Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger

Brian Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134347650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Phenomenology is one of the most pervasive and influential schools of thought in twentieth-century European philosophy. This book provides a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the idea of the imagination in Husserl and Heidegger. The author also locates phenomenology within the broader context of a philosophical world dominated by Kantian thought, arguing that the location of Husserl within the Kantian landscape is essential to an adequate understanding of phenomenology both as an historical event and as a legacy for present and future philosophy.

Part I
The sense of phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, 1893– 1925)

1
Intuition and expression in the early epistemology

Intention and intuition

The basic problem in Kant with which both Husserl and Heidegger are fundamentally concerned is the issue of an adequate articulation of the relationship between the transcendentally ideal and empirically real aspects of knowledge. In Husserl it is his extension of the concept of intuition in the Logical Investigations to include what he calls ‘categorial intuition’ that marks the decisive break with the letter of Kant’s philosophy. This move that lies at the heart of Husserl’s breakthrough to phenomenology appears to render otiose the basic function of what Kant calls the ‘transcendental imagination’ in bridging the divide between the conceptually ideal and the sensibly real. Having ‘deduced’ the a priori validity of the pure concepts of the understanding or categories (cf. KRV, A95 ff./B129 ff.), Kant is faced in the Critique of Pure Reason with the task of showing how such concepts are ‘realized’ in actual experience. In order to account for such ‘realization’ Kant posits a mental operation that he calls the ‘schematism’ of the transcendental imagination (op. cit., A137 ff./B176 ff.). However, this putative operation of productive imagination bears a troubling resemblance to Plato’s notion of methexis, that is, the ‘participation’ or inherence of intellectual forms within individual empirical objects.¹

Despite the Platonism apparent in Husserl’s strict distinction of empirical reality and logico-mathematical ideality,² his epistemological stance may be far more fairly described as Aristotelian. From the 1890s onwards Husserl’s central preoccupation in his ‘critique of knowledge’ (Erkenntniskritik) is to offer an adequate description of how ‘logical’ structure is adumbrated and predelineated at the most basic level of conscious life. Arguing as he does against a hypostasization of conscious acts in terms of a faculty psychology, Husserl is at pains to avoid any supposition of general ‘powers’ in his elucidation of the foundations of human knowledge. Accordingly, rather than running up against Kant’s pivotal problem of explaining how the radically heterogeneous impressions of the sensibility on the one hand and the concepts of the understanding on the other can be brought together, Husserl attempts to articulate a dynamic relationship between what he calls acts of signification or intention and acts of intuition or fulfilment. Each term of this relationship is intrinsically bound to the other. Consequently, any act of intention intends something and the ideal of that thing’s being given as ‘bodily present’ in intuition. Conversely, any act of intuition is the fulfilment of an intention that necessarily precedes it as an ‘empty intending’ of the object meant.

The intention/fulfilment dynamic articulates the basic insight underlying Husserl’s breakthrough to phenomenology. If as a consequence of this basic idea there no longer appears to be a need to identify a third term to unify the empirical and the conceptual, then, as indicated, anything like the Kantian transcendental imagination would be excluded from the sense of phenomenology from the very moment of its inception. It will be argued here that this is crucially not the case. It will be contended that, in fact, the imagination plays a pivotal role—in one case implicitly, in the other explicitly—within two areas of Husserlian phenomenology. First, at the most basic level of conscious life where the fundamental temporal synthesis is effected. Although Husserl goes to some length to distinguish the conscious processes that stretch lived time beyond the immediate present from any reproductive activity, the interpretation offered here will argue that the sense of intentionality worked out by Husserl requires that the repetitions of ‘retention’ and the projections of ‘protention’ be regarded as the workings of something essentially akin to the Kantian transcendental imagination.³ Second, Husserl himself expressly acknowledges the methodological role of the imagination or ‘free fantasy’ in phenomenological investigation. This role initially becomes explicit in the first volume of the Ideas (1913), where Husserl speaks of the primacy within phenomenological analysis of free fantasy over and against perception and goes so far as to claim that ‘“fiction” is the vital element of phenomenology, as of all eidetic sciences’.⁴

The initial task of the present enquiry will be to show that this explicitly announced preference for imaginary presentations in phenomenological description is intrinsically linked on the one hand to the analysis of inner time consciousness and, more fundamentally, to the basic sense of the intentional worked out by Husserl before the publication of his Logical Investigations. According to this sense intentionality signifies that the meaningfulness of mental acts is essentially independent of the empirical existence of what is intended or signified by such acts. Thus intentionality as the ‘mark of the mental’ is essentially characterized by Husserl as independence from empirical reality. Clarifying the sense of the intentional arrived at by Husserl before the publication of the work that officially inaugurates phenomenology will offer initial indications as to the sense of phenomenology in Husserl. Accordingly, the enquiry begins with an examination of several short texts, some published, others unpublished, composed in the mid-1890s in the wake of Husserl’s first major publication, the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891).

In a series of short writings from 1893 to 1898 Husserl steadily progressed in his working out of the underlying structures of mental life that came to be articulated in detail in his Logical Investigations (1900/1). In an article entitled ‘Psychological Studies for Elemental Logic’⁵ and published in the Philosophische Monatshefte in 1894, Husserl focuses on a distinction between ‘authentic’ (‘proper’) and ‘inauthentic’ presentations (eigentliche und uneigentliche Vorstellungen). After an initial consideration of some contemporary philosophical psychologists such as Wundt and Meinong, Husserl characterizes all authentic presentations as intuitive:

Intuition is not a ‘presentation’ in that inauthentic sense of mere representation (Stellvertretung) by parts, images, signs and such like; nor in the sense of a mere determination by characteristic marks (Merkmale)—by means of which what is presented is in truth not at all placed before us. Rather, it is a presentation in a more authentic sense that really places before us, so that it is itself the substrate of the psychic activity.

(Hua 22, p. 103)

This sense of the full intuitive givenness of what is intended by mental acts will come to assume pivotal significance in Husserl’s inauguration and working out of phenomenology. Though he will go on to speak of it in terms of a regulative ideal that in most cases remains a distant goal in actual mental life, this notion of intuition as ‘fulfilment’ remains the encompassing telos of intentional consciousness in all of Husserl’s phenomenological investigations.

It is notable, given this decisive significance of intuitive presentations in Husserlian phenomenology, that what directly follows the passage cited is an examination of imaginative presentations (Phantasievorstellungen). Such presentations, Husserl remarks, should also be considered a species of the authentic even though they share with sense perception the fate of being for the most part inadequate representations of the object meant. By ‘inadequacy’ Husserl means the necessarily one-sided or discontinuous givenness of something in perception or imagination. Generally speaking, I take all sides of an object to be potentially available for viewing, though I would seldom be sufficiently motivated to pursue the maximum actualization of this potentiality. Even if I were to survey an object successively from any number of perspectives there could only ever be one side or profile (Abschattung) of it given at any one time.⁶ In normal circumstances I do not have an unhindered view of things: I must reorientate myself or remove other things in order to reveal the object of interest. Beyond such spatial limitations to perceptual givenness there is an equally essential aspect of temporal discontinuity insofar as any one thing can be an object of attention for only a certain period of its existence, for example, for as long as I wish to use it.

However, though such a description may possess a rather obvious, indeed almost trivial validity with respect to sense perception, whether it holds in the case of imagination is questionable. Later phenomenologists, notably Sartre, have claimed that the intended objects of imaginative presentations lack any genuine spatiotemporal localization and that this invalidates in advance any talk of perspective or observation in imagination.⁷ If the lack of such characteristics is linked, as seems plausible, to the idea that any act of imagining takes place at one remove from bodily orientation, then perhaps notions such as elaboration or focusing in imagination could at best be granted metaphorical significance.⁸ However, such a move could only be justified if intuitive or ‘authentic’ presentations were restricted to sense perception. As we shall see, however, what is characteristic of Husserl’s approach is precisely the fact that he insists on the necessity of extending the idea of ‘perception’ to include non-sensory modes of intuitive givenness.

In Husserl’s early essay currently under consideration the imagination proves refractory to precise psychological characterization. If it is taken to include memory as well as pictorial presentation, the imagination is manifestly a type of inauthentic presentation in the sense of offering a representative (Repräsentant) for something not actually present. Husserl is unwilling, however, to deny that imaginative presentation contains any essential intuitive element whatever due to the fact that his primary concern is with the intuitive content of conceptual presentation (begriffliches Vorstellen) (cf. op. cit., p. 104). Still very much in the shadow of his mathematical studies, he conceives of the imagination at this stage principally in terms of the act of illustrating or ‘constructing’ mathematical objects in the form of perceptible characters and figures (cf. op. cit., p. 107). Here we find Husserl engaged with the Kantian problematic of the relation of concepts and intuitions already alluded to, namely, how to realize general concepts in particular acts of direct apprehension. Thus Husserl remarks: ‘[…] this is, however, the meaning of all constructing: to posit as an intuition that which is only inauthentically thought and indeed only by means of conceptual determinations, and thus to “render evident” (veranschaulichen) the concept’ (ibid.). Such intuitive realization is not achieved, as Husserl underscores, by the mere inscription of arithmetical notation. Accordingly, the relation of the sign to the signified is essentially distinct from that of the image to what is imagined.

Despite this distinction of signification and imagination and the inclusion of ‘imaginative presentation’ within the category of the authentic and intuitive, Husserl continues to vacillate throughout this early article when it comes to assigning the imagination a definite place within mental life. Thus when he reaches the cardinal distinction of representation (Repräsentation) and intuition and characterizes the latter as a type of presentation whereby the intended object is truly contained in the act of presentation (cf. op. cit., p. 108), it would appear that imaginative and con-ceptual forms of presentation are grouped together as figurative, mediated and so inauthentic. It is noteworthy that Husserl is also at pains here to point out the degree to which his treatment is in harmony with Kant (cf. op. cit., p. 109), as this goes some way in explaining the uncertainty evinced by Husserl’s treatment of imaginative presentations. For, as will emerge at various stages in the present investigation, this wavering in relation to the imagination follows the pattern of Kant’s own failure to offer an unambiguous characterization of this basic mental ‘faculty’ within the broader context of his critical analysis of the basic sources of knowledge.

As stated, Husserl’s principal concern in the present context is with the intuitive realization of conceptual presentations. Presumably taking his cue from Kant’s famous saying that concepts without intuition are empty, Husserl labels the realization of conceptual consciousness ‘fulfilment’ (Erfüllung) (ibid.). Here Husserl’s tendency to grasp the relation of representation and intuition as something basically static in nature involves the danger of viewing this relation in terms of two distinct classes of objects rather than of mental acts, that is, in terms of the immanent objects of intuition on the one hand and the merely intended objects of representation on the other (cf. op. cit., p. 112). The characterization of intuition also lacks the breadth that this notion will come to enjoy by the time of the Logical Investigations. In restricting intuitive consciousness to what he calls ‘a particular concern with (Beschäftigung mit), a peculiar attention (eigentümliche Zuwendung) to a content which is noticed in its own right’ (op. cit., p. 114), Husserl expressly rules out the idea of intuitive co-givenness of an object’s environment. Only when the concept of intuition has been made more accommodating will Husserl be able to adequately account for the particular presence that characterizes the intuitive horizon. In subjecting the phenomenon of background or ‘horizonal’ presence to a detailed analysis below it will become apparent to what degree a key achievement of the imagination is thereby indicated.

In the closing section of his article Husserl attempts to clarify what for him is the significance of the representation/intuition distinction. Here he speaks of nothing less than astonishment in the face of the psychological function of representations: ‘In and for itself it is really quite remarkable that a psychic act can refer over and above its immanent content to something else which is in no way consciously given’ (op. cit., p. 120). A trace of what might be called the ‘fundamental experience’ motivating Husserl’s inauguration of phenomenological philosophy is present here, namely, a sense of the wonder of meaningfulness in the absence of what is actually meant. In the specific area of Husserl’s interest—scientific knowledge—it is our reliance upon mere intentions for the most part (upon knowledge by description) that strikes him so forcefully. Such a tendency towards the inauthentic is by no means a matter of chance. It is rather a key characteristic of human cognition—the mark of its limitations—that necessitates the recourse to representation, particularly in the domain of highly complex, abstract thought. Yet this necessity in turn refers back to a possibility that grounds any genuinely free pursuit of knowledge: ‘Scientific knowledge—one thinks of [such knowledge] in the first instance—rests absolutely on the possibility of resigning oneself to the greatest extent to a merely symbolic or otherwise highly inadequate mode of thought or to intentionally prefer it (with certain reservations) to a more adequate mode’ (op. cit., p. 121).

Thus, while intuition is identified as the ultimate goal of all mental life—as it is in Kant’s first Critique (cf. KRV, A19/B33) ZHusserl at once recognizes the necessity of inauthentic presentations. Later this recognized need for the inauthentic will be elaborated on when dealing with Husserl’s analysis of inner time-consciousness. For just as mental life is seen in the 1894 article as a core of actual, adequate intuition surrounded by inauthentic presentations, so too is the temporal flow of conscious life centred for Husserl on the absolute position of the ‘originary impression’. Similarly, Husserl’s indications relating to the peculiar role of the imagination in bridging the divide between absolute presence and absence in presentations show themselves to be at work again in his account of the ‘distention’ of time-consciousness outwards from its core of pure presence. For the time being, however, it is a matter of arriving at a further clarified sense of the basic dynamic of intentionality in the immediate pre-phenomenological period.

Representation and fulfilment

A further short unpublished writing dating from the same period as the article already considered (1893)⁹ takes up once again the conceptual pairings of intention and intuition, representation and fulfilment. Whereas the 1894 essay displayed a preoccupation with the problematic realization of conceptual thought, Husserl’s principal concern here is with the unity and continuity of mental life. Using the example of apprehending a continuously sounding melody that will feature centrally in his 1905 time lectures, Husserl begins with the following question:

How is the presentation of the unity of a more extensively continuous process of change arrived at, of a unity that is effected and developed in succession, for example, the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Sense of Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, 1893– 1925)
• Part II: The Pre-Sense of Phenomenology (Martin Heidegger, 1920–36)
• Notes
• Bibliography