Abstract
The paper strives to clarify the essential structures of productive imagination using the resources of Husserlian phenomenology. According to my working hypothesis, productive imagination is a relative term, whose meaning derives from its opposition to reproductive imagination. One thus first needs to clarify what makes imagination into a reproductive mode of consciousness, and in this regard, Husserl’s phenomenology proves exceptionally fruitful. My analysis unfolds in four steps. First, I fix the sense in which phantasy is an essentially reproductive mode of consciousness. Secondly, I argue that phantasy cannot be conceived as an ingredient of perceptual consciousness. Thirdly, I show that both memory and phantasy generate patterns of sense, which can subsequently be transcribed into the field of positional experience. Finally, I conclude with a suggestion that the plurality of cultural worlds can be conceived as diverse configurations of sense, which are the constitutive accomplishments of productive imagination.
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- 1.
As Paul Ricoeur has argued in his noteworthy studies of productive imagination, insofar as one conceptualizes imagination alongside perception as a distinct type of intentional consciousness, one inevitably ends up limiting imagination to its reproductive function. Ricoeur thus asks: “if an image is not derived from perception, how can it be derived from language?” (Ricoeur 1991: 121). So also, in the in the framework of his analysis of Husserlian phenomenology of imagination, John Salis speaks of a “reorientation prompted by several of Husserl’s analyses … despite the massive constraints that Husserl thus employs to restrict imagination to the horizon of perception. It is preeminently a matter of reorienting the analysis to the site of appearing …. It is, then, at this site, in the appearing of the image-object, that the hold of presence is broken and imagination is drawn to spacing” (Sallis, 212–213).
- 2.
Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination, which were delivered at the University of Chicago in 1975 and to which I am here referring, still remain to be published. The volume is scheduled to appear in print in the near future. I am grateful to George Taylor, the editor of Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination, for the permission to quote Ricoeur’s lectures. When citing this work, I will indicate the lecture number before the manuscript page number.
- 3.
Besides being merely reproductive, as in Peter’s case, imagination can also be combinatory, as in the case of mermaids or unicorns. Yet combinatory imagination is essentially reducible to reproductive imagination: its fundamental elements (a horse and a horn, in the case of a unicorn, or a woman and a fish, in the case of a mermaid) are reproductive copies of pregiven reality.
- 4.
In Text No. 20 in Hua XXIII, after indicating that “‘phantasy’ is already related to the sphere of reproduction in Aristotle,” Husserl further remarks that the history of philosophy has not succeeded in clarifying the meaning of reproduction: “To be sure, the linguistic usage at present is not entirely univocal” (Hua XXIII 575/692).
- 5.
Here I will follow the established custom in phenomenological literature and quote Husserl’s works, which have been published in the Husserliana edition, using the following abbreviations: Hua + volume number + page number in the original German / page number in the English translation.
- 6.
In this regard, see Appendix XXXIII in Hua XXIII (315–316/381).
- 7.
This distinction is essential not only to Husserl’s but also to Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of imagination, which we come across in Sartre’s The Imaginary.
- 8.
See Christopher C. Berger and H. Henrik Ehrsson (2013), “Mental Imagery Changes Multisensory Perception,” in Current Biology, 23/14, 1367–1372.
- 9.
Transformation of this nature can take place in the framework of perceptual consciousness, while when it comes to analogical apperception, which is constitutive of the Other, such a transformation is in principle excluded. The constitution of intermonadic community will be the focus of the next section.
- 10.
For a detailed analysis of the concept of motivation in phenomenology, see Ideen II, 56.
- 11.
For a detailed discussion of such mixed experiences, see Ferencz-Flatz 2009.
- 12.
As Husserl remarks in §26 in the Third Cartesian Meditation, “we can be sure something is actual only by virtue of a synthesis of evident verification, which presents rightful or true actuality itself” (Hua I 95/60). As he further remarks, “it is evidence alone by virtue of which an ‘actually’ existing, true, rightly accepted object of whatever form or kind has sense for us” (ibid).
- 13.
Fur Husserl’s own discussion of the significance of communication in the constitution of a common world, see Ideen II, §51.
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Geniusas, S. (2020). What Is Productive Imagination? The Hidden Resources of Husserl’s Phenomenology of Phantasy. In: Apostolescu, I. (eds) The Subject(s) of Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4_8
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