A Study Of Husserl's Phenomenology Of Phantasy

Contrasting to Husserl's thoughts on perception,self,time-consciousness and intersubjectivity,only a little attention has been paid to his phenomenology of phantasy by Chinese scholars.Basing on Husserl's published works and unpublished manuscript,the dissertation tries to fully show his thoughts on phantasy.The first suggestion to occupy Husserl with phantasy problem owes to his professor Brentano,who already gave an seminar on "Selected Psychological and Aesthetic Questions" in the middle of the eighties at Viennese University,but he disagrees with Brentano's point of view that phantasy is an inauthentic presentation,he is also not satisfied with his concept of intentionality.The reason is that according to Brentano's doctrine of intentionality,the presentation is unable to introduce differentiations.In others words,these differentiations stem solely from the content.Husserl gives a new explanation of the concept of intentionality,which easily rebuts the ballpark of previous theoretical approaches to the question of imagination,especially those that relied on the supposition that the relation between the mind and the world is mediated by mental images.Nevertheless,Husserl's approach in the Halle years exhibits the fixed determination to defend the imagination as a genuine and intuitive consciousness.Even if Husserl already distinguishes between symbolic,imaginative,and perceptual acts,and grants that imaginative acts are intuitive acts in their own right,he still offers no answer to why a content undergoes a certain form of apprehension and not another.If phenomenology cannot offer a response to why we apprehend a specific content,e.g.,sometimes in the manner of a thing-e.g.,the arabesque-and sometimes in the manner of a sign or why a red-content can be equally taken up in the perception or in the imagination of an object,then these become a matter of psychological and empirical regularities.There is no doubt that Husserl's tenure at Gottingen is a time of great upheaval in the development of his thought.As is well known,during this period Husserl abandons the realist position of the Logische Untersuchungen in favor of a resolute transcendental idealism that would make its editorial debut with the publication of his Ideen I.At the margins of this central revolution in Husserl's thought there are three transformations regarding the imagination which will specially occupy us in the study of the writings in this period:First,the transform of the imagination from an imagining consciousness to a veritably imageless consciousness.Second,the abandonment of Husserl's account of imagination and of time-consciousness in terms of the 'content for an apprehension and apprehension' schema.Third,the conception of pure imagination has been put forward in the horizon of phenomenology.In dealing with the problem concerning presence and absence in the third of the 'Principal Parts' lectures of WS '1904-05' on imagination and image-consciousness,Husserl already pointed out time-consciousness can be used as the solution of the problem of the distinction between imagination and perception.But when we pass to the analysis of time consciousness itself in the fourth and final section of these lectures,we realize that in fact similar problems arise from the application of the 'content for an apprehension and apprehension' schema to time-consciousness as well.In the aftermath of the lectures on "Phantasy and Image consciousness" and "Time Consciousness",we situate three main steps in the development of Husserl's thought which serve as catalysts for the revision of the schema's application to phantasy and to time-consciousness.The first step is the introduction of the concept of absolute consciousness.The second is the consolidation of the phenomenological reduction.And the third is the deepening of the relation between primary and secondary memory.In contrast to the first presentation of the three levels of temporal constitution,H usserl sets for himself the goal of purging the sensuous contents from the absolute consciousness.He thereby makes a clear-cut distinction between the level of a primordial consciousness and the level of pre-empirical temporality:sensuous contents are immanent to the level of pre-empirical temporality,but not to the level of a primordial consciousness.But together with this distinction he draws a parallel between the relations of the primordial consciousness and pre-empirical and the relation of pre-empirical and empirical events in objective time.The price to be paid for this parallelism is the return of the problem whether and how the unity of the flow of absolute consciousness is itself temporally constituted.If this unity is only constituted by another more ulterior act,an infinite regress is again effectively engendered.Image consciousness,as an account of the intuitive imaginative giveness within the perceptual field of regard of something that is not hic et nunc,exerts such an influence on Husserl's thought that regularly up until 1909 it serves as leitmotiv for mere phantasy,recollection,and retention.In the last two chapters,I discuss a new concept of image-consciousness,which shows that while phantasy and perception remain distinct and irreducible to one another,they are peculiarly intertwined-as far as artistic images are concerned.Husserl's account of perceptual phantasy can significantly improve our understanding how we recognize and imaginatively participate in the artistic fictions.