The Rise and Fall of Image-Consciousness in Light of Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology of Phantasy

Abstract

Phantasy and imagination are frequently undistinguished in the history of philosophy. The same may be said of the phenomenological tradition, where they are either taken as synonyms or taken separately but as kinds of a more generic and single imaginative consciousness (the main difference would consist in their dependence on or independence of a physical support). But a closer look at Husserl´s analysis of these phenomena reveals that he did not only distinguish between them but also that he ended up granting primacy to phantasy, especially over image-consciousness. To see how and why phantasy finally prevailed over image-consciousness, this paper focuses on the context in which both concepts emerged in Husserl´s thought, particularly in his position vis-à-vis Brentano and Twardowski regarding the problem of objectless representations. The paper studies how the direct model of phantasy ended up better solving the problem to which the mediate model of image-consciousness initially sought to respond. It also argues that this evolution in the analysis led to the final fall of image-consciousness, which was ultimately reduced to a kind of perceptual phantasy. Acknowledging phantasy´s ultimate primacy over image-consciousness might have consequences in the study of those domains, theoretical or practical, in which phantasy ?and not necessarily image-consciousness? plays a role (such as the intuition of essences, empathy, the reconstruction of history, among others). It can also offer reasons to reconsider those domains in which image-consciousness is supposed to play a role, such as in aesthetics.