influence the direction of phenomenological speculation. And it is not immediately clear that this hypothesis necessarily conforms to the descriptive facts. I do not propose to pursue this matter further in this paper, beyond saying that it appears to require further phenomenological investigation.
Hua X, No.45, cited in Marbach (1993, pp. 84-5).
See, for example, Hua I, §51; or Experience and Judgement, §42, cited in Marbach (1993, p. 84).
Marbach (1993, p. 85).
Marbach (1993, pp. 153-4).
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Shum, P. The Evolution and Implications of Husserl’s Account of the Imagination. Husserl Stud 31, 213–236 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-015-9175-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-015-9175-3