The Imaginational and the Actual

Fred Kersten

THE TAR OF THE IMAGINATION

To discuss the intentionalities peculiar to imaginational consciousness, I deal with the work of four phenomenologists: David Hume, Sir William Hamilton, Dorion Cairns, and Maurice Natanson. I begin with Hume because he, more than any other thinker, I believe, saw the phenomenological significance of imaginational intentionalities in a way that makes it possible to develop, in the spirit of Cairns, a more Husserlian account that can be put to the test in fiction, one of Maurice Natanson’s areas of interest. It is the merit of Hamilton, I believe, to make Hume amenable to such restatement in phenomenological terms by removing Hume’s tendency to tar over experience with an imaginational brush. It is the virtue of Natanson, I believe, to have restored imaginational intentionalities to their rightful place in our experience. As shrewd a reader of Hume as of Sir William Hamilton,1 Dorion Cairns once suggested that in book 1 of his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume develops a view of the nature of our ontic belief or conviction that may best be called a “fictionalistic idealism.” Cairns’s argument ran something like this: in book 1, Hume begins by distinguishing between vulgar and philosophical beliefs, both of which are, in turn, distinguished from his own philosophical beliefs. Hume then asks, Why are such vulgar and (ostensibly false) philosophical beliefs held? Why are continued existence and identity, for example, imputed to objects of belief, and why do we believe what is so imputed? Hume’s answer is that both vulgar and false philosophical beliefs are ideas of the imagination and are therefore “fictions.”² He explains why the fictions are believed by his hypothesis of the transfer of force and liveliness of ideas based on the laws of association and the propensity to believe.3 As a consequence, according to Cairns, if we look at all of book 1 of Hume’s Treatise in this light—namely, that everyday or vulgar belief and (false) philosophical beliefs are the work of the imagination—it follows that all of book 1, parts 1, 2, and 3 are accounts of what book 1, part 4, will then show to be the work of the imagination.

BUT WHAT, THEN, IS THE “IMAGINATION”?

Under “imagination” Hume subsumes, for example, judgments about the depth and three-dimensionality of things. Suppose I see a uniformly colored sphere. Is my impression, then, uniformly colored and spherical? The answer, according to Hume’s philosophical view, is that the impression is variously colored, flat, circular, and oblong. What I see, if I am seeing, is an impression, and the sphere is not an impression. Rather, I have an idea of a sphere and not an idea of a flat, oblong, circular surface. Here the idea I have is not a copy of an impression. And if my idea is not a copy of an impression, it must, “therefore,” be an idea of the imagination. Likewise, my idea of any enduring, existing external thing independent of the flux of perceptions must be an idea of the imagination. On Hume’s view, only the present operation of the mind, or the present sensory datum, are not included among the ideas of the imagination.

It is then the imagination that produces the enduring objects of our ontic convictions, and these objects lie outside or external to the flux of operations of the mind. Even the idea of the mind itself in its operations, as an enduring something or other, is an idea of the imagination. To be sure, Hume also includes under the heading of “imagination” the products of free phantasy, perhaps even of dreams and superstitions, thus those “multiple realities”⁴ that are more or less arbitrarily framed and defined. In short, as Husserl or even Cairns might have said, under the cloak of the imagination Hume subsumes the constituting of a genuine as well as a spurious or even fictional world and objects.

Or, to invoke a phenomenological distinction we shall develop later,⁵ Hume subsumes and collapses together under the heading of “imagination” both predications of reality and existential predications. Existence proves to be a figment of the imagination to which Hume attaches an odium, especially when the odium becomes transferred to the genuine world of impressions and its objects. The one “world” in which we live our daily lives, our “paramount reality,” as Schutz and James would say, is tarred with the same brush of fiction that has already tarred the “worlds” of multiple realities.

Even so, at work in this view of the imagination is Hume’s great insight that, given just the perceptual and imaginational operations of the mind working together, we can take account of the whole universe of experience and verify it.6

Yet that insight itself is tarred with the odium Hume attaches to the imagination. One of the many merits of Sir William Hamilton is to provide the basis for removing the odious tar of the imagination from Hume’s insight, thus opening the door to a phenomenological clarification of the imagination and a recovery of Hume’s insight.

THE TAR REMOVED

Under the heading of “imagination,” Sir William Hamilton bravely includes almost as great a heterogeneous diversity as does Hume. The tar-removing difference is that Hamilton is explicitly aware of the heterogeneity and introduces into the “imagination” divisions that, at the same time, are unifying. Thus he gives a positive spin to “imagination” by treating it primarily as the “faculty of Representation” rather than of “Reproduction.”⁷ For him, “faculty” is the name for “mental phenomena,” that is, the operations of the mind such as seeings or rememberings or judgings or imaginings.⁸ In the specific case of the imagination, Hamilton insists that we are concerned with a “compound faculty”⁹ that is more than just a “vivid” exhibition of an object “held up for observation in a clear light” so as to take note of “various circumstances of relation” and resulting in the proposing of “new arrangements.”¹⁰

To clarify this phenomenal situation, Hamilton quotes extensively from Kant’s (now forgotten) French follower, Frédéric Ancillon, who insisted that there are “as many different kinds of imagination as there are different kinds of intellectual activity.”¹¹ Limiting “imagination” to the representation of objects of the senses, there is, for instance, “imagination of abstraction,” which selects certain facets of objects while excluding others and unites those selected by a sign; or the “imagination of judgment,” which connects various qualities of objects with respect to the relations of substance, mode, and attribute. He ends his list with “imagination of the poet,” which exhibits whatever is new, or beautiful, or sublime.

Hamilton’s criticism is that this idea of the “imagination,” worthwhile in its own right, is too narrowly confined to the senses and their objects. He proposes instead that the “imagination,” as representive, be considered in terms of three “orders:” the natural, the logical, and the poetical.12 The first two orders have in common that “they deliver to us notions in the dependence on which the antecedent explains the subsequent.” The natural order is that of impressions we receive, and the second order is that of things presented as particulars and universals. Whereas the natural order is involuntary, the logical order is voluntary. The order of the former is deduction, whereas that of the latter is induction. The poetical order, in contrast to the first two, “is exclusively calculated on effect,” and there is no other order of objects than that of being grouped and moved around dominant thoughts or feelings.

By following Ancillon, Hamilton groups under “imagination” all that Hume does, including abstraction, free phantasy, and judgment. Unlike Hume, and modifying Ancillon, he reorders the heterogeneous affairs in terms of the representation of what is presented to the senses naturally or logically, or in terms of the representation of what is presented to the senses with respect to emotional or sentimental effect. Now reexhibited in its rightful order, the genuine world is no longer tarred by the imagination because the very way in which Hamilton speaks of the imagination—for example, “imagination of judgment,” “imagination of abstraction,” “imagination of wit”—suggests that imagination is a presentive modification of representation rather than a presentive reproduction as in Hume. Hamilton would seem to foreshadow the phenomenological view where the imagination is, as Husserl would say, a “phantasy modification” of “serious” feelings, willings, judgings, and the like. And because the imagination belongs to the faculty of representation rather than of reproduction, not every case of the imagination is a fiction.

Hamilton’s idea of imaginational orders is equally interesting because it points to a diversity of “predication” peculiar to the ways in which the world, things, events, and ourselves are present and represented in our experience. Unfortunately, the rigid compartmentalization into “orders” still makes it very difficult to distinguish the imaginational representation from the nonimaginational representation. It also hides or clouds the fact that something is meant by “imagination of judgment,” or “of wit,” or “of abstraction”—why not just say “judgment,” “wit,” “abstraction,” “phantasy”? Once we ask such a question, at the same time we realize that it is the wrong question because it affords no further insight into the imagination and perhaps even dispenses with it altogether. Despite the improvement over Hume, we still think in the same way by trying to understand the imagination in terms of its objects and their orders.

Suppose instead we try to examine our presentive and representive experience further untarred by any admixture of what it is that we experience (objects in abstraction, objects regrouped and in different relations, or logically related, or just impressions, etc.). By ceasing to classify the “faculties” of the imagination solely in terms of objects of the imagination, at the same time we break with our unfortunate but natural inclination to substitute their determinations for their appearings in our experience—an inclination underpinning Hume as much as Ancillon and Hamilton (and, by extension, Kant).

What we learn from this brief review of Hume and Hamilton is that to further clarify the imagination, we must cease to regard the objects meant as phenomenal components of the imaginings—as in the case of Hume’s example of the uniformly colored sphere, where what I see is something flat, then something circular, then something oblong, rather than the uniformly colored sphere; or, in the case of Hamilton, where the natural or unnatural, the voluntary or involuntary, ordering of objects and their determinations defines the “imagining” in question.

Instead we try to reflect on our operations of the mind without regarding the objects intended to and meant as phenomenal components of our reflection. What we now aim at is an insight into operatings, such as imaginings, as distinguished from the objectivity intended to and meant in them. We try to see the operations of the mind untarred by any admixture of intended-to objectivity, and we seek to distinguish the correlative appearings or ways of being made present, their modes of awareness, from admixtures of determinations of the objects. As made present in modes of awareness, they are, as Husserl says, “irrealities”13—be they real or ideal, be they the things themselves, or images, or pictures, symbols, or fictions. Once we make this distinction, the door is open to sketch a “phenomenology of the imagination,” or, we may now say, of “imaginational irrealities.”

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION¹⁴

As the word “imagining” suggests, Sartre observed that “image-making” is a way of making present something “absent.”¹⁵ And from Hume, Ancillon, and Hamilton we learn that there are at least three sorts of presentational ways to be imaginationally aware of something: 1) what we may call with Hamilton “representation” that is a depicturing, re-presentative way of presentation; 2) a phantasying or feigning (or “fictive”) way; and 3) a reproductive, imaging way, such as a memory image. Because these three phenomenally different modes of imaginational awareness are often identified with the imagination as well as confused with each other, we must try to disentangle them at the beginning, even though the complexity of their concrete intentionalities deserves more extensive analysis. At the same time, we shall try to develop a terminology that will avoid some of the overloaded connotations of “imagination” and yet point to the affairs we wish to describe.

1. The first mode of image-making awareness, understood in the broadest sense, we may call a depicturing mode in which we are aware of one thing as a picture (in some specifiable sense or other) of something else.16 The word “picture” expresses a sense broad enough to say not only that a portrait painting, for instance, is a picture, but also that a portrait bust is a picture. However, in this sense something need not be an artifact in order to be apprehended as a picture. Anything whatever can be a picture if so construed as depictive of something else, and despite the fact that we tend to take our examples from the sphere of vision, other sorts of sensibility enter in as well. For example, there is the story of the blind man running his hand over the statue of the elephant and so being depictively aware of it. We may also say here that the blind man takes what he touches as depictive of something else. Or, if someone quacks like a duck, we are depictively put in mind of a duck. Not infrequently we also speak of “images” of things, and frequently the word “image” is used instead of the word “picture.” But the term “picture” is perhaps better because of the etymological linkage of “image” to “imagination,” and pictures need not be imaginary (or fictive) or natural or artifactual “images.” From the few words of the survivor, after all, I can “get the picture” of the horror of the disaster.

The basic sort of depicturing is that founded on being aware of something physical presented as it itself and, moreover, meant in the depicturing as more than something physical. The something physical is meant additionally as a picture of something else (as depictive of something else). To be sure, the something physical may or may not be believed in as existing. For example, when I see a portrait (painting or statue) of “W,” I believe in the existence of the depicturing thing with simple certainty; and I likewise believe in the thing depictured as existing. But if, in contrast, I see a picture of a centaur, what I am also aware of—a depictured centaur—does not include a believing in the depictured centaur as existing. I may believe that what I see exists—the picture—but not in what is also meant, namely, the existence of the depictured centaur.

Depicturing is a mediated way of being aware of something in contrast to, for example, perceiving, which is unmediated. Suppose, for instance, that I enter the painter’s studio and see the model along with the picture (portrait) of the model. In the one case I am aware of the model as depictured, although not presented (thus “absent”). In the other case, I am perceptually aware of the model. Our example is, to be sure, a case of a depicturing that is perceived. But a picture can be remembered as having been previously perceived. In such a case, there is an immediate memorial awareness of the picture and a mediate awareness of the thing depictured. And there are of course pictures of pictures: a reproduction of a painting not only depictures the model or sitter but also the picture of the depictured.

2. The brief account of depicturing suggests that there is an error in the view that what we call a depicturing of something is ipso facto an image of something. This need not be the case at all, nor is there any necessity for assuming it to be the case. We can clarify this further by comparing a depicturing awareness of something with a phantasying or, as we prefer to call it, feigning (or “fictive”) awareness of something in terms of Husserl’s insight17 that for every kind of unfeigning awareness of something, there is a corresponding kind of feigning or fictive awareness—a “phantasy modification,” as he calls it.

For example, feigning the seeing of the doorknob does not necessarily put me in mind of a picture of the doorknob, that is, it is not of itself equivalent to a depicturing awareness of the doorknob. Instead, the doorknob is presented in and through the feigning awareness just as immediately as in the case of the unfeigning seeing-awareness of the doorknob, which I seriously believe in with simple certainty as existing. To feign the unfeigned—we may also say “the serious”—believing in and seeing of a real doorknob is as distinct from seeing a picture of a real doorknob as seeing a picture of a doorknob is from seeing a doorknob.

Similarly, I can feign the remembering of something previously seen. Here, too, there is no question of a picture to mediate the awareness of what I feign to remember, nor is there a question of any sort of image. And in the case of depicturing, there is a corresponding feigning. For example, I see a photograph of Alexander’s horse, Bucephalus. I do not seriously believe in the photo as an existent photo of Bucephalus, but I do seriously believe in Alexander’s horse as having existed. Of course, I cannot remember having seen Alexander’s horse, but I can feign such a remembering. It is as though I remembered standing in the crowd of an ancient city watching Alexander as he entered on his horse. That remembering (better, “quasi-remembering”) is distinct from seeing an ostensible photo or drawing and taking it to be an image of Bucephalus; and again it is different from remembering having seen a statue of a horse in Central Park and taking it as an image of Bucephalus. Such a feigning awareness is, in Cairns’s words, “no image-awareness but rather the structural counterpart, in the realm of feigning, of a genuine remembering.”18

It would then seem that we have no choice but to say that there is a distinct difference between depicturing and remembering, on the one hand, and between remembering and feigning (the serious) remembering (or even depicturing), on the other hand. Likewise, there is a clear-cut difference between a depicturing in which one thing is taken to be a picture of something else, and feigning a depicturing of something as a picture of something else. Moreover, a feigning of a remembering is still not remembering, no more than a feigning of a depicturing is a depicturing. And in each case there is an equally clearcut distinction between believing in something as existent and feigning to believe in something as existent.

3. Depicturing and phantasying or feigning are common meanings of imagining. Perhaps equally common is imaging or imagining awareness. And imagining is perhaps the meaning most tarred by metaphysical baggage. Imagination as image-awareness is perhaps most commonly associated with making present not just something absent, but something past, that is, something that no longer exists. How can I make present what is past and no longer existent? Remembering is an awareness of memory-images, the answer often goes, and so image-awareness is then more a case of the reproductive than the representative faculty.¹⁹ However, the difficulty is that when remembering the Coliseum, I remember it as I perceived it two years ago. My remembering, then, is an awareness of the Coliseum as previously perceived. Phenomenologically, all that is present is my remembering of something as previously perceived in some specific manner or other. The remembering and not an image is present, nor need there be an image. To say otherwise would be to impute meant determinations of objects of awareness to the modes of awareness of the objects. Cases of the imagination such as depicturing and feigning—which are not at all, or need not be, images²⁰—would then be collapsed into imaging or image-awareness and, by extension, “imagination.”

Differently expressed, it would be no more right to say that, for example, the feigned real doorknob is “absent” or unpresented than it would be to say that, in feigning it, it is not believed in as existing. I do not feign an “imaginary” doorknob, I do not feign an image of a doorknob that represents a “real” but “absent” doorknob, nor do I feign a picture of, or an image representing, an “absent” but previously perceived doorknob. Instead I feign a real doorknob with the real, solid heft of a brass doorknob, just as when I attend a play I feign (or “cofeign” with the playwright) a real Macbeth with real witches and a real, prepossessing wife. Nevertheless, feigning the seeing of a real doorknob is not equivalent to feigning to myself believing in the existence of a doorknob. As Husserl would say, an “existential predication” is not equivalent to a “predication of reality.” To say that I feign the seeing of the real doorknob is to say that a certain sort of thing is “made present” in a very specific, correlative act that in turn modifies a quite different but very specific act of being aware of something. To feign remembering Alexander as previously perceived is not the same as feigning a present picture or an image of Alexander as previously perceived.

As a result, we must reject “imaging” as the central meaning of “imagination.” At best, “imaging” is but a very specific mode of depicturing. What, then, is it that unites depicturing, feigning, and imaging awarenesses so that we can remain with Hume’s insight that, given just operations of the mind, given just the presentive and non-presentive intentionalities, we are put in mind of the whole universe?

PRESENTIVENESS/NON-PRESENTIVENESS

A number of conclusions may be drawn from our brief excursion into the phenomenology of the imagination. In the first place, “imagining” or “feigning” is not a mediated case of making something present, nor is it a depicturing or a remembering. If that is so, what sort of “making present” is peculiar to the imagination? In the second place, in those terms, what is the relation between “imagination” and “perception,” or, phenomenologically expressed, between “orders of reality” expressed by “predications of reality” and “existential predications”?

Perceiving, remembering, and expecting are the obvious and ordinary ways of being aware of things, events, and ourselves. Perceiving—seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, or tasting—makes present real individuals, here and now, in the present indicative, simultaneous with the perceiving. Remembering is a way of being aware of real individuals in the past, of making them present in the past indicative as presented in an earlier perceiving. Expecting is a way of being aware of real individuals as yet to come, of being aware of real individuals in the subjunctive. Perceiving, remembering, and expecting are all cases of presentive awareness. They are alike in that each is a more or less clear awareness of something presented as itself “in person.”

What about imagining? By the process of elimination, we are left with one answer: imagining, like the other ways of making present, is a way in which we are feigningly aware of something. And feigning too makes something present, but always however in the “negative” rather than in the subjunctive or indicative—to use an expression of Maurice Natanson.21 This is a way of making the “absent” present. However, this is only a tentative beginning. We have to explore this idea more carefully.

In the first place, feigning intentiveness to something makes that something present in a non-presentive way. And we have to say “non-presentive” because even though the something feigned does appear to me, it is not part of my actual surroundings, nor does it pretend to be. It is an “absence” in its very presence. Thus it would make little sense to say that it is not present or that it is unpresent. Perhaps the best way to speak of awareness of something present in or by virtue of its absence is to speak of as a “non-presentive” awareness in contrast to the presentive awareness of perceiving, remembering, and expecting.

Although the term “non-presentive” awareness was coined by Dorion Cairns,²² the idea is Husserl’s: every genus or species of a serious awareness of something has as its counterpart a genus or species of feigning, that is, of a modification in phantasy. A perceiving has a quasi-perceiving, a remembering a quasi-remembering, an expecting a quasi-expecting, as their counterparts. Even an imaging or a depicturing include as their counterparts a quasi-perceiving, such as the quasi-perceiving of the doorknob in the photo (our previous example). Suppose, now, in contrast to seeing a doorknob on my door, I feign to myself seeing a real doorknob on a real door. This is a phantasying or feigning of a real doorknob, presented as it itself in the feigning of it. In this case I am not seeing something else and taking it as an image that represents a real doorknob, nor do I take it as a depicturing of a real doorknob. It is, instead, a case of a modification of a serious-doorknob-seeing and -touching.

In the second place, depicturing awareness and image awareness similarly make present in a non-presentive way, and likewise they include a presentive awareness of something perceived (such as the portrait of Erasmus by Holbein) and, founded on that presentive awareness, a non-presentive awareness of something else that is depicted or represented (imaged) by the presented something perceived (such as Erasmus who appears yet does not exist in my actual surroundings). Here the phenomenological situation is highly complex. It is best summarized in the words of Dorion Cairns.

The image-awareness has at least four strata: it is a presentive awareness of sensa, a presentive awareness of an appearance, a presentive awareness of a physical reality and, over and above all that, a non-presentive awareness of [e.g.] John Doe. The remembering, on the other hand, is a presentive awareness of John Doe as previously perceived—that is, as the terminal object of a past awareness that had a structure like that of the present awareness of the physical thing which is taken to be an image. Moreover, the remembering involves no awareness of a mediating image.23

To this situation we now have to add that it seems to be increasingly clear that feigning cuts across not only serious perceiving, remembering, and expecting, but also depicturing and imaging. Husserl expresses this situation in section 23 of his Ideas by introducing an analogy between the intentionalities of ideation and the generation of perceptual exemplifications of an eidos, on the one hand, and “fiction” or what we may call “feigning intentionalities” on the other hand.

THE DOUBLE DEFINITION OF IMAGINATION

The example Husserl provides is that of “imagining” a centaur, and the reason for the example is that the “nothingness” of the centaur is a striking demonstration of its transcendence to the processes of intending to the centaur (which in no way entails the “Platonistic hypostasizing” of the centaur). Husserl would have us understand here that in “spontaneous fiction,” that is, in spontaneous feigning, it is not the centaur that is generated but instead the feigning of (or consciousness of) the centaur that is generated. To be sure, by “generating” Husserl understands only the generating of existing things. Yet because he speaks of the feigning of a centaur, or the “imagining” of something non-existent, the meaning of the analogy is not obvious.

As a result, if mention of “generating” is to be relevant at all in this context, if the analogy is to make sense, then as Dorion Cairns once observed, the feigning, by analogy, also must be a generating as well,²⁴ but now of something non-existent. Only in this way will the analogy with ideation and generation of perceptual exemplifications hold. In terms we have now introduced, we can speak of an analogy between generating something presentive and generating something non-presentive. Moreover, once we have expressed the phenomenological situation in this fashion, we can proceed to make the important distinction between perceiving a real doorknob and feigning the real perceiving of a real doorknob, and between the serious positing of a real doorknob as possible (thus as an exemplification of the eidos, Doorknob), on the one hand, and on the other hand feigning the positing of a real, feigned doorknob as possible.

From now on I propose using “feigning” to express the broadest meaning of “imagining”; “depicturing” will express the narrower meaning of “imagining;” and “imaging” the narrowest meaning. Moreover, while imagining in the broadest meaning of the term “imagining” cuts across all other intentionalities (so that they are quasi-intentionalities), the same is not true of depicturing and imaging. In what follows, I shall also suggest that “fiction” is not always equivalent to “imagining” in the broadest meaning, that while all cases of “fiction” are feignings, not all feignings are fiction,25 just as not all feignings are imagings or depicturings.

The distinctions are important because, if we follow Hume, all feignings of something non-presentive are ipso facto fictions. The merit of Hamilton’s criticism of Hume is that this is not the case—not all of what we call feignings of the non-presentive are fictions. Similarly, depicturing and imaging are not themselves ipso facto feignings, let alone fictions. A mathematical ratio would be a depicturing of certain integers, a making present of non-presentive integers. But it is quite distinct from feigning the formulation of a ratio. And constructing a hypothesis is not ipso facto feigning the constructing of a hypothesis (so Newton’s “non fingo hypotheses”). Even so, integers, ratios, and hypotheses are among the affairs that are non-presentive but nonetheless are made present. Verbal expressions, judgments judged, sentences, significations, essences (“concepts”—universals, formal and material, and singulars), and symbolizations (non-presentive idealities of all kinds, in contrast to non-presentive realities of all kinds) are all non-presentive. Even so, they are made present in acts of consciousness that themselves are subject to feigning modifications.

On the one hand, then, we can define “imagination” as those intentionalities that make present non-presentive realities or idealities of all kinds. On the other hand, we can define “imagination” as those feignings of intentionalities that make present presentively or non-presentively. This definition would seem to encompass the parameters of Hume’s definition of “imagination,” while the first definition would encompass those of Hamilton. A phenomenology of the imagination will have to do justice to both definitions within a transcendental phenomenological context.

For the most part we shall limit our discussion to only one aspect of the phenomenology of the imagination by casting Hume’s great insight—that given just the operations of the mind, we can take account of the whole universe of experience and verify it—into terms of how we are now to understand presentive and non-presentive intentionalities together as a concrete whole.

To approach the problem, we shall narrow our scope still further and consider cases of feigning intentiveness to something non-presentive as fictional. Our point of reference will be a line of thought developed by Maurice Natanson dealing with the phenomenological problems of “fiction” and the “imagination.”

BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S FICTION

In 1961 Maurice Natanson published the article “Existentialism and Literature.” In it he wrote the following:

Recently I read a review of a novel in which the author had appropriated another writer’s character and had put him in his book. To be sure, the “stolen” character was a very minor one. Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull just happened to be staying that week-end at another novelist’s hotel. Nevertheless, I must confess that this providential loan left me most uneasy. How is it possible for one author to borrow another’s fiction? Now, each time I pick up the New York Times Book Review I have the uneasy feeling that something sacred has given way, that fictive sampling or even swapping may have gotten started, and that Felix Krull’s apparently harmless week-end off limits may have been the slender warning that presages total disaster. For if there is one thing that is certain, it is the cordon that seals off the microcosm of a fictive reality. We may say that an author’s characters are bound to him by a central intent, and that creative reading is an act based on the recognition of that intent.26

“To read is to uncover a world,” Natanson adds, so that literature, at least fiction in his examples, “presents the living categories that support and suffuse the experienced world.”27 In short, literature or fiction “fuses the statement and expression of a theme.”

“Appropriating,” “loaning,” “sampling,” “swapping,” “borrowing,” and “stealing” name the key terms here. They are especially appropriate in the context of Natanson’s example because Felix Krull, as a Hermes-figure and thief, a con man, “borrowed” someone else’s persona in Thomas Mann’s novel, Felix Krull. Thus we have the case in fiction of borrowing a character who feigningly “lived” the life of another character in the novel. It is the fictional case of a fictional character who lived the life of another fictional character.

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE NOVEL

Moreover, Natanson’s key terms, although he does not list them this way, all express what he calls “categories that support and suffuse the experienced world.” Even though we may agree that reading uncovers a world and its supporting categories, the question remains: Which world? What categories? In one respect, it is a world that is an “experienced” world only in the most unusual sense because I am neither born into it nor do I die in it, and unless I choose to entertain the world so uncovered, it exists non-presentively only in a ubiquitous limbo.

Of course, in another sense the experienced world in the ordinary sense is unusual too, but in quite a different way. The world into which I am born and in which I grow older and die is singular in the sense of being presumably self-identical and single but in an unusual sense. It is presumably self-identical because there is no other actual individual world from which it is different. And it is single because it is not individuated by having a place in space and time. “World” in this sense is the name for whatever exists and is presumably self-identical. However, the feigned world of the novel is singular precisely in the sense of being singular rather than single. It is singular because, as the world of a literary work of art, a novel, it cannot be used or used up, changed or possessed. Its non-presentive presence in the experienced world of daily life can neither be accommodated “to the business of daily life nor to the pure realm of ideas.”²⁸

The last-cited statement is from Natanson’s sketch of his “epistemology of the novel” in The Journeying Self. There he suggests the following three distinct aspects of non-presentive “presence” of the novel in the experienced world:

1. When reading a novel, the reader generates and makes present a “world” that possesses a structure, a time and space of its own, a “human creation of words . . . [yielding] . . . a microcosm,” which, Natanson adds, is a “philosophically outrageous fact.”

2. The world of the novel is populated with an assortment of people with their own biographies, actions, and ways to be, and they are participating in a sociality that is nonetheless quite other than the one we share (something, Natanson says, that is “immensely remarkable”).

3. Reading the novel has us witnessing events, some of which are ostensibly free as well some that are determined, in which people are involved as real yet are “fictional.”

In short, the reader reading feigns a real world with real people. The consequence is that, as a reader, I support a feigned real world comprised of a system of interpretation, information, and attitude, and that, as a reader, I take on “responsibility for a world . . . [I] . . . cannot enter.” I take on responsibility, moreover, for action that I cannot change, but yet that is a feigned reality depending on my “attention and complicity.” It is very much like a Greek tragedy.

“Reading” itself—leaving aside the act of writing—entails a complexity of synthesizing intentionalities that must be mentioned here even though it cannot be exhibited in detail. Briefly and roughly stated: the words I read have significations that express (are the verbal expressions of) actions or thoughts of the characters. The written words make known or manifest the perceivings, believings, judgings, valuings, and so on of the characters, and the correlative objects of those operations or processes are expressed by the words and sentences the characters think and speak and on which they act.

Moreover, there is a whole stratum of seeing and seizing upon the marks on the page as embodying significations, and these marks with their significations manifest what the characters believe or perceive and also what the characters are speaking about and what they are going to act upon. I read “George Muirford: ‘The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.’” I feign hearing a real person making the statement; I feign him seriously seeing and believing in greener grass—all founded on and modifying the complexity of the intentionalities minimally present in reading. In that way there arises my complicity in the lives of the characters, which I am responsible for interpreting and learning from. Yet, if I am responsible and complicit in any meaningful way, do I then have license to “borrow,” “steal,” “appropriate” and the like without altering the characters? How can I do so without entering the one world of the novel from the other world of my novel?

When I say the “experienced world of daily life” or the “world in which I am born and will die,” I use the word “world” as the name for whatever exists, a universe that is presumably self-identical and single. As Husserl would say, it is a “region.” Because “world” in this sense is not individuated by having a place in time and space, as are other actual individuals whose self-identities are different from each other, a “self-identity” of actual individuals is then a “regional category” in Husserl’s terms.

But what about the feigned actual individual, Felix Krull? Or the feigned actual world of Felix Krull? Is the latter too a self-identity that is single rather than singular? It is surely not an “image” depicting the universe of whatever exists, the presumed self-identical seriously experienced world, because the world of Felix Krull is quite different from the world of Hans Castorp or of Hamlet or of George Muirford in my novel. As a result, feigned worlds, we have to say, “behave” like regional categories instead of like a region. There is no one, presumably self-identical and single world but instead multiple self-identical worlds (“multiple realities”). Is there but one experienced world as region, and many feigned actual worlds as regional categories? Is not the singular parading as the single?

The questions for phenomenological clarification extend far beyond the parameters of fiction. Yet we may get a clue to the larger problems by further examination of the epistemology of the novel. To be sure, such problems arise in phenomenological reflection and not in the feigning of a fictional world or in the experiencing of daily life.

Perhaps the first thing to be said about the feigned world of the novel is that to be one world it must not contain any deliberate inconsistencies or gross contradictions, and it must exhibit events in an orderly sequence (even if not obvious, as in Finnegan’s Wake) so that, whether contriving such a world in our own imaginational feignings or following that contrived by an author, we proceed from phase to phase, each of which is connected like links in a chain. All that of course must be distinguished from the multiplicity of acts of feigning events and people, which may be separated from one another by greater or lesser intervals, as when I put down the novel and start reading it again only much later. The self-identity of the feigned world and events is in no way affected by the discontinuity of acts of feigning/reading/writing. The distinction remains between acts of consciousness, on the one hand, and the “temporal” structures apprehended in those acts, on the other hand.

Even so, we also have to say, second, that insofar as Felix Krull is concerned, “his” one world is the universe of whatever exists, namely, “all of reality.” Felix’s world may “behave” like a regional category but it certainly “operates” like a region. Importantly, though, it must be noted that my awareness of the feigned actual world of Felix Krull is, strictly speaking, non-presentive, whereas my awareness of my experienced world is presentive. When I feign a character such as Felix Krull while reading, I also feign at the same time that character’s own perceiving of his own actual presentive world.29 Moreover, in the third place, Felix Krull is self-identical and different from the other feigned actual individuals in the novel just as, and only insofar as, Felix Krull is concerned. However, I cannot say that my experienced world is self-identical or not. To be sure, my actual experienced world is also seriously presentive (and appresentive).³⁰

Thus, when I read and encounter the “living categories” that support and suffuse the world, I have to ask: Which world? And until I decide which “world,” it would seem difficult if not impossible to examine the idea of borrowing someone else’s fiction. Can I borrow a character such as Felix Krull, but without his world, and place him in the world of my fictional character, George Muirford?³¹ Can my fictional character swap clothes with him as Felix did with other characters (especially the Marquis de Venosta) in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man? Can I even appropriate for my character Felix Krull’s necktie? In what sense is it the “same” tie? Is it possible for George Muirford to buy Felix Krull lunch at the hotel where he spends the weekend in my novel, disguised as the Marquis de Venosta?

There are, after all, copyright laws. I can be sued for “plagiarism” no matter what my intentions and my philosophical wrestlings with the problem, no matter whether I always call it “research” or “fiction” (to paraphrase Tom Lehrer’s Lobachevsky)—as even the author of Confessions of Felix Krull found out when “borrowing” the world of atonality in his novel, Doktor Faustus.³² It would seem that I can own my own feigned actual world but cannot be its sovereign. But I can be sovereign of my actual experienced life-world, yet I cannot own it. Megalomania obviously has its limits.

How can we clarify this situation further?

PREDICATIONS OF REALITY; EXISTENTIAL PREDICATIONS

In his Experience and Judgment, Husserl makes a sharp distinction between predications of reality and existential predications. Predications of reality assert that something belongs to the world of presentive reality. We can illustrate the situation with an example provided by Aron Gurwitsch. Gurwitsch’s example is that of attending a new play in the theatre when, he says,

we may anticipate certain actions as more or less likely. At a certain phase of the play we may foresee, and thus posit, events we must cancel at a later phase because of complications occurring in the interim . . . [When a] certain object has been posited as existing within the world of reality, and when later experience motivates cancellation of that object, it is thereby n2ot declared an object of a “world of imagination.33

Cancellation of posited existence is possible as much in the case of real things as it is of feigned things. And when the cancellation occurs, the object remains a worldly object, or a feigned object, which, were it to exist, would have its place within the world of reality, or within the world of imagination.

As expressed by Aron Gurwitsch, a predication of reality can also be a modification of reality by explicitly referring an object to its own “order of existence.” Predications of reality are not to be confused with “existential predications” that express modalities of existence. They consist of positing something as existent or as non-existent, doubtful, presumptive, and the like, whether things be serious, depictive, imaginary, or feigned.

Here it is important to note that when something has been posited as existent in the presentive world of reality—the one experienced world—and later experience cancels out that something, it does not mean that the something in question is declared an object in the “world of the imagination” (the “world” of depicturing, imaging, and fiction). In other words, the something is not thereby subsumed under a concept of reality, nor is it thereby referred to a different order of existence or being. The something in question remains an object of the presentive world and would have a place in it were it to exist. And the same holds for objects of the imagination: to feign something as existent, or as probable, or to cancel it out, is not the same as subsuming it under a concept of imaginational or feigned reality. Similarly, to posit an essence as existing, or to cancel it out, is not the same as subsuming it under the concept of “essential reality.” Concepts such as those of reality, imagination, or essence arise only when we reflect on the contrast between real and imagined, or real and essential objects, each seized on as exemplifying perceivings of possible realities, or possible feignings of perceivings, or possible seeings of essences.

Existential predications, or modalities, do not refer anything to its order of existence. And under existential predications I would also include (with a later caveat) what Natanson once called the “condensation of experience by way of [non-presentive] theatrical [more broadly, feigning or fictive] conversion,” and even the “appropriation of the subjunctive.”34 The referral to another order of existence is already presupposed, along with reflection on the contrast between the presentive experienced and the non-presentive theatrical or feigned world, or reflection on the contrast between the indicative and the subjunctive.

This is because, following Husserl,³⁵ when we live straightforwardly, busied perceptually or imaginatively, we do not subsume things under any concept of reality. It is only when we are reflectively busied with them that we confront and contrast things that are feigned (or “theatrical”) or essential with those that are presentive and proceed to subsume them under one or another concept of reality. The concepts of reality arise when we reflect on the contrastive experience of things in the presentive, experienced world, and when we reflect on things of a non-presentive feigned world and apprehend them as exemplifying, respectively, possible presentive or possible feigned realities. Moreover, prior to any explicit seizing on real objects as real, feigned objects as feigned, or essential objects as ideal, real objects continue to persist and appear within the context of reality from which feigned objects, or from which essences, are excluded because they form a context of their own. To use Gurwitsch’s ontological term, each object is made present as it itself with its own respective “existential index.” And it is the object’s existential index that warrants its placement in its own context rather than in any other.

Reflection on the contrast between presentive and non-presentive things, or more broadly between presentively serious and non-presentively feigned realities, will provide us with still further clues for clarifying the “imagination” with respect to Natanson’s epistemology of the novel.

ORDERS OF EXISTENCE

To be sure, regardless of whether we make the contrast and reflect, presentive real things still appear as real, and non-presentive feigned or fictive things still appear as feigned or fictively real within their mutually exclusive connections and contexts. But it is only in the reflective attitude that the “existential index” of their respective orders of reality is made thematic. In this connection, some further light can be shed on “borrowing,” “appropriating,” and “swapping” someone else’s fiction.

Consider the temporality of feigned, fictive things, such as Felix Krull. That temporality must not be confused with other temporalilties, such as that of presentive things, let alone of so-called objective or standard temporalities. To ask whether Felix Krull’s lifetime is contemporaneous with mine or any reader or Thomas Mann’s is absurd and meaningless. To be sure, I can objectivate or make thematic the temporality of the novel in so far as it concerns the duration and order of the events of Felix Krull’s life. But then I am really concerned with a “quasi-temporality,” a “quasi-life time,” just as the world in which Felix Krull lives is a “quasi-world,”36 that is, a feigned real world. As Aron Gurwitsch nicely expressed the situation,

Since insertion into real objective time is the necessary condition for any object to belong to the order of reality, no world of imagination is a sub-order of reality. Hence every world of imagination must be considered as an order of existence in its own right.³⁷

To Gurwitsch’s statement we may add, with Natanson, that because my being in the experienced world always bears within it the possibility of its nihilation, that is, a predication of reality always includes the possibility of its negation, it follows that the non-presentive, the “imaginary,” is “the implicit margin surrounding the horizon of the real.” Accordingly, as an order of existence in its own right, the non-presentive feigned world is nonetheless the “margin” surrounding the order of reality that is the “paramount reality of worldly existence,” and because, as Natanson says, the “imaginary is unreal . . . it can be deciphered. The decoding presupposes the natural language from which it was translated and transposed. Without the real the unreal is unthinkable.”³⁸ More broadly expressed in paraphrase, without the presentive the non-presentive is unthinkable. In less precise but more Humean terms, we may also say that without perception, the imagination is unthinkable.

At this juncture we may now draw a few conclusions relevant for our phenomenology of the imagination:

In the first place, feigned and fictive realities are completely divorced not only from the realities of the presentive, experienced world, but also from each other. I shall return to this conclusion in a moment.

In the second place, insofar as the non-presentive, feigned world³⁹ is concerned, all the events in their quasi-temporalities are conceived as unified into one quasi-time encompassing the feigned world in question, but without being able to be inserted into a wider context than that of the feigned world in question. The key term here is “wider context.” I can read and thus entertain a feigned world of fiction, for instance, and then stop to do things other than read or write. The horizon of my presentive, experienced world includes entertaining non-presentive, feigned worlds, some of which are fictions, and then proceeding to do other things in my presentive, experienced world. Just that horizon of expectations is not included in the feigned world of fiction for doing things in the presentive, experienced world, nor for doing things in yet another feigned world of fiction.

Nor would it seem that a set of expectations in one feigned world of fiction can be set into yet another. There is no “appropriation of the subjunctive,” no “condensation” of feigned experience by theatrical conversion—those existential predications or modalities would seem to be entirely confined to the real, experienced world and are illicit in the world of the imagination, the feigned world of fiction. And we have here yet another aspect of making something present in the “negative,” as Natanson would say.

While the experienced world allows me to entertain and apprehend other orders of existence, with all their possibilities of a wider context that are real in the reality of fiction, for instance, the converse is not the case for fictive or for feigned worlds generally.40 As a consequence we might even be tempted to speak of the “priority” of the presentive, experienced world, the paramount reality of daily life, over the feigned worlds—for example, over the feigned fictive world of individuals in a novel or of characters in a play. Moreover, the unification of a feigned fictive world is always extrinsic to it as a product generated in feigning awareness in the sense that such unification depends entirely on the discretion, even whim, of the feigning acts of consciousness. Feigning a fictive world and its events and individuals, I am completely free to feign them as unified or as disconnected in any quasi-time or quasi-space that I please (as, for example, in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando). This, of course, I am not free to do in the presentive, experienced world, the unification of which is intrinsic.

In the third place, unified or disconnected, there is no question concerning the consistency or inconsistency between different feigned worlds—for example, between different feigned worlds of fiction.⁴¹ Each feigned, non-presentive world in general, and each feigned world of fiction in particular, is autonomous precisely and only as an order of existence. Each remains completely separate from every other one. In Gurwitsch’s terms, their existential indices are intractable with respect to each other. While I can always go back and forth between the presentive, experienced world and the feigned world of the novel I am reading, I cannot cross the boundaries of feigned worlds of fiction. As Natanson observed, there is always the “cordon that seals off the microcosm of a fictive [in the sense of a feigned] reality.” The quasi-temporality of the feigned actual world of fiction is like a past: events are irrevocable and cannot be changed. But it would also seem to be true that events are projected or planned. They are future-like with their real possibilities, and if these are not realized, it is because of the characters and events in the novel or play and not because of the reader or spectator. Instead of saying that the quasi-temporality of the feigned world of fiction has the future as its cardinal dimension,42 we might say that it is rather the quasi-future or the quasi-future perfect.

These distinctions with respect to temporality lead us to further distinctions. Phenomenologically, temporality and quasi-temporality distinguish the real and feigned “worlds” from each other. The atemporality of formal and material universals or concepts, along with eidetic singularities, distinguish them from both real and feigned “worlds.” Whereas the real “world” is presentive and temporal, and whereas the feigned “world” is non-presentive (or “imaginational”) and quasi-temporal, the eidetic “world” is presentive and atemporal. Obviously we cannot identify the real just with the presentive. The eidetic or “ideal” is also presentive. Nor can we identify the real entirely with the temporal, for the imaginational is also temporal, albeit quasi-temporal and non-presentive. However, the atemporal is presentive rather than non-presentive. What is it, then, that makes the real “real”? The ideal “ideal”? The imaginational “imaginational”? They are not quite opposites, so how do we express their relationship?

To express the matter in another way, we may say that the existential index of the one experienced world is also an index to non-presentive orders of reality existing in their own right apart from the one experienced world in which they are appresented by real events such as words, sounds, gestures, and actions.⁴³ Even though other orders of reality are not part of the presentive order of reality, they are never concretely apart from it. So in Gurwitsch’s example of a new play, the non-presentive order of reality appearing on the stage is allowed to be what we may call an “independent” variable in the sense of an order of reality not dependent on, even though not concretely apart from, actual presentive experience with quite recognizable “correlates in the life-world,” to use an expression of Alfred Schutz.⁴⁴ With respect to the one order to reality, the other is always an independent variable requiring, among other things, making explicit what Alfred Schutz called an “interpretational schema” or context to accomodate its shift in existential index.

Because all serious intentionalities are subject to a “phantasy modification,” we may also say that they are characterized at least implicitly by what we may call a “coefficient of non-presentiveness.” As a consequence, the existential index of the order of serious intentionalities always implicitly appresents feigned orders of reality.45 However, the contrary is not the case: the existential index of feigned realities appresent neither other feigned orders, nor the order of serious intentionalties, and thus they are not characterized by a “coefficient of presentiveness.” The order of serious intentionalities then has a primacy and accordingly is the paramount order of reality. To express the situation of orders of reality as mutually independent variables, we may say that the order of reality of serious intentionalities allows for those of feigned intentionalities, but the converse is not the case. And only the existential indices of serious intentionalties are appresentive of those of feigned realities, but the converse is not the case. As we shall suggest shortly,⁴⁶ however, the situation with the founding-founded structure of the presentive and non-presentive is quite distinct.

This whole structure is illustrated by Sartre in L’Imaginaire.

It is self-evident that the novelist, the poet, and the dramatist constitute an irreal object (objet irréel) [i.e., something non-presentive] by means of a verbal analogue;⁴⁷ it is also self-evident that the actor who plays Hamlet makes use of himself, of his whole body, as an analogue of the imaginary person. . . . The actor does not actually consider himself to be Hamlet. But this does not mean that he does not “mobilize” all his powers to make Hamlet real. He uses all his feelings, all his strength, all his gestures as analogues of the feelings and conduct of Hamlet. But by this very fact he irrealizes them (les irréalise) [i.e., makes present something non-presentive].⁴⁸

Making present an autonomous, non-presentive order of reality, “irrealizing” it, suggests a convergence of that order of reality with the order of reality of the one, experienced world. But, with Natanson, we have to say that these independent variables converge disjunctively.

DISJUNCTIVE CONVERGENCE

Perhaps, phenomenologically, it is not too far-fetched to speak of a character in a novel as a “type,” an “ideal type,” perhaps, but nevertheless a type, or an eidos, “Felix Krull.” No matter how we proceed to clarify the meaning of the terms “type” and “eidos,”49 they can be exemplified equally by products generated by feigning no less than by the facts of actual perception. To apprehend an eidos as exemplified by possible varieties and variations, be they actual or feigned, in no way eliminates the status of those varieties or variations as actual or feigned. Thus the eidos, Material Thing, is exemplified equally by golden mountains and winged horses, or by trees and stones.⁵⁰ Or, to take another example proposed by Natanson, the eidos “Bessie Berger” (in Odette’s Awake and Sing) is exemplified equally by the character in the play as well as by the “essential Stella Adler” (to take a specific case).⁵¹

But in the case of a feigned state of affairs such as fiction, for example, Felix Krull, we are confronted by the eidos “Felix Krull,” exemplified only by products generated by feigning. There are no “serious” exemplifications in actual perception. Is the eidos “Felix Krull” limited in its exemplifications to the novel by Thomas Mann, and more particularly to those exemplifications in a unified non-presentive quasi-time and quasi-space, written at a certain time and place? Or can that eidos equally be exemplified by characters in novels written by others, perhaps at other times and places? Phenomenologically, to ask those and similar questions is to ask about the “compossibility” or “incompossibility” of the eidos “Felix Krull.”⁵² In other words, to be a possible exemplification of the eidos “Felix Krull,” it is necessary that there be no inner contradictions, and to be a compossible exemplification it is necessary that an exemplification of “Felix Krull” not be incompatible with other types nor incompatible with the totality of feigned actual experiences of any feigned world of fiction you please.

The question, then, is whether the compossibility of the eidos “Felix Krull” must necessarily be compatible with any other feigned world of fiction, or even with the experienced life-world itself. In a way, we have already asked this question when seeking a definition of “world.” Still, before we can address that question, there is the question about just what sort of eidos is exemplified in Felix Krull the character. For instance, a character in a novel would seem to be neither a material nor a formal universal but instead an eidetic singularity, or an “ideal individual” (in contrast to an “ideal universal”). Perhaps it is like a piece of music or a verbal expression. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, an eidetic singularity, admits of performance in the experienced world, of exemplifications in actual performances.

But what about “Felix Krull”? Would the exemplification (or realization) then be in the words of the novel, words that, after all, make up the reading in the experienced world just as the performance of the symphony makes up the hearing in the experienced world? Is not the actual reading of the words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages of the novel like the actual play of the notes, the bars of the movements of the symphony?

To be sure, we may not want to think of the symphony (or anything else of that sort) as feigned as we think of the novel. Yet, like the novel, its status as artwork is not all that different. Listening to the music, do I not follow along with the composer’s “imagining” just as I do when I follow along with the author’s when reading?53 On the other hand, “Felix Krull” is unlike other “ideal individuals” such as verbal expressions or Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Although “Felix Krull” is like them in lacking spatiotemporal individuation and in retaining a self-identity, “Felix Krull” does not undergo historical change. Instead, “Felix Krull” as an “ideal individual” undergoes feigned or quasi-historical change. And feigned historical change is, to use Husserl’s term, a phantasy modification of real historical change such as befalls all ideal cultural things generally.⁵⁴

Nevertheless, as more than one writer from Sartre to Natanson has noted,⁵⁵ although I can go back and forth between them, I cannot entertain at once the feigned world of fiction and the experienced world of daily life in which listening and reading occur. The one world would always seem to require the “suspension” of the other. And it is even more so in the case of going from one feigned world of fiction to another feigned world of fiction—to feign the one and at the same time the other would be like feigning at the same time a circle and a square. And, again, in the case of a performance of a play: if I rush on the stage to warn Hamlet of what his biker-buddies in the castle are up to, people in strange uniforms would come to take me away. I cannot warn Hamlet. I am condemned to be a spectator at this fate that unrolls before me in the (quasi-) future perfect tense. “To read is to uncover a world,” Natanson says. But the world uncovered is certainly not the experienced world in which I am reading. How can I “suspend” the experienced world in which I read to entertain and uncover the feigned world of fiction, and yet, “at the same time,” continue to read? The “suspended” worlds are then not either the one or the other. Separate, autonomous orders of existence that are cordons that seal off the one from the other, the worlds of imagination and reality converge. The relation of the world of fiction and the experienced world in which I read is what Natanson called a “disjunctive convergence.”

The convergence is in fact a “clue to their disjunction.”56 The convergence proves to be, Natanson says, the “achievement of fictive [or feigning] consciousness” by virtue of disclosing the “transcendental structure of daily life.” To be sure, here as in other places in his writings, Natanson is interested in both the contrast between philosophy and literature as well as in their mutual illumination.⁵⁷ With respect to the latter, there are “zones”⁵⁸ or, as he later calls them, “enclaves”⁵⁹ where literature and philosophy mutually illuminate one another. But are there zones or enclaves between feigned worlds of fiction? Does one feigned fictive world reveal the transcendental structure of the other? A statement about plural feigned fictive worlds is a statement that cannot be made on the basis of feigning awareness. This is because such a statement presupposes the reflective contrast between the real world of daily life and the feigned fictive worlds, but not between the feigned fictive worlds themselves with respect to each other (thus Hamlet would have to realize the difference between his world and that of Lear, Felix between his world and that of Hans Castorp). In terms we used before, the existential indices of feigned fictional worlds do not have a coefficient of non-presentiveness allowing appresentation of other feigned, fictional worlds.

In terms such as these, it is impossible for me to complete Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, or add other chapters to the novel Felix Krull, and I am in the same difficulty if the adagio from Mahler’s Ninth Symphony turns up in a performance of mine. Different products generated by feigning would certainly seem to be incompossible. The predications of reality belong only to one specific world, and there would seem to be no compossible insertion into a wider context of another feigned fictive world. Yet I can compose a variation on a theme from Mahler, but not write a variation on a character from Thomas Mann. The comparison with a piece of music, or more generally with works of art, does not seem to add further clarification.

SCIENCE, ART, AND FICTION

There is, however, another line of thought to be pursued, and it is one inspired as much by Hume as by Hamilton. Sometimes the creative generation of a character in a novel has been compared to the constructive generation of “puppets,” of “homunculi” or “abstract models” by social theorists of the Weberian or Schutzian sort. This construction consists of the development of ideal types that, of course, can be borrowed by other investigators and theorists. How different is that from the creative generation of a character in fiction? To be sure, the latter in principle has a biography—a quasi-history that, like “ideal individuals,” preserves a self-identity uniquely embedded in a unique world—whereas the “puppet” does not and, by definition, is not unique. Moreover, the puppet or homunculus serves as a scientific instrument, and although it is not impossible for a feigned actual character in a novel or play to be so construed, nonetheless it is only incidentally so and not part of the eidos exemplified by the character. As a social theorist, I can use someone else’s puppet by borrowing it for scientific purposes, but that would seem absurd in the case of borrowing a character from someone else’s fiction to populate my own feigned novelistic world and not for scientific purposes.

What then is the status of fiction? Natanson himself admitted that the “status of the ‘fictive’ remains philosophically obscure.”60 In the same vein, however, he then goes on to say that “the individual may stand to the abstract model of society which the theorist has described and analyzed in a way which is similar to the writer’s relationship to the fictive microcosm he has created. And—to beat everything—the writer’s stance may enter his fiction.”⁶¹

Interesting enough, instead of the novel here providing “living categories that support and suffuse the experienced world,” it is rather the case of the “cry of the life-world” that “reverberates in the world of the novel.”⁶² Perhaps the former is an answer to the latter for Natanson.⁶³ If one writer’s stance can enter the microcosm, so can another writer’s. It is a stance in all likelihood bent on “borrowing,” “stealing,” and “appropriating.” Thus, to borrow someone else’s fiction, I need to be a writer of fiction, or do so insofar as I feign, or cofeign, the fictive world in question, such as that of Felix Krull. But then the “borrowing” is at best a quasi-borrowing, a feigned actual borrowing, and not a “serious” borrowing.

“Serious” borrowing, Natanson intimates, would be like the “serious man” who looks over my shoulder as I pen my novel and would construe my feigned fictional world as but illustrations of philosophical concepts, or as interruptions of the discussion of “serious matters,” instead of its parts, or as “devices” to get at what argumentations and scientific treatises cannot, or as the reduction of philosophy to ornamentation and of desire to pathology. In other words, the serious man reduces fiction to what Hamilton called the “imagination of the poet” that moves about and reshuffles dominant thoughts or feelings. The “serious man” is none other than the descendent of David Hume for whom “nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may, in this respect be compared to those angels whom the Scriptures represent as covering their eyes with their wings.”64

To confuse the feigned with the serious, to reduce the former to the latter, is to confuse predications of reality with existential predications. Or if not, then it is to substitute for the quasi-temporal non-presentive the temporal, or even the atemporal, presentive. The “serious man” tars over the experienced world with the “imagination,” and curiously enough, just as Hamilton has removed the tar, he cites Hume to repeat the tarring.

The introduction of the “serious man” points to the necessity of further clarification of the constituting of feigned actual worlds of fiction as purely possible worlds. Feigning awareness, as I have emphasized with Husserl, and as implied by Hamilton, is a modification of “serious” modes of awareness or consciousness, possessed of its own peculiar complexity. Moreover, as I have also suggested, feigning an actual world of fiction is to be sharply distinguished from all other forms of image-awareness, although, like the latter, it is a case of non-presentive intentionality in contrast to the complexity of “serious” cases of intentionality.

Yet even given the elaboration of the constituting of feigned actual worlds of fiction populated by feigned actual events, persons, and things, the question still remains concerning the status of “fiction.” Once the tar of the imagination has been removed, once the disjunctive convergence of the feigned and the experienced has been explored further, and once the principles of organization and unification of feigned actual and possible worlds have been accounted for, it is possible to develop further our test case of feigning worlds of fiction.

And what about the problem with which we began? It would now seem that borrowing someone else’s fiction depends on its compossiblity with yet another’s fiction. Still, there is no way to find out whether they are compossible or incompossible. There are no zones or enclaves between feigned worlds of fiction. To be sure, the clarification of the novel as a work of art is still not a clarification of the novel as fiction. Not every work of art is a fiction—certainly paintings, sculptures, and compositions of music, may as works of art have characteristics in common with the novel and other sorts of fiction (a theatrical work, for instance). Of themselves, those characteristics do not clarify the status or nature of something precisely as fiction, but only of fiction as a work of art.

Not all fiction is a work of art. For instance, such non-presentive idealities as the feigned puppets or homunculi of the social scientist are not works of art, nor are the hypotheses of the mathematician or physicist—or if they are, they are so only incidentally and not essentially.65 What then is the status of the fictional even when it is not a work of art? What is the status of the novel as fiction in its status as fiction? Even more broadly, what is the status of any feigned, multiple reality in its status as feigned? Although we may speak of a disjunctive convergence of feigned worlds of fiction with the experienced world, and of the latter with the former, what about the feigned worlds of fiction themselves: is there among them a disjunctive convergence? Is there a disjunctive convergence with the feigned world of scientific constructs and fiction (science fiction)? With the feigned non-presentive world of myth? Superstition? Religion? If not the experienced world of daily life, what would be the ground of their respective convergences? A whole domain of phenomenological inquiry is thus opened.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF FICTIVE INTENTIONALITY

If, as I have suggested here, all fiction is generated by a feigning or phantasy modification of “serious” intentionalities, and if, as I have also suggested, not all feigning (phantasy) modification generates non-presentive affairs and multiple realities or orders of existence that are fiction, then we deal with a very specific complexity of intentionalities. Here the complexity can be sketched only in its barest essentials.

Universally, whenever I make a statement, whenever I seriously judge or believe in the broadest sense, I carry out highly complex, founded activities. In any case of making a statement, the substrata about which the statement is made somehow or other must be intended to in order to be expressed, although those substrata need not be perceived. I can make a statement founded on an intuitive remembering of those things or affairs expressed in the statement. On the basis of an intuitive remembering as a modification of an intuitive sensuous perceiving, the object is consequently intuitively-memorially explicated. Having then explicated the object, instead of simply taking the perceived object as perceived, I can proceed to make a statement about it—for example, “this chair on which I sit is brown.” Here the copula, “is,” expresses a serious positing of the chair as existing in the one, experienced real world in addition to its standard function of joining “subject” and “object.” It is what we have called with Husserl a predication of reality.

Expressing in words statements founded on feigning or phantasy modifications are of a structure similar to serious positing expressed in statements. I may feigningly perceive or remember a perceiving of a chair. Then I may proceed to explicate the feigned chair-perceiving and, on that basis, go on to quasi-express in words the non-presentive state of affairs: “the chair is brown in this feigned real world.” Here the copula, “is,” of the quasi-statement “the chair is brown” no longer expresses a serious positing in addition to its copulative function. Instead, in addition “is” expresses a feigning-positing. Feigning-positing is expressed by a quasi-“is,” and the positing is only feigned—it is a quasi-predication of reality. Thus we would have to say that Natanson’s epistemology of the novel presupposes an ontology of the novel in which the same words, such as the copula “is,” have a very different meaning. Moreover, it is a very different meaning that I take for granted in reading a novel and without which the world of fiction disappears if I confuse it with expressing a serious positing.

The two “is’s” converge only disjunctively. With respect to each other, in reflective contrast, they are like two independent variables but only one of which appresents the other. Now, what is important for our purposes is that feigning-making of statements, that feigning-judging or making of statements, founded on feigned substrata, consists of the fact that, for example, feigned seeing of a brown chair also includes serious intending to the essential possibility of seriously seeing a brown chair and so includes original judgings founded on seriously intended to substrates with their essential possibility of being expressed by states of affairs produced by predications of reality. Thus quasi-positing, or feigning-positing, of a brown chair involves the essential possibility of the brown chair. It is in this manner that the disjunctive convergence of presentiveness/non-presentiveness discloses the transcendental structure of the world in which we are born and in which we grow old.

And this leads us, in the specific case of the novel, to the distinction between feigned actuality and essential possibility. Feigning-positing of a non-presentive or quasi-world is more than serious positing of a possible presentive world, or even feigning-positing of a presentive possible world. To feigningly posit a non-presentive world, the world of fiction of a novel for instance, it is necessary, first, to reduce the actual, seriously posited presentive world to an essentially possible seriously posited presentive world, so that, second, on that basis I can proceed to the feigning-positing of the presentive world as an essentially possible actual non-presentive world with those feigningly posited actual determinations it is feigningly meant as having. The incompatibility of feigningly meant actual determinations the non-presentive world is intended to as having is then evidence (in Husserl’s sense) of the essential incompatibility to any other world having such actual determinations.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE NOVEL

We have explored Natanson’s “epistemology of the novel” in order to test some of the chief tenets of a phenomenology of the imagination. While avoiding the tar of the imagination, we are now in a position to indicate how, in some ways, those operations work together in such a way that we can avoid the compartmentalization and separation of the imagination and perception, thus avoiding as well the separation of the imagination into representative and reproductive faculties. The exploration of Natanson’s discussion of fiction is, however, most important for our purposes because it discloses the complexity of imaginational intentionalities and the ways in which they and serious intentionalities in principle account universally for the world in which we live.

By way of summary, we can briefly return to Natanson’s account of how the novel is present in the experienced world as an example confirming Hume’s great insight. In the first place, to the extent that the novel is about the seriously posited actual presentive world, it includes a presentive awareness of the world as an essentially possible actual world by generating an essentially possible non-presentive awareness of an actual presentive world. More specifically, the world of the novel that appears in non-presentive awareness is characterized by an essentially possible space-time of its own, populated by essentially possible people sharing their actions and ways to be in an essentially possible sociality comprised of events and relationships, some of which are free while others are detemined, and all are motivated and non-presentively actual.

In the second place, for two reasons there is then non-presentive awareness of the feigned world of the novel as both single and singular. The first reason is that non-presentive awareness of the feigned world of the novel is founded on presentive awareness of an essentially possible seriously posited presentive world. And the second reason is that the latter is feigningly posited as an essentially possible actual non-presentive world with determinations incompatible with any other such world. Thus there is evidential presentive awareness of the essential incompatibility to any other such world having such actual determinations.

As a consequence of its singleness and singularity, it is a world for which, as Natanson says, I can take responsibility but into which I cannot enter. Its autonomy is unique and incomparable in just the same way as the one real or actual world of daily life—imposed on us by virtue of our being born into it and growing older in it—is utterly incomparable when we reflect on the contrastive experience of the presentive awareness of the world and the non-presentive awareness of the world founded on the essential possiblity of the former.

And the contrastive awareness testifies, in novel ways to be sure, to the validity of Hume’s insight that given the presentive and non-presentive operations of the mind working together, we can take account of the whole universe of experience and verify it.

In the third place, although the “worlds” of daily life and the novel are incomparable and essentially incompatible, and although their existential indices are intractable, the world of the novel makes present the “living categories that support and suffuse the world” of daily life. The categories of fiction, to be sure, always converge only disjunctively with those of daily life, and the latter with the former. In phenomenological-ontological terms, predications of reality, presentive and non-presentive, are to one another as independent variables. Thus, the categories of the one include those of the other. Although we cannot develop here the predicative structure of our experience of the world of the novel, we can note that it is quite distinct from that of unfeigned (or serious) awareness, or even non-presentive depicturing and image awareness.

Thus, finally, we can address the question about “borrowing someone else’s fiction.” We must say that in each case it is necessary to reduce the presentive awareness of the seriously posited presentive world to an essentially possible seriously posited presentive world on which is founded then, and only then, the non-presentive feigning-positing, in each case, of non-presentive awareness of an essentially possible feigned actual world with the determinations it is meant as having in non-presentive feigning awareness of it.

We may then conclude that borrowing and swapping fiction is an essential non-compossibility, and that fictional worlds are essentially incompatible one with another.66 To say that a character from one author’s novel appears in a hotel in another author’s novel is a fictional lie. Phenomenologically, I would have feigned a lie rather than a truth.⁶⁷

So far we have developed only a chapter in the phenomenology of the imagination, and an introductory one at that. It makes no pretense to being other than a beginning, and one that has to leave room for other sorts of non-presentive awareness, such as the awareness of things symbolized, of emotions expressed by, for example, the blush, of judgments expressed by sentences, of things imaged in a mirror,⁶⁸ and even of dreams⁶⁹ and the supernatural. All such cases of non-presentive awareness are similar, in one way or another, to the sorts of non-presentive awareness discussed here. In addition, once the tar of the imagination is removed, our phenomenology of the imagination has to include further clarification of the existential indices of the depicturing and depictured, imagining and the imaged, feigning and the feigned along with an account of the ways presentive and non-presentive predications of reality are combined to constitute the predicative structure of imaginational irreality.

NOTES

1. For Cairns’s interest in and view of Hume and Hamilton, see Dorion Cairns, “My Own Life,” in Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns, ed. Fred Kersten and Richard Zaner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 13.

2. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 209, see 187–218.

3. Hume, Treatise, 193–95, 201–8.

4. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” in Collected Papers, vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. M. Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 207–59.

5. See section titled “The Double Definition of Imagination” below.

6. For a phenomenological version of this thesis, see Fritz Kaufmann, “On Imagination,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 7 (1947): 372.

7. See Sir William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, 4 vols., ed. Rev. H. L. Mansel and John Veitch, 3rd rev. ed. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1855), 2:4.

8. Hamilton, Lectures, 2:4.

9. Hamilton, Lectures, 2:265.

10. Hamilton, Lectures, 2:264, 265.

11. Hamilton, Lectures, 2:265, and 267–74, where he provides his own translation of Ancillon’s Essai Philosophiques (1821).

12. Hamilton, Lectures, 2:266.

13. For Husserl’s use of the term, “irreality,” see Fred Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory and Practice (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), §§20, 92; 305.

14. For much of this section I draw extensively on Dorion Cairns, “Perceiving, Remembering, Image-Awareness, Feigning Awareness,” in Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns, ed. Fred Kersten and Richard Zaner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 251–62.

15. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 25. As we shall see, the meaning of “absence” needs considerable specification as a special case of what we shall call “non-presentiveness.”

16. See Fred Kersten, Galileo and the “Invention” of Opera: A Study in the Phenomenology of Consciousness (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 34.

17. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), I, §§104, 111.

18. Cairns, “Perceiving,” 260.

19. To be sure, it is then said that they can be converted into representations, e.g., by “abstraction” or some similar operation performed on them.

20. Of course, I can feign the seeing of a picture of Alexander, but that is different from seeing a picture of Alexander, which again is quite distinct from remembering a picture of Alexander as previously seen, which again is distinct from feigning to remember a picture as previously seen and remembering having feigned seeing a picture.

21. Maurice Natanson, “Man as Actor,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26, no. 3 (March 1966): 333, 340, 341.

22. See Cairns, “Perceiving,” 257–62. The awareness is not the awareness of an absence, nor is it a making present of something absent “as though” it were present. The indicative, subjunctive, and conditional are ways of presentiveness. Thus the only appropriate term, it would seem, is non-presentiveness. Cf. also the careful discussion of “image” by Jean Hering, “Concerning Image, Idea, and Dream: Phenomenological Notes,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (September 1947–June 1948): 188–205.

23. Cairns, “Perceiving,” 258.

24. And indeed Husserl does finally broaden the meaning of “generating” later on in Ideas, §§112 and 113. See the example from Sartre in the section “Orders of Existence.”

25. See Fred Kersten, Galileo, 244.

26. Maurice Natanson, “Existentialism and Literature,” Reflections from Chapel Hill 1, no. 2 (July–August 1961): 6–7. The italics are mine.

27. Natanson modifies his formulation here in his afterword to Jules Romains’s novel, The Death of a Nobody, where he writes, “philosophically informed literature is centrally concerned with our experience of a world rather than the experienced world” (122). Thus the “novelist offers us, in direct presentation, the structure of experiences that men in daily life often grasp, usually recognize, yet cannot express. The statement of the problem and the analysis of the problem are used in the creative act” (123). Maurice Natanson, “Afterword,” in The Death of a Nobody by Jules Romains (New York: Signet Classic, 1961), 115–24.

28. Maurice Natanson, The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1970), 113. See also Natanson, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature,” in Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 90–93., where Natanson speaks of these characteristics as the “a prioris” of the “literary microcosm.” Whether its presence in the experienced world of daily life is essential to it as a world of fiction is a question we cannot explore here; but its presence would surely have to be presupposed so as to be entertained (i.e., reading, I follow along with, reenact, the feigning of the author), and because it would have to be read in the experienced world to find out, the presence would have to be presupposed and taken for granted so as to raise the question in the first place.

29. Cf. Fred Kersten, “Some Reflections on the Ground for Comparison of Multiple Realities,” in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature,” ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publications, 1998), 159–64.

30. Cf. Natanson, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature,” 89–90. It is just the appresentive “horizonal character of the world” that is at issue in this comparison in reflection of the feigned and experienced world.

31. Fred Kersten, The Last Free Lunch (1997). This is a novel written by Kersten that was not widely published.

32. See the unnumbered last page of Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1956). See also Mann‘s

“Correspondence with Arnold Schoenberg,” Saturday Review of Literature 32 (January 1, 1949), 22–23, for the exchange of letters between Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg.

33. Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), 411–12.

34. See Maurice Natanson, “Man as Actor,” 333, 340, 341.

35. Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Classen Verlag, 1954), §74a.

36. Ibid., §39.

37. Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, 389, see also 411–12. See also Natanson, “Existentialism and the Theory of Literature,” 111–15.

38. Maurice Natanson, “Existentialism and the Theory of Literature,” in Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 101–15 (quotation is from page 112). For this reason we always have to speak of quasi-reality, quasi-temporality, and the like, when expressing the features of the feigned and fictive. It would seem that even though completely divorced from the paramount reality of the one experienced world, the feigned and the fictive are never completely apart from it.

39. This holds for all cases of feigned worlds of which the world of fiction is but one case; all fictive worlds are feigned worlds, but not all feigned worlds are fiction.

40. See Natanson, “Man as Actor,” 339.

41. A different example would be the feigned astronomical universes or worlds of Aristotle and Galileo; strictly speaking, one cannot say that one is consistent or inconsistent with the other, or that one is “true” and the other “false.” Each is autonomous, and their comparison requires a transformation formula of some sort. See Fred Kersten, Galileo, 22–26, 104–8.

42. See Natanson, Journeying Self, 117. Alfred Schutz, in contrast, insists that the cardinal dimension of the novel is the past; see Fred Kersten, “Some Reflections on the Ground for Comparison of Multiple Realities,” 152–56.

43. See Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, 389, 411–13; Natanson, “Existentialism and Literature,” 111.

44. And these “correlates in the life-world” undergo real historical changes, e.g., changes in acting styles, declamation, significations of words, punctuation, grammar, and vocabulary. See Dorion Cairns, “The Ideality of Verbal Expressions,” in Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns, ed. Fred Kersten and Richard Zaner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 239–50.

45. Because we have limited our discussion to imagining as feigning, and even more to those cases of feigning that are fictions, we cannot develop the corresponding problems for imagining and depicturing. There is also the further question, for example, of whether dreaming is a case of feigning, imagining or depicturing; is there a similar “coefficient of non-presentiveness” for dreams? For Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus? These and similar questions require a much longer work and a separate analysis of the ways in which they generate non-presentive realities under the heading of the first definition of imagination. See also Hering, “Concerning Image,” 197–205.

46. Below, “The Complexities of Fictive Intentionality.”

47. Cf. Husserl’s discussion and the example of the centaur, above, “The Double Definition of Imagination.”

48. Sartre, L’Imaginaire, 242. The translation is mine. See also Kersten, Galileo, 247–50.

49. See Kersten, Galileo, 117; and Alfred Schutz, “Type and Eidos in Husserl’s Late Philosophy,” in Collected Papers, ed. Ilse Schutz, vol. 3, Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 92–115.

50. See Fred Kersten, “The Occasion and Novelty of Husserl’s Phenomenology of Essence,” in Phenomenological Perspectives: Historical and Systematic Essays in Honor of Herbert Spiegelberg (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 61–92.

51. Natanson, “Man as Actor,” 330–31.

52. For the phenomenological ideas of “compossibility” and “incompossibility,” with reference to Husserl’s concepts, see Kersten, Galileo and the “Invention” of Opera, 101–3.

53. See Kersten, Galileo, 247–50; and Ernst Ansermet, Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1961), 142–53.

54. In this connection, see Dorion Cairns, “The Ideality of Verbal Expressions,” 247–50.

55. See Maurice Natanson, “Toward a Phenomenology of the Aesthetic Object,” in Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 79–85, in particular 82–85; “Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature,” 91–92; “Existentialism and the Theory of Literature,” 109. See also Hering, “Concerning Image,” 188–205; and Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire, 240–46.

56. Natanson, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature,” 96.

57. See especially chapter 7 of Natanson, The Erotic Bird. Phenomenology in Literature, with a foreword by Judith Butler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

58. See Natanson, “Man as Actor,” 335.

59. Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 136.

60. Ibid., 70.

61. Ibid., 136.

62. Ibid.

63. Natanson’s example is from Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Viking Press, 1975), where Humboldt telephones Citrine from Bellevue: “From Bellevue he phoned me at the Belasco Theatre. I heard his voice shaking, raging but rapid. He yelled, ‘Charlie, you know where I am, don’t you? All right, Charlie, this isn’t literature. This is life’” (156). “But,” Natanson adds, “it is literature.” And it would equally fit Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (New York: New American Library, 1963), where Krull says (12—13), “There was another interior activity that often occupied me at that time and that even today has not lost its charm for me. I would ask myself: which is better, to see the world small or to see it big? . . . It has always been a part of my nature, however, to hold instinctively to the second position, considering the world a great and infinitely enticing phenomenon offering priceless satisfactions and worthy in the highest degree of all my efforts and solitude.”

64. Hume, Treatise, book 1, part 4, §7. Cited with approval by Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, 2:266. See Sections 1–3 at the opening of this chapter.

65. See Georg Simmel, “The Handle,” in Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 267–75.

66. Whether this non-compossibility holds for other sub-universes or multiple realities remains an open question.

67. Cf. the discussion of Hans Jonas, appendix to “Image-Making and the Freedom of Man,” in The Phenomenon of Life, ed. Hans Jonas (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 157–82. Particularly relevant are pages 175–82, and especially 177n1.

68. See Cairns, “Perceiving,” 258–59.

69. See Hering, “Concerning Image,” 196–205.