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1 Introduction

Similar to phantasy and imagination, human passions, affects, and emotions have not been highly regarded in the history of modern philosophy. Above all, their original creative potential remained unrecognised. Phantasy and imagination were regarded primarily as reproductions or imitations of perception, and their pro-ductive power was sought in art rather than in rational cognition.2 A similar fate befell human affects and emotions, especially the simpler ones, those that seemed to be intertwined with instinctive inclinations like pleasure and displeasure. It is true that, in the course of the Enlightenment’s exploration of cognitive reason, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, or Wilhelm Leibniz all dealt intensively and construc-tively with human affects and passions. Emotions, affects, and imaginations also received great recognition in the moral philosophy of British Empiricism. But that recognition concerned only the practical realm, the realm of morality and ethics.3And even there, Immanuel Kant’s transcendental critique of experience drew a radical line, denying any constitutive capacity of the simpler emotions, instinctive inclinations, and affects, attributing to them the status of ‘lower desires’ and degrad-ing them as disturbing moments of both theoretical and practical cognition. Kant’s diagnosis was unmistakable: Inclinations are blind. They show our lack of freedom and the weakness of our autonomy. According to Kant, particularly in moral mat-ters, reason should dominate and take full control over our affects and inclinations (Kant 2000, 272).

This diagnosis was effective in at least two ways. The philosophical critique of cognition to date (i) tends to consider only the heuristic, but not the constitutive functions of affects, emotions, and phantasies when it comes to the building of (the-oretical and practical) cognition, and (ii) it focuses on the higher modes of affec-tivity, considering primarily feelings as formations that find expression in mental representations and images.

Unfortunately, at these higher levels, we are not able to adequately capture the efficacy of the dynamic and processual character of affectivity in human expe-rience. At the deeper levels of experience, on the other hand, there are still no conventional empirical representations. I, therefore, prefer to speak here of the character of emotivity rather than of affects or feelings. I use the term ‘emotiv-ity’ to denote a pre-reflective affective sphere of effectiveness. We will see that this sphere of effectiveness cannot simply be assigned to a separate faculty, such as the faculty of feeling, but that we encounter here an interaction of affective, bodily, instinctual-driving, and imaginative-imaginary moments. Even if we are moving in the pre-reflective realm (where we would search in vain for fully developed mental representations), the experiences in this sphere are certainly characterised by intuitive evidence. However, instead of clear and unambiguous intuitions, we deal here with ‘soft,’ often unclear and ambiguous evidences that are to be sought in bodily expressions, tendencies, and aspirations, and that can also be experienced bodily-phantasmatically as primary passions of pleasure and displeasure.

The present analysis focuses on some aspects of this pre-reflective, highly affec-tive dimension of experience that seems especially important to me when it comes to addressing phenomenology’s contribution to the clarification of the experiential foundations of the human sciences. Thus, it involves an approach to human beings as objects of research with a focus on bodily affects, emotions and phantasy, includ-ing bodily phantasy. In the following, I will interpret both bodily affects and phan-tasy phenomenologically as structures of emotive consciousness in order to discuss how this consciousness, as a personal and concrete field of experience, opens up a justified access to human experience, not only theoretically, but also practically and clinically.

2 Genetic-Phenomenological Description of Emotivity

Today, emotions and feelings, as well as phantasies and imaginations, are being re-discovered as a legitimate field of philosophical research. This rediscovery is mo-tivated, on the one hand, by the modern cognitive sciences, which intensively in-vestigate the role of emotions and phantasies in the formation of cognitions. On the other hand, it is challenged by neuroscientific research that attempts to explain these phenomena by revealing corresponding brain activities and investigates caus-al interactions between mental-emotional and imaginative phenomena, on the one

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Already the multi-faceted investigations of early descriptive phenomenology, which is also often referred to as phenomenological psychology, provide several examples of such an analysis (as in the works of Alexander Pfänder, Moritz Geiger, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aurel Kolnai, or Max Scheler, to mention just a few).5 However, descriptive phenomenology as psychology main-ly applies the method of eidetic description, while the phenomenological-genetic approach is less present.6 At the same time, feelings, emotions, and phantasies are primarily considered here in their empirical-existential dimension, less in the epis-temological one. With Husserl’s intentional-genetic method of transcendental phe-nomenology, however, it becomes possible to make important epistemological dif-ferentiations and to obtain findings that are of significance above all with regard to the epistemological foundation of personal experience – a possibility which, how-ever, was not sufficiently considered in the existentialist orientation of the second generation of phenomenologists (Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and others).

Genetic phenomenology as an investigation of concrete, living, world-experienc-ing subjectivity shows that sensibility, affect, and phantasy play an essential role in all cognitive activity, on all levels of pre-predicative and predicative, passive and active experience. From a transcendental phenomenological point of view, these are con-stitutive moments of the intentional structure of consciousness. From a lifeworldly perspective, they also play a decisive role as possible motives of action and as me-dia of experienceability, as well as in the constitution of primordial-subjective and above all intersubjective meanings in personal and interpersonal practical life.

From the intentional-genetic perspective, it becomes clear how emotions, affects, and phantasies are accessible even within the deep layers of experience. Affections are seen here as awakenings of subjective interests in the experiential process. Kinesthesesas the sense of movement undergird all bodily processes. Finally, phan-tasmata condition our capacity of expectation and anticipation, thus determining not only the facticity, but also the possibility of subjective experience.

Furthermore, the genetic-phenomenological description shows that these three moments are closely connected. If one understands affection in the broadest sense as the awakening of subjective interests in the experiential process, awakenings that motivate the turning towards or away from the apperceptive process, then it be-comes apparent in genetic terms that these awakenings are always also experienced kinaesthetically-affectively. As such, they go hand in hand with pre-objective bodi-ly processes in the sensation of movement and signify intentional anticipations of what is to come in the experiential event. They even find expression in a certain form of bodily phantasy.

In the interpretation of performing intentionality, the affections prove to be es-sential structural moments of any formation of meaning, being ‘responsible’ not only for the constitution of our practical world, but also for the theoretical world, the world of science and scientific knowledge. Husserl determines the role of af-fection in the process of turning-towards ( Zuwendungsprozess ) in his last book, Experience and Judgment (§ 17). Phenomenology proves here to be a comprehen-sive, profound, and at the same time modern and powerful method of analysing ex-perience, with which it becomes possible to approach the areas of emotive dynamics in their sense-bestowing functions.

In this context, however, the term ‘emotive’ must be defined more closely in its gen-uinely phenomenological sense. This is a term that could seemingly be easily replaced with the conventional concept of emotion. But this would be misleading. The con-cept of emotion would situate our analysis in the empirical-psychological realm. For in empirical research, ‘emotion’ stands for mental-bodily processes that accompany perceptions of various kinds, or occur epiphenomenally to physiological processes. It is assumed that emotions are accompanied by physiological changes and that they in-fluence cognitions as well as the behaviour of psychological subjects without, however,

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Genetic phenomenology shows that the emotive also encompasses very deep layers of constitution. It is the basic situation of being permeated and interwoven by affective tendencies, strivings, and volitions in the entire intra- and intersubjec- tive sphere .8 With the instruments of intentional-genetic analysis, the pre-objective and pre-reflective functioning of the emotive can be revealed in its bodily effects and phantasmatic manifestations. The common talk of the anonymity of this sphere should not make us think that we are in a merely hyletic and a-subjective realm here. Rather, we are dealing with the primal-subjective sphere of affectivity and sen-sibility, where affections and self-affections are at work, which co-determine the structure of all cognitive processes in a sense-bestowing way. As a dynamic, pre-re-flective sensible realm of experience, this sphere constitutes one of the most import-ant discoveries of genetic phenomenology and, at the same time, marks a still open research dimension, which, however, remains deeply rooted in Husserl’s thinking.

3 The Primordial Sphere of Bodily Affect

In 1932, Husserl notes the following in the context of his analysis of affection and feeling in the primordial sphere: “It is the feelings, after all, which or as which the hyletic data or the sensual objects motivate (affect) the active ego, ‘attract’ or ‘repel’ it” (Hua Mat 8, 318).9

This addresses a fundamental aspect of the affective tendency: motivation. Feelings are thereby rediscovered in their motivational potential. They are not a mere resonance of the external world but play an essential role in the practical and cognitive orientation of the subject. Even more, with the concept of primary feel-ing ( primäres Gefühl ), the structure of hyletic data acquires an experiential quality. Husserl clarifies this quality by referring to the dynamics of attraction and repulsion and conceiving the feeling subject as a dynamic one:

In this description, subjectivity – the ego – is conceived as a volitive subject since the beginning. The will, however, is also anchored with deep roots in affections of plea-sure and displeasure. Husserl asks, “what is the affecting moment [ das Affizierende ] for itself?,” and explains that this is a “pleasure affection [ Lustaffektion ]” of the ego. The ego follows a promise. Following the promise brings it into an anticipatory mode, which Husserl calls the “pre-mode of every ‘enjoying’ being-there [ Vormodus jedes ‘genießenden’ Dabei-Seins ].” This makes clear that the pleasure affection fulfils the emotive moment of reaching beyond oneself, which allows for transcending the present as well. This can only be realised through an elementary structure of phantasmatic grasping. In emotive consciousness, then, affect and phantasy meet when the pleasure affection tending towards the future transcends the mode of presence. In relation to the experience of concrete personal subjectivity, such pro-cesses fulfil fundamental functions that enable the formation of the unity of the person. In this context, Husserl speaks of “dynamic streams of feeling [ dynamischen Gefühlsströmen ]” and distinguishes between something like the core feeling of the person and its propagation:

With this observation, Husserl succeeds not only in integrating emotivity into the constitution of partial acts of consciousness, but also in highlighting it as fundamen-tal to the constitution of the unity of the person. The meaning of human affectivity cannot be conceived more radically. This step should not be seen as a relapse into empiricism, though. Rather, we find ourselves in the midst of the transcendental constitution of the person. Contrary to the fear prevailing since the Enlightenment that the passions fragment personal unity and threaten the dignity of the person, Husserl seems to recognise precisely the unity-forming forces of human affectivity and to appreciate them in their practical relations. This offers a way of overcoming the polarisation that repeatedly plagues emotion research: the opposition between rationality and emotion.

The emotive expresses itself in affective-phantasmatic manifestations such as pleasure and displeasure, processes of affection, affective-associative connections, instinctive strivings, tendencies of expectation, and desire. At the same time, affec-tivity contributes to all cognitive processes. If one considers the teleological aspect of every activity of consciousness, it becomes clear that it is precisely the affective moments that carry the goal-related striving for the fulfilment of any intention. From the beginning, striving is also realised kinaesthetically, i.e., through bodily movement, instinctive tendency, and libidinal desire. The expressivity of these pro-cesses always exceeds the present, it cannot be exhausted in the perception of mere presence. Its meaning is only revealed through its reference to the future, its volitive orientation towards the future, and its motivational anchoring in the past. Affect, bodily sensation, and imagination work hand in hand.

Here, the phenomenological analysis of corporeality and passivity comes into play. This analysis grasps the experience as a performing unity of body and soul. It becomes clear that the experience itself always carries with it a practical dimen-sion. In the practical effectiveness of experience, a new kind of rationality emerges: the rationality of the emotive performing unit of consciousness, which is provided with its own order and lawfulness. The specific lawfulness of emotive perform-ing consciousness is based on the motivational connection. The motivational web grounds the unity of experience and thus of the person, despite (and even through) contradictions, changes, and transformations of the person. Here, there are no loose experiences; the experiences are not comprehensible as isolated elements, but only in their developmental context. Structurally, connections between expe-riences are ensured by the transmission of affective content. We are dealing here with passive processes that take place in the subjective and intersubjective realms. In these two realms, corporeality cannot be understood separately from the func-tions of phantasy. As a final point, therefore, we turn to the question of phantasy as a mode of experience of subjective reality. This is where phenomenology and psychoanalysis meet.

4 Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Significance of Emotive Phantasy

The genetic-phenomenological conception of phantasy is characterised by the fact that it is taken not only in its weak, post-perceptual function, but emphasised in its strong, creative meaning. Its sensible formations, the phantasmata, are not under-stood as weakened, expired sensations, but rather as creative affective intrusions into experience. However, the re-evaluation of phantasmata as originally creative experiences cannot be fully accomplished with the instruments of phenomenologi-cal analysis. Rather, it is worthwhile considering psychoanalytic evidence. It is pre-cisely psychoanalysis, thanks to its methodical instruments, which is able to guide us into the pre-reflective and pre-predicative experience that we have already indi-cated with the concept of the emotive. In this process, phantasy plays a decisive role by providing the primary content of the unconscious psychic processes and at the same time accomplishing the inner coherence of psychic reality.

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For Freud, psychic reality does not consist of a mere collection of objects of percep-tion, but it is based on a complex substrate of desires, feelings, memories, etc. A large part of such a complicated inner reality remains unconscious, but it is nevertheless effective and affects the conscious life of the subject. The effectiveness of the uncon-scious becomes visible through fears, joys, and other emotional states that determine our behaviour towards internal and external reality. From a phenomenological point of view, this is an almost infinite field of conscious and unconscious phantasies.

As we have explained above, human beings live in a highly affective dimension, and on this basis, they are able to shape their own behaviour in the world. Human experience is never indifferent to the objects of perception. We always encounter objects by wanting or fearing them, on the basis of need or rejection. In this sense, psychoanalytic observations confirm that psychic reality and the primordial sphere of the emotive are dependent on phantasy. The subject grasps the truth of its world not in terms of neutrally existing objects, but through its own fears and desires. Similar to Husserl, for psychoanalysis the truth of experience is measured by the inner reality of the experiencing subject and not by the existence of subject-inde-pendent things in the world.

By opening up the realm of the unconscious, psychoanalysis also interprets phantasy as a valuable way of expressing and manifesting the unconscious dynamic in the form of desire, dream, association, daydream, and art. All these different forms are grounded in personal longings and needs. Freud summarises this in a forceful way by emphasis-ing that only the unhappy person has phantasies, not the happy, content person:

In relation to the unconscious sources of phantasy, Freud also uses the metaphor of ‘nature reserve:’ phantasy is the subject’s shelter, the place where the inner life can unfold independently of the objective and material conditions of life.12

This view of phantasy as a reserve, however, seems to be at odds with the phe-nomenological interpretation of phantasy as a creative achievement of conscious-ness highlighted above. Yet, Freud’s notion of reserve does not point to a passive, merely conservative quality of phantasy. Instead he understands ‘reserve’ as the source of wish-fulfilling, archaic thought and representations where wishes can survive, preserved from the challenges of reality. Phantasy establishes this ‘reserve’ as a protected area for the proliferation of infantile desires. These are to be under-stood, in phenomenological terms, as primary tendencies and needs, guiding the genesis of subjectivity. In Freud’s words, they are immortal tendencies of our inner reality:

Even though Freud associates phantasy with images, we should not imagine this di-mension as a separate, merely inner, private mental sphere. Just as we have grasped the bodily rootedness of phantasy and the emotive in a phenomenological perspec-tive, we are here to highlight the connection between phantasy and the body in psychoanalytic terms. For Freud, it is clear that phantasies deeply affect both the psychological and physical dimensions of life. Significant phenomena in this re-spect are the so-called conversion symptoms, e.g., in hysteria, when the patient goes blind because she unconsciously avoids what she is afraid of or disgusted by. From a phenomenological point of view, we are dealing with a radical effect of unpleasure affects that are realised bodily-kinesthetically and influence perception.

Other examples are provided by neurotic symptoms such as washing compul-sion, in which unconscious sexual phantasies associated with forbidden objects are warded off by compulsive hand-washing. Here, too, bodily-affective phantasies that protect the subject from embarrassing experiences have an effect on the pre-reflec-tive level. The emotive sphere remedies itself through dissociative and obstructive behaviours. Once again, the emotive phantasy shows its potential by offering cre-ative solutions to subjective distress. However, we observe this not only in the field of pathology, but in all fields of subjective and intersubjective experience.

In the intersubjective context, for example, the dynamic of transference offers a broad field of investigation. The term ‘transference’ is used in psychoanalysis to de-scribe a process that is decisive for the therapeutic setting. The patient experiences the analyst according to their previous, above all unconscious experiences with rele-vant persons of their past. Thus, they expect criticism and interpret the behaviour of their analyst, for example, as punitive, cold, and dismissive. In a phenomenological sense, this is an anticipation that is realised by means of bodily-affective phantasy.13The patient reacts to their own anticipation. They not only experience their oppo-site as a punishing and rejecting instance, but also experience themselves as pun-ished and rejected. This experience has its origins in the deep sphere of affections and self-affections and finds an immediate bodily-atmospheric expression: patients freeze, their muscles tense, their mouths feel dry, it becomes gloomy and threaten-ing around them.

As such, transferencealways takes place in an intersubjective exchange. In the psychoanalytic context, however, it becomes an instrument for the exploration of subjective reality, especially unconscious reality, on its formative emotive layers. From a phenomenological point of view, these are pre-predicative dynamics of in-tentional sense-constitution, which is grasped both by phenomenology and psycho-analysis as forms of association.

The associative dynamics of transferenceinclude mental and bodily elements, with tolerance for contradiction and conflict. Phantasy here serves the fulfilment of deep desires or the transformation of fears. Thereby creative and productive per-formance of phantasy comes into play beyond merely pictorial imagination. It plays a key role in the formation of the psyche itself and shows its constitutive power in the processes of the person’s becoming. Moreover, together with the analysis of the emotive primordial sphere, the concept of bodily phantasy contributes to a radi-cal revision of the body-mind dualism. This requires rethinking the experiential foundations of human experience, which in my view can be provided by genetic phenomenology in unison with psychoanalysis.

Toward an Empty Representational Account of Emotional Response to Fiction

Sonali Arvind Chunodkar

Abstract : At first glance, Edmund Husserl’s analyses of phantasy, image, and sym-bolic consciousness in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) offer themselves as suitable analogues or models for investigating the objective structure of the act of reading literary works. Any resulting analysis based on these models assumes as a given the co-occurrence of intuitive acts of phantasy that pre-sentify the corresponding literary objects and states of affairs. This assumption – also observed in Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser’s respective phenomenological accounts of the aesthetic cognition of literary works – in turn permits the possibility of Husserl’s specific understanding of aesthetic consciousness in the case of the act of reading. Rather than unquestioningly upholding such views, this paper investi-gates the implications of Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Husserl’s observations concerning the absence of mental images and that of intuitive phantasy, respectively, during the act of reading as well as the latter’s passing – but highly relevant – comment on the possibility of non-intuitive art. These observations, which can be corroborated by reflecting upon our own acts of reading, disclose the human incompossibility of achieving any intuitive or fulfilled imagination of literary objects and states of affairs during any ongoing act of reading. However, this incompossibility does not there-by preclude the possibility of emotional response to fictional characters, objects, situations, and so on during the act of reading. Accordingly, this paper ventures to provide a working outline of an empty representational account of the act of reading

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Keywords : Phenomenology of Reading, Intuitive Phantasy, Empty Representation, Aesthetic Response, Edmund Husserl, Roman Ingarden

1 Introduction

What is common among diverse literary and philosophical theories concerning the reading of literary works and any attendant aesthetic or emotional response is their implicit presupposition of or explicit reliance on the reader’s vivid imagination of the corresponding literary objectivities. Even phenomenological inquiries into the cognition of literary works have assumed as a given the occurrence of what can be described in Husserlian terms as intuitive or fulfilled acts of imagination. Rather than unquestioningly upholding such views, in this paper,1 I attempt to outline a phenomenology of the act of reading literary works in the absence of any intuitive phantasy or imagination of the corresponding literary objectivities while still main-taining the possibility of emotional response on the part of the reader. Before pro-ceeding with this outline, I first discuss the significance of the role played by intui-tive phantasy or imagination in Edmund Husserl, Roman Ingarden, and Wolfgang Iser’s respective accounts of the aesthetic experience or object in what follows.

2 Intuitive Phantasy and Aesthetic Response: A Standardized Model of the Act of Reading

At first glance, Husserl’s analyses of phantasy, image, symbolic, and aesthetic consciousness in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) offer themselves as suitable analogues or models for comparatively understanding the objective structure of the act of reading literary works.2 Before proceeding to an analysis of this structure, however, it would prove helpful to briefly discuss Husserl’s analyses. In keeping with his then-adherence to the image theory of phantasy,3Husserl had identified two distinct objective correlates of the act – the phantasy image and the phantasy object or subject. The image theory of phantasy dictated that the intended phantasy object could not be given directly to consciousness; instead, it was the function of the phantasy image to represent the intended or “meant” subject (see Husserl 2005, 19, 20, 25). Because of its ability to present the subject, one can safely conclude that this mediating image was an intuitively given one. His critical rejection of the image theory by 1909 – besides his reservations concerning the problematic presence of the immanent phantasms – led Husserl to revise his understanding of phantasy, thereafter considering it to be a “ modification [of consciousness] through and through ” (ibid., 326). This revised understanding of phantasy permits the immediate, unmediated, but still intuitive presentifications of the intended subjects of phantasy (ibid., 327, 426). The act of reading, however, is necessarily dependent on the perceptual givenness of the written work, because of which it cannot claim to be a thorough modification of consciousness as is the case with phantasy. Instead, its objective structure reveals itself to be comparatively similar to those of image and symbolic consciousness.

Image consciousness, according to Husserl, involves the three objective strata of the physical image or substrate, the image object, and the image subject. The phys-ical substrate is “the image as physical thing, as this painted and framed canvas, as this imprinted paper, and so on. In this sense we say that the image is warped, torn, or hangs on the wall, etc.” (ibid., 20). The function of the physical substrate is to bring about the appearance and awareness of the image object. It also facilitates the “identity, stability, and public character” (Brough 2005, xlv) of the image object thereby allowing one to think of the latter as an intersubjective object. With the de-struction of the physical substrate, no scope remains for the possibility of any corre-sponding image consciousness. While the physical substrate is the object that prop-erly belongs to the perceptual level of the complex act of image consciousness, the primary object of this consciousness remains the “directly and genuinely” (Husserl 2005, 18, 48) appearing image object. The image object is that which appears “in such and such a way through its determinate coloration and form” (ibid., 20) and depicts or represents the image subject.4 Thus, the appearance of the image object is also an intuitive rather than a non-intuitive one or one “in the manner of an empty sign” (ibid., 169, 461). The image subject, depicted by the image object through its “plastic shapes” (ibid., 49), is the intended subject of the painting, photograph, film, and so on.5 This subject is not given in a new act of phantasy; rather, it is seen in the image object (ibid., 28). As Husserl elaborates, “no appearance corresponds to it. It does not stand before me separately, in an intuition of its own; it does not appear as a second thing in addition to the image. It appears in and with the image, precisely because the image representation arises” (ibid., 29).

Like image consciousness, the act of reading is also determined by the presence of a corresponding physical substrate. While the characteristics and functions of this substrate are the same as those in the case of image consciousness, this substrate does not bring about the appearance of images in which one can see the image subject. Rather, it brings about the appearance of signs or symbols. Unlike image consciousness, the intended subjects in the case of the act of reading are not seen in the appearing signs or symbols themselves. The intuitive appearance of these in-tended subjects requires new presenting or presentifying acts. Because of this shift in the appearance of the intended subject, the act of reading proves to be closer to symbolic consciousness, which is taken up for discussion further on in this section.

As far as Husserl’s views on aesthetic consciousness are concerned, an important point to remember is that aesthetic interest is directed toward the manner of appear- ance of the image subject in the image object. In this connection, it must be empha-sized that a mere intuitive phantasy of an object does not amount to an aesthetic consciousness thereof: one must remember Husserl’s cautionary observation that when one “lives in” (ibid., 41) an act of phantasy, one’s interest is usually directed toward the phantasied objects themselves and not toward their specific manner of appearance. However, this does not imply that the act of phantasy thereby precludes the possibility of aesthetic consciousness.6 Nevertheless, for Husserl, it is an intui-tive appearance – regardless of whether it is perceptual or phantasied – rather than an empty one that can sustain the very possibility of any such aesthetic interest in the first place.7 The exclusive interest of aesthetic consciousness in an object’s manner of appearance also results in a unique neutralization of belief: “ in living in aesthetic consciousness I do not live in the respective positing of existence; the positing of existence does not found the aesthetic consciousness ” (ibid., 463).8

However, as Husserl suggests in his 1907 Letter to Hofmannsthal, such aesthetic neutralization is conditional upon the type as well as the contents of the work of art in question:

Challenging this claim of aesthetic impurity where belief positings are involved, Husserl finally concedes, in Text no. 15 (written in 1912), that existential positings can indeed play a role in bringing about aesthetic feelings, stating that “it can thus be the case that the belief in actuality is itself aesthetically co-determining” (Husserl 2005, 464). Conversely, it can also be the recognized empirical impossibility or fic-tionality of an object with regard to its manner of appearance that facilitates aes-thetic feelings. With regard to aesthetic feelings and the positing or non-positing of existence, it must be noted that at one point Husserl held the view that actual feel-ings can only be directed toward actual objectivities, while phantasied objects can only bring about quasi-feelings (ibid., 462ff.; cf. Walton 1978; Radford & Weston 1975). He later revised this view, noting that aesthetic feelings that are directed to-ward phantasied objects, while “modified,” are still “actual” ones (Brough 2005, xl; Husserl 2005, 465). What remains unrevised is his view that such feelings still pre-suppose the intuitive appearance of the objectivity in question.

In texts dated to 1904–1905, Husserl elaborates on some of the similarities and differences between image and a kind of symbolic consciousness, which in turn is founded upon image consciousness: he (2005, 54, 37) understands such symbolic consciousness as “transcendent image consciousness,” where “the meaning regard is pointed away from the symbol,” as opposed to “immanent image consciousness,” in which the “seeing” of the intended subject is “contained” within or “pointed toward” the image. If image consciousness is a “consciousness of identity,” then symbolic consciousness is a consciousness of “resemblance,” of “difference,” of “disparity” in varying degrees (ibid., 163ff.). Such disparity is also a characteristic feature of the consciousness of signs. Sign consciousness – another constitutive aspect of the act of reading – is, according to Husserl, yet another form of symbolic consciousness. In fact, Husserl goes on to distinguish between “ two classes in symbolic presenting” (ibid., 38). The first of these he understands as “symbolic presenting in the old, orig-inal sense of the word, the presenting of something externally by means of images, symbols, hieroglyphs” (ibid., 38f.). In this connection, he also claims that “speech and writing originally have, respectively, a symbolic or hieroglyphic character”

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In the Sixth Logical Investigation ,10 Husserl, in fact, questions whether “a purely signitive act” can exist without being founded upon some “intuitive basis,” to which he replies in the negative: “An act of signification is only possible in so far as an in-tuition becomes endued with a new intentional essence, whereby its intuitive object points beyond itself in the manner of a sign (whether as a sign regularly or fleetingly used)” (2001b, 241).11 He acknowledges here as well that the “intuition of a sign may have ‘nothing at all to do’ with the object of the significative act” (ibid.).12 However, he observes that in such cases it is not the “ founding intuition as a whole, but only its representational content , which really assists the signitive act” (ibid.). Husserl uses the example of verbal signs to explain what he means by the “founding intuition” and “founding content” in this context:

As far as the signitive consciousness of visually given letters and verbal signs is con-cerned, any intuitive appearance – an appearance that Husserl (ibid., 242) prefers to term as the “founding content” – is restricted to the “image” that functions as the sign.13

However, one does not live in these “images,” and barring the exceptional cas-es of self-reference, one does not see the intended subject in such “images” (see ibid., 219). Similarly, any aesthetic consciousness brought about by their manner of appearance occurs only in rare instances (e.g., when viewing typographical, cal-ligraphic artworks or runic or other script inscriptions and historical epigraphical artefacts) (see ibid., 105). As Husserl (2005, 185) elaborates, the apprehension of the sign itself is not usually foregrounded during signitive consciousness:

Since it is not seen in the appearing “image,” the “intended subject” of signitive con-sciousness, as also noted in the case of the act of reading earlier, requires new acts such as those of imagination, memory, perception, or image consciousness in order to be apprehended in an intuitive manner.14 Because of the possibility of intuitive fulfillment through such supplementary acts, especially that of intuitive phantasy, signitive consciousness – and consequently, the act of reading too – can still stake a claim to the possibility of aesthetic consciousness.

The importance of the role played by the act of intuitive phantasy in the constitu-tion of an aesthetic object during the act of reading is especially brought to the fore by Roman Ingarden in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art . He begins this work with a summary of his account of the essential structure of a literary work, which comprises four distinct strata. The first of these comprises “verbal sounds and phonetic formations and phenomena of a higher order,” while the second in-volves “semantic units: of sentence meanings and the meanings of whole groups of sentences” (Ingarden 1973, 12). The third stratum is that of “schematized aspects, in which objects of various kinds portrayed in the work come to appearance,” whereas the fourth stratum comprises the “objectivities portrayed in the intention-al states of affairs projected by the sentences” (ibid.). In connection with the cogni-tion of the literary work, he differentiates between two types of reading: “ordinary, purely passive (receptive) reading and active reading” (ibid., 37). As Ingarden elab-orates, passive reading, which is the more frequent as well as “mechanical” of the two, is mostly restricted to the achievement of the first and second strata and does not involve any intuitive imaginative appearance of the corresponding objects and states of affairs:

The stratum of portrayed objectivities in those rare instances where it is achieved through passive reading remains vague, distant, and obscure (ibid., 41). While pas-sive reading, according to Ingarden, does not imply a purely receptive attitude and is still marked by activity, active reading is especially distinguished by the intuitive imagination of the corresponding objects and states of affairs: “Suppose we assert that in ‘active’ reading one not only understands the sentence meanings but also ap-prehends their objects and has a sort of intercourse with them” (ibid., 39). This imag-inative experience is marked by such qualities as “greater plasticity,” “distinctness,” “vividness,” “concreteness,” “intensity,” and “richness” (ibid., 62). Furthermore, in active reading, “we project ourselves in a cocreative attitude into the realm of the ob-jects determined by the sentence meanings” (ibid., 40). Understood in a Husserlian context, such projection would also imply a sort of “doubling” or “splitting” of the ego (see Cavallaro 2017),15 thereby categorizing the act of reading as a peculiar type of phantasy experience as opposed to being, as Sartre (2004, 64) claims, “a sui ge-neris consciousness that has its own structure.”

For Ingarden, active reading is not simply restricted to the intuitive grasp of the portrayed objectivities as such. It also involves further creative, imaginative sup-plementation to such objectivities on the part of the reader. This creative activity is called for by the inherent descriptive incompleteness of the stratum of portrayed objectivities in particular. Ingarden (1973, 50) terms such instances of descriptive incompleteness “places of indeterminacy:”

According to Ingarden, it is only through active reading that the reader is able to creatively “fill-in” what “places” or “gaps” of “indeterminacy” this stratum affords:The creative “concretization” of the literary work that results from such readerly contribution is the aesthetic object, and it functions as the locus of any emotional response (see ibid., 52–58, 199ff., 207f., 220ff., 329).16 Thus, it is intuitive, co-creative phantasy that founds the possibility of emotional response in Ingarden’s highly in-fluential account of the aesthetic cognition of a literary work.

On the other hand, Wolfgang Iser (1978, 96), who engages with Ingarden’s views in The Act of Reading , locates the aesthetic object in the overall “meaning” or “sig-nificance” of the literary text – a significance that is characterized as serving a so-cio-cultural, psychological, and pedagogical purpose. At first glance, this shift of locus from the intuitive, co-creative imagination of the literary objectivities to the text’s overall meaning or significance might be taken to imply that such imagi-nation is not necessary for the possibility of any aesthetic or emotional response. Nevertheless, for Iser, any apprehension or achievement of this overall meaning or significance depends upon the “building” and “revising” of the mental images of schematized aspects and their corresponding literary objects (ibid., 135–159).17Iser’s continued reliance on such imagining is symptomatic of the ubiquitous belief in its occurrence during the act of reading. The poverty or richness of “mental im-ages” and a literary work’s ability to evoke them continue to serve as critical touch-stones concerning the aesthetic value(s) of a literary work. The occurrence of such imagination indeed functions as the backbone of almost every theory of aesthetic response barring the exceptions offered by those concerning mathematics and other abstract sciences.

A standardized structure of the objective correlates of the act of reading, which is jointly based on Husserl and Ingarden’s respective accounts, would accordingly involve the strata of (1) the physical object or substrate, (2) the sign, (3) the mean-ing, (4) the phonetic aspect, and (5) the intuitive appearance of the mentioned objectivities. As in the case with the objective structure of image consciousness, any apprehension of the stratum of signs during the act of reading presupposes the perceptual givenness of a physical substrate (e.g., a printed book or an e-book device).18 This physical substrate similarly facilitates the “identity, stability, and public” (Brough 2005, xlv) or intersubjective character of the stratum of signs.19This physical substrate can similarly be torn or even burned so that its destruction negates the very appearance of visual marks and thus of any corresponding sign consciousness. The perception of this physical substrate also shares such issues as its proper orientation as well as other situational and physiological conditions that allow for its adequate or “optimal givenness” (Husserl 2000, 63–80).20 The stratum of signs, as mentioned earlier, is characterized by its self-effacing tendency, which shifts the reader’s attention away from living in their appearance to the apprehen-sion of their culturally and habitually determined meanings (see Husserl 1969, 20). The apprehension of the stratum of the meanings of the words, sentences, and so on, curiously enough, includes the (passive) positing of a peculiar kind of belief – not the positing of the existence of the signified object but that of the meaningful word itself.21 It is perhaps because of the perceptual nature of the givenness of the book as well as the sign, in addition to the intersubjective characteristic of mean-ing and language, that the reader posits the meanings of the words with (passive) simple belief certainty. An easy way of disclosing the occurrence of such positing is to consider those instances that involve the belief modalities of doubt, questioning, cancellation, affirmation, or confirmation through verification with regard to the correctness of one’s previous apprehension of a sign or its meaning (cf. Husserl 1983, 251).22

The phonetic stratum, following Ingarden, involves either the auditory perception or the intuitive imagination of the phonetic forms of the visually (or even tactual-ly) apprehended signs (see Husserl 2005, 179, note 3). However, the inclusion of this stratum in the objective structure of the act of reading discloses an underlying presumption of physiological normality, thus raising questions concerning its es-sential necessity: the necessity of the achievement of this stratum is challenged by the practice of reading followed by those who are born deaf and are thus unable to perceive or imagine the corresponding phonetic forms of the apprehended signs.23As far as the stratum of the intuitive appearance of the mentioned objectivities is concerned, it can be achieved through image consciousness or, more commonly, through intuitive phantasy.24

3 On the Absence of Intuitive Phantasy during the Act of Reading

However, the possibility of the occurrence of intuitive phantasy during the act of reading as such is open to question: a rare challenge to the ubiquitous belief in the occurrence of such phantasy during the act of reading can be found in Sartre’s early phenomenological works on the imagination. In The Imagination , he discusses the French Bergsonian philosopher Albert Spaier’s observation concerning an interest-ing characteristic of cognitive processes involving mental images:

Spaier (1914; quoted in Sartre 2004, 62) understands this stage, which can be said to involve an adequate comprehension of the intended “idea,” but not any intui-tive imagination of the corresponding object, as the “dawn of the image.”25 In The Imaginary , Sartre (2004, 63) unpacks the implications of Spaier’s observation where the act of reading is concerned:

Significantly, in Text no. 18 from 1918, Husserl (2005, 616) acknowledges the possi-bility that some types of works of art could be grasped without recourse to intuitive imagination:

In an undated marginal note to Text no. 15 from 1912, he significantly revises his earlier views on the matter by unequivocally pointing out:

Rather than blindly accepting Sartre’s or Husserl’s respective observations concern-ing the poverty of mental images or the absence of intuitive phantasy, one can un-dertake a phenomenological reflection on one’s own myriad acts of reading in order to verify whether any such intuitive imaginative appearance does occur during the act of reading and whether it is possible to simultaneously carry out the different

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4 The Genetic Turn: Empty Representations, Conceptual Apprehensions, and Abiding Senses

The incompossibility of any intuitive phantasy of the mentioned objectivities does not thereby imply that the act of reading necessarily stops at the stratum of the apprehended meaning (cf. Ingarden 1973, 38). As noted by Husserl and Sartre, there are instances where the reader can indeed imagine some of the mentioned or described literary objectivities. However, such imagination, contra Ingarden, is of a non-intuitive sort: it is characterized by incompleteness, discontinuity, vague-ness, indirectness, and non-correspondence (cf. ibid., 38, 41, 50, 62). Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that any identification of such non-intuitively imagined objectivities as the exclusive locus of any aesthetic or emotional response during the act of reading would be premature without first examining the possibility of such response even in the absence of such imagination. Under such conditions of absence, the act of reading still involves an emptily intended representation of the corresponding objectivity.

These empty representations can be of three types. The occurrence of the first of these can be observed when one is ignorant of the corresponding objectivity or when the description of the objectivity in question is incomplete, general, ambigu-ous, and so on, at that specific temporal moment during the reading process. In the latter case, the reader usually seeks or expects an ‘informational fulfillment’ of the states of affairs in the further, as-yet unread parts of the work (e.g., the disclosure of the identity of the till-then emptily intended unknown killer in a murder mys-tery novel). Any ‘informational fulfilment’ need not entail an intuitive imagination of the corresponding objectivity. Such ‘informational fulfillment’ can, nonetheless, bring about an aesthetic or emotional response on the part of the reader. The second type of empty representations is not marked by such contextual ignorance; rather, it involves known but logically impossible objects (e.g., round square), conceptually impossible states of affairs (Husserl 2001b, 67f., 209), and uncommon physiologi-cally conditioned experiences.28 The third type of empty representations involves known objectivities that can readily achieve imaginative fulfillment, provided one ceases the act of reading. What remains to be considered is what the empty repre-sentations of known objectivities presuppose as well as entail, and whether they can facilitate any aesthetic or emotional response.

Before proceeding to identify the specific nature of the third type of empty rep-resentations, it would be helpful to first note the difference between the intuitive givenness and the conceptual apprehension of objectivities. In this connection, one can turn to Husserl’s comment on the Kantian differentiation between the intuition of individual objectivities and that of universals, which leads him to point out that the former kind of intuition

One can also turn to Sartre (2004, 63–68), who also acknowledges this Kantian dif-ferentiation but relies instead on what he calls “imaging knowledge,” which he con-siders to be a “degradation” of pure knowledge,30 and arrives at a similar realization:Significantly, Sartre also emphasizes that this “empty imaging knowledge” cannot be reduced to “pure sign knowledge” or to “the state of ‘meaning’” (ibid., 62, 63; cf. Husserl 2005, 95).

Relying on such differentiation, it would be more appropriate to state, contra Ingarden in particular, that the objective structure of the act of reading usual-ly culminates with the conceptual apprehension of the corresponding literary objectivities. In other words, the third type of empty representations comprises conceptual objectivities. However, readers are not aware of or attentive toward the conceptual nature of their apprehensions while living in the act of reading.31In addition, as far as the act of reading is concerned, the corresponding concep-tual objectivities cannot lay any claim to being phenomenologically pure con-cepts (see Husserl 1983, 165–167). Rather, because of their genesis in processes of abstraction undertaken in the natural attitude, such objectivities are of the empirical sort:

Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and its notions of secondary passivity (see Moran & Cohen 2012, 236), habituality, and sedimented, abiding senses can shed more light on what such conceptual apprehensions presuppose as far as the act of reading is concerned. Considered phenomenologically, the reader is a temporal phase of what Husserl (1982, 67f.; 2000, 314) terms the monad, which is “ the ego taken in full concreteness ” and “is the bearer of its habituality” as well as “its individual history.” Significantly, he also points out that belief positings become an important aspect of the monad’s habituality:

Accordingly, the influence of habitually determined belief positings is not restricted to the apprehension of the individual object in question or of its type; rather, it ex-tends to that of any associated or similar types of objectivities.

Thus, it is the reader’s stock of sedimented, abiding senses or of knowledge that facilitates the conceptual apprehension of most – if not all – of the objectivities mentioned in a literary work. It would not be farfetched to claim that the possibility of such senses, which also include the sense of being and other characteristic fea-tures of an object or state of affairs (see Husserl 1973, 122f.), founds that of the act of reading as such. For instance, the very possibility of the act of reading unavoid-ably depends upon the learnt acquisition of, and thus possession as a habitus, the primary language in which the work is written (see Ingarden 1973, 15f.; Fish 1980, 42–48).32 This condition does not imply that the reader should know all the words belonging to the language in question, nor does it assume any correct understand-ing of the meanings and pronunciations of such words. The possibility of the read-er’s continued engagement with as well as any aesthetic or emotional response to a literary work, however, depends upon more than linguistic, semantic competence.

As indicated by the process of achieving generalizations, any conceptual ap-prehension of objectivities during the act of reading requires prior experience(s) of some – if not all – of the types of objects and states of affairs that are usually mentioned in a fictional work along with some understanding of their respective characteristic features and capabilities. Such types of objectivities are usually those that one considers to be mundane: for example, the individual species and genera of trees, animals, birds, and so on; objects of daily use such as cups, plates, tables, chairs, clothes, food items, and so on; higher-level concepts like cities, nations, realms, money, and so on; sensible qualities of objects like colour, smoothness, roughness, jaggedness, and so on; as well as physical, cognitive, and emotional ex-periences such as perception, imagination, remembering, thinking, reasoning, pain, warmth, coolness, tiredness, joy, grief, sadness, and so on. The sedimented senses corresponding to such objectivities also include senses derived from socio-cultural customs and traditionally determined associations. Furthermore, the act of reading also involves the passive operation of such sedimented senses as the different types of fictional and non-fictional genres in circulation as well as the known generic category of the work in question.

The operating influence of the sense of the genre of a work in particular plays an important role in determining whether the act of reading is accompanied by belief positings or by their absence: a difference in position takings can be observed while reading, for example, news articles, political allegories, scholarly tomes on phenom-enology, as well as works of realistic, historical, philosophical, science, and fantasy fiction. However, the genesis of such sedimented senses as those listed above in the prior – often lived – experiences of the reader serves to challenge any straightfor-ward claim concerning the absence of belief positings when it comes to the read-ing of fictional works. With the absence of intuitive phantasy, the disclosure of the conceptual apprehension of literary objectivities, and the inescapable dependence on what are essentially “memorial” sedimented, abiding senses, the certainty of any claim concerning the non-positing or neutralization of belief that is a characteristic of pure intuitive phantasy is lost as far as the act of reading fictional works is con-cerned.33 What this loss and the possibility of passive belief positings – occurring as a result of the operating influence of sedimented senses of objectivities of the mundane sort – entail is an epistemic rather than an ontological blurring of the actual and the fictional during the reading of fictional works.34

In this connection, one recalls Husserl’s (1973, 298) differentiation in Experience and Judgment between “predications of existence, which have their counterparts in negations of existence” and “predications of actuality, which have their counterparts in predications of nonactuality, of fiction.” This distinction plays a crucial role when thinking about the respective modifications of belief during the reading of fictional and non-fictional works. As Husserl further observes, the concepts of actuality and fictionality first arise in connection with phantasy:

Positings of unmodified existence proper are restricted to that which is immediate-ly given in one’s perceptual surroundings. Such perceptually given objectivities are readily accepted to be actual as a matter of habit. When it comes to the reading of a non-fictional work, the mentioned or described objectivities, which are not per-ceptually present, are nonetheless accepted as actual and thus as existent precisely because of such matters of habit.

Further, if one considers the categories of “possible experience in general” and “actuality,” one finds those objectivities that have some “connection” or “agreement” with the reader’s abiding, sedimented senses arising in past perceptual experiences along with those acquired through learning qua knowledge. The positing of such objectivities as actual also implies a belief in the possibility of achieving in principle a corresponding unmodified positing of their existence – modalized or otherwise. The objectivities of “fictionality” or of “possible imagination in general,” on the other hand, are marked by an awareness of their “disconnection” with or “opposition” to such a possibility (see ibid., 300; Husserl 2005, 487). However, even a passing con-sideration of the kind of objects and states of affairs that are mentioned in literary works reveals that it is difficult to achieve a clear-cut epistemic separation between the objectivities of “possible experience in general,” “possible imagination in gener-al,” and “actuality.” Any attempt to distinguish between such objectivities faces fur-ther challenges in light of the fact that much that is included in fictional works does not exclusively belong to the restricted category of fictionality (cf. Husserl 1973, 302).

In keeping with Husserl’s (2005, 487f.) insights in Text no. 15 from 1912, the read-ing of fictional and even non-fictional works can instead be said to involve “nonho-mogeneous” positings. For instance, it is often difficult for a reader to posit known actual persons, geographical locations, objects, events, facts, and other literary works as “fictional” during the reading of fictional works. Conversely, it is also possible for a reader to apprehend an objectivity, if ignorant of its otherwise actual or historical sta-tus, as uniquely fictional. Any positing of actuality in such instances shares the char-acteristic feature of what Husserl understands as “mixed” rather than pure phantasy: “in mixed phantasy not everything turns into the as-if, but the as-if character does infect what is actually given” (ibid., 713f.). When those objectivities that would oth-erwise belong to the restricted category of fictionality are mentioned in non-fictional or scholarly works, the “as if” character of fiction in their case is similarly “infected” as it were by the otherwise predominant positings of actuality. Accordingly, a reader might apprehend a non-existing objectivity, a non-actual though possibly experi-enceable objectivity, or an unknown fictional one that is not explicitly highlighted as such in a non-fictional or scholarly work as an actual and thus existing one.

5 On the Empty “Intuitions” of Empathy

There are a few categories of such otherwise actual or possibly experienceable ob-jectivities that reveal themselves to be an inescapable part of any literary, fictional

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In this connection, it must be emphasized that empathy is not a neutralized act even in passivity (see W. Stein 1989, xviii; E. Stein 1989, 11). What this implies in the case of the apprehension of fictional narrators, characters, and so on, is the non-neutralized positing of a necessarily correlated psychic aspect or being with its own stream and horizon of lived experiences. Accordingly, while such individuals can be fictional, they are nonetheless grasped as essentially possessing a psychic life of their own. When it comes to the act of reading, the empathic transfer of the sense of being facilitates a signitive analogue of the three stages of empathy iden-tified by Edith Stein, beginning with the emergence of the specific psychic experi-ences of such fictional beings.35 This signitive emergence facilitates the possibility of the non-essential operations of empathic explication and objectification. Such empathic operations in turn allow the more crucial extensions of “fellow feeling” or “sympathy,” and “the contagion or transference of feeling.”36 The passive opera-tion of the former empathic extension is what founds the readers’ own primordially experienced emotional responses to the fates of fictional characters. Regardless of whether it involves existing, actual, or fictional beings, an essential feature of empa-thy is its cognitive insight into – rather than any direct or immediate experiencing of – their psychic experiences (ibid., 10). This essential inability to achieve any im-mediate experience restricts the manner in which the psychic experiences of such beings can achieve intuitive givenness in general, which brings empathy closer to other presentifying acts such as memory and imagination.

However, the specific issue here is to determine whether empathy and its exten-sions are adversely affected by the absence of intuitive phantasy. In this connec-tion, one can safely conclude that the act of reading would not be able to achieve any intuitive imagination of the physical body/Body ( Körper / Leib ) of the fictional characters, narrators, authors, and translators as well as editors.37 Nevertheless, the imaginative fulfillment of the phonetic stratum permits an intuitive appre-hension of the “voices” or “thoughts” of such fictional beings. The intuitive imag-ination of such fictional beings’ “speech” or “thoughts” – or even the mere de-scription of their emotional states, thoughts, desires, and motivations38 – renders the intuitive imagination of their corresponding bodies/Bodies superfluous as far as empathic operations are concerned. In other words, it is not necessary for the reader to intuitively imagine a crying, laughing, or scowling person to empathi-cally grasp a fictional (or actual) person’s sadness, happiness, or anger. Empathic “intuition” in such cases is directed toward that person’s experienced emotion or feeling itself. The empathic apprehension of the psychic state and experiences of fictional beings in this manner can readily facilitate the empathic extension of “fellow feeling” or “sympathy” in the reader. The passive operations of empathy are thus not adversely affected by the absence of intuitive imagination of literary objects and states of affairs.

In conclusion, these highly important operations of empathy and any resulting aesthetic or emotional response to fictional works are only possible because of the operating influence of the corresponding sedimented senses, which in their turn are guaranteed by our inescapable intersubjective condition (cf. Radford & Weston 1975, 74f.). Thus, it is the conceptual apprehension of the corresponding objectiv-ities; the operating influence of previously acquired sedimented, abiding senses along with their associated, variously modified belief positings; and the crucial, in-escapable dependence upon the operations of empathy along with the possibility of its extensions that facilitate the possibility of emotional response to fiction on the part of the reader in the absence of intuitive phantasy during the act of reading.

Some Methodological Concerns Regarding the Debate on Fictional Emotions

Christian Ferencz-Flatz

Abstract: The present article departs from several recent papers, which engage the question of fictional emotions from a phenomenological perspective. They are all shown to have certain difficulties in clearly establishing whether or not there is an essential difference between real and fictional emotions; whether or not fictional emotions can be voluntarily reproduced; or whether or not they need to draw from our prior actual experience. Without settling any of these questions in its turn, the article shows that there are key methodological constraints which necessarily lead phenomenology to an ambiguous treatment of these issues. These have to do with the methodological paradox of using imaginative procedures for exploring the rela-tionship between fantasy emotions and actual emotional experiences.

Keywords : Imaginative Variation, Husserl, Stanislavski, Phenomenological Method

1 Phenomenologists on Fictional Emotions

As is well known, fictional emotions are at the core of a long-standing philosophical debate, which circles around the question of whether such emotions – for instance, those experienced by the spectator of a horror film or the reader of a heart-rending novel – are indeed actual emotions or not. Given that at least some of these emotions only seem justified in regard to a real referent (for example fear when danger actu-ally lies ahead), to claim that they are genuine implies a highly irrational account of emotions. To claim that they are not brings the difficult burden of defining more accurately the exact nature of such emotional phenomena, which are not full-blown emotions proper. These questions, which can be traced back all the way to Hume and even to Shakespeare’s Hecuba soliloquy in Hamlet , led to heated debates among analytic philosophers peaking in the 1990s, focusing mostly on Walton’s concep-tion of ‘make believe’ and his interpretation of Radford and Weston’s ‘paradox of fiction.’ More recently, several phenomenologists have joined these discussions as well, trying to show that phenomenology has the resources to satisfyingly settle the key issues under scrutiny.

Among these recent interventions, three papers – Vendrell Ferran (2010), Summa (2019), and Cavallaro (2019) – stand out especially. Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s article puts the phenomenological contribution to the aforementioned debates in a histori-cal perspective. She shows that the phenomenological account of fictional emotions is by no means just a belated addition to the analytic discussions of the subject matter, but that the former actually predates the latter by far. To this extent, she revisits a substantial debate carried out at the turn of the 20th century in the early phenomenological school of Franz Brentano, in order to demonstrate how the rich-ness of those accounts – which also include discussions of the intertwinement of real aesthetic emotions and fictional emotions, or the role of bodily engagement in such experiences – could fruitfully enrich the current debates as well.2

In her more systematically oriented article, Michela Summa explicitly sets out to show how, despite having fictional objects as a reference, fictional emotions are nev-ertheless both genuine and rational. She thus opposes a phenomenologically refined concept of fictionality to the stark contrast in the analytic discussions between sheer existence and non-existence. This allows her, by further expanding on co-imagina-tion as a specifically intersubjective way of engaging artistic fictions, to argue for an intrinsic normativity of fictional emotions, which helps prove their implicit ratio-nality. In further drawing on Husserl’s theory of foundation – according to which non-objectifying acts such as emotions are necessarily founded on objectifying acts, whereas the latter can, in turn, be either positional (as in perceptions) or quasi-po-sitional (as in phantasies) – Summa is able to show that emotions never necessarily demand the real existence of their objective reference and that, therefore, emotion-al responses to fiction can be rationally justified. In the final section of her paper, Summa tackles the question of why fictional emotions do not motivate action. This is indeed a common objection: since spectators of a horror film, for instance, do not flee the cinema in fright, it is tempting to claim that they are not really afraid. In responding to this objection, Summa turns to Sartre’s conception of imagination. If one follows Sartre’s account, according to which imaginary experience necessarily also entails a ‘virtualization’ of the experiencing subject, the actual subject of the fictional experience is only an imaginarily co-constituted I, which should not be confounded with the real, empirical subject – hence the latter is not motivated to any real-world reactions.

Marco Cavallaro’s paper sketches out a similar argument following Husserl rather than Sartre. It has the merit of explicitly specifying two points, which remain slight-ly ambiguous in Summa’s article. Referring to Husserl’s earlier version of Sartre’s ‘virtualization’ thesis, Cavallaro takes note of the fact that setting up an essential divide between the imaginary I of fictional experience and the real, empirical I, as both Husserl and Sartre do, one is bound to ascribe the emotions experienced while receiving a work of fiction to the former. This, however, implies regarding them as mere quasi-experiences and not as actual experiences, which seems to somewhat contradict Summa’s initial thesis. Moreover, Cavallaro stresses the fact that, accord-ing to both Husserl and Sartre, one is ultimately led to regard emotions toward fictional artworks, as scrutinized in analytic philosophy, as equivalent to imaginary emotions, that is: to sheer phantasized emotions, since both only involve emotions under the auspices of a fictional ‘as-if’ attitude.

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Despite bringing to the fore relevant clarifications with regard to the subject mat-ter, all three papers ultimately seem somewhat hesitant in deciding the main ques-tions at hand. Neither of the three papers convincingly settles the issues of whether or not there are essential differences (say in the corresponding bodily experience) between real and fictional emotions; of whether or not fictional emotions can be voluntarily reproduced; of whether or not they necessarily feed on prior experi-ence. While I will not try to directly respond to these questions in the following considerations either, I intend to show more specifically that there may be central methodological reasons why a phenomenological approach necessarily leads to an ambiguous treatment of these issues.

2 Imaginative Procedures in Phenomenology

As the aforementioned articles show, Husserl’s philosophy can indeed serve as an enlightening tool for tackling the question of fictional emotions. There is however one point in his phenomenology which is of crucial importance here, but which is nevertheless constantly overlooked in the aforesaid discussions, namely Husserl’s methodological reflections on the use of phantasy in phenomenological research. As is well known, phenomenology should – in Husserl’s view, at least in its earlier static version – strive to offer structural analyses of the main types of lived experi-ences. To this extent, it is supposed to first depart from intuitive examples of such experiences by imaginatively modifying them in various ways such as to lay bare what invariably defines them. On Husserl’s account, however, the guiding examples used in such imaginative procedures do not need to be real, empirical lived expe-riences from the onset, but they can just as well be mere phantasy examples. His argument goes as follows:

Moreover, in his detailed discussion of this point in his Ideas I , Husserl even goes a step further in claiming that phantasy examples are not just equivalent to actual experiences, but most often even preferable to the latter. Undoubtedly, there are im-portant advantages of using actual experiences as a support for phenomenological analyses, because they are incomparably clearer and more stable than mere phan-tasies, as comes to view especially when considering external perception. However, according to Husserl, these advantages of original experience are not methodolog-ically invaluable for phenomenological research. If they were, phenomenology would urgently have to consider “where, how, and to what extent they are realizable in the various kinds of mental processes, which kinds of mental processes come es-pecially close in this respect to the privileged sphere of sense perception, and many other similar questions” (ibid., 158).

To be sure, some of Husserl’s later reflections add some nuances to this account. Already in the third book of his Ideas , he indeed seems to be much more keen in stressing the advantages of actual experience over phantasy, without however abandoning his initial position. If actual perception warrants the clarity of all its fully given moments while offering a stable intuition and lasting fulfilment of the intended aspects, phantasy is on the contrary often difficult to sustain, it quickly loses its intuitive density and risks lapsing into full obscurity. Therefore, Husserl unequivocally concludes: “Naturally the phenomenologist will therefore, wherever he can, draw from the primal source of clarity, from the fully living ‘impression,’ no matter how little he may be interested in factual existence” (Husserl 1980, 45). While this consequently leads to intricate theoretical debates concerning the pre-cise type of acts and phenomena where actual experiences are easily accessible and thus preferable, it nevertheless remains a given throughout Husserl’s oeuvre that, if preference cannot be given to sheer phantasies from the onset, actual experiences are still anyhow treated in principle as if they were mere phantasies in disregarding their sheer factuality, while eidetic variation further on reduces all experiential con-tent to the status of mere phantasy variants.3

In Husserl’s view, these reflections certainly apply to all classes of lived experi-ences in general, but they become especially relevant when considering the par-ticular case of emotions. For if the example of emotions is indeed brought up in this context on several occasions as a case in point of lived experiences with regard to which it is debatable whether phantasy instantiations are preferable over actual experiences or the other way around, the sheer fact that a phenomenological ap-proach treats phantasized emotions and actually experienced ones in principle as equivalents becomes highly significant against the backdrop of the ongoing debates concerning ‘fictional emotions.’ For, in linking up these two theoretical discussions, the obvious question arises: how can phenomenology ever settle the debate about whether fictional emotions are similar or dissimilar to real emotions if it presumes as its core methodological principle that phantasy emotions and real emotions can be treated as equivalents? What is needed here, then, is a more thorough reflection on how the methodological principle of regarding phantasy emotions as full-blown substitutes for real emotions impedes the theoretical definition of fictional emo-tions and vice versa.

3 A Methodological Paradox

Of course, when discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using phantasy examples, the question of emotions does not come up merely as a generic case in point. Instead, it plays a key role as an argument in this debate. Thus, in the afore-mentioned paragraph of Ideas I , Husserl indeed begins his argument by expanding on the various strongpoints of original experience for phenomenological analysis. In this context, he focuses especially on sensory perception because, in his view, the latter has certain advantages over phantasy, which are not shared by other types of originally lived experiences, most notably emotions. He illustrates this by speaking of anger:

In brief, Husserl argues that, although perception has all such obvious virtues over mere phantasy, without suffering the drawbacks of original emotional acts, these advantages are nevertheless not methodologically indispensable for phenomenol-ogy. If they were, Husserl continues, phenomenology would have to struggle to re-produce them as far as possible for all types of experiences, emotions included. In other words: if the conditions of originariness were indeed indispensable for phenomenology, it would have to develop techniques for experimentally provoking anger outbursts, or for maintaining them under reflection in order to gain insights into the structure of such emotions. In Husserl’s view, this is however not neces-sary. On the contrary, phenomenological analyses do not require the originariness of their starting examples. Moreover, there are substantial reasons why phantasies are preferable even in the treatment of perception itself – and one can easily notice Husserl’s preference for discussing perception on the ground of merely phantasized examples throughout his work –, while this is all the more so in the case of emo-tions, given that they do not even share the experimental upsides of perception. Consequently, analyzing them in the mode of originariness appears to be highly difficult, if not impossible, while working with phantasy instantiations seems to be the only plausible solution.

This is precisely where the debate on fictional emotions becomes relevant for questioning the phenomenological method and vice versa, as I would like to sketch out in the following four points.

(1)What the aforementioned passage in Ideas I shows is that, in Husserl’s view, phantasized emotions do not share the vicissitudes of actual emotions. More pre-cisely, this means on the one hand, that they do not evaporate when one approaches them reflectively, that is: they can be maintained more stably for analysis. On the other hand, they can be experimentally produced at any time by simply imagining oneself to be angry, sad, etc. Both aspects obviously imply that, in contrast to actual emotions, phantasy emotions are better suited methodologically for a phenomeno-logical analysis insofar as they are voluntarily accessible.

Now, this point is subject to some debate in the phenomenological literature on fictional emotions. According to Vendrell Ferran’s (2010, 143) account, several of the proponents engaged in the early discussions of fictional emotions within the Brentano school, e.g. Witasek, held these emotions to be basically voluntary in nature. On the contrary, in his paper, Cavallaro sees the main point of difference between fictional emotions, which occur while experiencing literary, dramatic, or

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While voluntary empty emotional phantasies seem to best satisfy Husserl’s afore-mentioned criteria of stability and experimental producibility, they nevertheless also have at least three obvious and insurmountable downsides. Firstly , conceiv-ing emotional phantasies as fully voluntary acts poses the question of whether they indeed abide Husserl’s principle of foundation, according to which non-objectify-ing acts require objectifying acts as their fundament, or whether we can on the contrary, also imagine being angry or sad out of the blue without phantasizing an underlying behaviour or context, or likewise: whether we can imagine the same event or situation in entirely different emotional colourings, for instance being hap-py about something that would normally cause us grief. If this is not the case, then phantasy emotions are certainly not entirely voluntary, but themselves motivated by their objectifying fundament and thus similar to what we have before termed as genuine emotional responses. Secondly , the question is whether such imagined emotions still resemble actual emotions sufficiently in order to consider them phe-nomenologically as intuitive instantiations of one and the same essence. According to Vendrell Ferran (2010, 136), several early phenomenologists already took note of the hybrid nature of fictional emotions, situating them somewhere between ac-tual emotions and mere representations. More importantly, from a methodolog-ical perspective, phantasized emotions of the aforementioned sort would have to be situated as such between mere signitive intentions and actual intuitions prop-er. While this is, of course, an argument brought forth already by Dieter Lohmar (2005, 67) against the employment of phantasy examples in eidetic variation, the point here is more specifically that such phantasy instantiations no longer actually ‘give’ the phenomenon in the flesh for analysis as they should, but only offer a very abstract schema of it. By considering these schemas as if they were the emotion itself, phenomenology thirdly tends to oversimplify, be it only because it isolates specific emotions that normally only come in complex entwinements with other emotions, or because it ascribes to them a mode of certainty, which is in real life most frequently contaminated with doubt, self-illusion, etc. The point here is that the complexities of our actual emotional life do not come into view by considering voluntarily phantasized empty emotions unless they are from the onset constructed such as to include them – which is to say that they only reflect our prior knowledge of what those emotions are and how they work, while as such they can only confirm our prejudices and clichés and do not yield any novel insight.

Considering these points, a phenomenological analysis of emotions is confront-ed with a methodological paradox: on the one hand, voluntarily produced empty phantasy emotions are ill-suited to serve as a basis for actual research into emo-tions; on the other hand, real-life emotions are themselves, as shown by Husserl with regard to anger, hardly available for phenomenological consideration. In con-trast to both claims, it is worth considering the exemplary use of genuine emotion-al responses generated by vividly phantasized situations, since this clearly allows one to hold on to both the freedom of manipulating the phenomenon in phantasy and the need for a concrete intuitive basis. Such concrete phantasy emotions are, on the one hand, similar to fictional emotions as discussed in the aforementioned contributions in that they also entail genuine emotional responses to quasi-posi-tional objectivations. They differ from the latter, however, insofar as, though not being voluntarily produced per se , they can nevertheless be provoked quasi-exper-imentally by wilfully delving into possible motives for anger, sadness, etc., that is,

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(2)As is well known, such techniques have been developed extensively in the tradition of method acting, especially in the writings of Constantin Stanislavski.5The reference is relevant in the present context insofar as both Summa and Vendrell Ferran explicitly refer to the experience of the actor as a guiding example for in-terpreting fictional emotions in general and particularly the receptive experience of readers of literary works, spectators of film and theatre, etc. Summa (2019, 17f.) draws on Sartre’s account of how an actor playing Hamlet uses his own body and his emotional experiences as analogues for those of the imaginary character in “ir-realizing” or virtualizing himself in order to show that the same interplay between realizing and irrealizing consciousness characterizes fictional emotions in general, in the case of the spectator as well. Similarly, Vendrell Ferran (2010, 133) refers to Moritz Geiger’s analyses of Scheingefühle , a term he applies to both the emotions of the actor on stage and those of the spectator or recipient in the theatre hall in order to prove that early discussions of fictional emotions included a far wider range of theoretical nuances than those tackled in recent analytic philosophy.

Now, if one indeed compares the emotional experience of the trained actor and that of the spectator or reader, it is obvious that, regardless of all points of intersec-tion, what differentiates them is precisely the fact that the spectator gets emotionally engaged with the play or film passively in virtue of his participatory attendance, while the actor on the contrary voluntarily works at producing and maintaining a particular emotion. Thus, Stanislavski indeed developed a wide range of techniques and exercises intended to allow the actor to arrive at wilfully experiencing the inner life of his character. This involves both what Stanislavski (1989, 54f.) termed the ‘magical if,’ a psycho-technical exercise by which the actor vividly imagines himself in the specific circumstances of the character in order to properly engage them emotionally, as well as physical exercises of improvisation and variation, wherein gestures and forms of object interaction are explored in order to help develop the corresponding emotional determination.

It is not necessary for the present context to go into the details of these tech-niques at length. Considering them here only serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it helps specify the aforementioned analogy between the complex con-struction of emotions put into play by trained actors and the participatory ex-perience of spectators, who often only empathically reduplicate or react to the depicted affective states of given characters in the manner of ‘feeling-with,’ or ‘feeling-for.’ In other words: it brings into play a relevant distinction that should be kept in mind when considering fictional emotions. At the same time, however, Stanislavski’s reflections also allow to draw a perhaps even more accurate paral-lel between the method actor’s work with emotions and the phenomenologist’s work in analytically exploring emotions ‘from within.’ Just as the actor employing Stanislavski’s techniques, the phenomenologist is himself, according to our earlier consideration, bound to work his way into specific emotional states and com-plexes by intensively using his phantasy and whatever exercises or experiments are at hand. While the actor is interested foremost in obtaining the ‘sincerity of feeling’ for his character, thus rendering him credible in his concrete individuality by putting his own individuality as an actor into play, the phenomenologist is on the contrary supposed to arrive by similar procedures of variation at the general structures of such or such emotional experiences. In fact, the phenomenologist would surely not strive to consolidate a specific individual character and a given context, but would rather need to more flexibly go through a wider range of cir-cumstances and individual characters in order to reveal the structural nuances of a specific emotional complex. Regardless of such substantial differences, the phenomenologist might nevertheless – in lack of his own tools for such an inqui-ry – find some relevant preliminary guidance in the highly nuanced and reflected methodological considerations on the subject matter put forth in the tradition of method acting. If this is indeed the case, one might at some point even consider if the traditional understanding of phenomenological research as performed by a passive ‘transcendental spectator’ does not perhaps essentially miss out on the more relevant points wherein his own exercises and activities more closely resem-ble the position of an actor than that of a spectator.

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(3)The grounding concept in Stanislavski’s methodological depiction of how actors should endow their characters with genuine emotions is that of “emotion memory” (ibid., 163f.). In his view, the greatest danger for an actor is that of only mechanically repeating but the exterior aspects of his part, his gestures, movements, and lines, without re-actualizing its inner intensity, that is, the emotions driving the character. The observation is important as it sheds light on why it is not suffi-cient for a phenomenologist either to simply replay the recollection of an emotion-al episode as a starting point for his analyses, insofar as the recollection does not revivify the emotion itself but only provides a review of its exterior circumstances. To this extent, Stanislavski makes a fundamental distinction between sheer sensa-tion memory, which allows us to recall what we initially experienced through our senses, and emotion memory proper, which helps us recall previous emotions per se , such that a subject may well retain the mere emotional atmosphere or mood of a certain situation without recalling their specific context in its details (ibid., 168f.). However, according to Stanislavski, sensory information such as a certain smell, taste, or sound can nevertheless on occasion help awaken our emotion memory, too, and therefore such stimuli can be used programmatically to reactivate emotion-al content. While actors can be more or less naturally endowed with the capacity for emotion memory, what is essential is that they use their training to learn to master the techniques necessary for managing and expanding the scope of their emotion memory. Consequently, the entire technique primarily consists in a wide range of exercises intended both to identify and use exterior circumstances to bring out and maintain dormant emotions as well as to modify and combine emotional elements from different prior experiences to articulate precise emotional nuances for an emo-tionally truthful character.

For Stanislavski, it goes without saying that actors can only bestow their char-acters with a genuine inner life if they resort to their own emotional past. In other words: their ‘fictional emotions’ can only be genuine if they are built out of past actual emotional experiences. One finds similar thoughts expressed with regard to the spectator’s fictional emotions as well. Vendrell Ferran (2010, 144) shows in her extended account of early phenomenological theories of fictional emotions that, according to Witasek’s interpretation, the quasi-feelings of a spectator or reader are primarily grounded on a form of “emotional resonance;” such that he or she is emo-tionally moved by the dramatic or literary work of art only insofar as the latter re-activates the recollection of prior lived experiences of such emotions. Similar views

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Whether this is indeed the case or not would certainly be a question for genetic phenomenology to decide. While Husserl himself devoted extended genetic inqui-ries into various doxic acts ranging all the way from judgments to the most basic forms of spatial and temporal perception, similar analyses could and should also be carried out with regard to emotions and their ‘inner historicity.’ One can fairly sur-mise that the emotional experiences of the full-grown adult similarly point back at the subject’s ‘emotional biography’ by evoking prior emotional experiences, just as it is the case in Husserl’s discussions of doxic typifications (Lohmar 2003; Ferencz-Flatz 2014). Just as our experiential apperceptions of novel objects are always guided and anticipated by our earlier experiences of similar objects, one might also speak of emotional typifications, apperceptions, and anticipations, which define how our current emotional responses draw from earlier lived encounters. And one can for sure, readily illustrate this by referring to both trivial examples like how a subject’s fear of dogs, for instance, most likely refers back to some early episode of intensive fright, as well as to more sophisticated accounts of the genesis of emotional com-plexes or emotional transfers as addressed in classical psychoanalysis (Freud 2000). If one could show that emotion memory plays an important role in shaping our emotional reactions in general, it would be easy to argue that this is all the more so in the case of phantasized emotions, by means of a genetic account of phantasy representations aiming at verifying the widespread belief according to which phan-tasies can only result from combinations, variations, and mutations of prior actual experiences.

While one may pursue such highly relevant genetic questions phenomenological-ly, my concern here is with a different issue. If one considers the methodological im-plications of ‘fictional emotions’ as discussed above, engaging the aforementioned questions automatically leads to a major difficulty, which could be spelled out by saying that the choice of the method put into play for phenomenologically tackling

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(4)For sure, in his aforementioned reflections, Stanislavski (1989, 175f.) does not entirely rule out the possibility of unpredicted emotional flashes during play-acting either. In his view, such outbursts, which indeed amount to “genuine emotional responses to fictional situations,” give spice to an actor’s performance by adding to its truth and sincerity. However, they are fundamentally unreliable in that they only occur involuntarily and depend on chance, whereas emotion memory offers an equally authentic, but far more dependable resource for actors. The point is relevant for our present discussion not only insofar as it helps set-tle the question of whether ‘fictional emotions’ are voluntary or involuntary, but also because it allows one to tackle the question of whether ‘fictional emotions’ are necessarily reproductive of emotional experiences primarily lived through in the original, or whether they also offer access to entirely new emotional content. While Stanislavski suggests the latter and exemplifies this by referring to the blood-thirst an actor might experience for the first time while play-acting a duel without ever having experienced such emotions in actuality, the question also comes up explicitly or implicitly in the aforementioned early phenomenological debates on ‘fictional emotions.’ According to Vendrell Ferran’s (2010, 148) account, in Ernst Schwarz’ view, aesthetic emotions do not rely solely on reproduction, but they can also unchain previously inaccessible emotional responses, and it is precisely on account of this that literature and art can be said to enrich the emotional life of the reader or spectator.

What stands for debate here is not simply the question of whether new emo-tions are generally accessible via fictional experience or not. One could, for in-stance, easily make a case for the former by drawing from early phenomenological

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This, of course, also has methodological consequences, insofar as one may well similarly ask whether or not the phenomenologist in his foray into the structures of emotional experience has access to new emotional material or not, and if so, by what means. To this extent, it is clear from the outset that a mere voluntary empty imaginative sketch could by no means offer the convincing intuitive instantiation of a new emotion. Instead, this would again only be possible by transposing oneself into a new phantasized situation so vividly that one genuinely elicits an emotional response that does not simply draw from earlier experiences. Stanislavski’s reflec-tions often touch on this issue as well, recommending various techniques intended to help the actor fully embody all the emotional nuances of his part in working with his phantasy. In his view, this is only possible insofar as the actor first imaginatively develops the situation of his character in all its minute details in order to render it particular and concrete, and then adds various incentive elements to his phantasy to trigger himself to actively respond to those imagined circumstances in his phantasy (Stanislavski 1989, 54f.).

While one could plausibly argue that the phenomenologist interested in imagi-natively exploring the structures of emotional experience should follow a similar path, it is far more important in the present context to stress why the question of the imaginability of new emotions, which may seem remote and irrelevant, is, in fact, central from a methodological point of view for phenomenology. Insofar as the

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In his reflections, Stanislavski indeed confronts this problem by generally claim-ing that actors can only truly play themselves by working with the emotions they have actually experienced, while being fundamentally unable to play parts that ap-peal to feelings unavailable to them (ibid., 186f.). However, in his view, one can nevertheless also artificially expand one’s spectrum of accessible emotions by, on the one hand, varying, combining, and mutating one’s lived impressions, and by, on the other hand, acquiring further material indirectly from keen observation of one’s surroundings as well as from “reminiscences, books, art, science, knowledge of all kinds, from journeys, museums and above all from communication with oth-er human beings” (ibid., 192). Interestingly, in his aforementioned considerations on the methodological import of phantasy for phenomenological research in Ideas I , Husserl (1983, 160) arrives at remarkably similar observations. On his account, phenomenologists, too, need to exercise their phantasy abundantly and moreover The passage is relevant foremost in that it obviously confronts the phenomenolo-gist with criteria that are not usually brought up in Husserl’s technical discussions of the phenomenological method: abundance of detail, originality of invention, or

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4 Conclusion

The present paper focused on some methodological difficulties facing a phenome-nology of emotions. To this extent, it was mainly aimed at stressing two points. On the one hand, I tried to show that, when basing such an inquiry on merely phan-tasized examples as required in principle by the phenomenological method, such phantasies should nevertheless amount to more than just the verbal supposition that one is angry or sad. While Husserl is right to state that perceptions are far eas-ier to experimentally produce in originariness than emotions, the same obviously applies for mere phantasies of perceptions when compared to phantasies of emo-tions, for one can at any time imagine perceiving something, whereas imagining a specific feeling by quasi-feeling it as such is not always possible. In fact, as I tried to show above, concretely reproducing the semblance of a feeling in phantasy requires a complex technique of luring out emotional reactions by drawing from one’s own emotion memory and manipulating and reshaping emotional residues. If this is in-deed the case, however, a phenomenology of emotions can find inspiration in the techniques developed in the tradition of method acting. While this tradition has faced consistent criticism in its own field – suffice to consider Brecht’s early charges against Stanislavski, accusing him of fostering a counter-emancipatory form of the-atrical reception7 –, it can nevertheless remain of interest for phenomenology as it provides techniques for creatively producing, reproducing, and varying emotions.

To be sure, such synthesized emotions as produced in the exercises of method acting are themselves prone to criticism. One might suspect that a methodologi-cally reproduced anger is not equivalent to an actual outburst of anger, be it only because it lacks the spontaneous and un-reflected dynamics of the latter. Instead – and this was the second point I was trying to make here –, phenomenology has a general difficulty in establishing such differences because its very methodology rests upon assuming a structural identity between actual and fictional experience. This becomes obvious not only when considering its particular treatment of emo-tions proper, insofar as it resorts to mere phantasies in analyzing them as if they were the actual experience, but it would similarly come to view when considering a phenomenological approach aiming to tackle fictional emotions per se . For one might ask: if phenomenology holds the view that in order to analyze any type of lived experience, phantasy reproductions can serve as starting examples just as well as actual instances of that experience, does this apply for emotional phantasies as well? Or, to make the point more clearly and more generally: is it all the same for a phenomenology specifically aiming to clarify phantasized acts, whether it departs from actual samples of experimentally produced phantasies, or from mere phanta-sies of phantasies? Accepting such a consequence obviously leads to absurd conse-quences.8 But even without going into such subtle details, this point lends itself to precisely the same argument brought up by Husserl against evaporating emotions: “[it] is by no means insignificant, but may not be what ought to be studied” (Husserl 1983, 158).

1 Introduction

In phenomenological circles it is common to distinguish between different types of self-consciousness and to claim that alongside a self-consciousness that is ex-plicit, reflective, thematic and intentional, there is also an implicit, pre-reflective, non-thematic and non-intentional awareness that the subject has of its experiences while undergoing them. Pre-reflective self-awareness is the common term used to designate this kind of self-consciousness . When phenomenologists argue that all consciousness is self-conscious, they mean thereby that all conscious experiences are characterized by pre-reflective self-awareness. To justify this view, they com-monly focus on the most basic forms of intentional experiences, viz., on presenta-tions ( Gegenwärtigungen ), and demonstrate that these basic experiences are funda-mentally and irreducibly self-aware. Such a strategy has served its purpose well: it is not easy to find a phenomenologist who would disagree with the proposed view (frankly, I do not know any). However, this common strategy also has its downside. It suggests that what is characteristic of the most basic experiences must be also common to more complex experiences. One thereby overlooks that not all experi- ences are self-aware in one and the same way . In what follows, I would like to argue that just as there are different forms of self-consciousness, so also, there are different kinds of pre-reflective self-awareness. To corroborate this view, I will focus on re-pre-sentational consciousness and argue that phantasy, memory, and anticipation are characterized by a different kind of self-awareness than perceptual consciousness. I will build on Husserl’s manuscripts that are collected in Hua 23.

2 Consciousness and Self-Consciousness

In Hua 23, Text No. 14, Husserl (2005, 369) writes: “Must we not say: Every act is consciousness of something. But there is also consciousness of every act. Every experience is ‘sensed,’ is immanently perceived (internal consciousness), although

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Do we not face an instance of an endless regress here? The proposed view suggests that each experience is inwardly perceived. However, is this inward perception not itself an experience? And if it is, is the experience of inward perception not also inwardly perceived, and so on ad infinitum ? To avoid an infinite regress, Husserl further notes: “Every ‘experience’ in the strict sense is internally perceived. The per-ceiving of the internal, however, is not an ‘experience’ in the same sense. It is not it-self again internally perceived” (ibid.).4 This allows us to escape the endless regress. Still, what else could inward perceiving ( das innere Wahrnehmen ) be if not an expe-rience ( ein Erlebnis )? To this question, Husserl’s answer runs as follows: it is not an experience ( Erlebnis ), but experiencing ( Erleben ). What sense are we to make of this distinction between Erlebnis and Erleben ,and can it be supported by any evidence?

Let us follow up on Husserl’s analysis: “Every experience […] presents itself as an experience that endures, that flows away, and that changes in such and such a way” (ibid.).5 That is, experience ( Erlebnis ) has its own specific temporal unity: it follows and precedes other experiences. To this, Husserl further adds: “The present, now existing, enduring experience […] is already a ‘unity of consciousness,’ of time consciousness” (ibid.).6 Thus, while experience ( Erlebnis ) is conceptualized as a tem-porally constituted unity, experiencing ( Erleben ) here is conceived as a time-con-stituting consciousness ( zeitkonstituierendes Bewusstsein ). This time-constituting consciousness ( Erleben ) entails its own retentions and protentions, through which the unity of all experiences ( Erlebnisse ) is constituted. “Behind this perceiving there does not stand another perceiving, as if this flow itself were again a unity in a flow” (ibid., 370).7

Thus, acts of judgment, of joy, or of external perception – these are Husserl’s own examples – are experiences ( Erlebnisse ), which are constituted as temporal unities in time-constituting consciousness. Their constitution relies on a temporal synthe-sis that joins impressions to a series of retentions and protentions. Without such a time-constituting synthesis, no unity of experience would be possible. As Husserl puts it in Appendix XXXV to Hua 23, “[e]very experience belonging to internal consciousness is given in this consciousness as an enduring being in ‘internal’ time” (ibid., 394).8

In this context, it is helpful to recall the view Husserl had defended in his Lectures on Internal Time-Consciousness from 1905(Hua 10, 80f.; Husserl 1991, 84f.). In these lectures, Husserl presented his strongest argument to support his view that each and every act of consciousness is at the same time self-conscious (i.e., self-aware). I am referring to Husserl’s well-known distinction between transversal and longitudinal intentionality ( Querintentionalität and Längsintentionalität ). Transversal intention-ality is what enables consciousness to intend an object in an enduring act. By con-trast, longitudinal intentionality enables consciousness to constitute the endurance of the act. On the basis of longitudinal intentionality, consciousness, in each of its phases, remains aware of the retentional phases (i.e., the past phases of conscious-ness). Since longitudinal and transversal forms of intentionality characterize each conscious act and are inseparably bound to one another, we have all the reasons needed to maintain that every conscious act is characterized by a tacit self-aware-ness. In the absence of nonreflective self-awareness, consciousness would not be capable of intending any object whatsoever. If it were divested of longitudinal in-tentionality, consciousness could only intend a succession of impressions, without being conscious of the succession itself. Such a consciousness would be a conscious-ness of mere senseless data, a consciousness without any sense of the past or future, a consciousness that is imprisoned in senseless presence. The constitution of any meaning would lie beyond its reach.

3 Erleben – Erlebnis – Gegenstand

What must the structure of consciousness be like if consciousness is to be capable of constituting meaning? It is common to answer this question by pointing one’s finger at intentionality. This answer suggests that consciousness that constitutes meaning is fundamentally and irreducibly two-sided: (1) the intending of meaning and (2) the intended meaning are the two irreducible components that make up the es-sential structure of intentional consciousness. Such an account, however, remains deficient in that it overlooks pre-reflective self-awareness that is characteristic of all conscious acts. Not surprisingly, therefore, in Appendix XXXV (Hua 23, 320–328; Husserl 2005, 389f.), Husserl singles out not two, but three structural moments that characterize presentations: (1) the inner consciousness, the experiencing ( das innere Bewusstsein, das Erleben ), (2) the experience ( das Erlebnis ), and (3) the intentional object of the experience ( der intentionale Gegenstand des Erlebnisses ) (Hua 23, 326; Husserl 2005, 397).9

These three components make up the essential structure of perceptual acts, which Husserl also identifies as presentations ( Gegenwärtigungen ). Otherwise put, there are no perceptual acts, there are no presentations, which would not include these three components. We can see this by considering any example taken from perceptual experience. Suppose you are sitting in the Husserl Archive and reading Hua 23. The book itself, considered in terms of its givenness, refers to the third structural component, the intentional object ( der intentionale Gegenstand ). Yet the structure of the intentional act (or rather, the series of intentional acts) cannot be explained if one only considers the object intended in the act and ignores the act itself, or the experience itself, i.e., the experience of reading the book ( Erlebnis ). This experience has its own temporal extension: it is preceded, accompanied, inter-rupted and followed by other experiences. Moreover, this experience has different phenomenal qualities than other experiences (say, listening to John Coltrane, or preparing tiramisu for dessert). However, this temporal duration of experience, taken along with its phenomenal qualities, is itself a constitutive accomplishment – an achievement of time-constituting consciousness. Only a consciousness that is capable of binding its impressions to their retentions and protentions, as well as the retention of the retentions and the protention of the protentions, is capable of un-dergoing a temporally extended experience. In the terms that Husserl employs in the manuscripts under consideration, this means that each experience also entails a moment of experiencing ( Erleben ). We can consider any other example of per-ceptual experience and in each case, we will rediscover the same three structural moments. We face here an eidetic insight into the essential structure of perceptual experience.

4 The Structure of Re-Presentational Consciousness

One should stress that this threefold structure does not characterize all experiences, considered without any further qualifications. This point becomes especially ev-ident in Texts No. 14 and 15 that are collected in Hua 23. In these texts, Husserl does not focus on presentations, but on re-presentations ( Vergegenwärtigungen ). Husserl (2005, 391) qualifies re-presentation as a reproductive mode of conscious-ness and he conceives of reproduction as an experience in which another experi-ence is reproductively re-presented: “A reproduction is itself an experience in which

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According to Husserl, all of my experiences are of either one of two kinds: “Every experience is either a reproduction or not a reproduction” (ibid., 394).11 Husserl qualifies presentations as original acts and conceives of re-presentations as their modifications (Hua 23, 323; Husserl 2005, 393). What exactly does it mean to claim that a re-presentation is a modification of a presentation?

We can begin answering this question by turning to a short text entitled “Definition of a Strict Concept of Reproduction” ( Definition eines prägnanten Begriffes von Reproduktion , Hua 23, 310ff.; Husserl 2005, 372ff.). Here, Husserl argues that a re-presentation of an object goes hand-in-hand with a reproduction of an inten-tional act. That is, a reproduction ( Reproduktion ) of a perceptual act is inseparable from a re-presentation ( Vergegenwärtigung ) of the object given in this act.12 When I remember, anticipate, or phantasize the sun rising over the horizon, I at the same time and necessarily reproduce the act of seeing it. Thus here, in this manuscript, reproduction is conceptualized as a twofold modification, which simultaneously affects the mode of givenness of the intentional object and the intentional act that intends this object.13

However, such an account cannot close off the matter. As Husserl himself explic-itly admits in Appendix XXXV to Hua 23, re-presentational consciousness is made possible not by a twofold, but by a threefold modification of original experience (Hua 23, 326; Husserl 2005, 397). As we already saw above, there is no experience without the experiencing of experience through which the temporal unity of expe-rience is constituted. With the distinction between Erleben and Erlebnis in mind, we can further say that re-presentational consciousness is accompanied by a modified inner self-consciousness. In Husserl’s (2005, 397) own words: “Now if we shift to reproductive modification, we have […] the reproductive modification of experi-encing, the experiencing as it were, the reproducing in which one is conscious of the originary experienc ing in the mode of the as it were.”14That is, the actual experi-encing that accompanies presentations is modified into quasi-experiencing ( Erleben im Modus des Gleichsam ), in which one is conscious of the original experiencing as quasi-experiencing. Re-presentational consciousness also reproduces the inner consciousness that accompanied reproduced experience as quasi-experiencing( gle- ichsam Erleben ).

We can now say that reproductive acts (re-presentations) are modifications of original acts (presentations) in a threefold sense. (1) While in original experience the object itself is given in flesh and blood, in reproductive experience the same object is given in the mode of the as if .15 (2) While original experience intends the object straightforwardly, reproductive experience intends it in the mode of the as if.16 (3) While original experience is given as a temporal unity that is constituted in original experiencing, reproduced experience is given as a temporal unity that is constituted in a reproduced act of experiencing (i.e., remembered, anticipated, or phantasized experiencing).

Thus, the three structural components that make up the essential structure of presentational consciousness reappear in re-presentational consciousness in a mod-ified form. To this we still need to add another crucial remark. As Husserl (2005, 281) puts it in Text No. 5 in Hua 23, “but phantasy consciousness, like memorial consciousness, etc., is nevertheless itself a present consciousness, itself a sensation; it can be internally perceived, can be arranged in time, can be characterized as expe-rienced in the now, and so on.”17 This rich sentence entails a variety of claims. I wish to emphasize only one crucial point: when I have a phantasy, I do not phantasize a phantasy; so also, when I have a recollection, I do not remember a recollection. Rather, I actually live through these experiences.18 Re-presentational consciousness is an actual consciousness ( ein gegenwärtiges Bewusstsein ). More precisely, repre-sentational consciousness is a presentational consciousness, which reproduces an-other consciousness. This does not mean, however, that the represented conscious-ness is the object of a new presentational consciousness, for as Husserl points out, only through a reflection in re-presentations does the past consciousness become a proper thematic object of a present intention. Representational consciousness is pre-reflectively directed towards the same object as the represented consciousness, yet in contrast to represented consciousness only the representational conscious-ness intentionally includes the represented consciousness in its own intentional directedness.

It thereby becomes understandable why Husserl would write: “I exist in phantasy as quasi- Ego, in memory as remembered Ego that quasi- perceives, quasi- judges, and so on” (ibid., 414).19 We can take this to mean that when the actual ego lives through a phantasy, it projects a phantasy ego as a non-actual subject of experience and to a large degree identifies itself with this phantasy ego: it sees the world “through its eyes,” touches the phantasy objects with its phantasized body, etc. Nonetheless, we face here a one-sided observation. While identifying itself with its own virtual dou-ble, the phantasizing ego also and simultaneously remains self-aware, i.e., it actually lives through a phantasy and is self-aware of living through it. It thereby becomes understandable why Husserl would also maintain that “now the phantasying itself is an actual experience. I am there too as actual Ego” (ibid., 412).20

At this point, we can say that in contrast to presentational consciousness, re-pre-sentational consciousness entails four essential components: (1) the inner con-sciousness, or experiencing, characteristic of the reproductive consciousness (con-sciousness of a memory, anticipation, or phantasy); (2) the inner consciousness, or experiencing, characteristic of the reproduced (remembered, anticipated, or phantasized) consciousness; (3) the experience that is given as a temporal unity that is simultaneously intended both in the reproductive and the reproduced time-con-stituting consciousness; and (4) the intentional object that is correlated with this experience.

I earlier argued that all consciousness is characterized by tacit, pre-reflective self-awareness. At this point, I would like to provide this claim with a crucial, albeit also counter-intuitive qualification: while presentational consciousness is self-aware, re-presentational consciousness is characterized by a double self-awareness. I can only remember, anticipate, or phantasize anything whatsoever if my consciousness of recollection, anticipation, or phantasy temporalizes its own experience, i.e., only if this experience is a temporally extended unity whose constitution relies on my present self-consciousness. Yet, at the same time, the remembered, anticipated, or phantasized experience is a temporal unity that is correlated with the remembered, anticipated, or phantasized consciousness. We thus face here an experience that is marked by a double self-awareness: in the case of recollection, I am conscious of the experience in question from the perspective of the present and the past ego; in the case of anticipation, I am conscious of the experience from the perspective of the present and the projected future ego; in the case of phantasy, I am conscious of the experience from the perspective of the actual ego and the phantasy ego.

One would be right to observe that in all these cases, only the actual ego has actual self-awareness. Nonetheless, the actual ego can reproduce its own experiences only if it is also capable of constituting the past, future, or phantasy ego as a non-actual subject of experience that is self-aware of the reproduced experience. There is no memory without the projection of the past ego that has experienced what one now remembers, just as there is no anticipation without the projection of the future ego that will presumably experience what one now anticipates. So also, there is no phan-tasy without the projection of a phantasy ego that supposedly has the experience in question. Reproduction necessarily entails both actual and non-actual self-aware-ness.21 To put this yet differently, reproductive consciousness is multi-layered : in direct, actual, experience there is entailed a reproduction of a different experience.

At this point I have established and clarified two claims: (1) all presentations are self-aware; (2) all re-presentations are marked by a double self-awareness. The sec-ond claim is more controversial than the first one, (a) because only the first claim has been explicitly endorsed by Husserl in his writings, and (b) because only the first claim has been extensively addressed in the literature. These reasons, however, make the second claim not only more polemical but also more important than the first one.

5 Phantasy and Self-Awareness

Having clarified the fundamental structural difference between presentational and re-presentational consciousness, I wish to focus on phantasy exclusively in what follows. Let me begin with three claims that are grounded in my foregoing analysis. First, pure phantasy, alongside recollection and anticipation, is a unique intuitive reproduction, whose essential characteristic concerns its non-positional nature. While recollection posits objects as having existed in the past, and while anticipa-tion posits objects as existing in the future, pure phantasy does not posit objects as existing in any temporal modality: it intends objects as quasi-existing.22 Second, reproduction is a two-sided modification of original experience: it modifies the manner in which the intentional object is given (the object is not presented, but re-presented) as well as modifies the way in which an experience is lived through (a new, original, reproductive experience reproduces another experience). In the case of phantasy, this means that the intentional object is phantasized, while another merely possible experience is reproduced. Third, besides such a two-sided modi-fication, reproduction also brings about a doubled self-consciousness, which fun-damentally relies on the distinction between Erleben and Erlebnis . I live through a reproduced experience in a twofold sense: from the perspective of the actual, present consciousness and from the perspective of the non-actual reproduced consciousness.

It thereby becomes understandable why Husserl would maintain that when it comes to reproduction, “we always have something double: the impressional (namely, the sympathetic) and the reproduced turning toward or position taking. Attention, too, is double in this sense: actual [attention] – reproduced [attention]” (ibid., 445).23 Yet, how exactly are we to understand the difference between these perspectives? We can characterize the perspective of the non-actual ego in terms of active engagement in the phantasy world. The phantasy ego perceives the phantasy objects, it is involved in phantasized activities, it lives through phantasized feelings and thinks phantasized thoughts. Suppose I phantasize that I am a tuk-tuk driver in Siem Reap. In such a phantasy, my phantasy ego ‘sees’ the faces of the privileged tourists, ‘drives’ them to Angor Wat, ‘feels’ the warmth of the blazing sun, ‘smells’ the sandy roads, etc. In short, the phantasy ego is engaged in phantasy activities. This concerns not only the phantasies in which the ego makes an appearance, ap-pears on the scene, so to speak. I can also phantasize the temples in Angor Wat without my own presence in the phantasy: it is just the façade of the temple that ‘appears’ to me. Yet, in such a case, too, the phantasy ego is fully involved, for it is not the actual ego, who is sitting in the Husserl Archive but the phantasy ego who ‘sees’ the face of the temple. In all cases, the role of the phantasy ego can be characterized in terms of active engagements in the phantasy world.

What about the other perspective – the perspective of the actual ego? This per-spective can take on various forms, and for this reason it is not easy to provide a general characterization of it. Relying on a general distinction between those phan-tasies that attract our attention and those that leave us indifferent, we can single out two limiting cases. On the one hand, there are those phantasies that only mildly affect the actual ego. With these phantasies in mind, Husserl writes: “As actual Ego, I merely comport myself contemplatively; as phantasy Ego, I perceive, I judge, and so on” (ibid., 424).24 In such instances, the perspective of the actual ego is mainly contemplative . Phantasies unfold at an inner distance from the ego: the actual ego does not live through them but only observes them. On the other hand, there are those phantasies that absorb our actual attention and force us to forget all our other concerns. Thus, in Hua 23, Husserl often speaks of “living in phantasy,” or “living in one’s own memories.” These expressions suggest a different kind of involvement of the actual ego in the phantasy world. What Husserl says about memory in the following passage can also be said about phantasy:

I will come back to this point below. At the moment, I only wish to stress that when the actual ego is absorbed in its own phantasies, its relation to the phantasy ego is marked by deep sympathy. The actual ego does not actually live through the pre-sumed experiences of the phantasy ego, it only observes the phantasy ego’s activities. If the phantasy ego is involved in an accident, no real blood runs out of the actu-al ego’s veins. Rather, the phantasized accident is a scene the actual ego observes. Nonetheless, when it comes to living in phantasy ( in der Phantasie lebend   … ), the actual ego does not observe the phantasy scenes with indifference. The joy that the phantasy ego lives through is also pleasing to the actual ego, just as the suffering of the phantasy ego is also distressing to the actual ego. What we face here is neither the identity of the feeling, nor even the identity of the subject that lives through these feelings. Still, when living in its phantasy, as it observes the activities of the phantasy ego, the actual ego sympathizes with the phantasy ego.

In principle, the actual ego’s relation to the phantasy ego is not much different from the relation that the actual ego establishes with the protagonist in a novel or a film. In some instances, we can observe the protagonist quite indifferently. In other instances, we can identify ourselves with the protagonist – ‘see’ the world with his or her eyes, ‘engage’ in his or her activities. We rediscover the same duplicity in phanta-sy. In some instances, the phantasy ego is ‘the other within,’ whose activities unfold at a distance from the actual ego; in other instances, the actual ego identifies itself with the phantasy ego, it immerses itself in the scene and forgets the inner distance that separates the two.

In light of these remarks, we can characterize the perspective of the phantasy ego in terms of active engagement and the perspective of the actual ego in terms of observation. In some cases, this observation can take the form of distant and unconcerned contemplation; in other cases, it can take the form of captivated atten-tion. The two forms of self-awareness that are characteristic of phantasy experience can therefore be further qualified as the awareness of distant observation and the awareness of being absorbed in the scene.

6 Judgments and Emotions in Phantasy

In Text No. 15 of Hua 23, this largely operative distinction between the two forms of self-awareness, understood as two perspectives on phantasized objectivities, becomes

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The distinctions Husserl draws here between actual and phantasized attention and the actual and phantasized position-taking relies on the more fundamental difference between the two forms of self-awareness discussed above. To illustrate the importance of these distinctions, Husserl introduces a mathematical exam-ple. Suppose, as a phantasy ego I express a phantasy judgment: 5 x 5 = 25. Taking an actual position towards this phantasy judgment, i.e., directing actual attention towards this phantasized objectivity, I can also pronounce an actual judgment in which I agree with the phantasized one. In such a case, my actual judgment coin-cides with the phantasized one. Yet suppose that, as a phantasy ego, I judge that 2 x 2 = 5; as an actual ego, I can take position against such a judgment. In such a case, as it is directed at the same phantasized objectivity (the content of the pronounced judgment), the actual position-taking contradicts the phantasized one. As Husserl further adds, just as the actual ego can take on a counter-position, it also can sup-press it (Hua 23, 351; Husserl 2005, 423).

These distinctions, taken together with the more fundamental distinction be-tween the two forms of self-awareness that are essential to phantasy experience en-able us to address the following question:

Since in the present context I am mainly concerned with pure phantasy, rather than different forms of image consciousness here listed, let me modify these examples: let us think not of reading about the fate of Anna Karenina but of phantasizing about her fate; let us think not of watching a horror movie but of phantasizing a horri-fying scenario; let us think not of seeing Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings but of phantasizing landscapes in the morning mists or the night skies, filled with barren trees or Gothic ruins. Such phantasies can provoke an emotional reaction not only on the part of the phantasy ego but also on the part of the actual ego. How do these fictional emotions relate to their real counterparts, that is, to our actual emotional reactions?

Let us recall Husserl’s mathematical examples that concern different kinds of judgment “actual” and “phantasized.” With these examples in mind, let us draw analogous distinctions between the emotional reactions of the phantasy ego and the emotional reactions of the actual ego. Just as in the case of judgments, so also in the case of emotions, we face a duplicity that allows for various forms of interrelation: in some cases, these reactions can overlap, in other cases they can be different, in yet other cases they can even oppose each other. When phantasizing a horror scene – say, that of being forced to commit suicide – not only my phantasy ego but my actual ego can be in despair. However, it can also happen that while my phantasy ego is in despair, the actual ego observes the phantasy scenario either with mere curiosity or with detached indifference. Furthermore, the phantasy ego can be emotionally undisturbed, while the actual ego might be filled with fear and desperation. Suppose I phantasize that an airplane I am traveling in is just about to crash: my phantasy ego does not know anything about its own fate. By contrast, the actual ego, as it spins this phantasy tale, finds itself at an inner distance, sees what the phantasy ego does not see and reacts emotionally to the scene. To return to the earlier analogy between engaging in the phantasy on the one hand, and reading a novel or watching a movie on the other hand, one can supplement the foregoing remarks with the following: just as the actual ego can identify itself with the protagonist, it can also take on the expressed position either of the author or of the movie director: it can view the fate of the phantasy ego from a distance, it can know more than the phantasy ego knows.

Yet it is not just that emotional reactions of the actual and phantasy ego can be different; they can also be opposed to each other. When phantasizing a perverse scene, the phantasy ego can be overcome by desire, while the actual ego can be filled with disgust; and vice versa , the phantasy ego can experience disgust, while the actual ego can be filled with desire. Thus, we not only need to admit that phan-tasy scenes can provoke both actual and non-actual emotional responses but we must also distinguish between these responses: in some cases, they can coincide, in other cases they can differ from each other, yet in other circumstances they can run counter each other.

7 Phantasy and Self-Forgetfulness

Let us ask: can the actual ego be emotionally indifferent to its own phantasies? It can, claims Husserl, yet he also adds that such an occurrence would mean that the phantasy in question is not truly carried out, that it remains lifeless. “A phantasy can emerge, but ‘lifelessly,’ without my ‘carrying it out’” (Husserl 2005, 412).28 Husserl contrasts such a lifeless emergence of a phantasy with those occasions in which the ego “lives in phantasy.” He suggests that living in a phantasy brings with it a peculiar self-forgetfulness: “When I phantasy in a living way, when I am completely absorbed in phantasy, I am ‘self-forgetful’” (ibid.).29 Husserl further qualifies this self-forgetfulness in terms of the actual ego’s becoming the phantasy ego ( Ich bin dann das Phantasie-Ich ) and he further maintains that under such circumstances, the ego’s life consists of pure reproductions. The more the actual ego identifies itself with the phantasy ego, the deeper it immerses itself in the phantasy world and the nearer it brings what is phantasized. Here, we come across a challenge to the view I have been defending: does such a phenomenological description of the immer-sion of the actual ego into the phantasy world not draw into question my earlier claim that phantasy experience necessarily entails a twofold self-awareness? If the actual ego can become the phantasy ego, what reasons do we have left to speak of such a duplicity? What else could self-forgetfulness mean if not the erasure of actual self-awareness and its replacement with non-actual self-awareness?

Yet the claim that the actual ego becomes the phantasy ego should not be under-stood as a kind of Kafkaesque metamorphosis. Rather, it should be understood as the accomplishment of a peculiar synthesis, which Husserl identifies as coinciding ( Deckung ). In Husserl’s own words,

That is, to claim that “the I is the phantasy I” is to suggest that when it is involved in the phantasy world, the actual ego’s beliefs, judgments, wishes, etc. coincide with those of the phantasy ego. Yet clearly – and this is the point I wish to emphasize – coincidence as such presupposes a duality and relies on the split between actual and non-actual self-awareness.

8 Concluding Remarks: The Mineness of Experience

I would like to conclude with some remarks on what the foregoing analysis of a split self-awareness means for the phenomenology of mineness. According to a dom-inant standpoint in contemporary phenomenology pre-reflective self-awareness provides us with the phenomenological evidence to speak not only of the mineness of experience but also of the minimal, or the core self, conceived as the phenom-enological basis of personhood. As Dan Zahavi puts it, it is “possible to identify this pre-reflective sense of mineness with a minimal, or core, sense of self … it is this first-personal givenness that constitutes the mineness or ipseity of experience” (Zahavi 2005, 125). In a similar vein, Shaun Gallagher contends that “even if all of the unessential features of self are stripped away, we still have an intuition that there is a basic, immediate, or primitive ‘something’ that we are willing to call a self” (Gallagher 2000, 15). He further identifies this primitive “something” as the “minimal” self. We face here a complex argument, yet I believe that it can be recon-structed in six major steps. (1) It is not possible to be conscious of an object without also, and simultaneously, being aware of experiencing it. This is the sense in which consciousness is always and necessarily self-aware. (2) Experiences do not float in the air, i.e., they are never given anonymously. They can only be given as mine. What distinguishes my own experiences from those of everyone else is the phenomeno-logical fact that they are given to me as mine . (3) However, if experiences are given as mine, they are also necessarily given to some kind of a self, for according to the proponents of the minimal-self doctrine it is meaningless to speak of mineness in the absence of selfhood.31 (4) The self of which we speak here need not refer to a hu-man person, since many other beings could also have experiences that are marked by mineness . (5) To make sense of this dimension of mineness , it becomes important to devise a minimal conception of the self in the absence of which experience as such would not be possible. (6) Yet what is this minimal self? We can identify it as the core self, add that it entails a sense of ownership and a sense of agency,32 and further maintain that any conception of selfhood must include this core dimension. This means: the sense of mineness inscribed in each and every experience forms the foundation of personhood.33

This argument relies exclusively on that conception of self-awareness which we find inscribed in perceptual consciousness. In the copious literature on self-aware-ness, we do not come across any analysis of the different modes of self-awareness that I addressed. Rather, when one argues that we need to distinguish between different forms of self-awareness, one means thereby that one needs to establish a distinction between reflective and pre-reflective self-awareness (see Gallagher 2002, 239). Are the different forms of pre-reflective self-awareness characteristic of re-presentational consciousness of any importance for the phenomenological re-flections on self-awareness and selfhood? I believe they are, and with this in mind, I would like to conclude by emphasizing four points.

(1) If pre-reflective self-awareness is the awareness of the minimal self, we have to admit that our experience provides us with the awareness of a multiplicity of selves. This multiplicity does not only concern the succession of minimal selves in the flow of experience (see Gallagher 2000 and especially Strawson 2009) but also the re-alization that in some instances we can be simultaneously aware of more than one minimal self. This happens necessarily, when the subject of experience is engaged in memories, anticipations, or phantasies. Being self-aware in more than one sense, the subject of experience is non-intentionally, non-thematically, and pre-reflectively aware of more than one minimal self.

(2) If it is indeed true that the subject of experience can be aware of more than one minimal self, then we have to abandon the view that the minimal self necessarily forms the core of actual selfhood. Not all minimal selves perform such a founding function. In this regard, all forms of re-presentational consciousness are problemat-ic. However, phantasy consciousness is especially troubling. The split self-awareness characteristic of phantasy consciousness entails a sense of mineness that does not refer to the actual self but to the phantasy ego. It does not form the foundation of the actual self; it does not even refer to the actual self in any of its temporal modalities. Paradoxically, here we discover a sense in which we can speak of mineness that is not mine . Think of the phantasy that you are a tuk-tuk driver. Such an experience, like all experiences, entails a sense of mineness. However, this mineness does not refer to your actual ego; for better or worse, you are not a tuk-tuk driver.

All representational consciousness includes this dimension, although admittedly, not in the same sense. On the one hand, a minimal self inscribed in a memory or an anticipation is different from the minimal self characteristic of the present expe-rience. On the other hand, a synthesis of coincidence binds these minimal selves to each other and lays the ground for personal identity. The structure of phantasy con-sciousness is different. Like memory and anticipation, phantasy also entails at least two minimal selves. However, in contrast to memory and anticipation, the synthesis of coincidence need not bind the minimal selves inscribed in phantasy experience to each other. We can thus say that positing and non-positing re-presentations en-tail a different kind of multiplicity of the minimal selves.

(3) Mineness that is not truly mine can never exist independently. It must be founded in re-presentational consciousness, which in its own turn entails a more rudimentary sense of mineness. This fundamental or rudimentary sense refers to a different kind of minimal self – the core self that forms the phenomenological foun-dation of actual personhood. All other minimal selves, which are cut off from the actual self, presuppose such a more fundamental minimal self as their basis. Only the minimal self that performs such a founding role can serve as a foundation of other minimal selves. In short, I can have a sense of mineness that is not truly mine if, and only if, this sense is founded in mineness that is truly mine.

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(4) Nonetheless, under some circumstances consciousness can suppress the foun-dational sense of mineness of which we just spoke. In Husserl’s words, the ego can be self-forgetful. In general, the greater the vitality ( Lebendigkeit ) of re-presentational consciousness, the deeper the suppression in question. This suppression results in the self-identification of the actual ego with the phantasy ego, i.e., it leads to the ego’s absorption in a sense of mineness that is not truly mine. However, suppression is not elimination . The mineness that forms the foundation of all re-presentations is still there, it is overpowered, yet not relinquished, it is still experienced in the back-ground and it still establishes the necessary condition of all other forms of mineness that consciousness can live through.

1 Phantasy and Image-Consciousness as Intentional Objectifying Experiences

How is it possible to be aware of something that is not strictly present and available to the senses, but rather unreal, fictitious, or even non-existent?Since its beginning, the phenomenological tradition has been interested in understanding the possibili-ty of experiencing something absent through acts of phantasy and imagination. This concern belongs to the more general interest in representation and its modalities, and, more precisely, to the inquiry into the mode of representing in the absence of the represented object . How can absent objects appear and what are the criteria that make it possible to distinguish between kinds of representations, especially when it comes to representations of the same object, which is sometimes perceived, some-times phantasized, sometimes judged, etc.?

In Edmund Husserl’s thought, the mystery of representation in absentia rei be-longs to the fundamental problem of intentionality and its modes. Although at first glance the subject of phantasy and image-consciousness may not seem to occupy a central place in his thought, in fact it appears throughout. As Eduard Marbach points out in his introduction to Hua 23 (xxv), Husserl first encountered this prob-lem in the lectures given by Franz Brentano in 1885/86, Carl Stumpf in 1886/87, and Anton Marty in 1889, while the last manuscript he dedicates to phantasy dates from 1936.1

The analysis of intentional experiences has, then, a long history, in the course of which Husserl progressively classifies and characterizes different kinds of inten-tionality and their modalities of fulfilment. That history can be divided into dif-ferent periods, which are not necessarily temporary (since they sometimes appear as moments within the same reflection, lecture, or work), but somewhat arbitrary, as indeed all periodization is. To a large extent, these phases coincide with the pe-riodization of Husserl’s phenomenology into psychological phenomenology (the Halle period), transcendental phenomenology (the Göttingen years), and genetic phenomenology (the Freiburg years). However, the inflection points that determine each period of the analysis of intentional experiences are not the same as those determining the phases of phenomenology in general, so to shed light on the evo-lution of the concepts of phantasy and image-consciousness it is necessary to first point them out.

Husserl’s analysis of intentional experiences begins in the 1880s, when he attends the lectures of Brentano, Marty, and Stumpf, among others, and lasts until the end of the century. In this period, Husserl’s position on imaginative representations is still very much attached to Brentano’s, which basically means that he takes into account only two types of representations: intuitive and conceptual.2 This peri-od ends when Husserl introduces the modalities of intuition and claims, against Brentano, that there are intuitive non-perceptual representations ( Gegenwärtigung ; Präsentation ), that is, that there are intuitive re-presentations ( Vergegenwärtigung ; Re-Präsentation ).3

The second phase takes place during Husserl’s years in Göttingen, and has two turning points. The first of these is constituted by the lectures of the winter semester 1904/05; the second, by the replacement of the schematic theory with a reproduc-tive explanation for re-presentations around 1908/09. The 1904/05 lectures were conceived as an extension of the Fifth Logical Investigation (Husserl 2001; Hua 19/1), where Husserl tackles the issue of determining the essence of consciousness and its basic objectifying acts from the perspective of an introduction to the problem of knowledge. The importance of objectifying acts is that they constitute the most basic stage in the knowing process insofar as they lay the foundation for more com-plex cognitive acts, such as judgments, which are the subject of the subsequent and final Sixth Logical Investigation . In the years following the publication of the Logical Investigations (1900/1901), Husserl deepens the analysis of the objectifying acts, es-pecially in the Göttingen lectures from the winter semester 1904/05, which focuses on the study of “perception, phantasy and time.”4 These lectures, entitled “Principle Parts of Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge”, are divided into four parts: the first and second parts deal with perception and attention (published in Hua 38); the third part deals with intuitive re-presentations, especially phantasy and im-age-consciousness (Husserl 2005, 1–205; Hua 23, Text Nº 1, 1–169), and the fourth and most famous part was first edited and published by Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger in 1928 as the lectures “On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time,” and appeared later, properly ordered, in Hua 10 (Husserl 1991).

The analysis of intuitive re-presentations pursues two goals, both present in the third part of the 1904/05 lectures on phantasy and image-consciousness. First, it seeks to establish the most general division between the original mode of intuition (presentation or perception) and the non-original modes of intuition (re-presen-tations). Accordingly, phantasy and image-consciousness are analyzed in terms of what they have in common (i.e., not being presentations) and are considered as two modes of a more general type of experience: imagination ( Imagination ). Second, once Husserl has established this first general difference, he goes on to examine the differences within the sphere of re-presentations. From this second perspective, Husserl abandons the “unitary point of view of the imagination” (Husserl 2005, 30; Hua 23, 29), as he observes that phantasy does not represent mediately, meaning through an image, but directly like memory. Thus, in the end, the “discriminatory treatment” of the imagination (Dubosson 2004, 103), which considers phantasy and image-consciousness as irreducible to one another, prevails.

Following Jean-François Lavigne (2005) and Eduard Marbach (1980, xxv) it can be argued that Husserl’s characterization of intentional experiences stabilized after the Logical Investigations and before the transcendental turn (which is usually dated between the 1905 Seefeld manuscript and the 1907 lectures on Thing and Space ), more precisely, during the 1904/05 Göttingen lectures. Hence, the 1904/05 lectures constitute an unavoidable reference point for the study of intentional experiences. After those lectures, the typology and classification of intentional experiences will remain essentially the same, and further variations will mostly concern the criteria for distinguishing between kinds of experiences and the theories that make it pos-sible to account for their constitution in internal time consciousness. Thus, another fundamental turning point during this period is the substitution of the theory with which he explained the constitution of re-presentations, i.e., the apprehension-con-tent of the apprehension ( Auffassung-Auffasungsinhalt ) schema, with a reproductive modification theory, especially developed around 1908/09.

Finally, the mature phase of the analysis of intentional experiences begins with the publication of Ideas I and extends throughout the Freiburg years. This period is characterized not so much by some turning point, as by the consolidation of pre-vious research, the application of results, revision of the conclusions drawn from them, and some adjustments in terminology. During these years an inversion of the initial primacy relation between phantasy and image-consciousness prevailed over the “discriminatory treatment.” Phantasy’s final primacy over image-consciousness is the result of various factors, such as the limitations faced by the image-conscious-ness model, the deepening of the analysis of internal time consciousness and the distinction established between pure phantasy and its tied modalities. Besides pure phantasy, which is the direct, simple and free form of phantasy, Husserl considered its “tied” ( verbunden , gebunden ) modalities, in which phantasy is “intertwined” or “bound up” with some other kind of appearance. For example, in the case of em-pathy, the operation of phantasy is bound to the appearance of the alter ego ’s body, while in the case of ideation it is bound to the example taken as starting point of

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Among Husserl’s successors, the question concerning objectless representations and, specifically, phantasy and image-consciousness appears in well-known writ-ings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugen Fink, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne, Roman Ingarden, and Paul Ricœur, among others. Few studies, however, have sys-tematically dealt with the question at stake from the point of view of Husserl’s phe-nomenology. The reference study so far (Saraiva 1970) offers an interpretation of Husserl’s concept of imagination that is too close to that of Sartre, due in part to the fact that it was not until 1980 that Husserl’s manuscripts on the subject were pub-lished. Hence, particularly since the translation of Hua 23into French in 2002 and into English in 2005, there has been a proliferation of works looking to shed light on the Husserlian phenomenology of phantasy and imagination.5 However, in most of these works certain misunderstandings, biased readings, or a lack of clarity and distinction can be found with respect to key concepts of Husserl’s phenomenology of intentional experiences. What is mainly lacking is the recognition of the ultimate primacy Husserl grants in his later writings to phantasy over image-consciousness.6Accordingly, the difficulties resulting from the (at least partial) lack of acknowledg-ment among post-Husserlian phenomenologists of this latest twist – which gives priority to pure free phantasy – also affect the studies concerning tied modalities of phantasy, such as the intuition of essences, the experience of the alter ego , the aesthetic experience, the understanding of history, etc.

Despite the fact that the ultimate priority of phantasy over image-consciousness is consolidated in the mature period, it is possible to find the underlying reasons for this inversion in the early stages of the analysis of intentional experiences, when Husserl first approaches the problem of representations in absentia rei . Image-consciousness, based in the image-copy or depiction model ( Abbild ) appears early with the objective of solving difficulties involved in explaining the representation of something absent in terms of direct apprehension, but it becomes superfluous once Husserl, guided by the fundamental phenomenological principle of the return to the things themselves, finds a direct model to explain the experience in absentia rei , precisely that of pure phantasy. By inquiring into the context in which the question about objectless representations appeared, it is possible to argue that both the rise and the fall of image-consciousness depend on Husserl’s early interest in phantasy, thus anticipating the establishment of the final priority of the pure phantasy model over that of image-consciousness.

2 The Intuitive Nature of Re-Presentations

The first turning point in the analysis of intentional experiences distances Husserl from Brentano, since it implies extending intuition beyond perception and consid-ering different modalities of intentionality. Against Brentano, Husserl claims that objectless representations, i.e., representations of things not necessarily existing or given in person, can have an intuitive nature. In fact, it has been pointed out that Husserl’s philosophical project began as a motivation to rigorously extend the sphere of intuitive experiences. If Brentano’s psychology distinguishes between in-tuitive representations and conceptual representations, Husserl considers intuition to be the essential way in which experiences are lived, and that includes non-pre-sentative or objectless experiences. Thus, intuition is ‘enlarged’ to encompass other modalities of intentionality, in which what appears to consciousness is not strictly present but nevertheless given intuitively, as is the case in phantasy, image-con-sciousness, memory, expectation, dreaming, etc. Those other modalities of intuition are called intuitive re-presentations ( anschauliche Vergegenwärtigungen ). Therefore, how can it be argued that Husserl’s concept of intuitive re-presentations distanced him from Brentano, and what role did phantasy play in that distancing?

In the winter semester of 1885/86, Husserl attended Brentano’s lectures “Ausgewählte Fragen aus Psychologie und Ästhetik”. Applying a historical method of conceptual definition, Brentano (1988, 68) fundamentally investigates in those lectures the nature of phantasy as well as the criteria for distinguishing between kinds of psychic phenomena or representations. The case of phantasy allows him to inquire into the differences between representations of the same physical phenom-enon (how is a perceived tree different from the same tree when it is phantasized, and how are they similar?).

To distinguish between perceptual representations ( Wahrnehmungsvorstellungen ) and phantasy representations ( Phantasievorstellungen ), Brentano adopts Hume’s criterion of vivacity . He postulates that the difference between a perception and a phantasy of the same object or physical phenomenon ought to lie in the intensity ( Lebendigkeit ) of the representation’s content.7 Thereby, he adopts a gradual crite-rion that concerns only the contents , but not the acts of representation.8 Following also Hume’s distinction between impressions and ideas , Brentano argues that, ac-cording to their degree of intensity, psychic phenomena can be divided into au-thentic or proper representations ( eigentliche Vorstellungen ) and inauthentic or improper representations ( uneigentliche Vorstellungen ). Authentic representations would be intuitive, while inauthentic representations would be ideas, abstractions, concepts. Thus, according to Brentano, it may be stated that, if perceptual repre- sentations are intuitive , and if phantasy must be discernible from perception, then phantasy representations , insofar as they are intuitively poorer than perceptual ones, can only be concepts or ideas .

Brentano does not, however, reach a satisfactory and definitive conclusion. He agrees with common sense in recognizing that there is a halo of intuitiveness in phantasies that brings them closer to perception, preventing them from being con-sidered sheer abstract or conceptual representations (ibid., 84). Phantasies there-by have an intermediate character, they belong “partly to the intuitive domain and partly to the conceptual domain” (ibid., 87). The 1885/86 lectures reach an ambig-uous conclusion, according to which phantasy representations are “between” intu-itions and concepts but are neither intuitions, nor concepts, but rather “concepts with an intuitive core.”9

Against Brentano’s gradual criterion, Husserl introduces an essential one, which means that the difference between representations must lie not only on the side of the content , but also on the side of the act . If differences between representations were only in the intensity of the contents, then a perceived and a phantasied color would only differ in its brightness, a perceived and a phantasied meal would only dif-fer in the degree to which it causes a burning sensation, and the difference between a perceived and a phantasized judgment would consist in “a phantasized judgment” being a less “lively conviction” (Husserl 2005, 103; Hua 23, 95ff.). Although Husserl acknowledges that Brentano has established the distinction between the act and the content of representation, he refuses to ground differences between acts on the intensity of their respective contents, arguing instead that each experience is differ-ent also by virtue of the inner characteristics of the act, and not just the variations in content (Husserl 2005, 8ff.; Hua 23, 9).

Underpinning this objection are the essential phenomenological principle of the intentional correlation and the theory with which Husserl explains the constitu-tion of all experiences until 1908/09: the apprehension-content of the apprehension ( Auffassung-Auffassungsinhalt ) scheme. The schematic theory distinguishes, on the one hand, the acts, apprehensions or apperceptions, and, on the other hand, the sen- suous content to which these acts give meaning. These differences in the acts corre-spond to differences between kinds of intuition. This reflects the principle of homo-geneous fulfilment, according to which different kinds of intuition correspond to each particular mode of intending (Barbaras 2015, 45). With the schematic theory, Husserl takes distance from Brentano, because it allows him to abandon the two-fold distinction between intuition and ideas or concepts, and embrace a plurality of modes of givenness or modalities of intuition. Thus, against Brentano’s ambiguous definition of phantasy as something in between impressions and ideas, according to Husserl, phantasy must differ from perception in both how and what consciousness apprehends. Otherwise, phantasy and perception would not truly be two different kinds of intuitive representations.

It should be highlighted that the terms ‘phantasy’ and ‘imagination’ are used during this early stage – that is, before the deepening of the analysis of intentional experiences in the Logical Investigations and particularly in the 1904/05 lectures – in an ambiguous and lax way. This is due to the fact that in the early analysis of intentional experiences, Husserl’s aim is to expand the concept of intuition and es-tablish a first general division between its two main modalities: original intuition (presentation or perception) and non-original intuition (re-presentation). Hence, as opposed to perceptual representations, phantasy representations are frequent-ly taken as representatives for the whole field of re-presentative experiences, even memory. Only when Husserl approaches the subsequent stage of analysis – thus seeking differences and specificities within the sphere of re-presentative experienc-es – does the concept of phantasy become distinct from other forms of non-original intuitive consciousness, such as imagination, image-consciousness, or memory. But until then, ‘imagination’ and ‘phantasy’ are mainly used in a wide sense.

Before contrasting different kinds of re-presentations, it should be inquired how intuitive re-presentations are constituted in or by consciousness as opposed to the

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3 The Rise of the Image-Copy or Depiction Model as a First Attempt to Explain the Constitution of Re-Presentation

If Husserl inherited from Brentano the issue of objectless representations and the criteria for distinguishing between representations, his first explanation was in-spired by the discussion of the representative or image theory ( Bildtheorie ) of his colleague Kasimir Twardowski.

In 1894, Twardowski wrote his habilitation thesis on the problem of the distinc-tion between the content and the object of representations: Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen. Eine psychologische Untersuchung . The disser-tation sought to overcome some difficulties of Brentano’s psychology, whose con-cept of intentionality had been the subject of scrutiny since 1889, mainly in relation to the status of the content of psychic phenomena (see Schuhmann 1993; English 1993; Rollinger 1999). In particular, Twardowski’s dissertation sought to overcome a paradox to which Brentano’s psychology led: if consciousness must always be direct- ed towards an object, what is it directed towards if it represents non-existent objects?

To solve the paradox of objectless representations, Twardowski introduces – be-side the distinction that is already present in Brentano, namely between the act ( Akt ) and the content ( Inhalt ) of representation – a distinction between the con-tent and “the object [ Gegenstand ] to which […] our representation” is addressed

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According to Twardowski, in painting , there is the act of painting and the “paint-ed” thing. But “painted” has two meanings, since “the painter paints a picture [ Bild ], but also paints a landscape” (ibid., 12). Thus, “painted” is predicated of the land-scape in two ways: first, of the landscape that appears in the painting, and, second, of the real landscape, the thing ( Sache ) that the painter depicts in his painting, which also has an existence exterior to and independent of the canvas. In the second case, “painted” serves as an attributive adjective, since it does not change the meaning of “landscape,” while, in the first case, “painted” serves as a modifying adjective, since it turns the real landscape into a merely depicted landscape in the painting. One “painted landscape” would be the image-copy ( Abbild ) of the other “painted land-scape,” which would be the original. Twardowski argues that

In representation , there is the act of representing and the represented thing. ‘Represented,’ as ‘painted,’ is also said in two ways. First, ‘represented’ serves as an attributive adjective with respect to the transcendent, actually existing object ( Gegenstand ). Second, ‘represented’ serves as a modifying adjective with respect to the inner, immanent, spiritual object ( Inhalt ). In the latter, ‘represented’ turns the transcendent real object into an immanent copy, into “the ‘psychic’ image existing ‘in’ us [ ‘in’ uns Bestehendes ]” of the real object “existing by itself [ an sich Bestehendes ]” (ibid., 2).

The value of this analogy between the painted landscape and the represented ob- ject , Twardowski concludes, comes from “our habit of designating representation as a spiritual way of copying into image [ abbilden ]” (ibid., 12). In other words, what is true for the original-copy relationship in painting would be also true for

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Husserl does not only recognize that Twardowski’s distinction between the con-tent and the object of representation makes it possible to avoid the paradox of ob-jectless representations,10 but he also uses the image-copy or depiction model with-in his analysis of intentional experiences to account for intuitive re-presentations ( anschauliche Vergegenwärtigungen ). In the above-mentioned manuscript from 1898, which serves as a precedent for the 1904/05 lectures (Husserl 2005, Appendix 1; Hua 23, 108–136), Husserl claims that re-presentation ( Repräsentation ) is a func-tion “analogous to indirect presentation [ indirekte Präsentation ]” (Husserl 2005; Hua 23, 115). This means that Husserl’s first attempt to explain re-presentations ( Repräsentation , Vergegenwärtigung ) appeals to Twardowski’s Abbild model, under-stood as indirect presentation, that is, as presentation ( Präsentation, Gegenwärtigung, Wahrnehmung ) by means of a representative ( Repräsentant , Vertreter ) of the absent intended thing. In Husserl’s phenomenology, the model for this indirect presenta-tion is that of image-consciousness ( Bildbewusstsein or Abbildbewusstsein ), which is essentially characterized as a mediate kind of consciousness, i.e., the kind of experi-ences of absent objects that do not appear in themselves, but through an image-copy ( Abbild ), which functions as an analogue resembling the intended object.

As we can see in the third part of the 1904/05 lectures, in which the schematic theory still prevails, Husserl first differentiates perception and image-consciousness according to the number and characteristics of the apprehensions involved in each. Hence, perception is considered simple and direct , because the object is immedi-ately apprehended in the original intuition, while image-consciousness is consid-ered a complex experience, in which two objectifying apprehensions intertwine: a perceptual apprehension ( perzeptive Auffassung ) and an imaginative apprehension ( imaginative Auffassung ). But in image-consciousness, the perceptual apprehension becomes neutralized, so that, instead of the physical support an image may appear. Hence, the image appearance is possible due to a second apprehension, precisely the imaginative one, which apprehends the sensuous material of the physical thing and reinterprets it in terms of an image (Husserl 2005, 48; Hua 23, 44). In a photograph of a child, for instance, we see neither the real child in person, nor the photographic paper but rather an image of the child. We then say that the child appears in the im-age. Thus, according to Husserl, image-consciousness has “an altered characteristic, the characteristic of representation by means of resemblance, the characteristic of seeing in an image [ Charakter des Schauens im Bild ]” (Husserl 2005, 28; Hua 23, 26).

Two intentions cannot coexist at the same time, otherwise, as Husserl warns, con-sciousness would undergo an illusion of the senses ( Sinnentrug ): is it a person or is it a wax mannequin? By contrast, for something to be seen in an image, a “peace-ful and clear consciousness of imaging” is needed (Husserl 2005, 44; Hua 23, 41). Hence, by the end of the third part of the 1904/05 lectures devoted to phantasy and image-consciousness, Husserl argues that ultimately there are not two appre-hensions but rather a unique imaginative apprehension , which is directed towards the only appearance of image-consciousness: the image object ( Bildobjekt ). That is why, for consciousness to be focused only on the image object, the perceptive ap-prehension has to be neutralized. Clearly, attention can turn to the physical support of, e.g., a picture. But that would constitute another objectifying act, which needs a shift of attention, a change of attitude ( Einstellungsänderung ) that would momen-tarily shutter the image intention to let perception prevail. This is because these two contending apprehensions (the perceptive and the imaginative) dispute over the interpretation of the same sensuous material, thus only one of them can prevail. The imaginative apprehension wins over the perceptual apprehension by borrow-ing the sensuous material and interpreting it as a representative or as an analogue of something else. When the imaginative apprehension prevails, consciousness can

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Given that the image can only arise on the basis of a physical thing that lends it its sensuous material, Husserl refers to image-consciousness as “physical imagination” ( physische Imagination ) (Husserl 2005, 19; Hua 23, 18), “perceptual imagination” ( perzeptive Imagination ) (Husserl 2005, 85, 89, 507; Hua 23, 79, 82, 431), or “imma-nent imagination” ( immanenten Bildlichkeit ) (see, e.g., Husserl 2005, 38f.; Hua 23, 35f.).11 Yet, why is the image not taken as perception?

The image object ( Bildobjekt ) relates not only to the depicted subject ( Bildsujet ) and to the physical support ( physisches Bild or Bildding ) but also to the entire complex of sensations and surrounding objects with which the physical object that provides the material for an imaginative apprehension is linked. Consequently, the image ob-ject stands out from a horizon of perception that does not completely disappear, but rather remains latent during the imaginative act. Due to the continuity between the surrounding reality and the materiality of the image, image-consciousness is con-sidered to be a harmonious and unitary experience (Übereinstimmungsbewusstsein) . The image appears in the middle of the actual reality but is taken as fiction, as if its frame was “a window” that opens up access to a fictitious world (Husserl 2005, 50; Hua 23, 46; see also Fink 1966, § 34, 77). The imaginative appearance is taken as fiction ( Fiktum ), as something unreal ( unwirklich ), as something disruptive of the reality in the midst of which the image emerges, thanks to the consciousness of the conflict ( Widerstreit ) that arises between the perceptual apprehension and the imaginative apprehension. The conflict, although limited only to the sphere in which the two apprehensions overlap, is the sign that prevents us from taking the fictitious as real (Husserl 2005, 187; Hua 23, 157).12

However, it must be asked what the scope of the Abbild model is in order to ac-count for the experiences of consciousness. Do all objects appear by means of an inner copy, an image, or an analogous representative of the real externally existing thing, as Twardowski argues? On the contrary, from his early writings, Husserl ac-cepted this model exclusively for experiences intending by means of a representa-tive, such as image-consciousness ( Bildbewusstsein ). So, why does Husserl restrict the Abbild model’s validity and what other models does he consider?

4 The Fall of the Image-Copy or Depiction Model

Husserl’s first objections to the image-copy or depiction theory appear early on and, as is known, cover more than Twardowski’s version of it. From the beginning, Husserl rejects this model for perception in particular, but its validity to account for intuitive re-presentations progressively declines as well. In fact, it is possible to argue that Husserl’s reasons to first partially restrict the validity of the image-copy or depiction model ends up annulling the theory itself. The ultimate reason for the complete downfall of the image-copyor depiction theory is related to the emer-gence of a direct model for intuitive re-presentations, developed to account for memory and phantasy.

As Karl Schuhmann (1993) and Jacques English (1993) point out, Husserl’s stance on Twardowski is ambiguous. Especially during their student years and until the turn of the century, both Husserl and Twardowski tried to solve “the same funda-mental problem,” whose solution would determine the understanding “of the whole functioning of intentionality” (ibid., 77). This concerns the problem of “the status to be attributed to intentional objects” (ibid., 9). Indeed, Husserl would have found the central motivation to develop his own theory of intentionality confronting Twardowski, in response to whom he explicitly claimed he had written his 1894 manuscript on intentional objects.13

On the one hand, Husserl accepts that Twardowski’s distinction between the content ( Inhalt ) and the object ( Gegenstand ) of representation allows avoiding the paradox of objectless representations, but, on the other hand, he refuses that every experience should be understood as having two objects (an immanent one serving as spiritual representative of the object existing outside the mind). The rejection of the idea that all representations have two objects concerns normal perception in particular. According to Husserl, the perceptum is neither an image nor a sign of the perceived thing: consciousness rather intends its objects basically in a direct fash-ion, and the perceived thing appears originally in person ( leibhaftig ).14 It is consid-ered a contradiction to assume that the perception of a natural object, “the tree there in the garden,” is only possible through the perception of “a second immanent tree, or even an ‘internal image’ [ inneres Bild ] of the actual tree standing out there before me” (Husserl 1982, 219; Hua 3/1, 186). Claiming that every representation requires an internal representative of the external thing would not only produce an unneces-sary multiplication of objectivities, a doubling of the world, but would also require “transcendent ontic and ontological guarantees” (English 1993, 10). Twardowski’s difference between the ‘real’ object and the ‘representative’ of the real object is re-duced, in Husserl’s phenomenology, to the difference between the intended object and the degrees of its fulfilment.

The image theory ( Bildtheorie ), image-copy or depiction theory ( Abbildstheorie ) is considered to be naïve not only because it attributes existence to intentionality (by taking it as an activity), but also because it ascribes existence to the terms of the intentional relationship. Hence, the image-copy or depiction theory falls into the “immanence illusion,” since “it conceives of the mental image as an object re-ally inhabiting the mind,” just as if “a physical thing” would be “there in reality,” while in truth “there is no image thing in the mind, or, better, in consciousness” (Husserl 2005, 23; Hua 23, 21). On the contrary, according to Husserl, intentionality is neither a relation between external things ( real ) nor a relation between internal things ( reell ), because it is simply not an active relation but, precisely, a reference . The intentional object exists neither inside nor outside consciousness. To avoid this misunderstanding, Husserl suggests abandoning the term “immanent object” and replacing it with that of “intentional object” (Husserl 2001, 97; Hua 19/1, 387). The intentional object does not exist, but “is ‘merely intentional,’” what exists is “the intention, the meaning of an object with these qualities, but not the object” (Husserl 2001, 127; Hua 19/1, 439).

Objectless representations make their appearance in this argument, since Husserl uses two examples of representations lacking an existing external object to reinforce his position on the merely intentional status of represented objects. One of these is the intuition of generalities or idealities, the other is phantasy (Hua Dok 3/1, 83). Husserl argues that if in the case of objectless representations, the reference of the immanent object to a transcendent object is unnecessary, then, such a reference to a corresponding real object becomes superfluous for all cases. Consciousness is always directed to a single object: the intentional object. Therefore, the mystery of objectless representations is closely related to the broader discussions on intention-ality and the status of intentional objects. For the concept of intentionality should make it possible to account for different modes of intentionality: beyond the mode in which consciousness is directed towards something existing and present, there are also those multiple other modes in which consciousness intends something not present. This is so either when consciousness intends something past or future, or when it imagines possible and impossible worlds, and even when it thinks of a gen-erality, such as ‘red’ or ‘spherical.’ In Husserl’s words, the real problem of intention-ality is not how consciousness addresses a “true or real [ wahres oder wirkliches ]” ob-ject, but rather how it addresses an object that is not present or does not exist within

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On the one hand, phantasy experiences, then, become a relevant example in the argument in favour of the merely intentional status of the correlates of conscious-ness, because they allow us to clearly see that representations do not need a refer-ence to some exterior or even interior existence. On the other hand, the fact that this example appears at such an early stage of phenomenology can be taken as a sign of Husserl’s primordial interest in offering a direct , and not a mediated, explanation for representations in absentia rei . A direct model would not only be more accurate for re-presentations such as memory and phantasy but also for image-conscious-ness – since it would make it possible to explain it as a complex experience, as the intertwining of simpler acts (a neutralized perception and a phantasy). A direct model for re-presentations would also be more faithful to the idea that each expe-rience is defined by an individual act aiming at an individual object: even if the act is founded on other acts, even if each experience opens up to infinite possibilities of new acts, it is singular in its intention, in its direction. Thus, the development of a direct model for intuitive re-presentations would render any explanation that ap-peals to immanent representatives of the intended object dispensable, superfluous, or, at least, derived in relation to simpler acts.

If the first restriction of image-consciousness’ validity excludes perception, the second restriction of the image theory takes place when Husserl finds a direct mod-el for re-presentations, and hence excludes phantasy, memory, expectation as well as other forms of direct re-presentation. Husserl’s first explanation of objectless rep-resentations was based on Twardowski’s mediate model, assuming that, as opposed to perception, which presents its objects directly , all re-presentations must present their objects indirectly : since absent objects do not give themselves in person, they must appear through a present medium . However, when Husserl seeks to establish differences between modes of representation in absentia rei , this model also proves insufficient to account for the whole field of intuitive re-presentations .

The restriction of the mediate model for re-presentations becomes evident espe-cially when contrasting image-consciousness with phantasy and memory. Indeed, in the 1904/05 lectures, Husserl first attempts to take phantasy as a ‘parallel case’ of image-consciousness but ultimately fails and asserts that there must be essential differences between both of them. When Husserl seeks to establish the more general differences between presentation and re-presentation, he takes the “unitary point of view of the imagination [ Imagination ]” (Husserl 2005, 30; Hua 23, 29) and considers phantasy and image-consciousness as two species of a generic type of imaginative representation. From this ‘unitary point of view,’ the difference between both modes of imagination would lie only in the kind of image that serves as representative of the absent thing. The image of image-consciousness would be external , physical , since it requires a physical support, a neutralized perception on which the imagi-native act is founded. By contrast, the image of phantasy would be internal , spiritu- al , since the phantasied object appears simply as hovering before us ( vorschweben ) (Husserl 2005, 20; Hua 23, 18), independently of any physical stimulus . But progres-sively, Husserl comes to discard the hypothesis that phantasy would also represent its object through an image, basically because phantasy aims directly at the object hovering before consciousness. Indeed, during the third part of the 1904/05 lec-tures, Husserl asserts that there are not two phantasy objects, one that is a copy of a second one, but a single object that appears directly . And since there is no depictive function ( Verbildlichung ), phantasy cannot be a sort of imaginative consciousness. Thus, the fact that phantasy representations do not involve any image-copy or de-piction leads Husserl to pursue a “discriminatory treatment” of fictitious or unreal consciousness (Dubosson 2004, 103), according to which image-consciousness and phantasy would be two types of consciousness, each irreducible to the other.16

Thus, Husserl rejects not only the mediate interpretation of perception but also the idea that all representations in absentia rei are “indirect intuitive presentations [ indirekte anschauuliche Präsentationen ]” (Husserl 2005, 125; Hua 23, 115). Hence, the scope of the representative theory would be restricted only to the cases in which representation occurs precisely by means of an image ( Bildbewusstsein ). This sharp separation of phantasy and image-consciousness corresponds to Husserl’s goal of distinguishing between different ways that consciousness has of intending and the different ways that the correlative objects are given, i.e., they are different “sorts of mental processes” (Husserl 2001, 91; Hua 19/1, 78):

However, the restriction of the mediate model to only one sort of intuitive ex-perience opens up a problem that the image-copy or depiction theory was sup-posed to avoid. How is it possible to actually experience something not-existent? Furthermore, how is it possible to directly re-present something absent ? Phantasy, like memory, demands a new model for intentional experience, which is neither the direct model of presentation nor the indirect model of complex re-presentation but rather a third kind: a direct model of re-presentations. Although it cannot be dealt with in detail here, it is necessary to succinctly show the path that led Husserl to develop a direct model of re-presentations, since it is in light of these investigations and, in particular, of the contrasting of phantasy and memory, that the image-copy or depiction model reaches its final phenomenological fall.

5 The Primacy of the Model of Pure Phantasy and Its ‘Tied’ Modalities

Husserl’s first attempt to solve the question of objectless representations was to establish the intuitive nature of phantasy representations (taken in a wide sense), against the ambiguous definition Brentano had come to in his 1885/86 lectures. Soon Husserl proposed, following Twardowski, that if presentation is the direct ap-prehension of a present object, then objectless representations (among which are intuitive re-presentations) must be the indirect apprehension of an absent object

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To answer these questions, Husserl turns first to his schematic theory and argues – as he had done when objecting to Brentano – that the difference between perception and phantasy must lie in both the act and in the content of representation. Thus, in the lectures of 1904/05, after sharply distinguishing it from image-consciousness, Husserl concludes that phantasy must be analogous to perception, but that it should apprehend a different kind of sensuous material. If sensations are apprehended di-rectly in perception, phantasy must be direct apprehension, but of a peculiar sen-suous content: “sensations serve as the basis for perceptions; sensuous phantasma- ta [ Phantasmen ] serve as the basis for phantasies” (Husserl 2005, 11; Hua 23, 11). However, unsolvable difficulties surrounding the status of phantasmata undermine the schematic explanation for the constitution of re-presentations. Neither in the case of phantasy, nor in the case of memory, does the schematic theory account for the experience of something absent (unreal or past), for where lies the past of what is remembered or the fictitious of what is phantasied? On the one hand, if phantasmata are absent , how can they even be apprehended? On the other hand, if

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Since the schematic theory only makes it possible to explain the present constitu-tion of present experiences, Husserl retains it for the presentation, but he seeks an-other way to explain re-presentations. While studying internal time consciousness, and particularly the constitution of memory, Husserl develops a new model: that of reproductive modification ( reproduktive Modifikation ).17 This model allows him to abandon the theories that remain locked in the present and to genuinely explain the intuitive apprehension of what is lived as absent .18 Thus, memory is explained as the reproduction of a previous experience, and not as a direct apprehension of something past. Reproducing something already lived means reliving what was constituted in that original experience. And the awareness of the distance elapsed between the original experience and the reproductive experience is what gives the remembered the trait of being past. This means that the past characteristic of what is remembered is not something apprehended directly but rather a feature of the intentional object reproduced by the act of memory.

After developing the reproductive theory, Husserl takes phantasy to be analogous to memory. Only, in addition to the plain reproductive modification, phantasy also needs another modification to neutralize the being and the positional characteris-tics of what is experienced. The “imaginative modification” or, strictly speaking, the “phantasy modification,”19 takes the phantasized objects as disconnected from the rest of the experiences, which explains why it appears as just hovering before us. Hence, in contrast to memory, phantasy is defined as a “non-positional [ nicht set- zende ]” reproduction: “universally phantasying is the neutrality modification of ‘pos- iting’ re-presentation , therefore of memory in the widest conceivable sense [ Näher ausgeführt, ist das Phantasieren überhaupt die Neutralitätsmodifikation der ‘setzen- den’ Vergegenwärtigung, also der Erinnerung im denkbar weitesten Sinne ]” (Husserl 1982, 260; Hua 3/1, 224).

Although the reproductive modification theory allowed Husserl to make great progress with respect to the Abbild theory, it must be pointed out that conceiving phantasy as reproductive, even if it is of a non-positional kind, ignores its essential feature, since phantasy ought to be inventive, productive, or at least quasi -produc-tive. Otherwise, what would the phantasy of a centaur be reproducing? But despite the objections that can be raised to the reproductive interpretation of phantasy, Husserl’s phenomenology does not go further, which means that it does not develop a productive or quasi -productive model for pure phantasy. Nevertheless, phantasy is essentially characterized by its freedom: unlike perception and image-conscious-ness, it is independent of actual reality; unlike memory, it is disconnected from the rest of the experiences. However, phantasy is not always (if ever) purely free but is usually mixed with other experiences. Hence, Husserl distinguishes between two kinds of phantasy. On the one hand, ‘free’ ( frei ), ‘pure’ ( rein , pure ), ‘disconnected’ phantasies. On the other hand, ‘mixed’ or ‘tied’ phantasies, which are phantasies ‘bound up with’ ( verbunden , gebunden ) other acts or appearances.20 ‘Mere,’ ‘sheer,’ or ‘simple’ phantasy ( bloß , gewöhnlich , schlicht ) would then take the place of the proto-mode of phantasy: it would be the pure case , unmixed with other experiences, while mixed phantasies would be modalizations of the pure case. Phantasy is modal-ized, for instance, in the intuition of essences where it is limited by the example tak-en as a starting point of eidetic variation (see Lohmar 2005); or in empathy, where it is bound to the bodily appearance of the other. Phantasies tied to a perceptual appearance are then called ‘perceptual phantasies’ ( perzeptive Phantasien ).

It is in this context of the development of a direct explanation for represen-tations in absentia rei that phantasy becomes an ultimate priority over all oth-er forms of fictitious consciousness. Accordingly, the mediate model becomes unnecessary even for image-consciousness, because the latter can be reduced to a form of mixed phantasy. From the point of view of reproductive theory, im-age-consciousness is considered a mixed or complex sort of experience in which an apprehension of phantasy is intertwined with and modifies a perceptual ap-pearance. Indeed, at least from 1918 on, since it is clear that it is a sort of percep-tual phantasy, Husserl no longer refers to it as “image-consciousness” (Husserl 2005, 599; Hua 23, 498):

Thus, aesthetic experiences are also taken to be examples of perceptual phantasy (ibid.). Contemplating a play, for instance, entails experiencing “perceptive fictions [ perzeptive Fikta ]” in which the viewer neutralizes the actors to see characters in-stead.22 But despite the fact that the distinction between pure phantasy and its mo-dalities appears frequently in Husserl’s manuscripts, it is less frequent in the litera-ture on the subject, where there is a widespread lack of recognition of the primacy of pure phantasy over image-consciousness and even of the continuity between the concepts of image-consciousness and perceptual phantasy. Nevertheless, such misunderstandings may be overcome in light of Husserl’s early position vis-à-vis Brentano and Twardowski on the matter of objectless representations, where the logical priority of pure phantasy over all other forms of consciousness mixed with it is prefigured. Ever since Husserl was faced with the mystery of representations in absentia rei , his motivation was aimed at offering a direct and not a mediated answer. Hence, it can be concluded that both the rise and the fall of the image-consciousness model is due to Husserl’s interest in phantasy. The image-copy or depiction theory is not only naïve in its understanding of intentionality, but it also remains locked into the present, i.e., it fails to give a genuine explanation for the multiple ways in which something absent – past or future, unreal or fictitious, possible or even contradicto-ry – may become conscious. On the contrary, the direct model of pure phantasy and its modalities – even if it must be developed as productive or quasi -productiveand not just as reproductive – makes it possible to explain how consciousness can intuit something other than what presently appears.

1 Problematization of Our View of Phantasy, Emotions, and Thinking

In this chapter, I interpret phantasy not as a method to intentionally get rid of re-ality. In my view, a big part of our phantasy is more an activity of thinking that deals with important aspects of reality. Still, we cannot identify phantasy with real-ity, there is a limitation: the aspects of phantasy I am addressing in this chapter are connected to reality only in the sense of possible consequences, possible actions, or

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There is another limitation of my investigations. I am starting with a quite am-bitious hypothesis: the biggest part of the thinking activity related to bound phan-tasies only rarely uses language as a means of representing its objects. Usually, this thinking uses phantasy scenes related to concrete actions and events. We might as well refer to daydreams – indeed, I consider daydreaming to be highly relevant for our orientation in life and as an effective method of thinking about possible options for action. Therefore, I prefer to speak in this case of the ‘scenic-phantasmatic sys-tem of non-linguistic thinking,’ which I regard as a system still working in human thinking today.

The special focus of my present paper are emotions considered as a part of this non-linguistic system (Lohmar 2016b). Happiness and grief, fun and pain, regret, joy and pre-joy, shame and pride, etc. belong to the large repertoire of emotions and each of them has a rich dimension of meanings. I will not try to give an exhaustive overview of the different types of emotions (this is the topic of another project). I am rather interested in the many dimensions of meaning we are able to address while using emotions in our phantasies.

Due to this starting point, my view on phantasy and emotions in human mental life is quite exceptional: I will consider the function of both phantasy and emotions in the framework of non-linguistic thinking. From this perspective, we concentrate on phantasies of situations and the connection of events that are accompanied by emotions. They may occur as a single picture of a person or object, or more com-monly as a kind of video clip or daydream. These phantasmatic scenes carry mean-ings, evaluations, experiences, and sometimes they are even something like a plan and an outlook on the future. Simply put, phantasy and emotions are important parts of a system of thinking that does not use the concepts of language, but lies somehow on a deeper level than language.

This is exceptional because the overwhelming majority of thinkers in modern times and recent philosophy regard language as the only mode of thinking about

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In my paper, I will not provide in detail the phenomenological reasons justifying this approach, as I have discussed them in a recent monograph on non-linguistic thinking (Lohmar 2016a). I will also not delve into the more general discussion concerning the principal affordances of a non-linguistic system. In what follows, I will rather address concrete forms of this kind of thinking.

2 The Scenic-Phantasmatic System of Representation

The first question we have to solve is the following: how are we able to think of objects, facts (states of affairs), and events without using language? To answer this question, I have to shortly characterize the scenic-phantasmatic system of repre-senting objects, facts, and events.

Consider the experience of vividly imagining an object or fact (it is not yet de-termined whether it is a present, past, or future fact): for instance, with the help of phantasy, I am able to ‘see’ a ripe banana. This phantasmatic picture makes the banana appear to me in full colour and perhaps also with the typical smell of ripe

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Apart from these real or imagined facts, we also understand that there is an evalu-ation in the accompanying feelings of shame, which brings into play the community we live in. We are ashamed in the eyes of our community. Additionally – and quite astonishingly –, there is also something like an emotional indication towards the past, present, and future moment of the imagined events: shame is related to my past actions, fear can only be connected with a future event. We should keep in mind that usually we regard the indication of temporal relations to be one of the most remarkable performances of our language – but now we see that this can be done much more easily with a combination of phantasy and emotions.

With this short story of my vivid imaginative ideas about real or possible states of affairs in a non-linguistic mode,1 I wanted to show that – also from an evolution-ary point of view – we humans are still using the scenic-phantasmatic system of rep-resentation. This system is representing objects, states of affairs, past and possible future events, etc. by using a combination of phantasy scenes with emotions – and all of this without language. We have also realized that the feelings accompanying these phantasies are adding important elements of sense to the respective evalu-ation, relevance, and location in time of these real or imagined events. We might even think that we have already detected a full-blown system of representation for the most common, but quite basic events of our everyday life.

It seems to me that in a series of imaginative pictures, as in daydreaming, we are using scenic phantasmata to ‘express’ our knowledge of states of affairs as well as our wishes and fears, including our plans for the future. But with regard to whom do we express these ideas? No one can see my phantasies or feel my feelings except me, so the only person for whom I am expressing my convictions and fears is me, myself. This means that I am thinking about them and pondering possible alternative plans.

If I imagine to visit my grandchild Lea, I immediately feel the pleasant anticipa-tion (in German: Vorfreude , pre-joy) of such a future event, and a plan ripens in me: do not longer read the boring student papers, but go over to your daughter’s place and see whether it may be possible to spend some time with her and her daughter. Analogously, the thought of last Sunday and a nice trip to a nearby play-ground appears in my mind, accompanied by pleasant memories (feelings of past-joy, German: Nachfreude ). Both kinds of feeling are clearly distinguished, and they indicate different times of the events pondered on.

Thus, we see that daydreams generally function as representations of cognitive contents connected with practical and evaluative components. It is always a state of affairs or event that we wish for or are in fear of. But we do not only express our preferences, our urgent wishes, and our views of the facts by these means. It turns out that the scenic-phantasmatic system can also be a kind of response to a (real or possible) problem. Sometimes we may even find a mental action, a mental manipulation of the problematic situation that might lead to a solution of some-thing which until now was unknown. This is my thesis: scenic phantasmata and daydreaming connected with emotions are an old mode of thinking still working in our consciousness.2

In daydreams, we are trying out possible solutions to a problem, i.e., we are men-tally testing our options, their probability and usefulness for a solution, and their respective consequences. This ‘life’ of scenic phantasmata constitutes a great and important part of our conscious life. Some examples: worries about urgent chal-lenges, the possible unpleasant effects of events, uncertainties concerning possible developments, etc. make us sleepless at night. There are many phantasies of having success. In these scenic episodes of our conscious life, the linguistic expressions fade into the background in favour of pictorial elements. Thus, we realize the meet-ing of past, present, and possible future events in our scenic phantasmata, but we still have to find out in more detail how this kind of thinking proceeds (Lohmar 2016a).

We might also take a side-view on animals. We know that most highly developed mammals can dream (e.g., dogs). While dreaming, they show first signs of an at-tempt to act as well as emotions. We interpret these phases of their sleep as dream episodes prolonging wakeful states of action and representing aims. We might therefore claim that a system of representations on the basis of scenic phantasmata, combined with feelings, is also operative in higher cerebralized mammals up to primates in dreams and wakeful states in the same way as in humans. This claim, however, only indicates an important consequence that stems from my investiga-tions into the systems of representation in humans. Nevertheless, this hypothesis about animal thinking is not mere fancy or arbitrary phantasy, because, as the phe-nomenological analysis reveals, it characterizes an important dimension of our own thinking. Thus, through these analyses we might find out in which way we are still thinking like animals. In the present analysis, I will however not concentrate further on the theme of animal thinking.

In the abovementioned examples, we have also realized that feelings are an im-portant element of the non-linguistic system of representation, functioning in the framework of scenic phantasmata.3 Emotions can easily meet the most important request for an element in a system of representation: we can have them in an actual situation and we can also ‘produce’ them (although not arbitrarily) in the absence of the intuitive situation, i.e., only through imagination (or in thinking about a topic). For example, the feeling of fury might move me violently in a certain situation, and the same feeling can also reappear when merely thinking of the same situation later on. In both cases, the feeling ‘tells’ me something about the value of this event, it is part of my inner ‘expression’ that has a certain meaning. In thinking about a cheer-ful experience, the pleasant feeling ‘means’ the desirable quality of the event.4

But when analysing feelings in non-linguistic thinking, it turns out that the most frequent way in which feelings arise is in the context of an intention towards an object or event. Thus, an object must be present to me in the scenic phantasmatic way of vivid phantasmata before I can combine it with emotions that mirror, for example, my evaluation or the relevance of the event. Emotions cannot stand alone in this respect.

We might come up with another difficulty by considering feelings as part of a symbolic system of representation. It is obvious that in using linguistic symbols for thinking about cognitive contents, we have a certain freedom of choosing alterna-tive wordings to express the same cognitive content. We may speak about a nice or pleasant outcome, or we might speak about a necessary or an unavoidable outcome referring to the same state of affairs. When using feelings in the scenic-phantasmat-ic system in thinking about an outcome of our actions and its high value, we simply have no choice: a pleasant feeling accompanies the idea of this resulting state. In non-linguistic systems, it seems to me that we cannot use an alternative ‘expression’ to characterise our valuations.5

We see that we should not always expect the same characteristics in a system of non-linguistic representation as in the case of language. The two systems of repre-sentation are phylogenetically at a great distance from each other and they are using quite different semantics (Lohmar 2016a, III.3).

3 The Multi-Modality of Feelings in the Non-Linguistic System of Thinking

There are more important facts about the function of feelings in the non-linguis-tic system of representation and thinking in humans (and perhaps also animals). This concerns in the first place the multi-modal function of feelings. What we have already realized is that feelings can help the imagination in many ways to fill in el-ements of sense that we cannot represent simply in scenic-phantasmatic pictures – for instance, evaluations and meta-cognitive elements of sense such as security or insecurity of our knowledge. We have to be able to represent these elements of sense somehow in our non-linguistic thinking; even if they are more sublime, they cannot be sensed by one of our senses. I will discuss some of these aspects in the following.

The aspect of relevance or meaningfulness for my life is represented in the feelings of liking and disliking, grief, and promise. For example, when I see the banana, I feel a pleasant anticipation concerning the possibility of eating it. We need to notice that pleasant anticipation feels differently than simply being happy now – the same is true of pleasant memories.

Let us consider briefly security or confidence concerning a possible solution to our problems. Both aspects are on the level of metacognition, for they do not con-cern the content of cognition but rather a meta-quality like the knowledge about the source or the reliability of this knowledge. Think about the problem of not having enough money. Different solutions could pop up in our minds: for example, win-ning the lottery will easily solve the pressing financial concerns, but it is unlikely to happen and does not give me a feeling of confidence; working hard or suffering hardship for some time will work as well, and this idea gives me much more con-fidence in its success. This shows clearly one function of feelings in non-linguistic modes of thinking: our feelings are realistically adjusting to the chances or proba-bility of the result of our actions. Therefore, daydreaming should not be interpreted as an evasive regression to a childish mode of handling problems only in phantasy. There is a strong realistic trait in daydreams and – surprisingly enough – it is hidden in feelings.6

This opens up a way to understand the meta-cognitive abilities of many animals. Up to now, there are only few insights concerning the meta-cognitive abilities of primates, but this kind of empirical research has only been conducted over the last ten years. With a view of the role of feelings in non-linguistic thinking, we imme-diately understand why animals can also think about such meta-properties of our intentions relating to states of affairs. The only thing we or other animals need is a representation of the state of affairs itself – this can happen in a scenic phantasma – and additionally a feeling of security that accompanies this idea of a state of affairs. The meaning of this feeling is the conviction that the state of affairs we are thinking about is a fact, that it is real – or that the planned outcome is very likely to happen.

There is another aspect of meta-cognition closely connected to the probability that certain events will happen: it concerns our confidence to act effectively in a specific way. I ‘think’ myself to be capable of some action, and this conviction – which is in fact a meta-conviction – is mirrored in my confidence, in my safe feeling concerning this planned activity. On the contrary, when I do not feel confident in my abilities to act – for example to climb a wall –, I feel helpless and depressed when thinking about my planned action.

Feelings are not a simple element of conveying sense in non-linguistic thinking; sometimes their contents are quite complex. We see this especially in the case of social feelings such as pride or shame. When being ashamed, we feel shame about something and we are ashamed in the eyes of a community, a group of people that share a valua-tion of my person. Therefore, social feelings are usually connected to a complex net of relations concerning valuations from history and personal relations, etc. This mirrors one of the big advantages of feelings: they can represent very complex relations.

We cannot see time, nor taste it, nor sense it in any other way. Therefore, time is difficult to indicate in the scenic-phantasmatic system, apart from being indicated in the form of extended episodes that are structured in time – a kind of narrative story. We might think of time passed when seeing flowers blossom in spring, or snow on the hills may indicate winter, etc., but it is difficult to indicate whether events I am conceiving in my scenic phantasmata are past or future events without the help of additional information. And in this situation, emotions also do their work in the framework of non-linguistic thinking by indicating the past or the fu-ture. Recall the examples of pleasant anticipation and pleasant memories. We can notice a difference of feeling in these two cases and we thereby realize that an emo-tion can also indicate a point in time and temporal relations between events.7

It seems difficult to conceive of a scenic image of the character of a person and of his or her probable behaviour towards me, especially within complex constellations with others involved in action. But scenic phantasmata offer a simple solution to this apparent difficulty. In remembering a brutal former classmate, I see his face looking at me with evil eyes, with clenched fists, ready to beat me up. This scene presents cen-tral aspects both of his character and of his future behaviour within a social context. It also includes the felt aversion of him towards me, which is reflected in his facial expression. I feel that he hates me. But careful: co-feeling his hate is not to identify with self-hate, although my feeling is the only way of representing his deep motives.

The scenic presentation of the attitude and behaviour of a person need not be so one-dimensional as in this case, since there are normally multiple facets of the character of other persons that we are able to present. Thus, the question arises: how can I conceive a multitude of (changing) attitudes in a scenic mode? Now, think of a colleague with whom you work together successfully in most cases, but who occasionally appears to have an air of stuck-up arrogance. Both ‘faces,’ i.e. both aspects of her character, may be represented in a scenic phantasma of her face, one after the other, or even alternately mixed, which results in an uncertain basis for your plan-making. The modal characters of possibility and uncertainty are thus also presented in the changing and merging faces of your colleague. We might even in-terpret this changing image as a non-linguistic form of the logical ‘or.’ Additionally, her attitude towards others and her preferences to act in a changing situation may be represented in a short but eloquent side-view of others.

The value and the usefulness of objects are also reflected in feelings. Moreover, as we know that the reliable qualities of objects can change, this, too, may be reflected in feelings. For instance, if I own a car that usually breaks down and thus has to be towed off and repaired, the characteristic scene within which I am positively excit-ed about my car is modified and converted to one that is negative. The emotional aspects of this bad experience are mirrored in feelings: I no longer imagine the car with the joyful expectation of reliable use, but with the cheerless expectation of future harm, expense, and inconvenience.

In the non-linguistic system of thinking in the mode of scenic phantasmata, feel-ings have another important role that is quite difficult to understand, because it deals with the big problem of non-linguistic thinking about general ideas. In sce-nic phantasmata we usually imagine individuals. General ideas are what we speak about as ‘concepts’ in the language system, ideas of not only one object but a group or class of objects, such as horse, man, animal, living creature, fairness, justice, etc. In the non-linguistic system of representation, there is a rather easy method of thinking of low-level general ideas like horse or man by using a vague visual

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Nevertheless, there must be other means to ‘think’ about high-level general ideas without using linguistic concepts. One of these means is using objects of our expe-rience in an exemplary way. We might therefore call this method ‘exemplary seman-tics,’ and we find it, for example, when trying to think about unlimited generosity, benevolence, or moral integrity in a person, suddenly a picture of our grandfather comes into our mind. In this situation, he represents unrestricted benevolence – but in exemplary semantics – and this is a general idea of higher order, i.e. an idea we cannot represent in the pictorial mode of scenic phantasmata, because there is simply no ‘visual side’ of the high-level general ideas of benevolence, justice, etc.

There is a fine stratification of generality in low-level general ideas which is not easy to represent by means of more or less visual vagueness. This difficulty can be easily exemplified by my remembering an embarrassing situation that also has some witnesses, i.e. there were some people around when the event happened. If we try to think about this event, there is the event itself in the centre of my scenic phantasma, but there are also ‘these people in the background,’ who come to see the embarrass-ing event, too. Who are they? These witnesses in the background are presented only vaguely when I remember the situation, but my feeling tells me additional things about them, for I imagine them with a graded feeling of acquaintance. I understand through this feeling that perhaps they were colleagues, neighbours, or even friends of mine. Without fully individualizing them in my scenic phantasma, I only feel that they are not completely unknown to me. If the feeling of acquaintance is weaker, they may have been only loose acquaintances, people I have met only a few times. In this way, emotions also modulate the generality of low-level general ideas in non-linguis-tic modes. We see that emotions can carry a multitude of meanings and functions in non-linguistic thinking and that it would be difficult to draw up a complete list.

4 On Deciding in ‘Emotional Calculation’

Now we may ask: is the fact that there are so many mixed and concurring emo-tions found in our non-linguistic thinking about former events and future plans a

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Nonetheless, besides some disadvantages, there are also big advantages in the mixture of emotions in non-linguistic thinking. I first sketch a rough idea about the general advantage of deciding to follow the result of an emotional calculation, then I provide a concrete example before discussing some problems arising from this fact.

Emotional calculation has to be used in non-linguistic thinking in situations where there are many different factors that influence our decision. Most decisions of everyday life are of this kind. Think for example of the decision to choose a cer-tain restaurant for lunch. Here we find the factor of food quality, but this is not the only factor because the ratio between quality and expenses usually lead us to a kind of compromise. Additionally, there may be other factors like the experience that my favourite restaurant is usually overcrowded, so there is a substantial probability that no table will be available. Furthermore, if I am short on time, there might be the factor of time consumption in reaching my favourite restaurant. But how are we able to find a solution to this difficult decision? There are factors that influence our decision-making, but these factors cannot really be set against each other in a con-ceptual way: in what rational relation can we think of quality and price, of probabil-ity and time, etc.? In fact, we solve problems like this all the time, but the solution is not based on linguistic concepts and rational calculations. We come to a solution simply by listening to our emotional answer to these kinds of complex problems.

Speaking of emotional calculation should not imply that this method of relating partly paradoxical motives is somehow a calculation with numbers on a methodical basis. ‘Calculation’ in this context is used only as a metaphor for our ability to reach a decision in the stormy centre of mixed emotional motives. This kind of mixture of motives is to be found in so many situations of our life that it is easy to see that we only gain our capacity to act by using an emotional calculus. Moreover, there is another advantage of this method of decision-making: It can be done in a second’s time. I do not claim that such a decision is always the best decision we are able to find. It is often pointed out that there might have been much better solutions. But from the point of view of evolutionary theory, the mere fact that we are able to decide in a situation with very mixed motives must be understood as an incredibly big advantage.

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Apart from the advantages of the strong mixture of emotions in the scenic-phan-tasmatic system of representation, there are also some disadvantages of founding our decisions on the ‘offset of different emotions’ in an ‘emotional calculation.’ One of the very obvious problems is that we have to take elements stemming from very different sources into our ‘calculation’ of the mixture of emotions. Here is an exam-ple: here may be our strong aversion against a certain person, say Peter, who usually starts his day by playing a mean joke on me. Think of the situation when you enter the office after having realized that someone has let the air out of your bike’s tires, so you are already suspecting that Peter might be the culprit. Then he welcomes you with a broad grin on his face and you immediately know: it was him, i.e. you are sure without any further examination that it was him, even though you heard chil-dren laughing in the bushes in the background near your bike. In cases like this, we might speak of ‘prejudices,’ and this would be true if we were only language-using thinkers, but in fact there are strong emotions stemming from completely different sources, and we do not hesitate to rest our judgment and the further actions on this emotional information. Thus, you see immediately that emotions stemming from our wishes concerning future events, our fears and aversions, and on the other side emotions representing the security of former insights, etc., may be calculated together as if they were the same ‘currency’ and deserve the same respect – which in fact is a source of possible errors.

Eventually, we see that we can consider phantasy and emotions quite differently from the standard view. There are advantages to look from a completely different angle at emotions as a central multi-modal element of a non-linguistic system of thinking. But as we are now informed about the great variety of information and valuations entailed in the condensed emotional attitudes we experience in our ev-eryday lives, we may easily run into radical questions about the relation of the two systems (language and non-linguistic thinking).

Ultimately, I see the following alternatives: (1) the non-linguistic system is only a non-functional redundant system of our consciousness, while real thinking takes place only in the mode of linguistic concepts (primacy of language); (2) both sys-tems work in parallel in our thinking and they do not influence each other (parallel systems of equal performance); (3) our language-based thinking is only a kind of secondary, symbolic form of the fundamental non-linguistic system of thinking. I should confess that the latter is the thesis that I sympathize with the most (i.e., the primacy of the non-linguistic system of thinking). It implies that our rich life of

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Nevertheless, language has the merit of being a means of communication, so that we might be able to speak about and discuss items of some importance with others. Thereby, we reach a new level of constitution in intersubjective thinking about states of affairs in the objective world. It seems to us that only by communication can we reach this level of shared opinions on common topics and make up our mind about notions like fairness, justice, and other important topics that can only be conceived by high-level general concepts. But it seems difficult to reach a decision on this level of generality without going back to the everyday intuitions that guide our actions.

To conclude, we had quite an interesting journey into the deep subjective core of a non-linguistic creature. And in fact, we realized that we humans are quite like this: a big part of our conscious life proceeds in a non-linguistic mode, and a big part of our everyday decision-making rests on the rather strange form of calculation in emotional currencies. I do not tend to interpret this way of deciding as ‘irrational’ (only by following the prejudice that emotions are irrational); it is rather a path of getting back to finding the specific rationality of creatures that are also able to think in non-linguistic modes.

1 Introduction

If you watch a horror movie, walk through a haunted house, or play a horror virtual reality (VR) game, you may experience fear, the sheer amount of which can even-tually cause you to leave the theatre, close your eyes, or stop playing. Although you know that the ‘fictitious’ events will do you no harm (except perhaps the fear they cause), the feeling of fear you may feel in relation to such events does not seem to be inferior in any way to its ‘normal’ counterparts in relation to ‘real’ events.

Following this basic intuition, I argue against the claim that emotions concerning fictional objects or events are not normal emotions, that they are only quasi-emo-tions or the like (e.g. Mulligan 2009; Walton 1978). I will thus argue that emotions towards fictional objects do not differ in principle from emotions concerning actual events or objects. However, I will not argue for this claim directly (by providing a theory of emotions in fictional contexts, for example), but rather by arguing for a distinction between two separate positing modes of ordinary perceptual experience . With reference to Husserl, these positing modesare referred to in the following as the “mode of living presence” ( Modus der Leibhaftigkeit ) and as the “belief mode” ( Seinsglaube or Geltungsmodus ) of perceptual experience. As I will argue, these two modes derive from two different types of what Husserl calls the experience of ‘accor-dance’ ( Einstimmigkeit ) in perception – ‘local accordance’ and ‘global accordance.’2

2 Mode of Living Presence vs. Belief Mode of Certainty

Here is how the account is supposed to work: Perceptual experience of something in the broadest possible sense of the term (which comprises things, events, processes, symbols and situations) normally involves the respective entity to be presented as itself in perception, it has to be given in the ‘mode of living presence’ ( Modus der Leibhaftigkeit ).3 This givenness of something in the mode of living presence is not to be identified, however, with the “existential belief” or “belief mode of certainty” (what Husserl calls Seinsglaube or Modus der Gewißheit) which normally accompa-nies it (EU, 101 [93]).4 In the default mode of perception, what appears in the mode of living presence is without hesitation or reflection tacitly posited in the ‘belief mode of certainty’. If two objects are perceptually given as having different lengths in the mode of living presence, they are normally also posited as having different lengths in the belief mode of certainty. However, mode of living presence and ex-istential belief mode may come apart. You might – if, for example, immersed into a VR environment or if you experience some common perceptual illusion (like a rainbow in the sky) – perceive something in the mode of living presence while at the same time experiencing it in the belief mode of ‘nullity.’ Thus, in cases of known illusion like the Müller-Lyer illusion (or if you suffer from tinnitus, for example) the two positing modes of perceptual experience come apart: What you see (or hear) is not what you, at the same time, perceptually believe to be the case. You see what you see, you hear what you hear, but you do not take what you see or hear at face value.

I will thus argue that we can perceive a certain state of affairs in the mode of liv-ing presence while at the same time holding existential perceptual beliefs that run contrary to what we perceive in the mode of living presence. And I will do so on Husserlian grounds.

But how is the distinction between mode of living presence and belief mode of certainty as distinct positing modes of perceptual experience helpful in showing that emotional responses towards fictional objects or events do not differ in general from ordinary emotional responses? When we, for example, experience fear of a ghost in a haunted house, we do not so much consciously participate in a game of make-believe in which we pretend to believe that the white shape in front of us is a ghost. We do not vividly imagine seeing a ghost, either. We rather – at least in some instances – experience the white shape in front of us as something which might ac- tually harm us , we really do see a ghost (in the mode of living presence), while at the same time holding the existential belief , that the thing that we see and fear is not real- ly a ghost (at least as far as we do not believe in the existence of ghosts).5 Now, expe-riencing something in the mode of living presence is arguably much more immedi-ate than the rather reflective belief or endorsement aspect of perceptual experience: it is much more closely linked to our emotional responses.6 We thus simultaneously really do fear what we see (in the mode of living presence), while we do not perceivewhat we see and fear as ‘real.’

The claim is that the same holds for the experience of ‘fictional’ objects in gen-eral: when experiencing ‘fictional’ objects, characters, events, or states of affairs – through a novel, a film, or a theatre performance – they are often perceived in the mode of living presence, inducing ordinary emotional reactions, while at the same time being perceived in the belief mode of nullity. Thus, while perceiving them in the mode of living presence, subjects do not hold the existential belief that these ob-jects really exist as material objects within the spatio-temporal continuum of their everyday lives. You can watch The Simpsons and fear for Bart’s life because you expe-rience him and his being threatened by Sideshow Bob in the mode of living presence , while at the same time not believing that both of them exist, at least not as beings of flesh and blood like your real-life friends do. You can look at René Magritte’s La trahison des images and not get the joke while at the same time perceiving a pipe in the mode of living presence and not perceptually believing that there really is a pipe that can be plugged, smoked, or thrown away.7 To put this idea somewhat dif-ferently, the proposal is that we should not so much use pretend-play as a paradigm for understanding fictional objects and events, but rather cases of known illusions .

I recognize, however, that the way I am interpreting Husserl concerning the per-ception of movies, images, or theatre runs contrary to Husserl’s own explications concerning the as-if-perception of image objects. However, I will show that the in-terpretation I offer here is in accordance with Husserl’s reflections on the difference between mode of living presence and perceptual belief mode, although it admittedly somewhat runs contrary to Husserl’s own account of image-consciousness and the unique ‘nullity’ of figments.

I will argue for this account by showing that the mode of living presence and the belief mode of perception are linked to two different types of ‘accordance’ ( Einstimmigkeit ) in experience, which Husserl himself does not, at least to my knowledge, explicitly distinguish. On the one hand, there is local accordance , which consists in the perceptual experience of a “concordant transition to new appear-ances” ( einstimmige Überleitung in neue Erscheinungen ) from a certain point of im-pressional “institution” ( Stiftung ) of “a line of harmony [ Einstimmigkeit ] and dis-agreement [ Unstimmigkeit ]” (Hua 11, 37 [76]). If you start to see (something as) a dog (be it on the street or on a screen) a line of local accordance is instituted which delineates an “internal horizon” ( Innenhorizont ) of possible unfoldings of appear-ances which will let you continue to see (what you see as) a dog (EU, 28 [33]). Local accordance can thus be characterized by the unfolding of appearances in agreement with lines of accordance instituted by recent perceptual apprehensions within a certain spatio-temporal episode or domain. On the other hand, there is global accordance , which is characterized by the agreement between sensations and appearances un- folding in local accordance within such an internal horizon with previous and simul-taneous apprehensions concerning the spatio-temporal surroundings – the ‘external horizon’ ( Außenhorizont )  – of this domain . Global accordance thus amounts to the more or less tacit judgement, belief or experience that an apprehended object ap-pearing in perception in local accordance (and thus in the mode of living presence) is also in accordance with its external horizon, the spatio-temporal continuum pre-viously perceived and posited by the subject. If this is the case, the object perceived in the mode of living presence is also posited as ‘real.’

Now, while the perception of something in local accordance manifests itself in the fact that the perceived is given in the mode of living presence , the perception of something in global accordance manifests itself in the fact that the perceived is given in the belief mode of certainty . If newly emerging appearances are in local ac-cordance with previously instituted lines of accordance (which are based on certain apprehensions), the perceived is immediately given in the mode of living presence . If you see a character on a screen and apprehend them as Homer Simpson (or as a dog) and they continue to behave in a Homer Simpson (or dog) like manner, you will perceive Homer Simpson (or a dog) in the mode of living presence . If, on the other hand, a newly emerging appearance is experienced in global accordance with what was previously posited by a subject, the perceived is without any fur-ther or conscious consideration given (or posited) as real in belief mode. If, again,

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However, before we can turn to the further clarification of these two types of accordance, I would like to start with some introductory remarks concerning the notions of ‘perceptual apprehension’ and ‘apperception,’ which I consider crucial to understanding Husserl’s thoughts on accordance , the mode of living presence and the belief mode in perceptual experience.

3 Some Remarks on the Notions of ‘Perceptual Apprehension’ and ‘Apperception’

Understanding what Husserl has in mind when he talks about ‘perceptual appre-hension’ or ‘apperception’ is crucial for what follows. In order to provide such an understanding, however, I would like to take a short detour on a somewhat for-gotten strand of the philosophical history of the notion ‘apperception.’ Husserl himself often uses the notions “apprehension” ( Auffassung ) and “apperception” ( Apperzeption ) interchangeably (see, e.g., EU, 305), he sometimes even combines the two when he talks about “apperceptive apprehension” ( apperzeptive Auffassung ) (Hua 11, 18). In his lecture on Thing and Space (1907), he states that he would prefer “to avoid completely the ambiguous word ‘apperception’; the term ‘apprehension’ suffices, as Stumpf advocated long ago” (TS, 42; Hua 16, 49), although he kept on using both of these notions synonymously in later works. Nevertheless, his use of both notions bears a striking resemblance to the concept of “apperception” as it was first used by Herbart and later taken up and expanded by the psychologists Steinthal and Lazarus (see also Holenstein 1972, 140f.).8

“Apperception” (which stems from the Latin word ad-percipere ), as these authors as well as Husserl use this notion, points to the fact that “there is literally something added to the mere sensual perception , in order to intend an object as something” (Breyer & Gutland 2016, 7). All three authors discussed in the following take ap-perception to mean different variants of the way in which, within perception, there is something added or appresented (e.g. the hidden parts of an object or unseen parts of the building one is in) to that which is ‘properly’ perceived (e.g. the facing side of an object). This is why Husserl occasionally speaks of “improper perception” ( uneigentlicher Wahrnehmung ) (Hua 10, 55) or “co-perception” ( Mitwahrnehmung ) (Hua 1, 150) when it comes to apperception. As we will see, however, Herbart and Lazarus take apperception to describe a process on a subpersonal, unconscious level underlying perception, while Husserl’s conception of apperception focusses on a phenomenologically descriptive aspect of perceptual experience itself.

Herbart illustrates his conception of apperception in the second volume of his Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1825) with a simple example: when we ordinarily think about “different places and occupations,” we associatively represent further thoughts and ideas that seem to belong to these places or occupations: “[f]or exam-ple, the church, the theatre, the office, the garden, the chessboard, the card game, etc. One will immediately notice that each of these entities corresponds to its own complex of ideas” (Herbart 1825, 213).9 According to Herbart, ideas form associa-tive complexes in consciousness that seem to belong together due to past experienc-es of their spatial or temporal contiguity. In Herbart’s case, apperception refers to the fact that the ideas ( Vorstellungen ) of external perception, of the “external sense,” are grasped or understood by means of such “complexes of ideas” ( Vorstellungsmassen ) already sedimented in the subject:

Herbart describes the process of apperception as a process taking place on a subper-sonal level within the subject, in which complexes of ideas are conceived by other com- plexes of ideas . He therefore distinguishes between “apperceiving” ( appercipirender ) and “apperceived” ( appercipirter ) complexes of ideas (ibid., 215). Apperception thus refers to the way in which present perceptual ideas ( Wahrnehmungsvorstellungen ) are understood and processed through the background of sedimented experiences of the subject. In this sense, apperception denotes a “sensualistic-associationist pro-cess of assimilation” of the present to the past (Holenstein 1972, 135). Perceptual ideas are directly conceived against the background of similar past ideas, provided that the current sensations and ideas show sufficient similarity to older complexes of ideas.10 Apperception thus fulfils an “interpretive function” ( Deutungsfunktion ) (ibid., 140). Herbart (1825, 216) therefore distinguishes between perception and ap- perception , whereby the former “always precedes apperception,” while “the latter is what remains” in consciousness.

For Herbart, expectation and anticipation, which will prove central to the view advocated here, are connected with apperception in that perceptual sensations and ideas awaken or highlight probable courses of further perceptual sensations and ideas that could follow and continue current sensations, based on usual sequences of ideas throughout previous experiences (see also Poljanšek 2015). According to Herbart (1825, 215), every “new perception [ Wahrnehmung ], even with the greatest strength of the current percept [ Auffassung ],” must “accept being drawn into the already existing connections and movements of the older ideas.” (Ap)perception thus always takes place against the background of previous experiences sedimented in complexes of ideas, through which current perceptual ideas are then apperceived.

Lazarus (1878, 41), who takes up Herbart’s thoughts on apperception, likewise distinguishes between perception and apperception with regard to the “psychic” pro-cess of the “perception of the outside world” ( Auffassung der Außenwelt ). In a letter to his friend Paul Heye, Lazarus illustrates his conception of apperception with re-gard to a picture of himself that he attached to the letter:

For Lazarus also, both perception and apperception are separate processes ‘in the whole of a sensory perception.’ However, “for the ordinary consciousness of expe-rience [ das einfache Bewußtsein der Erfahrung ]” they prove to be “completely indis-tinguishable” (Lazarus 1878, 41): in “the real world of psychic phenomena, every perception […] is at the same time an apperception” (ibid., 42).

Thus, with regard to external experience, the “previously acquired content” turns out to be “a participating organ of the soul,” while the “pure perception by the soul that is not filled with any content” proves to be “a mere abstraction that hardly has any reality in the newborn child” (ibid.). There is never, according to Lazarus, some-thing like pure uninterpreted sensory content in perceptual experience. Common perception of a concrete object thus culminates in the fact that we “recognize” ( erkennen ) the perceived object,

Apperception here thus refers to the immediate perception or understanding of an object through a general type or idea , which manifests itself in the perceptual struc-ture of something-as-something. It is “hardly necessary first to remind” the reader, Lazarus adds, that “this inner process takes place unconsciously and involuntarily,” whereby the “emergence of the present image [ Bild ] itself (perception), according to the whole type and form [ Art und Gestalt ] given to it, is dependent on the earlier image coming from within, which we have already possessed” (ibid.). Apperception thus informs the very structure of what is given as phenomenal content in per-ception, it does not name some additional predicative judgement that is added or applied to some pure or uninterpreted sensory content.

One of the most important ways in which apperception or apprehension informs the phenomenal and sensory content of perception is by highlighting and appresent- ing specific horizons of typical anticipations and expectations , which determine what the perceived is perceived as (see also Poljanšek 2015). Apperception of something as a thing of a certain type goes along with the institution of “a line of harmony [ Einstimmigkeit ] and disagreement [ Unstimmigkeit ]” concerning further percep-tion (Hua 23, 565 [681]). If I see something as a dog , not only do I, without any conscious consideration, appresent in perception visually hidden parts of the dog, I also appresent typical ways a dog is likely to behave.11 The same goes for event types (like greetings or conversations) or types of situations (like birthdays or funerals). If this analysis turns out to be true, to see something as a thing of a certain type means in the first place to appresent such type-specific horizons of expectations, without necessarily involving any perceptual judgement or propositional content in percep-tual experience.

Now, for Lazarus, the ‘best known and most striking example’ of the necessary influence of apperception on the constitution of the objects of immediate percep-tion is reading.

Among other examples concerning the way in which unclearly uttered words are apperceptively supplemented or “intensified” into familiar ones, Lazarus empha-sizes that apperception is closely related to expectation in that the latter represents a “readiness for apperception” (ibid., 51). If a corresponding expectation triggered or instituted by a certain previous apperception is disappointed, “then obviously a negation of the subjective (apperceiving) idea [ Vorstellung ] becomes necessary”; a new apperception has to take place on the basis of the experience that contradicted previous expectations (ibid., 51f.).

The assumption of such a connection between expectation and apperception now offers us the opportunity to turn to Husserl’s conception of apperception or apprehension.12 For Husserl, apprehension is a characteristic feature that de-scribes “at bottom absolutely every perception, indeed every evidence, […] in respect of a most general feature” (Hua 1, 151 [122]). Apprehension presupposes a “core of presentation,” it is a “making present combined by associations with presentation, with perception proper, but a making present that is fused with the latter in the particular function of ‘co-perception’ [ Mitwahrnehmung ]” (ibid., 150 [122]). In every perceptual apprehension of something we can thus phe-nomenally distinguish a perceptual core that is presented as actual (e.g. the facing side of an object) from an internal horizon of co-perceived or appresented spatial and temporal parts of what is perceived that is presented as virtual or ‘empty’ (e.g. hidden spatial parts of the object or horizons of likely or probable possibilities). Now, both of these, the core that is presented as actual and the horizon that is presented as empty, are “so fused that they stand in the functional community of one perception ” (ibid.). Therefore, in every perception of an object “making its appearance in the mode, itself-there,” (what Husserl on other occasions calls the mode of living presence ), the “genuinely perceived” can phenomenally be dis-tinguished from the “rest [ Überschuss ], which is not strictly perceived and yet is indeed there too” (ibid., 151). However, co-perception does not end with the appresentation of spatial and temporal parts of the object perceived (its ‘internal horizon’), it also includes the appresentation of its surroundings (its ‘external horizon’).

There is thus a close connection between this general structure of perceptual apprehension (or apperception) and what the perceived is perceived as . Husserl’s crucial idea, the roots of which can be traced back to Herbart’s and Lazarus’ concep-tion of apperception, is that, on the one hand, the apprehension or apperception of some sensory content interprets this content as the genuinely perceived core of what is perceived (the facing side of a living being, a flower, etc.), and that, on the other hand, apperception thus essentially informs the appresented, co-perceived spatial and temporal parts of the perceived entity itself. Apperception adds, so to say, the specific internal horizon that surrounds and supplements the genuinely perceived core of the perceived.

The main difference between Husserl’s conception of apprehension and Herbart’s and Lazarus’s conception of apperception is, then, that Husserl does not take ap-perception to name some “obscure, hypothetical events in the soul’s unconscious depths, or in the sphere of physiological happenings” (Hua 19/1, 399 [105]). For him, apperception is rather a phenomenologically descriptive aspect of perceptual experience itself.

For the following, however, the most important aspect of apperception in Husserl’s sense lies in its close connectedness to the formation of specific horizons of expec-tations, anticipations and co-presentation according to the specific ‘type’ through which it is mediated.13

The apperception of some sensory content through a specific type thus indicates (and institutes) possible routes of continually experiencing the same something (the same melody, the same dog, the same person) in local accordance and thus, as I will argue in the next section, in the mode of living presence .

However, apperception does not only add the internal horizon of the perceived, it also adds external horizons concerning its surroundings in different degrees of clari-ty and distinctness. Apperception thus not only concerns the appresentation of parts of the perceived itself (which belong to its internal horizon), it further extends to the Thus, what is given in perception in the mode of living presence is always supple-mented with a “domain of this intuitionally clear or obscure, distinct or indistinct, co-present [ Mitgegenwärtigen ] – which makes up a constant halo around the field of actual perception [ einen beständigen Umring des aktuellen Wahrnehmungsfeldes ausmacht ] ” (ibid.). And it doesn’t stop there: this appresented co-present itself is, again, “penetrated and surrounded by an obscurely intended to horizon of indeter- minate actuality ” into which “rays of the illuminative regard of attention [ Strahlen des aufhellenden Blickes der Aufmerksamkeit ]” can be sent by the perceiving subject (ibid.). We can thus discriminate between three phenomenological layers of per-ception (1) the field of actual perception (which comprises the genuinely perceived core as well as the co-perceived internal horizon of the perceived) (2) the domain of the intuitionally given co-present surrounding this field and (3) the obscurely in- tended horizon of indeterminate actuality . Phenomenologically speaking, we find the field of current perception enveloped by co-perceived layers of apprehensions, which are again enveloped by an obscurely intended horizon of indeterminate actuality.

If we apply this distinction to the concept of global accordance in perception, we can see that global accordance (or discordance) concerning the field of actual perception and its relation to a certain layer of the intuitionally given co-present can be immediately experienced (as far as they both are intuitionally given). While, on the other hand, the question whether the field of actual perception is in global accordance with the obscurely intended horizon of indeterminate actuality seems to involve a rather reflective or cognitive judgement (insofar as this horizon is not intuitionally, but only obscurely intended).

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4 From Certainty to Doubt and Back to Certainty Again: Mode of Living Presence and Local Accordance in Perceptual Apprehension

In a short note from 1909, Husserl grapples with the different “modifications of be-lieving” that are involved in the phenomena of (perceptual) “belief (certainty),” in-clination, and doubt. In a first step, he distinguishes between uncontested “normal perception,” where “[t]he mode is that of certainty” and “[d]oubting apprehension,” which he exemplifies in the following passage:

While in “normal, univocal perception, i.e., in perception running its course con-cordantly” the intentional object is presented “as being there in a straightforward manner” ([ sofern das ] leibhaftig Erscheinende […] in der normalen, einsinnig, also einstimmig verlaufenden Wahrnehmung, eben als schlechthin-da bewußt ist ), in doubting apprehension the object “is now given to us as questionable, as dubious, as contentious” (Hua 11, 35f. [74]). Normal perception “has the primordial mode […] [of] naïve certainty. The appearing object is there in uncontested and unbroken certainty” (ibid., 36 [75]). Thus, normal perception has the “entirely original, en-tirely unmodified mode of certain validity; the straightforward constitution of the perceptual object is carried out univocally [ einstimmig ] in this mode, and without struggle” (ibid., 37 [76]). This is why Husserl can say that “[b]elief is not something appended to presentations, not a feeling associating itself with them, not a way of be-ing affected, now present, now absent […], it is the unmodified consciousness itself ” (Hua 23, 558 [670]). In ordinary concordantly unfolding perception, there is thus no doubt for the perceiving subject to “carry out the unbroken thesis: ‘It is so’” (Hua 11, 44 [84]). Doubting apprehension , on the other hand, is characterized by two or

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Husserl often exemplifies the specific belief mode of doubting apprehension with an example he first uses in his Logical Investigations :

After we have realized that we have been tricked, we “experience a perfectly good percept” again, we see a waxwork figure. Nevertheless, between these two states of perception in the mode of certainty, we often experience an episode of doubting apprehension (EU, 99 [92]). Two different “perceptual interpretations” – the percep-tion of a lady and that of a waxwork figure – “interpenetrate in conflicting fashion, so that our observation wanders from one to another of the apparent objects each barring the other from existence ” (Hua 19/1, 458 [138, my emphasis]). In cases of doubting apprehension, we experience, as Husserl puts it, two diverging “inclina-tions of belief” ( Glaubensneigungen ) (EU, 103 [95]) at once. What occurs when we begin to see the waxwork figure or mannequin in addition to seeing a human being is thus “not a radical break in the form of a decisive disappointment,” “not a conflict of an anticipatory intention with a newly emerging perceptual appearance, resulting in the cancellation of the first [the perception of a human being]” (EU, 99f. [92]). That is to say, the two instituted lines of local accordance (seeing a charming lady and seeing a waxwork figure) both remain intact as far as they are not contested by newly emerging appearances. What rather happens is that the “full concrete content in the actual appearance now obtains all at once a second content, which slips over it” (EU, 100 [92]):

Now, Husserl seems somewhat indecisive concerning the question of whether this kind of doubting perception is to be adequately construed as a “ double perception ” (EU, 100 [93]), meaning that we would experience two perceptual apprehensions (or interpretations) at the same time . The description cited above seems to imply that, at least in a certain sense, this is indeed the case as far as the two apprehensions are ‘superimposed on each other’ and neither of the two ‘is canceled out.’ “And yet not really two [perceptions], for their conflict [ Widerstreit ] also implies a certain reciprocal displacement [ gewisse wechselseitige Verdrängung ]” (EU, 100 [93]).

How is this supposed conflict to be resolved? In order to understand the nature of doubting apprehension we have to take into account Husserl’s distinction between “mode of living presence” ( Modus der Leibhaftigkeit ) and “mode of being” or “belief mode” ( Seins- oder Geltungsmodus ) of perceptual experience (EU, 101 [93]).14 As we have seen before, in ordinary, univocal perception, “what appears stands there as being [ als Seiendes ]; it counts as actual [ es gilt als wirklich ]” (Hua 16, 151 [126]). Yet, the “essential core of the phenomenon, which we call appearance, can be pre-served even though this character of belief is lacking” (Hua 16, 151 [126]). But what remains of a perceptual apprehension when the character of belief is lacking? What is appearance without (existential) belief? Let’s focus once again on the moment when “the apperception of human being suddenly changes into the apperception of wax figure”: first, “the human being will stand there […] in its presentation in the flesh, and then a wax figure [ zuerst [steht] der Mensch in Leibhaftigkeit da, und das andere Mal eine Puppe ]” (Hua 11, 35 [74]).15 Once such a shift of apperceptions has occurred, the “mode of consciousness has altered, although the objective sense and its modes of appearance, now as before, has the mode of being presented in the flesh [ Modus der Leibhaftigkeit ]” (Hua 11, 35 [74]). That means that appearances of an objective sense can retain the mode of living presence while the belief mode is altered to that of doubt.

We can now see that in univocal perception of an object, the mode of living presence and the belief mode are indistinguishably interwoven, “one is conscious of it in the originary mode […] of actuality ‘in person,’ [ in dem Ursprungsmodus […] der leibhaftigen Wirklichkeit ] or, more precisely, of primal actuality ‘in person,’ [ der leibhaftigen Urwirklichkeit ] which is called the present” (Hua 23, 500 [601]).16However, according to Husserl, consciousness “which presents its object originally [sic] [ originär ] and in person [ leibhaft ] not only has the mode of living presence […]; it also has a variable mode of being or validity ” (EU, 101 [93]). Thus, although the perceiving subject does not consciously distinguish between mode of living presence and belief mode of certainty in the mode of primal actuality ‘in person,’ we can nev-ertheless – as far as they both may come apart – distinguish these two aspects: the mode of living presence , through which the object in question is given as appearance ‘in person , ’ and the belief mode , through which the object is posited as being real or actual . To perceive something in the mode of living presence then amounts to ap-prehensively experiencing it as being there ‘in person,’ which, according to Husserl, further implies a certain inclination to believe in the existence of this something. In other words, to perceptually perceive something in the mode of living presence implies having a certain apprehension concerning a current complex of sense data as its foundation, while the further unfolding of sense data doesn’t contest the line of accordance instituted by the apprehension in question.

Now it also becomes clear how the experience of something (some “objective sense” or appearance) in the mode of living presence is linked with the phenom-enon of local accordance . If a perceptual “impression” is apperceived through a certain type (e.g. as a human being) – or, as Husserl sometimes puts it, with “the institution [ Stiftung ] of an objective sense” – “a line of harmony [ Einstimmigkeit ] and disagreement [ Unstimmigkeit ] is instituted” (Hua 23, 565 [681]). That is to say, when perceptual experience unfolds along the line of accordance instituted by a specific perceptual apprehension, the objective sense (e.g. a human being) will be given in the mode of living presence, regardless of the belief mode in which it is given. Local accordance thus amounts to the unfolding of perception along the line of accordance instituted by a certain apprehension.

Now, according to Husserl, “normal perception” is characterized by the fact that within it “only one sense” is constituted “in unanimity [ in Einstimmigkeit ]” (EU, 101 [93]). In normal perception we thus simply believe in what is perceptually giv-en to us (in the mode of living presence). What is perceived in the mode of living presence is without hesitation posited as real in belief mode, because no simultane-ously contesting apprehension and thus inclination of belief is perceptually given. If a bifurcation of contesting apprehensions emerges in perception, however, like in Husserl’s examples of the waxwork figure or mannequin, we experience interpene- trating apprehensions in the mode of living presence with conflicting inclinations of belief , which thus leads to perception in the belief mode of doubt . In doubting ap-prehension, we experience two (or more) apprehensions in the mode of living pres- ence at the same time (or, at least, one after the other), while the belief mode of our perception is that of doubt , because the diverging inclinations of belief going hand in hand with these two apprehensions (experienced in the mode of living presence ) cannot, supposedly, be underwritten by the subject at the same time.

Thus, the supposed conflict concerning the question of double perception seems to be resolved by the distinction of mode of living presence and belief mode . Husserl seems to admit that we can experience two diverging apprehensions in the mode of living presence at the same time (and without conflict) while these two apprehen-sions cannot be given in perception in the belief mode of certainty without conflict at the same time. Why is that so? Concerning the question of local accordance in ex-perience, there is prima facie no reason why a subject should not have two (or more) apprehensions concerning ‘a common stock of sensations’ in the mode of living presence at the same time, as far as the further succession of perceptions allows for them to be experienced in local accordance. An everyday example of this phenom-enon is ambiguous verbal allusion, in which two different senses are expressed and grasped simultaneously without any conflict.17

This interpretation of the mode of living presence is further supported by the following passage, in which Husserl describes a situation in which the subject has already convinced herself that she has been tricked by a waxwork figure (which she now perceives in the belief mode of certainty), but still somehow sees the lady she perceived before in (or through) the waxwork figure. However, the lady is now per-ceptually given both in the mode of living presence and in the belief mode of invalidity ( nullity or unbelief ).

It thus seems as if experiencing something in the mode of living presence is in itself somehow positional, i.e. suggesting the positing of the experienced object or state of affairs as existing or holding, without the subject necessarily subscribing (in belief mode) to this existential suggestion. “The sense itself has the propensity to be” (Hua 11, 42 [82]). That explains why Husserl often talks about the subject having to make some kind of “decision” concerning diverging inclinations of belief in perception (see, e.g., EU, 103 [95]), while in normal uncontested perception, the existential suggestion implied by the perception of something in the mode of living presence is immediately and without any hesitation underwritten by the subject (Hua 11, 36 [75]).

A question that remains concerns the relation between belief mode of certainty (or ‘mode of being’) and the experience of global accordance in perception . As already indicated at the beginning, Husserl does not explicitly distinguish between local ac-cordance and global accordance. He sometimes even seems to define belief simply as “consciousness of harmony [ Einstimmigkeit ]; unbelief as consciousness of what conflicts with the harmony and is annulled by it” (Hua 23, 565 [681]). But what exactly does the belief mode of certainty have to do with the experience of global accordance?

5 Belief Mode of Certainty and Global Accordance in Perceptual Apprehension

Throughout his intellectual life, Husserl hovered between the idea that “existential belief” ( Seinsglaube ) should be conceptualized as a “specific, separable moment” of perception and the idea that it is rather to be conceptualized as an (inseparable) “mode” of perception (Hua 23, 220 [269]; see also Ni 1999, 29). As was already stat-ed above, Husserl held the idea that “naïve perception […] is simply a consciousness of the perceptual object” (Hua 11, 228 [361]). In normal, uncontested perception, the subject “will grasp the object simpliciter ,” so that “objective sense” ( gegenständli- cher Sinn ) and “mode of being [ Seinsmodus ] are not distinguished at all for con-sciousness” (Hua 11, 228 [361]).

As I hope has become clear from the previous discussion, the experience of accordance or discordance plays a crucial role when it comes to both – the mode of living presence as well as the belief mode of perceptual experience. As we have seen, whether some objective sense is experienced in the mode of living pres-ence is determined by whether the unfolding course of perception lies within the apperceived horizons of expectations and anticipations instituted by a certain apprehension (i.e. whether perceptual experience continues in local accordance with a certain apprehension of what the perceived is perceived as ). Local accor- dance thus names a rather internal relation between a recent apprehension and the further course of perceptual experience. It concerns the internal horizon of an object.18

The remaining question is what kind of accordance relation is responsible for the belief mode of perceptual experience. According to Husserl, the “ positing of certainty [ Gewissheitssetzung ] that is inherent in perception” is “related to a nexus [ Zusammenhang ], and accordingly to an apprehension that posits what appears in a wider context [ Zusammenhang ]” (Hua 23, 215 [264], my emphasis). The posit- ing of certainty that Husserl has in mind here clearly refers to the “general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude” ( Generalthesis der natürlichen Einstellung ), which is “put out of action” in what Husserl calls epoché (Hua 3/1, 65 [61]).19 It thus concerns the relation of the perceptual apprehension of a cer-tain stock of sensations unfolding (in local accordance) within a certain frame and the previous and simultaneous apprehensions concerning the surroundings of this frame. Husserl thinks that a second apprehension, which goes beyond the percep-tual apprehension of a certain stock of sensations unfolding in local accordance, comes into play with regard to this positing or mode of certainty. This further ap-prehension ‘posits what appears,’ i.e. the objective sense given in processual accor-dance, ‘in a wider context.’

As we have already seen above, Husserl sometimes tends to conceptualize the thesis or positing of the ‘It is so’ that belongs to the belief mode of certain-ty as a separate step, which succeeds the experience of an appearance (or objec-tive sense) in the mode of living presence, but is nevertheless performed without hesitation in univocal perception. The important question remains, however: what is “coherence [ Zusammenhang ] (naturally, objective coherence among af-fairs [ sachlicher Zusammenhang ], but what is that?), and what is incoherence [ Zusammenhanglosigkeit ]?” (Hua 23, 150f. [179]). Here is Husserl’s answer:

We can now see more clearly why we have to distinguish between local accordance, which is a relation between appearances of the same apperceived object, and global accordance , which is a relation between an object given in the mode of living pres-ence and its spatio-temporal surroundings. While local accordance only concerns what’s happening inside a certain perceptual frame or domain, global accordance concerns the relation between what is happening inside a certain frame and its sur-roundings. Now, the previous distinction of three layers of what is intentionally given in perception (the field of actual perception, the apperceived co-present and the obscurely intended horizon of indefinite actuality) allows for an even more fine-grained clarification of the concept of global accordance. There is, first, an experi- ential part of global accordance, which concerns the relation between the field of actual perception and layers of the intuitionally given co-present. Secondly, there is also a rather cognitive part of global accordance, which involves a kind of judgement concerning the question whether what is intuitionally given in perception fits into the world as the subject already knows it.

The proposal is thus that, in contrast to local accordance which is determined by the ‘internal’ unfolding of perceptual experience from a starting point of im-pressional institution along the instituted line of accordance, global accordance is determined by the (somewhat ‘external’) relation between the perceptual appre-hension in question, on the one hand, and layers of simultaneous as well as pre-vious perceptual apprehensions concerning its surrounding, on the other. Global accordance thus concerns the relation between the internal and external horizon of the perceived; it addresses the question whether a given perceptual apprehen-sion – and especially the inclination of belief that goes along with it – fits into the web of previous and simultaneous perceptual apprehensions that manifests itself in the tacit positing and co-perception of a spatio-temporal system of a uniform ‘world’ or ‘reality.’

If this interpretation is correct, the possible modifications of the belief mode in perception are to be explained in terms of the relation between a current perceptual apprehension and further perceptual apprehensions which were either previously experienced – and therefore have been “posited with a legitimacy derived from ex- perience ”(Hua 3/1, 97 [102]) – by the subject, or apprehensions which the subject apperceives simultaneously. If a subject perceives something in the mode of living presence that is fundamentally discordant with previous and/or simultaneous per-ceptual apprehensions, this something is ‘annulled,’ that is to say, given to the sub-ject in the belief mode of invalidity, nullity, or unbelief (relative to the co-perceived layer or frame in question).

To use a common example: a major phenomenological difference between a video call with a close friend living on the other side of the world and the

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6 Husserl’s Distinction of Three Types of Annulment in Perception

Husserl distinguishes three main possibilities of how such an annulment can take place in perception – immediate annulment , ex post annulment ,and fictional annul- ment in the case of ‘perceptual figments.’ The first possibility is defined by situations where a “perceptual apprehension conflicts with the perceptual apprehensions of the ‘surroundings.’ The latter hold their own as impressional perceptions, and the former perceptual apprehension is ‘annulled’ [ aufgehoben ]” (Hua 23, 222 [271]). Think of the example where someone continues to see a lady in a wax figure “as a fiction, with a full-blooded appearance which yet amounts to nothing” (Hua 19/1, 460 [138]). Other examples Husserl uses to illustrate this case are stereoscopic images, mirror images, rainbows, or the blue sky (see Hua 23, 590). These are all examples of local accordance with global discordance, as far as the perceptual apprehensions themselves are in local accordance, while their positing as real would conflict with their surroundings (we see the rainbow in the mode of living presence, however, we know that it does not really exist as a physical thing within the spatio-temporal continuum we inhabit).

The second possibility is that of ex post annulment of previous apprehensions like in the two cases of the perception of a waxwork figure or a mannequin that were already discussed above:

In this sense, “whatever is there for me in the world of physical things [ Dingwelt ] is necessarily only a presumptive actuality [ nur präsumptive Wirklichkeit ],” awaiting possible annulment (Hua 1, 93 [58]).

Finally, the third possibility concerns the specific annulment that is linked to the experience of fictional objects, like in the case of image perception. To understand this case, we have to turn to Husserl’s distinction between “physical image thing, the image object, and the image subject” (Hua 23, 489 [584]). The physical image thing is simply the spatio-temporal object, experienced in the mode of living presence and in the belief mode of certainty, on which an image is depicted. Now, the image object or ‘image appearance’ is the perceptual apprehension (mediated by types) which we experience when looking at an image. We might, for example, experience the per-ceptual apprehension of a tiny, grey human being or a horse when we look at a black and white photograph or a coin. The image subject, finally, is the scene represented through the image object. It “need not appear; and if it does appear, we have a phan-tasy or memory” (Hua 23, 489 [584]). The image subject appears when we “live in the image consciousness;” we then “see the subject in the image object; the latter is what directly and genuinely appears” (Hua 23, 44 [48]). Now, Husserl thinks of these three as a constitutional or foundational cascade: “below everything else, the sensu-ous sensations undergo a perceptual apprehension by means of which the physical image becomes constituted […], in a second step, a new perceptual apprehension is grounded on the first apprehension [and] the image object” is constituted, and the image subject, finally, is founded in this image object (Hua 23, 44 [48]).

Now, according to Husserl, the annulment of the image object takes place on two separate levels. On the first level, there is a conflict between the apprehension of the image object and the apprehension of the image thing:

These two apprehensions “certainly cannot exist at once: they cannot make two ap-pearances stand out simultaneously” (ibid.); like in the cases of doubting apprehen-sion discussed above, two appearances and thus two inclinations of belief seem to

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However, image objects are also, as Husserl claims, “anomalous appearances” (Hua 23, 488 [582]). What makes image objects anomalous? Husserl argues that besides the global discordance between image object and its surroundings there is also in-ner (local?) discordance, another “conflict” involved in the constitution of the image object which characterizes it as a “figment” [ Fiktum ]; He even claims that the image object “is of a type that cannot support the positing of reality [ Wirklichkeitssetzung nicht verträgt ];”

The claim is thus that image objects are not only annulled with respect to their discordance with their surroundings, they are also annulled in themselves because they instantiate certain features that are in conflict with the type or idea that guides their apprehension. Human beings, for instance, are normally not white like plaster or only 7 inches tall. (But what if a real human being standing in front of us were white like plaster or only 7 inches tall? Would we really experience it as annulled? Wouldn’t we perceive it in the mode of living presence and in the belief mode of cer- tainty ? And wouldn’t we even perceive it as an (anomalous) human being ?) The same holds, as Husserl claims, for the case of a play, although “it certainly seems to be otherwise:”

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This is what, at least according to Husserl, distinguishes image objects from cases of known illusion, as far as the latter is “something harmonious in itself that is an-nulled by the surrounding reality,” while image objects are “annulled in themselves” (Hua 23, 490 [585]). Husserl therefore speaks of the “image figment” as “a nullity of a unique type. It is [not] an appearance with the characteristic of annulled positing, but an appearance annulled in itself” (Hua 23, 491 [586]).

Now, the main reason why Husserl insists that there is a unique kind of nullity or annulment involved in the perception of figments which goes beyond the annul-ment by global discordance, his insistence on the idea that “the image must be clear- ly set apart from reality; that is, set apart in a purely intuitive way, without any assis-tance from indirect thoughts” seems to lie in his belief that image consciousness is “the essential foundation for the possibility of aesthetic feeling in fine art” and that “[a]esthetic effects are not the effects of annual fairs [ nicht Jahrmarktseffekte ]” (Hua 23, 41 [44]).

However, I do not belief that Husserl’s conception of an aesthetic ‘nullity of a unique type’ which is based on an annulment in itself is sound as it stands; I would rather argue that annulment by global discordance between what is apprehended in local accordance and its surrounding is sufficient to explain the case of image perception, too. Think of the video call example again: if one accepts the phenome-nological description that it is possible to experience another person in the mode of living presence and the belief mode of certainty through the mediation of a screen (or a loudspeaker)  – which is a question of phenomenological observation that should not be tainted by theoretical considerations or convictions –, there seems to be no possibility left for a specific annulment in itself which distinguishes the case

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Now, this last thought allows for an important clarification concerning the expe-riential part of the belief mode of certainty; and I want to introduce this clarification with the following passage in which Husserl seems to imagine some kind of VR experience avant la lettre :

Based on our previous considerations, the questions Husserl asks in this paragraph can be answered as follows: The phantasy world he describes would be perceived in the mode of living presence insofar as it unfolds in local accordance. Thus, if we would watch a movie in this phantasy world, the movie would also be perceived in the mode of living presence, however, in the belief mode of nullity with regard to the phantasy world which surrounds it, insofar as the relation of the movie and the phantasy world surrounding it is that of global discordance. And the phantasy world itself? If we were – in a Matrix like scenario – able to ‘enter’ and ‘leave’ this phantasy world through some kind of portal or gate, we would experience it in the belief mode of nullity with regard to the spatio-temporal continuum we otherwise inhabit. However, if these considerations are sound, wouldn’t we also experience the spatio-temporal continuum we otherwise inhabit in the belief mode of nullity with regard to the phantasy world? I think this would indeed be the case, insofar as the belief mode of certainty or nullity is always relative to a certain world (understood as a coherent frame or layer of simultaneous and previous apprehensions).

7 Seeing Ghosts: Closing Remarks

Now, instead of further discussing Husserl’s considerations concerning the unique type of nullity which he claims to be involved in image perception, how this type of nullity is linked to what he calls ‘neutrality modification’ ( Neutralitätsmodifikation ) and the phenomenon of phantasy and as-if-perception (for these topics see espe-cially Ferencz-Flatz 2009 and Wiesing 2011), I would like to conclude the paper by proposing a rather straightforward explanation of the perception of fictional objects and events. An explanation, however, which – although it was rejected by Husserl himself – is nevertheless based on Husserlian ideas as far as it derives from his own distinction between mode of living presence and belief mode and their connection to local and global accordance concerning perceptual apprehension.

The idea is simple: when we perceive fictional objects or events, what happens on a rather basic level of perception is that we immediately apprehend certain stocks of impressional sensations through certain types (which stem from previously sed-imented experience).23 These apprehensions go along with the institution of lines of local accordance, which – if no discordant sensations occur – lead us to experience the perceived in the mode of living presence. If we watch a video on the internet, for example, we can focus on the scene depicted within the frame and immediately ap-prehend the objects and events taking place in the mode of living presence without having to pay attention to the screen as a physical image thing and our actual spa-tio-temporal surrounding co-presented in perception (e.g. the room we are watch-ing the video in). Now, as we have seen, the belief mode of perceptual experience derives from global accordance between a given perceptual apprehension and oth-er previous as well as simultaneous perceptual apprehensions of a spatio-temporal continuum. So if we take or experience what is depicted on the screen to be in global accordance with the spatio-temporal world we know from past experience, it will be perceived in the belief mode of certainty (like in the case of watching a live video of a protest nearby on the smartphone).

Concerning their belief mode, fictional objects are given in the mode of unbelief or nullity, at least as far as the previous and simultaneous perceptual apprehensions of the spatio-temporal continuum outside the frame are discordant with what is going on in-side the frame. This, however, seems to be the main reason why in most cases where people consciously experience fictional objects or events, the surroundings (and the apprehensions that go along with them) are occluded or faded out as much as possible. The aim of such occlusions is to draw the attention away from the concurrent appre-hensions and co-perceptions of the ‘world outside’ (and the global discordance which comes along with them) in order to allow for an immersive experience in the mode of living presence deriving from the local accordance of what is depicted within the frame.24 “I can contemplate a semblance object without paying attention to my unbelief. For example, I follow the actions, and so forth, of a character on the stage. Or the move-ments of the ghost, its meaningful gestures, and so on” (Hua 23, 279 [338]).25 However, the more the apprehensions concerning the ‘world outside’ (the movie theatre, etc.) fade and recede into the background of our attention and the stronger the apprehensions and co-perceptions of the surroundings of the ‘fictional world’ itself become, the more the events depicted might not only be experienced in the mode of living presence, but also in the belief mode of certainty (relative to the co-presented world of fiction; however, not relative to the co-presented ‘real’ surrounding).

By focusing on the impressionally instituted lines of local accordance as well as their co-perceived fictional surroundings, and by occluding the simultaneous perceptual apprehensions of the real situation surrounding the subject, the objects and events within a frame come to life. Yet, the subject never totally loses sight of the distinc-tion between reality and fiction concerning the cognitive aspect of the belief mode of experience, at least under normal circumstances and as long as it, and even if only obscurely, somehow appresents the spatio-temporal continuum of the ‘real’ world. While we consciously experience fictional objects and events in the mode of living presence, we nevertheless immediately know that what we are experiencing is “not really” happening, at least not within the spatio-temporal realm which we otherwise inhabit. However, with the occlusion of the surroundings, this distinction itself fades into the background of that which is perceived and co-perceived in the mode of living presence. We can immediately – and without any pretence or as-if-perception being involved – see and fear the ghost in the haunted house in the mode of living presence while knowing at the same time that what we see and fear is not really a ghost.26

1 Images and Belief

According to Husserl (1997, § 5), the notion of belief plays a primary role in the constitution of perception in “flesh and blood,” where the concrete object is per-ceived in the sense that it is “ wahr-genommen ,” that is, “taken-as-true, as real.” Conversely, as we shall see, an image is never “perceived” ( wahr-genommen ) in it-self, properly speaking: it is merely a “ figment , an illusory object ” (Husserl 2005, 52). Notwithstanding this point, I aim to shed light on the pivotal role belief assumes in the experience of filmic images claiming to represent reality.

In the third part of the 1904/05 Göttingen course on “Principal Parts of the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge” (ibid., 1–108), Husserl introduces his famous tripartition concerning the structure of image consciousness, which distin-guishes between: (1) the “image-thing” ( Bildding ), that is, “the physical image, the physical thing made from canvas, marble, and so on”; (2) “the ‘representing image’ or ‘image object’” ( Bildobjekt ), that is, “the representing or depicting object”; and (3) the “‘ image subject ’” ( Bildsujet ), that is, “the represented or depicted object” (ibid., 21).

According to such an analysis, the question of the ontological status of images seems to concern the image object in particular. In fact, the ‘image thing’ made of

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From this point of view, one might say that the depictive image puts the subject at a certain ontological distance (even in the case of close-up images), in the specific sense that it is never there where it appears: it manifests itself in absentia . From this perspective, filmic images, like other physical images, do not show perceptual objects: what appears on the screen are in themselves images and not things ‘in the flesh,’ ‘in person.’ Properly speaking, we could not touch the objects on the screen even if we wanted to – they are intangible objects, exclusively visual in nature. They are not inserted into the material flux of the actuality surrounding us (images as things exist, not the image objects manifesting themselves on their surface). There is a conflict ( Widerstreit ) between the iconic objects emerging in the peculiar space manifesting itself on a screen and the actual objects surrounding the screen (includ-ing the screen itself as a ‘thing’).6 In other words, if someone on screen spills milk, no one worries about stains on the movie theatre floor. We cannot grasp the objects we see on screen and share them with the people around us, because image objects within the screen space do not pertain to the domain of perception.

This, of course, bears upon the nature of the act of viewing. When viewing these images, what type of experience are we living? We know that an image of a knife on a screen cannot physically hurt us; it is merely an image object showing a knife. On the one hand, we can affirm that we see a knife (image subject) in the ‘cine-matographic depictive image.’7 On the other hand, this seeing is not the same see-ing I experience when perceiving a knife in ‘the flesh.’8 Looking at the screen, we do not experience a presentation ( Gegenwärtigung ) of a knife, but a presentification ( Vergegenwärtigung ) of it – that is, the knife is presentified on screen, not actually present in the movie theatre with us . Still, even though the question of existence appears to be neutralized at the image-object level – the image object being a “ noth- ing ” (ibid., 50), a “ nullity ” (ibid., 51), neither existent nor nonexistent –, it must be asked what our attitude toward the image subject is in such experiences, because, as we noted earlier, image consciousness does not eo ipso imply a consciousness of unreality as regards the image subject, which, in fact, can be intentioned as existent or nonexistent.

Let us consider the case in which we know that what we are about to see is a documentary film, e.g., one in which the photographic nature of the image might work as a testimony of the fact that – as Roland Barthes (1981, 76) says – the person or thing manifesting on the iconic surface “ has been there .” In this type of context, even though what we effectively see are only images and not things “in person,” we believe in the existence of what we see in them. Interestingly, in a manuscript published as Appendix XLII (probably around 1911/12) to Husserliana 23, also ref-erencing photographs, Husserl offers an insight into the possibility of experiencing an image with a “positional”9 connotation – not a positional stance towards the image object, which is a “ figment ” that “is a nullity of a unique type” (Husserl 2005, 586), but rather towards the subject presentified in the image:

In other words, there can be an interaction between iconic presentification and be- lief ,10 as is the case with the images Husserl calls ‘impressional.’ Such an interaction can imply a belief with regard not only to past occurrences, but also to present ones. In the case of live broadcasts, we believe that the action we are seeing on the screen (which is definitely not literally happening on the screen) is genuinely taking place in front of one or more cameras.

Nevertheless, it must be stressed that nothing in the image itself seems able to ground our belief on its own. ‘Impressional images’ are not eo ipso trustworthy. Recognition of the image always seems to presuppose a certain knowledge about it. We know that an image can be manipulated or doctored, thereby eliciting our position of reality through deception. Photographs, even those that manifest themselves in all their documentary power, always acquire this ‘authority’ within a specific context, a horizon of meaning which, alone, can support our attitude towards them and make them function in a certain way.11 In fact, the power to ‘ratify,’ which Barthes attributes to photography itself, is not something that can be traced back entirely to the image itself; rather, he resorts to a knowledge underpinning it, that is, a knowledge about the process through which the ‘trace’ has been generated – a chemical process.12

However, it is important to recall how such a consideration, in principle, also holds true with regard to perceptual reality. Many of the perceptual experiences that our eyes ‘baptize’ as real may have been surreptitiously adjusted to appear as such. “ Perceptio ” ( Perzeption ) in itself – read: perception without the “character of belief”13 – is not yet a guarantee of reality: “ perceptio as such determines nothing” (ibid., 625, translation slightly modified). Our perception ( Wahrnehmung ) can only arise in a horizon of sense, in a mutual cross-reference of meanings that essentially hold an emotional connotation.

One such example would be practical jokes – planned simulations carried out in an everyday perceptual context, leading the unfortunate victim to ‘take’ the sit-uation ‘as true’ ( Wahrnehmen as ‘ Für-wahr-Nehmen ’). We always perceive contex-tually, and a switch of sense can modify the reality of what we had previously per-ceived, only then allowing us to recognize it as an illusion. Consider this dynamic of belief in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), in which John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, a retired detective, is lured by a former college friend, Gavin Elster, into believing that his wife Madeleine suffers from a serious condition, and thus into accepting the task of following her around to make sure nothing bad happens to her. However, the reality Scottie takes to be true – and to be fitting into the perceptual flux of his everyday life – is “only” performed by Elster’s mistress, Judy Barton, who imper-sonates Madeleine as part of a plot she and Elster have devised in order to murder Elster’s wife.

The point I am trying to make is that a distinction between perceptio ( Perzeption ) and image consciousness does not ipso facto correspond to the distinction between reality and unreality. Again: I can “see” in a perceptio the body of Othello as some-thing unreal on the stage and also “take as true, as real ” some facial features of a man when viewing his photograph (Husserl 2005, 616–620). In fact, our shared objective present (and past) is – seemingly increasingly – constituted by images that we be-lieve to be presenting a reality that is actually happening (or has actually happened) and consequently find a place in our shared world and its history, as in the infa-mous cases of live coverage of 9/11 (fig. 1) or Abraham Zapruder’s film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination (fig. 2). The same holds true for our personal lives and our personal and shared narratives, which are increasingly based on the presentification of real occurrences through either streamed or recorded images.

Fig. 1: Still from CNN’s coverage of the 9/11 attacks

From this standpoint, images experienced through a documentary consciousness differ from those lacking the mark of belief, which do not find a place in our shared ‘objective’ world – nor do they aspire to. In fact, as we all know, there are also images that, in a manner of speaking, do not lay claim to existence, or to any positional stance as regards the actions they presentify to us (fig. 3). Thus, in keeping with what I proposed earlier, we can distinguish in phenomenological terms between positing images , which involve a claim to reality (the ones we experience in a documentary attitude, for example) and quasi-positing images experienced in a fictional context as presentifications of fictional subjects.

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Fig. 2: Still from Abraham Zapruder’s film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination

Fig. 3: Still from Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) – James Stewart as Scottie

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Rightly, Husserl implies that judgments ‘made on the basis of impressional imag-es’ – i.e., a ‘positing […] pictorial exhibiting’ – are not the same as those made when confronting a ‘pictorial exhibiting’ pertaining to a fictional subject. This might well hold true for our emotional reactions to such images as well. We may feel threatened by positing images that – despite their presentifying nature – we find frightening or upsetting in a very different way than if we were told that everything presentified in them was merely fiction. In order to give these issues the necessary consideration, we begin with a philosophical inquiry into whether and how the emotions we expe-rience in connection with fictional images are different from those intertwined with a consciousness of reality.

2 Paradoxical Emotions?

While watching a documentary film, if we see one person showing compassion to-wards another, we might feel admiration for that gesture or upon seeing someone harassing someone else, we might respond with indignation. Using Husserl’s view as our starting point, and keeping in mind our previous remarks on the possibility of experiencing images positionally, we might say that the emotions we feel in these instances are “actual,” (ibid., 554) unmodified emotions, since they are founded upon a form of existential position-taking: presentification and belief.14 To put it in somewhat rougher, more general terms, we generally do not question the reality of those emotions, taking them for real emotional responses to real (or, at least, believed-to-be-real) facts.

But what about emotions grounded in presentifications of fictional subjects? How are they to be understood? To return to our previous example, we might ask how our responses of admiration and indignation might change upon learning that the film we were watching in a ‘documentary mode’ was, in fact, a work of fiction. Do emotions change in nature depending on whether or not they are grounded in presentifications involving belief in the existence of the subject/situation? If so, then what kind of emotions are elicited by fictional films?15

Indeed, if I get scared or if I feel joy in phantasy, my “emotions” (Gefühle) , Husserl says, are “modified” in the sense of “not relating to reality but to a phantasied world” (ibid., 448, translation slightly modified).16 Let us assume (via Husserl)17 that I am sitting in a movie theatre watching a fictional film,

However, I would like to stress that the adjective ‘modified’ here is not to refer to the emotion in itself, as if – say – tears shed for a phantasized character were inherently different from those shed for a ‘real person.’ In a patently fictional situation, I know that my tears fit the phantasy actions I am experiencing (or we, the audience, are experiencing), and I am aware that such actions are not presenting real occurrences that are happening, or have happened, elsewhere. In other words, my tears are not motivated by a consciousness of reality as regards the individual existence of char-acters: their actions affect only the specific quasi-world unfolding in our iconically phantasized experience.18

Analogously, this also holds for desires elicited by iconic phantasies: if we see “a beautiful woman” on screen “and desire her love […] [we] actually feel this ‘desire,’” and yet we “certainly cannot ‘actually’ desire that this woman, who does not even exist, love [us]” (ibid., 448, my italics). Following Husserl’s example, when watch-ing Vertigo , one might fall under Madeleine’s (or Judy’s, for that matter) spell and desire her, just as Scottie does. That act would not be irrational. What would be irrational, in this case, would be to desire that person – specifically, that Madeleine (or Judy) who does not (and did not, for that matter) actually live in San Francisco or elsewhere.

Nevertheless, when viewing this issue through the lens of the well-known Paradox of Fiction mentioned in the introductory section, one might well conclude that emo-tions aroused by documentary images (grounded in a belief in the real existence of the image subjects presentified) are fully justifiable and ‘genuine,’ whereas emotions aroused by phantasy characters (whom we do not actually believe to exist) cannot be justified. In fact, one of the three premises underlying the paradox is that (a) in order for us to have an emotion we must believe that the object of our emotion exists.

The Paradox of Fiction comprises three premises, each considered plausible in themselves but contradicting one another when considered as a group – each indi-vidual statement is allegedly true, yet they cannot all be true at the same time. The other two premises (the a, b, and c labels are taken to be arbitrary here, insofar as the three premises are of equal importance; what matters is their mutual irreconcilabil-ity) are as follows: (b) we do not believe in the existence of fictional characters; (c) we have emotional reactions towards objects we know to be fictional.

In view of this paradox, then, problems concerning the nature of our emotions seem to arise when considering fictional presentifications. In fact, in his famous 1975 essay that gave rise to the debate on the Paradox of Fiction, Colin Radford (1975, 69, my italics) claimed that

According to Radford, this kind of reaction “involves us in inconsistency and so incoherence” (ibid., 78). To go back to Vertigo , the idea of reacting emotionally to Scottie’s or Judy’s fate, viewed from this perspective, should seem unintelligible to us, as they have never existed.

However, I believe that a phenomenological account as outlined above can put this very inconsistency into question. On the one hand, we might say that the asser-tions in premises (b) and (c) can be supported by the phenomenological analysis we have delineated. They present results that can be exhibited by “phenomenological data” (Husserl 2005, 3). Premise (b) states that one can tell the difference between believing in the actual existence of a person and phantasizing about the existence of a made-up character; as for (c), it is merely a statement of fact – the fact that our awareness that characters and stories are fictional does not prevent us from having reactions fitting these quasi-people and their quasi-actions that are not found as concrete individuals in our world.

Premise (a), on the other hand, is an explanatory proposition, which alludes to a ‘theory of emotion’ postulating a cognitive basis: namely, that belief in the existence of the object of an emotion is a prerequisite condition for that emotion.19 From a phenomenological point of view, this appears to be an unjustified assumption: the phenomenological description brings to light that our experiences, whether posi-tional or fictional, always manifest themselves through emotional connotations. It is not by chance that, in Being and Time , Heidegger maintains that Befindlichkeit , our ‘affective state,’ is an essential feature of our ‘being-in-the-world.’20 Emotions do not presuppose beliefs, but rather an original relationship of ‘involvement,’21and this holds also for our worldly “involvement” in phantasy, for our phantasy states.

The latter sheds light on a key aspect of the structure of phantasy experience. Husserl’s phenomenological description indicates that phantasy acts do not consist solely of the intuitive presentification of the phantasized object, but rather essen-tially implies the reproduction of a subjective act that quasi-perceives that object, thereby generating a splitting of consciousness between a real ego and a phantasy ego. In First Philosophy , Husserl (2019, 320) writes that “the actus ‘I phantasize a scene of centaurs’ is only possible in the form that I enact, in the mode of the ‘as if,’ the actus ‘I perceive the scene of centaurs.’”

Even though we cannot linger on this specific question here,22 it is beneficial to underscore two aspects relevant to the matter at hand: for one, the ego-splitting pertaining to phantasy experience is not to be construed as a sort of schizophrenic process involving a real ego and a phantasy ego unable to communicate.23 For an-other, it is exactly this awareness of such an egological difference accompanying our phantasy (however minimal, for example, when absorbed in a vivid daydream)24that prevents us from slipping into hallucination, which we might call the absolute state of immersion.

The latter (ii), in particular, also counts as one significant reason why a naïve theory of illusion  – which might be summoned to justify emotions in a fictional re-gime in compliance with the paradox premise (a) – is insufficient. If spectators were completely unaware of the fictional nature of the action unfolding on screen, they would react differently from how they usually do and not in the ‘modified’ manner described above. (In Pasolini’s Che cosa sono le nuvole? (1968),the audience, who cannot tell reality from imagination, intervenes to try to save Desdemona from her fate – or, to refer to a famous literary example, consider Don Quixote’s attack on Maese Pedro’s Puppet Show.)

Besides, in keeping with the former point, it must be stressed that the emergence of an ego-splitting as a condition of possibility of a ‘phantasy life’ does not automat-ically entail two separate and wholly impermeable sides of emotions (reality/phan-tasy, that is), as though when acting as a phantasy ego I lost all awareness of my real ego’s emotional life and vice versa. Undoubtedly, there are several cases in which emotional responses of the real ego and of the phantasy ego are in sharp contrast, as though the real and the phantasy egos were, so to speak, two strangers. For example, we might be puzzled by the fact that fictional movies allow us to quasi-participate in phantasy actions that we would never carry out in real life, for a variety of reasons – we might be alarmed to find ourselves enjoying a fictional situation that, at least prima facie , we would likely condemn in reality. Nevertheless, this is not necessarily a symptom of egological incompatibility. For one, although we refer to the ‘same’ ac-tion being experienced in reality and in phantasy, the real ego and the phantasy ego are not, strictly speaking, in the ‘same’ situation. Our phantasy ego knows it is not actually carrying out an action, and thus we need not concern ourselves with a long list of real material consequences that such an action might have for us if it were actually accomplished. Accordingly, our emotional responses in phantasy situations might fit this kind of awareness.

Moreover, the very possibility of puzzlement in this regard is grounded in the fact that the real ego can touch upon these phantasy experiences, and that, despite the split, it appears to remain the only one responsible for them. Let us notice that this view can also offer some relevant insights with regard to the phenomenon of “imag-inative resistance” (Moran 2017, 18–25; Michela Summa’s chapter in this volume), in which the phantasy ego, despite its almost inexhaustible ability to generate phan-tasy experiences, is incapable of even imagining some specific situations, of even quasi-carrying out certain specific quasi-acts of phantasy. This suggests once more

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3 Experiencing Values

To clarify and possibly expand upon these questions, I would like to draw attention to a passage from Marcel Proust’s masterpiece  À la recherche du temps perdu  ( In Search of Lost Time ), in which one can quite rightly say that the narrator raises the issue concerning emotions elicited by fiction. On the one hand, Recherche ’s narra-tor has no problem admitting that “it is true that the people concerned in” fiction are “not what Françoise would have called ‘real people’” (Proust 1992, 116). We might suggest that, in Recherche , the maid Françoise represents the uncontested and unproblematized natural attitude. Clichés and popular wisdom are sculpted in her with the force of sedimentation over time, repeatedly fortified by the silent perseverance of “habit” (Beckett 1931, 9).25

It is not by chance that, in this context ruled by the natural attitude, the young narrator is granted the ‘pleasures of reading’ only on Sundays, days of rest on which labour is banned – in other words, days where any activity is permitted, as long as it is nothing ‘serious,’ nothing ‘concrete’: no work, only pastimes. According to this sedimented view, then, no serious activity or emotion can be elicited in fiction (the same goes for watching fictional movies, a perfect Sunday activity from this perspective):

However, as we shall soon see, Proust’s response to these clichés points in the direc-tion we stressed above, proposing that, in the emotional process, involvement in a world (be it ‘fictional’ or ‘real’) takes precedence over the moment of belief in exis-tence. In this regard, before delving expressly into Proust’s suggestion, it is useful to return our attention to, and expand upon, several Husserlian perspectives that can add to the phenomenological account of emotion we developed earlier, and may offer insights that will aid us in relating the Proustian issue in question to the iconic dimension implied in movies.

As I have pointed out elsewhere (Rozzoni 2017), in a passage from Husserliana 23, dating back to 1918, Husserl finally seems to recognize the productive power images can acquire when dramatized (as is also the case in fictional movies) – that is, elaborating on Husserl’s manuscript, when the generative power of the narrative allows meanings and values to originate through images, irrespective of whether these images depict our ‘objective’ reality or not.26

A fictional film can lead us, as phantasy egos, to experience new perspectives – new variations of what we call a real ego, as pointed out in the previous section – whence we are able to experience values, which can either corroborate or conflict with the values participating in the constitution of our ‘real life’ and motivating our actions on a daily basis.27 Cinema can make me feel values that run contrary to my own, show me standpoints and narratives that help me understand and feel differently about things. And even though a film is presenting ‘facts’ that have nev-er existed empirically and that I believe will never exist as such, a counter-value I feel while quasi-living a cinematic dramatization can prompt me to draw ‘my own’ values, i.e., the values I feel personally attached to, into question – not by making a logical point, but by triggering a process of emotional evaluations holding a cogni-tive value, even though it may not be fully articulable in a predicative thought or re-ducible to propositional knowledge: an “aesthetic mode of understanding” (Pippin 2020, 11).

In other words, although I, as a phantasy subject, can be said to act in a neutral and ‘protected’ situation ( qua being unaffected by the question of whether a character in a story really exists or not), I cannot be considered unaffected by counter-values and alternative perspectives expressed in that story. And these axiological effects, as we suggested earlier, cannot be simply confined to the phantasy boundaries of my egological dimension – they also can concern me as a real ego.

The key point is that, in such cases, despite not believing in the existence of what we see in the image, we are still involved and caught up in another interest  – namely, what Husserl (2019, 307) in First Philosophy calls an “ interest of the heart [ Gemütsinteresse ], a valuing interest [ wertendes Interesse ] in the broadest sense of the term.” This kind of interest is not preconditioned by a belief in existence: Wertnehmung as “value-tak-ing” is not founded upon Wahrnehmung as taking something as existent – both are originary modes of givenness.28 In fact, there is an essential relationship between the perception of values [ Wert-nehmung ] and the emotional dimension: a value is some-thing that can originally appear to us only as felt ,and an object of evaluation cannot be reduced to a merely propositional/logical significance.

Accordingly, from a phenomenological point of view, we – as quasi-audience – are not axiologically separated from what is quasi-happening on the screen. Within a fictional context, we can also be said to be emotionally ‘interested,’ despite our disbelief in the actual existence of what we are experiencing. A fictional movie can express a world in a way that invites our phantasy ego to participate in a horizon of perspectives opening different values, which can expand, confirm, restrict, or call into question our axiological scope.

It should be emphasized, however, that this is not merely tantamount to simply handing predetermined senses and values to the audience in a fictional context, as if the film were simply a means to ‘translate’ them in a cinematic language (at least: this rarely makes for a good film). Rather, in the vein of Pippin’s account of cinemat-ic thought (Pippin 2020), we can say that such cases involve cinematic thinking in a non-propositional way: an “a-conceptual”29 thought is developed through a word/image narrative implying an axiological-emotional dimension.

These final considerations, of course, open up a whole field of research that surely warrants further study and invites further phenomenological distinctions. Though this would go beyond the scope of the present study, I would like to stress that, in keeping with what I have said above, a quasi-value expressed through a fictional situation is not to be considered a quasi-value in the sense of being non-genuine, a ‘make-believe’ value, or a copy of a value – for, as we have seen, a value is something attracting the subject before the issue of something’s factual existence.

All this, as I indicated earlier, might also serve to help us better interpret Proust’s responses to Françoise-like stubborn complete mistrust in fictional people. Indeed, the Recherche ’s narrator seems to prompt his reader to make one step further, shift-ing the emphasis to the imaginative side of emotion . He makes a key remark on the nature of our emotions when he points out how “none of the feelings [ sentiments ] which the joys or misfortunes of a real person[ personnage réel ] […] arouse in us can be awakened except through an image [ image ] of those joys or misfortunes” (Proust 1992, 116, translation modified).

Of course, ‘image’ in this sense does not specifically refer to an iconic manifes-tation, but to the narrative construction of fragments that we are called to piece together every day in order to get to know others – and that alone, according to Proust, can prompt us to care for or despise them,30 thereby suggesting the prece-dence of the sense of our narratives over the real existence of our ‘objective’ bodies.31It is on this basis that the narrator can affirm that

Let us remark, in conclusion, that this same mechanism is very much at work in the other art piece I referenced here, i.e. Hitchcock’s Vertigo ,32 in which Madeleine and Judy, despite sharing one body, are in fact two different persons, two different ‘characters’ (figs. 4 and 5).

Fig. 4: Still from Vertigo (1958) – Madeleine (Kim Novak)

Fig. 5: Still from Vertigo (1958) – Judy (Kim Novak)

When the desperate Scottie, still pining for Madeleine (whom he believes dead), meets a girl who looks exactly like her – the very same Judy Barton who imperson-ated Madeleine, the ‘fake wife’ (as the audience is going to discover at that point) – he actually re-encounters Madeleine’s physical body, but this is clearly not sufficient for him to find Madeleine again. Obsessed with Judy’s resemblance to Madeleine, he pleads with her to dress as Madeleine, to mimic Madeleine’s physical mannerisms, in a frantic effort to recreate a narrative that will allow him to see Madeleine again. In Proust’s terms, he tries to reconstruct her ‘image.’

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Fig. 6: Still from Vertigo – Judy (Kim Novak) dressed as Madeleine.

At the end of Vertigo , upon Scottie’s final discovery that Madeleine was, in reality, Judy Barton, he still addresses the latter by saying, “I loved you so, Madeleine” – thereby

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1 Introduction

In his essay “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), while considering our engagement with literary texts, David Hume compares cases in which we are confronted with ‘speculative errors’ with cases in which we are confronted with the affordance to agree with claims that conflict with our moral standards. Whereas in the former case we seem to be able to take up, at least imaginatively, the positions expressed in the literary work – which “detract but little from the value of those compositions” (Hume 1985, 283) –, in the latter case the situation is different. In fact, as Hume emphasizes, it is only with a “very violent effort” that we can have “sentiments of approbation and blame” for something that diverges from the moral standards we endorse in reality (ibid). Hume observes:

These passages have often been considered by scholars in the theory of fiction as the seminal characterization of the phenomenon of ‘imaginative resistance.’ Indeed, Hume describes here a kind of resistance we experience when afforded to imagine something that conflicts with our moral standards. More precisely, however, such resistance does not concern the mere phantasy of a situation in which those moral standards are transgressed or the phantasy that someone may defend claims that conflict with our moral standards. Rather, such resistance arises when we are af-forded to endorseor agree with such claims from our first-person perspective. Thus, even if requested to only imagine subscribing to such claims, it seems that, already for Hume, such endorsement goes beyond the realm of the imaginary.

Hume’s own approach to this phenomenon, in fact, is rather complex, since it entails theoretical, moral, and aesthetic considerations. The current debate on imag-inative resistance often reflects this complexity, as well. It focuses, among other is-sues, on questions concerning the contents that provoke imaginative resistance, the cognitive attitudes of individuals experiencing such resistance, whether individuals ‘are not able’ or ‘do not want’ to imagine scenarios that conflict with their moral con-victions, and whether the resistance only concerns moral stances and evaluations or also impinges on aesthetic and epistemic evaluations, how such a phenomenon can and should be connected with more general questions concerning the status of fictional emotions, etc. (Moran 1994; Walton 1994; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Levy 2005; Gendler 2010, 179f., 203f.). Notably, some of the studies on imagina-tive resistance – including some recent phenomenological works – focus on how

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Expanding on Hume’s remark, in this paper I wish to argue, first ,that imaginative resistance arises when we are afforded not only to agree with a claim that conflicts with our moral standards in an imaginative context, but rather when such a request goes beyond the realm of the imaginary. This has also been addressed as a kind of removal or weakening of the ‘quarantine’ that typically characterizes our experience of the fictional and the imaginary. Affordances eliciting imaginative resistance com-pel us to respond and this means that we “cannot conveniently quarantine” (Stueber 2006, 164) them. Saying that imaginary and fictional contexts are normally quar-antined, isolated from the real, means that they do not and should not have a direct causal or motivational impact on what is real. If they have such an impact – and imaginative resistance shows that in certain cases they do have it – the quarantine is somehow broken. Secondly, I wish to argue that this weakening of the boundaries between the real and the imaginary provokes a kind of collapse of the typical struc-ture of self-awareness in imagination, including the particular kind of imagination that is operative in the experience of fiction.

In what follows, I consider imaginative resistance in relation to the complex structure of our self-experience in fictional and imaginative contexts. It must be emphasized that the relevant participation in imaginative fictional contexts, as well as the resistance to the endorsement of something that deviates from our mor-al standards, is primarily affective and experienced in a pre-reflective way. With reference to Sartre, I wish to show that such affective resistance comes, in a sense to be specified, from within ourselves. It results from the menace of disrupting the discontinuity between the two attitudes characterizing our self-experience in imagination and fiction. Accordingly, imaginative resistance pre-reflectively occurs when we find ourselves imagining something that represents a menace to an intimate core of self-experience, which itself goes beyond the domain of pre-reflective awareness and entails moments of an interiorized social and ethical self-understanding.

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After discussing more closely the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (section 1), I turn to some remarks on the relation between imagination and fiction (section 2). These analyses provide the basis to investigate whether and how we can speak of ‘resistance’ in imaginative and fictional contexts (section 3). Following Sartre, I first discuss whether and in what sense we can speak of resistance in imaginative and fictional experience and thereby particularly reassess Sartre’s claim that such resis-tance comes from within ourselves, or that it is a resistance of consciousness against itself. Secondly, I address the question of how such resistance is connected with the emotional and affective attitudes we take in the face of the imaginary and the fictional. Finally, I draw some conclusions related to the tension between modes of self-experience in imagination and fiction, which underlies imaginative resistance.

2 Imaginative Resistance in the Aesthetics of Fiction

As I briefly mentioned above, imaginative resistance does not simply concern the imaginative representation of something we would consider as morally unaccept-able: we can imagine violent torture scenes, and are often exposed to such scenes in fictional works, without experiencing such resistance.2 Instead, ‘imaginative re-sistance,’ in the specific sense in which the concept is used in the current debate in aesthetics, denotes the resistance to the endorsement of morally relevant as-sumptions that (a) conflict with our moral standards and (b) claim some validity beyond the boundaries of the fictional world. I will return to the question of why precisely morally relevant statements are important here. First, I wish to shed light on these two requirements. As Hume’s reference to the ‘sentiments of approba-tion and blame’ indicates, the requested endorsement is not primarily of a cogni-tive kind, but rather represents a sort of emotional agreement, which occurs in a pre-reflective, spontaneous, and affective way. Let us clarify these points by con-sidering some paradigmatic examples discussed in the literature on imaginative resistance:3

What is disturbing in all these cases, or what we resist to, are not primarily the scenes of the killing of an innocent girl or a widow, nor the explosion of exaggerated and unjustified anger. Rather, what we resist is the endorsement, even if only in the imagination, of the following generalizing justifications: ‘after all, it was a girl;’ ‘[they] did their duty before God;’ ‘[s]o Craig did the right thing, because Jack and Jill should have taken their argument somewhere else where they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.’

We can find a more articulated literary example of how imaginative resistance arises – and of the aims literary authors may pursue when they adopt this liter-ary means – in the second chapter of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist . In the work-house where he lives and in agreement with the other children, Oliver Twist dares to ask for some more food instead of declaring himself satisfied with the portion he is entitled to. This behaviour offends the supervisors, who opt for severe pun-ishment of the boy. At the end of the chapter, as well as at the beginning of chapter three, we find the narrator justifying the corrective measure taken against Oliver. Commenting on these passages, Wolfgang Iser – who, without using this concept, offers a seminal discussion of imaginative resistance – particularly emphasizes the function of the narrator’s commentary of this episode. In such commentary, we find not only the expression of personal agreement with the supervisors’ punishment, but also hints to generalize the justification for such punishment as aimed at correct and just education. Offering such generalizing justification, the text paradoxically affords the readers to endorse the positive evaluation of the punishment – i.e., of an educational measure which they will consider likely unjust according to their moral standards and due to the empathizing with Oliver. Iser (1975, 240) describes the reaction of the reader and the narrative strategy behind this episode as follows:For Iser, the episode can only have been written in this way in order to arouse the reader’s resistance to agree with the positive evaluation of the punishment in terms

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Importantly, the request to endorse claims that deviate from the moral standard is not exclusive to literature and can be realized in different ways: montage or perspec-tivation of the narrative – in literature as well as other kinds of art such as cinema or theatre – can also be used for this purpose. Furthermore, that request can be more or less explicit and the corresponding reaction of resistance can be more or less immediate. Take, for example, Humbert Humbert’s confession at the beginning of Nabokov’s Lolita : this initially provokes some kind of sympathy, which is, how-ever, revised in the course of the novel, and in retrospect can lead the reader to a kind of resistance with respect to his or her first reaction (Bareis 2014). Possibly, no resistance arises at the first reading, and the uncomfortable or resisting reaction is awakened only afterwards.

In the current philosophical literature on fiction, as I mentioned, the discussion about imaginative resistance has different facets.6 Besides the already mentioned aspects, it has been pointed out that such resistance also provokes a kind of “author-itative breakdown” (Gendler 2010, 204f.; Weatherson 2004). Although we might not fully agree with the current interpretations of authoritative breakdown, we can at least take up the following: inviting us, by means of generalizing value statements, to remove the boundaries between what is restricted to the fictional world and what we should endorse even beyond this world, and inviting us to do so with regard to such an extremely sensitive matter as moral convictions, the work loses part of its authority. In this sense, removing the ‘quarantine’ or the discontinuity and isolation of the fiction with respect to reality has some disturbing effects. In other words, readers develop a more distanced attitude and partly lose ‘trust’ with respect to what the text affords. In addition, it seems that such resistance is connected with the at-tempt to avoid some kind of moral contagion: after all, cannot our endorsement of wrong moral judgments in fiction affect our real moral convictions?7

Yet, does all this not imply that there is a change, or even disruption, of our self-experience and self-understanding? And why are self-experience and self-un-derstanding so particularly touched when it comes to affective-moral issues? It seems to me that these questions have not yet garnered the attention they require. We find some seminal work in this direction in Richard Moran’s (1994) article “The Expression of Feelings in Imagination.” Moran discusses the tension between the feelings afforded and required by what happens in the fiction and the feelings we ourselves are prone to. This tension, as we will see in the next sections, indicates a double attitude in our experience of fiction. Furthermore, Moran’s distinction be-tween imagination as ‘hypothetical imagining’ and as ‘dramatic imagining’ proves to be relevant for phenomenological analysis. ‘Hypothetical imagining’ designates a kind of supposition or as-if assumption filled with intuitive content. Hypothetically, we can, for instance, imagine that an affirmative judgment of value could be en-dorsed by someone about a morally unacceptable situation – or maybe even that we in a fictional situation could endorse it. In this case, we are not asked to agree, nor to really endorse that claim. Thus, we can refrain from making this statement through feelings of disapproval, and possibly through distance from the fictional situation. Therefore, we do not experience any fundamental resistance when intro-ducing it. This remark converges with the claim that the resistance does not concern mere supposition, for example, that a society based on racist principles could be considered good or the assumption that someone could endorse this as a moral value. Resistance arises instead when the concrete intuitive (thus not merely suppo-sitional) presentation of the respective scenario is coupled with the request for our first-personal approval or endorsement of the positive assessment of this scenario. This happens, for example, when we are asked for a first-personal approval of the positive evaluation of a society based on racist principles. Moran calls this form of imagination ‘dramatic imagining.’ Unlike the former, it requires our non-distant participation in the imagined or fictional context. Thereby, we do not experience any feelings of disgust, anger or disapproval about what is being imagined. We rath-er feel the resistance in the imagining itself.8 Precisely this form of dramatic imag-ining is demanded by the situations described above: this requires not only our first-personal participation, but also our – albeit provisional – real assent to the imagined. Moran’s view on the just-mentioned questions can be supported by some reflections on our experience of fiction inspired by the work of Sartre. His phe-nomenological description of the diversity of our affective participation in fictional and imaginative contexts can underpin these distinctions with a conception of the diversity and unity of self-experience in imaginative and fictional contexts.

3 Fiction and Imagination

Before turning to Sartre’s contribution, I wish to spend some words on the relation between imagination and fiction. Imaginative resistance mostly arises in the ex-perience of fiction. Thus, it does not seem to primarily concern subjective or even private forms of imaginative experience, but rather what we are asked to imagine by a fictional work. As I have argued elsewhere, I consider the experience of fiction as based on a specific kind of ‘bound’ imaginative activity (Summa 2018; 2019b). I un-derstand the boundedness of the imagination in the experience of fiction as related to the appellative character of the text, to the normativity of the affordances to imag-ine, and to the interaction between authors and receivers of a fictional work. Let me try to explain this by referring to the work of Kendall Walton, Iser, and Sartre, who addressed the function of imagination in fiction in different ways.

Although he does not use this terminology, we can consider Walton’s work against the background of this interpretation. For Walton (1990), fictional works have an analogous function as ‘props,’ i.e., as those objects that invite us to imagine (or make-believe). In games of make-believe, objects function in an unconventional way, inviting the players to imagine and to act consistently, thereby supporting and at the same time limiting their imaginative powers within the context of the game. Fictions are thus formed by the responses to the affordances to imagine generated by objects functioning as props. In such a way, affordances contribute to shaping the framework for what can and what cannot be imagined, as well as a set of possible responses. Despite the differences between the case of games of make-believe and the case of artistic fictions, Walton considers them to be analogous: in the case of fiction, our imagination is also active – as in games of make-believe contexts –, and such an activity is also prompted by something, namely the work of fiction. Without going into the details of this argument and addressing the problematic aspects of this analogy, I wish to retain here the idea of boundedness of the imagination and the affording or appellative character of the work (Summa 2018; 2019b).

These features defining the role of imagination in fiction also characterize both Sartre’s and Iser’s approach. Iser considers the phenomenon of reading as based on the activation of the reader’s imagination. The imagination thereby not only has the function of visualizing the scenes portrayed by the author; it must also “fill in” the gaps that the author leaves open in the text (Iser 1975; 1984). This view is strong-ly indebted to Roman Ingarden’s insights into the ontology of the literary work, and particularly the remarks on the constitutive indeterminacy of works of fiction. What authors do not say in their text is indeterminate, or constitutively empty, and each reader is asked to fill in those gaps in ways that consistently fit the text. Such an activity is called a concretization or actualization of the work (Ingarden 1972). Saying that imagination is involved in such concretization and actualization does not mean that we fully visualize with the mind’s eye whatever the author leaves unsaid. This does not only seem to be counter-intuitive, but is actually impossible, because the ‘unsaid’ corresponds to a potentially unlimited field of imaginable states of affairs, and we obviously cannot imagine all of them. Yet, what we can say is that we at least implicitly form a vague imagining of how the described things should appear and of the relevant connections between events, which allows us to under-stand the narrative developments of the story even if the narrator does not tell us everything. The relevant imaginative activity may range from a kind of unsharp atmospheric imagining to clearer and more defined imaginative presentations of characters or scenes. That some sort of imagining is operative in filling the gaps of fiction becomes clear if we consider one rather common attitude we have when confronted with the concretization of literary works in theatre or cinema. It often

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In the second essay of What is literature? , Sartre (1966, 38f.) also addresses the appellative character of literary texts. Like Ingarden and Iser, he also emphasizes the constitutive function of the reader for the coming into existence of literary works, but he does so by relying on a dialectical approach to the literary work as a social product. A written work that is not read is, for Sartre, only the product of the au-thor’s spontaneity, it cannot be considered as an object for others and, therefore, it lacks objectivity in the proper sense. Accordingly, for Sartre, it is nonsense to claim that someone writes for him/herself: when confronted with such writings, the author will only find him/herself; the work has no autonomy with respect to the sponta-neous act of the author’s imagining. A literary or fictional object, thus, does not come into existence only thanks to the creativity of the writer; it also needs the reader as the one who gives objectivity to what would otherwise be only the product of the spontaneous imaginative activity of the author. This is a process in which the reader, in his/her reading activity, negates the spontaneity of the author’s imaginative act, somehow expropriating the product of its imagining, and making it into a public object – or something ‘for others.’ This process of negation, which cannot be done by the author, is necessary for the production of an autonomous work of fiction.

Accordingly, literary, and more generally fictional works (as well as the charac-ters, objects, and situations in them), have an intersubjective/objective existence only thanks to the interaction between author and readers. By ‘uncovering’ what the text says, and by imaginatively following the literary work, readers also complement it and thereby produce something new. The reader’s imaginative act, which delimits the spontaneity of the productive act of the author by looking at the products of such spontaneous activity from the outside, arises as a response to the appeal of the text. Accordingly, the reader’s imagination is also normatively limited by the work itself. Sartre therefore understands the act of reading as a “pact of generosity” be-tween reader and author, which he considers as an expression of freedom:

The free “pact of generosity” (ibid., 55) that arises as a response to this appeal, con-sists in limiting the spontaneity of one’s own imaginative activity and letting one’s own imagination be guided by the text. Such imagining needs to be a dramatic kind of imagining in Moran’s sense: it cannot be a merely hypothetical and pos-sibly empty supposition but needs to be concretized or intuitively fulfilled. This, as I wish to show in the following, implies that the complex double structure of self-awareness that characterizes imagination, in general, is connected with the specific affordances generated by the fictional work, i.e., by an imaginative project made by someone else.

Despite their differences, Walton, Iser, and Sartre emphasize that works of fiction are collective and responsive enterprises and can only come into being thanks to the interaction between authors and receivers and thanks to their respective imaginative activities. Yet, in what sense can such an approach to

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4 Sartre on the Resistance in the Imaginary and on the Conduct in the Face of the Irreal

In order to understand why Sartre’s phenomenology of the imagination can be help-ful for reassessing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance in relation to self-expe-rience, we should particularly address two of his claims regarding the imagination: (a) the first claim is that irreal objects do not offer resistance as the real ones do; and yet, this apparent lack of resistance implies another kind of resistance, which Sartre considers as a resistance of consciousness against itself; (b) the second claim is that such tension within consciousness in imaginative experience is particularly reflect-ed in the emotional responses we have in the face of the imaginary and the fictional.

5 Conclusion: Imaginative Resistance and the Tension between Modes of Self-Experience

Trying to draw some conclusions from the previous analyses, we can say that imag-inative resistance is an affective response to affordances to imagine that occurs pre-reflectively, but shows how deep and intimate our identification with certain culturally and socially mediated, moral standards is. In this sense, imaginative re-sistance can be considered a kind of spontaneous defence against a menace of our self-experience and interiorized social self-conception. In short, what we experi-ence is a kind of menace or impairment concerning a very intimate core of our self,

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I believe that Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of imagination and fiction con-tributes to shedding light on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance at different levels. We have seen that irreal objects do not offer resistance in the same way as real ones and that, precisely for this reason, they resist (in another sense) our real desire for richness in emotional experience. Such resistance arises from the tension between will and spontaneity, or from the impossibility to wilfully control sponta-neous imaginative activity.

With the specific phenomenon of imaginative resistance, we have a partly differ-ent situation. As I pointed out, such a phenomenon arises in the face of fiction , i.e., when we are afforded to imagine something that was spontaneously projected by someone else, and not in our own spontaneous acts of imagining. Our own imagin-ing – as receivers of a work of fiction – is thereby still spontaneous, even if it arises as a response to the affordances of a fictional work. Yet, the “generosity” that character-izes such a spontaneous act has some limits, as it ends precisely when the boundary between imaginary and real agreement with the affordances in the text is removed or becomes too weak. What we resist in imaginative resistance is an agreement with something that goes beyond the sphere of imaginative experience and thereby cor-rupts the essential features of emotional responses in the face of the imaginary: their being the result of irrealization, which amounts to their poverty and their freedom.

This goes hand in hand with the tension between will and spontaneity (or resis-tance of consciousness to itself): such a tension within the phenomenon of imagi-native resistance consists in the fact that, although we spontaneously follow what is prescribed by fictional works of our imagination, we wilfully resist to follow some of the prescriptions when they interfere with the sphere of our most sensible and inti-mate moral standards. This resistance is real , i.e., it is not itself a product of irreal-ization. Indeed, complete irrealization would imply that we enter into the imagina-tive context without experiencing resistance, and in this case the spontaneity of the production of the imaginary would unfold without any constraints. In other words, Sartre’s observation that resistance in the imaginary always affects us as real I , and that it can arise only if we maintain the tension between our real and our imaginary experience, implies that, if we were completely absorbed in the imaginary, we would experience neither the resistance of the will nor the resistance of the deception of wishes and the poverty of feelings. The fact that we resist endorsing some claims

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This characteristic poorness amounts indeed to a kind of containment of the un-canny, the evil, or the morally bad within the merely imagined context (or the fact that it is only an unreal uncanny, evil, or morally bad). In this sense, maintaining such poverty or restricting what conflicts with our moral standards to the realm of fiction offers protection against our own imaginings, even when they arise in response to invitations in fictional works. In a certain sense, the appeal to emotional approval of the scenarios presented above attempts to remove this protection by de-manding our real approval, thus opening up the possibility of the contagion of our real self by the imaginary. That such contagion or contamination is possible, or that we have the need to guard against it, shows that the two levels of real and imaginary experience, although discontinuous, are permeable (Summa 2018). In other words, we resist imaginary approval because real and imaginary selves, despite discontinu-ity, are expressions of a unified consciousness. And also, our – socially mediated – moral self-understanding seems to be endangered by the very idea of a blending between the two levels. As Moran (1994) points out, this phenomenon also brings to light two features of our ethical/moral self-understanding: its deep-rooted char-acter and its fundamental vulnerability, which is particularly evident in protecting ourselves from possible contamination.

Fictional Emotions and Their Qualitative Feel

Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

Abstract : Contemporary accounts of fictional emotions, i.e., emotions experienced towards objects we know to be fictional, are mainly concerned with explaining their rationality or lack thereof. In this context dominated by an interest in the role of be-lief, questions regarding their phenomenal quality have received far less attention: it is often assumed that they feel ‘similar’ to emotions that target real objects. Against this background, this paper focuses on the possible specificities of the qualitative feel of fictional emotions. It starts by presenting what I call the ‘phenomenological question’ about the qualitative feel of fictional emotions (section 1) and by showing that this is irreducible to questions about their cognitive, intentional, evaluative, and embodied nature (section 2). Drawing on some insights from early phenomenolo-gists, the next two sections elaborate criteria for distinguishing between real and sham emotions on the one hand (section 3), and between genuine and non-genuine emotions, on the other (section 4). Finally, I apply this orthogonal distinction to the particular case of fictional emotions (section 5). The paper argues that fictional emotions are neither sham emotions nor quasi-emotions, but full-fledged emotion-al experiences, despite them displaying the distinctive phenomenology of emotions experienced as non-genuine. In the particular case of fictional emotions, they are non-genuine, because our psychology is in fact in a state dominated by aesthetic enjoyment.

Keywords : Sham Emotions, Quasi-emotions, (Non-)Genuine Emotions, (In)au-thentic Emotions, Fictional Emotions, Qualitative Feel, Imagination

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1 Fictional Emotions: The Cognitive and the Phenomenological Question

Contemporary accounts on fictional emotions, i.e., emotions we experience to-wards objects we know to be fictional, have mainly sought to explain their ratio-nality or lack thereof. Already Colin Radford’s paper “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” (1975) provocatively described fictional emotions as paradoxical and as a blatant case of doxastic and practical irrationality. This inter-vention prompted a prolific debate on what is known as “the paradox of fiction” (for an overview, Konrad et al. 2018). The discussions around this paradox, mostly of analytical provenance, were concerned with understanding how it is possible to react emotionally towards something we know to be fictional. The debate was largely dominated by a cognitivist view of the emotions typical of early analytical accounts, according to which emotions require beliefs to take place or are them-selves a form of belief.1 Over time, the cognitivist paradigm has been rejected and substituted by cognitive approaches that acknowledge the function of states other than belief, such as perceptions or imaginings, as constitutive elements of the emotions. As a result, the view that fictional emotions are paradoxical has also been challenged, leading to the conclusion that the paradox is obsolete and even a fiction in itself (Moyal-Sharrock 2009, 169). If emotion does not require belief, then there is nothing odd about reacting emotionally to objects that we know do not exist. Yet, this verdict on the paradox does not necessarily imply that we have already explained everything about our emotional reactions towards fiction. What remains to be clarified, and indeed what comprises the main focus of this paper, is the entanglement between emotion and imagination in responding to fiction.2 In particular, I will be considering how fictional emotions feel: Do the lack of belief and the influence of imagination have an impact on how fictional emotions are experienced?

This question has been rather neglected and trivialized in contemporary philos-ophy. In a context that is largely dominated by cognitivist and cognitive accounts of emotions, it became natural to focus on aspects of emotions’ cognitive structure, which appeared to be problematic (primarily their lack of belief in the existence of the targeted object). Thus, philosophers were preoccupied with what I call ‘the cogni-tive question,’ i.e., the question about the role of rational belief in fictional emotions. Against this background, questions regarding the phenomenal quality of fictional emotions received far less attention. Either it was considered a question of secondary importance, or it was tacitly or implicitly assumed that their phenomenology (often reduced to their somatic elements) is similar to that of emotions targeting objects known to be real. Kendall Walton can be seen as a representative of this view. As is well known, Walton claims that unlike emotions towards real objects, fictional emo-tions are neither based on beliefs nor do they motivate actions and that, as a result, they are quasi-emotions rather than full-fledged emotional experiences.3 However, when it comes to their phenomenology, he considers this to be similar to emotions directed towards real objects. As he puts it, Charles, a cinemagoer who claims to be afraid of the green slime, is in a similar condition to that of a person fearing a real di-saster: “[h]is muscles are tensed, he clutches his chair, his pulse quickens, his adrena-line flows” (Walton 1990, 196). Walton’s ‘similarity hypothesis’ (as I call it) entails, in fact, two claims: first, the assumption that fictional emotions and emotions towards real objects feel alike; and second, that their phenomenology can be explained in terms of their physiology. Both theses have been typical of a whole generation of approaches to fictional emotions that continue to circulate in current research.

Should we take the similarity hypothesis for granted? – I think not. It cannot be naively assumed that fictional emotions feel similar to emotions targeting real objects, nor can it be taken for granted that the phenomenology of an emotion (fic-tional or not) can be reduced to its physiology. The question of ‘what it is like’ to ex-perience a fictional emotion still has to be posed in the current debate. It is precisely this question, which I call ‘the phenomenological question,’ that forms the central concern of this paper.

Let me start by mentioning two reasons for stressing the significance of this unex-plored area of research. Both reasons indicate a possible difference in the phenome-nology of fictional emotions compared to that of our emotions towards real objects. First, we know from first-person experience that despite being very intense, our emotions towards fictional objects are experienced as being more superficial and as not having the same weight on our psychology. Certainly, Anna Karenina can make us cry, but the sadness we experience while reading this novel has something hollow about it when compared to the sadness towards a friend in a similar situation. In addition, like Walton’s cinemagoer Charles, we can also feel afraid of the green slime in the movie. If my physiological reaction were measured, my fear would probably show similar patterns as my fear towards a real-life danger. However, these physio-logical similarities would not suffice to prevent us from claiming that our fictional fear is coreless compared to the fear we might experience towards a real threat: we feel the impulse to protect ourselves from the slime, but, ultimately, we remain seat-ed in the cinema and even enjoy the experience. However, if the green slime were real and situated in my room right now, I would definitively run away.

The second reason originates from some historical considerations. There is a long tradition in aesthetics holding that emotions experienced under the influence of imagination show a distinctive phenomenology. One of the most prominent propo-nents of this view is Hume. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40), he develops a cognitive theory of emotions, but he acknowledges that fictional emotions do not require belief (in fact, he treats fictions as lies) and describes the phenomenology of fictional emotions in the following terms:

In Hume’s view, the differences on the phenomenological level (which he takes for granted) are derived from differences on the cognitive level. In short: the fact that we do not believe that the object of our emotion exists (and, thus, the protago-nist does not really suffer, etc.), but merely imagine it, leads us to experience such

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Hume’s view was echoed by the main representatives of German aesthetics in the late 19th and early 20th century. In Das Wesen der Kunst , Lange (1901, 100, 105) describes fictional emotions as “dulled, moderate and as stuck half-way.” In “Das Problem der ästhetischen Scheingefühle”, Geiger (1914, 191f.) depicts them as being of shorter duration, less influential, and distant. By virtue of their sham character they are as-if experiences; they lack weight and cannot be taken seriously. Meinong (1902, 313), in Über Annahmen , describes them as being “ uneingentlich verspürt ” (experienced as non-genuine). Though offering different explanations of the phe-nomenon, these authors endorse the view that their felt quality differs from the felt quality of our emotions towards objects known to be real.

In contemporary philosophy, there are only very scattered discussions about the possibility that the imagination (by engaging in idiosyncratic phantasies or engag-ing with fictions) influences the way in which we experience our emotions (Kenny 1963, 49; Ryle 1963, 103; Budd 1985, 128; Pugmire 2005, 36). But this phenomenon has rarely been the focus of research due to the predominance of cognitive models mainly interested in the role of belief and not in how emotions under the influence of the imagination are felt.

The phenomenological question is not irrelevant. Analyzing it can lead to a bet-ter understanding of how imagination enables, transforms, influences, and even distorts our emotional life. To approach this question, I will turn to the tradition in which much has been done to describe the phenomenal aspects of emotional experience: phenomenology.4 In particular, I will explore some of the efforts of ear-ly phenomenologists to describe and analyze the phenomenal nature of emotions. These efforts can enrich our language, which would otherwise remain too limited to grasp the subtle and complex nuances of our affective life. In the works of Scheler, Geiger, Voigtländer, Haas, and Pfänder, among others, we can find inspiring in-sights which, once refined in the light of more recent developments in emotion the-ory, can be fruitfully applied to the question of the phenomenal character of emo-tions in general and of fictional emotions in particular. Of special interest for the purposes of this paper is an orthogonal distinction, which is mentioned – though not fully developed – in these authors’ works: The distinction is between real and sham emotions (cases in which we imagine having an emotion), on the one hand, and between genuine and non-genuine emotions (cases of emotions experienced as out of tune with the rest of our psychology), on the other.

The paper is structured in five main sections. Having introduced the phenomeno-logical question (section 1), I argue for its irreducibility to other questions regarding the cognitive, intentional, evaluative, or embodied nature of emotions (section 2). Drawing on early phenomenology, the next two sections elaborate criteria for dis-tinguishing between real and sham emotions (section 3), and between genuine and non-genuine emotions (section 4). Finally, I apply this distinction to the particular case of fictional emotions (section 5). My thesis is that fictional emotions are neither sham emotions nor quasi-emotions, but full-fledged emotional experiences, though they display the phenomenology that is distinctive of non-genuine emotions. In the particular case of fictional emotions, they are non-genuine, because our psychology is in fact in a state dominated by aesthetic enjoyment.

2 The Irreducibility of the Phenomenological Question

I begin with what I consider to be a necessary refinement of ‘the phenomenological question.’ This refinement will take place, first, by showing how the qualitative feel of emotions cannot be reduced to any of their other dimensions and, second, by unpacking the elements involved in what I call ‘their qualitative feel.’ I start by distin-guishing five moments of emotional experience. These moments are experienced as unified, but I will treat them separately for analytical purposes. Discussing them will enable me to narrow the phenomenological question down to its essential points.

3 Real Emotions and Sham Emotions

In this section, I introduce a distinction between real emotions and emotion-like states which, despite all semblances, are not emotions: sham emotions. As my point of departure, I consider some claims about mental reality developed by Geiger in “Fragment über den Begriff des Unbewussten und die psychische Realität” (1921) and Scheler in “Idols of Self-Knowledge” (1912) and “Realism and Idealism” (1928). According to both authors, in outer as well as in inner perception, delusions and illusions are possible. This idea, which is based on an analogy between outer and inner perception, presupposes (against Descartes and Brentano, but in line with Husserl) that there is no evidence of inner perception. The existence of an emotion does not guarantee its being felt (we can have an emotion and not be conscious of it), we can also have a failed or misleading perception of our emotions (we can think that we love the environment and thus we do not fly, but in fact this love is a disguised fear of flying), and we can experience an emotion without having one (I have the phantasy of being in love and end up experiencing a love-like state). In this last-mentioned case, we have a sham emotion. In the phenomenological field, sham emotions are given different names: “imagined emotions” ( vorgestellte Gefühle )

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The very idea of a sham emotion might seem puzzling: if someone claims to have an emotional experience, then why should we cast doubt on this? The possibility of experiencing something like an emotion without really having one is the result of seeing inner and outer perception as analogous. In outer perception, it is possible to have the illusion of perceiving a tree without there being a tree to be perceived, and analogically in inner perception it is possible to have the illusion of perceiving an emotion without having one.11

The idea that we can experience an emotion-like state which actually is not an emotion implies a normative view about what counts as a real emotion. In general terms, Geiger and Scheler argue that when an object of outer or inner perception is real, it exhibits two features: resistance ( Widerstand ) and effectivity ( Wirksamkeit ). Real objects from outer and inner perception resist being changed at will and are effective in relation to other objects connected with them. As a result, for the par-ticular case of the emotions (which are the object of inner perception) we can ex-tract the following two conditions that must be fulfilled in order to count as real emotions:

4 Genuine and Non-Genuine Emotions

Regarding how emotions are felt, early phenomenologists distinguished genuine from non-genuine emotions (used synonymously with the couple authentic/inau-thentic). This distinction is not to be conflated with that between real and sham emotions, though they might in certain circumstances overlap. In order to elaborate specific criteria for this distinction, I first discuss three descriptions of this phenom-enon as found in Voigtländer, Pfänder, and Haas.

In Vom Selbstgefühl , Voigtländer (1910, 94f.) claims that non-genuine ( unei- gentlich ) feelings “are experienced in all cases of attitudinizing, acting, presenting oneself, pretending, boasting, also in fantasized experiences, in self-deception and sham existence.” Those emotions, which have their origin in experiencing ourselves from a third-person perspective and in playing a role, also count as non-genuine. The nature of non-genuine emotions is playful, airy, and less solid than the nature of our genuine ones (Haas 1910, 97). They are experienced as distant, as having their origins outside the self (in artworks and in the intersubjective sphere). Similar descriptions can be found in Pfänder’s Psychologie der Gesinnungen . For Pfänder, not only emotions, but also sentiments as well as thoughts can be authentic ( echt ) or inauthentic ( unecht ). Inauthentic states have a “pale,” “schematic,” “hollow,” “airy,” “coreless,” and “insubstantial” nature (Pfänder 1913, 58).

In Über Echtheit und Unechtheit von Gefühlen , Haas (1910, 24) uses the distinc-tion to refer to how an emotion is felt at a certain moment according to our own attitude or stance towards it. According to Haas, an emotion is inauthentic ( unecht ) when, at the moment of being felt, there is an underlying dominant emotion that contradicts it. In his view, we then experience this contradiction in a feeling. There is a “feeling of depth” (ibid., 23)when we experience both emotions as being in tune with one another, and the lack of this feeling points to a contradiction between the two emotional states.

In contemporary research, there is a tendency to conflate the question of the gen-uineness – or authenticity – of an emotion with the question of its reality (Mulligan 2009), and that of whether emotions fit in with the character of a person.16 In con-trast, early phenomenologists make clear that the distinction between genuineness and non-genuineness (authenticity and inauthenticity) is neither a question of the reality of an emotion nor one of how the emotion fits in with a person’s character; rather, it concerns exclusively how an emotion is felt at a specific moment . In what follows, I will extract some findings from the phenomenological view in order to develop my own account of non-genuineness.

First, to be genuine or non-genuine is a mode of experiencing an emotion, i.e., it refers to how the emotion is felt. What is different is not the emotion and its prop-erties (valence, duration, intensity, etc.), but the way in which I relate to it. Thus, to be genuine or non-genuine is not a property of the emotion. Properties such as intensity or duration belong to the nature of the emotion, but to be genuine or non-genuine concerns a form in which the emotion is experienced.

Second, to be genuine or non-genuine refers to the stance of the subject towards its own emotion. Emotions felt as non-genuine are experienced as subjectively not belonging to us in the same sense that genuine emotions do. Thus, to be genuine or non-genuine is a mode of experiencing an emotion in relation to our psychology . Given that this relation can change, the same emotion might be felt as genuine at one time and as non-genuine at another.

Third, it refers to how we experience an emotion at a certain moment . Thus, an emotion might be non-genuine and nevertheless fit the character of a person. For instance, a melancholic person might be prone to experience all emotions as dis-tant, as not really touching him. Genuine and non-genuine emotions are subjected to transformation in accordance with how the rest of our psychology changes. An emotion which is felt as non-genuine might transform into a genuine one (and vice versa). A child loves her new sister because he has internalized this emotion from his environment, but this love can be non-genuine because of an underlying ambiv-alence towards the newborn. This non-genuine love might turn into a genuine one when the deeper ambivalence disappears.

Finally, these concepts are employed by the phenomenologists with a descriptive purpose. No pejorative connotation is involved. They describe how we experience our emotions in relation to the rest of our psychology at a given moment. Used in this descriptive sense, genuineness and non-genuineness are not normative concepts, i.e., they do not refer to how we should feel in certain circumstances, but rather to how we actually experience our emotions at a given moment.

These four claims provide the foundation on which to develop accurate criteria for distinguishing genuine from non-genuine emotions, criteria that I will use in the next section to explain the distinctive phenomenology of fictional emotions. Like Haas, I will propose what might be dubbed a ‘coherence model.’17 According to this model, non-genuine emotions presuppose the simultaneous existence of two emotional states (1. simultaneity). But unlike Haas, I do not locate the force of my explanation in the existence of contradictory feelings. In fact, I do not think that the simultaneous emotions must contradict each other. Instead my model argues that the simultaneous emotions must be of a different type (not necessarily contra-dicting each other) (2. typological difference). What makes an emotion genuine or non-genuine is the way in which the subject relates to it (3. subjective stance).

The genuine emotion is genuine because the subject feels involved in it, while he feels not involved in the non-genuine (3.1. subjective involvement). Moreover, gen-uine emotions are experienced as fitting with significant elements of the momentary psychology, while non-genuine emotions are experienced as unfitting with these significant elements (3.2. subjective fittingness). A genuine emotion is experienced as fitting (independently of whether it is really fitting) in with our cognitive (beliefs, perceptions, imaginings, memories, etc.), motivational (desires, wishes, volitions), emotional (emotions, moods, sentiments), etc., structure. Non-genuine emotions might be experienced as fitting, but only within a restricted subsystem of our mo-mentary psychology and not within our momentary psychology as a whole. Thus the subject feels the genuine emotion as coherent compared to the non-genuine emotion (3.3. comparative fittingness).

According to this view, the non-genuine emotion is felt as unfitting in our psy-chology because at the time of being felt, our psychology is dominated by a different emotional state that is experienced as fitting. In my view, it is because it is experi-enced as unfitting that we describe them as coreless, light, thin, less solid, etc. It refers to how you experience the emotion at a certain moment as not having the weight with which we might experience the same emotion on other occasions.

Let me clarify this model with an example. I call it the ‘Sadness 1’ example: Imagine that you enjoy having been promoted, but at the same time you feel sad because your colleague’s promotion was rejected. Your sadness is real, you care about your colleague and you think that he deserves a promotion: it cannot be manipulated at will and it has efficacy (it motivates you to hug him, to comfort him, to encourage him to apply again, etc.). However, this sadness is felt as non-genuine. You expe-rience this sadness simultaneously with joy. Both emotions are of different types: the joy is felt as concerning you more than the sadness, it is supported by the rest of your psychology (you desired to be promoted, you believed that you deserved it, the promotion is of value to you, you hoped to be promoted, etc.), while the sadness is embedded in a subsystem existing within (you appreciate your colleague and this benevolence towards him is supported by beliefs about him, motivations to help him and positive emotions towards him, but his desires, beliefs, values, and hopes are not yours). Moreover, you feel the joy as fitting and the sadness as lacking coherence.

Now consider the hypothetical case of ‘Sadness 2.’ Imagine that for a moment you are overwhelmed by the reactions of your colleague, the joy loses its preponderance and the sadness towards him becomes dominant. Now, the sadness is experienced as genuine, and the joy as non-genuine. Still, you experience two emotions of a different type simultaneously, but you have taken a stance towards the sadness, you are more involved in the sadness than in the joy, the former is felt as being coherent with the rest of your psychology, while the joy is felt as less coherent (now what counts is not your personal purposes, but the values that you endorse; and you cannot tolerate unfairness). The sadness is felt as comparatively more fitting in the momentary state of your psychology than the non-genuine joy. However, both emo-tions are real, both are resistant to being changed at will and both have efficacy (my joy in this case continues to motivate me, influencing my thoughts, etc., but now it operates in a subsystem that is much more restricted than the sadness that has become dominant within my psychology).

There are two important results of this process. First, the non-genuine sadness (Sadness 1) has transformed into a genuine one (Sadness 2), whose impact on our mental and motivational life has a wider scope than that of the non-genuine one. However, Sadness 1 and Sadness 2 are the same sadness. What has changed is how we experience the emotions according to our subjective stance towards them. Thus, the difference is a psychological difference, not a structural one. Second, and as

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5 Fictional Emotions and Their Qualitative Feel

A long tradition in aesthetics claims that fictional emotions are what I called sham emotions above. In fact, for Lange, Geiger, and Meinong, fictional emotions have a distinctive phenomenology because they are not emotions, but rather emo-tion-like states. Lange (1901, 104) holds that the emotions of the audience, ac-tors, and artists are “emotional imaginings, emotional illusions or sham emotions [ Gefühlsvorstellungen, Illusiongsgefühle oder Scheingefühle ]” (we are not victims of self-deception, since we know that we are reacting to something fictional). According to Geiger (1914, 191f.), sham emotions ( Scheingefühle ) are of a shorter duration, bound to specific situations, less influential than our real emotions, and we can enjoy them despite them being unpleasant. In a similar vein, Meinong (1977, 310) argues that fictional emotions are quasi-emotions because they are based on sup-positions, they lack motivational force, and they have a different phenomenology.

Unlike these accounts, contemporary approaches take for granted that the phe-nomenology of emotions towards real objects and fictional emotions is similar, but they come to the same conclusion. Walton defines the latter ‘quasi-emotions’ (or ‘make-believe emotions’) as imagined emotions that emerge by ‘imagining from the inside.’ Such emotions emerge when we imagine ourselves to be in a fictional situation. We have a ‘quasi-emotion’ when we are at the cinema and we imagine being the film’s protagonist. About his hypothetical cinemagoer, Walton (1993, 242) claims: “Charles is participating psychologically in his game of make-believe. It is not true but fictional that he fears the slime. […] It is fictional that he is afraid, and it is fictional that he says he is.” This quasi-fear is structurally similar to the quasi-fear of the child playing a game of make-believe. The child acts as if he is afraid, even though he knows that there is no real danger just as the cinemagoer pretends to be afraid. Mulligan (2006) takes fictional emotions to be quasi-emotions or as-if emo-tions, a phenomenon that he distinguishes from imagining that one has an emotion.

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Employing the criteria developed in the preceding two sections, I will argue against the view that fictional emotions are a product of the imagination. However, acknowledging the influence of the imagination on them, I will defend the view that despite them being real emotions , fictional emotions are felt as non-genuine . Fictional emotions display all five aspects typical of emotions, though they exhibit specificities in each of these features, meaning that we can speak of them as consti-tuting a specific subclass.

6 Concluding Remarks

In this paper, I have argued that fictional emotions are neither sham emotions nor quasi-emotions, but real emotions experienced as non-genuine. They are

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