Matter and Form of Phantasy: Elements for a Husserlian Phenomenology of Invention

Abstract

The paper seeks to establish the conditions of possibility of invention through the analysis of the different models with which Husserl accounts for the constitution of intentional experiences. The first section analyzes the perceptive hylomorphic model or the apprehension-content of apprehension schema that explains the constitution of the originally new experiences. The second section shows how Husserl initially unravels the structure of imagination and the possibility of immersing oneself in fictional worlds displayed in images with a variation of the perceptual model, which we call analogical hylomorphism. However, further analysis of image-consciousness reveals that the possibility of inventing fictional worlds depends on another kind of experience, free phantasy, which, for its part, resists being explained with a variation of the content-forma scheme because it can act without a sensual base. For this reason, the third section presents the reproductive modification model developed by Husserl in response to the paradoxes that arise from applying the hylomorphic scheme to presentifications such as phantasy and memory. However, since a variation of the reproductive model is not enough to genuinely account of the productive nature of phantasy, the fourth section defines invention as the excess of meaning introduced by acts of phantasy according to three conditions: self-neutralization of one’s own flow of experiences; a duplication of consciousness; and the unusual association of partial intentions in a phantasized configuration.