IMAGINATION

IMAGINATION. 1. An experience that represents an object that is both absent and non-actual. In both aspects imagination is opposed to perception. The imagined object can take the form of an image or imageobject, but it need not. Imagination can represent (that is, make present) an object by refashioning materials gathered from memory and perception. The structure of this representation is such that the objective content of these memories and perceptions are grasped apart from their temporal and belief indices and thereby a new object is represented as if it were an actual object. The refashioning that imagination achieves can be spontaneous and creative; the imagination is not bound by the content of the memories and perceptions from which it departs. In representing objects as if actual, the imagination presents objects either as pure possibilities or as feigned. Moreover, in the case of imagination’s constituting an image, the intentionalities involved are even more complex, since the resultant image-consciousness incorporates a specifically perceptual moment in its grasp of the sensible basis of the image. 2. The capacity for imaginative experiences. Imagination in this sense plays an important methodological role for Husserl. Imagining is the University of Lvov. In 1945, he accepted a chair at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Ingarden was among those early students of Husserl who declined to follow Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction that they saw as leading the way to idealism. It is no small irony, therefore, that he was suspended by the Communist authorities from his teaching position for several years during the 1950s for his supposed idealism. Nevertheless, Ingarden remained in contact with Husserl and maintained familiarity with Husserl’s later philosophy, even writing commentaries on it. Ingarden’s most significant phenomenological work is in aesthetics, especially the philosophy of literature. His most noted works are Das literarische Kunstwerk (The Literary Work of Art) published in 1931 and O poznawaniu dziela literackiego (The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art) published in 1937. These works are eidetic in character. Regarding the work of art, Ingarden identifies as essential the material basis of the work (for example, the words on paper), the work of art, which is a purely intentional object having neither real nor ideal existence, and the aesthetic object, which is also a purely intentional object and the “concretization” of the work of art achieved by a reader or member of the audience in the aesthetic attitude. Bound up with the distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object is the distinction between artistic value, which pertains to the work of art as produced by a skillful artist, and aesthetic value, which belongs to the concretized work. The ontological significance of the claim that the work of art is purely intentional is clear; it is an attempt to break through the opposition between realism and idealism.