actes de colloque
Erez Nir
Imagination and the Image: A Revised Phenomenology of Imagination and Affectivity
Volume 13 (2017), Numéro 2 (Série Actes, 10: L'acte d'imagination: Approches phénoménologiques), p. 52-67
https://doi.org/10.25518/1782-2041.963
Abstract: In this paper I offer a critical revision of the main thematic phenomenological writings on imagination by Sartre and Edward Casey based on the following three criteria: 1. the sufficiency of their respective sui generis accounts of imagination. 2. The capacity of their respective frameworks to account for imagination’s rich affectivity. 3. Their ability to provide a coherent and purely transcendental description of the difference between imagination and perception. I argue that in both Sartre and Casey the problematic aspects of their theories derive from focusing solely on the nature of the imaginative object at the expense of the imaginative experience as a whole. Using Husserl’s transcripts on the subject, I suggest a new phenomenological analysis of imagination as the direct intuition of the experience of the object instead of an intuition of an object in a possible mode. I argue that in imagination the object is present in a marginal way and what is directly experienced is the object’s affective form, which is an intuitive aspect of the object’s value qualities. This analysis shows that the intentional presence of value qualities in objects, and the general presence of value in the world is always connected to the way we imagine objects and not the way we perceive them, and that the value of things is better to be called their imaginative structure.
Mots-clefs: imagination, image, Sartre, Husserl, Casey.
