| John Salis is a famous contemporary American phenomenologist and professor of philosophy at Boston College.He is dedicated to establishing a phenomenology about imagination.Differing from the traditional philosophy to define imagination as the initiative ability of the soul,Salis's imagination is a passive,receiving imagination.This passive,receiving imagination is open to the elemental nature.Therefore,for Salis imagination and nature are two aspects of one problem.The imagination in Salis's philosophy is no longer the imagination in Husserl's and Sartre's philosophy that is confined to consciousness.Instead,it is the imagination with bodily sensibility,and Salis's imagination is not limited to the perception in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy.Salis's phenomenology of imagination persists and further advances the ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.He opposes any sense of synthesis,whether it is the consciousness of Husserl or Sartre's Synthetic,or Merleau-Ponty's sense of bodily synthesis.The nature in Salis's philosophy is the elemental nature.The elemental he describes are not basic elements that constitute the whole,but the basic elements that nature manifest to us.Therefore,the problem of nature that Salis cares about is not form which constitutes the nature,but form which nature manifest to us.Salis is radically opposed to any sense of simplicity understanding of nature.His exploration of nature attempts to return to the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratic period.He is restoring the understanding of nature in the ancient Greek period,that is,understanding nature as naturally generated,nature in the sense of phusis.For Sallis art seems to need to get rid of the imitation,and the true art need to making visible,rather than copy the visible,as Paul Klee said.Salis tried to eliminate the long-lasting division between art and nature.From the perspective of imagination,nature and art are in a state of integration rather than division.For Salis,through gathering the elementals imagination making art and nature manifest itself.That is to say,imagination is the condition for the manifest of the art and nature as a phenomenon.This article will be divided into two parts.The first part consists of the first chapter and the second chapter.In the first part,we will mainly discuss Husserl's concept of image conscious and imagination and the main ideas of Sartre and Casey's phenomenology of imagination.Husserl's swaying position between perception and imagination disappeared in Sartre and Casey,they emphasized the split between perception and imagination.Sartre and Casey's phenomenology of imagination was based on the intentional act.For Sartre and Casey,imagination is understood as act of image consciousness.The second part of this article consists of the third chapter to sixth chapter.Chapter 3 attempt to show how Merleau-Ponty's later phenomenology about visible and invisible became the birthplace of Salis's phenomenology.Chapter 4 will mainly discuss Salis's rediscovery of the imagination and show to what extent Salis's phenomenology of imagination breaks through the traditional theory of confining imagination to an act of conscious.In chapter 5,we will discuss Sallis's thought of elemental nature.Sallis thinks that the elemental is not from which constitute but from which manifest.Through the gathering of elementals in imagination nature manifest itself.The most prominent elemental is the sky and the earth.The sky and the earth constitute the region where all natural things show itself to us.Chapter VI will discuss Sallis's view of art,which is different from Sartre's diametrical opposition to natural art.Sallis tried to show the fusion of art and nature through the analysis of Cezanne and Klee's paintings.For Sallis,both the art and the nature are the manifestations of the sensible world in the imagination.Therefore,he broadened the traditional understanding of beauty.The beauty no longer means a certain kind of pleasure,but it means the manifestation of a broader sensible world. |
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