/<§ /10/. The community of essence between physical imagination and
/[21] /ordinary phantasy presentation with respect to “mental images”>/
15 Now the situation is certainly more complicated in the case of physical
imagination than it is in the case of ordinary phantasy presentation,
but we do find that both have something essential in common: In the case
of physical imagination, a physical object that exercises the function
of awakening a “mental image” is presupposed; in phantasy
20 presentation in the ordinary sense, a mental image is there without
being tied to such a physical excitant. In both cases, however, the
mental image is precisely an image; it represents a subject.
In the simpler case of ordinary phantasy presentation, we had
distinguished two objects under the titles “image” and “subject.” In order
25 to make two objects present, however, two objectivations, two
apprehensions, are needed; or we must be able to distinguish
phenomenologically two directions or components of apprehension in the
unity of the phantasy presentation. The naïve interpretation is much
simpler, of course. The image lies hidden in the “mind,” and in addition an
30 object possibly exists “outside.” If it is a question of a mere
fiction, however, as when we phantasy a dragon, then precisely only the
mental image is on hand and there is nothing further to explain.
Naturally, we would reply: Nothing further than the trifling matter of
how the mind, provided that something like an image exists in it, manages
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TEXT NO. 1 (1904–1905)
23
to present the subject to itself, hence something different from the
image. If I put a picture in a drawer, does /the drawer /represent
something? But the naïve view errs above all in that it conceives of
the mental image as an object really inhabiting the mind. It conceives 5
of the image as there in the mind just as a physical thing is there in
reality. <todo>Phenomenologically, however, there is no image thing in the
mind, or, better, in consciousness.</todo> The situation is exactly the same in
the case of the physically depicting representation in which the painted
lion does indeed appear but does not exist and at best makes 10
objective an actual thing, a certain lion belonging to reality, which
then for its part does exist but does not appear in the proper sense. In
both cases, the images (understood as the appearing, analogically [22]
representing objects) are truly nothing. To speak of them as objects
carries an obviously modified sense that refers to existences entirely
15 different from those that the images give themselves out to be. <todo>The
image object truly does not exist, which means not only that it has no
existence outside my consciousness, but also that it has no existence
inside my consciousness; it has no existence at all. What does actually
exist there, apart from the “painting” as a physical thing, the piece of
20 canvas with its determinate distribution of color pigments, /is /a
certain complex of sensations that the spectator contemplating the
painting experiences in himself, as well as the apprehension and meaning
that he bases on this complex so that the consciousness of the image
occurs for him.</todo> Likewise, the phantasy image does not truly exist at 25
all; it does not, perchance, have a psychological existence. Rather, a
certain complex of sensuous contents, the complex of phantasms, exists;
and a certain apprehending consciousness, with which the image
consciousness is first consummated, is based on this complex. Just as in
the one case the color sensations and the other visual con-30 tents in
their concrete complex are not yet the image itself — since, for
example, they still contain nothing of the full three-dimensional
corporeality that characterizes the appearing image — so too in the
other case, that of phantasy, the phantasm, or the complex of phantasms,
is not yet the phantasy image. In neither case, of course, can 35 what
is lacking consist in the mere supervention of new sensuous contents, as
if an increase in sensuous contents could produce what we call the
consciousness of an objectivated objectivity [/objektiven/
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24
TEXT NO. 1 (1904–1905)
/Gegenstandlichkeit/]. Sensations accumulated with sensations, sensuous
contents accumulated with sensuous contents, just give ever new
complexes of experienced sensuous contents; they do not yield an
appearing object. <nb>What is added in both cases, of course, is the 5
objectivating consciousness. What is added is the apprehension that
interprets the content, conferring on it the relation to something
objective, and that brings about from the content’s blind factual being
the apprehending of the content as objectively this or that, the
presenting of something with the content, the meaning, not of the
content, but of
10 something by means of the content. To experience this apprehending
and to have the object in the presentation are one and the same.</nb> To
produce an act of meaning on the basis of this apprehending and to [23]
be related in the meaning to the object are again one and the same. The
apprehension content, the corresponding mode of apprehension
15 and the meaning founded in it, possibly connected in addition with
such and such higher intentional characteristics, intellectual or
emotional, exist here phenomenologically (in the empirical case, really
exist psychically). This is everything that can be brought to light here
/descriptively/, everything that can be found by means of analysis.
20 Apart from this, whatever presents itself psychologically, the
attendant /dispositions /[for example], are naturally not descriptive
/facts /that one can come upon in phenomenology. Hence this is all that
is left of the allegedly immanent existence of the representing image
object.
Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, image consciousness, and memory (1898-1925), Translated by John B. Brough
eidetisch 