Abstract

Husserl discusses imagination in 1901 in the context of the structure and functions of 'presentation' . He is interested more in imagination as sensory than as "categorically structured". Brentano, Husserl's teacher, held imagining was presentation that plays a "surrogate" role for originary experience, and is "inauthentic" i.e. is an amalgam of blanched sensory contents, and conceptual elements that 'fill the gaps' and relate surrogate to original. ;In the 1901 edition of Logical Investigations, Husserl held a 'picture-intentional' theory of imagining, though not a naively imagistic one. Both physical depiction and imaging proper are taken to instantiate his phenomenological theory of depiction. The conviction that imagining is necessarily pictorial began to crumble when, in 1904-'05, he inquired into the nature of the intentional act in which the supposed 'picture' of imagining would be presented to consciousness. He concluded that there is no such picture 'present', and the distinction between what is 'present' and 'non-present' in consciousness leads him into the connection with inner-time theory and memory. Sensory imagining and sensorily vivid recollection are closely associated. Inner time, as awareness of mental acts and states, provides the middle term for the new theory of imagining and memory, invoking primarily the notion of 'reproduction' of lived-experiences. "Simple imagining" essentially does not have the foundational structure of depiction, although depictions can be founded on simple imaginings. Imagining is related to memory as its belief-free or neutrality modification, clearly set-out in Ideen I. ;Husserl holds both that anything that can be imagined is possible; and anything that is possible can be imagined . It follows from that what is impossible cannot be imagined. An objection to this is examined: since some impossibles can be depicted they can also be imagined. Husserl takes imagining to play a key role in phenomenology because imagining is belief-free, is central to eidetic variation, and allows us to replicate any part of lived-experience at will