Abstract

The contradictory function of imagination could be noticed as early as in Plato’s Sophist – eikon and phantasma dialectics reveals the process of confusion by which we are unable to unambiguously diagnose truth or deceit and accurately draw the line between reality and unreality. Both Sartre and Husserl admit that imagination is necessary to phenomenology and brings up new data that are important of the understanding of truth. The provision by Husserl also recognizes the nature of simulacrum experience and a dynamic cocktail of ontological tumult within imagination. However, phenomenology is concerned with safeguarding the craggy authority of the human mind directed towards ideal of universality. Conversely, as Heidegger notices in his interpretation of Kant, the deepest transcendental structures permit recognition of the primordial temporality characteristic of imagination. Thereby the grasp on the processes of the functioning of imagination assumes its most important and the most ambivalent role. It seems that what offers an unreliable view of the world – termed by Husserl as the “protean character of fantasy” – can provide a basis of pathways to form a relationship with a weakening or even a nearly disappearing ontology.