This article begins by presenting the two most important transformations that establish a genuine Husserlian approach to the imagination: the first lies in the grasping of imagination, despite its ...essential differences with perception and hallucination, as an intuitive, or sensuous consciousness (thereby contrasting it with signification); the second lies in the insight that imagination, or better – phantasy –, requires no images, mental or otherwise (thereby contrasting it with image consciousness). Further, the distinction between pure and perceptual phantasies and their respective fictional objects is drawn out. A comparison between pure phantasy and memory, then leads to a closer look at the role of inner consciousness in pure phantasy and to a clarification of the ‘splitting of the subject’. The exploration of this split allows us to trace the role of the real-ego and the phantasy-ego in pure phantasy, which opens the exploration of phantasy as a consciousness of possibilities. This helps us gain clarity about the nature of both real and ideal possibilities and the respective modes of phantasy. Objects of phantasy also most easily lend themselves to an eidetic variation and to an insight into essences. Phenomenological essences concern the ideal possibility of real and ideal objects and of their experience. It is through their contribution to insight into the real and ideal conditions of possibility of different forms of intentional acts that acts of phantasy best show their potential for Husserl’s project of philosophy as a rigorous science. Imagination or fiction becomes, in his own words, the ‘vital element of phenomenology.’
Este artículo enfatiza la importancia de un análisis conceptual de nuestra experiencia del mundo real, explora nuevas formas de pensamiento conceptual e investiga sus límites inherentes y ...persistentes. Se muestra que ambos lados del pensamiento conceptual poseen límites; tanto aquello a lo que permite acceder como aquello que se le escapa. Comienzo por resumir las objeciones de Heidegger y Deleuze en contra de que el pensamiento filosófico sea la cuestión de un sujeto que re-conoce, que se representa para sí y que conceptualiza objetos idénticos. En un segundo paso, usaré a Deleuze para explorar la posibilidad de una nueva forma de pensamiento filosófico conceptual que opera sin las presuposiciones de una “imagen del pensamiento” (kantiana). La última parte de este artículo trata de cómo Husserl, Bergson y Spinoza promueven una forma de pensamiento intuitivo que supera los límites de lo que podemos concebir conceptualmente.
This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the ...phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl’s analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence—whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the complete presence of an ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida’s reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason’s limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity.
This article traces how Heidegger’s development of a specific phenomenological understanding of truth in Being and Time owes a debt to Husserl’s conception of truth as laid out in the sixth logical ...investigation. The critique of “traditional conceptions of truth”—ubiquitous in Heidegger’s texts on the essence of truth—does not primarily have Husserl in its sights, and only pertains to his concept of truth in a very limited way. Furthermore, the article shows that Heidegger’s later determination of truth as “un-concealedness” Un-Verborgenheit does not entail any deep schism with his earlier theory and that it moves along certain paths
Heidegger’s lecture course on “Parmenides” (1942/1943) lays strong emphasis on the dimension of
lethe
in truth (
aletheia
). Such a withdrawal belonging to unconcealment should not be confused with a ...dissembling or hiding (
pseudos
). A concealment pertaining to the presence of a thing can be illustrated by means of a phenomenological description of oblivion, anamnesis, the rare, the gift and the secret. Especially Heidegger’s account of an “open secret” lends itself to a philosophical interpretation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”. Dupin recurrently meditates on the right way of keeping a secret and mocks the police for confusing
lethe
with
pseudos
. Incidentally, stealing is shown to be no less a form of unconcealment than the gift. Poe’s description of how and where The Purloined Letter is openly present in the minister’s study sheds light on how a thing can remain secret by giving way to other things.
The article approaches the work of Van Breda and De Waelhens with respect to the question of how philosophical thought relates to the problems arising in natural life. Van Breda's main contribution ...to philosophy is related to the exceptional natural skills he showed in his rescuing of E. Husserl's Nachlass and his founding of the Husserl Archives in Leuven. It is lesser known that he also brought E. Husserl's widow to Leuven and rescued her from deportation by the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. Extensive excerpts from Malvine Husserl's private correspondence demonstrate her admiration for and gratitude towards Van Breda. This correspondence also gives us a good idea of her daily life during the seven years that she spent in Leuven, her strong character, and the reasons behind her conversion to Catholicism. Less anchored in natural life than Van Breda, De Waelhens nevertheless claimed that philosophy's main task is to shed light on the problems of bodily human existence in its social dimensions and its relation to a linguistically-structured world. This led De Waelhens into a study first of Heidegger, then to Merleau-Ponty, Hegel and Marx and, finally, to psychoanalysis. But his entire work remained dedicated to a reflection on the relation between "philosophy and natural experiences". He understood this relation in strongly dialectical terms: philosophy must give natural life a better understanding of itself in order to allow it to play the role of a critical counter-balance to philosophical speculation. The article concludes with some of the author's personal reflections on what philosophy can and cannot do in order to improve natural human life.
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