Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger
Of all movements and schools of thought in twentieth-century European philosophy, it is undoubtedly phenomenology that has proved the most pervasive and influential. Following its founding by Edmund Husserl at the end of the nineteenth century, this seminal school of thought was profoundly reformed through the work of Husserl’s young assistant, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger sought to transform his teacher’s idea of phenomenology as a rigorous science of immediate experience into an analysis of historical human existence. Within this reformulation, the efforts of phenomenology become directed towards art as the pre-eminent sphere of human understanding. In order to account for this development of phenomenology, this book focuses on the theme of the imagination and attempts to show that it is this power of the mind, rather than any strictly intellectual power, that stands at the centre of both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s account of human experience. Following this basic claim, Husserl’s notion of consciousness as ‘intentional’ is extensively interpreted in light of his writings on imagination which remained largely published decades after his death in 1938. Explicitly identifying the imagination as the fundamental power of human understanding in the context of his Kant interpretation in the late 1920s, Heidegger subsequently adopts an explicitly political register within his theory of imagination in line with the mythological constructions of German National Socialism. Brian Elliott suggests that, despite such erring, Heidegger succeeded in pointing the way towards an appreciation of artworks that makes the legacy of phenomenology one of abiding contemporary interest. Beyond this, he also locates phenomenology within the broader context of a philosophical world dominated by Kantian thought, arguing that the positioning of Husserl within the Kantian landscape is essential to an adequate understanding of