A Controversy Over the Existence of Fictional Objects: Husserl and Ingarden on Imagination and Fiction

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the structure and elements of the intentional experiences of imagining fictional objects. The author critically examines the argument that whereas Husserl’s theory of imagination cannot do justice to fictional objects, Ingarden’s theory of purely intentional objects provides a basis for the theory of intentionality that explains the status of fictional objects. The paper discusses this argument to show that it is justified only in regard to Husserl’s early account of imagination, and on the condition of understanding contents as the phantasmas. Moreover, the author sketches Ingarden’s theory of imagination, and compares it to Husserl’s later account of imagination in terms of noetic-noematic structures. Finally, the author questions the sharp distinction between Husserl and Ingarden with respect to their theories of imagination and fictional objects by showing that it is hard to classify clearly their theories as content or object theories respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Intentionality
• imagination
• content-apprehension schema
• purely intentional object
• Husserl
• Ingarden

ORCID

Witold Płotka http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1984-3078

Notes

1 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 349.

2 Thomasson claims that “accounting for our intentional relations to non-existent objects is one of the most important tasks for a theory of intentionality,” and that “fiction comprises perhaps the richest source of experiences of non-existent objects.” As a result, as she states, “analyzing our intentional relations to fictional objects should be one of the most important tests of a theory of intentionality.” See Thomasson, “Fiction and intentionality,” 278. See also Crane; Heffernan, “The paradox of objectless presentations in early phenomenology.”

3 On the relationship between imagination and fiction, see Stock.

4 See, e.g., Aldea; Jansen, “On the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of imagination and its use for interdisciplinary research”; Marbach.

5 For discussion, see, e.g., Waller, “In defense of Husserl’s transcendental idealism,” 37, 43–45; Bostar 216; Mitscherling 41–65; Mohanty 43–45. As Simons states: “In order to argue his case against Husserl, which he was most concerned to do, Ingarden needed to analyse and clarify the notion of dependence. If the real world is independent of minds we need to know what this means.” Simons 39.

6 See Husserl, Briefwechsel. Band III. Die Göttinger Schule, 183–200; Ingarden, “Bemerkungen zum Problem ‘Idealismus-Realismus’”; idem, On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism; idem, Controversy over the Existence of the World. Vol. I.

7 Currie, The Nature of Fiction, 49.

8 To explain the “make-believe” function of fiction, Currie refers to Walton, for whom fiction produces props in games of make-believe, understood by him as games in imagining. See Walton 11–69; Stock 206. For discussion of Currie’s account, see Davies 265–66.

9 See Thomasson, “Fiction and intentionality.”

10 See also Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, 21–23.

11 Thomasson, “Fiction and intentionality,” 297.

12 Thomasson, “Fiction and intentionality,” 295.

13 Cf. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, 77–79; Smith and McIntyre xiv. For discussion, see Drummond. On the problem of contents in Husserl with respect to objectless presentations, see Heffernan, “The paradox of objectless presentations in early phenomenology,” 79–83.

14 On Husserl’s theory of content, see Szanto 208–236.

15 Jansen, “On the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of imagination and its use for interdisciplinary research,” 121–22; eadem, “Husserl,” 69–70.

16 See, e.g., Marbach.

17 Cobos.

18 Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 113.

19 For further discussion of representationalism-presentationalism, see e.g., Jansen, “Husserl,” 73–75.

20 For Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes, see Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 1–45; Sokolowski; Willard, “Wholes, parts, and the objectivity of knowledge”; idem, “The theory of wholes and parts and Husserl’s explication of the possibility of knowledge in the Logical Investigations.”

21 Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 99.

22 Husserl, Briefwechsel. Band I. Die Brentanoschule, 76.

23 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1890-1910), 333.

24 For a discussion of the thesis that imagination is dependent on perception, see e.g., Dorst, “The primacy of perception in Husserl’s theory of imagining”; Casey 125–73; Lohmar, “On the function of weak phantasmata in perception”; Thompson, “Look again”; “Representationalism and the phenomenology of mental imagery”; Ferencz-Flatz; Aldea; Cobos.

25 See Jansen, “On the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of imagination and its use for interdisciplinary research,” 123.

26 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 20.

27 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 50.

28 See Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 4–7. The term “object” Husserl uses here in the ontological sense as “whatsoever.” See Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 5. For an overview of Husserl’s whole-part theory, see Willard, “Wholes, parts, and the objectivity of knowledge”. I am grateful to Di Huang for his help with describing imagination as a mereological structure.

29 See Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 5.

30 Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 6.

31 Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 5.

32 Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 104. In Ideas I, Husserl develops the distinction between sensations and apprehensions as the structure of hyletic data and noetic moments. See Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 203–07.

33 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 87.

34 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 99.

35 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 100.

36 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 101.

37 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 84.

38 Husserl, Logical Investigations. Vol. 2, 121.

39 See Kuspit 32: “The image is a ‘thing-in-itself,” not the analogue for the thing, as the memory is. Neither fact nor essence intends that the image exist, but neither would have their objectivity without it. In a sense, consciousness produces images to save itself from facts and essences.”

40 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 42.

41 Jansen, “Husserl,” 125. For discussion, see Lohmar, “Synthesis in Husserls Phänomenologie”; Lohmar, “On the constitution of the time of the world,” 118. I am grateful to Di Huang for this reference.

42 See Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 323: “I have not seen (and generally it has not been seen) that in the phantasy of a color, for example, it is not the case that something present is given, that color as a really immanent occurrence is given, which then serves as the representant for the actual color. On this view, sensed color and phantasm-color in themselves would be one and the same, only charged with different functions. I had the schema ‘content of apprehension and apprehension,’ and certainly this schema makes good sense. However, in the case of perception understood as a concrete experience, we do not first of all have a color as content of apprehension and then the characteristic of apprehension that produces the appearance. And likewise in the case of phantasy we do not again have a color as content of apprehension and then a changed apprehension, the apprehension that produces the phantasy appearance.”

43 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 323.

44 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 323.

45 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 329.

46 For discussion of this thesis, see Kortooms 88–89, 91–94.

47 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 323, 324, footnote.

48 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 288.

49 For Lohmar, Husserl indeed abandons the content-apprehension schema, but he adapts it to describe other classes of acts of consciousness. See Lohmar, “Synthesis in Husserls Phänomenologie”. I am grateful to Di Huang for this suggestion.

50 In the Second Edition of the “Sixth Logical Investigation” (from 1913) Husserl was already clear that consciousness has to be described from the perspective of the noesis-noema correlation. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband, 58: “Jedes ‘intentionale Erlebnis’ (‘Bewusstsein’) hat seinen ‘Inhalt,’ deutlicher sein Noema, es ist Vermeinen eines Was, das hier genau so zu nehmen ist, wie es in diesem Bewusstsein bewusst ist.”

51 Marbach.

52 See Drummond 142. For the West Coast reading of the noema, see Smith and McIntyre.

53 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 114.

54 Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, 389.

55 Føllesdal (13) emphasizes that consciousness constitutes the perceived object as existing: “The important points for Husserl are that perception is underdetermined by what reaches our sensory organs, and that there is nothing given in perception. Perception is directly of objects, and there are no intermediary steps. Neither the hyle, nor the noesis nor the noema are the objects that we perceive.”

56 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 257.

57 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 471–72.

58 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 19, 179–80, 416, 499–500; Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, 77, 283–84, 286.

59 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 84, 108.

60 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 264; Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), 345–46, 358–61, 428, 471.

61 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 298–99.

62 See Thomasson, “Fiction and Intentionality,” 295.

63 Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922-1937), 21; idem, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, 123, 139.

64 As Husserl emphasizes: “Unter Subjektverbänden verstehen wir nicht bloße Mengen, bloße Vielheiten von Subjekten, sondern aus Subjekten gebildete Einheiten höherer Ordnung, gegliederte Subjektganzen, an denen zwar die physischen Leiber der Subjekte beteiligt sind, aber so, dass nicht sie als physische Objekte Verbindung und Gliederung bestimmen, sondern ausschließlich die Subjekte, die in ihrer Einzelheit die letzten Glieder sind. Die “Verbindung” ist dabei eine “geistige,” sie ist eine durch die Wechselbeziehung der Subjekte aufeinander in Subjektakten sich konstituierende und sich im Wechsel entscheidender und auswertender Subjekte möglicherweise fortpflanzende und selbsterhaltende Leistung.” See Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, 133.

65 Husserl, Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927, 24.

66 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book, 249.

67 See Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book, 249–50: “The book with its paper pages, its cover, etc. is a thing. To this book there does not append a second thing, the sense; but instead the latter, in “animating,” penetrates the physical whole in a certain way: namely, insofar as it animates every word, though, again, not each word taken for itself, but rather the word-nexuses, which are bound together by the sense into meaningful forms, and these later bound into higher formations, etc. The spiritual sense is, by animating the sensuous appearances, fused with them in a certain way instead of just being bound with them side by side.”

68 See Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 31–39. For a discussion of Husserl’s theory of horizons, see Geniusas.

69 Cf. Ingarden, U podstaw teorii poznania. Część pierwsza, 310–18; Chrudzimski 29–33. Of course, the role that imagination plays in the methodological question of eidetic variation, and its relation to free fantasy, is one of the central questions of Husserl’s phenomenology as well (cf. Levin; Jansen, “On the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of imagination and its use for interdisciplinary research,” 126–27; Jansen, “Husserl,” 76–78; Schmicking). This aspect, though significant for the phenomenological method as such, is not my concern here.

70 Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, 225–27.

71 Smith, “Review of The Literary Work of Art,” 141; idem, “Ingarden vs. Meinong on the logic of fiction,” 94; Thomasson, “Fiction and intentionality,” 290, 293–95.

72 Thomasson, “Fiction and intentionality,” 295.

73 Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, 225.

74 Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, 225–26.

75 Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, 226–27.

76 Thomasson, “Fiction and intentionality,” 287–89.

77 Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. II/1, 174–210.

78 Given that phantasy creates its objects through contents, Ingarden defines five conditions of how to understand that “objects are created in imagination” (Bildung der Gegenstände in der Phantasie): (1) Imagination is a combination of previous (and not original) experiences; (2) it is always possible to indicate a moment when such a presentation was built; (3) this presentation is a correlation of a concrete and creative psychic process that is localizable in time; (4) one can manipulate the imagined object; and (5) the object referred by the imaginative act does not exist. Thus what is created by imagination is an appearance (Schein) of the existence of the imagined object that follows from the combined contents that “represent” the object. See Ingarden, “Essentiale Fragen,” 269–70.

79 Cf. Ingarden, Controversy over the Existence of the World. Vol. I, 109–55. Ingarden identifies the PIO with the imagined object, e.g., in Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. II/1, 174–210. See also Seifert and Smith 99–100.

80 For a short presentation of Ingarden’s ontology, see Simons.

81 See Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, 127: “As soon as the purely intentional object loses its direct contact with experience, however (i.e., when it is a derived intentional object), and finds its immediate ontic support in the borrowed intentionality of a word meaning (or a meaning content of a sentence), it also loses both its imaginational intuitiveness and its manifold feeling and value characters, since the full word meaning, too, can contain only what corresponds exactly to the content of a simple intentional act. Of the originally intended purely intentional object there remains, so to speak, only a skeleton, a schema.” Cf. also Ingarden, Controversy over the Existence of the World. Vol. I, 147–52; Thomasson, “Ingarden and the ontology of cultural objects,” 123–24.

82 See Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, 119: “The given purely intentional object as such has its own carrier, i.e., a carrier of its properties or features, which are different from properties that appear in its content and pertain to the intended ‘table’.” Cf. also Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. II/1, 174–210.

83 Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, 248–51.

84 Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. II/1. Formalontologie 1. Teil, 210–24; Chrudzimski 105–10.

85 Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, 48.

86 Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. II/2, 91–95.

87 Thomasson, “Fiction and intentionality,” 295.

88 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, 211.

89 See, e.g. Kriegel.

90 See, e.g., Heffernan.

91 See, e.g., Mohanty 36–45; Kosowski 132–33.

92 I would like to express my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their helpful suggestions and inspiring comments. I hope that due to their suggestions the structure and the argument of the article have become clearer. I also would like to thank George Heffernan for revising the language of the manuscript.