Home > Work > Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, 1898-1925
1 " The free artistic fiction and the formation produced in the real world by means of the connection of fictions creates a predelineation for the one contemplating art. But it extends only as far as the artist has tied his unitary forms to such predelineations; beyond that, everything is again an empty possibility that can be shaped by phantasies chosen at will with any sense one likes. The perception as such determines nothing. One sees this in the fact that we would not live with one another in a pure phantasy world and that obviously nothing at all would change in what has been said if we had the same immediate freedom of perceptual phantasy as we do of reproductive phantasy: hence if we could hallucinate at will. "
― Edmund Husserl , Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, 1898-1925
2 " The physical image presentation aims at the subject. The presentation of the image itself as the presentation of the appearing image-representant is an entirely different experience. Here, too, it is possible that the consciousness of imaging can slip away entirely, in which case an ordinary perceptual presentation would result. Preventing this consciousness of imaging from arising from the start in a purely intuitive manner is the effect produced by images simulating the look of reality, images of the sort found in the wax museum, and the like. Although in such cases we have a conceptual knowledge of the fact that the appearances are merely image appearances, in the intuitive experience itself the re-presentative moment, which is otherwise intimately mingled with the appearances, is absent. But this moment is decisive for intuitive image presentation. We have genuine perceptual presentations in those cases, accompanied by the thought that their objects are mere images. The appearance itself, however, presents itself as the appearance of a present object and not as an image. Indeed, in naïvely contemplating it, the appearance forces us to make the intuitive perceptual judgment. In doing this, it deceives us. In truth, there is perhaps another (nonappearing) object, standing to the appearing object in the relation of original to image. We know all of this, and yet the illusion continues to exist, since the appearance possesses the characteristic of normal perceptual presentation so completely that it will not stand being degraded into a mere representant. The accompanying judgment that it is a mere image just does not impress the image-characteristic on the appearance itself. "
3 " Why must the plastic form make up the foundation of image consciousness? "
