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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Depraz
"Even if Edmund Husserl never created such a research field as phenomenological aesthetics, a great number of his first generation students did. Why ? Either they felt that Husserl was about to develop one, or they were tempted enough by the phenomenology of imagination he invented to apply it to aesthetics. It is therefore worthwhile coming back to Husserl’s understanding of the act of imagining as well as to his apprehension of images. Such an analysis is to be found very early in a 1904/1905 lecture course that he devoted to the relationships between (1) imagination as an act of imagining (Phantasie), (2) our consciousness of images (Bildbewusstsein), and (3) the act of remembering (Wiedererinnerung) (Husserl 1980).
Two remarks proceed directly from what has just been said.
(1) Imagination is an act of our consciousness, which means that it is not a faculty as in the classical (Kantian and Cartesian) view: in short, it is a move directed toward the world, and not a closed-up mental state. Imagining is an activity of producing a new reality, the reality of the images, directly related to previous perceptions or indirectly linked to them (namely, via remembering), which enables the subject to enlarge his/her own inner world.
(2) Consequently, imagination is not an isolated activity, which would, again, trap the subject within itself: it is closely related to perception, remembering, and empathy, since all of these acts of consciousness are identified as intentional, that is, as directed toward their object (imagined, perceived, remembered, or empathized) and opened up toward the world.
As early as 1904–1905, Husserl’s original contribution with regard to the experience of imagination is to make a new distinction between two different acts of imagination: on the one hand, Phantasie, which corresponds to an act through which the imagined object appears directly to me; on the other hand, Bildbewusstsein, which is the re-presentation of an imagined object much like the perceived object (Sallis 1989). Such a clear-cut distinction between two different intentionalities of imagination has deep consequences for the relationship between perception and imagination in both cases. On the one hand, in the experience of Bildbewusstsein, my experience of images is necessarily and experientially founded on my experience of previous perceptions; on the other hand, in the experience of Phantasie, my direct vision of images founds a renewed vision of perception. Both approaches to images therefore lead to specific and original apprehensions of aesthetic pictures, as Husserl mentions. They correspond, for example, to two different ways of looking at a picture: in the first case, you may look at Monet’s painted sunsets as being founded on the painter’s own previous perceptions of sunsets ; in the second case, you will see them as a new creation of an unknown reality, that is, as the opening of the way for another perception of sunsets for both the spectator and the creator.
The methodological tensions emerging around 1913 are especially telling with regard to Husserl’s quest for a radically renewed understanding of imagination. Indeed, in the first book of Ideen, and above all in §§111–12, he provides us with an intrinsic link between imagination and the very method of phenomenology, namely, the epoche. Contrary to perception, which is directed toward an object considered as being effectively existent, imagination suspends the actual existence of the object and is directed toward the pure possibility of the latter, that is, toward its ineffective modality. Imagination therefore paves the way for the free openness of multifarious possibilities, whereas perception traps us in a closed and limited unique reality. Now the method of the epoche similarly operates as a gesture of suspension of preconceived and taken-for-granted realities, so as to question them as “being able not to be.” Epoche and imagination are therefore structurally linked by their common concern for freedom from facts and their quest for unlimited possibilities.
Consequently, such a methodological understanding of imagination paves the way for the primacy of imagination with regard to perception in the early 1920s. During these years [...] the dynamic of experience that is emphasized demonstrates a strong continuity between perception and imagination, which goes hand in hand with a phenomenon of graduality between them—hence the numerous intermediate experiences of dreams, lucid dreaming, and daydreaming, but also modalized perceptions (doubt, negation, probability, uncertainty), or motor imagination. The genetic-phenomenological experience of imagination stresses the process of imagining rather than the act as it is directed toward images; in contrast, the founding experience of perception that is given a privilege during the first decade of Husserl’s philosophical activity echoes a clear (hierarchized) stratification of the different acts of consciousness (Casey 1976).
In Vergegenwärtigung und Bild (1930), Eugen Fink is the first phenomenologist to provide us with a view of Husserl’s 1905 phenomenology of imagination. Indeed, the early lecture course was unpublished then. Fink stresses the primacy of Phantasie by once again taking up the Husserlian distinction between Vergegenwärtigung (representation)—among others, imagination, but also for example, remembering and empathy—and Gegenwärtigung (presentation)— exemplarily perception—and by showing that perception corresponds to a full but static and therefore rigid and limited presence of the object, whereas imagination entirely creates its object—the image—while characterizing it by its inner distance from the full presence of the perceived object: the mode of being of the image lies in its fragmented presence, its constitutive dimension of possible nonpresence. Fink therefore emphasizes the relationship of imagination with the dynamic of its becoming present, starting from the abyssal reality of absence. In short, imagining is a process of creation founded on nothingness as a starting point. This is why he is led to use another word for such a dynamic of absence: he calls it Entgegenwärtigung. The “Ent-” is meant to identify the move of “absentification.” Thus as a process of creation rooted in the experience of nothingness, imagining is the very matrix of every aesthetic experience, which literally presents a wholly unknown reality to our eyes, radically intensifying our primary sensations.
Finally, it turns out that imagination intrinsically has the power of transforming our habitual reality [...] Such a powerful transformation can be accounted for in two ways: (1) Husserlian imagination is in itself a fragmented reality, where images may take up different forms, literally being trans-formed through each other; and (2) imagination contains in itself the originary experience of altering perceptual reality, and it is therefore a leading thread of much meditative visualization.
(1) It is possible to distinguish four aspects of imagining (Depraz 1996b).
(a) The first aspect corresponds to the imaginative eidetic variation of an object (external or internal), through which the different perceptual data are distinguished into essential or contingent ones. The process of varying sensory perceptions is primarily imaginative, for it not only lets the different possibilities of the existence of the object appear, but helps us to leave the sole level of effective factuality, which is in principe unique.
(b) The second aspect has to do with the genuine link between perceptions and imaginations—hence the multifarious experiences of perceptual imaginations or imaginary perceptions we may have. This includes dreams on the one hand and their different forms (daydreaming, deep sleep, lucid dreaming, nightmares), and hallucinations on the other hand (hypnotic images, deliriums, drug like images).
(c) The third aspect deals with the epoche as a neutralization of validities, and with the possibility of understanding epoche in terms of imagination as a neutralizing ¯modification of effective perceptions.
And (d) the fourth aspect finally puts empathy to the fore as an imaginative self-transposal, thus involving a particular relationship between self and other via my ability to imagine the thoughts, and the entire existence, of others. In short, imagining is a complex process that does not seem to possess a strong and solid (a substantial) unity. But such an absence is neither a deficit nor a weakness: it defines the very identity of imagining, which is not state-like, but process-like.
(2) As a consequence, there is an intrinsic power of imagining that goes hand in hand with its specific embodiment. If imagination aims at altering sensations, at modifying perceptions, at neutralizing preconceptions, and at self-transposal (in the case of intersubjective experience), it literally contains a transformative dimension that inherently involves a deep criticism of every grounding temptation. Interestingly enough, in contemporary debates that put together different approaches to imagination (scientific, spiritual, and philosophical), this is exactly what is stressed: in a pioneering article (Varela and Depraz 2003), it is shown how imagining is an embodying transformative process at the crossroads of mental imagery in neuroscience; of perception and imagination in Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty; and of meditative visualizations in Buddhism. Now such an embodied metamorphic power seems to be exactly what is needed for the subject in the world as a general aesthetic ability of creation.
Whereas the German circle of phenomenologists involved in aesthetics worked directly under the direction of Husserl and developed a phenomenological aesthetics immediately inspired by his methodology, the French generation of philosophers who were “summoned” by phenomenology did not meet Husserl himself (except for Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Hering, and Gaston Berger). Jean-Paul Sartre himself discovered Husserl’s phenomenology in the 1930s in Berlin while reading Levinas’s Théorie de l’intuition (1930) and his translation of Husserl’s Méditations cartésiennes (1931). As for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he read some of Husserl’s D Manuscripts on space in the Husserl Archives in Leuven during the war.
In short, none of them was able to see Husserl directly at work with the phenomena and therefore appreciate the way they could be inspired by his methodological praxis. Such a difficulty, however, may be considered in the light of its benefit for the very study of imagination and of images. In that respect, Sartre is highly representative for the double ability to deal with methodological issues and to engage in concrete thematic analysis. And in addition, the author of L’imaginaire (1940) is early enough in his discoveries to remain a permanent surprise for his readers. In L’imaginaire, Sartre develops a phenomenological psychology of the consciousness of the image. He therefore links together the two main (so may one think) requirements of a phenomenological aesthetics: first, a concern for the phenomenological method as it may be illuminating for aesthetic experience (a concern shared by the early German phenomenologists after Husserl) ; and second, an interest in the experience of imagination and of images, an interest that is the heart of such an aesthetic experience (a concern of Husserl himself). These two threads come to be knotted together in the analysis of what Sartre calls the “conscience imageante” (imagining consciousness), the adjective being representative for the second thematic interest, the substantive for the first methodic concern.
Contrary to the classical representationalist view that erroneously understands the image as an object within consciousness, the image is for Sartre a particular kind of intentional consciousness that is characterized by its ability to intend an absent or nonexistent embodied object via a psychic or physical content that is not given itself, but plays the part of an “analogical representation” of the intended object. But image-intentionality is not a matter of the kind of empty intention that we can find in the case of the consciousness of meaning. Nor is it embodied like perceptual consciousness, which directly presents its object in flesh and blood. Hence the requirement is to find an analogical representation of the embodied perceived object, be it a physical or a psychic content.
Such a general definition of the imagining consciousness opens up the way for a description of a great number of images, be they natural or artistic. Hence a very great richness and diversity becomes possible for phenomenological aesthetics, both thematically and methodologically: the realm of imaginary experiences includes not only psychic images, be they pathological, kinetic, affective, or linguistic, but also images that are built on the basis of a physical content: a painting, a sculpture, a photograph, the play of an actor, a piece of music. And this does not merely have to do with an adaptation of the phenomenological (here intentional) method to works of art, insofar as the experience of images exceeds that of artistic images to the point of integrating the internal world of dreams, hallucinations, and emotions and thereby contributing to a more encompassing theory of aesthetics (not limited to art although including it).
Nevertheless, what is striking in Sartre’s phenomenological analysis is the structural duality between perception and imagination. Whereas the former is an activity that is situated hic et nunc, the latter refers to an irreal space and time. My consciousness is the producer of images, which do not possess any directly embodied content. In this respect, Sartre is faithful to Husserl’s own static delimitation of both activities, but incredibly blind to their constitutive reciprocal permeation. Such an experiential mixture would unavoidably pave the way for another access to aesthetics—perhaps one that is less delimited and stabilized, that is, more chaotic and also more fluctuating.
In a sense, Maurice Merleau-Ponty clearly made such a second choice. Although his Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) deliberately focuses on the perceptual access to the world—primarily via kinaesthetic experience—and tends to push imagination to the rear as a less embodied experience, the entire description of our perception of the world is laden with the pregnancy of the memories, emotions, and encounters of the individual subject. Perception is therefore neither formal nor theoretical, as in a certain narrow understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology: it is originarily permeated by the images that inhabit me as a human subject. Hence detailed descriptions of day-dreaming, for example, provide an exemplary case of the loose boundary between perception and imagination: daydreaming plays the role of an intermediate condition between dreaming as such and everyday perception insofar as the unique characteristic of day-dreaming is that it manifests as imagined emotional meaning [...] In this respect Merleau-Ponty is more akin to Husserl’s genetic analysis of imagining as an affective and kinaesthetic process of my becoming-conscious.
Such a mobile relationship between perception and imagination gives way to an access to literature and painting where the very distinction between reality and irreality, between spatiotemporal perceiving and irrealized imagining, is completely blurred. In L’œil et l’esprit (1964), Merleau-Ponty offers a radical criticism of the image understood as a representation. More than music or literature, his leading thread is painting, and more precisely, the art of the impressionists. Cézanne is his privileged case study: far from imitating the nature painted in a realistic style, he aimed at expressing nature as it directly appears to the embodied subject.
Now Merleau-Ponty’s use of metaphors as genuine expressions of the lived experience of the subject show how his very way of writing is a remarkable aesthetic experience of the writing process [...] So it is not exaggerated to assert that Merleau-Ponty’s metaphorical expression of experience is as such experiential. In other words, imaged expressing is an experience of language. In short, his language seeks to be the very language of perception itself, while perception is originarily permeated with an immanent expressivity. The metaphysical distinction between concepts (categories) and images (metaphors) is superseded by an experiential expression where the genuineness of images refers to the originarity of our experience of the world. In this respect phenomenological writing is the immanent and continuous creation of an imminent meaning that is already given to us, but needs to be re-created each time (Depraz 1999).
Though he too wrote in the 1960s, Mikel Dufrenne is quite an original phenomenologist compared to others of his generation (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty). Indeed he is the first French phenomenologist to complete a systematic phenomenological aesthetics, Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (1953). In this respect he shares a common concern with the early German Husserlian circle. Like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, though, he considers phenomenological analysis as a description of an embodied meaning (sens sensible). Aesthetic experience, i.e., the sensory perception of the work of art, is accordingly an experience of sensuousness at its height. On the part of the spectator (viewer, listener, etc.), the aesthetic relationship with the object of art is affective, grounded on the affective a priori qualities of the artistic work and on the expressed feelings of the attending subject ; on the part of the creator, the relationship is one of performance: the artist makes of his/her work a “quasi-subject,” i.e., a being endowed with expressivity, like other human beings showing emotions.
Michel Henry goes one step further with his account of contemporary painting as radically non-representational. Whereas previous representational painting during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries only offered a “representation” of the world and is thus an objectifying artistic phenomenon, Henry’s contention is that the artistic revolution conducted by Kandinsky, who founded so-called abstract painting, freed human beings from our perplexity, once again furnish us with what we had lost. We therefore have to find our inner life as subjects once again Instead of seeing lines and colors as lines and colors, as we usually do while looking at paintings, we will contemplate lines as so many ongoing forces, colors as so many emotional tones. If we see primarily force and affect, we see less geometrical form than a pure and moving expression. Abstract painting therefore paradoxically paves the way for a new popular vision of painting, since it is not ruled by language and concepts, i.e., mediation: it is a fully immediate pathic expression of the invisible. Beneath any idea of representing, i.e., of representing objects and people in an ideally scientific true way, such painting is an expression of our most archaic desires and impulses. In Voir l’invisible (1988), Henry opens the way for a truly radical phenomenology of primordial aesthetics.
In a sense, this is also Jean-Luc Marion's purpose in La croisée du visible (1991). Indeed, the challenge is to become aware of the genuineness of visibility as such. In this respect painting does not belong to painters or to people dedicated to aesthetics. It is everybody’s possession insofar as one learns to look at things a bit differently. As he rightly puts it, “voir ne va pas de soi” (seeing is not an activity that can be taken for granted)—which means that our looking at things needs to be worked out, cultivated, and submitted to an exercise of vision. And since phenomenology endeavors to help us in seeing how things are given to us, rather than what things are as being visible, it offers the most adequate approach to avoid taking visibility for granted.
In contrast to Henry’s emphasis on abstract painting as the source of the most archaic affective pulsions of the subject, however, Marion relies on the tradition of religious iconography in order to reveal the multifarious modes of givenness that make the depth and variety of the visible: it is “saturated presence.” In particular, whereas the icon appears as a force of self-irradiation that opens up visibility from itself as a full subject, the idol is what is being looked at according to its finitude and limitation as object.
Although not phenomenologically inspired, both Jaussian reception aesthetics in Germany and Balthazarian theological aesthetics in France begin with close links to phenomenology understood as a ruled experience and as a descriptive method for approaching experience where style is governed by certain regularities.
Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss developed what they called an “aesthetics of reception” in the 1960s. Whereas the latter applied such an aesthetics within the framework of numerous literary works, the former stresses the activity of reading as an intrinsic part of the aesthetic process. The reader is thus constructing the text as a literary work. By leaving space, the author enables the reader to play an active part in the elaboration of the literary process. Thus the author is not the only creator of the work of art, for it is co-generated by the reading process. In a sense, the reader is the one who truly completes the creative role of the author. He is re-creating his/her own story within the written one, which is actually not entirely written, but needs to be continuously unwritten and rewritten. So we have to do with a dynamic process of co-generating the written work, which structurally echoes the phenomenological co-generativity of the subject and the world.
As far as Urs von Balthazar’s thrust in theology is concerned, it is characterized by a new approach that puts aesthetics to the fore. Instead of considering revelation from the viewpoint of the true or the good, the divine is seen as beautiful. Theology is a science that puts the divine glory at the center: divine beauty is its glory, a glory that only appears to the faithful and is paroxistically manifested with the crucifixion of Christ. In this respect such an aesthetic theology is not a theological aesthetics insofar as the divine is seen as a beautiful phenomenon, not beauty as a divine experience. Such a contrast is also what radically distinguishes icons from idols. Whereas the latter are looked at as representations of the absolute, thus untruly absolutizing what is actually only a limited representation, the former are direct presentations of the absolute, thus showing the divine manifestation as such. And with this, Balthazar displays close links with the phenomenological approach to the phenomenon as opposed to the classical representative process."
-Natalie Depraz, "Imagination", in Hans Rainer Sepp & Lester Embree (eds.), Handbook of phenomenological Aesthetics, Springer, 2010, 383 pages, pp.155-160.
"Au fond, la pratique est toujours définie en creux comme le « non-théorique », ce qui peut expliquer son discrédit dès Aristote. Comment valoriser la pratique pour elle-même alors que la philosophie est le lieu de la vérité, c’est-à-dire de l’universel et du nécessaire, à savoir de la validité objective ? Si, comme le dit Aristote, il n’y a de science que du général, à savoir de l’essence ou de l’être, la dimension pratique apparaît bien comme l’autre de la philosophie, au point de ne pouvoir faire l’objet d’un intérêt philosophique sans se travestir elle-même. En effet, le terrain pratique est celui 1) de l’individuel et 2) du hic et nunc. Il y a donc là une contradictio in adjecto à chercher à tenir un propos philosophique sur un type d’objet qui lui échappe semble-t-il de façon irréductible."
-Nathalie Depraz, Comprendre la phénoménologie, Armand Colin, 2012.
"Even if Edmund Husserl never created such a research field as phenomenological aesthetics, a great number of his first generation students did. Why ? Either they felt that Husserl was about to develop one, or they were tempted enough by the phenomenology of imagination he invented to apply it to aesthetics. It is therefore worthwhile coming back to Husserl’s understanding of the act of imagining as well as to his apprehension of images. Such an analysis is to be found very early in a 1904/1905 lecture course that he devoted to the relationships between (1) imagination as an act of imagining (Phantasie), (2) our consciousness of images (Bildbewusstsein), and (3) the act of remembering (Wiedererinnerung) (Husserl 1980).
Two remarks proceed directly from what has just been said.
(1) Imagination is an act of our consciousness, which means that it is not a faculty as in the classical (Kantian and Cartesian) view: in short, it is a move directed toward the world, and not a closed-up mental state. Imagining is an activity of producing a new reality, the reality of the images, directly related to previous perceptions or indirectly linked to them (namely, via remembering), which enables the subject to enlarge his/her own inner world.
(2) Consequently, imagination is not an isolated activity, which would, again, trap the subject within itself: it is closely related to perception, remembering, and empathy, since all of these acts of consciousness are identified as intentional, that is, as directed toward their object (imagined, perceived, remembered, or empathized) and opened up toward the world.
As early as 1904–1905, Husserl’s original contribution with regard to the experience of imagination is to make a new distinction between two different acts of imagination: on the one hand, Phantasie, which corresponds to an act through which the imagined object appears directly to me; on the other hand, Bildbewusstsein, which is the re-presentation of an imagined object much like the perceived object (Sallis 1989). Such a clear-cut distinction between two different intentionalities of imagination has deep consequences for the relationship between perception and imagination in both cases. On the one hand, in the experience of Bildbewusstsein, my experience of images is necessarily and experientially founded on my experience of previous perceptions; on the other hand, in the experience of Phantasie, my direct vision of images founds a renewed vision of perception. Both approaches to images therefore lead to specific and original apprehensions of aesthetic pictures, as Husserl mentions. They correspond, for example, to two different ways of looking at a picture: in the first case, you may look at Monet’s painted sunsets as being founded on the painter’s own previous perceptions of sunsets ; in the second case, you will see them as a new creation of an unknown reality, that is, as the opening of the way for another perception of sunsets for both the spectator and the creator.
The methodological tensions emerging around 1913 are especially telling with regard to Husserl’s quest for a radically renewed understanding of imagination. Indeed, in the first book of Ideen, and above all in §§111–12, he provides us with an intrinsic link between imagination and the very method of phenomenology, namely, the epoche. Contrary to perception, which is directed toward an object considered as being effectively existent, imagination suspends the actual existence of the object and is directed toward the pure possibility of the latter, that is, toward its ineffective modality. Imagination therefore paves the way for the free openness of multifarious possibilities, whereas perception traps us in a closed and limited unique reality. Now the method of the epoche similarly operates as a gesture of suspension of preconceived and taken-for-granted realities, so as to question them as “being able not to be.” Epoche and imagination are therefore structurally linked by their common concern for freedom from facts and their quest for unlimited possibilities.
Consequently, such a methodological understanding of imagination paves the way for the primacy of imagination with regard to perception in the early 1920s. During these years [...] the dynamic of experience that is emphasized demonstrates a strong continuity between perception and imagination, which goes hand in hand with a phenomenon of graduality between them—hence the numerous intermediate experiences of dreams, lucid dreaming, and daydreaming, but also modalized perceptions (doubt, negation, probability, uncertainty), or motor imagination. The genetic-phenomenological experience of imagination stresses the process of imagining rather than the act as it is directed toward images; in contrast, the founding experience of perception that is given a privilege during the first decade of Husserl’s philosophical activity echoes a clear (hierarchized) stratification of the different acts of consciousness (Casey 1976).
In Vergegenwärtigung und Bild (1930), Eugen Fink is the first phenomenologist to provide us with a view of Husserl’s 1905 phenomenology of imagination. Indeed, the early lecture course was unpublished then. Fink stresses the primacy of Phantasie by once again taking up the Husserlian distinction between Vergegenwärtigung (representation)—among others, imagination, but also for example, remembering and empathy—and Gegenwärtigung (presentation)— exemplarily perception—and by showing that perception corresponds to a full but static and therefore rigid and limited presence of the object, whereas imagination entirely creates its object—the image—while characterizing it by its inner distance from the full presence of the perceived object: the mode of being of the image lies in its fragmented presence, its constitutive dimension of possible nonpresence. Fink therefore emphasizes the relationship of imagination with the dynamic of its becoming present, starting from the abyssal reality of absence. In short, imagining is a process of creation founded on nothingness as a starting point. This is why he is led to use another word for such a dynamic of absence: he calls it Entgegenwärtigung. The “Ent-” is meant to identify the move of “absentification.” Thus as a process of creation rooted in the experience of nothingness, imagining is the very matrix of every aesthetic experience, which literally presents a wholly unknown reality to our eyes, radically intensifying our primary sensations.
Finally, it turns out that imagination intrinsically has the power of transforming our habitual reality [...] Such a powerful transformation can be accounted for in two ways: (1) Husserlian imagination is in itself a fragmented reality, where images may take up different forms, literally being trans-formed through each other; and (2) imagination contains in itself the originary experience of altering perceptual reality, and it is therefore a leading thread of much meditative visualization.
(1) It is possible to distinguish four aspects of imagining (Depraz 1996b).
(a) The first aspect corresponds to the imaginative eidetic variation of an object (external or internal), through which the different perceptual data are distinguished into essential or contingent ones. The process of varying sensory perceptions is primarily imaginative, for it not only lets the different possibilities of the existence of the object appear, but helps us to leave the sole level of effective factuality, which is in principe unique.
(b) The second aspect has to do with the genuine link between perceptions and imaginations—hence the multifarious experiences of perceptual imaginations or imaginary perceptions we may have. This includes dreams on the one hand and their different forms (daydreaming, deep sleep, lucid dreaming, nightmares), and hallucinations on the other hand (hypnotic images, deliriums, drug like images).
(c) The third aspect deals with the epoche as a neutralization of validities, and with the possibility of understanding epoche in terms of imagination as a neutralizing ¯modification of effective perceptions.
And (d) the fourth aspect finally puts empathy to the fore as an imaginative self-transposal, thus involving a particular relationship between self and other via my ability to imagine the thoughts, and the entire existence, of others. In short, imagining is a complex process that does not seem to possess a strong and solid (a substantial) unity. But such an absence is neither a deficit nor a weakness: it defines the very identity of imagining, which is not state-like, but process-like.
(2) As a consequence, there is an intrinsic power of imagining that goes hand in hand with its specific embodiment. If imagination aims at altering sensations, at modifying perceptions, at neutralizing preconceptions, and at self-transposal (in the case of intersubjective experience), it literally contains a transformative dimension that inherently involves a deep criticism of every grounding temptation. Interestingly enough, in contemporary debates that put together different approaches to imagination (scientific, spiritual, and philosophical), this is exactly what is stressed: in a pioneering article (Varela and Depraz 2003), it is shown how imagining is an embodying transformative process at the crossroads of mental imagery in neuroscience; of perception and imagination in Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty; and of meditative visualizations in Buddhism. Now such an embodied metamorphic power seems to be exactly what is needed for the subject in the world as a general aesthetic ability of creation.
Whereas the German circle of phenomenologists involved in aesthetics worked directly under the direction of Husserl and developed a phenomenological aesthetics immediately inspired by his methodology, the French generation of philosophers who were “summoned” by phenomenology did not meet Husserl himself (except for Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Hering, and Gaston Berger). Jean-Paul Sartre himself discovered Husserl’s phenomenology in the 1930s in Berlin while reading Levinas’s Théorie de l’intuition (1930) and his translation of Husserl’s Méditations cartésiennes (1931). As for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he read some of Husserl’s D Manuscripts on space in the Husserl Archives in Leuven during the war.
In short, none of them was able to see Husserl directly at work with the phenomena and therefore appreciate the way they could be inspired by his methodological praxis. Such a difficulty, however, may be considered in the light of its benefit for the very study of imagination and of images. In that respect, Sartre is highly representative for the double ability to deal with methodological issues and to engage in concrete thematic analysis. And in addition, the author of L’imaginaire (1940) is early enough in his discoveries to remain a permanent surprise for his readers. In L’imaginaire, Sartre develops a phenomenological psychology of the consciousness of the image. He therefore links together the two main (so may one think) requirements of a phenomenological aesthetics: first, a concern for the phenomenological method as it may be illuminating for aesthetic experience (a concern shared by the early German phenomenologists after Husserl) ; and second, an interest in the experience of imagination and of images, an interest that is the heart of such an aesthetic experience (a concern of Husserl himself). These two threads come to be knotted together in the analysis of what Sartre calls the “conscience imageante” (imagining consciousness), the adjective being representative for the second thematic interest, the substantive for the first methodic concern.
Contrary to the classical representationalist view that erroneously understands the image as an object within consciousness, the image is for Sartre a particular kind of intentional consciousness that is characterized by its ability to intend an absent or nonexistent embodied object via a psychic or physical content that is not given itself, but plays the part of an “analogical representation” of the intended object. But image-intentionality is not a matter of the kind of empty intention that we can find in the case of the consciousness of meaning. Nor is it embodied like perceptual consciousness, which directly presents its object in flesh and blood. Hence the requirement is to find an analogical representation of the embodied perceived object, be it a physical or a psychic content.
Such a general definition of the imagining consciousness opens up the way for a description of a great number of images, be they natural or artistic. Hence a very great richness and diversity becomes possible for phenomenological aesthetics, both thematically and methodologically: the realm of imaginary experiences includes not only psychic images, be they pathological, kinetic, affective, or linguistic, but also images that are built on the basis of a physical content: a painting, a sculpture, a photograph, the play of an actor, a piece of music. And this does not merely have to do with an adaptation of the phenomenological (here intentional) method to works of art, insofar as the experience of images exceeds that of artistic images to the point of integrating the internal world of dreams, hallucinations, and emotions and thereby contributing to a more encompassing theory of aesthetics (not limited to art although including it).
Nevertheless, what is striking in Sartre’s phenomenological analysis is the structural duality between perception and imagination. Whereas the former is an activity that is situated hic et nunc, the latter refers to an irreal space and time. My consciousness is the producer of images, which do not possess any directly embodied content. In this respect, Sartre is faithful to Husserl’s own static delimitation of both activities, but incredibly blind to their constitutive reciprocal permeation. Such an experiential mixture would unavoidably pave the way for another access to aesthetics—perhaps one that is less delimited and stabilized, that is, more chaotic and also more fluctuating.
In a sense, Maurice Merleau-Ponty clearly made such a second choice. Although his Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) deliberately focuses on the perceptual access to the world—primarily via kinaesthetic experience—and tends to push imagination to the rear as a less embodied experience, the entire description of our perception of the world is laden with the pregnancy of the memories, emotions, and encounters of the individual subject. Perception is therefore neither formal nor theoretical, as in a certain narrow understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology: it is originarily permeated by the images that inhabit me as a human subject. Hence detailed descriptions of day-dreaming, for example, provide an exemplary case of the loose boundary between perception and imagination: daydreaming plays the role of an intermediate condition between dreaming as such and everyday perception insofar as the unique characteristic of day-dreaming is that it manifests as imagined emotional meaning [...] In this respect Merleau-Ponty is more akin to Husserl’s genetic analysis of imagining as an affective and kinaesthetic process of my becoming-conscious.
Such a mobile relationship between perception and imagination gives way to an access to literature and painting where the very distinction between reality and irreality, between spatiotemporal perceiving and irrealized imagining, is completely blurred. In L’œil et l’esprit (1964), Merleau-Ponty offers a radical criticism of the image understood as a representation. More than music or literature, his leading thread is painting, and more precisely, the art of the impressionists. Cézanne is his privileged case study: far from imitating the nature painted in a realistic style, he aimed at expressing nature as it directly appears to the embodied subject.
Now Merleau-Ponty’s use of metaphors as genuine expressions of the lived experience of the subject show how his very way of writing is a remarkable aesthetic experience of the writing process [...] So it is not exaggerated to assert that Merleau-Ponty’s metaphorical expression of experience is as such experiential. In other words, imaged expressing is an experience of language. In short, his language seeks to be the very language of perception itself, while perception is originarily permeated with an immanent expressivity. The metaphysical distinction between concepts (categories) and images (metaphors) is superseded by an experiential expression where the genuineness of images refers to the originarity of our experience of the world. In this respect phenomenological writing is the immanent and continuous creation of an imminent meaning that is already given to us, but needs to be re-created each time (Depraz 1999).
Though he too wrote in the 1960s, Mikel Dufrenne is quite an original phenomenologist compared to others of his generation (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty). Indeed he is the first French phenomenologist to complete a systematic phenomenological aesthetics, Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (1953). In this respect he shares a common concern with the early German Husserlian circle. Like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, though, he considers phenomenological analysis as a description of an embodied meaning (sens sensible). Aesthetic experience, i.e., the sensory perception of the work of art, is accordingly an experience of sensuousness at its height. On the part of the spectator (viewer, listener, etc.), the aesthetic relationship with the object of art is affective, grounded on the affective a priori qualities of the artistic work and on the expressed feelings of the attending subject ; on the part of the creator, the relationship is one of performance: the artist makes of his/her work a “quasi-subject,” i.e., a being endowed with expressivity, like other human beings showing emotions.
Michel Henry goes one step further with his account of contemporary painting as radically non-representational. Whereas previous representational painting during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries only offered a “representation” of the world and is thus an objectifying artistic phenomenon, Henry’s contention is that the artistic revolution conducted by Kandinsky, who founded so-called abstract painting, freed human beings from our perplexity, once again furnish us with what we had lost. We therefore have to find our inner life as subjects once again Instead of seeing lines and colors as lines and colors, as we usually do while looking at paintings, we will contemplate lines as so many ongoing forces, colors as so many emotional tones. If we see primarily force and affect, we see less geometrical form than a pure and moving expression. Abstract painting therefore paradoxically paves the way for a new popular vision of painting, since it is not ruled by language and concepts, i.e., mediation: it is a fully immediate pathic expression of the invisible. Beneath any idea of representing, i.e., of representing objects and people in an ideally scientific true way, such painting is an expression of our most archaic desires and impulses. In Voir l’invisible (1988), Henry opens the way for a truly radical phenomenology of primordial aesthetics.
In a sense, this is also Jean-Luc Marion's purpose in La croisée du visible (1991). Indeed, the challenge is to become aware of the genuineness of visibility as such. In this respect painting does not belong to painters or to people dedicated to aesthetics. It is everybody’s possession insofar as one learns to look at things a bit differently. As he rightly puts it, “voir ne va pas de soi” (seeing is not an activity that can be taken for granted)—which means that our looking at things needs to be worked out, cultivated, and submitted to an exercise of vision. And since phenomenology endeavors to help us in seeing how things are given to us, rather than what things are as being visible, it offers the most adequate approach to avoid taking visibility for granted.
In contrast to Henry’s emphasis on abstract painting as the source of the most archaic affective pulsions of the subject, however, Marion relies on the tradition of religious iconography in order to reveal the multifarious modes of givenness that make the depth and variety of the visible: it is “saturated presence.” In particular, whereas the icon appears as a force of self-irradiation that opens up visibility from itself as a full subject, the idol is what is being looked at according to its finitude and limitation as object.
Although not phenomenologically inspired, both Jaussian reception aesthetics in Germany and Balthazarian theological aesthetics in France begin with close links to phenomenology understood as a ruled experience and as a descriptive method for approaching experience where style is governed by certain regularities.
Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss developed what they called an “aesthetics of reception” in the 1960s. Whereas the latter applied such an aesthetics within the framework of numerous literary works, the former stresses the activity of reading as an intrinsic part of the aesthetic process. The reader is thus constructing the text as a literary work. By leaving space, the author enables the reader to play an active part in the elaboration of the literary process. Thus the author is not the only creator of the work of art, for it is co-generated by the reading process. In a sense, the reader is the one who truly completes the creative role of the author. He is re-creating his/her own story within the written one, which is actually not entirely written, but needs to be continuously unwritten and rewritten. So we have to do with a dynamic process of co-generating the written work, which structurally echoes the phenomenological co-generativity of the subject and the world.
As far as Urs von Balthazar’s thrust in theology is concerned, it is characterized by a new approach that puts aesthetics to the fore. Instead of considering revelation from the viewpoint of the true or the good, the divine is seen as beautiful. Theology is a science that puts the divine glory at the center: divine beauty is its glory, a glory that only appears to the faithful and is paroxistically manifested with the crucifixion of Christ. In this respect such an aesthetic theology is not a theological aesthetics insofar as the divine is seen as a beautiful phenomenon, not beauty as a divine experience. Such a contrast is also what radically distinguishes icons from idols. Whereas the latter are looked at as representations of the absolute, thus untruly absolutizing what is actually only a limited representation, the former are direct presentations of the absolute, thus showing the divine manifestation as such. And with this, Balthazar displays close links with the phenomenological approach to the phenomenon as opposed to the classical representative process."
-Natalie Depraz, "Imagination", in Hans Rainer Sepp & Lester Embree (eds.), Handbook of phenomenological Aesthetics, Springer, 2010, 383 pages, pp.155-160.
"Au fond, la pratique est toujours définie en creux comme le « non-théorique », ce qui peut expliquer son discrédit dès Aristote. Comment valoriser la pratique pour elle-même alors que la philosophie est le lieu de la vérité, c’est-à-dire de l’universel et du nécessaire, à savoir de la validité objective ? Si, comme le dit Aristote, il n’y a de science que du général, à savoir de l’essence ou de l’être, la dimension pratique apparaît bien comme l’autre de la philosophie, au point de ne pouvoir faire l’objet d’un intérêt philosophique sans se travestir elle-même. En effet, le terrain pratique est celui 1) de l’individuel et 2) du hic et nunc. Il y a donc là une contradictio in adjecto à chercher à tenir un propos philosophique sur un type d’objet qui lui échappe semble-t-il de façon irréductible."
-Nathalie Depraz, Comprendre la phénoménologie, Armand Colin, 2012.
