10th Creph Annual Seminar: Imagination as an Act: Phenomenological Approaches

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Like sense perception, imagination involves hyletic components, which, as Husserl claims, puts it amongst acts of intuition and allows it to fulfill meaning intentions. However, unlike sensations, images do not present themselves on the mode of actuality, which means that they can only play part of the role of fulfillment: like sensations they provide concrete instances of what was thought in a general way, yet unlike sensations they do not confirm the effective reality of what was just conceived. They result either in a de-realising attitude towards the presented objects (which are explicitly taken as unreal) or in a suspensive attitude towards the ontological status of the presented objects (which are considered without concern for the question of their existence). Such a freedom from the question of actuality is also what allows imagination to consider unrealised possibilities. Now, to imagine possibilities is not the same as to conceive them. First of all, imagination considers singular and concrete possibilities while conceptual thought only considers general possibilities - it is not the same to think about "golden mountain" and to imagine one. Secondly, while considering possibilities, imagination seems to be restricted by some specific constraints: not all what is theoretically conceivable can be presented in space and time and therefore can be imagined - a "surface without colour", a "triangle which is neither scalene nor isosceles nor right-angled" or a "round square" can be conceived yet not imagined.

From such descriptive features of imagination result some essential epistemic, esthetic, moral and political functions.

By meeting their limits, imaginary variations help to identify material essences. The illustrative but also exploratory role of the construction of figures and diagrams supporting mathematical proofs confirms the importance of intuition in what first seemed to be a pure matter of understanding. And such intuition is not so much perceptive as imaginative, since figures are not given for their effective singularity but as standing for a lot of similar figures whose features can vary within some limits.

Imagination also provides concrete representations that help to "materialize" ideologies and facilitate their affective investment by connecting them with sensibility. This explains both the didactic efficiency of pictures and the fact that they can be instrumentalized. On another side, imagination allows to consider alternatives to the actual situation. By suspending the actual determinations and by unlocking ideologically shaped situations imagination works on many grounds as a critical tool: struggle against assigned identities, deconstruction of normative evidence, reconfiguration of common/shared territories, play with kinds and roles, and so on. The work of opening possibilities and promoting indecision which imagination often practices by using artistic tools (either literary or visual) allows new determinations.

In so far as it inhabits within the tension between concepts and sensibility, imagination is the function on which creativity stands. It allows the reconfiguration of the relations between sensibility and understanding, which are both mobilized by artistic creation. Through imagination, art throws us into some free play of the faculties since - as Romantics will say after Kant - it leads to two suspensions : suspension of the cognitive power of understanding (which determines sensibility according to categories) and, through de-realisation, suspension of the interested nature of sensibility.

The seminar aims at investigating such descriptive features and functions of imagination which separate it from both perception and conception. It will particularly be relevant to:

1. finely analyze the act of imagination (and its elements/components) on the ground of descriptive psychology, by contrasting it with perception, meaning intention, as well as with other mental functions such as memory;
2. study the specific role of the act of imagination (by contrast with sense experience and intellectual conception) within knowledge, but also within political and/or artistic representation and creativity.