The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Phantasy Working with Husserl 9781032079462, 9781032080239, 9781003212553

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“This much needed study does a masterful job of knitting together Husserl’s texts on art and aesthetic consciousness and of showing how relevant they are for addressing the fundamental questions of aesthetics.” John Brough, Georgetown University, USA

The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Phantasy

This is the first book dedicated to Husserl’s aesthetics. Paul Crowther pieces together Husserl’s ideas of phantasy and image and presents them as a unified and innovative account of aesthetic consciousness. He also shows how Husserl’s ideas can be developed to solve problems in aesthetics, especially those related to visual art, literature, theatre, and nature. After outlining the major components of Husserl’s phenomenological method, Crowther addresses the scope and structure of Husserl’s notion of aesthetic consciousness. For Husserl, aesthetic consciousness in all its forms involves phantasy – where items or states of affairs are represented as if actually perceived or experienced, even though they are not, in fact, given in the present perceptual field. Husserl also makes some extraordinarily interesting links between aesthetic consciousness and nature, showing how natural things and environments become instigators of such consciousness when apprehended in the appropriate terms. This “unreality” of the object of aesthetic consciousness anticipates contemporary debates about pictorial representation and also brings new dimensions to the philosophy of literature and theatre. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Phantasy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, philosophy of art, phenomenological aesthetics, and Husserl’s philosophy. Paul Crowther is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland Galway, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has published many monographs on phenomenology and the arts, most recently The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower, Routledge (2019).

Routledge Research in Aesthetics

Paintings and the Past Philosophy, History, Art Ivan Gaskell Portraits and Philosophy Edited by Hans Maes Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts A Philosophical Approach James O. Young Philosophy of Sculpture Historical Problems, Contemporary Approaches Edited by Kristin Gjesdal, Fred Rush, and Ingvild Torsen Art, Representation, and Make-Believe Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton Edited by Sonia Sedivy Philosophy of Improvisation Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Theory and Practice Edited by Susanne Ravn, Simon Høffding, and James McGuirk The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality Grant Tavinor The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Phantasy Working with Husserl Paul Crowther For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Aesthetics/book-series/RRA

The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Phantasy Working with Husserl Paul Crowther

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Paul Crowther The right of Paul Crowther to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-07946-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-08023-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-21255-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003212553 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

List of Figures Introduction: Husserl’s Phenomenology and Phenomenological Aesthetics

viii

1

1 The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness

23

2 The Phenomenology of Visual Representation

64

3 Aesthetic Form and the Phenomenological Reduction 118 4 The Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, and Music

134

5 Final Review: And Some Glimpses of the Digital

163

Bibliography Index

172 175

Figures

1.1 The David Vases, Jingdezhen, China, around 1351 AD (British Museum, London); public domain. 1.2 Jan Davidsz de Heem, Vase of Flowers (c. 1645, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); public domain. 1.3 Albrect Durer, The Knight, Death, and the Devil (engraving, 1513); public domain. 1.4 Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea (18081810, Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin); public domain. 2.1 Eighteenth-century engraving after Raphael’s Theologia by Giovanni Volpano; public domain. 2.2 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, (1514, Galleria Borghese, Rome); public domain. 2.3 Hans Burgkmair, Emperor Maximilian 1st, (woodcut, 1518); public domain. 2.4 James Tissot, Miss Golly Wilson, (pencil drawing c. 1870; private collection); public domain. 2.5 Walter Crane Glengarriffe Estuary (1901, private collection); public domain. 2.6 Raphael, The Sistine Madonna (1512, here engraved by A.L. Payne); public domain. 2.7 Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (1573, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice); public domain. 2.8 Franz von Lembach, Portrait of Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, (1890, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore); public domain. 2.9 Wassily Kandinsky, Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St-Ursula (1908, Lenbachhaus, Munich); public domain. 2.10 Wassily Kandinsky, Landscape with Factory Chimney (1910, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York); public domain.

27 29 45 47 66 70 73 77 79 96 98 100 103 104

Figures  ix 2.11 Donald Judd, Untitled (1977, riverside, Muenster); photograph by Florian Adler. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. 106 2.12 Amy Ellingson, Variation (white/oak) No.2, 2019 (a twelve-color lithograph). Photograph provided by the artist. 107 5.1 Char Davies. Seeds, Ephémère (1998). Digital still captured in real-time through HMD (head-mounted display), during live performance of immersive virtual environment Ephémère. 169

Introduction Husserl’s Phenomenology and Phenomenological Aesthetics

Phenomenology as a philosophical method is not something tightly defined. Broadly speaking, it is based on close description of first-person experience of the world. The main feature that separates the different kinds of phenomenological approach is where they start from, and the topics of concern they develop from this. Husserl’s starting point is the act of consciousness itself – in relation to its object. Heidegger and Sartre, in contrast, emphasize the nature of the human subject’s existential immersion in the world vis-à-vis the question of Being (Heidegger), or that of being and nothingness (Sartre); whilst Merleau-Ponty’s pivotal orientation is that of the senses operating as a unified field by virtue of the body. Husserl’s continuing potential for developing phenomenology has been shown by Anthony Steinbock and others, but his potential for aesthetics is only just beginning to be fully appreciated.1 This is hardly surprising, for the work which contains the bulk of his thoughts on aesthetics and related topics involves lecture notes and kindred material that was only published in 1980, and, in English translation in 2005.2 Its main subject-matter concerns ‘phantasy, image consciousness, and memory,’ but, within nearly 600 pages (and, in fact, over 700 in the English translation) there are enough relevant arguments to yield a short monograph on aesthetics, one, indeed, with highly original content.3 However, the work is a formidably difficult text, insofar as Husserl returns to the same problems again and again, usually following one problem before turning to another, and then turning back again, with his position changing very gradually, often with occasional significant revisions. The material on aesthetics and image consciousness is embedded in this phenomenological investigation of phantasy, and the bulk of the present text will endeavor to extract an account of his position overall in relation to topics of concern, rather than offer an exegetical study of the development of his ideas per se. Our main concern, in other words, is with Husserl’s ideas as a means for solving problems in aesthetics, and this is why our volume is subtitled ‘Working with Husserl’ rather than ‘A Study of Husserl.’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003212553-1

2 Introduction The text will be guided by a principle of hermeneutic charity that we have already employed elsewhere, notably in relation to Kant’s aesthetics. Rather than continually review possible alternative interpretations of Husserl’s position, we will opt for the most economic one – the one that is most consistent with lines of argument that he has already established, and which offers the best possibility for further development. More specifically, in this opening discussion, we present material that will provide a context in which Husserl’s phenomenology of aesthetic consciousness can be better understood. In this respect, Section I offers a brief outline of his general phenomenological philosophy, geared to the foregrounding of ideas that are most relevant to his aesthetic theory. In Section II, we offer an account of key developments in the tradition of phenomenological aesthetics, explaining and reviewing the theories of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne, and Sartre.

I Let us begin, then, with Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology. We are told that there is a consciousness that posits the relevant appearing objectivity as standing in such and such a relation to the actual world. This leads to intentional connections that combine ‘active’ intentions – actual and possible – with one another. Determinate paths of fulfilment (and types of fulfilment), always running their course in actual intentions, are predelineated.4 Husserl claims that belief is a central factor in this. It is a way of ‘actually experiencing intention’ and, when it informs judgment, it ‘is spontaneous, grasping, relating, etc..’5 Belief – both in the individual case, and in the vast networks of relationships between such states, is the cornerstone of the natural standpoint. Now, Husserl emphasizes a particular mode of belief – ‘positing’ or the ‘posited’ which he defines as ‘a claim on reality, on actuality.’6 In the most basic terms, this means an assumption (tacit or explicit) that what is given directly in perception does indeed exist and can be expected to be accessible in ways consistent with that particular mode of existence. However, for Husserl, the question arises as to how the nexus of knowledge and beliefs that constitute the natural standpoint is itself possible. And this involves identifying transcendental conditions and essential structures that are inherent in consciousness itself and in how things appear before it. If, accordingly, we seek foundational philosophical knowledge, we must suspend the presuppositions that are bound up with the natural standpoint, in order to identify the deeper, essential features. This suspension,

Introduction  3 and the description of how things appear before consciousness at the most fundamental level, are aspects of what Husserl calls the phenomenological reduction. One factor revealed at this fundamental level is the intentionality of consciousness. To be conscious is to be conscious of something, and this is true of all cognitive states, from perception and thought, to feeling and the performance of actions. In its most basic form, intentionality involves a pre-reflective mode wherein we simply perceive things or perform cognitive acts without at the same time being explicitly aware that we are so engaged. (This is the mode of consciousness especially involved in the ‘positing’ of actuality described earlier.) However, it can also take a more complex reflective mode that posits things explicitly, and where, sometimes, we consider things that we have done pre-reflectively, and, indeed, our own earlier reflections – thus making our own previous experiences into new intentional objects. Husserl himself observes that ‘Reflexion itself is … self-directing of the Ego upon its experiences’7 Indeed, it is a modification wherein, in principle, any pre-reflective consciousness can become an object of explicit awareness. In fact, the notion of the Ego is of great importance for Husserl. He also tells us that the intentional object of a consciousness (understood as the latter’s full correlate) is by no means to be identified with [the] apprehended object … In the widest sense of the word, apprehending an object coincides with mindfully heeding it, and noting its special nature.8 This means that our intentional acts do not simply register data passively; they position it relation to the cognizing subject’s other experiential contents and values. The very fact that such intentionality is exercised by a being who can reflect upon and self-ascribe experiences, means that even pre-reflective consciousness is always shaped by such a context, and, in consequence, has a ‘mindful’ aspect. Even though the world exists independently of whether we perceive it or not, whatever we are conscious of, has an apperceptive aspect. It is related to the pure Ego – not the empirical self of our particular memories and experiences, but the pure Ego, our very capacity to recognize experiences and memories as being our own. On these terms, any act of consciousness is what Husserl calls an ‘apprehension’ (a term that is especially important in his account of aesthetic consciousness). Apprehension is a cognitive act that involves ‘synthetic’ activity – wherein in being conscious of something we ‘intend’ it, and give it a meaning by relating it to our previous experience and the particular expectations that we have of it. When the object of consciousness is a sensory one – i.e., a perceptual object, Husserl describes what is apprehended as an ‘intuition’ (another term that is frequently encountered in his aesthetic theory).

4 Introduction We now reach a crucial point. Apprehension of any kind is only made possible through another effect exerted by the apperceptive dimension, namely the unity of temporal experience. Husserl says that ‘Perception consists of complexes of sensation that are bearers of perceptual intentions.’9 And, if we ask what ‘sensation’ is, Husserl describes it as A purely immanent consciousness of a sensuous content. Nothing of the spatial present is in it. It does, however, essentially involve the temporal present …, for sensation is nothing else but the original consciousness of immanent time.10 Sensation, (or ‘primal impression,’ as Husserl sometimes calls it) is, in other words, the brute sense of something specific happening. However, this occurs within a more complex temporal synthesis – in Husserl’s words, ‘“Perceiving” … is nothing other than the time-constituting consciousness with its phases of flowing retentions and protentions.’11 On these terms perception arises when a stream of sensations is gathered up and connected in two respects – as a continuous flow of the appearances of the same thing, and also as the unity of a specific individual or kind of appearing thing or state of affairs. These two factors can be distinguished from one another, analytically speaking, as different ‘moments’ (i.e., aspects) of perceptual apprehension, but in phenomenological terms they are wholly integrated and inseparable. The notions of retention and protention alluded to in the last quotation are of central importance in this. They constellate around our sense of the present moment of perception – the ‘now’ in which we are conscious of some object. To have such a present is to experience unity of intuition or of thought (or both) in terms of what we are currently perceiving or thinking. But this cannot happen without both the capacity to retain a sense of what immediately preceded the present moment (retention), and what we expect will happen next (protention). To use a contemporary phrase, there must be a tracking mechanism in place which allows the present to be temporally situated in terms of before and after – and the capacities for retention and protention provide this. The perceptual ‘now,’ in other words, is dependent on what is not immediately present in order for its character to be known, just as the capacities for retention and protention involved in this ‘not present’ are themselves dependent on the immediate present – as its persisting residue and as its expected replacement, respectively. This temporal synthesis is, in turn, profoundly modified by the reflective intentionality discussed earlier. Specifically, through the power of reflection, it now becomes possible to recognize explicitly that the states that have run from the present have become ‘the past’ – in terms of both our own experience and more generally speaking; and likewise, the things that we expect to happen but which have not yet done so, can now be characterized specifically as ‘the future.’12 In this way time as a unified

Introduction  5 horizon of experience is constituted. Sensation is no longer brute. It is recognized as perception of such and such and object, carried out at such and such a time, by such and such a subject. Husserl has one other vital point to make about these things. He observes that Primal impression … is the primal source of individuality and is itself primally individual. However, it is what it is as something nonself-sufficient in the stream and as conceivable only in its place … [Indeed,] every perceptual reality has the parallel property that it is what it is only in the temporal nexus and this carries in itself the infinity of life or is carried by that life, which as past is settled but as future moves forward as endlessly explicable and bestows on the individual temporal being, although it now no longer exists, an ever new temporal determination.13 Husserl’s point here is that every perception and its sensational core is given an individual character by its position in an infinitely vast everchanging causal nexus of other present situations – alongside it, and also in terms of those that have gone before it. It is, in other words, given its identity as a particular configuration by the constant flow of life itself. The importance of this for the present discussion lies in its relation to phantasy. Husserl prefers this term to ‘imagination’ because he feels that the latter term is more appropriate to the realm of images that are physically embodied (in pictures and the like). He defines phantasy as follows. Phantasy consciousness is a modified consciousness. By that we understand a consciousness in which one is aware of something objective as if it were being actually experienced or had been actually experienced, etc., even though it is not really being actually experienced, not being perceived … and so on. One is conscious of what is phantasied ‘as if’ [it were] existing.14 The key point here is that – whilst we can be reflectively aware of having a phantasy, its ‘default’ position is one of pre-reflective absorption. if, I say, I live in a phantasy, then I do not notice anything at all in the way of re-presenting consciousness; I do not see an appearance before me and take it as a representant of something else. On the contrary, I see the thing itself, the event, and so on.15 Indeed, Living in phantasy consciousness, we have a consciousness of what is, as it were, now; of the physical thing, event, and so forth, given as

6 Introduction it were. Living in the phantasy consciousness, we have no consciousness of nullity; but as soon as we direct our regard to the here and now and to actual reality as such, we surely do have such a consciousness. Then what is phantasied is null; it is nowhere at all, not in any space, not in any time, and so on.16 The notion of ‘living in’ phantasy described here is, as we shall see in due course, also central to aesthetic consciousness. Whilst absorbed in phantasy, we are conscious of some item or state of affairs as if it were real – we do not posit its ‘nullity’ or unreality (i.e., the fact that it is not really present before us as a perceptual object). However, this recognition is forced upon us as soon as we turn our attention to the actual world that surrounds us and which impinges upon us. This is because phantasy gives a possible present but not an actual present and accordingly not an individual present. This is indeed noteworthy. A concrete individual cannot, properly speaking, be phantasied fully and completely … it gives ‘something’ that can be fashioned in the form of an individual and that becomes intuitive only with regard to its sense content, which is indeterminate as far as individuality is concerned.17 The point is that when we engage in phantasy, no matter how much we are absorbed in it, it can never reproduce the individuality of an actually present perceptual configuration – since this individuality (as we saw earlier) is constituted from the infinite causal nexus that subtends it. There will always be an unbridgeable distance between phantasy and perception. This being said, there is one form of phantasy – memory – where the relation to reality is a more direct one. We can, of course, simply recall facts about our past life, but it is also possible to recall them as if we were seeing them again as they happened, and in this case, we are again absorbed in phantasy – because however vividly we relive the memory, what we are recalling is not something happening now in the present perceptual field. It has in consequence nullity but not, of course, in an absolute sense, because we posit it as a memory, as something that did once happen to us in reality. But even so, despite this grounding, our memory cannot reproduce the individuality of the perceptual situation that we are striving to recall, and so, all we have in such a case is phantasy guided by posited details of our past. Husserl also identifies another form of phantasy, the one that is most relevant to the present study, as it involves ‘physical imaging’ – in the form of pictures, photographs, sculptures, and film. Husserl observes that such imaging has a differently constructed apprehensional basis. The phantasy image [of the mental or ‘internal’ kind] exists outside all connection with

Introduction  7 [immediate] ‘reality,’ that is, with the field of regard of possible perception. On the other hand, the image presented physically is incorporated in a certain sense into the nexus of reality, although it is not itself taken to be something real in that nexus. Furthermore: In the case of the physical image presentation, a real object belonging to perception’s field of regard – namely, the physical image – functions as the instigator of the pictorial apprehension; … In the case of phantasy presentation, this unique connection to a determinate appearance in perception’s field of regard is missing; phantasy presentation has no instigator.18 With physical imaging, in other words, our phantasy activity has an immediate perceptual ground or ‘instigator’ – namely the material basis of the image in which we see the ‘image-object’ (i.e. the subject as represented). But this material base has a curious perceptual status. For whilst its existence sustains our phantasy, we do not actually posit its presence. Indeed, if we are to apprehend the phantasy image itself qua phantasy, we must suspend immediate awareness of this physical base, and simply see ‘x,’ rather than ‘a painting of x’ (or whatever). The base is necessary to physical imaging in terms of enabling the image to be phantasied, but only insofar as it conceals itself. Of course, this is only a rudimentary sense of how the physical image works. When it comes to our aesthetic consciousness of it, matters are much more complex (as we shall see in Chapter 2). There is one other general feature of phantasy to be noted before addressing Husserl’s account of its phenomenology. As we saw earlier, given the individuality of perception, as we accumulate experience, this changes the significance of things we have experienced. From this it follows that if two different people phantasize the same thing, or the same person phantasizes the same thing on different occasions, there will be a difference between all these apprehensions. On each occasion of phantasy, the different subjects performing the acts will be different individuals (in Husserl’s sense) and what they phantasize, accordingly, will involve a different interpretation of its object.19 Let us now consider Husserl’s phenomenology of phantasy itself. He observes that When in phantasy we re-present to ourselves an object, an event – in short anything objective at all – it presents itself in a determinate appearance that precisely corresponds to a determinate appearance belonging to a possible perception. The synthesis of the nexus of possible perceptions precisely corresponds to the synthesis of the nexus of possible phantasies relating to the unity of the same object. The same object presents itself from the same side with the same phenomenal determinations, with the same colors, gradations of brightness,

8 Introduction perspectival adumbrations, and so on – in short, with ‘the same appearance’ in presentational and re-presentational modes.20 Husserl is claiming, here, that the same logic of spatial appearance is found in both perception and phantasy re-presentation (to varying degrees). Phantasy resembles perception vis-à-vis its sensory characteristics i.e., particular features of shape, color, mass, volume, proportion, position and number, and the like. He also emphasizes examples that show how phantasy – like perception – has an aspectual character, insofar as objects are always presented to the subject under partial aspects, appearances that change in correlation with temporal factors (most often, of course, caused by changes to our own position, or to the object’s own movements).21 However, no matter how phantasy strives to deploy this shared logic of spatial appearance and aspectuality, there is, as we saw earlier, always a distance between it and perception. This distance is reflected in another aspect of the phenomenology of the phantasy image. Husserl declares that The phantasy objects appear as empty phantoms, transparently pale, with colors wholly unsaturated, with imperfect plastic form, often with only vague or unsteady contours filled out with je ne sais quoi or, properly speaking, with nothing, with nothing that one would assign as a defined surface, colored in such and such a way, to what appears.22 Indeed, The appearance changes in protean fashion; something flashes there as color and plastic form and is immediately gone again. And the color, even when it flashes, is peculiarly empty, unsaturated, without force; and similarly, the form is something so vague, so ghostly, that it could not occur to us to posit it the sphere of actual perception and imaging.23 However, despite its precarious and ‘protean’ character, in phantasy, as Husserl puts it, ‘the intention aims nevertheless at an object in a direct way.’24 The phantasy, in other words, aspires towards the sustained continuity of perceptual temporal synthesis – the characteristic of individuality as described earlier. It would like to be perception, even though it will always fall short. Interestingly, this falling short is by no means a negative fact. For it means that phantasy involves a significant degree of freedom. Sometimes such states simply come upon us (as when we daydream), but in large part phantasy has a volitional or, as Husserl himself puts it, an ‘optional’ character – which extends to the phenomenology of the phantasy itself, as well as to whether or not we engage in it.25

Introduction  9 In this respect, we will recall Husserl’s observation from earlier that ‘A concrete individual cannot, properly speaking, be phantasied fully and completely … it gives “something” that can be fashioned in the form of an individual’.26 This fashioning means that there is an element of choice in what and how we phantasy something, and that accordingly, it to some degree expresses the agent of phantasy’s own freedom. There is, however, an ambiguous restriction on this insofar as Husserl also emphasizes the ‘unconditioned arbitrariness’ of phantasy.27 Suppose for example, that we decide to phantasy Boris Johnson with the head of a turnip, and that the specified image appears before the ‘mind’s eye.’ Whilst the conjunction of person and vegetable is intended, the control does not extend to the details and texture of the phantasied image. These features simply come along with what is phantasied – and are determined entirely subconsciously. Of course, on occasion, we might choose the details and textures of what we phantasy, but again, even if we intend the phantasy to have such an exact appearance, we cannot select how our chosen details are realized in the way, for example, that a painter can – when he or she selects the colors and forms for a particular physical image. This completes our introductory exposition of Husserl’s phenomenology. For the purposes of understanding the following chapters, it is important mainly, to emphasize the meanings of some of Husserl’s key terms. Here is a short glossary of the most relevant ones apperception – related to the pure Ego as the basic capacity to ascribe experiences to oneself. Every intentional object has an apperceptive aspect insofar as it is apprehended through the perspective of our previous experiences of the world, as well as through its own presence. apprehension – cognitive act of attention and recognition that gives or finds meaning in an intentional object. Synthesis is involved in this to the degree that what we apprehend is characterized through being linked to previous aspects of our experience. individuality – the identity of the particular perception, as determined by its relation to the infinite flow of life. intentionality – the fact that consciousness is consciousness of some object or other – be it perceptual, or something thought or felt. intuition – sensuously presented perception; intuitive – pertaining to such presentation; when an intuition is anticipated but not yet present. (Husserl sometimes calls this an ‘empty’ intuition.) moment – an aspect of something nullity – the fact that phantasy does not present an actually existing perception, even though it seems to. This ‘seeming to’ Husserl often designates through using the term ‘quasi’ as a prefix to the object of the phantasy.

10 Introduction synthesis – the act of connecting material presented in perception, or in thought. retention/protention – the former is our sense of present moments running into the past, and the latter, our anticipations of how our present perception will change or develop.

II Before addressing Husserl’s aesthetics per se, we now outline four of the most important thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, namely Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne, and Sartre.28 First, Heidegger. He argues that Being as such cannot be understood in straightforward philosophical terms. The concepts which philosophy has created for itself historically carry many metaphysical implications that do not allow Being to be approached without our understanding of it suffering distortion. Being – for Heidegger – is the dynamic presencing of things, places, people, and events at levels of experience that includes overt reflective thinking and also involves the ways in which humans conduct themselves in relation to the world and to other people, and, indeed, the ways in which they create things. These features mean that such things as feelings and states of mind are also important ways in which Being is encountered and understood. Our engagement with Being, in other words, is not as an object of thought alone but is achieved through our being-in-the-world – all the things we think, do, and feel, and the relationships that are involved in them. Heidegger places special importance on the role of time as the horizon through which Being is shown and is engaged with. Our fundamental relation to it is based, ultimately, on understanding the relation between finitude and being-in-the-world, as such. The truth of Being reaches beyond the truth arising from simple correct correspondence between judgment and states of affairs. Philosophy, in consequence, needs a noninvasive strategy where the burden of truth in disclosing the Being of beings falls on how philosophy is written or spoken, as well as on what is said. A consequence of this is that the truth of Being can be disclosed by artworks as well as by philosophy. Heidegger explores this possibility by reference to painting, architecture, and poetry – asking what and how the work of art is. To answer this, he considers a painting by Van Gogh of a pair of shoes. According to him, the picture discloses the ‘equipmentality of equipment’ through the impression of the shoes’ ‘reliability’ that the picture creates. Indeed, represented in this way, the shoes evoke many other waves of association – an effect that, according to Heidegger, is not merely subjective, but something that reveals the extraordinary complex dimensions of how something so simple as a pair of shoes actually exists through time.

Introduction  11 From the dark opening of the worn inside of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field … This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting within itself.29 Heidegger concludes, accordingly, that Van Gogh’s painting discloses what the equipment the pair of peasant shoes is in truth. It does so by disclosing the truth of the shoes’ being – how their equipmental status is given a unique accent in the way they endure through the vicissitudes of time. Heidegger develops his position here by explaining in more detail what he means by the relation between ‘world’ and ‘earth’ mentioned in the last quotation. He explains ‘earth’ as follows: What this word says is not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent.30 Understanding ‘earth’ also requires us to immediately consider Heidegger’s explanation of ‘world’. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds … The peasant woman … has a world because she dwells in the overtness of beings, of the things that are. Her equipment, in its reliability, gives to this world a necessity and nearness of its own. 31 Earth, then, is the realm of physical being in time. The earth’s natural cycles of generation and decay are the ground in which humanity erects a world – of personal relationships, social institutions, communities, and artifacts, wherein things become meaningful. This is both a conflict and a harmony. It is a conflict because the passage of time changes the physical vicissitudes under which humans exist and leads to the decay of old ways

12 Introduction (just as individual human beings themselves grow old, die, and return to the realm of earth). It is a harmony because it is this very inevitability of the return to earth that drives humanity to create new ways of making sense of it all, and of deepening their hold on the earth, as far as can be done. As Heidegger says, The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As selfopening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.32 Van Gogh’s painting – indeed, all great art, in general – is taken by Heidegger to disclose this creative strife of world and earth. The work discloses the truth of its own being by giving a particular disclosure also of the truth of being as manifest by world and earth. As a finite entity, there is always a restrictedness in how Being is disclosed through particular contexts. The whole truth cannot be delivered at once – something always remains concealed. This means that art’s revelation of truth is a dynamic unconcealing. In Heidegger’s words, ‘The unconcealedness of beings – this is never a merely existent state, but a happening.’33 It is notable how, in the quotation describing the van Gogh painting, everything is centered on what the picture represents. The special quality of van Gogh’s style is swallowed up by Heidegger’s account of how it discloses the shoes. But surely, in the artwork the unique accents of the artist’s way of disclosing are just as important as the subject matter that is disclosed. Indeed, as well as neglecting the meaning of the individual artistic style, Heidegger does not have any sense of the complicated nuances of how subject and object of experience are changed through aesthetic experience. The kind of disclosure that Heidegger describes is no more than ontological insight achieved through art. The relation of earth and world is a good example of this. Truth as unconcealedness and the world/earth relation are all well and good, but again we must insist on an explanation as to why – in the context of art – these have an aesthetic structure that is different from ontological insight as such. If we cannot provide an explanation of this, then Heidegger’s link between art and the unconcealedness of Being, and world and earth, etc., is a mere stipulation derived from his more general philosophy. Let us now consider another major ontological approach – that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He states that: Before our undivided existence the world is true; it exists. The unity, the articulations of both are intermingled. We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.34

Introduction  13 This means that our most basic level of perception is established pre-reflectively on the foundations of the body working as a unified sensori-motor field. All cognition is ultimately grounded in the body – and emerges through the body’s and the world’s correlated mutual modifications of one another. Being as such exists independently of the body, but how it appears – how it becomes a world – is determined by what the structure of our body allows, and the physical constraints and possibilities that Being presents to it. On these terms, perception is never finalized in once-and-for-all terms. No matter how intensely we perceive a thing, it cannot be, as it were, ‘used up’ in our perceptions of it. There is, in principle, always something more to be perceived. It is in this sense of the object always exceeding the grasp of perception to at least some degree, that the world is transcendent (in an ontological rather than a mystical sense). The correlation of perception and world achieved through the body is, for Merleau-Ponty, central to art – especially painting. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes this very point when he says that Cezanne: did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization … We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with ‘nature’ as our base that we construct our sciences. Cezanne wanted to paint this primordial world, and his pictures therefore seem to show nature pure, whilst photographs of the same landscapes suggest man’s works, conveniences, and imminent presence.35 Merleau-Ponty is suggesting here that Cezanne understood the dynamic nature of perception, and how the familiar structures of the world are correlated with the hold that our body can take on them. In other words, he presents our perception of nature not as a visual translation of the given, but as one that evokes the way perception emerges from a more primordial natural ground to constitute the familiar world of things. The shifting viewpoints and unstable contours in Cezanne’s way of painting are central to this evocation; his is a visual style of things taking on form. This interest in Cezanne is allied with an important skepticism about the primacy of perspective – in traditionalist and pre-modern varieties of pictorial representation. There is a common cultural prejudice that perspective somehow gives the truth of how we see things. According to Merleau-Ponty, it does not. The lesson to be drawn from Cezanne is that lived and immediate perception cannot be understood in terms of the rigid orthogonals and fixed monocular viewpoint of perspective. The inexhaustibility of depth as an existential dimension and the dynamic binocular roving of our perceptual orientation suggest that painting’s task is not to record what we ‘see,’ but to show the way in which things become visible.

14 Introduction This lesson becomes the guiding feature of Merleau-Ponty’s general philosophy of painting. He presents painting as an ontological revelation of how the world emerges to vision through our immersion in the world of the visible. This idea seems, however (though Merleau-Ponty does not explicitly acknowledge it), to have a hierarchical implication – Cezanne, and perhaps modernist art is general, is to be preferred to traditional modes because it thematizes the conditions of perception (instead of just taking a static version of them for granted). It might be said that Merleau-Ponty falls into the same trap as Heidegger. He emphasizes the importance of art, but leaves the experience of it at the level of ontological insight achieved through the artwork. But while this arises from the artwork rather than philosophy, MerleauPonty, like Heidegger, does not explain how the experience of art actively differs from philosophical insight – what it does that philosophy cannot. If it is a case of the artist showing how things take on form, why is this this anything more than indirect philosophical insight? The answer to this problem clearly resides in the different status that the particular phenomenal or imaginatively intended state of affairs enjoys in philosophy and in art, respectively. In philosophy, the particular is something whose description is something that discloses the more general truths that are embodied in it; whereas, in art, we value the particular work for its own sake. It is not the truths that it discloses which concern us, so much as how these enable its particularity. But why should this particularity be so rewarding in the perception of it – rewarding in a way that philosophy is not? It is interesting that both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty lack a developed theory of the aesthetic qua aesthetic.36 This might allow the problem to be solved, since, from the time of Kant, it has been acknowledged that aesthetic experiences converge on distinctive ways in which some phenomenal or imaginatively intended forms provide cognitive and affective engagement with the world. Kant’s own theory is of use – as I have shown in the greatest detail elsewhere – but, in it, the work of art is only dealt with under a limited aspect, in the guise of ‘aesthetic ideas.’37 To do full justice to the aesthetic status of art, we need a more comprehensive theory that can comprehend the nuances of artistic meaning as embodied in the artwork and show why this is of philosophical significance in a way that does not simply reduce to a mode of indirect philosophy. We need, in other words, a phenomenological aesthetics. A remarkable but neglected figure (in the English-speaking world at least) is Mikel Dufrenne. Dufrenne makes the uniqueness of art and the phenomenological structure of aesthetic experience into the cornerstone of his aesthetics.38 He is able to do this because of an important difference between his approach and those of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. For while Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have superb insights into the basic superstructure of finitude and our perceptual orientation towards

Introduction  15 the world, they tend not to address the infrastructure of this – the particular features that make, for example, the formation and application of concepts possible. Dufrenne is far more keyed into such factors. For example, like Heidegger, Dufrenne takes our basic orientation towards the world to be horizonal – we make immediate things intelligible through relating them to an immensely complicated network of things not immediately present. This means that temporality is fundamental. However, Dufrenne assigns equal importance to space in this horizon, and propounds a theory of ‘originary’ time and space. The theory, presented in a very condensed way, draws upon Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and, most notably, Kant. The gist of the argument is that time and space are, in primordial terms, mutually inseparable horizons which we inhabit, and from which our more objective understanding of time and space is constructed through movement. As Dufrenne observes, The subject-object relationship is prefigured, at the very core of the subject, by the relation of time to space. And movement, which exists in the subject before appearing in the object, expresses this relation in terms of the object itself. [Indeed,] movement can be apprehended in the world only because movement is first of all the act of a subject who manifests himself by positing the possibility of a world.39 In the experience of objects, time is spatialized and space temporalized. Of course, it may seem odd to think of temporality as constituted by self-consciousness, but Dufrenne’s claim is viable. One might argue that whilst things come into being and pass away independently of the will, the only way, nevertheless, in which they connect with their (no-longerexisting) past and (not-yet-existing) future states is through the recollective and imaginative activity of self-conscious beings. The self-conscious being, indeed, becomes conscious of itself through its connective cognitive movements in apprehending, and acting upon, spatial items and states of affairs. On these terms, time as process is independent of subjectivity, but temporality in the fullest sense – time in all its dimensions – exists only through the subject’s actions upon spatial things, and through the selfconsciousness that both emerges from, and determines these actions. All these factors exist in a state of reciprocal dependency. Our beingin-the-world requires specific cognitive mechanisms that negotiate spatial issues as well as temporal ones. Indeed, while Heidegger is profound in his analysis of how the self is existentially related to Being and to the network of personal relations and social institutions through which the truth of Being is expressed, he does not address the conditions that enable the self to exist as a unified structure able to comprehend Being. And this is true to some extent of Merleau-Ponty also. For whilst in his philosophy,

16 Introduction our basic perceptual contact with the world is through the body and all the senses operating as a unified field, within that field there are, nevertheless, many more specialized structures whose character needs to be explained. Dufrenne’s emphases allow him to focus on this area. Merleau-Ponty, for example, emphasizes the transcendence of the perceptual object, but Dufrenne focuses on this not only as a fact about perception, but on the kind of thwarted striving for total comprehension that goes along with this. By focusing on just this relation, more concrete insights about the dynamics between subject and object of experience become possible – and have great implications for understanding what makes art and the aesthetic special. Indeed, the formal constitution of the self through ‘self affection’ in space and time allows Dufrenne even greater scope for identifying the unique contribution of art and the aesthetic to the human condition. He shows that the work of art – in terms of both its reception by the audience and creation by the artist – involves much more than the former reconstructing emotional intuitions about the artists’ feelings through using the artwork as a kind of intermediary (as is asserted by Richard Wollheim and others). This means that, for Dufrenne, the particular character of the medium and the particular artist’s use of it are the basis of much more intimate rapport with the audience in which the changed experiences of space and time are to the fore. This reciprocity of time and space through movement is manifest, at the heart of the aesthetic object. There is a dynamic that is internal to the artwork and which makes of it a ‘quasi-subject.’ Indeed, more specifically, in the artwork we see the subject matter and the artist’s relation to it in new ways and experience imaginative possibilities with which we can identify or which unsettle our existing attitudes. As our own experience grows, the picture will grow also – offering new insights just as if it were another person. Hence, Dufrenne’s own comment that An understanding of the work comes no longer from the discovery of who produced it but, rather, from seeing how it produces and unfolds itself. In the end, we probably understand the development and behaviour of a living being in exactly the same way.40 On these terms, Dufrenne’s approach shows us why the aesthetic is so crucial for phenomenology’s relation to art. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty emphasize art as a mode of ontological disclosure, but this does not sufficiently explain what distinguishes artistic and philosophical meaning. The distinctive feature of the former is how the disclosure of truth is achieved by the particular artistic creator, and it is, accordingly, the sharing of this disclosure through the artist’s style – the aesthetic dimension – which is decisive. Dufrenne shows how aesthetic experience opens up a world of

Introduction  17 expressive meaning that embodies an intensified experience of time and space. This is why the aesthetic is intrinsically valuable. It can be said with great justice that Dufrenne’s ideas contain a goldmine of insights about art and the aesthetic – a goldmine that has scarcely been worked by the literature. There is, however, one key direction in which he might be criticized, but we shall leave its presentation until after we have considered Husserl’s own approaches to aesthetic consciousness. Finally, a brief mention should be made of Jean-Paul Sartre. He published a number of essays on artists and literary figures, but the burden of meaning in them is critical and existential rather than phenomenological.41 The one exception to this is a short section on ‘The Work of Art’ in the Conclusion to his book The Imaginary.42 Before writing this work, Sartre had studied Husserl’s Ideas very closely, and The Imaginary shows its clear influence.43 Like Husserl, Sartre was intrigued by the phenomenology of the pictorial image and discusses it by way of an example – of a painting of Charles VIII.44 So long as we consider the canvas and frame for themselves, the aesthetic object Charles VIII does not appear.45 Indeed, This depicted Charles VIII is necessarily the correlate of the intentional act of an imaging consciousness. And as this Charles VIII, who is an irreality as far as he is grasped on the canvas, is precisely the object of our aesthetic appreciations …, we are led to realize that in a picture the aesthetic object is an irreality.46 In these remarks, Sartre makes a very clear distinction between the painting as a physical thing and the depicted subject that is emergent from it through intentional apprehension. This latter feature is an ‘analogon,’ i.e., a likeness created – in the case of painting – of marks placed on a canvas in a specific order. These present shapes and dispositions of color that resemble the correlated features of a three-dimensional thing over and above the marked canvas itself. Now, it is interesting that Sartre uses the term ‘irreality’ in relation to the analogon because this is clearly derived from Husserl’s use of that term in Ideas.47 However, his linkage of irreality to the aesthetic object as such, is distinctively Sartre’s own. He develops it as follows. Certain of Matisse’s reds … produce a sensual enjoyment in those that see them. But we must understand that this sensual enjoyment, if considered in isolation – for example, if it is provoked by a red actually given us in nature – has nothing of the aesthetic. It is purely and simply

18 Introduction a pleasure of the senses. But when, on the other hand, one grasps the red on the painting, one grasps it, despite everything as making up a part of an irreal whole, and it is in this whole that it is beautiful.48 In this respect, Sartre considers a specific painting that contains a red rug near a table. Even if the artist is concerned solely with the sensible relation between forms and colours, that artist will choose a rug precisely in order to increase the sensory value of the red: tactile elements, for example, must be intended through that red, it is a woollen red, because the rug is of woollen material. Without this woollen characteristic of the rug something would be lost.49 Sartre’s point here is that, whilst the painting contains color in the form of marks physically placed on a canvas, how we perceive these colors is modified by the relation to the depicted subject. Through this relation, the mere sensuousness of the colors form an aesthetic whole that is ‘irreal’ precisely because it involves an appearance that goes beyond what is there in strictly physical terms. As Sartre continues, As for the aesthetic enjoyment, it is real but not grasped for itself, as produced by real colour: it is nothing but a manner of apprehending the irreal object and, far from it being directed on the real painting, it serves to constitute the imaginary object through the real canvas.50 According to Sartre, this phenomenon is the ground of the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience. Such disinterestedness is not some mysterious way of apprehending the real, but is the outcome, rather, of its object’s irreality. Having addressed the aesthetic through the example of painting, Sartre generalizes his approach to cover the other arts. the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irreal objects through verbal analogons.51 In relation to theater, for example, we are told that the actor who plays Hamlet makes himself, his whole body, serve as an analogon for that imaginary person … it is evident that the actor does not posit that he is Hamlet … He uses all his feelings, all his strength, all his gestures as analogons of the feelings and conduct of Hamlet. But by this very fact he irrealizes them. He lives entirely in an irreal world … It is not that the character is realized in the actor, but that the actor is irrealized in the character.52

Introduction  19 On these terms, then, the actor does not pretend that he is Hamlet; he immerses himself in the role in such a way that he forgets his empirical self through the analogon provided by the play and by Hamlet’s specific lines and role within it. Even if he cries, these tears are of course physically real, but their meaning and significance nevertheless is determined exclusively by the character – and all his predicaments – that the actor has irrealized himself in. Sartre also devotes a significant proportion of his account of irreality to its musical expression. And since his treatment of this art is so consistent with Husserl’s approach, and since Husserl himself pays little attention to it as an art form, we shall defer consideration of Sartre’s account of the subject until Chapter 4, where we will use his ideas to develop an effective Husserlian standpoint on music. However, let us now complete our discussion of Sartre by raising a problem concerning his notion of the aesthetic. Sartre holds that We can take the attitude of aesthetic contemplation in the face of real objects and events. In that case, everyone can observe in themselves a kind of standing back from the object contemplated, which itself slides into nothingness. Starting from this moment, the object is no longer perceived; it functions as an analogon of itself, which is to say that an irreal image of what it is becomes manifested for us through its current presence.53 Here, the real object seems to be ‘behind itself’ and ‘untouchable’ and brings about ‘a kind of painful disinterest in relation to it.’54 Through being contemplated for its beauty, our normal sense of its presence is suspended in favor of features of appearance that are not a part of its simple givenness. Indeed, as Sartre goes on to say, It is in this sense that one can say: the extreme beauty of a woman kills the desire for her. In fact we cannot simultaneously place ourselves on the aesthetic plane with this irreal ‘herself’ that we admire and on the realizing plane of physical possession. In order to desire her it is necessary to forget that she is beautiful, since desire is a plunge into the heart of existence, into what is most contingent and most absurd.55 In respect of these points, it must be admitted that whilst we can enjoy the beauty of things other than artworks, it would require considerably more argument on Sartre’s part to show why this involves the object becoming ‘irreal.’ In the case of artworks, the analogon feature is contrived to exhibit something other than what the work is as a physical object, or what it is as a performed set of actions, or as a narrative presented through spoken or through written words on a page. But what is it

20 Introduction about the beautiful woman, or natural scene (or whatever) that enables it to become an ‘analogon of itself’? In the absence of intended contrivance in the object bringing about such an effect, we need criteria that account for the possibility of this self-analogon. However, this leads us to a problem concerning Sartre’s identification of the aesthetic object with ‘irreality.’ For surely, the irreality factor is bound up with having analogon status – which is something that works of art share with the most mundane representations – be they pictures, simple stories, or verses on a birthday card. These simple structures are as irreal as the Mona Lisa or Hamlet, but they are surely not aesthetic objects. And, even if Sartre should qualify his position and say that not all analogons amount to aesthetic objects, he would still have to explain why it is that we should even link the irreality of the analogon to the aesthetic object in the first place. Of course, to be fair to Sartre, the discussion we have been considering is only – as he himself emphasizes – an abbreviated one, and it may well be that in a fuller account he would have been able to deal with the issues raised here. Unfortunately, he never found himself in a position to provide such an account. However, as we shall see in due course, Husserl’s account of aesthetic consciousness provides the requisite explanations. It is to that theory we now turn.

Notes 1 See, for example, Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1996). 2 Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein und Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie deranschaulichen Vergegenwartigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). Husserliana XXIII, hsrg. Eduard Marbach (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1980). In English as Phenomenology, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Springer, Dordrecht, 2005). Brough’s Introduction is exemplary in picking Husserl’s main concepts and concerns. The present author has also found two discussions by Julia Jansen to be especially helpful: ‘Husserl’ in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, (Routledge, London and New York, 2016), 69–81; and ‘On the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of imagination and its use for interdisciplinary research,’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4 (2005), 121–132. 3 In terms of book-length approaches, the work that comes to the present volume is Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s Sehen als-ob: Husserls Bildlehre zwischen Ästhetik und Pragmatik (Traugott Bautz, Germany, 2016). It outlines a approach to aspects of Husserl’s theory of visual image consciousness that seeks to link it with contemporary visual theory, and which deals with some aesthetic issues, without being a dedicated work on Husserl’s aesthetics per se. The present work, in contrast, is far more comprehensive. ReginaNino Kurg’s 2014 University of Fribourg doctoral thesis, ‘Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Image Consciousness, Aesthetic Consciousness, and Art,’ is available online – https://doc.rero.ch/record/233307/files/KurgR.pdf (accessed 31 May 2020). It has not yet been published as a book but deserves to be, since it

Introduction  21 is a very well-written and imaginative study (albeit one that tends to deal with Husserl’s theory mainly in the context of the Analytic tradition in aesthetics.) From the viewpoint of the present book, the work falls short in not identifying what (in Chapter 2) we will call the ‘phenomenological subject,’ and in not dealing adequately with the various grounds of the ‘unreality’ of artistic representation – most notably (in the case of visual art at least) the importance of ‘nonanalogizing’ features, and their anomalous nature in relation to perception. The present volume argues that the concept of ‘unreality’ and its complementary aspects is what makes Husserl’s aesthetics so distinctive. 4 Husserl, Phantasy, 310–311. For more on the natural standpoint see especially, Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (George Allen and Unwin/Humanities Press, London and New York, 1969), 101–111. Throughout this book, all italics in quotations appear in the original sources unless otherwise indicated. 5 Husserl, Phantasy, 469 and 469n156, respectively. 6 Ibid., 310. 7 Husserl, Ideas, 221. 8 Ibid., 121 9 Husserl, Phantasy, 307. A very useful paper vis-à-vis Husserl’s understanding of perception is Walter Hopp’s ‘Husserl on Sensation, Perception, and Interpretation,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 38, no. 2 (June 2008), 219–246. 10 Husserl, Phantasy, 307. 11 Ibid., 369–370. 12 For more on this see Husserl, Ideas, 216 13 Husserl, Phantasy, 665; see also Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1966), 91–94. 14 Husserl, Phantasy, 659. 15 Ibid., 178. 16 Ibid., 309. 17 Ibid., 665. 18 Ibid.,135. For a discussion of physical images in the broader context of ‘image consciousness,’ see Walter Hopp’s ‘Image Consciousness and the Horizonal Structure of Perception, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 41 (2017), 130–153. 19 See Husserl, Phantasy. From pages 661–662, Husserl considers the possibility of phantasy images of the same thing being identical across different occasions of phantasying, only to reject this possibility on page 665. 20 Ibid., 96–97. The dimension of affinity between perceptual and phantasy is also explored in relation to Husserl and in more general terms in Michela Somma’s interesting ‘Phenomenology of Imaginal Space,’ included in The Changing Faces of Space, ed. M.T. Catena and F. Masi (Springer, Dordrecht, 2017), 75–99. 21 Husserl, Phantasy, 97. 22 Ibid., 64. 23 Ibid., 64. 24 Ibid., 192. 25 See ibid., 642. 26 Ibid., 665. 27 Ibid., 642. 28 There is no general monograph study of the development of phenomenological aesthetics per se, but there are a couple of good collections, such as Art and Phenomenology ed. Joseph D. Parry (Routledge, London and New York, 2010), and Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, ed. H.R. Sepp and Lester Embree (Springer, Dordrecht, 2010).

22 Introduction 29 Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Reclam, Germany, 1960); Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ included in Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper and Row, New York, 1975), 15–87; here, 33–34. 30 Heidegger, ‘Origin,’ 42. 31 Ibid., 44–45. 32 Ibid., 49. 33 Ibid., 54. 34 Maurice Merleau-Ponty La Prose du monde (Gallimard, Paris, 1969); The Prose of the World (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1973), xii. 35 Maurice Merleau-Ponty ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ included in Sens et non-sens (Nagel, Paris, 1948). We have used the version from Galen A. Johnson, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, trans Michael B. Smith. (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1993), 59–75; here, 63–64. 36 Heidegger’s most extensive discussions of the aesthetic are found in his Nietzsche Volume One: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981). His readings are very idiosyncratic and mainly try to link the aesthetic to the disclosure of Being. This is taken to an unlikely extreme in his discussions of Kant’s aesthetics, pp. 107–114. 37 I have discussed Kant’s aesthetics in many works. See especially The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). 38 Mikel Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l'expérience esthétique (France, 1953). English translation: The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1973). 39 Ibid., 247. 40 Ibid., 393. 41 Some of these have been collected together in a volume entitled Essays in Aesthetics, trans. Wayne Gaskin (Peter Owen, London, 1964). 42 See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (Routledge, London and New York, 2004), 188–194. 43 Sartre’s debt to Husserl’s Ideas is discussed very effectively in Beata Stawowska’s ‘Sartre and Husserl’s Ideen: Phenomenology and Imagination.’ Included in Sartre – Key Concepts. ed. Jack Reynolds and Steve Churchill (Acumen/Routledge, London and New York, 2013), 12–31. 44 Sartre does not name either the specific painting or its artist, but in passing does mention that it is in the Uffizi. The only work in the Uffizi galleries group that matches the subject is Giuseppe Bezzuoli’s Charles VIII Entering Florence (1829, Pitti Palace, Florence). 45 Sartre, The Imaginary, 189. 46 Ibid., 189. 47 See the translator’s comments on this in Husserl, Ideas, 444. 48 Sartre, The Imaginary, 190. 49 Ibid., 190. 50 Ibid., 191. 51 Ibid., 191. 52 Ibid., 191. 53 Ibid., 193. 54 Ibid., 194. 55 Ibid., 194.

1 The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness

Husserl tells us that Art is the realm of phantasy that has been given form, of perceptual phantasy that has been given form, of intuitive phantasy, but also, in part of nonintuitive phantasy [i.e., literature].1 Indeed, ‘All art is “aesthetic”; it is delight in what is seen in concreto.’2 It is important to understand the scope of these definitions. In terms of the first one, by ‘non-intuitive’ phantasy, Husserl is refering to literary works whereby the intuitive factor – such as words presented on a page – is not (under normal circumstances) itself the object of aesthetic appreciation.3 Rather, the words are vehicles for structured phantasy that is consequent upon their reading. They are, to use a non-Husserlian parlance, mere tokens (with innumerable possible instances) that present a type – namely the particular poem or literary narrative embodied in them. And what we appreciate here is how the type is configured as a phantasy-structure – a structure that becomes quasi-sensuous when it is realized and thence a candidate for in concreto aesthetic appreciation. The fact that the aesthetic involves consciousness of how things are presented in sensuous or quasi-sensuous terms means that it has a potentially very wide range of applications. Husserl’s phenomenological approach does great justice to these. Indeed, some of his most subtle analyses of all concern the aesthetics of nature. There is one other question of definition that should be considered at the outset. Husserl allows that we can become reflectively aware that we are currently aesthetically conscious of an object, and when we make critical verdicts upon such experience, a reflective standpoint is involved. However, for the most part, as we shall see, Husserl emphasizes that aesthetic consciousness involves ‘living-in’ – i.e., attentional absorption of a pre-reflective kind. As Husserl says, We are living in an aesthetic consciousness. In it we ask no questions about the being or nonbeing of what directly appears in an image.4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003212553-2

24  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness That being said, we will see also that aesthetic consciousness is dynamic in many respects, not least of which is its alternation from one emphasis to another, often in the context of more reflective attitudes and nonaesthetic factors. In this opening Chapter, therefore, Section I sets out the most essential features of Husserl’s understanding of aesthetic consciousness, namely, its status as mode of valuing grounded in the realm of sensory and/or phantasy appearance, which involves the disinterested appreciation of such appearances. A number of comparisons and contrasts are made with Kant’s aesthetics (with which Husserl’s has some affinity). We then move on to discussion of the varieties of aesthetic object that Husserl identifies. Section II addresses those arising from ‘external perception,’ most notably the aesthetic consciousness of nature; and Section III discusses the aesthetics of phantasy as such, and of the spatial arts, and of the symbolically presented arts of literature and music. In Section IV, we address the interesting general significance that Husserl assigns to the aesthetic and beauty, and in the Conclusion, we offer a critical review of his theory overall and a further development of one of its most interesting points. Before proceding, however, one important qualification should be made. Since the present discussion focuses on Husserl’s criteria of aesthetic consciousness as such, it requires, accordingly, that his more detailed analyses of the major idioms of art and of nature are deferred until relevant dedicated chapters later on in this book. For present purposes, accordingly, the aforementioned topics will be addressed only in the most general terms.

I Husserl’s most basic position on aesthetic consciousness is presented in the following ways. The aesthetic interest aims at the presented object in the How of its presentedness …5 Indeed, Aesthetic valuation is essentially connected with the distinction between the consciousness of an object as such and the object’s manner of appearing. Every object, in being given in a consciousness, is given in a manner of appearing; and it can then be the manner of appearing that determines aesthetic comportment, one appearance inducing aesthetic pleasure, and another inducing aesthetic displeasure, and so on.6 In these statements, Husserl presents us with the essence of his theory. It concerns our enjoyment of how things appear – be it to the senses, or in phantasy (or, in many cases, combinations of the two). In these

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  25 points, Husserl is aligning himself broadly with Kant’s general account of the aesthetic as a form of pleasure bound up entirely with the sensible manifold or quasi-sensuous phantasy associations.7 Indeed, like, Kant, Husserl also emphasizes the fact that, as a pleasure in how things appear, it follows that we cannot have such enjoyment without having direct perceptual acquaintance with the object itself.8 In this respect, he tells us that A poem, a picture. The description of the work … I already know that it is an aesthetic work, an aesthetic formation. The description grasps the work conceptually, but the description is of something intuitable and is to be redeemed by intuition.9 The importance of this dimension extends even to the level of interpreting the aesthetic object. Husserl says, Everyone has his ideal Beethoven. Every artist interprets him differently. One artist, hearing another’s interpretation, takes it as a good or bad, or inadequate image of his own Beethoven, of his own interpretation.10 Now, whilst this interpretative dimension is something that arises directly in the phenomenology of the performing arts, Husserl generalizes its significance. He suggests that Ideally: I study the Sonata. Demands that the parts of the aesthetic whole reciprocally exert – this would correspond to the knowledge of the subject of the work and of its presentation in these tonal structures. As in the case of any art work, ‘absorption’ is needed in order to produce an interpretation adequate to it. What did the artist intend to present, and how did he intend to present it? What feelings did he want to excite, and so on. But not abstract reflection. In itself, every aesthetic apperception is ambiguous. Which interpretation is the appropriate one? Which attitude towards the image, which mood, and so on? Understanding the image yields this.11 Everything here depends on how we interpret the claim that ‘As in the case of any artwork, “absorption” is needed in order to produce an interpretation adequate to it.’ As we understand Husserl, his point is that our interpretation of what the artists’ intentions are (and of what attitudes and moods are appropriate to the work) must come exclusively through attentiveness to the How of the work’s appearance – as Husserl puts it, ‘the ways in which the parts of the aesthetic whole reciprocally exert [effects on one another].’ As in Kant, the particularity of the aesthetic object is fundamental.

26  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness However, Husserl’s account of aesthetic consciousness also presents some extremely stark contrasts with Kant. For example, in Kant’s theory, the paradigm of aesthetic pleasure is the appreciation of purely formal sensory structures in nature. The fine artwork has to be treated differently since – as the product of human artifice – it is to be judged in terms of the purposes that define the artifice in question. In fine art’s case, this involves its status as an original product of genius and the source of ‘aesthetic ideas.’12 Whilst, as we shall see, Husserl does separate the aesthetic appreciation of art from that of nature, he tends nevertheless not to distinguish them as sharply as Kant. Indeed, whereas Kant links aesthetic pleasure to the freedom of understanding and imagination – arising from our perception of the relation between unity and variety in the manifold, Husserl does not do this in any direct way.13 In fact, he has a very different set of emphases. To understand why, we must consider Husserl’s point that Aesthetic valuation is essentially connected with the distinction between the consciousness of an object as such and the object’s manner of appearing.14 The aesthetic pleasure we take in appearances is, for Husserl, one of evaluation. Of course, this can sometimes amount to no more than the quantitative sense of describing some form as more beautiful than another, but Husserl’s meaning runs deeper still. Aesthetic pleasure is a form of judgment that is selective. We find some aspects of items or states of affairs – both perceptual or phantasied – to draw our attention to how that ‘object’ presents itself in sensuous or quasi-sensuous terms. Husserl notes that ‘manner of appearing’ signifies not only the manner of display in the case of external objects and all of the similar differences in the case of other objects, but also differences in clarity and obscurity, in immediacy and mediacy.15 However, there are even deeper levels of selectivity involved. Husserl states that One selects the most favourable appearance. This involves: a) the appearance that contains in itself the maximum stock of sensuous moments [i.e, aspects] and the particular combination of such moments that arouse pleasure; b) the clear awakening of the consciousness of the object, although the interest does not concern the object as an element of the actual world with respect to its objective properties, relations, and so on, but precisely the appearance alone.16

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  27 These remarks offer a strong point of contrast with Kant, insofar as, for him, the pure aesthetic judgment presupposes no knowledge of the nature of the object that sustains it (no reference to a ‘definite end’). Husserl’s difference from Kant is underlined further still by the following: The content of the object is not aesthetically insignificant … [Think of] every objectivity that motivates existential delight or, as phantasied, quasi-delight. In itself, this delight is not aesthetic. But the aesthetic pleasure, which depends on the manner of appearing, can combine with this delight (understood as something actual), and the whole has the character of an enhanced aesthetic delight.17 This insight has extensive ramifications in terms of how Husserl understands aesthetic consciousness. We will consider these in detail vis-à-vis the individual arts in subsequent chapters, but a few important general points can be made now – starting with the realm of functional artifice, and using an example that Husserl himself does not consider, but which is, nevertheless, highly instructive. It consists of the pair of cobalt blue and white porcelain glazed works, known as the David Vases (Figure 1.1). Generally speaking, a vase is an open container where the body is the dominant feature, narrowing to a neck presented by vertical, angled, convex.

Figure 1.1  The David Vases, Jingdezhen, China, around 1351 AD (British Museum, London); public domain.

28  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness or concave means. Very often, of course, vases are used to contain water and flowers. The aesthetic importance of the David vases is the particular way in which this basic form and function is presented by their pattern of appearance. The neck and elephant-head handles are densely populated with organic and avian imagery, a density which is repeated at the base. Between these upper and lower extremes the body of each vase tapers down from its upper bulb, adorned with a dominant dragon and cognate curvilinear forms. The fact that the bulb areas are larger than the upper and lower structures and less densely populated with forms means that the vases achieve a risky balance in terms of how they present to the senses. But, more than this, the particular patterns of the vases’ appearances are ones whose curvilinear forms wrap themselves around the body and, in so doing, declare the basic all-containing volumetric shape and function. Indeed, in the luster of the glaze, they ingeniously evoke the very possibility of liquid within. Hence, in this case, the craftsperson has designed artifacts whose very appearance declares the characteristic function of the kind of artifact in question, but does so in way where the function becomes significant mainly as a factor within the declaration of appearance. Interestingly, however, this same example might strike some other viewer in very different terms. Husserl himself remarks that since the objective apprehension is there and, of course, unavoidable, and since the function of the object, its purposes and so on, are coexcited, they must be there in clear fashion … [.] otherwise [there would be] conflict between the form of the object and its function.18 In the present case, it might be argued that the David vases are so ornate and complex in configuration that they actually conceal the vase function, and that there is, accordingly, a conflict between them. Rather than dwell on the complexities of this case, it is better to consider another example – of a kind that Husserl does mention, namely the still-life. We are told that This title includes not only the manner of the presentations but all of the ways in which we are conscious of objectivities, insofar as these different ways ground one’s own particular feelings, one’s own particular position takings, which, thanks to these ways of being conscious, are then feelings about the objectivities.19 In terms of still-life particularly, Husserl goes on to point out The fluctuation of actual delights and quasi-delights (in nature: delight in the fruit-bearing trees, delight in the fields, and so on) and sorrows and other actual position takings is again itself a principal part of truly aesthetic delight.20

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  29

Figure 1.2  Jan Davidsz de Heem, Vase of Flowers (c. 1645, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); public domain.

To illustrate Husserl’s points, we might consider, for example, the Jan Davidsz de Heem still-life Vase of Flowers (Figure 1.2) Here, the artist presents a luxurious, outwards thrusting, whirling abundance of different forms of flower and vegetation. The momentum of form is such that we cannot help but think of them as real flowers in one moment, only to shift to their function as representations within a broader representational whole. And all the while these same recognitions are contextualized against broader associations determined by our own personal history and sense of the trees and fields which gave birth to this abundance. A feeling of sorrow might also be involved insofar as the presence of snails and the lizard, as well as the overall compositional effect of visual-overload, might well evoke nature as a multitude of processes that are beyond any human control and which will revert to the domain of simpler life-forms when humans have gone. In a work such as this, in other words, real-life associations are drawn upon in the course of our attentiveness to the work as re-presentation, and serve to enhance that attentiveness. These considerations illuminate, then, why for Husserl, the ‘manner of appearing’ leads from the selected/selective manner of the presentations

30  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness to ways in which these engage our own deeper feelings and attitudes. Indeed, this transition can lead to surprising outcomes vis-à-vis our own self-discovery. Husserl observes that From living in the appearing I must go back to the appearance, and vice-versa. And then the feeling is awakened: The object, however displeasing it may be in itself, however negatively I may value it, receives an aesthetic coloration because of its manner of appearing; and turning back to the appearance brings the original feeling.21 Again, Husserl’s point here can be illustrated by way of an example. Consider the Samuel Beckett play, Not I of 1972.22 The protagonist here is a single female character who appears only as a mouth – picked out by spotlight about eight feet above the stage – against a setting that is entirely darkened and empty of any props.23 The character engages in a rushed monologue that addresses four events in her life, starting with a revelation she underwent whilst lying in a field. Previously, she had been near mute, but this event gives her the power of speech in an almost torrential form. Now the key relevance of this for Husserl’s position is that here, something that is ugly and disturbing – the mouth, presented in complete isolation from the rest of the body, becomes the perfect vehicle for a drama concerning the overcoming of mutilated verbal communication. Indeed, the relation between this and the other scenes that the mouth narrates is a factor that suggests other layers of meaning concerning the specific episodes described – layers whose emergence and meaning will suggest different things to different audiences on the basis of their own personal experiences. But the major point is that it is the single unsettling appearance of the isolated mouth that is the gravitational point of such self-discovery. There is a repeated turning from this appearance to the narrative it presents, then back to our own experience, and then, once again, to the vocalizing mouth. Through this dynamic, our original feeling of shock or dismay at beholding such an appearance has been transformed. The mouth itself has become invested with an ‘aesthetic coloration.’ It is now the focus of a complex range of expressive meanings. Husserl usefully summarized his position as follows: Aesthetic appearances are appearances exclusively, appearances that express something, present something; and they do not do this in the manner of an empty sign. They always express from within, through their moments.24 The ‘something’ referred to in this passage is the very key to what is distinctive about Husserl’s position. In other theorists, there is generally a focus on art and (to a lesser degree) nature as the main founts of aesthetic

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  31 experience, where these modes tend to be sharply distinguished – both from one another, and from the realm of the non-aesthetic.25 But Husserl’s approach is far more inclusive. Any sensible item or state of affairs or quasi-sensuous (i.e., phantasy) equivalent has the potential, in principle, to become an aesthetic object – if it is encountered in the right sort of context and has the appropriate aspects vis-à-vis an object of that kind (a factor that will be addressed in more detail in Section II). At the heart of Husserl’s insight is the realization that non-aesthetic factors and aesthetic aspects of experience can in fact be often be complementary. Indeed, it is this realization that allows Husserl to indicate something of the existential depth that aesthetic consciousness can achieve. However, this very fact can also prompt a putative objection to his theory on Kantian grounds. The objection would note Husserl’s claim (already quoted in part earlier on) that The aesthetic interest aims at the presented object in the How of its presentedness, without interest in its existence itself and in its quasi-existence.26 This clearly commits Husserl to the position that aesthetic consciousness has a disinterested character. Kant popularized this notion as a standard criterion of the aesthetic and meant by it that, in the pure aesthetic judgment, the questions of what kind of thing giving rise to the judgment is, or even whether the thing really exists or not, are entirely irrelevant to the grounds of our aesthetic pleasure.27 For Husserl, in contrast (as we have just seen), such factors can have direct relevance. Given this, with what justification does Husserl assert the disinterestedness of aesthetic consciousness? One might present this justification as follows. First, Husserl’s approach can readily allow that there are some cases of aesthetic consciousness where our interest in the appearance of the aesthetic configuration is entirely indifferent to what kind of thing presents the appearance, or even whether it is real or illusory. However, Husserl realizes also that there can be other forms of aesthetic experience of a much more complex kind. In these, position takings with respect to the objects of feelings can be combined with ways of exhibiting, and the like, into a unity. The manner of appearing pleases; the way consciousness moves within a nexus of contrasting or harmonizing position takings pleases or displeases only ‘because of this’.28 With regard to such cases, Husserl observes that if, for example, I contemplate nature aesthetically, then nature remains for me this determinate actuality. That I do not live in the actuality consciousness does not mean that I exclude it by shifting

32  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness into a corresponding ‘mere presentation.’ Rather, it means that I live in feelings that are determined by nature’s manner of appearing, by this or that way of being conscious of nature. And in looking at these subjective modes of givenness, and in the shift from the focus on the object to this reflective focus and vice-versa, I am conscious of the feeling as affective determinations of the object itself. It can thus be the case that the belief in actuality is itself aesthetically co-determining.29 To illustrate Husserl’s point here, suppose that we appreciate the way a cherry blossom tree presents its flowers in the spring breeze. In such a case, it is not the mere appearance of the tree as such that engages us; nor is it mere admiration for the tree’s health or the liveliness of the spring breeze – and the sense of rebirth it evokes; rather, we appreciate the way in which all these things contribute to the tree’s aesthetic appearance. In such a case, position takings with regard to the objects of feelings can be combined with ways of exhibiting, and the like, into a unity. The manner of appearing pleases; the way consciousness moves within a nexus of contrasting or harmonizing position takings pleases or displeases only ‘because of this.’30 The point is, then, that whilst someone such as Kant ties aesthetic appearance to a strict range of natural forms (presenting immediate relations of unity and diversity in the sensible manifold), Husserl realizes that new formal unities can emerge also when appearances are enjoyed as interesting and ‘playful’ variations on real characteristics of the kind of thing in question. We have a new aesthetic whole that is more than the sum of its constituent aspects, i.e., in the case of the cherry blossom tree, attractive appearance/ healthy thing of such and such a kind/animated by the spring breeze. This leads us to Husserl’s general and more inclusive criterion of disinterestedness. He states it as follows. every actuality feeling aims at an appearing object through the appearance, but the situation is totally different in aesthetic feeling, which does not aim through the appearance but aims at it, and aims at the object only ‘for the sake of the appearance’.31 Given this, the superiority of Husserl’s over Kant’s theory of disinterestedness becomes manifest. In the case of some aesthetic configurations, we are concerned only with the formal pattern of appearance as such, and thence, such cases are for Husserl – as for Kant – disinterested in an absolute sense. However, the merit of Husserl’s position is his realization that there are also occasions when attention to the kind of thing something is, or whether it is real or not, can be positive elements in a particular

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  33 aesthetic feeling. On such occasions, we are not interested in those features in themselves, but only insofar as they enhance our sense of the aesthetic appearance. In the case of the cherry blossom, for example, it is the health of the living organism and its broader perceptual context that helps display the freshness of its formal appearance. In such a case our aesthetic consciousness counts as at least relatively disinterested because the ‘real world’ factors are enjoyed only as factors comprised within an overall aesthetic appearance. (We shall return to this issue in Section II.) The fact that Husserl’s theory involves this relative notion of disinterestedness as well as Kant’s absolute version is of great importance also for the understanding of art. For nowhere in his Critical philosophy does Kant even attempt to link the notion of disinterestedness to the experience of art. And the reason why is that he cannot do so for conceptual reasons. His absolute notion of disinterestedness is simply not consistent with the artwork’s status as something made according to such and such a format – issues that surely have to be taken account of in order to do justice to the artwork’s status as a made aesthetic object. This means that a key factor in determining art’s general aesthetic status is left unclarified.32 As we shall now see, Husserl’s treatment of the main varieties of aesthetic object does offer some such clarification.

II Husserl distinguishes between four main sources of aesthetic experience. First, ‘We can produce aesthetic consciousness on the basis of external perception. We contemplate aesthetically the objects we see or hear.’33 What Husserl has in mind here are perceptual objects other than works of art, including, of course, nature. In relation to external objects, the selectivity involved in aesthetic valuation is involved – often in surprising ways. Husserl informs us that Different appearances of the same object are not equivalent in [the] affective direction. The disposition of vases, ashtrays, and so forth, in the drawing room. ‘Which arrangement is the most beautiful?’… Hence this is already a question of aesthetics.34 In a footnote to this, he says, ‘If it is an object of use, then it is not its existence as an object of use that is in question, but how the object of use presents itself as an object, etc.’35 We have already considered examples of a functional artifact and a natural thing which show something of the presentational factor referred to here. The object’s reality as an existing example of such and such a kind of thing is relevant only insofar as awareness of this can contribute to the aesthetics of its appearance. What is more interesting for present purposes is the way Husserl himself gives special emphasis to the human body in this respect.

34  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness Among the innumerable particular positions that actually occur, which is the one ‘noticed’? And among those that are noticed, which is the ‘best’? Every nerve, every muscle, attuned to the action. Nothing indifferent, nothing random … As much expression as possible; that is to say: the excitation with the greatest possible wealth of appearance, the most powerful and intuitive excitation possible of the consciousness of the object.36 In this passage, Husserl specifies some criteria of selectivity involved in arranging the human body as an aesthetically significant configuration. He goes on to emphasize that this is not done with the intention of presenting the human form as a physical thing, but rather to express the human being in its function, in its activity [say, as] (a pugilist), in its doing and suffering, which is supposed to be precisely the object of presentation. With as much unity as possible. The pugilist can, of course, simultaneously have a stomachache, and the gripes can express themselves in his grimace. Now that would be a beautiful aesthetic object: A pugilist or discus thrower who simultaneously has a stomachache.37 The amusing character of this example should not deflect us from its acuity. Husserl is emphasizing that criteria of aesthetic selectivity must focus on particular features whose sensory eloquence is such as to evoke the active whole of which they are a part – no matter how complex that whole might be. However, it is important to be clear about the scope of this, as Husserl warns that in aesthetic consciousness, my intention … is not directed towards the object’s fulfilment from every point of view, toward that which it is in each and every respect and as a whole, like an intention aimed at cognition.38 However, Husserl is less forthcoming about what such consciousness is directed towards. An explanation consistent with his position would be as follows. Some aspects of sensible things do no more than suggest the whole of which they are a part – they simply protend (in the sense described in the Introduction to this book) appearances of the thing that are yet to unfold. However, an aesthetically significant aspect has a different effect; it evokes a multitude of associations that suggest not only the idea of the whole of which it is a part but also the wealth of sensory richness that this whole might be expected to possess – in terms of both its immediate appearance and what it might reveal from other positions of viewing. Husserl’s example of the body is an evocation of this very kind. In the text itself, there is a suggestion that Husserl devised this example to illustrate the problem of composition in ‘Instant photography.’ But

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  35 despite this specific application, it is equally clear that he is, in effect, describing one of the most important principles of selectivity at work in aesthetic consciousness as such. (We will return to this question in the Conclusion of this chapter.) Now, the major source of aesthetic enjoyment arising from ‘external perception’ is, of course, nature, and Husserl devotes significant and original attention to this over and above the general points already noted in Section I. Let us consider, for example, his treatment of an aesthetic feature of nature that was first noted in eighteenth-century theories of the picturesque – namely, appreciating nature as if it were an artistic composition. As Husserl describes it, this arises when we contemplate a beautiful landscape aesthetically, and the landscape and even all the human beings and houses, and villages that we see in our experience of it are ‘accepted’ by us as if they were figures in a mere painted landscape. We are, of course, actually experiencing, but we are not in the attitude of actual experience; we do not actually join in the experiential positing. The reality changes into reality-as-if for us, changes into ‘play’; the objects turn into aesthetic semblance: into mere –though perceptual – phantasy objects.39 The key passage in this quotation is the last sentence. For here, Husserl describes a mode of apprehension whereby, in effect, the landscape is made into a quasi-vehicle for human freedom – appearing to be composed for the very purpose of stimulating our phantasies. In this way, we find in nature the echo of the human spirit itself, albeit through a kind of appropriation of it for human ends. However, Husserl also provides a more unusual explanation of this approach to nature. He asks: Why does nature, a landscape, act as an ‘image’? A distant village. The houses ‘little houses.’ These little houses have a) an altered size in comparison with houses as we ordinarily see them; b) a more shallow stereoscopic quality, altered coloring, and so on. Like toy houses, they are apprehended in a manner similar to that in which we apprehend images. Likewise the human beings: dolls.40 Husserl develops this example further. Referring to the landscape and its contents, he claims that In image contemplation, we take them as not present: as images. We take as present what is in our immediate surroundings, what we ‘see, just as it is.’ We take the appearances of the village, of the tiny human beings, and so on, as images for the nonpresent possible present, for the appearances that we would have, if, etc.41

36  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness Here, Husserl describes a contrast wherein what immediately surrounds us becomes a kind of criterion of the present; the distant views – through their contrast of scale, etc., re-present nonpresent possible presents – i.e., places where we could travel and, on arrival, find ourselves in a new present constituted by our new surroundings. The interest is that this is a perceptual image, one where something perceived becomes an image of hidden possibilities – an aesthetic protention. Of course, whenever we journey through an area of attractive natural scenery, we will see things as far away and small in the distance, but do not remark upon it, as such experiences are part and parcel of making a journey. However, Husserl’s point is that sometimes the vistas we perceive are such as to pictorialize the distance and make vivid to perception, the nature of the journey before us and the new present that we could find there. Aspects of the panoramic features that envelop us, give aesthetic expression to features of that envelopment. This connects directly to Husserl’s second main approach to the aesthetic consciousness of nature. He observes, for example, that If I am in the aesthetic attitude, I do not abandon it when I shift into consciousness of the actuality of nature, here and there confirming new actualities, and in my continuous glance filling with determinations the indeterminate boundaries of what is seen.42 Here Husserl is identifying, in effect, factors distinctive to the aesthetic experience of nature, wherein the viewer engages with it as mobile embodied subject exploring an environment. This leads him to consider two possibilities. Living in feeling has a double significance. In one sense, it means turning toward: here, in aesthetic feeling, turning towards the manner of appearing, which thereby gains a distinctive mode. In the other sense, it means a thematic primacy. If I contemplate nature and progressively take cognisance of it, the aesthetic consciousness can nevertheless have thematic primacy (even though in the aesthetic consciousness I am not turned towards something in the first sense).43 This is a vital point. The aesthetic consciousness of art and aspects of nature is based on an attentiveness to the details of the aesthetic object, but before considering the particular ramifications of this in its detailed relation to nature, we shall address the other key notion mentioned earlier, namely ‘thematic primacy’ as an idiom of orientation – since it contextualizes the ‘turning toward’ idiom of aesthetic consciousness of nature in very interesting ways. First, then, of its essence nature is enveloping – often in an open way. We wander through it, taking notice of some things and not others, and perhaps doing so over a considerable period of time and physical distance wherein at

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  37 some points we need to rest before beginning again. Here, we are not engaged in constant contemplation of aesthetically significant formations, but we are, as it were, ‘tuned in’ to recognizing such formations as they arise. In our journey, we are not simply interested in travelling from A to B, but, rather, by the aesthetic configurations that we might happen upon along the way. On these terms, our exploration has a sense of nature’s manner of appearing as its thematic – guiding us through a succession of appearances that unfold in concert with our explorations. Once we are guided by this thematic primacy, our sense of nature’s actuality is a secondary correlate of this – engaging us Only insofar as it carries on through the appearance series, which I taste in their aesthetic effect.44 Husserl summarizes his position by saying that In this case, the appearance series have a certain distinctiveness together with their feelings, without my constantly having to be turned toward these appearance series attentively and in affective turning towards.45 Husserl’s insights here overturn a traditional stereotype of the aesthetics of nature – based on marvelling at it as an aesthetic spectacle of the sublime, the beautiful, or the picturesque and the like. Rather, he refers us to a (perhaps) more pervasive aesthetic sense of nature that is involved in simply moving through an attractive environment as a kind of aesthetic flaneur. Husserl has, in effect, identified an aesthetics of natural ambience and leisurely exploration, where individual phenomena and events form an enveloping whole, whose pleasures are better appreciated if our aesthetic consciousness involves nothing more than thematic primacy – i.e., a looser and thence freer mode of being attentive to many different manners of appearing. Indeed, though Husserl does not suggest it himself, something like this approach is surely relevant also to our aesthetic consciousness of buildings where a full aesthetic demands attending not only to how facades and other dominant external characteristics appear, but also to the way the building facilitates aesthetic impressions of the enveloping whole as we move through it. Now, the question arises as to how – within this aesthetic of envelopment by nature – we attend to it in more specific terms. For, even if we have aesthetic orientation in the loose thematic sense, there are specific points within this where our aesthetic consciousness of nature is engaged in more concentrated terms – where, as Husserl puts it in a remark noted earlier, ‘it means turning toward: here, in aesthetic feeling, turning towards the manner of appearing.’ Husserl deals with this first by way of a contrast between two different emphases in perception. The first concerns ‘objective’ things.

38  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness As possible perceptions, they have their existence independently of momentary actual givenness. Their being is not their momentary being perceived, and this despite their ‘mere subjectivity.’46 On these terms, objective structures are a source of appearances that can be perceived, and have this status irrespective of whether or not any subjects actually are actually perceiving them. When such perceptions do occur, the appearances they involve are, as Husserl puts it, “in themselves” vis-à-vis the one who perceives them, i.e., have a possibility that is independent of the individual percipient. Matters are rather different in respect of our aesthetic consciousness of natural objectivities. One of Husserl’s main examples of this is the ‘momentary cognitional function.’47 As Husserl observes, The ‘beautiful’ object, this mountain as seen from this specific location, always has its identical beauty as long as it offers precisely ‘this prospect.’ And as often as I go and look at it from there, I have the same prospect aesthetically. The same ‘image.’ This ‘image’ is an ideal object (obviously not something real enduring in time). The mountain offers this image continuously, but the image itself is not something that endures.48 Husserl concludes, accordingly, that If … an aesthetic valuation is directed towards a thing given at a particular time, then this ‘being’ of the modes of appearance, and consequently their attachments to actual subjects (and to subjects projected into the world by phantasy), and mediately to natural space and natural time, and the natural world itself, are entirely beside the point.49 In these remarks, the term ‘subject’ surely refers to the bearer of the momentary image (rather than the person who is having the experience). In which case, Husserl is talking of the aesthetic form as a highly transient configuration of shape and color, that is encountered from one position of beholding, and is gone as soon as we change position. This delight in pure appearance is something extremely familiar – as in those moments when we ‘catch’ a particular set of reflections in water, or when mist swirling around a mountaintop or the play of sunlight upon it is counted as a ‘beautiful moment.’ This experience has the kind of absolute disinterestedness that Kant assigns to the pure aesthetic judgment. However, as we have seen, one of the great interests of Husserl’s aesthetics is the way he finds a role for non-aesthetic factors, and, as we saw only a little earlier, he allows that aesthetic consciousness of nature can involve exploration where

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  39 aesthetic interest acts as a thematic orientation. Within this, our sense of nature’s actuality is real but is a secondary correlate of our enjoyment of its appearances. It is hardly surprising, then, that Husserl also offers a sense of the aesthetic consciousness of nature where our sense of its actuality plays a more direct role. His argument goes as follows. When we take a pleasure in actual objects, our belief in their existence is a condition of our pleasure (as Husserl says, ‘the belief in existence founds the feeling’).50 It is, of course, not the fact of their existence as such that is pleasurable but rather specific delightful aspects suggested by their appearance. A sleek riderless horse, for example, might please us through the relation between its strong flanks and the elegance of their configuration, and the promise of the smooth ride it will provide if saddled up and mounted. Or an expanse of grassland spread panoramically about us, might delight us with the thought of it as pastureland, lush and verdant. Husserl suggests, however, that It is otherwise in the case of aesthetic feelings. There position takings with regard to the objects of feelings can be combined with ways of exhibiting, and the like, into a unity. The manner of appearing pleases; the way consciousness moves within a nexus of contrasting or harmonizing position takings pleases or displeases only ‘because of this.’51 He then draws the key contrast. every actuality feeling aims at an appearing object through the appearance, but the situation is totally different in aesthetic feeling, which does not aim through the appearance but aims at it, and aims at the object only ‘for the sake of the appearance.’52 The point is that if we look at the grassy landscape as good pastureland, we are delighting in what the appearance promises, but, if we regard it aesthetically, our pleasure is grounded in the appearance itself – in the configuration, say, of chartreuse and emerald greens and the textures they sustain. This might involve no more than the kind of absolutely disinterested pleasure in appearance that Husserl describes in relation to the mountain view (discussed earlier), but he also raises a far more interesting possibility. We are told, for example, that If I value the consciousness of something aesthetically, if, for example, I contemplate nature aesthetically, then nature remains for me this determinate actuality. That I do not live in the actuality consciousness

40  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness does not mean that I exclude it by shifting into a corresponding ‘mere presentation.’ Rather, it means that I live in feelings that are determined by nature’s manner of appearing, by this or that way of being conscious of nature.53 On these terms, instead of taking a pleasure in some benefit promised by the natural appearance, or in its play of shape and colors alone, the way its particular appearance discloses the kind of natural thing or phenomenon that it is can be something that absorbs us and fills us with positive feelings. In this way, for example, we ‘feel’ the sturdiness of the oak tree in its broad uprightness and through the apparent vigor of its bark and branches. Or, rather more unexpectedly, in an example provided by Ronald Hepburn: ‘I had seen from the map that this was a deserted moor, but not until I stood in the middle of it did I realize its desolation’. Here ‘realize’ involves making, or becoming vivid to perception, or to the imagination … In the aesthetic setting that interests us, it is an experience accompanying and arising out of perceptions – perceptions upon which we dwell and linger.54 The interest of Hepburn’s example is that the aesthetic ‘realization’ it provides is not some simple pre-reflective ‘lived-in’ apprehension. It involves a reflection on nature that characterizes it in a way that is then vivified by some aspect of appearance related to that reflection. There are transitions from non-aesthetic cogitation to aesthetic presentation and feeling. Hepburn’s example helps illuminate Husserl’s own direction of thought – and, in particular, his ability to find a role for non-aesthetic factors in aesthetic situations (as we noted earlier). For example, in relation to our responses to natural appearance, Husserl suggests that in looking at these subjective modes of givenness, and in the shift from the focus on the object to this reflective focus and vice-versa, I am conscious of the feeling as affective determinations of the object itself. It can thus be the case that the belief in actuality is itself aesthetically co-determining.55 On these terms, the way in which an appearance ‘realizes’ the nature of the kind of thing or phenomenon that it is, enables that nature itself to seem invested with feeling – it is as if it were constituted as a beautiful nature or essence by virtue of the relation between its actuality and its eloquent appearance. Or, in another case – that we discussed earlier – when the actual landscape seems as if it were a picture, the distant figures can act as (in Hepburnian terms) as aesthetic realizations of what distance involves and the new present that awaits us there. Indeed, the transient

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  41 view of the mountain that we considered earlier, can surely sometimes strike us as a stunning exemplar of what the mountain would reveal if we were to survey it from all sides – i.e., discloses the aesthetic potential of its wholeness, and its physical majesty qua mountain, as well as providing a fleeting beautiful view of it. The importance of these realizations can perhaps be best illustrated through a contrast with something noted by Husserl himself. The photograph as a physical thing has a ‘normal position’ in which the image object that belongs to it show itself. That is, the image thing has a function, it is the bearer of an obligation: it is supposed to be held in such and such a way, perceived in this orientation, and then an image object appearance that is the normal appearance belongs to it.56 Now, natural organisms of animal and insect kinds have faces – and this is the focal point for how they interact with their habitats and other creatures. Viewing such faces frontally provides our ‘normal’ perceptual position. However, organic forms and the particular forms of earth, water, air, fire, and the like do not bring with them any such intrinsically privileged angle of view; there is no ‘normal’ perceptual position to be taken on them. They are not to be ‘pinned down.’ This fact means that the enveloping character of nature itself is here reflected back at us through the particular aesthetic judgment. The aspect that provokes our aesthetic realization is not objectively privileged; it is one that the human subject has come across through his or her mobile exploration of the environment. Its eloquence announces itself as the discovery of a sensuous emblem of the object or phenomenon’s momentary disposition in our favor (as it were) – something that is the outcome of how we are enveloped by nature, rather than something contrived by our own kind. The point is, then, that Husserl offers us an aesthetic of the natural landscape that acknowledges its enveloping character and our more particular negotiations of features of this, before pointing back to the former. Let us now move on to Husserl’s other specified varieties of aesthetic object, namely phantasy in itself, spatial artworks, and art which presents symbolically (namely literature and music).

III In respect of the aesthetic consciousness of phantasy per se, Husserl tells us that, under normal circumstances, ‘When we phantasy, we live in the phantasied events; the How of the internal image presentation falls outside the scope of our natural interests.’57 However, he notes also that

42  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness On exceptional occasions, one can also enjoy one’s phantasies aesthetically and contemplate them in an aesthetic manner. Then we do not merely look at the subject in the image consciousness; rather what interests us is how the subject presents itself there, what manner of appearing in the image it displays, and perhaps how aesthetically pleasing the manner of appearing is.58 Earlier we emphasized that one of the reasons why Husserl is able to engage with the existential depth of the aesthetic is because he acknowledges how objects that strike us aesthetically also tap into realms of more personal association by virtue of the kinds of thing that they are (we used the example of the De Heem Vase of Flowers still-life to show this). One presumes that in aesthetic phantasy of the purely internal kind, this associational factor is to the fore, especially in daydreams and reverie, where we relocate ourselves into more satisfying environments. Of course, it might be objected that this ‘self-indulgence’ has nothing of the aesthetic about it, but, in this respect we must note Husserl’s remark that ‘the phantasy attitude, … of itself belongs to the aesthetic, even when it is precisely actual experience that is the starting point.’59 If this is true, then it may be that the rectifying of the world in harmony with our beliefs and desires that characterizes such things as daydreams is the very proto-aesthetic fount from which more advanced forms of aesthetic phantasy – embodied in objects, ultimately spring. What is most certainly true is Husserl’s further vital point that I can ask myself in the case of the perceptual object: From which side does the object work best aesthetically? Thus in phantasy I present the object to myself from different sides and, living in the consciousness of the subject, ask myself: In what way does it have the greatest effect aesthetically?60 The point here is that aesthetic consciousness is not something that is mainly passive – activated only when we encounter works of art and the like; it is also part of our nature qua human – a perspective brought to bear on things that we encounter or which matter to us one way or another, and that allows our experience of them to find transitory internal aesthetic expression. Interestingly, Husserl considers the points made in the last quotation in relation to the phantasies involved in artistic creation itself. He declares that Thus the artist will listen to and lie in wait for his own phantasies in order to see in them the most aesthetically beautiful poses. Or he directly experiments in phantasy. He phantasies a subject in various ways and seeks out among its ways of appearing in phantasy (among

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  43 its ways of being presented by an image object that has been formed and appears in such and such a way) those that are the most beautiful aesthetically.61 However, Husserl goes on to reject this idea in a footnote, claiming that This is incorrect. Confusion between image-object appearance and appearance of the subject … In the case of the physical image …, the side from which the object comes to presentation is essential. Add to this the How with respect to what does not belong materially to the object itself, e.g., marble, brush work, the way in which the colors operate. Only the psychologist, not the artist, turns his attention to the appearance just as it exists in phantasy.62 Husserl’s point here is that the artist’s creativity is not a case of phantasying the object’s aesthetic possibilities, because these are primarily concerned with a ‘side’ that does not belong to the object itself, namely the materials of that medium whereby the physical image will be realized. However, Husserl is surely wrong about this in one respect. For artists do not simply conjure up their object of representation’s appearance through the medium itself; rather, it is very often something about the object’s appearance and the different perspectives upon it that the artist phantasizes, that lead him or her to undertake its representation in the first place.63 That being said, Husserl’s objection is a salutary corrective to the idealist approach of thinkers such as Croce and Collingwood, who imagine that the physical artwork is merely the physical analogue of the real artwork – in the artist’s mind. Even if Husserl is wrong about the role of phantasy, he is surely right, nevertheless, that the work is added to creatively by being worked through a medium (or at least is so in the case of traditional forms of artistic creation such as drawing, painting, and sculpture). In other words, vis-à-vis artistic creativity in its most complete sense, phantasy is indeed not enough. Having thus arrived at questions concerning art, let us now turn to Husserl’s specific treatments of it. We shall start with the arts of spatial realization (or ‘iconic phantasy,’ as Husserl sometimes calls them). This is the province of drawing, painting, and sculpture, and theatrical performance. Let us begin with Husserl’s observation that ‘we comport ourselves aesthetically in the fine arts; we contemplate the objectivities exhibiting themselves in an image.’64 However, what is decisive here is how these objectivities are cognized. For example, Husserl observes that images can function just like symbols insofar as they receive, conventionally or on the basis of one’s own arbitrary stipulation, the

44  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness determination to function this way as ‘engines of memory.’ In this case, the images, just like symbols, bear a phenomenological characteristic of their own. They are charged with responsibility. They not only carry with themselves the presentation of the signified object, they also refer to it as … that which is supposed to be meant.65 The contrast here is based on the fact that some things are created in order to refer to other things. This is, for example, the ordinary function of language. In comprehending the meaning of words, we do not deliberate on how they sound when enunciated by different individuals, or – in the case of writing – on the particular character of the font in which they are written. In their normal indicative functions, the particularities of how symbols appear are not relevant to their meaning (except, of course, in languages with a pictographic dimension such as Chinese). The entire ‘responsibility’ of a symbol – to use Husserl’s parlance – is for its particular character to be overlooked in favor of the meaning it is meant to convey. In this respect there are clearly visual images that function as no more than symbols. This can involve something as simple as a represented schema of children in a traffic sign indicating the proximity of a school, or as complex as a work of socialist realist visual propaganda where the represented scene or people are meant to present a message about the virtues of life in the state. Indeed, in western history, many great works of art have originated with fundamentally symbolic intent – as illustrations of scenes from the Bible. However, many of these works transcend their simple illustrative function to become aesthetically significant, and of course, there are many other images – whether by accident or (more usually by intent) that also achieve this effect. These are images of an artistic kind. Of them, Husserl says that In the case of aesthetic image-contemplation … my attention is directed toward the image object itself just as it exhibits the image subject.66 We will deal with Husserl’s analysis of images in greater detail in a later chapter. For the moment, it is sufficient to note an example used by Husserl, namely Durer’s famous engraving of The Knight, Death, and the Devil (Figure 1.3). What Husserl means by the ‘image subject’ is the subject-matter described by the title but the main aspect of interest in the artistic image is the perceptive consciousnesss within which in the black lines of the picture there appear to us the small colourless creatures, ‘knight on horseback’, ‘death’, and ‘devil.’ In aesthetic observation we do not consider these as the objects; we have our attention fixed on what is

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  45

Figure 1.3  Albrect Durer, The Knight, Death, and the Devil (engraving, 1513); public domain.

portrayed ‘in the picture,’ more precisely, on the ‘depicted’ realities, the knight of flesh and blood, and so forth.67 It is this relation between the material features of the work and the depicted subject that constitutes what Husserl calls the ‘image object.’ In terms of enjoying this aesthetically, Husserl says Aesthetic delight … concerns what is presented only with respect to the moments (and the How of the moments) presented in the presenting depictive images, and is concerned with these only to the extent to which and in the way in which they are presented.68 But what relation to existence does this actually involve? Husserl says Living in the iconic consciousness, I take the image as neither existing nor as nonexisting. I take it (without its becoming an object of course) only as the exhibiting of something else: I make the latter intuitable in the image, but in no way do I posit, either positively or negatively, what I ‘mean’ there. Every position taking is absent.69

46  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness Husserl overstates things here a little – since as we saw earlier, he allows that non-aesthetic factors pertaining to the existence of things can sometimes play an important contributory role in aesthetic consciousness. A more balanced presentation of his major point is found when he describes our experience of the image-object phenomenologically. He says I … run through the system of appearances of the depicting figment, and in them I look at the How of the presenting depiction. I delight in the ‘imitation,’ in the ‘presentation’ (This valuing that determines …).70 The point is, then, that instead of simply seeing the picture as presenting a male figure or a landscape or whatever, we see it in terms of how that medium’s materials are used to present the subject in this particular case. Whether or not this particular image subject ever existed in the world is not relevant, but its character as an image subject of just that kind most certainly is, and what engages us is the way in which the artist’s handling of the medium changes the subject’s appearance. In this respect, we might recall an observation by Husserl (quoted, in part, earlier). I call attention to the aesthetic function of the means and materials of reproduction, for example, the bold brushwork of many masters, the aesthetic effect of marble and so on. The consciousness of the image subject is present there too and is in no way inessential, for without it there is no aesthetic image; but the mode of meaning, the distribution of the meaning intentions as well as the feeling intentions is entirely different from what it is, say, in the case of the photograph that we do not look at aesthetically, but as the picture of a friend, of a great man, and the like.71 The notion of ‘feeling intentions’ is especially important in Husserl’s account of the spatial arts. He observes that A landscape awakens a mood. A picture of a landscape presents a landscape in a mood: In looking at the image, I do not need actually to get into the mood. Such exhibited moods, feelings, and so on, do not presuppose a co-exhibiting of the spectator, although the spectator goes into action in his own way. More precisely, I, with this mood, certainly do not belong in the picture. Should I say: I, not as an empirical human being, but ‘purely as the correlate of the mood’?72 Here Husserl is describing one of the most distinctive features of our aesthetic appreciation of the arts, especially those involving spatial objects or states of affairs. Consider, for example, Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea (Figure 1.4).

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  47

Figure 1.4   Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea (1808–1810, Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin); public domain.

This landscape is not discussed by Husserl, but it is the perfect illustration of the points Husserl is making. The work is formidably impressive in its evocation of a mood of desolation – achieved through the sparsity of beach details and the conjunction of the deep green sea with the dark clouds immediately above the horizon. Now, even if we ourselves happen to be in a good mood at the time when we encounter the work, the enjoyment of the painting requires that we, as it were, ‘feel-with’ it. This means that rather than project our own feelings onto the work, we adapt ourselves to what the artist is presenting to us through its appearance. But how is this possible, and what is involved in it, phenomenologically speaking? Husserl explains. The mood is a quasi-positing act that bestows on the landscape the ontic mood. The landscape is a landscape exhibited with this ontic characteristic … In my quasi-being-in-a-mood, I am conscious of the mood of the landscape (as of a quasi-mood); and my quasi-being-ina-mood exhibits to me the mood of the landscape. Artworks everywhere not only exhibit things and not only exhibit persons who have feelings, thoughts, and so on; they also exhibit various moods, thoughts, etc., such that we must say: These are characteristics of exhibited things and are themselves exhibited characteristics.73 In this long and important passage, Husserl first emphasizes that the landscape as presented by the artist has itself the look of a certain kind of mood – an ‘ontic’ feature of the picture over and above any moods expressed by persons represented in the picture. The Friedrich painting,

48  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness for example, involves dark expanses of color and a sky that is vast in relation to the scanty expanses of sea and beach, giving the sense of something pressing down – becoming claustrophobic even – despite the outdoor setting. The feathery articulation of the band of horizonal clouds also infuse the work with a sense of instability as though the vastness of the sky is about to generate something that will actively overwhelm the solitary monk. Indeed, the very fact he is the only human figure in the work, and that his hands are covering his face, is suggestive of an individual’s crisis of introspection when faced with nature in its rawest form as simple, unrelenting spatial expanse. This example shows, accordingly, that although Husserl himself does not mention it, it is also possible for the ontic mood of an artwork to be integrated with that of its represented figures. The question arises, however, as to why Husserl gives such insistent emphasis to the ontic mood over and above that of the figures. The answer can be found in something that Husserl does not remark upon considered in relation to something that he does articulate. What he does not remark upon is that when we encounter someone in a mood in real life, there is a kind of social pressure to identify with their mood – to take something of it upon ourselves through empathy. However, in the ontic mood of the picture, there is no such real-life pressure. As Husserl emphasizes, the spectator has a freedom to engage with the mood on his or her own terms in the form of phantasy. Rather than being ‘infected’ by a real mood, we can experience it in ‘quasi’ terms – as if we were encountering the represented scene under the mood-conditions evoked by the artist. The ontic mood in art actively facilitates a phantasy response instead of a real one because it is a property of the picture. This point can be developed further. Husserl emphasizes again and again that aesthetic consciousness is mainly indifferent to the real existence of what the image represents. We are living in an aesthetic consciousness. In it we ask no questions about the being or nonbeing of what directly appears in an image. The situation may be anything as far as the being of what is presented is concerned.74 Let us link these points to his other claim about ontic moods namely that ‘they do not belong to exhibited persons as their experiences, thoughts, and so on.’ More specifically, let us understand this exclusion as extending to the artist as well as the persons he or she represents. True, the work is the product of his or her artifice and all the feelings, moods, and happenstances that the artist experienced during the time of its creation. But we do not have to take account of all this in order to recognize the mood of the work and to enjoy it as if it were our own. In many – perhaps most – cases, we have no way of knowing what the artist was

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  49 actually feeling when creating the work, and it is surely possible that the ontic mood we find in a work can even be the opposite of what he or she actually felt during its creation. The ontic mood, in other words, is a clue to a specifically artistic sense of disinterestedness. In order to enjoy the aesthetic features of an artwork, it is not necessary that we relate these to how the artist felt at the time of the work’s creation, or, indeed, any other information about his or her circumstances. In effect, Husserl recognizes that art exists in a broader cultural stock of associations made between kinds of things, shapes, and colours. Hence, when it comes to artistic creation intended for public display, this context of associational meaning will be decisive for the spectator’s interpretation. If it is made on the basis of happy or sad, or desolate-looking visual materials and compositional motifs, then that just is the mood of the picture, irrespective of what the artist’s own feelings or particular intentions might or might not be. Some of the features just described are also applicable to symbolically based works, of which Husserl says, Finally, we comport ourselves aesthetically in art that presents symbolically: We contemplate aesthetically objectivities presenting themselves in language or some other symbolic way.75 In respect of literature, Husserl suggests that Often enough we understand narrations without decision as to their truth or falsity … when we read novels, this is normally the case: we know we are dealing with aesthetic fictions, but this knowledge remains inoperative in the purely aesthetic effect.76 The point is that when engaging with literature, aesthetic consciousness involves a ‘living-in’ whereby we are carried along by the narrative without even being attentive to the fact that we are reading fiction and that questions of the truth, falsity, or (presumably) existence of what we are reading about, are not involved. One of Husserl’s most extended discussions of literary meaning makes use of the example of reading or writing a fairy tale. Here, ‘We have a pure phantasy in whose nexus nothing at all in the way of actual reality occurs.’77 This mode of literature, in other words, involves a format farremoved from any factual content, and is thence a fairly pure example of literary narrative. Of it, he makes the following observations, To give oneself up to the fairy tale, narrating or reading (hearing it) it, is not the ‘I think,’ ‘I suppose,’ that it did exist once … the statements themselves that I am making there are expressions of phantasy and not themselves statements in phantasy. This reading and

50  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness understanding of the statements corresponds, I believe, to the modified (but not genuine) judging.78 On these terms, reading the fairy tale does not involve our usual, perceptually engaged self, because it is determined exclusively by the phantasy narrative, with the result that what we judge to be taking place does not involve real judgment but rather a modified phantasy form of it. (One presumes that if we engaged in real judgment, this would involve the affirmation that one is now reading a story and would, accordingly, exclude the possibility of ‘living in’ the narrative itself.) Continuing the example of the fairy tale, Husserl says that We have phantasies that we carry out. We perform predicating acts (together with all the acts belonging to them) as modifications of judgment. We perform other acts as well. We sympathize emotionally with the persons in the fairy tale; we rejoice and are sad; we experience fear and pity and so on … These are actual affective acts in which we live, with which we actually react. They are modified just as the predications are. They correspond to the predications in which we are actually ‘adjusted’ to what is intuited in phantasy, in which we actually conform to it.79 Husserl’s points here parallel his account of how ontic moods in the iconic arts engage modified phantasy forms of them in the spectator. As present affective states of our consciousness, they are real enough, but they differ phenomenologically from ‘normal’ affective states in that they are prompted by phantasy embodied in images or textual narratives, rather than by perceptual reality itself. There is an interesting question raised by literary arts that Husserl addresses mainly in passing; it is that of how the phantasy attitude is triggered by them. Obviously, if a work is presented as a ‘novel’ or a ‘poem,’ this will mean that we are prepared in advance to adapt ourselves to the kind of phantasy expression embodied in such works. Even an opening line of the ‘Once upon a time …’ type is enough to set up the expectation that we are about to enter the realm of phantasy rather than reality.80 In the case of music, the need for a framing format to set up phantasy expectations is avoided, because this art form’s main level of meaning involves expressive symbols rather than ones designed to convey information about ‘objectivities.’ Generally speaking, Husserl describes music ‘as an expression of such and such feelings, moods (music as expression).’81 However, other than this, and some remarks concerning interpretation (noted in Section I of this chapter), Husserl does not discuss musical meaning in any further detail, with one important exception. He frequently uses the example of melody when making points about the phenomenology of time-consciousness. In this respect, we are told that

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  51 With a melody, for example, we can arrest a moment, as it were, and discover therein shadings of memory of the past notes. It is obvious that same holds true for every individual note. We have, then, the immanent tonal now and the immanent tonal pasts in their series or immediate continuity.82 This persistence involves capacities that are basic to our experience of time. The actual tonal now is constantly changed into something that that has been; constantly, an ever fresh tonal now, which passes over into modification, peels off. However, when the tonal now, the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention is itself again a now, an actual existent. While it itself is actual (but not an actual sound), it is the retention of a sound that has been … The now changes continuously from retention to retention. The results, therefore, a stable continuum which is such that every subsequent point is a retention for every earlier one. And every retention is already a continuum. The sound begins and steadily continues.83 Whilst Husserl is here using melody only in passing as an example, we must emphasize that it shows something not only essential to how we exist in time, but which usually passes unnoticed and/or is taken for granted. This is the specifically linear dimension of temporal unfolding – an unfolding that centers on events or processes whose understanding requires the relevant perceptual impressions to be apprehended in strict succession on the basis of significant retentions of what came before (as described by Husserl in the passage just presented). This is not recollection, but a more primal registering of stimuli as they pass beyond the present, each orientated towards their own earlier states. Of importance also – though Husserl devotes much less attention to it – is the way the present is informed by an expectation of the future appearances of the manifold it is currently attending to. Husserl’s best statement of this is in the context of the temporalizing of spatial items. We are told: There belongs to every external perception its reference from the ‘genuinely perceived’ sides of the object of perception to the sides ‘also meant’ not yet perceived, but only anticipated and, at first, with a non-intuitional emptiness (as the sides that are ‘coming’ now perceptually): a continuous protention, which, with each phase of the perception, has a new sense.84 In the case of the ‘tonal now,’ this expected unfolding or ‘continuous protention’ is even more accentuated – because of the very structure of the

52  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness tonal system of music. Husserl does mention that music involves ‘presentation in … tonal structures’ but does not discuss the tonal system itself.85 However, by discussing its salient aspects now, we can develop his basic insights in important ways. First, tonality centers on relationships between melody and harmony vis-à-vis tones, chords, scales, chromatic structures, and intervals. More generally, it is an organized system of tones (e.g., the tones of a major or minor scale) in which one tone (the tonic) becomes the central point for the remaining tones. The other tones in a tonal piece are all defined in terms of their relationship to the tonic. In tonality, the tonic (tonal center) is the tone of complete relaxation and stability, the target toward which other tones lead.86 This means that as a piece of music unfolds in the tonal system, it declares patterns of melodic and harmonic progressions, tensions, and resolutions that constellate around the tonic. Recalling Husserl’s notion of the ‘ontic mood’ in iconic art, one might make the same point about music. The tonal system provides a framework for associations of action and mood that the western audience is accustomed to make, and it is this that sustains the aesthetic meaning of music. However, it is important to emphasize a deeper level to this meaning. For the associations set up by music exemplify the very conditions of temporal intelligibility in a heightened form. All our existential adventures unfold in relation to goals we have set ourselves. And in working towards them and giving our activities meaning, there is a constant flow of present intuitions and moments of understanding subtended by retentions of our previous states, and by protentions of what is yet to come. When a piece of music engages us in its ontic moods based on gestural and emotional association and the tacit presence of the tonic, our phantasies follow the temporal dynamics of experience without being distracted by its physical spatial elements. In enjoying the unfolding tonal ‘narrative’ of a piece of music – the relation between individual tones and passages and the whole – we have a play of aesthetic consciousness that is, at the same time, disclosive, of something fundamental in how we experience the world. Husserl’s treatment of melody as an exemplar of internal-time-consciousness points us towards this very significance in an intuitive way. This does not make music into something superior (since all the art forms have their own kinds of individual uniqueness), but it is a form of temporally realized aesthetic meaning with what we have elsewhere called phenomenological intimacy.87 We turn, finally, to Husserl’s account of some more general features of aesthetic consciousness.

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  53

IV Husserl points out that nature as a universal concept does not include ‘any distinctive cognizing subject as point of reference.’88 In contrast to this stand not only personality and communities of persons of every sort, but also ‘subjective’ values and works of every kind; namely, values and works that in their intrinsic sense point back to definite subjects and groups of subjects.89 Hence, whilst the world of nature has no constitutive role for the individual, the realm of value does. As Husserl notes, positing a value means the same as simultaneously positing subjects who, in valuing, constitute the value … This is obvious in the case of works. In the case of art values, image values, works of fiction, and so on, abstracting from the fact that they are works, we are referred to their beautiful appearance and with it to human beings who sense, even if the latter are not determined further.90 The more difficult question concerns how the beauty of the artwork relates to individual human beings – both in terms of the creator of the work, and in terms of its audience. In formulating his theory, Husserl observes that In what follows, the work of art is discussed only as the product of objectivating fiction and as the creation of an embodiment of figments. The embodiment produces an unreasonable demand that everyone (who can follow and understand) accept what is subsequently phantasied as ‘the same’ figment that the artist has produced with a view to such acceptance.91 Given Husserl’s points (noted earlier) about the importance of the process of making and the manner of the artwork’s embodiment, it is reasonable to assume that what Husserl means by ‘the same’ in the foregoing quotation is that the audience’s phantasies will follow the character of the art object qua object rather than try to evoke the artist’s states of mind during its creation. But what does this mean in practice, and why should Husserl describe it as an ‘unreasonable demand’? To understand what is at issue, we must proceed immediately to Husserl’s next important point. It involves an extraordinary distinction. He talks of ‘the objectivity of the beauty of an artistic formation, apart from its value as a work.’92 The grounds of a distinction between the beauty of the artwork and its status as a ‘work’ is not – at first sight – readily apparent. In fact, it involves a line of reasoning that is extremely

54  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness complex and demanding to follow. Its starting point is the fact that in our engagement with any artwork, the ‘work’ aspect pertains not only to the artist’s creation of the physical work, but the fact that it engages his or her audience mainly in the form of phantasy apprehensions. In literary or musical works, for example, we fill out the sensory configurations apprehended through reading or hearing with our own associations; and even in the case of the physical images of spatial art, our engagement with the image object involves horizons of phantasy association, rather than the bare recognition of the image as a representation of such and such a thing. Now (as we saw in the Introduction to the present work), no phantasy is the same on different occasions, not even when we – or others – phantasy the very same item or state of affairs. However, despite the deep subjectivity of phantasy, in the case of the artwork, these different phantasies are based upon the work itself – ‘the objective being-beautiful of this beautiful something.’93 Of course, in the case of realist works, Husserl admits that ‘There is no talk of beauty here,’ only to immediately add, ‘But the beautiful can make its appearance simultaneously as attractiveness.’94 This is an important qualification, since clearly, if an extreme work is not to simply disgust us through its subject matter, there must, nevertheless, be something about the way this subject matter is presented that we find attractive – hence we can regard beauty as, in effect, making a ‘simultaneous appearance’ of an ‘honorary’ kind. Husserl is very insistent on the grounds of artistic beauty and locates them in the work’s own structure and its internalization by the audience. I continually mean the phantasied theme as the same, or respectively, the mode of appearance as the same. The verbal sound of the poem is the same as what is poetically composed itself, the situation presented therein in the How of its mental presentation. Whether different persons read it in different timbres, present it in different subjective phantasies, its internal reading, its external reciting, and so on, reproduces only the sound that belongs to the poem itself.95 This is why Husserl (in ironic vein) describes the demands placed upon phantasy as ‘unreasonable.’ Different people may have different phantasies when, say, reading a novel, but, unless they wander away from the work entirely, they are constrained within bounds set by the written work. Their phantasy activity internalizes and reiterates the objective features of the work itself as the basis of these subjective realizations. Indeed (as far as we understand Husserl’s complex train of thought), the objective beauty of the work in the fullest sense consists in how its objective physical features are internalized by the audience as a basis for their phantasies.

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  55 The fact of such internalization is not some mere assumption on Husserl’s part. For the very fact that we are inclined to engage with a work and persist in the engagement entails that we have not simply encountered it, but have been affected by – and thence have internalized its ‘How’ of presentation to some significant degree. In effect, we accept the authority of the work as something which – if followed – will allow us to educate our capacity for phantasy through making them consistent with what the work sets forth, and taking them in new directions. Husserl is arguing, then, that the objective beauty of the artwork centers on a relation between, on the one hand, the manner of its ‘self-identity’ – as embodied in figments such as texts and images, and, on the other hand, the internalization of this as a basis for phantasy realizations in a potentially unlimited audience. As Husserl observes, In this self-identity it is actually something beautiful. What is identified by me, posited by me as an abidingly accepted object, can also be posited as an object intersubjectively: The ideally identical figment as an object is then an intersubjective object, something existing ideally and intersubjectively, which we can all claim as our own through the really objective being of the work in its physical embodiment.96 The objective beauty of the artwork, then, is not just its identity as a physical figment, but also the internalization of it in the phantasy-work of all those who engage with it aesthetically. In this way, art is an active focus for artist, for audience, and for the experience of intersubjectivity. Whilst nature may have no special place for the concrete individual subject, the phenomena of art declares its actuality in the most insistent terms. As Husserl concludes, Ultimately, therefore, we are led back to the creative subject [i.e., the artist], who intends and creates the figment to be an abiding object, and who, furthermore, produces a physical thing that awakens the spiritual ideal object in a fixed way for everyone who can understand.97 There is a further vital point embedded in Husserl’s understanding of the objective beauty of art, but before developing it, we shall offer a critical appraisal of Husserl’s general phenomenology of aesthetic consciousness.

Conclusion Hopefully, some of the great strengths of Husserl’s approach will have already been gathered. One of the most important of these is its inclusive character. Husserl does assign distinctive criteria to the aesthetic but is attentive also to the ways in which associations arising from

56  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness non-aesthetic factors can influence our aesthetic experiences. Indeed, though it has not been possible to highlight it in such a general chapter, one of the great strengths of Husserl’s approach is the way in which he focuses on the dynamic involved in particular cases of phantasy and aesthetic consciousness – attending how consciousness shifts from one emphasis to another, from the non-aesthetic to the aesthetic and back again. (In this respect one might refer the reader back to the example of still-life, where the complexities of appreciation are such as to slip from simple enjoyment of the appearance of things to genuine relish of how the represented thing might be if encountered in reality.) One aspect of this inclusiveness is the way Husserl understands the selectivity of aesthetic consciousness as one of its essential factors. This positions him in relation to Kant both disadvantageously and advantageously. The disadvantageous aspect is that Kant offers a general explanation as to why aesthetic phenomena of the simple natural kind are pleasurable (they involve a heightened interaction of imagination and understanding – the two factors that are essential to the unity of experience), but Husserl offers no such general account. The grounds of why aesthetic consciousness is a pleasurable experience are left unclarified. However, earlier on, we suggested a possible criterion of aesthetic selectivity for Husserl based on the way aesthetic aspects work by evoking not so much a sense of the whole of which they are a part, so much as the richness of its phenomenal qualities (and where relevant) propensities. Interestingly, Kant himself provides a clue that can assist this idea to be developed further through his notion of the ‘aesthetic idea.’ He describes it as ‘that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.’98 Such a representation, indeed, ‘aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way.’99 Kant and Husserl are agreed that imagination (or in Husserl’s case, ‘phantasy’) cooperates with understanding by bringing order to the flow of perceptions – enabling them to be recognized as perceptions of the same thing or state of affairs. The capacity to apply concepts and imagination are correlated. Now, in Husserl’s case, the aesthetic aspect evokes the phenomenal richness of its associated whole. This means that in relation to its conceptual core (as this individual thing or state of affairs), it gives rise to associational activity that involves our conceptualizing capacity and imagination being stimulated into a cooperation that is much more open and much freer than is usually the case. The perceived aesthetic aspect makes us imagine other aspects (real and imaginary) and, in so doing, also unlocks thought about those aspects, and how rich this phenomenal whole is. Whereas the normal roles of imagination and understanding are to issue in definite acts of recognition and then move on to the next problem, in aesthetic consciousness

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  57 they are brought into a playful relationship. For, the more the select aspect illuminates the richness of the whole, the more our sense of its own fecundity is enhanced. Hence, the presently apprehended configuration stimulates our capacities for retention and protention as vehicles of phantasy association. In this way, the apprehended form or narrative brings features essential to consciousness into enhanced cooperation. Now, Kant himself links the aesthetic idea specifically to fine art, but the Husserlian variant just described has the advantage of fitting the enjoyment of nature also, i.e., it continues the inclusiveness of Husserl’s general aesthetics. Indeed, it might even be taken to rectify an inbalance in Kant’s own aesthetics. For his tying of aesthetic enjoyment to how the object appears without any reference to what kind of thing it is (i.e., the absolute disinterestedness discussed in Section II) would surely fit only the most simple configurations. However, if we take the aesthetic idea in the Husserlian variant just proposed as a more representative ground of general aesthetic enjoyment, then we have an explanation that fits both nature and artifice in equal measure at whatever level of complexity. This being said, the concept of art still presents a problem for Husserl, and one that – once again – benefits from thinking the problem through in relation to Kant’s aesthetics. For, as well as regarding art as an embodiment of aesthetic ideas. Kant also sees it as defined by originality. He noticed also that since there can be ‘original nonsense,’ the criterion of artistic originality must, accordingly, be based on the invention of new rules that can become exemplary for practice in the relevant medium.100 We have shown at great length elsewhere why Kant is – in broad terms at least – right about this.101 The key insight is that aesthetic merit in art, whatever else, is involved, requires some originality, and this means that in order for it to be recognized, we need an horizon of comparison based on the history and geographical distributions of practice in the medium. Husserl’s account of aesthetic conscious is consistent with this in at least one respect. It is his constant emphasis that what is central to this is ‘How’ appearances present to the senses. This brings the notion of originality and a comparative horizon ‘in by the back door.’ For selectiveness in artistic presentation logically entails that what is selected is taken in preference to other possibilities. And this can be far more than mere preference, because decisions of taste can often be justified by reference to evidence, e.g., when we show how artist x simply repeats the kind of compositional strategy developed by artist y and does so in a stiffer way. It should also be noted that this comparative context is required also – at least to some degree – by aesthetic consciousness in relation to natural phenomena. When we enjoy sunrises and sunsets, it is because they do not simply happen in the same way every day; there is always something new involved. And even if we appreciate something familiar, such as a familiar kind of rose, our very familiarity heightens our sensitivity to pleasing idiosyncrasies of appearance, thus enhancing our aesthetic pleasure.

58  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness Of course, the reason why Husserl does not invoke this comparative horizon is because his method is phenomenological and focuses, accordingly, on immediate appearance rather than the factors that determine our orientation towards it. Nevertheless, this is a gap that inhibits the comprehensiveness of Husserl’s approach, and thence once that we will have to return to when discussing his treatments of the main varieties of art. However, it is important not to end our chapter on a negative note. In this respect, we will recall that at the end of Section III it was suggested that one final important point could be developed concerning his account of artistic beauty. It is time to make good on that promise. As a starting point, let us consider Husserl’s claim that The poem is an individual. The idea has its temporality; namely, the temporality of its origination by the artist, specifically, in the verbal expression, which alone makes something ideal accessible and identifiable intersubjectively.102 Indeed, The poem in its linguistic body, just like the poem in its ‘spiritual’ content, is obviously an idea that, in being read, becomes actualized more or less perfectly, and, for the rest, in ways that are, ideally, infinitely more various.103 Whilst Husserl is talking specifically about the poem here, his description of it as an individual applies to the other idioms of art. In this respect, we must recall (from the Introduction to this book) that, for Husserl, ‘individual’ has a specific technical meaning. Primal impression … is the primal source of individuality and is itself primally individual. However, it is what it is as something nonself-sufficient in the stream and as conceivable only in its place … [Indeed,] every perceptual reality has the parallel property that it is what it is only in the temporal nexus and this carries in itself the infinity of life or is carried by that life, which as past is settled but as future moves forward as endlessly explicable and bestows on the individual temporal being, although it now no longer exists, an ever new temporal determination.104 Individual sensations and perceptions arise from an infinity of other states of affairs, and, as they endure, they change – either in themselves or through being displaced or through being changed into something entirely different. No individual, in this sense, endures as an individual outside the infinite open temporal nexus of causal relations. All individual conscious states emerge from an infinite background only to be

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  59 dissipated in the constant flux of infinite becoming. Individuality in this transient sense, in other words, is the character of the present moment of experience, or sequences of such moments. Why, then, does Husserl call the work of art an ‘individual’? Certainly it counts as an individual material thing, but the implication in Husserl’s remark is that it has kinship with the individuality of sensation/perception. The implication is justified. The reason why concerns its positioning in relation to two different infinities, and its status as an entity whose existence depends upon these infinities and yet also becomes independent of them. To explain the significance of this, let us now consider the artwork vis-à-vis ‘the temporality of its origination by the artist’ (as Husserl puts in in an earlier quotation). An artist makes or composes a work from a multitude of methods, interests, ideas, feelings, and the like, that are all in play during the entire process of creation. This, and the deeper context of attitudes, experience, and memory which inform such a process, might be described as (at the very least) a quasi-infinity since the number of elements and factors involved, and the permutations of them, are, in practice, beyond the scope of any finite comprehension, and, indeed, they reconfigure with every passing moment of the creative process. In the course of all this, there may well be some overriding intentions as to the character of the final whole (e.g., intending its subject matter), but the major tasks of composition and execution are likely to be modified continuously during the process, and even if the modification is, in fact, slight, the guiding intentions, are phenomenologically speaking, inseparably bonded with the broader conditions of personal experience that enable them. Indeed, the very positing of definite artistic ‘intentions’ seems more likely to be something we infer from the work in retrospect rather than factors with efficient causality in the creative process, and this, of course, is why the Idealist notion of the artwork residing in the artist’s intentions is so unlikely. Now, we will recall also (from the Introduction to the present work) that Husserl understands phantasy consciousness to be a modification of perception rather than a separate mode of apprehension. Perception involves an immediate relation to externally originated stimuli (or states of ourselves that are a response to such stimuli), whereas phantasy is a mode of quasi-perceptual re-presentation. It generates its ‘objects,’ but, since we are finite, it cannot reproduce the infinite nexus which sustains the character of individual perceptions. It yields only quasi-perceptual schemata with varying degrees of vividness. But, let us now also recall Husserl’s description of the artwork from the start of this Chapter. ‘Art is the realm of phantasy that has been given form.’105 The artist’s ‘giving form’ starts from what we have described as the quasi-infinity of his or her experiential states, which issue in a focus whereby the particular work is brought to completion. It then comes to exist independently of the artist’s own being. Of course, one might say the

60  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness same about any kind of human artifact, but, as we have seen, the artwork has the characteristic of beauty or cognate ‘attractiveness.’ This means that it exists in order to be structurally phantasied, so that its structure is internalized by members of its audience. Such internalization – if conducted for its own sake – strives to be consistent with the structure of the work itself, but, of course, since phantasies can never be identical with one another, there will also be interesting contingent variations in how the structure is realized on different occasions and by different people. These infinite possibilities of variation enable the work’s shared intersubjective-structure to become something of more personal significance also. In this way, the artwork achieves something remarkable. It originates in a subjective quasi-infinity and takes on an objective physical character whose essence is to engage with and be internalized by a potential infinity of other human subjects. Whereas the individual perception emerges from an infinity of items and relations and, at best, persists for a while – only to be changed and ultimately dissipitated in the infinity of becoming, the individual artwork endures and brings change to some degree through the phantasy realizations of those who engage with it. Of course, the infinity that art emerges from is only a quasi-one, and its pattern of subsequent existence is not the same as the infinity of becoming per se, but this is exactly the point. We cannot make the individuality of actual moments of perception endure in a real sense, but Husserl’s understanding of the artwork shows how it offers a kind of aesthetic compensation for this. The work’s particular ‘How’ of existing is one that brings the artist’s moments of creation into a form where they are never lost, and where what they bring forth is lived in and realized by others. It is a quasi-individual aesthetic form. This explains why Husserl is right to emphasize the lived in dimension of aesthetic consciousness. Normally in life there is no distinction between our states of awareness and their objects. They are characterized by what F.H. Bradley described as ‘an immediate feeling, a knowing and being in one.’106 For the most part, such immediate experience is no more that our general feeling of life. It swells and ebbs in the rhythms of what we do – in all their frustrations and fulfillments – and when we reflect upon it, its unity is broken. We become apart from our sensory immersion in the world. However, when we experience the artwork through aesthetic consciousness, we are dealing with quasi-individuality in the sense described earlier, which means that, here, immediate feeling exists in a distinctive and heightened form, because the object that engages the subject is already primed to disclose factors basic to perception and to our experience of both ourselves and other people. When we live in aesthetic consciousness, in other words, we exist at home with the world – through thought, sense, and feeling – in a way that we do not with other experiences.

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  61 Husserl’s approach, then, shows that whilst the basic pleasure of aesthetic consciousness is grounded in the eloquent part’s disclosure of the aesthetic richness of the whole, there is – in the case of art at least – also something much deeper involved. It involves an Ideal symbolic overcoming of the limits of finitude achieved at the level of perception itself, the creation of a quasiindividual. We would propose that it is only by reference to this implicit level that the ultimate worth of aesthetic consciousness can be adequately disclosed.

Notes 1 Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898– 1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 616. 2 Ibid., 654. 3 One of the exceptions is of course, Stephane Mallarme’s Un coup de des of 1897. 4 Husserl, Phantasy, 459. 5 Ibid., 704. 6 Ibid., 461. 7 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 104. 8 Ibid., 168n6. Here, Husserl himself refers to ‘Kant’s theory’ without specifying anything further. 9 Husserl, Phantasy, 597. 10 Ibid., 189. 11 Ibid., 190. 12 See Kant, Critique of the Power, sections 46–49, 186–195. 13 Husserl’s only extended reference to aesthetic unity is a rather opaque passage in the Logical Investigations, Vol. II, trans. J.N. Findlay (London and New Jersey: Routledge Kegan-Paul/Humanities Press, 1970), 483. 14 Husserl, Phantasy, 461. 15 Ibid., 461. 16 Ibid., 168. 17 Ibid., 462. 18 Ibid., 168. 19 Ibid., 462. 20 Ibid., 462. 21 Ibid., 462. 22 The play can be seen in a 1973 version on YouTube, starring Billie Whitelaw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFQH7hhDTSE (accessed 29 May 2020). 23 In early productions, a figure called the Auditor was also present who makes four gestures – of an ineffectual kind – during moments of crisis in the main character’s monologue. Beckett allowed the figure to be omitted from subsequent productions, but he/she remains in the published text of the play. 24 Ibid., 169. 25 This is true not only of Kant, but also Hegel, Schopenhauer, Collingwood, and Adorno. 26 Husserl, Phantasy, 704. 27 See Kant, Critique of the Power, section 2, 90–91. 28 Husserl, Phantasy, 464. 29 Ibid., 463–464. 30 Ibid., 464. 31 Ibid., 464. The superiority of Husserl’s position on the aesthetic over Kant’s has also been noted by Michel Liptak in his Phenomenology Theory of Art in Light

62  The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness of Husserliana XXIII, https://www.academia.edu/3632910/Phenomenological_ Theory_of_Art_in_Light_of_Husserliana_XXIII, 5 (downloaded 20 April 2020). 32 He does try to negotiate this through the notion of ‘aesthetic ideas’ mentioned earlier, but, even so, the question of disinterestedness is not mentioned in relation to them. 33 Husserl, Phantasy, 459. 34 Ibid., 168. 35 Ibid., 168n6. 36 Ibid., 169. 37 Ibid., 169. 38 Ibid., 647. 39 Ibid., 615. 40 Ibid., 167. 41 Ibid., 167. 42 Ibid., 464. 43 Ibid., 464–465. 44 Ibid., 465. 45 Ibid., 465. 46 Ibid., 648. 47 Ibid., 648. 48 Ibid., 648. 49 Ibid., 649. 50 Ibid., 464. 51 Ibid., 464. 52 Ibid., 464. 53 Ibid., 463–464. 54 Ronald W. Hepburn, Wonder, and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 27. 55 Husserl, Phantasy, 463–464. 56 Ibid., 586. 57 Ibid., 41. 58 Ibid., 40. See also Husserl’s remarks that ‘In the aesthetic image, I have posited – quasi-posited a world, an image world, as a first world. In the case of an inventive reproductive phantasy, I can produce the first world at my pleasure, although that is not always the case. Suddenly – I know not how – a phantasy world is there and perhaps forces itself upon me, without for that reason being taken as reality.’ Ibid., 553–554. 59 Ibid., 615. 60 Ibid., 41n5. 61 Ibid., 41. 62 Ibid., 41n5. 63 A more balanced observation is his remark that ‘we also speak of the phantasies of an artist, and in doing so have in view certain psychic experiences that he produces in himself or that he awakens in us by means of his works.’ Ibid., 1. 64 Ibid., 459. 65 Ibid., 56. 66 Ibid., 193n11. 67 Ibid., 311. 68 Ibid., 647. 69 Ibid., 457. 70 Ibid., 647. 71 Ibid., 55–56.

The Scope of Aesthetic Consciousness  63 72 Ibid., 565–566. 73 Ibid., 566. 74 Ibid., 459. 75 Ibid., 459. 76 Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. II, 645. 77 Husserl, Phantasy, 535. 78 Ibid., 454n129. 79 Ibid., 455. 80 See Ibid., 535. 81 Ibid., 189. Here Husserl is referring specifically to the sonata, but his point concerns the music per se, rather than the specifics of sonata form. 82 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1966), 151. 83 Ibid., 50–51. 84 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 44. 85 See Husserl, Phantasy, 190. 86 Bruce Benward and Marilyn Saker. Music: In Theory and Practice, Vol. 1 (McGraw Hill, New York, 2003), 36. 87 See Paul Crowther, The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 127–134. 88 Husserl, Phantasy, 655. 89 Ibid., 655. 90 Ibid., 655. 91 Ibid., 655n1. 92 Ibid., 656. 93 Ibid., 656. 94 Ibid., 653. 95 Ibid., 656. 96 Ibid., 658. 97 Ibid., 658. 98 Kant, The Critique of the Power, 192. 99 Ibid., 193. 100 See ibid., section 46, 186–187. 101 See Paul Crowther, Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially 116–121. 102 Husserl, Phantasy, 656. 103 Ibid., 656. 104 Ibid., 665. 105 Ibid., 616. 106 See F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 159. Not surprisingly, Bradley himself sees the ‘aesthetic attitude’ as having a special relation to immediate experience. As he says, ‘the aesthetic attitude seems to retain the immediacy of feeling. And it also has an object with a certain character, but yet an object self-existent and not merely ideal. This aspect of the world satisfies us in a way unattainable by theory or practice, and it plainly cannot be reduced or resolved into either.’ Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), 410– 411. Bradley’s position on these matters is, of course, complicated by his broader Absolute Idealism – which raises issues that range far beyond the remit of the present work.

2 The Phenomenology of Visual Representation

In this chapter, we will attempt to articulate Husserl’s theories of visual representation.1 His thoughts on these matters were in constant motion for many years, but we will synthesize a general position from them, beginning with a summary of Husserl’s starting point – some early notes on phantasy dating from 1898. In these notes, Husserl says Perceptual presentation presents its object directly, phantasy presentation indirectly: phantasy presentation presents its object in such a way that it first brings to appearance another object resembling the object, by means of which it apprehends and means the object in image.2 Indeed, ‘The image object appears in the phantasy presentation, but it is by no means meant. On the contrary, the depicted object alone is meant.’3 In referring to the phantasy presentation as an ‘image object’ whereby the intended object is ‘depicted,’ Husserl is clearly constructing his notion of phantasy as such on the analogy of picturing. He even goes so far as to say, As far as the act-characteristics are concerned, the phantasy image and the physically presented image are internally of the same sort: There are certainly pictorial re-presentations in both cases.4 On these terms, in other words, phantasy involves a unified act but with two components – the generation of the image, and the use of it to intend the object. Later, Husserl abandoned this position and was right to do so – insofar as generating the image through features that resemble its object entails that we already intend the object in the very act of generation. It follows accordingly that the image itself cannot be the ‘means’ wherein we grasp the object referred to.5

DOI: 10.4324/9781003212553-3

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  65 However, whilst Husserl abandoned this ‘image consciousness’ approach to phantasy in general, he clearly recognized that it was relevant in relation to visual representation, and this is probably why he was interested in such representation for many years to come. But, in the first instance, let us focus on a number of important differences between phantasy and visual re-presentation. In this respect, the 1898 text informs us that Presentations by means of phantasy images and presentations by means of physically mediated images are manifestly different kinds of experiences.6 For one thing, such experiences involve different apprehensional bases: The phantasy image exists outside all connection with ‘reality,’ that is, with the field of regard of possible perception. On the other hand, the image presented physically is incorporated in a certain sense into the nexus of reality, although it is not itself taken to be something real in that nexus. Furthermore: … the physical image – functions as the instigator of the pictorial apprehension … In the case of phantasy presentation, this unique connection to a determinate appearance in perception’s field of regard is missing; phantasy presentation has no instigator.7 Phantasy, then, is a phenomenon internal to consciousness, whereas the physical image has a material base that is just a part of the real nexus of external objects and events as any other spatial object, even though there is more to it than that. The ‘more’ in question here concerns, of course, how the physical image is able to ‘instigate’ the ‘pictorial apprehension.’ Husserl offers a detailed phenomenology of this relation. His first account considers the specific example of an engraving of a religious painting by Raphael currently hanging on the wall of his room. It becomes clear from his description of the work (and from subsequent references) that this is, in fact, an engraving after Raphael’s allegorical representation of Theologia – a tondo from the Stanze della Segnatura in the Vatican (1509–1511) (Figure 2.1). In relation to the print, Husserl says, First I contemplate it as this physical thing. Then I change my way of considering it; I focus my attention not on what hangs on the wall but on the subject of the picture: an exalted figure of a woman, enthroned on a cloud, with two robust and youthful angels fluttering around her, and so on. I again change my way of considering it and turn from the presented image object to the image that presents it, in the sense of the re-presenting image object. It is a rather small woman doll with two considerably smaller angel dolls, objectively colored in mere shades of grey.8

66  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation

Figure 2.1  Eighteenth-century engraving after Raphael’s Theologia by Giovanni Volpano; public domain.

Husserl suggests that it is the first two modes of beholding that are the customary ones in everyday life. But the first of them – the materiality of the image – is something that we tend to overlook in favor of the second level, which is the ‘normal function’ insofar as the picture is created for the very purpose of depicting such and such a subject matter, whereas the third, is of more particular interest for ‘the artist and psychologist.’ This third level of contemplative attention is of special interest since it concerns how we engage with the picture aesthetically as a work of art. Here, we are not concerned with what the work represents as such, but rather with the pictorial means whereby the representation is achieved – in this case, by the ‘rather small woman doll with two considerably smaller angel dolls, objectively colored in mere shades of grey.’ Through the relation between the image object and these more basic idioms of shape and color, the painted figures ‘influence us aesthetically without positing anything.’9 There is another factor that is also relevant. We are told that not only the colors and forms of the drawing, but also the framing and even the wider spatial surroundings become organically a part of the depicted object: the image, let us say, leaps from the frame: or we look through it, as if through a window, into the space of its objects, and so on.10

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  67 The framing dimension – provided by a physical frame, or by the image’s physical edge, or by its surroundings, or by combinations of these limiting factors – constitute a fourth level involved in depiction, photography, and figurative sculpture. Now, these four levels provide the basic framework which Husserl refines and entwines in complex ways in the course of his subsequent work down to the mid-1920s.11 This chapter will explore them in detail. Section I offers a sustained analysis of how Husserl develops his fourfold structure of visual representation – especially in relation to his focus on (what we shall call) the phenomenological subject. Section II concentrates on what is at the heart of Husserl’s account of visual representation, namely the role played by resemblance and ‘nonanalogizing’ features. In Section III, attention is paid to Husserl’s understanding of the ‘unreality’ of the image object, the importance of the frame, and, more significantly, the aforementioned nonanalogizing features in declaring this unreality. We then turn in Section IV to the specific relation between the image object and aesthetic consciousness. Special consideration is given here to his notions of ‘plastic form’ and the ‘double halo’ of retention that is at issue in works of art. In the Conclusion, we offer a critical review of Husserl’s key ideas and a significant development of some of them.

I In order to understand Husserl’s approach in the deepest terms, we must first contextualize it in relation to some broader contemporary ideas concerning depiction. Ernst Gombrich, for example, held that in perceiving a physical image, our attention alternates between the physical material aspect, and the representational form emergent from it – we cannot, strictly speaking, ‘watch ourselves having an illusion.’12 Our perception shifts from one aspect to the other as in the duck/rabbit figure of gestalt psychology. In contrast to this view, Richard Wollheim held that the ‘twofoldness’ of the physical image is highly distinctive. Whilst seeing the physical surface and seeing the image ‘in’ it can be logically distinguished, they are nevertheless perceptually inseparable. As Wollheim describes this ‘seeing-in,’ They are two aspects of a single experience, they are not two experiences. They are neither two separate simultaneous experiences, which I somehow hold in the mind at once, nor two separate alternating experiences, between which I oscillate – though it is true that each aspect of the single experience is capable of being described as analogous to a separate experience.13 John Brough has taken matters further still, with an account of depiction and photography that utilizes ideas from Husserl. He claims, for

68  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation example, that seeing something in the image’s physical support is a first level of seeing-in, and that seeing the subject in the image constitutes a second level.14 He notes also that Wollheim’s notion of seeing-in does not extend beyond the first level described here, and so, in consequence, does not encompass the phenomenon of seeing the subject in the image object. Brough concludes accordingly, That there are two senses of seeing-in suggests that we should speak of ‘threefoldness’ rather than ‘twofoldness’ in image consciousness: on one level I am aware of the surface of the physical support; on another I see something in it, giving me the image; and on the third I see the subject in the image.15 Let us now relate this to Husserl’s treatment of visual representation. First, we will recall from the Introduction to this chapter, his early discussion describes four levels of meaning – the physical base, the depicted subject, the image object, and finally, the significance of framing devices. The second, third, and fourth of these factors go significantly beyond the existing literature, and we will devote considerable attention to each of them. In the texts from 1904 to 1906, he reintroduces some of these factors as follows 1) The image as physical thing, as this painted and framed canvas, as this imprinted paper, and so on … 2) The image as the image object appearing in such and such a way through its determinate coloration and form. By image object, we do not mean the depicted subject, the image subject, but the precise analogue of the phantasy image; namely, the appearing object that is the representant for the image subject.16 This means that the image object is not simply a series on marks on a surface, but rather how the marks are configured in terms of line, shape, and color, or, in the case of sculpture, how the three-dimensional material is shaped. These features are ‘the representant for the image subject’ in that they constitute the particular pictorial means that allow the subject to be recognized. However, this very emergence raises the question of just what the image subject actually is. There is one very basic sense of this that characterizes mundane visual representations. On many occasions, such representations are created in order to do little more than signify or refer to their depicted subject symbolically, as when a picture of a pointing hand tells us which direction to go, or when a snapshot refers us to the holiday which it represents. In these cases, the depicted subject functions as something mainly external to the image object, and the image disappears, as it were, in evoking the subject. But this leads to a key contrast. As Husserl says,

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  69 The symbolizing function represents something externally; the imaging function exhibits its subject internally, seeing it in the image.17 However, this ‘seeing it in the image’ aspect of the depicted subject is acutely ambiguous. For, whilst we can use the image object merely to symbolize its subject on the lines just described, in phenomenological terms, any image object works by first, as it were, assimilating the subject through the process of making (or, in the photograph’s case, of being ‘taken’). This is the phenomenologically decisive aspect of the ‘depicted subject.’ Brough suggests that The second level of seeing-in involves seeing something in the image rather than in its physical substratum. Here the subject of the image comes into play. I see the subject in the image. Thus in the small grey figure of a woman that I see in Cartier-Bresson’s photograph, I see a specific person, Simone de Beauvoir, standing on a street in Paris.18 However, whilst this is indeed one sense of the depicted subject, it is not the phenomenologically essential one that we alluded to earlier. Brough, like Wollheim (and all other commentators on visual representation that we know of) conflates two separate notions of the depicted subject, one of which is essential to the image object, and one of which is not. The conflated terms are, on the one hand, the phenomenological subject of visual representation, and, on the other hand, the iconographical subject intended by the artist.19 To his credit, Husserl focusses exclusively on the former. He tells us that We look into the image object, we look at that by means of which it is an image object, at these moments of resemblance. And the subject presents itself to us in them: through them we look into the subject. The consciousness of the subject extends throughout the consciousness of the image object with respect to aspects of the analogizing moments. As far as the moments reach, a consciousness of identity is given, such that we in fact see the subject in them.20 In practice, this means that the phenomenological subject is recognized when we identify what kind of item of state of affairs is presented by the image object. In creating a visual image object, the artist uses material to fabricate the image of such and such a kind of thing or state of affairs, and in that very process secures reference to the subject-kind by giving it a particular appearance through the very act of making. Whether or not there is a corresponding ‘real life’ iconographical subject that corresponds to what is ‘in’ the image object, or which it can be compared with subsequently is a contingent matter – depending on the link between the image object and a broader empirical context that would allow the phenomenological subject to also be seen in these more particular terms.

70  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation Of course, the artist may create the work with specific iconographical intentions throughout the process of creation. However, whilst such intentions would then be constitutive of the identity of this particular image object, they would not be the features which were essential to it as an image object. The iconographical dimension relates to factors external to the image object qua image object, and it is not a phenomenological feature that is essential to the making or apprehension of such objects. This is also true in relation to the spectator’s position. To apprehend something as a picture, or a photograph, or a figurative sculpture, entails that we recognize it as being ‘of’ such and such a kind of thing or state of affairs, and all this requires is some general familiarity with how such things or states of affairs generally appear. To apprehend an image object in these terms just is to apprehend its phenomenological subject. The artist may intend the image object to be recognized as a portrait of such and such a person, or as such and such an actual location, but this specificity of intention is not entailed in our being able to recognize it as a visual image object that presents a person, or a landscape scene, per se. And it is these latter apprehension of kind or class characteristics that constitute it as the phenomenological subject. Given these points, let us consider Husserl’s practical approach to visual representation, starting with an example that he uses frequently, namely Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (Figure 2.2). The subject of this work can be determined only by referring to the title, and, in this case, even the title may not be historically correct. (Indeed, the precise iconographical subject of the work is a topic of much debate amongst scholars.) However, the most Husserl says about the subject of this work is that ‘the subject is precisely sacred love, this glorious, superterrestrial female figure, and so on.’21 Even if we do not know the subject in precise terms, the very juxtaposition of a clothed female figure, and a relatively unclothed one – gazing questioningly towards the other – suggests two different conceptions of femininity are at issue: an ideal one, and a more natural one.

Figure 2.2  Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, (1514, Galleria Borghese, Rome); public domain.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  71 Let us consider a further example – namely Husserl’s second approach to Raphael’s Theologia (made around six years after the discussion noted in the Introduction to this chapter). Here, he makes similar points to those made in the first characterization, but let us focus specifically on his description of the image object and the image subject respectively. First, the image object, there … appears to me an achromatic little figure of a woman, about a foot and a half high, tinted only in black and white and surrounded by two little cherubs, considerably smaller, and tinted in the same way.22 And now, the image subject: In normal contemplation of the picture, I live in the image consciousness. In that case, I … see the form of a sublime woman, of superhuman size, two powerful and large young angels, and so on. I also say of these that they ‘appear,’ but obviously this does not occur in the proper sense. I see the subject in the image object; the latter is what directly and genuinely appears.23 For present purposes, what is important is that when talking of seeing the subject, Husserl is alluding specifically to forms which present kinds of visual things. These are ‘what directly and genuinely appears.’ We can recognize how the image object interprets and presents the subject, because we have a general familiarity with features associated with things of that kind. There is no question of seeing it as an intended allegory of theology. Our point is, then, that when Husserl talks of the ‘subject’ of the image object, he generally means it in the phenomenological sense just described. He is talking of us recognizing the kind of subjects that are essential to apprehending the work as a visual representation. It may be that in order to do full aesthetic justice to the woman in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, we do need to know the precise intended allegory, but even without such knowledge, the work still interprets femininity as a depicted subject simply through the way the female form is made to appear. Husserl’s emphasis on the phenomenological subject is an important breakthrough because it is the focal point of meaning in all idioms of visual representation. In particular, it is what enables such representation to be intelligible across cultural divides insofar as, for example, whilst we might not recognize the deities represented by a Hindu sculpture, we can at least recognize that this is an image object that presents a combination of human and animal forms as its phenomenological subject.24 It is also, of course, what enables us to find visual representations of interest even when we have no knowledge of what the artist’s actual iconographical intentions were.

72  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation Against this, it might be objected that since Husserl so often emphasizes the conflict between the image object and its subject, this would surely suggest that he intends reference to the ‘depicted subject’ in a stronger sense than the phenomenological one just described. We will consider the question of such ‘conflict’ in great detail in Section III, but for now, we can state that the conflict in question here is internal before it is external. For once we recognize something as an image object, this entails that we have recognized the image to represent such and such a kind of three-dimensional thing – a young man, an old woman, a tree, a social gathering, a landscape, or whatever. In this way, we apprehend the phenomenological subject as something that conflicts with immediate perception insofar as it is presented as if present, even though we know it is not. In this recognition, we also relate the image object to our previous experiences of how such kinds of subject appear, and intuit the ways it deviates from them through being rendered in a medium. Through this deviation, we again register a conflict with actual perception. Now, it might be argued that photography is an exception to all this, since here the idiom of representation involves capturing a ‘real-life’ subject through a process of mechanical reproduction. Here, accordingly, we surely have a ‘harder’ sense of the subject on the lines that Brough describes vis-à-vis the Cartier–Bresson photograph mentioned earlier. However, this is not the case, for even here, the phenomenological subject has primacy. Suppose, for example, that we see a photograph of the face and upper torso of a clothed woman with hair gathered in a braid on top.25 She is in early middle age on a city street, and is tucked into the lower right corner of the picture with a slightly self-conscious expression, peering towards an unknown object or simply ‘into space,’ at an oblique angle to the viewer. This is not a real woman. It is a photograph of one – presented to us in a partial aspect, with a receding street and pedestrians, and a lamppost situated behind the woman. The photograph in itself conflicts with the perceptual reality of the subject it presents and, through this conflict, characterizes the subject (in ways we shall describe at length later). Now, what we have just described is the phenomenological subject of the photograph alone – without significant reference to either the formal means whereby the image object enables the appearance of the woman, or to her actual empirical identity. In terms of the latter – the iconographical subject – we may know that it is, in fact, Simone de Beauvoir photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson in St. Germain des Pres (Paris 1947) and such knowledge might enhance our pleasure in the image, but, as we have seen, it is not a necessary factor in our phenomenological apprehension of the photograph as an image object of a photographed subject. Despite all these considerations, it might still be pointed out that Husserl very often describes image objects along with their subject’s particular empirical identity, but, again, we must insist that, for him, it is not this iconographical identity which is at issue in phenomenological terms.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  73

Figure 2.3  Hans Burgkmair, Emperor Maximilian 1st, (woodcut, 1518); public domain.

In this respect (and to make an important transition in our discussion), we can consider another example offered by Husserl (Figure 2.3). A three-dimensional body, with colors spread over it, indeed does appear to us in the engraving – let us say, the Emperor Maximilian on his horse, a figure appearing three-dimensionally, but built up visually from gradations of grey and from enclosing boundaries. This figure, of course, is not identical with the gradations of grey tints that are really found on the physical image, on the sheet of paper, and are really assigned to it. The same color sensations that we interpret at one time as the objective distribution of colors on the paper, on the canvas, we interpret at another time as the image rider, as the image child, and so on.26 In this example, it is quite clear that the actual historical subject of the image object – Emperor Maximilian – is of no relevance. Husserl is, instead, interested in the how the work presents what we have called the

74  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation phenomenological subject. The key consideration in this respect is that the image object and its physical base do not have ‘separate and different apprehension contents,’ but involve instead the very same visual sensations interpreted as both material support and the appearing plastic form. Of this, Husserl suggests that in spite of the identity of their sensory foundation, the two apprehensions certainly cannot exist at once: they cannot make two appearances stand out simultaneously. By turns, indeed, and therefore separately, but certainly not at once.27 It might seem, at first glance, that Husserl is here favoring Gombrich’s view of seeing the material base and figurative content in alternating terms as gestalt switches. Actually, this is not the case. For Husserl – as with Wollheim – the image object and its physical image base are inseparable. Specifically, the image is immediately felt to be an image. The apprehension based on sensuous sensation is not a mere perceptual apprehension; it has an altered characteristic, the characteristic of representation by means of resemblance, the characteristic of seeing in an image,28 Indeed, Husserl came to acknowledge that given a physical image, it is actually difficult to see it its physical characteristics independently of the image object they present. In relation to the example of a photograph, for example, we are told that A little grey figure appears, but the appearance does not belong to any perceptual object (not to the photograph as a paper card, and so on). Indeed, even if I wanted to, I could by no means just push aside the appearance belonging to the image object and then see only the lines and shadows on the card. At most I could do this with respect to particular spots that I pick out. It is otherwise, no doubt, when I contemplate a child’s drawing. [But] this is hardly possible when I see a body drawn with good ‘plastic’ form: Only when I pick out a single detail – a single line, say – and abstract it from the rest, do I ‘see’ it on the paper.29 In these remarks and the earlier ones, then, Husserl acknowledges that ‘seeing in’ involves a single unified apprehension, and whilst the resolution of it into its component aspects can be done analytically, this does not reflect how the phenomenon is itself experienced. (Indeed, as we have just seen, it can only be performed partially in terms of apprehending the physicality of the image alone.) Phenomenologically speaking, the two aspects are inseparable rather than two different apprehensions that have

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  75 been combined. This is broadly consistent with Wollheim’s position, also, insofar as he regards the two aspects considered independently of one another as simply ‘analogous’ to different experiences. Surprisingly, then, Husserl anticipates Wollheim’s theory of pictorial meaning by over 60 years, and it is, indeed, he who first uses the term ‘seeing in’ to describe the nature of such meaning. However, the four levels of meaning that he identifies, and especially his emphasis on the phenomenological subject, diverge from Wollheim’s emphases in creative ways and allow him to develop further original concepts.30 To see why, let us now consider the more specific factors that inform Husserl’s account of ‘seeing in.’

II We begin with Husserl’s succinct presentation of his major insight. It is that in the image one sees the subject … its primary object [is]: the characteristic of representation according to resemblance.31 In fuller terms, As long as we live in the image consciousness, we live in the intuition of the image object, but not as if the image object signified nothing else. On the contrary, we live in it in such a way that we experience the resembling traits as resembling, as exhibiting, and see the [phenomenological] subject in them, while the rest of the moments belonging to the image (to the image object) do indeed appear but are not accepted as being true of the image subject.32 It is important to emphasize that living in the image object in this way involves pre-reflective consciousness. When we experience the work ‘as resembling,’ ‘as exhibiting,’ etc., we do not remark upon this, but rather become immersed in what we see. Husserl alludes to some of the features that enable this in the previous quotation, and we can now consider them in greater detail. He tells us that The image (expressed more precisely: the image object) brings the subject to intuitive presentation in itself, and it does this to a greater or lesser extent depending on whether the number of pictorializing moments is greater or smaller … Some of the moments, … are genuine bearers of the consciousness of internal representation; others do not have this function. In the former, the image object exhibits the subject to us …; it is re-presented in the proper sense.33

76  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation The moments that are ‘genuine bearers’ of the internal representation – or ‘analogizing’ features as Husserl more often terms them – consist of particular points of visual resemblance between the image object and that which it is an image of – such as shared features of shape and volumetric proportions, and/or of line and color. These are the main focus in our apprehension of the image object. Let us now consider Husserl’s criteria of resemblance in more detail. He says that The greater the extent of the agreement between the image object and the subject … the more perfectly the subject is made intuitable in the image and the more we feel the object to be re-presented when we see into the image, and the less discord there is between the remaining moments, functioning as stopgaps, and the meaning of the subject.34 In this respect, it may be recalled from the Introduction to this book that whilst phantasy cannot hope to reproduce the real perceptual individuality of its objects, it does, nevertheless, strive towards as complete a presentation as it can accomplish. Husserl is making a similar point here about the way the iconic image object strives towards resemblance. He considers some criteria of this. ‘In the sphere of physical images, we … find different levels of adequacy in the presentation of the image subject by the image object.’35 These can pertain to ‘extensity,’ where, as Husserl puts it, the range of the depictive moments – now more, now fewer moments of the image appearance can be involved in the imaging. The range is greater in an oil painting or an oleograph than in the case of an engraving or an ink drawing.36 He suggests also that there is a dimension of ‘intensity’ involved – as shown in more ‘primitive’ resemblances such as drawings that work only through suggested outlines. But even here, such simple devices can sometimes evoke extraordinary resemblance – such as, for example (though Husserl does not cite them himself), the drawings of Ingres or Tissot where there is almost a sumptuous economy in the way slight linear gestures evoke volumetric plenitude. In Tissot’s portrait of Golly Wilson, for example, the voluminosity of the subject’s presence is invoked not only by a frugal network of undulating lines, but by areas that are left almost blank (especially in the sitter’s hair), and where the spectators’ imagination adds the material bulk that these absences suggest (Figure 2.4). Now already, we see in these examples that whilst the image object is based on resemblance, this is by no means a sufficient condition for it to represent its subject matter. Indeed (again anticipating ideas that Wollheim later arrives at), Husserl has little regard for those image objects whose

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  77

Figure 2.4  James Tissot, Miss Golly Wilson, (pencil drawing c. 1870; private collection); public domain.

resemblance is absolute, and which issue in trompe l’eouil effects. He takes these to be better regarded as sources of perceptual error insofar as their status as images is meant to be concealed and their intended effect only comes about insofar as we mistake them for real things. Indeed, Husserl makes the following contrast. The image object is a figment, but not an illusory figment, since it is not – as in the case of an illusion – something harmonious in itself that is annulled by the surrounding reality.37 Now, in the case of genuine image objects – and especially those intended as art – we must overtly recognize the work to be an image, and in this respect, Husserl emphasizes the necessary role played by ‘non-analogizing’ features – which are bound up, in the first instance, with the medium of representation and its anomalous relation to present perception. They include such things as framing devices (be it a physical frame, or just the picture’s edge. etc.), and the ramifications of a work’s obviously painted, sculpted, or photographic character,

78  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation We will consider these in some detail in Section II, when addressing the ‘unreality’ of the image object. However, there is another equally important aspect to nonanalogizing features that can be addressed now. It centers on the ‘How’ aspect of the image object – which, as we saw in Chapter 1, is, for Husserl, fundamental to aesthetic consciousness. For if we are concerned with how a visual representation presents its subject, this means that we are looking for variations of appearance that make us see the subject in a different way from our usual expectations of it. Such stylistic features are not themselves properties of the depicted subject, but they are, nevertheless, fundamental to our experience of it in the image object. 38 Indeed, Husserl suggests that to experience the image object just is: To live in the consciousness of resemblance and the blending of resembling moments with the nonanalogized but co-intended moments accompanying them contiguously.39 The important point here is that the image object involves a blending of its two aspects – we apprehend them as a unity. But, it might be asked, if nonanalogized moments are not features of the subject itself, why is their role so important? Husserl’s answer is as follows. If the appearing object were always absolutely identical phenomenally with the object meant, or, better, if the image appearance showed no difference whatsoever from the perceptual appearance of the object itself, a depictive consciousness could scarcely come about … A consciousness of difference must be there, albeit the subject does not appear in the proper sense.40 This means that nonanalogizing features are essential in order for us to apprehend the image object as an image instead of mistaking it for the subject it presents. The character of the particular image qua image is determined by the relation between its analogizing and nonanalogizing aspects.41 This complex relation means that the demands they put on the viewer will be rather different from the demands of normal visual perception. Given this, it is hardly surprising that Husserl assigns the spectator a very active role in the cognition of the image object. the intuition of the image awakens precisely a new consciousness, a presentation of a new object which has an internal affinity with, a resemblance to, the image object as a whole and, as far as particular details are concerned, with respect to certain of its points.42 This means that in apprehending the relation between the analogizing and nonanalogizing features, the spectatorial ‘new consciousness’ does not simply accompany the image object but rather ‘coincides with it,

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  79 permeates it, and in this permeation gives it the characteristic of the image object.’43 The spectator engages with the particularities of the representation and, through these is led to his or her own response – one guided by the image object but involving more. Let us consider an example (though not one offered by Husserl himself) (Figure 2.5). In Walter Crane’s watercolor Glengarriffe Estuary, we all see the same immediate colors and shapes, but how we imagine them in relation to the actual estuary, and interpret the things not wholly visible but nevertheless suggested (such as the church whose spire appears above the trees) will involve more personal phantasy work on the spectator’s part. Indeed, this will be even more the case with spectators who are particularly attentive to the brooding painted character of the work, and the way it both sustains resemblance to the subject and introduces deviations from it (by way of the artist’s handling of the medium). Husserl summarizes the role of nonanalogizing features very effectively as follows. the image object does not merely appear but bears a new apprehension characteristic, which is fused and in a certain way with the original [and] which, as it were, refers to the object properly meant not simply at a distance from the content of what appears, but in it, or refers to the object properly meant through this content…The subject looks at us, as it were, through these traits.44

Figure 2.5  Walter Crane Glengarriffe Estuary (1901, private collection); public domain.

80  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation The point is, then, that the image object gives rise to an apprehension wherein the original subject and this presentation of it are ‘fused’. The work does not simply signify its subject, but does so through a wealth of resemblances and complementary nonanalogizing factors which, in concert, declare the work as an image object and allow the phenomenological subject to be apprehended. We have, then, presented Husserl’s basic position on visual representation in outline. Attention must now be turned to some further remarkable features that he assigns to the image object and phenomenological ­subject – this time addressing the broader implications of the ‘unreality’ of the image object, and the way this relates to various nonanalogizing features (including framing devices) that make the image object appear anomalous in relation perception.

III Let us begin with a general statement by Husserl concerning the relation between perception and the image object. The image object’s appearance is perceptual …: insofar as it has the sensation’s sensuousness, which undergoes apprehension. It is not, however, a perceptual appearance …: It lacks ‘belief’ [i.e., we do not take it as a positing of the actual existence of its subject]; it lacks the characteristic of reality. Hence there is no conflict between claimed reality and reality that is firmly established, or between two claims to reality, as in the case of an illusion; and there cannot be, since the image-object appearance is not a ‘normal’ thing appearance.45 Husserl explains the spectator’s role in relation to this as follows: The image object truly does not exist, which means not only that it has no existence outside my consciousness, but also that it has no existence inside my consciousness; it has no existence at all. What does actually exist there, apart from the ‘painting’ as a physical thing … is a certain complex of sensations that the spectator contemplating the painting experiences in himself, as well as the apprehension and meaning that he bases on this complex so that the consciousness of the image occurs for him.46 In these remarks, Husserl overstates his position (somewhat) for dramatic effect. The image object cannot be identified sufficiently with the existence of its material base, but neither does it exist in the mind except as a configuration of sensations. The image object is not ‘lodged’ in the mind; rather, it is constituted by the subject’s interpretation of his or her sensations – sensations that are instigated by the physical image.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  81 Understood thus, the image object is unreal in two initial respects. As Husserl puts it, In one sense (a), it is in conflict with the actual perceptual present. This is the conflict between the image as image object and the image as physical object thing; (b) in the other sense, there is the conflict between the image object appearance and the presentation of the subject entwined with it or, rather, partially coinciding with it.47 On these terms then, whilst perceptually speaking, the image object is simply a physical thing, it also declares itself as an image object – as the appearance of a three-dimensional something over and above its own physicality. Yet, whilst presenting this three-dimensional subject, it involves nonanalogizing features that manifestly cannot be properties of the subject, even though they are here inseparable from its presentation. There are, in other words, two conflicts of identity involved – between, on the one hand, the image object and its physical base and, on the other hand, between the image object and its subject. Husserl also identifies a third conflict, this time, one of temporality. We are told that The appearance belonging to the image object is distinguished in one point from the normal perceptual appearance. This is an essential point that makes it impossible for us to view the appearance belonging to the image object as a normal perception: It bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the actual present. … It erases the genuineness of a corresponding part of the now-perception; it coincides, therefore, with a part of that perception that offers only non-genuine appearance. So we have appearance here, sensuous intuition and objectification, but in conflict with an experienced present. We have the appearance of a not now in the now.48 In the two aspects of conflict already noted, Husserl mentions ‘the conflict between the image as image object and the image as physical object thing.’ Here, however, he is identifying something in addition – something more general, namely the fact that in presenting its phenomenological subject, the visual representation makes it seem as if that subject were actually now before us, when in reality it is not. Hence his memorable characterization of it as ‘the appearance of a not now in the now.’ Unlike the trompe l’oeuil, the image object does not pretend to be real. There are concrete features in how it is presented, and in its internal structure that – when we focus on them – create an active temporal conflict with the perceptual field. This conflict constitutes, in effect, a third level of unreality in addition to the two noted a little earlier.

82  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation However, Husserl qualifies this basic position in an important way. This is not, as it were, the logically unfolding and synthetic consciousness of conflict, but a phenomenological characteristic, a characteristic, so to speak, of nullity, discord, and so on. And for the sake of its unity, the whole image object, as soon as we take and consider it as a whole, has the characteristic of conflict.49 On these terms, whilst we are familiar with the three aspects of conflict noted earlier, when we apprehend the image object, the apprehension is not itself a logically unfolding synthesis of them – we do not apprehend them successively. It is rather an intuitive apprehension – in the nonHusserlian sense of ‘intuitive’. This means that our apprehension draws on a wealth of knowledge about its object pre-reflectively – by habit, as it were. For example, if we begin a long journey over a difficult terrain, our apprehension of the journey ahead involves a clear sense of the difficulties involved – without our having to enumerate them in advance. We could, of course, explicitly perform such an enumeration, but the point is that we do not have to. Our apprehension ‘difficult journey ahead’ simply draws intuitively on a wealth of previously acquired contextualizing knowledge. This seems also to be the case with Husserl’s characterization of apprehending the image object. Our sense of conflict is an intuitive one based on our previous experiences of what pictures, sculptures, and the like actually are. In practice, it focuses on our understanding of nonanalogizing features. Earlier on, we discussed how these pertain to the differences between the represented subject and How it is represented vis-à-vis the artist’s stylistic handling of the medium. However, there are a number of other nonanalogizing features that are especially important in affirming the unreality of the visual representation. In this respect, we will recall from the Introduction to this chapter that framing devices of various kinds constitute a fourth level in how we apprehend the image object. Husserl’s identification of such devices is by no means an idiosyncrasy of his phenomenological method. It engages with a vital dimension of our experiences of visual representation. And whilst its analysis has been foolishly neglected in most contemporary philosophy of the visual arts, its importance was recognized by at least two other important thinkers, just after Husserl drew attention to it. The first example is a paper by Georg Simmel dating from 1902 (four years after Husserl’s first treatment of the frame) where he claims that the pictorial artwork is a self-contained aesthetic whole, and that its boundaries are that absolute ending which exercises indifference towards and defence against the exterior and a unifying integration with respect to the interior in a single act. What the frame achieves for the work of

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  83 art is to symbolize and strengthen this double function of its boundary. It excludes all that surrounds it, and thus the viewer as well, from the work of art, and thereby helps to place it at that distance from which alone it is aesthetically enjoyable.50 Simmel emphasizes, then, the way in which the frame separates the image from the external world, thus declaring it as an aesthetic whole, whilst at the same time serving an integrating function vis-à-vis the work’s internal contents. This latter factor was made more explicit by the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin in 1915 through his distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ form – where the picture’s edges provide a structure which allows the pictorial content to be arranged compositionally with reference to the edges – either regarded as a limit (in ‘closed’ form) or as something to be continued notionally beyond those edges (i.e., as ‘open’ form).51 Simmel’s and Wolfflin’s observations, then, help explain further why Husserl was right to emphasize the frame, but it is interesting that he takes matters much further than they vis-à-vis the role of the frame in relation to the unreality of the image object. We are told, for example, that The real space of perception does not have a portion that is framed off in such and such a way and that leaves room in its midst for a fictive space for my phantasies.52 And, in the course of discussing an unnamed engraving of a painting, he observes of the plain paper margins that The apprehension contents [i.e., paper, etc.] are permeated by the image object apprehension; they fuse into the unity of the appearance. But the other apprehension is still there; it has its normal, stable connection with the appearance of the surroundings … The surroundings are real surroundings; the paper too is something actual. The image appears, but it conflicts with what is actually present. It is therefore merely an ‘image’; however much it appears, it is a nothing.53 The border or frame is, accordingly, ambiguous. On the one hand, its main function is to hide itself in declaring the image object, but, at the same, we are aware of it (in Husserl’s terms, ‘apprehend’ it) as an affirmation of the border between the genuine perceptual reality and the unreal pictorial space of the image object. In this way, it highlights a conflict. This conflict with perception goes beyond the frame, to center also on more particular internal features of the image object structure. Husserl considers the black and white shades of an engraving. ‘They are there in the image, but they are not operative. We do not intuit the

84  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation subject in them. They do not even have a symbolic function.’54 However, ‘As soon as our interest is directed towards these moments, the consciousness of conflict emerges, the conflict of the meant object’s “being otherwise.”’55The example of photography is also illuminating in these respects. Husserl considers the example of a photograph of a child, where we see immediately – through its analogizing features of resemblance – that it presents a child’s appearance. However, Husserl then notes that The child appearing photographically displays none of [the image subject’s] colors at all. On the contrary, it displays photographic colors. What has photographic colors in the appearance presents something that is colored in an entirely different way. Not only do we know this from reflection, but it belongs to the essence of the imaginative apprehension from the beginning that, whilst this object colored violet grey appears to it, it does not mean this object but a different object that only resembles it.56 There are also other aspects to the photograph’s nonanalogizing features. We are told that In the case of a photograph: The spatiality (as in the case of a relief) is only an approximate, imperfect, analogical spatiality. This points to the fact that the motivations belonging to the constitution of its spatiality are anomalous. This is certainly true with respect to the ocular motor unity … and even with respect to revolving and turning, in short, with respect to changes in orientation.57 In these comments, in other words, Husserl is emphasizing that the photograph presents itself as anomalous in relation to the viewing position of an embodied subject because it is static and fixed, whereas the perceptual subject can move itself in order to make present things more accessible to perception, and can encounter objects that are themselves mobile.58 The conflict between perception and visual representation is also marked by an anomaly of scale – which Husserl indicates in a footnote to the effect that We must … distinguish between the larger or smaller plastic form of the image object and the anomaly inherent in it that the true plastic form of the image subject is supposed to be presented by a ‘plastic form that is too small.’59 Here, in other words, there is a conflict between the space of orientation within the image object and that of our orientation in relation to the actual perceptual world. He considers the case of a plaster bust.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  85 Here the spatiality is perfect. It is at the same time the spatiality of the actual thing made from plaster. Here in fact we have two intuitions ‘permeating one another’ and in a certain way ‘conflicting’ with one another – and yet conflicting in only a loose sense.60 In a wax mannequin figure intended to trick, there is a ‘quarrel’ between two perceptual objects each of which has its own positing quality, i.e. affirms itself as existent. The image status of the illusion is affirmed only when its claim to be real is annulled by the surrounding reality. In the case of the bust, however, we have only one perception (the perception of the plaster thing), and the other element is a mere ‘image’ intuition.61 On these terms, then, We have anomalous appearances; that is, we have appearances that resemble other ‘normal’ appearances which are appearances of something else. And what resembles is presented in something resembling it. There can be full appearances insofar as they are constitutive of actual objects, as in the case of the bust; or there can be appearances, such as the photographic image, which are anomalous in that they do not constitute objects.62 In these remarks, Husserl has linked the anomalies between image object and perception to general features of the media of visual representation vis-à-vis their particular idioms of physicality. In photography (and one presumes pictorial art also) we have two-dimensional presentations that do not constitute three-dimensional states of affairs – despite suggesting them – whereas in sculpture, we have a genuine three-dimensional object but one that is anomalous insofar as, whilst the sculptural object has the three-dimensionality of human form, it is made of a different kind of material.63 In his later work, Husserl further refines his understanding of how the image object is manifestly anomalous in the context of ordinary perception, and, again, this involves considerations based on distinctive aspects of individual iconic media. Vis-à-vis ‘the system of modes of visual appearance,’ Husserl declares that we must take heed of the fact that not only the depictive image and its subject must be distinguished, but also, with regard to the depictive image, the relevant image object itself, its phantom, and the modes of appearance belonging to the phantom.64 As far as we understand Husserl here, the ‘phantom’ is the particular kind of image object that is created from different conventions and media of

86  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation visual projection – the particular artistic medium that presents the phantom’s individual mode of appearance.65 Drawings and photographs, for example, are projections of three-dimensional items and states of affairs on a notionally two-dimensional surface. Sculptures are physically threedimensional likenesses. Cinematography is again a three-dimensional projection but from a two-dimensional support that remains unseen, and whose three-dimensional content is presented successively in real passages of time even though the image object has a different status (that we shall consider in a few moments). And from these general differences more particular nonanalogizing features (in directions already noted) will follow – such as the manifest characteristics of having been drawn, painted, printed, or sculpted, or whatever, and finer differentiations arising from these. Now, as we have already seen, in most cases, there are also differences of size and scale between the phantom and that which it represents, and that, in pictorial arts, it is also represented statically. Hence, in understanding the relevant ‘system’ of image object appearances, we must take account of all these anomalies – they are a part of the conventions whereby we recognize visual image objects as images. Likewise, this convention leads us to ‘see in’ to the image defined by the physical edge and to overlook the physicality of the support – as paper, or canvas, or whatever. These contrasts between perception and the different media of visual representation lead to one final major anomaly. Perception changes from moment to moment, but the depictive image has ‘enduring “being.”’66 Even the moving ‘cinematographic depictive image’ has this character in that it can be repeated, and yet in each repetition ‘is given as identically the same image object … or same mode of appearance.’67 This is even more the case in static depictive modes such as drawing, painting, and sculpture. To show this, Husserl considers the example of a bronze sculpture of a runner. As often as I look at the little sculptural figure, the image object is the same, and each of its modes of appearance is the same … The thing made from bronze is physically unchanged and endures objectively in time. The runner belongs to another time and to another space. He is a figment. But the phase of time to which he belongs is ‘presented’ as detached and does not abide in time and is not really an enduring phase. On the contrary, it is precisely only a phase, and the same phase again and again, however often I look at it.68 In these insights, Husserl realizes that the anomalous character of the image object involves transformations of time as well as space. As a physical image, its material endures like any other objective thing, but the image object is outside the time of perceptual space, per se. It is an

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  87 appearance that cancels the normal transient conditions of perception. As Husserl adds, Figments are ideal objectivities graspable through a change in focus’ e.g., when we move from positing the figment as figment [i.e., acknowledging its physicality], to the ‘quasi-positing that is involved in our living of the depictive image.69 This quasi-positing presents a quasi-perceptual configuration that conflicts with and is anomalous to perceptual experience itself by virtue of presenting an Idealized appearance of space and time – one that endures in a different realm of appearance than that of real perception. This anomaly provides another factor in the image object appearance’s selfannulling vis-à-vis the surrounding perceptual reality. Husserl concludes accordingly that with respect to the perceptual figments … they always have the characteristic of cancelled realities … and, in the presence of the ‘firmness’ of what is actually experienced, [the image has] its nullity.70 Interestingly, almost immediately after reaching this conclusion, Husserl became more circumspect about how active the awareness of such nullity is in consciousness of the image object.71 He suggests that a distinction should be made between actual conflict between image object and actuality – such as in sculpture where the image object is itself a three-dimensional object amongst other three-dimensional objects, and merely potential conflict – as in the case of image objects with two-dimensional formats. In the latter case the conflict only emerges to the degree that we overtly contrast the pictorial space of the image with the surrounding perceptual space.72 This is a problem that we shall return to in our Conclusion. One other feature of image consciousness came to preoccupy Husserl (from 1912 onwards). It is the idea that the image object ‘exhibits’ its subject. We are told, for example, that Image consciousness has implicated in it ‘sensation contents’ that one can find in it, that one can grasp in it, and doubtlessly it has this in common with perceptual consciousness. However, if we focus our attention strictly on the image appearances in which these trees, these human beings, and so on, appear as image trees, image human beings, we find … the sensation content in the appearance exhibits something, and the appearance itself exhibits appearance. The appearance is not simply apprehension, but the exhibiting of apprehension.73 For Husserl, this involves a single apprehension ‘only it is modified; we have one modified appearance, or, to state it more adequately, a modification of

88  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation appearance whose essence it is to exhibit (to ‘present’) appearance.’74 More specifically, the exhibited appearance is that of the image subject – in the case of Husserl’s example of the Raphael theology picture, we are told The little grey cherubs, the small female figure – I called these little figures image objects. What is exhibited, the subject, is the form of a sublime woman, and so on … The little figures [also] are indeed exhibited objects.75 On these terms, the image object ‘exhibits’ what we earlier called the phenomenological subject. However, we must also mention the fact that whilst the female figure may have the form of a sublime woman, the actual iconographical subject that the artist intends through this figure is an allegory of theology. Nevertheless, this is not a decisive factor, since (as we argued in Section I) Husserl is right to link ‘exhibiting’ to the kind of thing displayed rather to its iconographical meaning(s), insofar as the former is something shown within the internal resources of the work itself, whereas iconographic meanings intended by the artist are recognizable only through mediation by circumstances external to the work itself – such as (in the case of Raphael’s religious picture) the context of Christian belief, or in Husserl’s earlier example of the equestrian engraving of the Emperor Maximilian, the appropriate kinds of historical knowledge. The iconographical content of images, in other words, cannot be apprehended through purely phenomenological investigation. Husserl further articulates what is at issue in ‘exhibiting’ in terms of five points.76 The first three of them are as follows. 1) We must separate the apprehension of an image object and the consciousness of a perceptual illusion.. The former is nonpositing, the latter positing.’ 2) In union with the image-object apprehension we have the exhibiting; specifically, what is exhibited can be exhibited in the appearing image object according to the entire content of its appearance or only according to a part of it … 3) The exhibiting is often a reproductive phantasy combined with the nonpositing perceptual appearance (belonging to the image object) or with an empty presentation corresponding to such a reproductive phantasy.77 In terms of point (1) here, we have already discussed Husserl’s distinction between image objects and illusions. The former are manifestly unreal; the latter operate by intending to fool us – they posit something whilst concealing their identity as no more than a facsimile of that something. Point (2) is also straightforward – we can see the exhibited content of a work as delivered by the whole work, but we can also talk of such content in more particular terms vis-à-vis its localized parts (as in the earlier example of the Raphael theology picture).

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  89 Point (3) is altogether more complicated. The key to it is probably an example provided by Husserl that we have not yet considered – namely a small photographic bust of ‘Malvine’ (presumably his wife Malvine, nee Steinschneider). This work is something that forms an image object – a small oval presentation of a woman’s face and upper torso in ‘photographic colors.’78 But, of course, this image object – for Husserl at least – exhibits an appearance that is apprehended through memory and recollection – through ‘reproductive phantasy.’ The subject exhibited by some image objects, in other words, is not just a phenomenological subject, but one that has been contextually loaded to evoke personal recollective associations for the viewer. It exhibits the subject in a form that is prepared in advance – as it were – for reproductive phantasies. In some cases, of course (where the empirical subject is unknown to us), it may be that the reproductive phantasies are not, in fact, evoked and that such emptiness of presentation means that the content of the image reverts to the phenomenological subject. Husserl himself observes that I can shift to a reproductive imagining: in the case of a portrait, to a memory of the person I know. But then I have a second consciousness.79 Given this, we should perhaps take point (3) to be a modified form of exhibiting, one that is consequent upon certain kinds of image object and which involves a ‘second consciousness.’ Let us now consider Husserl’s two remaining points. 4) image consciousness can be either positing or nonpositing. The subject is posited. It is given as existing, however, only by a shift into a nexus of actual appearances. This points to the fact that the possibility of a shift into presentive intuition essentially belongs to every exhibiting, just as possible shifts in perceptual connections are involved in every perception, and we have to take corresponding ‘intentions’ aimed at possible fulfillment to be an intrinsic part of the perception. Hence the question – What is essentially involved in image consciousness as ‘intention’ – is a cardinal point.80 The fact that intention is a cardinal point is not something that Husserl has drawn attention to previously in his discussion of image objects. But his presentation of the point requires careful elaboration. He has held consistently that all visual representations are non-positing and his various emphases on their unreality, conflicting and anomalous nature vis-à-vis the actual perceptual world, are testimony to this. We have also seen that the exhibiting of the subject can operate at a non-positing level – as when we see the ‘sublime woman’ and angels in the Raphael work. In what sense, then, could the image object ever be seen as exhibiting a subject by positing it? The answer, of course, lies in Husserl’s suggestion that ‘It is given as existing, however, only by a shift into a nexus of actual appearances.’ There are a number of senses in which this could be interpreted. We

90  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation might, for example, take the woman and angels in the Raphael picture to have been based on real-life models, and to make conjectures as to their actual identity. In such a case, the image object would now be taken to posit such real subjects. In cases where we take a work to be a portrait of a definite person, similar considerations would hold. And even if we to interpret the Raphael work as the artist intended it – as an allegory of theology – this also would involve a shift into the realm of how images were understood in the historical reality of the renaissance. However, Husserl’s main intention in point (4) is perhaps something more general. He is underlining that since the iconic image object is quasiperceptual, in principle we can always recontextualize it as exhibiting a phenomenological subject that exists in real perceptual terms – no matter how far-fetched such existence might seem. The fact that every image object exhibits something that could be or could become a perceptual reality is not something that Husserl develops much further. But actually, it is one of the keys – metaphorically speaking – to the magic of iconic image objects. There is always that little touch of mystery – the suspicion that, in principle, they might be exhibiting an appearance that somewhere, somewhen, might be the basis for apprehending an actual perceptual reality. Husserl’s final point is, in effect, a summary. We are told that 5) … exhibiting has a community of essence with reproduction: namely, precisely the fact that we have in every component of the exhibiting (of the genuine exhibiting) a reference to ‘something corresponding.’81 In this point Husserl is underlining what has already been suggested in points (2) to (4). Reproductive phantasy is based on things we have experienced, and when the image object exhibits its subject, it does so by engaging with possible realities which we have perceived, or which we might, in principle, perceive. This almost completes our exposition of Husserl’s theory of meaning in depiction, photography, and figurative sculpture. There is one other factor that should be mentioned. Husserl devotes much attention to image objects that are copies of other image objects, and treats as a case history several reproductions of Titian’s painting Sacred and Profane Love (a work discussed earlier). His general position on the relation between copies and the original is sufficiently summarized as follows. Each copy of a work involves an intention aimed at the original which can be fulfilled with greater or lesser degrees of success. In the case of paintings: The images of paintings can be adequate if, say, the image intends to be the image only of the plastic form. In this respect we have perception; we have fulfillment of the plastic intention.82 But, of course, there are other aspects which such a reproduction might not capture – such as colors.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  91 Thus we see the original in the image according to one side – a seeing, a having of fulfilled intentions, but not a perceiving, since it is a question of moments that combined with other moments that have not been granted the favour of fulfilment.83 Some reproductions, in other words, are better than others. With this summary, our exposition of Husserl’s theory of visual representation is now complete. We turn, accordingly, to the major question of how it engages with aesthetic consciousness, before proceeding to our Conclusion

IV Husserl declares that Image consciousness, is the essential foundation for the possibility of aesthetic feeling in fine art. Without an image there is no fine art. And the image must be clearly set apart from reality … without any assistance from indirect thoughts.84 Indeed, In the aesthetic image, I have posited – quasi-posited a world, an image world, as a first world … as an artist, I form the seeming world, the image world, by means of color, and so on, even if indirectly.85 But what is it that allows the image object to become a ‘first world’ in such terms? What is it about the image object that makes it so amenable to aesthetic consciousness? An important part of the answer has, of course, already been provided through our descriptions of how the image object is set apart by its unreality, and its conflicting and anomalous status in relation to the ordinary perceptual world. What now has to be explained is how this engages aesthetic consciousness. Husserl observes that Aesthetic delight therefore concerns what is presented only with respect to the moments (and the How of the moments) presented in the presenting depictive images, and is concerned with these only to the extent to which and in the way in which they are presented.86 In this appreciation, described phenomenologically, I … run through the system of appearances of the depicting figment, and in them I look at the How of the presenting depiction. I delight in the ‘imitation,’ in the ‘presentation.’ (This valuing that determines …)87

92  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation But why should the way in which the image object presents its subject be of specifically aesthetic significance? In this respect, Husserl says I am not interested in the existence of what is presented per se. But I am interested in the existence of the ideal presentation of what is presented.88 Husserl does not offer much clarification of what ‘ideal presentation’ involves, over and above the following remarks. Enjoying something in its originary givenness – I contemplate a plastic figure, intuit in the depictive image the prototype appearing through it, but only as it presents itself in the image. The aesthetic delight is directed toward what presents itself as it presents itself in … a depictive image, giving itself in a definite mode of appearance.89 We will recall from Chapter 1 that aesthetic consciousness centers on the appreciation of select features of the sensory or phantasy manifold, and that – in general terms – aesthetic aspects work by evoking not only a sense of the whole of which they are a part, but also the richness of its phenomenal qualities (and where relevant) propensities. Now in terms of drawing, painting, and sculpture, this needs to be tied to a more specific factor if it is to have significant explanatory value. Interestingly, in Ideas, Husserl notes that every experience has its parallels in different forms of reproduction which can be regarded as ideal ‘operative’ transformations of the original experience; each has its ‘exactly corresponding’ and yet radically modified counterpart in a recollection, as also in a possible anticipation, in a possible fancy, and again in repetitions of such transformations.90 Phantasy in other words, can transform how what is phantasied appears – it can idealize it, and, of course, physical images can do this all the more – since, in the process of making, the creator has freedom of choice to experiment (at his or her leisure) and then to select which features to emphasize at the expense of others. But the question is, which features are the relevant ones vis-à-vis aesthetic consciousness of depiction and sculpture? In this respect, Husserl’s reference (in the quotation before last) to the ‘plastic figure’ and the ‘prototype’ appearing through it, is of considerable significance. Indeed, ‘plastic form’ (meaning volumetric or three-dimensional shape) is one of Husserl’s most frequently used terms in characterizing the visual image object. We are told, for example, that

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  93 A plaster cast can be good or bad; that is, not objectively good or bad, but good or bad phenomenologically speaking. Namely, the plastic form can furnish us with a perfect image of the object; without the least consciousness of conflict or disparity, we see the plastic form of the presented object, of the Moses of Michelangelo, for example, in the plaster.91 Husserl also acknowledges the role of color in articulating form. [W]hen the image operates aesthetically, it may indeed be that a new presentation brings the subject or some of its components to a more complete intuition – say, to a more fitting coloration.92 Husserl does not clarify his sense of form in any terms further than the passages already quoted, but they are perhaps further explicable in relation to a particular source. As noted in the Introduction to this chapter, Husserl mentions the name ‘Hildebrand’ as a single footnote, and we shall now show that Husserl’s position can, indeed, be clarified by reference to Hildebrand’s important book The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture published in 1893.93 Hildebrand emphasizes the importance of the ‘kinesthetic’ – ‘pertaining to sensations of movement.’94 Vision involves eye movement, and our sense of three-dimensionality or plastic form depends on this. As Hildebrand observes: Form is that factor in our perception which depends only on the object. It is obtained either through movement direct or is inferred from the appearance, and we term it the actual form.95 Actual form, in other words, is the particular invariant or ‘idea; which structures all appearances of the corresponding kinds of three-dimensional object. If we simply abstract such a shape from its instances, it will, of course, be no more than a schema. The artist, in contrast, is interested in it as a creative power whose particular instances give it rich kinesthetic expression. This means that he or she will look for ways of expressing how it is implicit in the appearances of things of the relevant kind. Hildebrand explains the more general importance of this as follows: At times certain illuminations are to be found in Nature, such as reflected light scattered over a surface, which dissolve every impression of form and thereby work against the possibility of gaining any clear spatial idea. He [the artist] must learn, rather, from his visual perceptions how they come to express their form content. And this he does by learning to differentiate that appearance which speaks clearly to us from those others which do not.96

94  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation This means, of course, that the artist must select aspects that convey the unifying power of this actual form in terms of both their own sensory richness and that of the suggested whole of which they are a part. Hildebrand says also that The artist enriches our intercourse with Nature so far as his individual talent enables him to bring the actual form into situations which lend it new but normal accents of effectiveness. The more normal and typical these accents are in a work of art, the more real is the importance of the work.97 By ‘accent’ here, Hildebrand has in mind those individual appearances that give a sense of the whole as a kinesthetic formation, i.e., something emerging from previous moments of perception, and which anticipates ones yet to unfold. In this respect, we might see it in relation to Husserl’s notions of retention and protention that were discussed in the Introduction to this volume. Indeed, Husserl states that Every perception has its retentional halo and its protentional halo. The modification of perception [i.e., phantasy] must also contain this double halo in the mode of modification.98 Now whereas in phantasy per se, the double halo aspect is not something we are likely to attend to explicitly in the intentional act, matters are necessarily otherwise in the case of pictorial, photographic, and sculptural representation. For example, we are told in relation to the aesthetic enjoyment of how a landscape picture presents itself that it may even belong to this How that the unity still carries with it the former infinite horizon (it is precisely a landscape), and undisclosed horizon bordered with vague essential prefigurings, which in this vagueness touches my emotions. But I am not supposed to have the vague prefigurings as the thematic horizon of my cognition; that is, what is unknown is not part of what I now grasp thematically and take cognizance of as existing. Rather, what pertains to it is only that it is this unity of appearances and, as this unity, belongs in an horizon of the unknown that encompasses the unity. This unity in the How of its givenness, of its intuitive givenness and of its givenness through the unknown horizon as unknown, is my theme.99 Whilst these difficult comments refer specifically to landscape, Husserl is actually making a vital contrast that is of general significance for visual representation. The horizon of actual perceptions extends all around the perceptual subject and into the immediate past, and the as-yet unknown future, but this ‘prefiguring’ of things-not-yet-perceived is not something that in itself engages our feelings. It is something we live in as part of the everyday openness of the perceptual world.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  95 The image object, however, in its very manner of appearing – its ‘restricted synthetic unity’ – thematizes accents that point toward an unknown horizon. This is because the very making of any picture, sculpture, or photograph, involves the creation of notionally plane surfaces or the use of real three-dimensional material marked, inscribed, printed, or otherwise worked in such a way as to suggest the appearance of a recognizable kind of virtual three-dimensional item or state of affairs. If the represented states of affairs share the same pictorial space (as opposed, say, to simply being on the same page of a sketch book), they are represented as adjacent to one another in terms of a represented place. And even though the depicted, photographed, or sculpted object or state of affairs is itself static by virtue of the medium of representation involved, it is, nevertheless, as an occupant of represented space, symbolically loaded with the possibility of change and/or movement – in terms of both positions it has previously occupied, and those which might emerge as its circumstances change. This possibility of change or movement is an intrinsic ontological feature of any item or state of affairs qua finite, so that when the artist represents it, he or she also has to take into account the way this dimension is inscribed in its visual nature, for example through its relation to presently hidden aspects or to its previous appearances, or ones which might emerge if it were to change in relation to the viewer’s position. These factors are the double halo of retention and protention in the context of visual representation. Now, presumably, in most cases of visual representation, we simply do not notice this. We just treat the work as an image of such and such a thing. However, what Husserl has realized is that in the aesthetic image object, the restricted synthetic unity of the visual image object can evoke the double halo effect more actively. This effect serves to frame and thence accentuate the presence of what is represented vis-à-vis its position in the greater flow of life, but it does so in a unique way. In the world of actual perception, whilst its hidden horizons are ‘unknown,’ they are so only in a mundane practical sense. We could in principle access them through physical exploration – given world enough and time. But the unknown horizon of retention and protention suggested by the double halo of the visual image object is unknown in a conceptual sense – it exists only as an imaginative challenge for the viewer enabled by how the artist presents his or her plastic forms in relation to one another. It is this personal factor that, as Husserl puts it in the last quotation ‘touches my emotions.’ Let us consider in this respect two works that Husserl himself discusses – Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1512, Gemäldegalerie Alter Meister, Dresden), and the Durer engraving, of the Knight, Death, and the Devil noted in Chapter 1 (Figure 2.6). In the former work, Raphael has depicted stationary figures consisting of a supplicant St. Sixtus to the left, and St. Barbara to the right.100

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Figure 2.6  Raphael, The Sistine Madonna (1512, here engraved by A.L. Payne); public domain.

The Madonna in the center – like the supplicants – is standing on what appears to be a floor of clouds. Behind the drawn green drapes at either top corner is a multitude of cherub faces blended together in a vague continuum of forms that complements the color and texture of the clouds. At the front of the image is one of the most well-known incidental details in the history of western art – the two slightly distracted cherubs resting their arms on a ledge. Now even in a static work such as this, the double halo effect operates in a subtle way – and at two levels. The most basic one is that of a woman child who is situated in front of a background from which she may have emerged and which the man’s outwards pointing gesture may be encouraging her to leave, i.e., enter the viewer’s space. Of course, the vector of the viewer’s gaze is into the picture. This gentle double halo consisting of the forward motion of subject and viewer and our retentional sense of the notional positions left behind both enhance our sense of the superb balance of volumetric design and coloration that gives such solidity to the central group, despite their standing on clouds.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  97 As well as this formal double halo effect, there is one based on the iconography of the work. The clouds and the manifold cherub faces are meant to evoke heaven – the place of ultimate aspiration for mortals, presented in the space behind the Madonna and Child. However, there are some important visual cues in the picture that indicate Christ is destined to come amongst the very audience who is beholding him in a past form in the arms of his mother. The powerfully foreshortened pointing gesture made by Sixtus towards the audience consolidates this. And the way the cherubim lean on the ledge underlines that there is a border to be crossed – on the one hand by the Madonna and Christ into the realm of the finite, and on the other hand by the audience of believers in Christ towards heaven. In Raphael’s picture, in other words, we have a kind of aesthetic portal. The artist’s handling and composition sets up a subtle motion. It has an appearance wherein Christ and Mary in heaven are pointed back towards their past role in the finite world of the audience, and the audience is pointed towards their aspiration for future entry into the heavenly world. This means that the double halo effect is one of great complexity – encompassing the phenomenological and iconographical subjects – and pointing to a future that can only happen if Madonna and Child are already on the earth. In the case of Durer’s The Knight, Death, and the Devil, we have a more overt evocation of the double halo effect since the horse and rider are in motion traveling from right to left. The knight’s expression is one of resolve, and of notable indifference to the figure of death, and the devil to the rear. There is a busy harmony constructed from the horse’s confident strides and the knight’s resolute upright posture, a harmony that is accentuated by the motion of the dog running beneath the horse. This harmony creates a forward momentum that is perfectly finished by the acute angle of the lance – which, in effect, points forward in the most uncompromising terms (an effect that is enhanced by forming a parallel with the upper part of the horse’s striding leg). Through these compositional devices, the protentional and retentional aspects aspect of the image’s phenomenological subject are made into something aesthetically active. We need not explicitly phantasize this past and future, but the moment depicted is loaded with it through tacit compositional devices of the kind just noted. In concert, they suggest that the knight is engaged on a spiritual journey forward to some important goal, and has already been subject to great tribulations in the events he has left behind, all of which are ours to phantasy guided by the compositional structure of the engraving. With the Raphael picture, we need external evidence in order to interpret the meaning of the story, but here our sense of the Knight’s mission is more self-evident because of the universality of the Death and Devil figures. Now, we will review the strength and limits of Husserl’s conception of plastic form and the double halo at length in our Conclusion. Before that, it is important to address another aesthetically relevant aspect of depiction, sculpture, and photography as discussed by Husserl. It concerns the role

98  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation of the image subject and of ‘positing,’ in relation to the ‘disinterestedness’, that we saw, in Chapter 1, to be fundamental to aesthetic consciousness. As we saw then, in Husserl’s terms, this does not involve existential positing, as our aesthetic appreciation centers on how the image object is configured, and this does not presuppose any belief as to whether the image subject actually exists or not. However, on some occasions, Husserl uses ‘posit’ to mean no more than something that we apprehend as such and such an individual thing and/or thing of a certain kind. This mode of positing involves no more than consciousness of its object as such, without raising questions of whether that something exists or not, and is, of course, the mode that is basic to visual representation. We recognize what kind of thing is depicted but are concerned only with the How of the depiction. Husserl illustrates this in an interesting way as follows. Universally, the play of phantasy may be set in motion in such a way that we become immersed in the world of the subject, as when, on seeing the pictures of Paolo Veronese, we feel ourselves transplanted into the magnificent, opulent life and activity of the grand Venetians of the sixteenth-century … But how essentially the image object participates in this interest becomes apparent by the fact that the phantasy does not pursue these new presentations; on the contrary, interest always returns to the image object and attaches to it internally, finding satisfaction in the manner of its depicting.101 We can provide an example to illustrate this, namely Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi (1573, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice) (Figure 2.7). In this work Veronese depicts the last supper with Christ and his disciples, but places it within a much grander feast involving guests servants, and entertainers – all in renaissance garb and situated in the architectural

Figure 2.7  Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (1573, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice); public domain.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  99 context of sixteenth-century Venice. In this way, the feast is made into an extravaganza for the kind of imaginative associations mentioned by Husserl. However, whilst we might imagine biographies for the ‘players’ in the extended scene or construct explanations of their interactions, this is all done at the level of phantasy – it does not require that we believe the depiction to present people who really existed in Veronese’s time (even though some of them may well be based ‘on life’). Such associations remain no more than phantasy – unless we then attend to such things as how the opulent scene is given character by the richness of Veronese’s coloring and design, and by his capturing of the players and their interchanges through particularly evocative accents of appearance. Then mere pictorial daydream becomes aesthetic consciousness. Husserl extends this approach, applying it even to cases where we are dealing with a representation of a historically familiar figure. however much I may be convinced that what is depicted exists and has such and such properties perhaps known to me in other ways, in the aesthetic attitude this occurs outside thematising, positional performance.102 When for example, we look at a picture of Bismarck, we may see things that confirm many of our historical beliefs about his character; but this, of course, is not aesthetic appreciation in itself. However, Husserl adds that it can become so ‘insofar as it simultaneously awakens for me the horizon of a personality on which the artist may count.’103 This is more than a focus on the being of the subject because What serves us aesthetically … would have the function of awakening only certain moments and horizons, and of doing so in universality. Everything else, without exception, would be wholly excluded from the horizon of the theme.104 Let us make sense of this by considering an actual portrait of Bismarck done by Franz von Lembach (1890, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) (Figure 2.8).105 Bismarck is wearing the uniform of the Magdeburg Cuirassiers’ Regiment no. 7, and amongst the decorations on his chest is the yellow ribbon of the Order of the Black Eagle. It is also known that the image is based on studies done from life during the winter of 1889–1890. However, these specific details are, of course, bound up with knowing the historical context in which the picture was painted. In aesthetic terms in contrast, what counts is how the medals figure in declaring Bismarck’s distinguished personality – now marked by the vulnerabilities of age, and an expression that seems to convey a sad knowingness vis-à-vis the way of all things. Martial assertiveness is a feature commonly associated with

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Figure 2.8  Franz von Lembach, Portrait of Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, (1890, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore); public domain.

Bismarck, but it is here tempered pictorially – not only by the somewhat informal angle of presentation but also by the painterly character of the handling and tonally circumspect coloration. In this way, Lenbach focuses on ‘moments and horizons’ imbued with ‘universality’ insofar as he presents Bismarck in a way that transforms his historical reality into a mere setting – for the artist’s aesthetic interpretation of a specific personality in relation to the human condition per se. Here, in other words, we see how an interest in the real existence of the subject is absorbed into aesthetic enjoyment of how the subject is presented to us. In the case of things that depict entirely fictional situations, the aesthetic factor is, of course, even more accessible. Husserl suggests that if, for example, one encounters a picture of a landscape inhabited by centaurs, one might take a non-aesthetic in this by, say, wondering through the landscape as if it were trying to grasp it cognitively as a continuum – this would be a ‘fiction of cognizing.’106 In contrast, with this,

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  101 The aesthetic interest aims at the presented object in the How of its presentedness, without interest in its existence itself and in its quasiexistence. In the case of the beautiful landscape that I am actually seeing, [my aesthetic interest aims] at the landscape presenting itself from here, from this entrance to the valley, just as it presents itself.107 Now, it is important to emphasize that the aesthetic consciousness described in all the foregoing examples does not involve an explicit account of the particular formal means employed by the artist. The explanations just offered do no more than articulate what is apprehended in pre-reflective terms, i.e., intuitively.108 In this respect, Husserl states that there is a difference between what is ‘genuinely’ perceived and what is ‘not genuinely’ perceived. I can live in the image consciousness of this Madonna by Michelangelo, and I then ‘feel’ through the flesh and the inner life, while I do not at the same time see a color. And universally I cannot have the visible visibly.109 The key thing is that in the aesthetic consciousness of the visual arts we live in the immediate feeling of the artwork (in the way described at the end of Chapter 1).

Conclusion We are now in a position to offer a critical review of the salient features of Husserl’s account of depiction, photography, and sculpture. One deficiency can be noted at the very outset in relation to the specific case of photography. As Husserl’s approach is phenomenological, this means that he is not able to take full account of causal/genetic issues. In the case of depiction and sculpture, this is something of a worry, but in the case of photography, it is a severe limitation. For the essence of photography is found not in how its image objects appear, but rather in the photographic image’s origins – as a mechanically registered causal trace of the subject’s visual presence.110 Once this is understood as the basis of photographic meaning, a correspondingly specific mode of aesthetic consciousness can be explained in relation to its image objects. (We have already offered this elsewhere.)111 The other areas of difficulty in Husserl’s accounts of visual representation involve more general issues. First, we will recall his treatment of the image object in terms of nonanalogizing features, conflict, anomalies, plastic form, and the double halo of retention and protention. These factors are involved implicitly in any static visual representation, but, in most cases the image object simply functions as a sign – simply directing us to the subject; or else as ‘proxy’ for an appearance of the subject in a way that focuses our attention on it exclusively. We only engage with the enabling nonanalogizing features and conflict, etc., when the work

102  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation engages our attention in terms of how it makes the subject appear, i.e., through aesthetic consciousness. But this raises a considerable difficulty. For, in order for our aesthetic attention to be engaged, the image object must stand out in some way. However, as just noted, most images objects do no more than draw attention to their subject. They have the aesthetically relevant properties, but they are not configured in a way that draws attention to the constitutive role played by these properties in the particular representation. In order for this to happen, the work must have some element of distinctiveness – originality of style in terms of composition, and/or handling, and choice of subject matter. Without an account of this, Husserl’s theory does not link aesthetic consciousness to the visual image object in a completely integrated way. It remains incomplete. In reply to this worry, Husserl would no doubt reiterate that his investigation is a phenomenological one and must confine itself to appearance without recourse to broader contextualizing relations. The objection does not conflict with his theory as it stands, and could be satisfied, accordingly, by simply supplementing his position with an appropriate account of the role of originality in enabling the aesthetic consciousness of art. Such a response is entirely reasonable, but there are other difficulties in Husserl that are more directly tied to his investigative results. As we saw earlier, he gives emphasis to how the image object renders the ‘plastic form’ of its subject, and we suggested further that this is of key significance for aesthetic consciousness of the work. Plastic form involves the selection of aspects that convey the three-dimensional forms that unify both the particular aspect’s own sensory richness and that of the suggested whole of which they are a part. Now, one apparent problem with this is its restricted nature. Husserl sometimes describes the artist as ‘perfecting’ his or her work in terms of its resemblance to the represented subject, and this makes it appear that he is thinking primarily of quite traditional idioms of figurative art. But if this is so, then it might seem inapplicable to avant-garde and modernist idioms of representation. Admittedly, Husserl’s range of examples (in terms of visual works at least) do tend to involve traditional figurative works, but we must remember that Husserl’s main interest in the image object is in its relation to phantasy, and in its phenomenological structure qua image object and phenomenological subject. Visual artworks are also of interest to him, but the variety of images he addresses extends mainly to more common reproductions and copies – which make use of traditional idioms and of course, are far more prevalent in a mass culture. Hence, his particular emphases on more traditional forms. This being said, Husserl’s notion of plastic form can still be applied to many idioms of avant-garde and modernist art. In Fauvist and Expressionist works, for example, no matter how manifest their nonanalogizing features

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  103 might be, they still achieve an evocation of the reciprocity between the selected aspect(s) and the whole(s) of which they are a part. Consider, for example, Kandinsky’s painting Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St-Ursula (Figure 2.9). This spectacularly multicolored work swamps the viewer with a wide range of pure and differentiated areas of intense – almost gaudy – hues. Yet even so, there are eloquent evocations of plastic form achieved by the juxtaposition of colors (rather than through volume evoked by tones and shadows). The group of figures in the lower left, for example, are presented from a particular viewpoint in a particular visual disposition of component parts. This makes the group into something substantial, with the potential to reveal other aspects – if the viewer’s angle were to change or some action between the members were to take place. This sense of the plastic form of the group’s wholeness is accentuated further by some less determinate features that of the landscape that seem to point

Figure 2.9  Wassily Kandinsky, Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St-Ursula (1908, Lenbachhaus, Munich); public domain.

104  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation towards them in narrow flowing masses, penetrating the picture plane at oblique angles. Kandinsky, however, also shows us the real limits of Husserl’s ‘official’ notion of plastic form. In Landscape with Factory Chimney, it becomes harder to discuss the work in terms of recognizable kinds of everyday three-dimensional objects (Figure 2.10). Indeed, the main visual orientation of the work seems to be a transformation of the picture plane into a series of smaller irregular and unstable planes that blend with one another under the guidance of the main contours of the landscape and the patchy coloring. Here, in other words, the presentation of specific plastic forms becomes far more elusive, and when Kandinsky and others arrive at entirely abstract compositions, plastic form does not seem relevant. Some abstract works incorporate recognizable three-dimensional elements, but they are rarely of the familiar kind used in figurative art, and in those cases where some such forms do make (as it were) a ‘guest appearance,’ they are incidental features that cannot be used as a basic aesthetic principle for understanding the work as a whole. Abstract art then, appears to marks a limit to Husserl’s approach.112 However, there is a possibility of developing his position through a general theory of abstract art that we have developed in great detail elsewhere. Such art has developed – even in its minimal and conceptual forms – in contexts where it is displayed in galleries and the like, and/or using the

Figure 2.10  Wassily Kandinsky, Landscape with Factory Chimney (1910, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York); public domain.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  105 same presentation formats used by more traditional visual representation (e.g., frames and plinths and the like). This creates a strong convention – what we shall call a presumption of virtuality, wherein anything that is exhibited in a gallery and/or presented in an appropriate display format is taken to be ‘about’ something other than itself. And even if the work manifests no more than its own physicality, even this brings in aboutness, in effect, insofar as it is drawing attention to its particular mode of space occupancy. Given the displayed object, we look for meaning in it. But what could constitute the phenomenological subject of such abstract works? The answer has two aspects. First, all works presented in the aforementioned formats involve some level or other of optical illusion. Once a mark is placed on a surface, it appears to cut into or emerge from that surface, and such marks can be configured in complex ways that can suggest also more complex three-dimensional forms and relations with a rich range of phantasy associations. And if the work is minimal sculpture, its display context or format will create noematic meaning concerning how the object occupies and is disposed in space. It is our contention, accordingly, that abstract works present their phenomenological subject by alluding to a specific range of visual possibilities. Specifically, they engage with what we shall call the transperceptual. The transperceptual domain consists of all the background details and relations that are not noticed in everyday perception, and in the memories, imaginings, and associations that contextualize the immediately given. The transperceptual is something we exist in but which we, as it were, normally ‘edit out.’ For if we attended to all the constituent features of visual reality – all details of the fabric of appearance, and its various settings – our perceptual capacities would be overwhelmed. We suggest, then, that when we attend to the optical illusion of abstract art, and seek to give the work meaning, we do so by finding allusions to transperceptual possibility. There are a number of levels of transperceptuality. For convenience, we will mention just two. 1. Spatial items, relations or states of affairs that are not accessible to perception under ordinary circumstances, or which are incompletely presented, or so taken for granted as not to be noticed, usually. This includes such things as hidden aspects of things, forms on the margins of the immediate visual field, small or microscopic structures, internal states of a body or state of affairs, and unusual perceptual perspectives (such as aerial ones). 2. Possible visual items, relations, states of affairs, or life-forms as they might appear under different perceptual conditions from normal – e.g., under unusual atmospheric conditions, or in sub-aquatic or subterranean environments, or as reshaped by catastrophic physical events, dream-content, and imagined environments populated by extra-terrestrial objects or states of affairs.

106  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation Let us consider examples that have elements from both these levels. First, there is Untitled – a Donald Judd minimalist work (1977) that is located in a public space near Muenster in Germany (Figure 2.11). The Husserlian image object here consists of two concentric concrete rings – with the inner ring disposed horizontally, and the outer ring following the incline of the hill. Ring forms of one sort of another, of course, are embedded in a huge range of visual appearances – from wedding bands to Castel St. Angelo, to mechanical locking mechanisms. Generally speaking, we see and use these practical things but rarely attend to the forms that are embodied in their physicality. In the Judd work, matters are otherwise. The monumentality and starkness of the way it is configured creates an image object where the ‘plastic form’ of the ring is given a striking display in its own right. In this way, one of the key shapes involved in the fabric of appearance is made available as a source of phantasy associations in its own right. It becomes a phenomenological subject. This dimension is enhanced by the work’s relation to the second aspect of the transperceptual noted earlier – in particular, dream-content. For here, we do not encounter the image object in a gallery setting, but rather in an outdoor context. The surrounding landscape (near a riverside) frames the plastic forms in such a way that their presence seems incongruous – even uncanny, an effect that is amplified by the monumentality of the work, and the fact that it is so obviously made of concrete. This

Figure 2.11  Donald Judd, Untitled (1977, riverside, Muenster);photograph by Florian Adler, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  107 latter fact is of note because we usually associate concrete with extremely practical forms of building – especially shelters. But if we look at this structure, we do not find any such function. Indeed, the tilt of the outer ring in conjunction with the horizontality of its inner partner creates an obliqueness of disposition that presents itself – in visual terms – as something unamenable to practical function. It has distinct boundaries, but not in such a way as to create an interior. We have an obviously artifactual structure, but one without clear purpose, one that has simply appeared in this unlikely location – as if encountered in a dream. As our second example, let us consider the contemporary abstractionist Amy Ellingson’s Variation (white/oak) No.2 (Figure 2.12). This image object involves a panoply of slightly fibrous vertical forms with a network of more abbreviated horizontal structures – sometimes obliquely tilted – that intersect with the former, perhaps even enmeshing them. The whole is, however, far more than a linear composition, for there is a ‘busyness’ of coloristic forms that populate the work in ways that both draw attention to, and struggle with, the work’s most important compositional feature – namely, the areas of irregularly disposed areas of whiteness. These could be taken as erasures, or of mere concealment in equal measure, and the relation between these two slightly different possibilities gives the work an enigmatic quality.

Figure 2.12  Amy Ellingson, Variation (white/oak) No. 2, 2019 (a twelve-color lithograph). Photograph provided by the artist.

108  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation Given this, we might say that in this work one phenomenological subject is the active disclosure of the textural richness of appearance as such. Everyday reality is crammed with such detail, but we scarcely ever trouble to attend to it. In contrast, Ellingson’s work ‘wakes us up’ by presenting an erasure/concealment strategy that declares this richness by making us work to find what is there when there is a possibility that it is going to disappear. In this way, the visual fabric of appearance becomes something ‘not to be overlooked.’ This work also offers various allusive possibilities in relation to the second transperceptual level. There is a suggestion that we are here perhaps witnessing a process of gradual dissolution or transformation involving the action of some unknown biological or chemical agent on a manifold of appearance. The manifold has linear and color elements that suggest some kind of ordered environment, but one whose normal perceptual grounds have already lost their moorings through the process of dissolution. It may even be that the phenomenological subject here is the atrophy of vision itself – as the outcome of this invasiveness. We are arguing, then, that an abstract work – however abstract – will always find phenomenological subjects by virtue of its optical illusion and/or the way it is framed by surrounding features. Through this, its image object is made sense of intuitively by tapping our sense of the transperceptual – the unnoticed or hidden details and broader associational context that informs everyday visual perception. In ordinary visual representation, we have specific recognized kinds of three-dimensional items or states of affairs as the phenomenological subject. Abstract works, in contrast, do not have depicted subjects. They have allusive phenomenological subjects, which means that there will always be more than one transperceptual possibility consistent with the work. Such works indeed, present – as Husserl puts it – a ‘not now in the now,’ but it is a ‘not now’ that lacks the temporal specificity of traditional visual representation. Now, it might be objected that ‘seeing in’ vis-à-vis abstract works understood on the basis of the foregoing amounts to no more than seeing in the work what we wish to see. But this is by no means the case. For allusive ‘seeing in’ is far from arbitrary; it involves recognizing a possibility or range of possibilities that are consistent with how the work’s image object appears. This means that we can justify our interpretation by pointing to visual evidence manifest in our apprehension of the work itself. Although Husserl did not explicitly countenance the theory we have just broached, it is not only consistent with his position, but might even have had special appeal to him qua phenomenologist. For if we are correct, abstract art involves the particular exploration of a dimension – the transperceptual – that is essential to experience. We can describe this in phenomenological terms, but the abstract work makes it even more amenable to apprehension.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  109 Having shown how Husserl’s basic approach can be extended to abstract works, let us now consider some questions arising from Husserl’s emphasis on the unreality of the image object and its conflicts and anomalies in relation to perception. We will recall from Section II that this unreality has two major aspects, (a) the image object presents a ‘not now in the now,’ and (b) it involves a fusion of analogizing and nonanalogizing features (determined by the physical basis of the different media). These nonanalogizing features mean that whilst the image object presents such and such a subject, its mode of presentation involves visual properties that conflict with how the subject would be perceived in reality. Immediately, this raises a problem with kinship to one already noted. One assumes that with the vast majority of image objects, there is no question of their unreality or of the dimension of conflict arising, because the image object does no more than point towards or immerse us in the subject itself – without the conditions which enable this being noticed overtly. Presumably, it is only the artwork where such conditions become thematic, in which case we must ask what it is about the artwork that brings this about in a way that mundane image objects do not. Now, as we saw earlier, this objection could be dealt with, in principle, by supplementing Husserl’s position with an account of the role of artistic originality. However, in this case, there is a further problem; namely why the unreality of the image and the anomalies arising from nonanalogizing features (in relation to perception) should even be relevant to aesthetic consciousness. That there is such a relevance is indicated by Husserl himself. He tells us that whilst image objects in general strive towards resemblance with the subject, there is one important exception. This happens in the case of aesthetic contemplation when, with the same apprehensional basis, the meaning does not aim exclusively at the subject. Rather an interest, specifically, an interest in the form of aesthetic feeling, fastens on to the image object, and fastens on to it even with regard to its nonanalogizing moments.113 Husserl is not only correct about this, but points us, in effect, towards a dimension of artistic meaning that is of the greatest moment. To understand it we need to first reflect upon the nature of the image object’s unreality, beginning with it as ‘a not now in the now.’114 Husserl variously characterizes the unreality of the image object in terms of its being ‘cancelled,’ ‘annulled,’ ‘concealed,’ ‘neutralized’ by its relation to the surrounding perceptual reality. One presumes that this cancellation occurs because perceptual change involves ‘individuality’ – determined by an infinite network of productive factors – that we described in the Introduction to this book. The image object itself can feature in the individuality of our present perception, but the quasi-perceptual scene or figure(s) it represents stand apart from this. The image

110  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation seems to present a perceived scene but does so in no more than an ‘as if’ way. This is why it is recognized as conflicting with actual perception and is annulled by its inexhaustible flow of detail. As we saw earlier, framing devices are of great importance here. with respect to the perceptual figments … they always have the characteristic of cancelled realities. The ‘image’ has its image space, but this perceptual space somewhere borders on the real space with the realities belonging to immediate perception (the edge of the image belonging to the painting hanging on the wall indicates such congruences, for example). The unseen part of the space belonging to the image [presumably the part which would emerge if we could enter the pictorial space and advance through it] conflicts with parts of the space of actual experience; and from this the image itself receives its condition of being contested, and, in the presence of what is actually experienced, its nullity.115 Now because ‘nullity’ has negative connotations, it might seem that this conflict with perceptual reality is one in which the image object must always be the loser – the poor relation who is exiled from the fullness of the perceptual flow. However, we must bear in mind that Husserl’s strategy here is purely descriptive and that he is merely emphasizing the differences between the visual image object and our normal perception of reality. Indeed, he tells us that During the consciousness of the image, during the aesthetic contemplation in its absence of interest in being and nonbeing, one is not quasi-thematically conscious of the image object as something null in its background (even though it is in conflict with its surroundings.’ In this form of ‘abstention’ I do not have judgments but a mere ‘thought,’ … that I do not have something existing or not existing, something simply not seen, a thing pure and simple or a thing illusion, but instead a ‘visual image,’ a pure appearing as if, and so on.116 The point is, that in aesthetic consciousness, the nullity of the image is not an issue in itself; instead, we are dealing with something of its own kind – a pure appearance. Now, in aesthetic consciousness – as Husserl frequently reiterates – we are concerned with the How of pure appearing – which means the artist’s style of selecting represented aspects and subjects, and ways of handling the medium. Attention to this demands, of course, that we address the relation between the pure appearance and that from which it is constituted. This means attention to the artist’s presentation of the analogizing features of plastic form and the double halo of retention and protention; and also the way these are embodied in terms of size, proportion, physical rendition (i.e., such things as drawing, painting, printing,

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  111 worked or cast material) and planarity. At the heart of all this will be the artist’s overall style of rendering. It follows from this, that in the aesthetic consciousness of visual representation, the relation between analogizing and nonanalogizing features is to the fore. As we saw in Section I, Husserl notes that it is very difficult to see the physical base of the image object apart from its representational content, but now we can say that, in the case of the aesthetic pure appearance, the converse is not only true as a fact, but is a necessity. When we see Raphael’s Madonna, our apprehension of it is informed by awareness of how it is composed and painted as well as by what is represented. We might momentarily dismiss this compositional and painted base, and try to see it as an appearance of Madonna and Child per se, but to see it as a pure appearance – and thence a bearer of aesthetic feeling – requires that our sense of its creative style is present in the apprehension. This means that what is a conflict in terms of the image object’s phenomenological status vis-à-vis perception, is, in aesthetic consciousness, transformed into a complementary difference of aspects – a harmony, even. And here, transformation is the decisive term. In fact, it offers us a chance to reinterpret the meaning of the ‘unreality’ and ‘cancelled’ quality (etc.) of the image object. Husserl is right to emphasize the differences at stake here, but we can now contextualize them in a deeper way. For, in its complementarity of analogizing and nonanalogizing aspects, the artwork differs from perception in a positive way – one that is at the heart of the ‘not now in the now’ presented by the image object. Specifically, the ‘not now’ when artistically expressed is not a mere cancellation or nullity, but an intervention on the perceptual ‘now.’ Husserl himself recognizes this in phenomenological terms, but without thinking through its consequences in terms of aesthetic consciousness. We will recall his example of the bronze sculpture of a runner discussed in Section III (in relation to how the Ideal static aspect of plastic form in visual representation emphasizes the conflict with perception). Husserl suggested that The runner belongs to another time and to another space. He is a figment. But the phase of time to which he belongs is ‘presented’ as detached and does not abide in time and is not a really enduring phase. On the contrary, it is precisely only a phase, and the same phase again and again, however often I look at it. And likewise every mode of appearance belongs to a perceptual phase and is also, however often I contemplate it, constantly the same; and accordingly, the depicted phase as depicted is constantly the same as well.117 This is an excellent example of how the ‘unreality’ of the image becomes something positive – if we develop the implications of Husserl’s ideas. In the perceptual and affective being of ordinary lives, every present moment

112  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation – every experienced ‘Now’ – is entirely transient and washed away in the flow of time. But we seek something enduring amongst this flow of moments, a way of making them endure, and the existence of the ubiquitous photographic ‘snapshot’ is a convincing example of this. For, on many occasions, it does not simply attempt to factually document moments of happiness or celebration or whatever, but rather to let them endure in a way that allows them to replenish our present existence – however faintly. Now whilst the photographic snapshot does this in a basic way, depiction, artistic photography, and figurative sculpture have the same potential, but are enriched through the artist’s creativity in the How of their presentation. The image object presents a ‘now’ that is forever present (on the grounds indicated by Husserl, shown earlier) and is so in a special way – because it has been created through consciousness working with enduring analogizing and nonanalogizing materials. And this is true, even if the item or state of affairs is an immobile one such as a still life or landscape. In such cases, we know that no matter how fixed in their appearances things are, they are, nevertheless, constantly in flux at some level, and in time will be transformed into something different. Such a depicted ‘now’ differs indeed from the present that is given to us, but as an artistic pure appearance, it is far more than just a ‘not now.’ It is a transformation of the perceptual ‘now’ into a timeless quasi-version of it – one free from the constraints of finitude, and enriched by our aesthetic empathy with the one who created it. True, in the broadest terms, this provides only a symbolic compensation for the vagaries of finitude, but its presentation in the immediate perceptual field gives it a compelling character that mere ideas of timelessness do not have. It is also worth briefly relating these ideas to our major thesis concerning the aesthetic meaning of the artwork in general (broached near the end of Chapter 1). There, we argued that the artwork embodies a quasi-individuality. It originates the subjective quasi-infinity of the artist’s personal history, and takes on an objective physical character whose essence is to engage with and be internalized by a potential infinity of other human subjects (namely, the artistic audience). Whereas the actual individual perception emerges from an infinity of items and relations and, at best, persists for a while – only to be changed and ultimately dissipated in the infinite flow of becoming – the individual artwork, in contrast, endures and brings change to some degree through the phantasy realizations of those who engage with it. In the course of the present chapter, and in particular this Conclusion, we have explained the specific way in which works of visual representational art are involved in this. Having, then, developed Husserl’s position, we foresee two objections. The first is that our developments of his ideas go far beyond what Husserl himself would have accepted; and second, that the image object’s eternalization of the now is surely not something that figures in our normal aesthetic consciousness of the image object.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  113 In reply to the first point, we must bear in mind that Husserl’s phenomenological investigations into the image object are not a simple cut-and-dried theory, but one that he was constantly rethinking and exploring from new angles. If presented with our extension of his position, he would surely note that there is nothing in it that is in conflict with his more general approach; indeed, it makes that approach all the more comprehensive. In terms of the second objection, the great strength of following Husserl’s investigations is that often lead us to simple things that, if thought through, involve issues of much deeper significance. The eternalization of the ‘now’ is of this sort. It is a source of intrinsic fascination with the visual image object that is so simple that it is almost entirely overlooked. When we look at depictions, photographs, and sculpture, they do not move or change in perceptual terms, whereas life does. They are the ideal points of reference for a release from the flow of things, that look back at us from that very flow. Such awareness is surely an at-least intuitive aspect of our experience of visual art (in ways we have described at great length elsewhere).118 Aestheticians may content themselves with chatter about ‘expressive qualities’ and the like, but the truth of visual art runs much deeper, and we need thinkers such as Husserl to help explore its depths.

Notes 1 Husserl himself frequently refers to these art forms as ‘iconic’ phantasy, but he also includes theatre in this category, which, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a mistaken strategy. So, to avoid theatre, we use the narrower term ‘visual representation.’ 2 Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898– 1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 122. 3 Ibid., 123. 4 Ibid., 136. 5 See the discussion of image consciousness in John B. Brough’s Introduction to Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, xliv–li; and the same author’s first approach to the topic in ‘Some Husserlian comments on depiction and art,’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 46, no. 2 (Spring 1992). 241–259. 6 Ibid., 131. 7 Ibid., 135. 8 Ibid., 132. See also 47. 9 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. II, trans. J.N. Findlay (London and Henley: Routledge Kegan Paul; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1970), 646. 10 Husserl, Phantasy, 133. Here, he puts Hildebrand’s name as a single entry footnote. 11 A useful introduction to the relevant literature surrounding Husserl’s three points (especially in comparison with Wollheim) can be found in ReginaNino Kurg’s ‘Seeing-In as Three-fold Experience,’ Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 11, no. 1 (Spring 2014), 18–26. However, as we shall see a little further on, Husserl’s approach is better described as ‘fourfold.’

114  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation 12 Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon Press, 1977), 5. 13 Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 46. 14 John B. Brough, ‘Something That Is Nothing but Can Be Anything: The Image and Our Consciousness of It’. Included in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by D. Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 545–563; see especially 551. This excellent discussion is not an analysis of Husserl’s theory of image consciousness as such, but it makes use of many important insights from him. A useful introduction to the relevant literature surrounding Husserl’s ‘threefoldness’ (especially in comparison with Wollheim) can be found in Kurg’s ‘Seeing-In.’ 15 Brough, ‘Something That Is Nothing,’ 552 16 Husserl, Phantasy, 20. 17 Ibid,. 89 18 Brough, ‘Something That Is Nothing,’ 551. The photograph can be seen on the Magnum website at https://pro.magnumphotos.com/CS.aspx?VP3=Sear chResult&VBID=2K1HZOBWEUTRE9&SMLS=1&RW=1189&RH=654 (accessed 29 May 2020). 19 The most thorough and sophisticated treatment of Husserl’s understanding of the depicted subject is probably Patrick Eldridge’s ‘Depicting and Seeing-in. The “Sujet” in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Images,’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17, no. 3 (2018), 555–578. However, Eldridge operates very closely within Husserl’s own conceptual framework and focuses his analysis on the subject intention. In consequence, he too fails to make the decisive distinction between the phenomenological and the iconographical subject – which, whilst intrinsic to Husserl’s position, is something easily overlooked if we adhere too closely to his own ‘jargon.’ 20 Husserl, Phantasy, 33. 21 Ibid., 183. 22 Ibid., 48. 23 Ibid., 48. 24 We have argued this at length in many books including Paul Crowther, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the Frame) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); see especially 36–41. However, the notion of the ‘phenomenological subject’ that Husserl leads us to is an altogether more exact way of articulating what is at issue here. 25 In what follows, we shall use the same Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph of de Beauvoir that is discussed by Brough, ‘Something That Is Nothing,’ 551–552. We shall, however, draw very different conclusions from those drawn by him. 26 Husserl, Phantasy, 21. The image of Maximilian that Husserl mentions here is probably the engraving by Hans Burckmair dated 1518. 27 Ibid., 48–49. 28 Ibid., 28. 29 Ibid., 583. 30 For a dedicated and sustained critique of Wollheim’s theory of art and pictorial representation, see Chapters 1 and 2 of Paul Crowther, Phenomenologies of Art and Vision: A Post-Analytic Turn (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 31 Husserl, Phantasy, 27. John B. Brough’s discussion of resemblance in relation to picturing in general is especially effective. See Brough, ‘Something That Is Nothing,’ 555–559. The link between resemblance and visual resemblance is now generally accepted. The main dissenting voice in this respect was Nelson Goodman in Chapter 1 of Languages of Art: An Approach to the Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett and Co., 1976), 3–43. However,

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  115 Goodman’s position has found few supporters, and we have refuted it in detail in our The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 189–200. 32 Husserl, Phantasy, 187. 33 Ibid., 54. 34 Ibid., 55. 35 Ibid., 61. 36 Ibid., 61. Husserl’s ideas here have kinship to Nelson Goodman’s notion of ‘repleteness.’ In this respect, see Goodman, Languages of Art, 229–232 37 Husserl, Phantasy, 585. For more on this topic see, Husserl, Phantasy, 570– 571. And for Wollheim’s remarks on trompe-l’oeuil, see Painting as an Art, 62. Wollheim even goes so far as to define such works as ‘non-representational’; like Husserl, he identifies ‘illusion’ as something that involves ‘false perceptual belief.’ See Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 76–77. 38 See Husserl, Phantasy, 35. 39 Ibid., 161. 40 Ibid., 21. 41 See also Ibid., 54–55. 42 Ibid., 32. 43 Ibid., 33. 44 Ibid., 31–32. 45 Ibid., 584. 46 Ibid., 23. 47 Ibid., 55. 48 Ibid., 51. 49 Ibid., 55. 50 Georg Simmel, ‘The picture frame: An aesthetic study,’ Theory, Culture and Society, 11 (1994), 11–17; this reference, 11. 51 Wolfflin’s main exposition of this can be found in The Principles of Art History, trans. M. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 124– 148. This book was first published in 1915. 52 Ibid., 53. 53 Ibid., 50. 54 Ibid., 54. 55 Ibid,. 54–55. 56 Ibid., 21. 57 Ibid., 581. 58 However, it should be noted that as well as showing anomalies between the image object and perception, Husserl also notices that like physical things, image objects have right and wrong ways of being presented, vis-à-vis their ‘normal position. See Ibid., 586–587. 59 Ibid., 581n2. 60 Ibid., 582. 61 Ibid., 582. 62 Ibid., 582–583. 63 The issues just surveyed show how misguided Christian Lotz is in his paper ‘Depiction and plastic perception: A critique of Husserl’s theory of picture consciousness,’ Continental Philosophy Review, 40 (2007), 171–185. Lotz claims that ‘The main problem with Husserl’s theory is, as I see it, the assumption that pictures are constituted primarily as a negation of purely perceptual consciousness and as a conflict … between perception and imagination. Against this ultimately mentalistic claim, I maintain the thesis that pictures are socially and materially constituted manifestations of plastic formations and that Husserl fails to consider the fact that pictures

116  The Phenomenology of Visual Representation are ultimately made by human beings, and that what we “see” in pictures is ultimately our own shaping power’ (172). As we have seen at great length, Husserl is deeply attentive to the nonanalogizing aspect of the image object and sees the material factors involved in this as fundamental to the conflict in question. Lotz, however, does not even mention Husserl’s notions of plastic form and the nonanalogizing dimension (let alone their rich ramifications) and confines his exposition of Husserl to a few summary points. In this respect, it is worth emphasizing that one of the great strengths of Husserl’s approach is how he leads us to features that enable pictures to be ‘socially and materially constituted manifestations of plastic formations.’ For unless ‘plastic formations had some kind of compelling structure with intrinsic value, there would no explanation of why humans should have pursued their development so resolutely. For a systematic justification of this point, see our own The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). 64 Husserl, Phantasy, 645 65 For a very valuable discussion of ‘phantasm,’ see Regina-Nino Mion’s ‘Phantasms and physical imagination in Husserl’s theory of pictorialization,’ Anuario Filosofico, 51, no. 2 (2018), 325–345, in particular, 329–343. This paper explores the relation between phantasy and the physical image in detail, operating mainly within the terms of Husserl’s own conceptual framework. She defends his account of the distinctiveness of the physical imagination from objections offered (most notably) by Peter Shum. 66 Husserl, Phantasy, 645. 67 Ibid., 646. 68 Ibid., 646. 69 Ibid., 646. 70 Ibid., 610–611. 71 See also his earlier suggestion ‘the image figment is a nullity of a unique type. It is < not > an appearance with the characteristic of annulled positing, but an appearance annulled in itself.’ Ibid., 586. After stating this, Husserl immediately remarks upon its ambiguity, before ending on a question – ‘it can be that I am visually absorbed and immersed in the photograph or semblance image in such a way that it “takes on” life, and I feel the tendency to shift to positing, which, however, is immediately “nullified.” But does the object for that reason suggest itself as possibly real, and is negated?’ Ibid., 586. 72 Husserl, Phantasy, 612. 73 Ibid., 561–562. 74 Ibid., 561. 75 Ibid., 562. 76 Curiously, he takes these to be a summary of what he has said previously, but, as far as we can see, in some respects they introduce more original material 77 Husserl, Phantasy, 563–564. 78 Ibid., 562. 79 Ibid., 572. 80 Ibid., 564–565. 81 Ibid., 565. 82 Ibid., 190. 83 Ibid., 190. 84 Ibid., 44. 85 Ibid., 553. 86 Ibid., 647.

The Phenomenology of Visual Representation  117 87 Ibid., 647. 88 Ibid., 647. 89 Ibid., 647. 90 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd; New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1976), 220. 91 Husserl, Phantasy, 61. 92 Ibid., 40. 93 Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, English translation by Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (G.E. Stechert and Co. New York, 1907). Husserl’s reference to Hildebrand is in Phantasy, 133n24. 94 Ibid., 20. 95 Ibid., 36. 96 Ibid., 19. 97 Ibid., 41. 98 Husserl, Phantasy, 320. 99 Ibid., 705–706. 100 This the work that Husserl refers to as the ‘Dresden Madonna.’ 101 Husserl, Phantasy, 40. 102 Ibid., 704. 103 Ibid., 704. 104 Ibid., 704. 105 Our iconographic information here is derived from the Walters Museum website, https://art.thewalters.org/detail/36852/portrait-of-otto-eduard-leopold-von-bismarck/ (accessed 25 April 2020). 106 Husserl, Phantasy, 704. 107 Ibid., 704. 108 We have explained the importance of the intuitive (in the commonly understood rather than specifically Husserlian sense) at length elsewhere. See especially Crowther, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts, 24, 29–32. 109 Husserl, Phantasy, 582. 110 This point has been well understood by John B. Brough, who has developed an extremely interesting approach to the topic based on key ideas from Husserl. See John B. Brough, ‘The Curious Image: Husserlian Thoughts on Photography.’ In Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis and History. Contributions to Phenomenology (In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology), vol 72, eds. J. Bloechl, and N. de Warren (Cham: Springer, 2015). 111 See Chapter 6 of Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). 112 Regina-Nino Mion has taken some interesting steps in relating Husserl’s approach to Conceptual art in her paper ‘Husserl’s theory of the image applied to conceptual art,’ The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 49, no. 2 (2018), 59–70. However, she considers only one work – Joseph Kosuth’s Three Chairs of 1964. 113 Husserl, Phantasy, 55. 114 Ibid., 51. 115 Ibid., 610–611. 116 Ibid., 707–708. 117 Ibid., 646. 118 See for example, Chapter 5 of Paul Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).

3 Aesthetic Form and the Phenomenological Reduction

In this short chapter, we shall explore the interesting and productive affinities that exist between Husserl’s aesthetic theories of visual art, and the approach to aesthetic form taken by the British art theorists Clive Bell and Roger Fry – whose formative period of work in aesthetics in part coincides with Husserl’s own work in the area. We will approach the connection by means of Husserl’s own positing of links between phenomenology and art practice, as set out in his well-known letter to Hugo Hofmannstahl of 1907.1 Section I explores Husserl’s ideas in that letter (supported by some references to his theory of phantasy), whilst Section II considers some related conceptions of art found in Bell’s and Fry’s formalism. In Section III, we show how Fry’s ideas, in particular, can be used to enhance the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, and that phenomenology itself, can enhance artistic creativity. In the Conclusion, we suggest that Husserl’s own account of aesthetic consciousness makes good some deficiencies in Bell’s and Fry’s approaches.

I In his letter to Hofmannstahl, Husserl summarizes his general conception of the aesthetic, linking it – like the phenomenological reduction itself – to a suspension of the natural attitude.2 We are told, for example, that Things that stand before us in a sensuous way, the things of which actual scientific discourse speaks, are posited by us as realities, and acts of mind and will are based on these positings of existence: joy – that this is, sorrow, that this is not, wish, that it could be, etc. (= existential attitude of the mind).3 At the ‘opposite pole’ from this is the mental attitude ‘that belongs to pure aesthetic intuition and the corresponding emotional state.’4 Husserl describes this in fuller terms as follows. DOI: 10.4324/9781003212553-4

Phenomenological Reduction  119 The intuition of a purely aesthetic work of art is enacted under a strict suspension of all existential attitudes of the intellect and of all attitudes relating to emotions and the will which presuppose such an existential attitude. Or more precisely: the work of art places us in (almost forces us into) a state of aesthetic intuition that excludes these attitudes. The more of the existential world that resounds or is brought to attention, and the more the work of art demands an existential attitude of us out of itself (for instance a naturalistic sensuous appearance: the natural truth of photography), the less aesthetically pure the work is.5 In these sentiments, Husserl emphasizes that the task of the artist and phenomenologist are kindred in their suspension of the natural attitude, but notes also, of course, a key difference. In his words, The artist, who ‘observes’ the world in order to gain ‘knowledge’ of nature and man for his own purposes, relates to it in a similar way as the phenomenologist … When he observes the world, it becomes a phenomenon for him, its existence is indifferent, just as it is to the philosopher (in the critique of reason). The difference is that the artist, unlike the philosopher, does not attempt to found the “meaning” of the world-phenomenon and grasp it in concepts, but appropriates it intuitively, in order to gather, out if its plenitude, materials for the creation of aesthetic forms.6 But what is the key to the artist’s intuitive appropriation and gathering up from the ‘plenitude’ of the ‘world-phenomenon’? As we have seen, the answer is in the realm of intentional acts whose nature is ‘phantasy’ – something which exists in the realm of mind and can also be made into artifacts. In phantasy, we experience ‘an original quasi-perceptual as-if giving of the object itself.’7 If the object is embodied in a physical form such as a painting, the as-if character of the represented object is dominant; we entertain no beliefs concerning its existence or non-existence, it is something in whose quasi-perception we are simply absorbed. However, not all phantasies are aesthetic. For them to have this character, an extra feature is involved. As Husserl observes: Aesthetic valuation is essentially connected with the distinction between an object of consciousness as such and the object’s manner of appearing.8 As we have seen in previous chapters, Husserl provides a surprising number of very effective descriptions of aesthetic consciousness in all its nuances – especially in respect of how its aspects are engaged differently by the individual artistic media, and by nature. However, when it comes

120  Phenomenological Reduction to explaining why aesthetic consciousness is itself so worthwhile, Husserl has few direct answers – which is why at many points (especially in the Conclusions to Chapters 1, 2, and 4) we have had to develop his hints and insights much further than he developed them himself. Now, there is another way in which Husserl’s theory can be given support and which has some interesting outcomes in terms of the relation between art and phenomenology. This is provided by the accounts of aesthetic form found in the work of Clive Bell and Roger Fry. It is to their ideas that we now turn.

II Let us consider first, the work of Clive Bell. He argues that ‘significant form’ – ‘relations and combinations of lines and colours’ is the object of the aesthetic response.9 In such responses, a form is enjoyed for its own sake – as an ‘end in itself.’ Experience of this kind presupposes only two basic capacities. The first is aesthetic sensitivity; the second, a knowledge of form and color and three-dimensional space.10 Questions such as what a form represents or what practical significance it has are entirely secondary. As Bell puts it, a realistic form may be as significant as part of the design, as an abstract. But if a representative form has value, it is a form, not as a representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; it is always irrelevant.11 Hence, Bell is led to the conclusion that to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation.12 In these remarks, Bell’s treatment of representational elements comes close to Husserl’s suspension of the natural standpoint and to his account of the ‘image object,’ i.e., the pictorial means whereby the phenomenological subject is made to appear. Certainly, like Husserl, Bell is emphasizing the ‘How’ of artistic representation rather than simply what is represented. Bell, however, also gives substance to Husserl’s point that the work of art places us – indeed, almost forces us – into a state of aesthetic intuition. The compelling factor is ‘significant form.’ Whereas to suspend the natural standpoint in the search for phenomenological knowledge can be done, in principle, in relation, to any intentional object of perception, in the case of art, the suspension of such an standpoint is elicited by the character of the intended object itself, specifically by its significant form.

Phenomenological Reduction  121 Roger Fry explains significant form with rather more phenomenological richness than Bell. For him, the origins of art and the aesthetic response lie in the human capacity for imagination, i.e., the ability to represent items and states of affairs that are not immediately present to perception, and thence whose content is lifted above practical concerns. As Fry puts it, Art is an expression of this imaginative life, which is separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action. [Indeed,] it presents a life freed from the binding necessities of our actual existence.13 This allows a ‘disinterested intensity of contemplation’ wherein we enjoy a ‘heightened power of perception.’14 Such heightened perception is at work in both the creation and appreciation of art wherein both aspects focus on the relation between order and variety in the artistic manifold, and the creative purpose which finds its realization in this arrangement. Our sense of this realization is, according to Fry, why art affects us so profoundly. In his words, when we come to the higher works of art, where sensations are so arranged that they arouse in us deep emotions, this feeling of a special tie with the man who expressed them becomes very strong. We feel that he has expressed something which was latent in us all the time, but which we never realized, that he has revealed us to ourselves in revealing himself.15 Again, Fry offers important insights as to what this might involve. The key is his account of the ‘emotional elements of designs.’16 This involves a series of factors the artist must deal with in order to create a visual artistic manifold. The first such factor is ‘rhythm of line,’ wherein the drawing or painting records a gesture influenced by the artist’s feeling in a way that allows the feeling to be communicated to us. Of central importance in this, is the second factor, namely the artist’s treatment of mass. This treatment involves much more than the rendering of an object’s spatial extension as such. In Fry’s words: When an object is so presented that we recognise it as having inertia, we feel its power of resisting movement, or communicating its own movement to other bodies, and our imaginative reaction to such an image is governed by our experience of mass in actual life.17 In other words, mass has to be rendered in terms of displaying its power of inertia, or its potential for interaction with other features of the spatial manifold, i.e., a dialectic of stasis and potential motion. In visual art this

122  Phenomenological Reduction involves a third feature which Fry describes simply as ‘space,’ and which is rather too general to be of help. It is better described as a pictorial scale wherein what is represented is assigned a determinate range of extension. Simple shapes, such as a cube, for example, can be used to depict diverse things ranging from lumps of sugar to large buildings. What any such form represents depends on its spatial scale, and this is determined by its more particular visual characteristics and relations in terms of which it is contextualized. The means of such contextualization depend on the relation between shape, and fourth and fifth characteristics, namely light and shade, and color, respectively. These features not only allow scale to be made determinate but are also, of course, major forces that allow visual art to be invested with emotional significance. Fry suggests a sixth element (whilst noting that it may be no more than a compound of his notions of mass and space). It is the way planes are inclined towards the eye either through frontal presentation or at an angle that seems to make them lean away from us. Though Fry does not remark upon it here, this is especially important for pictorial art, insofar as all representations have a flat frontal plane, ‘behind’ which the contents of pictorial depth are set out. Sometimes this illusion of depth will involve forms distributed in layered structures that repeat the orientation of the frontal plane; on other occasions, forms will seem to be distributed in internal planes that are obliquely disposed to the viewer. The phenomenon of planarity is not exclusively pictorial. Our everyday experience of the spatial world is informed by planes vis-à-vis how phenomena are grouped between our present position and the horizon, especially in the case of urban landscape, where the square and cubic aspects are inescapable. The artist makes this structure into a central creative concern – the visual artwork, concentrating and refining structures that are fundamental to our existence. As Fry observes, nearly all these emotional elements of design are connected with essential conditions of our physical existence: rhythm appeals to all the sensations which accompany muscular activity; mass to all the infinite adaptations to the force of gravity which we are forced to make; the spatial judgement is equally profound and universal in its application to life; our feeling about inclined planes is connected with our necessary judgment about the conformation of the Earth itself; light, again, is so necessary a condition of our existence that we become intensely sensitive to changes in its intensity.18 The point is, then, that the visual artwork is an action on the conditions of our spatial physical existence. It creatively adapts visual material related to deep-seated needs, in such a way that we discover new spatial possibilities, and thence enjoy an empathy with the one who has so

Phenomenological Reduction  123 created them for us. Natural beauty gives us pleasure, but here there is the intimacy of being linked to a fellow human’s artifice, and it is this that gives the aesthetic experience of art a special meaning. Of course, not every picture or sculpture affects us aesthetically. Fry suggests that representation in a picture may be of two kinds: one in which, by the choice of objects and the manner of their presentment they invite us to apprehend ‘psychological volumes,’ the other in which they serve to the construction of spatial and plastic wholes.19 Some pictures, in other words, are constructed simply to convey visual information or tell stories of one sort or another, whereas others are created so as to draw attention to how the particular work generates its plasticity (i.e., the illusion of three-dimensional form). We are suggesting, then, that Bell’s and (especially) Fry’s aesthetic is extremely congruent with Husserl’s and fills in areas of detail that Husserl does not address. Like the phenomenologist, Fry addresses the ‘meaning’ of the ‘world-phenomenon’ but does not seek to grasp it in concepts alone; rather, he appropriates it through concepts that are also fundamental to how visual reality is felt. The essence of their deployment is in creating an individual style. However, this is not their only use, for in their character ‘as connected with essential conditions of our physical existence,’ they are also useful in enriching the phenomenological reduction itself. Let us explore this in detail.

III We begin with the visual arts’ distinctive ontological status. They are arts of spatial realization – that is to say, the spatial character of the individual artwork is always a necessary part of its in meaning, whereas, in the case of literary works, spatial features – such as the printed and physical character of their vehicles of presentation – are contingent and have no bearing on the meaning of the works they present (except in very rare marginal cases). The spatial primacy of the visual arts gives them a special significance, insofar as space occupation is the supreme criterion of existence. If a phenomenon did not occupy space, or was not an effect of space-occupying phenomena, we would have no way of determining whether it existed or not. For visual art, the question of space occupation is the very basis of the creative act. The spatial artist negotiates the fabric of particular appearances at the level of the objects represented and/or the materiality of the particular work created. Let us now consider how Husserl characterizes the phenomenological reduction.

124  Phenomenological Reduction The phenomenological reduction is, of course, a complex operation that has different inflections in how it should be understood – inflections that reflect Husserl’s different ways of articulating it as his conception of phenomenology developed.20 In its most basic sense, the phenomenological reduction involves two aspects – a suspending of the natural attitude (as described in the Introduction to this book), and our apprehension of the essential structures of appearance in what remains. Whilst these aspects can be distinguished analytically, they are, phenomenologically speaking, completely integrated and mutually requisite aspects of the same apprehension.21 Now, of course, Husserl devotes much attention to the painstaking analysis of the meaning of essence in its many different moments and contexts.22 However, these are analyses, rather than phenomenological reductions. For that to take place, we must focus strictly on the how the object’s appearance is apprehended and the ‘phenomenological residuum’ of essence that is left after the reduction.23 An especially effective description of the phenomenological reduction is as follows. We are told that the pure thing seen, what is visible ‘of’ the thing, is first of all a surface, and in the changing course of seeing I see it now from this ‘side,’ now from that, continuously perceiving it from ever differing sides. But in them the surface exhibits itself to me in a continuous synthesis; each side is for consciousness a manner of exhibition of it.24 [Indeed] I am speaking now of the alteration of perspectives. The perspectives of the shape and also of its color are different, but each is in this new way an exhibiting of – of this shape, this color. In the course of alteration they all play their role as exhibitings, now being interrupted, now beginning again; they offer many types of manifolds of exhibitings, appearances, each of which functions precisely as an exhibiting of. In running their course they function in such a way as to form a sometimes continuous and sometimes discrete synthesis of identification or, better, of unification.25 The key point here is that the unfolding of appearance has an essence that is the characteristic of the kind of thing and which, in its particular unfolding further discloses the nature and scope of that essence in its experiential embodiment. Husserl says of such revelation, This happens not as a blending of externals; rather as bearers of ‘sense’ in each phase, as meaning something, the perspectives combine in an advancing enrichment of meaning and a continuing development of meaning, such that what no longer appears is still valid as retained and such that the prior meaning which anticipates a continuous flow, the expectation of ‘what is to come,’ is straight[a]way

Phenomenological Reduction  125 fulfilled and more closely determined. Thus everything is taken up into the unity of validity or into the one, the thing.26 To reiterate; the phenomenological reduction terminates not in the recognition of essential structure as such, but rather in how that is essence is disclosed in the apprehension of its appearances. We are interested how a thing or a manifold of things comes to appear and compose itself or finds ‘fulfillment’ as the unity of just this thing or just this state of affairs. Its essence is dynamic, a structure which all variations of the object’s appearance constellate around and elaborate – as the conditions of its apprehension change. There is a clear sense that this notion of essence has, in the context of spatial things, a great affinity to Husserl’s notion of plastic form, especially in the sense that we suggested it was best understood – namely through Hildebrand’s notion of ‘actual form.’ As Hildebrand puts it, Form is that factor in our perception which depends only on the object. It is obtained either through movement direct or is inferred from the appearance, and we term it the actual form.27 To understand ‘plastic form’ in this sense is something that is functional in terms of real spatial objects as well as those represented in depiction and sculpture. Given a spatial object’s aspects, to see them unfold in the course of our apprehension of them, or even in a static presentation, will both exemplify the essence that unifies them as something of such and such a kind, as well as illuminating something of the scope of that essence. Given this, it is clear that, if the phenomenological reduction is to be developed further, we need the right kind of orientation for tracking these variations in relation to their plastic form. Husserl himself has little to say on the matter over and above the very general descriptions already noted, but it is at this point that the points made earlier by Fry become highly instructive. As we have just seen, spatial art has a special ontological significance because the artist has to address the conditions of space occupancy. Some artists then choose to emphasize what Fry calls ‘psychological volumes,’ whilst others continue to emphasize ‘spatial and plastic wholes.’ Now, in Fry’s terms, the artist addresses these wholes as a means to producing a satisfying particular composition; but what if we consider them and Fry’s descriptions of the features implicated in their realization as essential features of how spatial things appear as such? We might then argue as follows. Whilst any plastic form can be apprehended and tracked through its simple variations of appearance, it is possible to develop an orientation in apprehension which addresses these variations in much closer terms than are offered by Husserl. To show this, we can develop Fry’s position visà-vis those ‘emotional elements’ of design linked to ‘essential conditions of our physical existence’ that were discussed earlier. The key step is that

126  Phenomenological Reduction instead of seeing these as exclusively the province of art practice, we now understand them – in modified form – as also relevant to the phenomenological description of essence. The first of Fry’s conditions is the ‘rhythm of line.’ In perceptual terms, lines appear mainly as the edges or contours of things that are indicated through their contrasts with the bodies and contours of other objects. As spatial things change their position – either through the observer’s movement or through momentum they create or have imparted to them, linear forms will be especially effective in describing this change insofar as they express changes in, and constancy of shape during the various transformations. The second condition concerns the ‘mass’ of the object wherein ‘we recognise it as having inertia, we feel its power of resisting movement, or communicating its own movement to other bodies.’28 When a body changes position or the observer changes his or hers, more of the object’s mass is revealed than was accessible previously. And in the course of this happening, our sense of what the object’s plastic form sustains is likewise heightened through its mass being presented in relation to other things – resisting their force, or being moved by them, or through its power of setting other things in motion. Of course, all these features happen with reference to the third of Fry’s criteria, namely space itself. Fry’s interest in this is not simply as a general feature that objects and their possibilities of transformation have in common, but rather as a constructive power at work in both individual objects and their potential transformation and repositioning. For example, as well as having surface mass, plastic form also has volume, a factor whose ‘look’ will often express features such as density and solidity, as well as a range of causal propensities. Even more important, through the systematic conjunction of volumes, we will also perceive the phenomenon of depth. In this, the fourth of Fry’s levels – light and shade – is profoundly implicated. Shape as delineated by line can allow volume to be expressed, but, of course, the play of light upon a surface according to its different dispositions in relation to other parts, and towards surrounding objects, means that all these things are given more precise definition in terms of the manifold of appearance. In particular, foreshortening effects and expressions of depth are at a premium, as are those of shadow. This is also vital for Fry’s fifth factor – color. Color takes on specific intensity, texture, and tonal value through the effect of all the foregoing factors. Through them, it is given a specific character that significantly modifies its intrinsic properties. Fry’s final factor is especially interesting. It is that of ‘the inclination to the eye of a plane, whether it is impending over or leaning away from us.’29 As we saw earlier, Fry was unsure about this factor – as he conjectured that it might be no more than ‘a compound of mass and space.’30 He was entirely right to give it a separate treatment because of its intrinsic

Phenomenological Reduction  127 perceptual importance. Modern human beings dwell, in constructed dwellings which – in urban societies – are almost composed of rectangular and/or square structures and variations on these. When it comes to preparing food, and doing many forms of work, for convenience we work upon flat surfaces, and for communication and leisure purposes, attend to flat screens of many different kinds. The human habitat and many of its tools and work areas are replete with tilted planes. In the contemporary perceptual world, they are more or less unavoidable Let us now consider, then, an example of how Fry’s six factors can enrich the phenomenological reduction, by addressing a pair of scissors. We know in advance that the scissors are an instrument for cutting thin material through the action of two blades whose cutting edges slide past each other around a pivot. The cutting is initiated by opening the blades and then closing them through actions of the thumb, and of the middle or forefinger inserted respectively into handles composed of closed bands (generally of a circular or oval shape) at the bottom of each blade. This is the essence of the instrument and, as a spatial object, is the basis of its ‘plastic form.’ In the natural standpoint when approaching such an instrument, we will be orientated towards it practically – through being mindful of a specific task that needs to be done with it, and will, accordingly, be solicitous about whether it is in a sharp enough condition to perform the task. We may also have noticed some traces of residue on the blade that suggest it was used previously to cut glued paper, and it may, indeed, have been the very pair of scissors that we formerly used to cut photocollages some 20 or so years earlier. We may also note that on both the blade and the handles, there is a maker’s mark – ‘Fiskars, Finland’ – that makes us think of its general Scandinavian origins, and of the reputation for efficiency and functional elegance in artifacts from that area. However, in the phenomenological reduction, we disregard all such anticipations and associations and focus entirely on the manifold of appearance that the scissors embody. This has a configuration that we recognize as a pair of scissors, and it is the particular way this essence is disclosed that will now preoccupy us. The instrument is small and made of short metal blades with handles of orange plastic at each end. The contours of both the handles and the blades are sharply defined by the contrast between them, the white plastic plane surface on which they are presently disposed, and by light from the small lamp off to the left that illuminates them. The size and shape of the instrument is given completely to perception in such a way that we can ‘read’; that its mass is complete through what is present to view and its underside. Because of the angle of view vis-à-vis the light, the blade gives only the faint suggestion of being metallic, but the contours and volume of the two oval-shaped orange plastic handles are more richly declared through contrasts of light and shadow. Through this there are highlights near the

128  Phenomenological Reduction top of each handle, from where the broadness of the oval bands of the finger pieces are evoked with shadows, and much fainter gleams. In fact, it is these features that declare the volume of the handles and especially their look of being plastic. There are raised contours that define indents in the upper parts of the handles, but again with a lining of shadow that declares the shallow depth of the indents. The scissors are presently positioned on a white planar surface. This seems to tilt away from the viewer slightly, with the scissors themselves also appearing at an angle. There is a sense in which this particular angled disposition of the scissors declares them as available for work rather than as something that just ‘happens to be there.’ In picking up the scissors, and opening them, there is, of course, a continuous motion involved, and the instrument now appears slightly bigger when brought closer to the viewer’s face. From this position, the metallic luster of the blades is now illuminated and seems to move up and down the lower blade as the two are opened and closed. There is now a more pronounced suggestion of a perpendicular axis that is present between the two blades – closed or open – but more manifest in the closed position. If the viewer looks away from the instrument, the appearances of it that have already been investigated suggest that when attention is paid to it once more, its mass and volume will remain the same, and – if the light source remains constant – the effects previously described will recur once more, in a broadly similar form. Now in a case such as this, we begin to form a glimpse – but only a glimpse – of the richness of the ‘phenomenological residuum that remains once we have suspended the natural standpoint. In that standpoint, we know what the essence of a pair of scissors is – it is as defined at the outset of our exercise. However, we now know, through phenomenological description, something of how this essence is embodied, the richness of appearance which it can sustain is revealed to us, and the particularity of its embodiment enhances this all the more. An interesting possibility arises. If an enemy of phenomenology had secretly learned of our exercise and nefariously superglued the blades together before our task commenced, even this would be phenomenologically instructive. Since the scissors are clearly made to be opened (i.e., this is an aspect of their essence) the fact that they failed to do so would – through this very inhibition, through this forced inertia – emphasize all the more that they are meant to open and do work. The essence would be disclosed even in an inhibition of appearance brought about by a compromised example. Now, it might well be asked what the point of our exercise is, and even what the significance of the phenomenological reduction actually is – in the final analysis. Our exercise has shown that using Fry’s criteria, we can make it more detailed than in Husserl’s own examples, and we have also suggested that it can be taken much further. But why is this needed? Husserl describes the phenomenological residuum as

Phenomenological Reduction  129 a region of Being which is in principle unique, and can become in fact the field of a new science – the science of Phenomenology.31 But, against this, it might be objected that, in practice, most of his work involves analytic description of the apprehensions involved in consciousness, rather than specific phenomenological reductions. However, this worry is beside the point. For, whilst much of phenomenology’s work, is done at the reflective analytic level, it constellates ultimately around reality as disclosed through consciousness of objects and the appearances through which they are apprehended. And, if this is so, we need – if called upon – to show how this level of consciousness works, which is, of course, exactly what the phenomenological reduction leads us to. It is, in methodological terms, a guarantor of the entire enterprise. Hence, any enrichment of it can only be to the good. In this, the connections between phenomenology and the understanding of aesthetic form can play a continually illuminating role. In this respect, we might consider the example of a group of people gathered in a great hall. The essence of this conjunction in spatial terms involves a space for human habitation enclosed in such a way as to enable a gathering and shared activity. The phenomenological reduction of such a scene, might well learn from the hall and gathering that is the centerpiece of a painting by Poussin on the subject of Achilles discovered by Ulysses amongst the daughters of Lycomedon. For argument’s sake, let us assume in the first instance that this is a real space populated by real figures. In suspending the natural standpoint we shift our interest from the particular people who are appearing, and where the hall is, and when the gathering is taking place. What remains are two foreground groups of gesticulating figures extended across the same broad plane, with a table that provides an interval between the groups (punctuated – as it were – by Achilles’ helmet on top of it). Vis-à-vis this scene, Fry draws attention to, First the curious impression of the receding rectangular hollow of the hall seen in perspective and the lateral spread, in contrast to that, of the chamber in which the scene takes place. This we see to be almost continuously occupied by the volumes of the figures disposed around the circular table, and these volumes are all ample and clearly distinguished but bound together by contrasted movements of the whole body and also by the flowing rhythm set up by the arms, a rhythm which, as it were, plays over and across the main volumes. Next, I find, the four dark rectangular openings at the end of the hall impose themselves and are instantly and agreeably related to the two dark masses of the chamber wall to right and left, as well as to darker masses in the dresses.32

130  Phenomenological Reduction Here Fry presents the relation between figures and a great hall, by exploring an example where the two elements in this relation exist in a particularly harmonious way – a harmony, indeed, which could accordingly be claimed to present the essence of the relation under one particular aspect. If the scene were real, the essence involved could be explored further by observing the further motions of the figures in the enclosed space, and the character of their actions and interactions with one another, and their positionings and repositions vis-à-vis the hall’s physical space. However, whilst Fry’s interpretation of the Poussin painting can act as a useful guide to phenomenological reduction, we know that it is not, in fact, a real scene; that it is – in terms of our present field of perception – an image that presents a state of affairs that is not actually happening. However, this is the basis for another interest made available by the picture. For, if we follow Husserl’s emphasis on the How and selectivity factors in aesthetic consciousness, the phenomenological subjects as described by Fry lead us to a heightened level of appreciation. As Fry himself says of the Poussin work: our contemplation of plastic and spatial relations is continually rewarded. We can dwell with delight on every interval, we accept the exact situation of every single thing with a thrilling sense of surprise that it should so exactly satisfy the demands which the rest of the composition sets up.33 The key thing is that what we admire is not simply the rich fabric of spatial appearance and relations that Poussin presents, but his creativity in devising a presentational aspect wherein so much of the essence is disclosed. The phenomenological reduction takes us from a particular thing to the disclosure of essence, whereas in aesthetic consciousness we move from the revelation of essence – of plastic form – to the creative particularity involved in how this is presented. Indeed, given the possibility of the phenomenological reduction as a technique leading to close scrutiny of essential features inscribed in particular spatial appearances, the ‘science of Phenomenology’ might well have some utility for training in the visual arts. For even if an artist is interested in creating pictures that tell stories rather than explore plastic form as such, he or she still has, nevertheless, to becoming accomplished in that formative realm in order to find the means of telling the visual stories.

Conclusion We have, then, taken Husserl’s basic insights concerning similarities and differences between phenomenology and artistic creation and developed them in much fuller terms. Both are, indeed, different, but seen in the perspective of the conditions of aesthetic form as described by Bell and Fry, are found mutually illuminating and even of active assistance to one another.

Phenomenological Reduction  131 However, we must end by considering a problem. Since the 1980s, a cultural orthodoxy has arisen whereby meaning in the visual arts is seen as determined primarily by its specific contexts of production, reception, and transmission (in relation to questions of gender, race, and class). Within this orthodoxy, figures such as Bell and Fry are dismissed as mere ‘formalists’ who perpetuate the imperialistic and patriarchal misrepresentation of artistic ‘production.’ Given this, why should we sympathetically compare Husserl’s ideas with such discredited approaches? Does this not – indirectly at least – run the risk of implicating him also? The answer is a resounding no! We have criticized the orthodoxy in the greatest detail elsewhere, and have shown that none of its varieties are able to explain why visual artworks are able to have their deep and historically recurrent effects.34 It must be emphasized also that Bell’s and Fry’s notion of aesthetic form is effectively supplemented by Husserl’s ideas. For his attention to the aesthetics of nature, and to the importance of the unreality of the image, and, indeed, to the relation between resemblance and nonanalogizing features, all bring into play factors that are lacking in Bell’s and Fry’s accounts of the visual artwork. There is, in other words, room for far more development of the relation between Husserl, Bell, and Fry; indeed, there may even be some possibilities for exploring this in relation to Fry’s and Husserl’s respective theories of literature.

Notes 1 There is some literature that considers the letter to Hofmannstahl, but none of which moves in the specific comparative direction taken in this chapter. Sebastian Luft’s ‘Husserl on the artist and the philosopher: Aesthetic and phenomenological attitude,’ Glimpse, 1, no. 1 (1999), 46–53, for example, addresses the letter as a factor in a more general account of the aesthetic attitude. We might also mention Wolfgang Huemer’s ‘PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION AND AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: HUSSERL MEETS HOFMANNSTHAL’ (title capitalized at point of origin) in Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations between Philosophy and Literature, ed. Wolfgang Huemer and Marc-Oliver Schuster (Edmonton, Alberta: WirthInstitute for Austrian and Central European Studies, 2003), 121–130. Whilst reasonable in his exposition of Husserl, Huemer takes his discussion in a curious direction that leads him to the conclusion that ‘The comparison between phenomenological method and aesthetic experience that Husserl makes in his letter to Hofmannsthal fails because Husserl refers to the aesthetic theory Hofmannsthal had held before he wrote the Lord Chandos Letter, i.e., he compares it to the theory that Hofmannsthal had modified four years before they met’ (128). What makes this conclusion so strange is that it is quite clear from the letter itself that Husserl is making general points about the relation between aesthetic experience and phenomenology per se. He admits to having been influenced by Hofmannstahl’s stories, but there is no evidence whatsoever that Husserl is actually addressing the writer’s own conception of the aesthetic. Rudolf Bernet’s ‘PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC EPOCHE: PAINTING THE INVISIBLE THINGS THEMSELVES’ (title

132  Phenomenological Reduction capitalized in original publication) in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) starts off with some very general musings on Husserl’s phenomenology but ends up paying comparatively little attention to the substance of his treatment of aesthetics and to the phenomenological reduction – preferring rather to focus on a very specific issue in the interpretation of pictorial art. 2 Edmund Husserl, ‘Letter to Hofmannstahl,’ trans. Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Site, 26–27.09, 2. 3 Ibid., 2. 4 Ibid.,, 2. 5 Ibid.,, 2. 6 Ibid.,, 2. 7 Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusststein, Erinnerung. Zur Phanomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwartigungen. Text aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). Husserliana XXIII, hrsg. Edward Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); English translation, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 696. 8 Husserl, Phantasy, 461. 9 Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914), 8. 10 Ibid., 27. 11 Ibid., 25. 12 Ibid., 25. 13 Roger Fry, Vision and Design (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1981), 15. 14 Ibid., 21. 15 Ibid., 21. 16 Ibid., 23. 17 Ibid., 24. 18 Ibid., 24. Strangely, Fry goes on to observe that ‘Colour is the only one of our elements which is not of critical or universal importance to life, and its emotional effect is neither so deep nor so clearly determined as the others.’ 19 Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art, (New York: Chatto and Windus/Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 34. 20 See, for example Iso Kern’s discussion of these in ‘The Three Ways to the Transcendental Phenomenological Reduction in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl,’ in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, eds. Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 126–149. 21 For more on this, see Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 41. 22 See, for example, the discussion of ‘Fact and Essence’ in Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. Boyce Gibson (London and New York: George Allen Unwin/Humanities Press, 1976), 51–79. 23 Ibid., 113. 24 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 157– 158. For other accounts of the reduction, see also Husserl, Ideas, 130–132, 258–261; and Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 24. 25 Husserl, The Crisis, 158. 26 Ibid., 158.

Phenomenological Reduction  133 27 Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, English translation by Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden, (New York: G.E. Stechert and Co., 1907), 36. 28 Fry, Vision and Design, 24. 29 Ibid., 24. 30 Ibid., 24. 31 Ibid., 113. 32 Fry, Transformations, 18–19. 33 Ibid., 19. 34 See for example, Paul Crowther, Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 42–64; and, more recently, Paul Crowther, The Aesthetics of SelfBecoming: How Art Forms Empower (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 1–13

4 The Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, and Music

Literature, theatre, film, and music are arts of temporal realization. There is a qualitative difference between them and the spatial arts of visual representation considered in the previous chapters. With the unity of a spatial object, one can apprehend its parts in order – starting at the top and working down, for example, or from left to right or whatever, but there is no necessity that our perceptual exploration of it should follow any linear temporal order. In the case of the arts of temporal realization, the opposite is true. One cannot form a sense of the unity of the work unless the parts of the work are apprehended contiguously in and exact linear temporal order. As we shall see in Section IV, Husserl links theatre to the iconic arts (depiction, sculpture, and photography). However, this is an error, in that the greater burden of meaning in the theatrical play falls on the temporally linear presentation noted earlier. In consequence, this chapter will focus on literary narrative in poems and novels, and then its role in theatre. Husserl did not pay much attention to music as an art form, and the main possibilities for developing his thoughts on that topic have already been addressed in Chapter 2. However, since Sartre’s position is quite amenable to Husserl’s, we shall take the opportunity to supplement the latter’s thought by means by means of the former’s interesting account of the musical artwork. It should also be noted in passing that Husserl makes occasional reference to film, but these are mainly illustrative of general problems, and we have found no basis whereby they might be developed into something more.1 In this chapter, accordingly, Section I offers a review of Husserl’s ideas concerning the nature of literary narrative and the objective status of the literary work. Section II will consider the specific forms of conflict that occur between perception and phantasy as realized through literary narrative, giving a special emphasis to the importance of freedom in both the creation and reception of the work. As literature is the only art form where Husserl discusses some of the different genres involved, Section III pays attention to these and considers examples, including some that test DOI: 10.4324/9781003212553-5

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  135 the logical limits of narrative. In Section IV, our attention is turned to theatre and music specifically. It is shown that whilst scenery and props of some sort are necessary to a theatrical production in the fullest sense, their particularity is a contingent matter, and that Husserl seems to have recognized this. The nature of the specific apprehensions involved in theatre and the distinctive conflicts they involve, are outlined in detail. We use Sartre’s ‘Husserlian’ theory to illuminate the conflictual basis of music. By way of the Conclusion, we review some weaknesses in Husserl’s approach – which are similar to those identified in earlier chapters, but end by developing some important ideas embedded in his work that show the aesthetic significance of literary narrative to be grounded in its embodiment of a quasi-trans finite view of the world that the reader can share with the writer.

I Let us begin with narrative – a structure which is fundamental to literature and theatre, and to poetry. Husserl himself does not formally define the essence of the literary narrative, i.e., those features that set it apart from mere narrative description as such. But it would be entirely consistent with his general aesthetic position to characterize it as a narrative whose meaning consists not so much of the network of related events that it intends to communicate, but rather the How of this communication, i.e., the way it is communicated, the writer’s style of presentation. This is suggested when he says of poetry ‘The verbal sound of the poem is the same as what is poetically composed itself, the situation presented therein in the How of its mental presentation.’2 The point is, then, just as the How determines the apprehension of artistic depiction, so too, it does in literature. However, the greater burden of emphasis in Husserl’s accounts of literature falls on the nature of the literary object, and on the conflicts that are involved in its phenomenological apprehension. In terms of the former, Husserl approaches the topic by way of a comparison. In the case of depiction, what is depicted in the How of its being depicted determines the boundary of what appears insofar as it appears … Just as in a narrative, a novel, and the like. I can go beyond the narrative to the extent that I become more deeply engrossed, elucidating what is narrated as such, the landscape, the persons, and so on: But my phantasy is not free in this further development … On the contrary, I am bound—the unity of the appearances as presented appearances must always be what is narrated as such and nothing else. Otherwise I am engaging in further fictional invention and am not living in the fictional work of the artist.3

136  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music And with poetry, The poem in its linguistic body, just like the poem in its ‘spiritual’ content, is obviously an idea that, in being read, becomes actualized more or less perfectly … The poem is an individual. The idea has its temporality; namely, the temporality of its origination by the artist, specifically, in the verbal expression, which alone makes something ideal accessible and identifiable intersubjectively.4 In terms of the literary arts, in other words, we must follow how the novelist or poet presents his or her narrative and develop it only by following the text – otherwise, we run the risk of merely projecting our own personal preoccupations onto the experience. The literary narrative has an authority that predelineates what the reader is to apprehend, through the style in which he or she characterizes the situations and developments in the narrative. Sometimes, indeed, Husserl states this in even stronger terms, as in his observations that The phantasies here are not freely produced by us (the creative artist alone has freedom here and exercises it only in union with aesthetic ideals). Rather they have their objectivity; they are prescribed for us, forced upon us in a way analogous to that in which the things belonging to reality are forced upon us as things to which we must submit.5 By emphasizing this, Husserl is anticipating a factor that was made much of by Nelson Goodman exactly 50 years later. Goodman says of the specifically ‘literary work’ that All and only inscriptions and utterances of the text are instances of the work; and identification of the work from instance to instance is ensured by the fact that the text is a character in a notational scheme – in a vocabulary of syntactically disjoint and differentiated symbols. Even replacement of a character in a text by another synonymous character (if any can be found in a discursive language) yields a different work.6 In this respect, consider the following poem ‘The Mirror’ by Sylvia Plath (cited in full, in a convenient online edition.)7 In the present reader’s opinion, not a single word of this poem can be removed or altered into a synonym without changing the identity of the whole. The removal of any word (with one exception) introduces irregular grammaticality into the work and spoils the effect of the whole. The nominal exception is the word ‘immediate’ in the second line, which could indeed be removed without altering the sense of the line following. However, in the literary narrative we are concerned not only with exact grammar, but also with

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  137 rhythm and euphony and other factors that determine the unity of the whole. This means that even replacing individual words with synonyms will not work as they will change the work’s texture of particularity. Hence, Goodman is correct in holding that the removal or alteration of a single character would result in a different work. On these terms, then, the literary text exists in a set form as a written and/or spoken text. Indeed, we might say also that whatever different interpretations arise from such texts, the disagreements involved can only find their space of disputation through shared reference to the work qua text. There may, of course, be other disagreements concerning what is, in fact, the authentic text for a particular work, but the very fact that establishing this authenticity is of such moment is testimony to the importance of the work’s textual integrity. Given these considerations, Husserl is entirely right in declaring the work of literary art to have an objective aspect that is fixed and a basis for inter-subjective orientation in all those who can read it or hear it. This is because of its text character – in the sense just described.

II As we saw in Chapter 2, the physical image of the visual arts involves perceptual conflicts and anomalies wherein the image manifests as unreal. In the case of literary art, this is also the case but on very different grounds. For here we are dealing with a succession of spoken or written words, which means that the elements of conflict involved are based on mainly non-perceptual criteria. In this respect, Husserl suggests that The novel, the play, in its determinate image stock and image nexus, has intersubjective ‘existence’ insofar as everyone who brings the ‘presenting’ experienced objects to appearance under suitable circumstances, … produces conflicts that are not dependent on accidental subjectivity.8 This is a strong claim, for in it, Husserl appears to be saying that in the very act of submitting to the authority of the literary, conflicts are produced. But why does Husserl suggest that these conflicts are not dependent on ‘accidental’ subjectivity? Indeed, what does ‘accidental subjectivity’ mean here? We would suggest that Husserl has in mind those occasions when a literary work has some content or idiom of expression that we ourselves find incongruous or unpleasant, or which we find ourselves simply unable to understand. This is indeed ‘conflict.’ However, it is clear that Husserl is talking of conflict in a much deeper sense than this – of something that is inherent in the very structure of literary narrative itself.

138  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music In this respect, Husserl identifies the following key mediating factor. We are told that At all times a stock of experiential realities on hand in the world of actual experience, and therefore binding, serves by means of its mode of givenness, as binding necessity, in connection with which the understanding of the artistic intention that we wish to follow … also plays its role.9 The importance of this principle of contextuality (as we shall call it) cannot be stated enough. When we approach the literary text, we do so through an established stock of experiences and expectations based upon the natural standpoint described in the Introduction to this book. It is this sense of ordinary reality with which the literary text conflicts. The starting point for this is a very basic level. Husserl says that Printed words are … involved in conflict when they are used artistically. They present themselves simply as words; this is their ‘experiential’ apperception.10 In their normal communicative functions, words cancel out our awareness of what they are as marks on a page or whatever, in order to communicate the facts they are intended to communicate. They are significations and no more. In the case of literary meaning of an artistic kind, however, printed or spoken words are taken as ‘quasi-significations in the phantasy-image attitude.’11 They do indeed signify, but the way they do so means that the nature of the signifying function is transformed. We are interested in how rather than what they signify, and this is why Husserl is right to describe them as ‘quasi-significations.’ They have an ‘as if’ character, because the format in which they are presented and the way they are written declare that the narrative is intended as more than merely descriptive. But, of course, as fictions they also pretend to be accounts of actual states of affairs (even fairy tales begin with the fib of ‘Once upon a time…’ as though they were about to recount something that actually happened). Husserl’s point, therefore, is that literary narrative is conflict with the descriptive material that it appears to present, and, of course, we know this is so simply through the format of presentation and features of style. It follows from this that, when we make judgments concerning the characters in a novel or a play, these are not ‘normal’ judgments. As Husserl says, They refer to the persons, the actions, as if; they express above all what we expect in the fictionalizing attitude, hence what is carried out by us as expectation in the as-if. And if we describe the course of action, the character of the personalities, their motives, and so

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  139 on, then we live entirely in phantasy, do not merely reproduce them. Rather, we explicate their sense in the as-if. We follow the indicated motivations in the as-if; fulfil the intentions; extract what, in the inwardness that we do not actually quasi-experience intuitively, is living and effective in the way of thoughts, feelings of dark, hidden motives, and so on.12 In these comments, Husserl is emphasizing the depth of our immersion when ‘living in’ the work of fiction. We do not simply experience a sequence of phantasy intuitions concerning the exact narrative events as presented; instead, the style of presentation prompts us to also feel between the lines, as it were, and surround the intuited characters with our own sense of their subjective life – their more precise motivations and nuances of feeling, and the like. Even the phenomenology of reading the literary work brings its own complexities. For example, in relation to reading a fairy tale, Husserl suggests that In this case, I do in fact carry out phantasies; and descriptive expressions, descriptive statements, coincide with the phantasies. In reading them, I first have the expressions, which are translated into appropriate intuitions.13 However, What I have read can 1) remain unintuititve. 2) [Or] it is carried out intuitively; for example, ‘A house stands by the roadside,’ ‘A tower stands by the highway.’ I place the phantasy-tower on the street that I have before me in memory. The phantasy formation that thus arises finds its predicative expression: It is in part normal positing, in part modified positing. (Does not something of normal positing exist at all times in the components? Such and such once was: Somewhere in the world, in space, in time, such and such did exist.14 This combination of phantasy and partial elements of reality can be even more specific. We are told that I can have a fairy-tale intuition, but in such a way that the fairy tale mixes reality and imagination, as when it is said, for example, Once upon a time there lived a knight in Strasbourg, and so on. This is certainly the way it is in the case of most fairy tales. Here, therefore, the consciousness of nullity obtains.15 Whilst Husserl is talking specifically about fairy tales here, there are grounds for taking them to be an apt characterization of our reading of literary texts per se. On these terms, the things we experience through

140  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music reading literature involve positings, but mainly ‘adjusted’ to the requirements of phantasy. They have an ‘as if’ character, but aspects of our experiences of the real world will frequently inhere in them, mainly through the way the writer presents the narrative, and, secondarily, through the reader’s more personal associations. On these terms, what we earlier called the principle of contextuality can even be a partial internal factor in our apprehension of the narrative. Now, this phenomenological involvement of the reader in the text brings further non-perceptual conflicts over and above the one already described. For, as we have seen, the reader must of necessity submit to the authority of the text in terms of the narrative that it presents, and his or her realization of phantasy through reading incorporates elements of described reality – arising from both the content of the narrative and personal interpretation. However, Husserl also identifies ‘a kind of objective truth’ that is other than that of the authority of the textual integrity of the work itself and the ‘predelineations’ it sets up for the reader.16 Rather, this truth is internal to the fiction itself, and consists in the fact that the world it presents has its own consistency of being, within which the events described and the persons who are involved in them take their place and are constrained by the character of the narrative as a whole. The aspect of reader-immersion described earlier as ‘feeling between the lines’ is an example of how – if it is not to be mere subjective phantasy on our part – we adapt ourselves to the internal truth of what the author presents, filling it out in ways that we take to be consistent with how the character has been presented to us. However, this places the reader in an ambiguous position. For the one who is phantasying lives in the fiction; that is, he lives in the carrying out of the quasi-experiences  …  And to the extent that he actually does that, he posits neither the actually experienced reality nor himself, and does not mix the two together or does not allow the one to become null in the other. And he also does not make hypotheses as if something else would also be actual in addition to the reality that exists, or hypothesizes that this or that part of actual reality – indeed actual reality in its entirely – would not exist and that merely what is invented would exist, in connection with which he nevertheless preserves himself as actual reality.17 This passage – however difficult Husserl’s language – is probably the clearest of his expositions of what it is to live in our aesthetic consciousness of art. It is an absorption that lifts us entirely from the real world and immerses us in the fictional one, so much so that we become unaware of the relation between the two worlds and do not posit the fact that it is a fictional world that we are currently immersed in. Yet despite this immersion, our sense of actual reality is not abandoned.

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  141 To some limited degree, this might be explained by the previously mentioned elements of posited reality that inhere in the narrative and our phantasies of it. However, Husserl is probably thinking of something deeper here that (presumably) arises because of the phenomenology of the phantasy image itself. As we saw in the Introduction to the present work, such images are characteristically highly unstable and relatively schematic, in contrast with the reality of perception itself. This means that whilst the written or verbal literary text has an objectivity around which the reader’s or listener’s phantasies cohere and are realized, this core of meaning is, nevertheless, dependent on our general powers of phantasy, which are precariousness enough to be displaced by our normal perceptual vigilance. The precariousness in question here arises from the fact that – as we again saw in our Introduction – the phantasy lacks the ‘individuality’ arising from each perceptual state’s connection with the infinite causal nexus of surrounding objects and events. Lacking this hard individuality, phantasies arising from our immersion in the fictional world can, in phenomenological terms, amount to no more than transient absorption, not remotely sufficient to displace our sense of actual Ego. Now, the question arises of why we should even want to be immersed in the literary narrative in the first place. Husserl himself does not address this question explicitly. However, one possible answer is that it takes us away from the boredom of everyday life and the demands of the natural standpoint, and, in this respect, Husserl does takes us directly to the grounds of this. In fact, he identifies a feature that makes literature into something far more than escapism alone – namely, exemplars of an aesthetically elevated mode of phantasy. We use the term ‘elevated’ here because the fictional world offers something that is not available from the real one, and in this sense, it lifts us above it. At the heart of this is the fact that, as Husserl explains, With respect to the realm of fiction at the cognizing subject’s disposal, it is not, so to speak, a realm with a geography and an established constitution. Rather, every reproductive fictive inventing is free, and fictions can be connected, just as quasi-experiences can join harmoniously to form the unity of one experience with the correlate of an invented world partially intuited in these experiences.18 Here, Husserl recognizes that the world’s empirical limits (an aspect of what we earlier called the principle of contextuality) are something against which literature actively plays off (at least implicitly) to varying degrees. In this respect, we are told also that Every factual truth in the simple, unmodified sense, hence every experiential truth that has its basis in actual empirical experience, is decided a priori; … Every indeterminancy in the factual domain is

142  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music determinable before all determining experience, therefore determinable a priori. … The world behind the most distant stars that we have actually reached in our experience to this point is unknown, but it is actually cognizable.19 Husserl’s point here is that those elements of the unknown that surround us empirically are things that are structured a priori in such a way that, even if we have not experienced such and such an empirical reality, it could, nevertheless, in principle be experienced by us – given the right circumstances. What is ‘out there’ is out there in the way it is, irrespective of whether we will it to be or not. Things are otherwise with respect to fictional worlds. Husserl affirms that The free artistic fiction and the formation produced in the real world by means of the connection of fictions creates a predelineation for the one contemplating art. But it extends only as far as the artist has tied his unitary forms to such predelineations; beyond that, everything is again an empty possibility that can be shaped by phantasies chosen at will with any sense one likes.20 This dimension of freedom within the narrative is decisive for fictional meaning. For example, Husserl declares that ‘To the questions – What will the phantasied centaur eat in the phantasy morning? With who will he pass the time or do battle? – there are no answers.’21 Indeed, the future is freely phantasyable within the laws belonging to the style of the object … The actual future belonging to the real world is not freely alterable. It can only be changed ‘mechanically’: physically, it is subject to fixed laws, and so on.22 On these terms, then, fiction allows the writer to present a reality – within the bounds of logical intelligibility – that allows the free invention of modes of quasi-objective reality, that are not constrained by having to conform to what actually exists. This means that in contrast to the ‘the realm of actual experience, which is linked to the reality of the cognizing subject and its empirical experiences, [and] is a single and fixed realm,’23 the creation of fiction allows an element of freedom in how the writer relates to the world. The world can be fictively remade according to the wishes of the creative artist, and this is an active factor in how the audience responds to his or her work. If, for example, in a story, the centaur decides to eat a goat for breakfast, we know that this embodies a creative choice made by the writer, and that this is true also of any decision made by, or anything that happens to any fictional character in the course of a literary work.24 In such

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  143 factors we can discern the choice and style of the writer. And, of course, as we saw earlier, there is also a freedom in how the reader responds to literature, because no matter how detailed the texture is of what is narrated, it is not a completely given reality. When we live in the reading of the literary work, there is a creative conflict between the fixed perceptual boundaries of our surrounding reality, and the phantasy contours whereby the novelist, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, takes up his dwelling in a character’s behaviour and gives the reader only a suggestion of it, its nervous and peremptory trace in the surroundings. [Indeed,] If the author is a writer, that is, if he is capable of finding the elisions and caesuras which indicate the behaviour, the reader responds to his appeal, and joins him at the virtual center of the writing, even if neither one of them is aware of it.25 In this respect, we might recall that Plath’s poem ‘The Mirror,’ simply describes what the mirror ‘sees’, and many poems indeed, appear to do no more than describe something experienced by the poet. But such things as the rhythm of the prose, the weighting of some vocal emphases over others, and the use of imagery and metaphor mean that poet is articulating his or her experiences in a striking way that seeks to attract the reader or listener to inhabit the experience as they do – to bear witness to the poet’s particular perspective by sharing it through this enhancement of language. Although Husserl has led us to this same point, he does not, however, draw the key conclusion – namely that this is another conflict with ordinary perception, insofar as, instead of living in our own embodied perspective, it is as if we now inhabit that of another. The aesthetic elevation involved in the literary narrative, in other words, is more than escapism because the inherent dimension of freedom in involves the artist presenting the work in an interpretative perspective that allows us to see the world as he or she sees it, and experience it anew. Mere escapist entertainment, in contrast, allows little more than temporary distraction from our current preoccupations. It is interesting to consider just how far this inherent freedom can extend, by testing Husserl a little. He suggests that there are limits that apply even to fictions, telling us, for example, that All logical laws and also normative laws apply to them. Logic does not privilege the given reality; it relates to every possible reality. It expresses laws that hold for every possible act of judgment.26 Now, it might seem that many modernist works challenge Husserl’s posited limit here. Perhaps the most extreme possibility of such a putatively alogical narrative is James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The final paragraph reads

144  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the.27 In these lines – and the rest of the book – Joyce stretches the intelligibility of language to its limits. Yet even here, there is enough in terms of accumulating juxtapositions, and allusions that allow some sense to be made of the text. Indeed, the fact that one is dealing with a narrative of sorts is indicated not only by the internal allusional momentum and dynamics of the text, but also by the fact that the final line leads directly back to the book’s opening line. There is logic to the narrative – but of a fragmented kind. Now, whilst Finnegan’s Wake does not entirely escape Husserl’s positing of logical limits, its very stretching of these limits involves an important aesthetic effect – of liberation. Indeed, like all fiction, it plays off against the principle of contextuality. In this respect, it is instructive that writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll often incorporate nonsensical situations and descriptive devices in an incidental way, framed – as it were – by sustained passages of normal narrative exposition. And, in a novel such as Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, the nonsensical strategy is maintained throughout the narrative, but again, with much of the work’s aesthetic effect arising from the fact that the nonsensical events are always kept, as it were, in the shadow of their normal counterparts, playing off against expectations based on them (in this case, the occupants and day-to-day business of a rural Irish police station). Indeed, a work that was entirely nonsensical or gibberish seems impossible insofar as to recognize it as a narrative would require some presentational context that clearly indicated its intentional status. On these terms, then, whilst the perceptual world is loaded with meaning for us, the writer of fiction edits it in a phantasy form whose syntheses enhance particular avenues of its intersubjective significance – including, as we have just seen, the limits of rational narrative. Bringing all these points together, then, it can be said that, for Husserl, literary narrative allows us to be elevated over everyday consciousness by conflicting with it in four broad respects: (i) the way its style brings about quasi-signification rather than actual signification; (ii) by shifting our consciousness from the actual perceptual world to live in the fictional narrative and its hybrid of pure phantasy and the description of real features; (iii) by investing these narratives with an inherent dimension of freedom – both in terms of the author’s compositional strategy, and the

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  145 reader’s realizations of it; and (iv) by making it appear that we are experiencing the world as if we were the writer. These four aspects can, of course, be separated in an analytic discussion as this, but in the apprehension of the literary narrative they are subsumed in our apprehension of the work as a novel or poem or whatever, and in our reading of it. Now, whilst Husserl spends much time describing our apprehensions of fiction, he does not venture into the deeper question of how the aforementioned conflicts might actually condition aesthetic consciousness as well as our experience of the literary narrative. We will return to this important question in our Conclusion. As a step in this direction, we turn now to the way Husserl investigates some of the different idioms of fiction.

III Husserl suggests that the artist operates between two extremes. (a) The given world and time can be as fully determinate as our surrounding world is for us now (not the actual world). For example, the Berlin of today, as determinate as it is for us and even for the Berliners themselves. (b) The case at the opposite extreme: Once upon a time, somewhere, in some fable land, in some time, in some world with entirely different animal beings, even different natural laws, and so on.28 In effect, what Husserl is describing here is – at one pole, the world of the realist genres; and, at the other, the world of fantasy and fairy tale. In terms of the former, he has a quite specific example in mind – the work of Arthur Schnitzler. Of this author, we are told, Within the indefinite horizon belonging to a given world and time, more concretely, belonging to a given city, Vienna, a series of events is clearly phantasied and presented in a vital way – not described, but represented in such a way that we witness a situation, a life’s destiny, and so forth, in the as-if, as if we were present. We are ‘spectators’ as it were; we are present, as it were, in the society.29 He suggests also that In descriptions of ‘strange’ countries that we do not know – we are also present: But here the traveller who is doing the describing is co-posited, and we have consciousness of following and understanding him, and of transplanting ourselves into his portrayal. In the case of fiction, the writer is not the one describing, not the actual witness who is to be understood. It is the work of fiction, not its author, that we follow and understand.30

146  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music Now, in these comments, Husserl has actually identified a key feature of literary narrative that sets it apart from say, the narratives of travel journalism and the like. In the former, we find descriptive narratives – often with vivid detail, and accounts of what the author actually experienced, and in many cases – such as Gerard de Nerval’s travel writing – the style and descriptive evocativeness of the prose can make it in to something of aesthetic significance even if it is not formally a work of art. (It has, as it were, honorary artistic status.) But, for Husserl, the literary narrative goes much further than this. As we saw in Section II, it is the work of fiction itself that we follow insofar as it presents its contents as if they were being witnessed by both the anonymous narrator, and, simultaneously, by the reader of the narrative.31 Whilst at one point identifying the as if witnessed effect as a feature of realist literature, he immediately goes on to generalize it – saying Description of this ‘witnessing,’ of this being a spectator … belongs to every presentation occurring by means of word and image.32 However, as well as identifying essence, Husserl’s particular characterization of realist literature compresses many issues of great complexity that he goes on to elaborate in only a roundabout manner – beginning with the following comments. The intent of realism: To present landscapes, human beings, human communities, destinies, and the interweaving of destinies, in the fullest possible ‘characteristic’ concreteness, as if we were seeing them, and, within a fixed frame, witnessing everything related to them in the richest possible fullness and in the substance of their being according to their innermost, though intuitive motivations.33 And he continues. It is the same as when a purely contemplative interest in reality and in what is characteristic and typical of a given slice of the world guides us. A characteristic Black Forrest farm, a Black Forrest landscape, and so on … These portrayals can be wonderful art. Delight in the intuition of the concrete, which is illuminated in its motivations, in its typically representing kind, and delight in the art of making this transparent to us.34 From these remarks, it is clear that Husserl is not interpreting realism in terms of some narrow genre base – e.g. as politically motivated or ‘socially concerned’ art, but in a much broader way – as art that is simply attentive to the relation between human deeds, experiences and interactions, and the context of their particular societal surroundings. In terms of this form of literature, Husserl says,

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  147 Realistic art is … a sort of biography of a time, of the strata of a time. It portrays through characteristic ‘images.’ It constructs fictions in which characteristic types belonging to the time present themselves. It is art, not science, though in its own way it does mediate knowledge. It produces formations in the manner peculiar to phantasy, and as types with respect to times and world epochs … To this belongs the ‘matter of factness’ of the situation, the restriction by time, by the real.35 Husserl suggests also that this is ‘Artistic empiricism or positivism.’36 In fact, what he is describing is the dominant idiom of western literature since the late eighteenth century, encompassing figures as diverse as Schnitzler, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, and Jonathan Franzen. Such literature has many different emphases determined by the individual author, but in all cases, it centers upon personal relationships as closely mediated by the surrounding age and society. Interestingly, however, instead of contrasting this idiom with the other ‘extreme’ – of fantasy and fairy tale – Husserl then introduces two other literary idioms. The first of these is presented as follows. Idealistic fiction. The idealistic author does not merely see facts and types belonging to regions of the empirical world and empirical life; he sees ideas and ideals, and, in seeing them, values them and sets them forth as values.37 Husserl acknowledges that Realist fiction too, can show people guided by ideals, but The idealistic author, however, has a normative focus. He presents value types in concrete images, or he ‘embodies’ values in characters, and the values battle against disvalues in real quasi-situations. And he not only presents values and the conflict of good and evil; he wants to kindle the love of good in our souls: without moralizing or preaching. He transfigures the love in the medium of beauty.38 As Husserl does not provide examples, it is not clear which particular authors he is thinking of, but his characterization would perhaps fit novels such as Rousseau’s New Heloise or Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Or, The History of a Young Lady published in 1748. In the latter work, the tribulations of the heroine are described in a series of letters wherein she recounts appalling treatment at the hands of her family, and relentless pursuit by a libertine called Robert Lovelace who wishes her to marry him. She resists all his overtures and dishonest strategies of wooing, but undergoes terrible suffering as a result of his deceits. He eventually

148  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music drugs and rapes her. She remains resistant to all his blandishments, and despite episodes of insanity, continues to assert her sincerity and virtue even down to her early death. Lovelace himself is eventually killed by her cousin Colonel Morden, who has become familiar with the extent of Clarissa’s suffering at the hands of Lovelace and others. Now, in this story, there is a basic battle between good and evil, neither of whose ‘value types’ in the novel are given formulaic presentation. The heroine is a good woman with depth of feeling who asserts her right to make her own choices, and who is unfailingly patient with those who wittingly, or otherwise, provide assistance to Lovelace. Indeed, the story is far more than a moralizing saga of feminine integrity, because it is expounded through detailed exploration of the heroine’s feelings as she is ‘thrown from pillar to post’ in the course of Lovelace’s pursuit. Interestingly, Husserl also identifies a ‘philocallistic’ form of literary art that is concerned primarily with the beautiful, rather than which is ‘characteristic.’39 Again, Husserl does not provide examples, but one might consider Virginia Woolf’s The Waves of 1931 as an example. This difficult novel consists of six characters who engage in individual soliloquies of varying lengths, and are linked also by third-person intermezzos presenting a coastal scene across different times of day. The soliloquies address both the individual character’s own feelings and, sometimes, their relation to the other characters. Here is an example, spoken by ‘Rhoda,’ reflecting to a childhood event at which some of the others were initially present. Miss Hudson goes. I am left alone to find an answer. The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join so and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, ‘Oh, save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time.’40 In this passage, a simple childhood problem – being kept behind in class to solve a mathematical problem – becomes a vehicle for conveying the fantasies and occasional wonder that subtends our conscious life, and which allows us to find distraction – however unsatisfying – during times when we are tested unpleasantly. The Waves is full of such lyrical material, and the six character soliloquies are woven together through it in a narrative that finds beauty in the transient nuances of the everyday, but finds even deeper beauty in the curious unity of the whole in which these transient moments and scenes inhere.

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  149 Husserl also considers a final category of literary art. As he puts it. In a still higher stage, art can also be philosophical, metaphysical, elevating one to the idea of the good, to the deity through beauty, to the deepest world-ground, uniting one with it … To see the world of ideas in the real world with its real set of types, to substitute for the real set of types and ideal set of types that is imperfectly realized in the real set of types, yet strives forward and battles upwards through them to the divine.41 One imagines that what Husserl has in mind here are things such as the great works of literature that operate on the ‘grand scale.’ A clear example would be Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which addresses the destiny of a number of characters at the time of the world-historic Napoleonic era. In fact, Napoleon himself features heavily in the novel, but in a scene set in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Borodino, he makes an appearance that the narrative’s deeper meaning reduces to no more than a ‘walk-on’ part. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky has been wounded on the battlefield, and as he is lying on the ground, scarcely conscious, Napoleon arrives and, in the course of speaking, leads him to an unexpected revelation. Tolstoy presents it thus: he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only did they not interest him, but he took no notice of them and at once forgot them. His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon his hero but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it. At that moment it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or what was said of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him and only wished that they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so differently.42 In this passage, Bolkonsky experiences a revelation of far greater moment than even the arrival of a world-historical figure such as Napoleon. However, Tolstoy does not reduce this to some Saul of Tarsus vision of divine truth; it is presented rather as something in its first beginnings – as an experience of the divine through physical symbols which might be taken as its manifestations, but without the truth of this being definitively settled. In this way, a sense is created of Bolkonsky as having entered a path of spiritual discovery – one that will be developed as the novel itself progresses. This completes our exposition of literary narrative as found in poetry and fiction. We turn now to Husserl’s treatment of theatre and acting.

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IV As we saw in the Introduction to this chapter, theatre is to be counted amongst the arts of temporalization rather than the iconic idioms of visual representation, because its unity is constituted by a sequence of actions that are intelligible only if we comprehend them in strictly linear and contiguously successive unfolding. That Husserl links them to visual art is understandable because theatre must be physically performed in order to exist in the fullest sense, and this means that it must involve space-occupying features such as the actors themselves, and props for different scenes. However, we must register an important qualification that Husserl does not consider. It is the fact that whilst space-occupying phenomena are essential to theatrical performance, they are not so in terms of their particularity. For even if the stage directions specify certain kinds of scenery and props, these can take many different forms. Likewise, whilst an actor may become strongly associated with a certain role, and whilst in some cases a playwright may even write a role with a certain actor in mind, this specificity is not essential to the performance of the play. In principle, any actor could play any role. And here is the key contrast. In the case of visual representation, the work’s meaning is entirely dependent on the How of the particular appearance, with its quite specific nonanalogizing features – as we saw in Chapter 1 – playing a central role. With theatre, however, the particularity of costume, scenery, and other props play only a contingent role in terms of how they appear, because – in the final analysis – they are no more than supports to the narrative. (Later, we shall see how, in effect, Husserl comes to recognize this contrast, when he realizes that theatre is not a depictive art form.) With this qualification in mind, let us now consider Husserl’s general approach to theatre. He suggests that: I follow the performances in a stage play, or I contemplate a painting. Here the (pictorially produced) presentations, perceptions, judgments, feelings, etc., exhibited in the image are distinguished from those that are actual and excited in me, the spectator, which is similar to what happens in reproductive phantasy. The exhibiting itself is actual. Just as I carry out the reproductive phantasy, living in it, so I carry out the iconic imagining, the image consciousness, the perceptual image consciousness.43 As we have seen, the particularities of staged performance are not a part of the play’s meaning as they are for, say, painting, but the dimension of visual performance is essential to theatrical meaning.44 One might simply read a play on one’s own; we might have a group of people read

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  151 it in different voices; but until the work is performed before an audience using the appropriate props, its embodiment remains incomplete. And in the foregoing comparison with painting, Husserl is emphasizing this. He is emphasizing also another essential feature common to both theatre and painting, and indeed, to all the arts: the fact that we must become absorbed in what is presented – that we must live in it. This living in means that we are absorbed in the image object rather than the means whereby this is evoked for us, namely the actors playing their role amongst the stage sets. In relation to the consciousness that this involves, Husserl argues as follows. I follow the actions, and so forth, of a character on the stage. Or the movements of the ghost, its meaningful gestures, and so on. This contemplating is not belief or unbelief relating to the being of the thing: It is contemplation of the appearing object as appearing, a positing act that does not posit the actuality but precisely ‘what appears as it appears’ (hence it is obviously not mere presentation in the sense of phantasy and the like).45 This is a continuation of Husserl’s ideas concerning absorption in the literary presentation. We posit the characters on stage – but not as such and such an actor playing such and such a role; rather it is as if we were witnessing a scene from real life. Where this differs from simply reading or hearing a literary narrative is that in theatre we are dealing with a ‘perceptual figment’ rather than reading a text. As Husserl says of the visual art forms in general, The figment masks from me the re-presenting (reproductive) presentation, coincides with it; what is re-presented slides into what is present, which turns into what is exhibiting.46 In the case of theatre, of course, the fact that the literary image object is generated through the actions of real people and real props mean that the ‘slide’ into ‘what is present’ is far more manifest than in the case of the other visual artistic idioms. What are we to make of this? Husserl suggests that Here, indeed, the individual image objects – ‘king,’ ‘villain,’ ‘hero,’ and so on exist harmoniously in themselves. They are, however, members of an enveloping pictoriality, of a total image object from an enveloping image world, that runs its course on the stage, in artificial sets etc. What was said, then, applies to this whole. It is annulled intrinsically and not only by being in conflict with the space of the theatre … Stage, sets, prompter, and so on, serve to realize the intrinsic

152  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music annulment. They are necessary in order to bring a conflict into the image object itself, which makes it appear in itself as a figment. But permeation by the image thing also contributes to that end.47 He concludes that, here, the image figment is a nullity of a unique type. It is < not > an appearance with the characteristic of annulled positing, but an appearance annulled in itself.48 The phenomenology of this annulled position has, of course, some affinity with the way framing devices draw attention to the image object aspect of the physical image. However, the phenomenology of the consciousness involved in the theatrical play is more complicated still. The passive characteristic of uninhibited actuality, the characteristic of actual experience, is, of course, cut off by the passive characteristic of being cancelled; and hence it would indeed be impossible to see how the mere carrying out of the one apperception should not already give rise to a consciousness of the object in the character of nullity. This characteristic makes its appearance here in its first stage as inhibited actuality. This leads in the transition to the other apperception while one holds on to what is given in the first apperception, to the actualized givenness of the conflict and to the transition to actual nullity.49 The key point in this difficult passage is that when we perceive a play’s performance, this is, from the very beginning, a modified intuition. We become pre-reflectively immersed in something whose format and narrative content already present it as something that tells of an order of events over and above that of the real performance of actions and spoken words which are the vehicle of the narrative. This initial conflict is then maintained throughout in what happens in the performance, and constitutes our consciousness of the play as an image object – as a nullity, as a conflict with reality. It presents a quasi-world that is other than the real physical gestures and spoken words that constitute its physical performance. Our apprehension of this is prepared by the format, and declared by the action of the play. In the theatrical work, then, the activities of the real human figures are the activities of real human figures, but the physical setting of the performance – with all the framing details Husserl describes – present the play as a fictional world, at the same time enabling an involvement with it that is akin to our absorption in the literary narrative described earlier. The huge difference between theatre and the other literary arts, however, is that in them, the narrative is intuited exclusively through phantasy

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  153 realizations that follow the text, whereas as a visual and auditory configuration, the play presents phantasy in an intuitive form. These considerations lead Husserl to question one of his own basic principles. Previously, he took the essence of fine art ‘to present in image.’50 But he then finds that theatrical performance shows that this belief is not correct. As he puts it, In the case of a theatrical performance, we live in a world of perceptual phantasy; we ‘images’ within the cohesive unity of one image, but we do not for that reason have depictions. Some depictive elements may be involved (in terms of stage scenery presumably, and costume and the like) but ‘depictiveness is not the primary concern; rather it is a matter of imaging in the sense of perceptual phantasy understood as immediate imagination.51 These remarks make it clear that Husserl is not actually rejecting the image status of theatre, but only his earlier view of theatre as a depictive medium akin to visual representation. In this, Husserl is, in effect, intuitively recognizing a key point that we made explicitly at the start of our discussion of his treatment of theatre, namely that he was wrong to group it with the other forms of visual representation because, in their case, the particularity of the appearance plays a constitutive role in how the image object is apprehended, whereas in theatre, it is a contingent factor. Indeed, such particularity might well be said to be the essence of depictiveness. However, as Husserl puts it earlier, in the case of theatre, ‘depictiveness is not its primary concern’ but is, rather, more an aspect of theatrical framing devices. Having qualified the scope of depiction vis-à-vis theatre, Husserl also clarifies the notion of a distinctively theatrical, non-depictive version of the image. He suggests that theatrical presentation might be described as ‘imaging presentation.’ Specifically, The performance of the actor … means the production of an ‘image’ by means of his real actions, and among these are his movements, his change of expression, his external ‘appearance,’ which is his production.52 As we have just seen, in this context ‘image’ does not mean depiction, and there is, indeed, a further factor involved. In Husserl’s words once more, The actor’s presentation is not a presentation in the sense in which we say of an image object that an image subject is presented in it. Neither the actor nor the image that is his performance for us is an image object in which another object, an actual or even fictive image subject, is depicted.53

154  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music What appears, rather, is a pure perceptual figment. We live in neutrality; we do not carry out any actual positing in relation to what is intuited. Everything that occurs there, everything there in the way of things and persons, everything said and done there, … all of this has the characteristic of the as-if.54 Husserl explains his position further by linking theatre to illusion – albeit of a very particular kind. In the case of ordinary perceptual illusion, we place ourselves on the ground of actual experience and take sides with what is experienced against what is illusory, which we actively negate, cancel.55 However, in relation to theatrical production, we do not take sides with reality against illusion. Husserl emphasizes, rather, that We ‘know’ that what is happening here is play acting. That these pasteboard scenes and canvas screens are not actual trees, and so on. In a certain inactive (passive) manner, everything that is ‘seen’ here has the characteristic of what is null, of what is cancelled, or, better, what is annulled with respect to its reality. But we (who are not children) do not carry out any cancellation understood as active negation, any more than we actively carry out the consciousness of reality belonging to actual experience in which the actors and ‘presenting’ things are given to us as actual … we have from the beginning only the artistic ‘image’; and what is real that functions as presentation, …  [i.e., the actor’s own speech and body, etc.] is continuously concealed – concealed, though there is consciousness of it, only consciousness of it non-intuitively and in the peculiar fashion that the word ‘concealment’ suggests in this case.56 As in an illusion, the real-life status of what is presented by theatre is concealed, but instead of this reality being eventually ‘uncovered’ as in real-life illusion, in theatre it is maintained – in a hidden way, which means that we do not need to cancel out the real-life existence of the actor’s speech physical gestures. The presentational format of theatre allows these to be concealed throughout the narrative that the performance brings forth. As Husserl tells us, In the fictionalizing experience [of theatre], or in the attitude in which we live in the ‘image’ world, we have not carried out anything belonging to the real world of actual experience, and specifically of the realities serving for presentation; this world, for us, is not a posited but a suspended world.57

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  155 Of course, we always have knowledge of the natural standpoint and the real world as a general background for our experience of the arts – the principle of contextuality – but here Husserl is pointing out that in the consciousness of theatre as fiction, no explicit consideration of the real world is involved in the narrative itself. 58And this is also true of the props in a play – even if they are physically real things such as pieces of furniture. In the theatrical play such furniture strikes the observer only through the part it plays as a background feature of the narrative. They become no more than ‘semblances’ that are in conflict with actual reality. As Husserl says of a scene in a play, The room  …  is a figment presented by means of conflict; the use to which the furnishings are subject and for which they are there is annulled by conflict. It is use presented in the figment, which is use for the persons who belong to the figment, who sit on the furnishings, and so on – in which case the sitting is not actual sitting but phantasy sitting, although the actor does actually sit (which, however, only means that he performs all the movements, that he has the corresponding physiological processes run their course in the muscles.59 Husserl has argued, then, that theatrical performance is not to be understood as a mode of depiction, but is rather a process of imaging whereby real speech and action becomes the vehicle for phantasy intuition determined by the narrative that the speech and action present. This is a suspended world. It presents a quasi-reality existing in a phantasy space that is other than the space of the actual performance (whose real physical basis it serves to conceal). Finally, let us consider the case of music. In Chapter 1, we indicated how Husserl describes it as ‘as an expression of such and such feelings, moods (music as expression).’60 We also emphasized the importance of melody and the tonal system as a way of making sense of musical meaning. However, we did not address the unreality of music and the nature of its conflicts – because, of course, Husserl himself does not consider these issues. Nevertheless, as we also saw in the Introduction to this book, Sartre considers the question of music. Since he does so in a way that is highly consistent with Husserl’s sensitivities to the unreality of the art work, let us, accordingly, now use Sartre to provide a Husserlian account of the unreality of the musical work. Sartre asks whether some arts escape irreality by their very nature – for example, music and architecture, and he considers an example through which to explore this, namely attending a concert to hear Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Of the symphony, he says It is evidently a thing, which is to say something that is before me, that resists, that endures. Of course, there is no further need to prove

156  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music that this thing is a synthetic whole, that does not exist note by note but through large thematic ensembles.61 But Sartre then declares that the way we engage with the symphony is as a musical work rather than a thing. He describes this, at length. I am  …  confronted by the Seventh Symphony but on the express condition that I hear it nowhere, that I cease to think of the event as current and dated, and on condition that I interpret the succession of themes as an absolute succession and not as a real succession. … To the extent that I grasp it, the symphony is not there, between those walls, at the tip of the violin bows. Nor is it ‘past’ as if I thought: this is the work that took shape on such and such a date in the mind of Beethoven. It is entirely outside the real.62 On these terms, the domain in which the musical work exists is not that of real time – neither in terms of an actual occasion of its actual performance, nor that of the time in which Beethoven composed it and completed the composition. Indeed, Sartre continues: It has its own time, which is to say, that it possesses an internal time which flows from the first note of the allegro to the last note of the finale, but this time does not follow another time that happened ‘before’ the beginning of the allegro, nor is followed by a time that would come ‘after’ the finale. … It therefore entirely escapes the real. It is given in person, but as being absent, as being out of reach. It would be impossible for me to act upon it, to change a single note of it, or to slow its movement. Yet it depends, in its appearance on the real.63 Here Sartre identifies why musical works are ‘irrealities’ – and why, in Husserlian terms, they conflict with perceptual reality. They depend upon being performed for their existence, and upon the physical score (or, in the case of transmitted music, on humans who have committed the work to memory), but even so, what is presented in the performance of the work is a structure that is independent of the flow of perceptual temporality insofar as its beginning of its structural unfolding is not itself the continuation of the process that gave rise to it, and when the work is finished, its ending does not give rise to a ‘next’ event in its own temporal world. It is, in other words, an irreal, or what Husserl himself would describe as an Ideal unity, whose temporality is other than the constant flow of the perceptual temporal order. As Sartre concludes, ‘It is … given as a perpetual elsewhere, a perpetual absence.’64 It is of course this dimension of irreality or conflict that helps make music especially meaningful in aesthetic terms. Though Sartre himself does not put it like this, we might say that, in principle, the musical work

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  157 never changes whereas its performers and listeners do. This means the internal temporal order of the musical composition has a similar effect to that of the eternalization of the present achieved in visual representation. By not changing – as its listeners do – it seems to be a consummation of experience by preserving a configuration that articulates expressive moments, whilst at the same time making them transfinite by virtue of the Ideal temporal order in which they are inscribed. By expounding and interpreting Sartre’s arguments, then, we arrive at a position that perfectly explains the route that Husserl would have taken had he addressed the conflict dimension of music. Given this, we can now proceed to a Conclusion.

Conclusion The aesthetic consciousness of any form of art involves living in what the artwork presents – it’s How of presenting. But it is here that the contrast described in the beginning between the open temporal unity of the spatial work of art, and the linear temporality of the literary work proves important. In order to apprehend the literary work in its completeness we have to devote more time to it, and our absorption in it is, accordingly, all the greater. We come to live in a world that is intelligible in terms of comparison with the actual one (even when it deviates from it). We can also, of course, become absorbed in a picture, but in the literary work, the engagement is more sustained and intimate insofar as much of the narrative is made real for us through our own phantasy realizations of what the writer lays down for us. In theatre, matters are different because the performance presents phantasy intuitions that are temporally developed as the events play out. However, the very physicality of the performance – its perceptual givenness – means that the literary work is here close to us in a way that the novel or poem is not. As in music also, there is accordingly a sense of interpretation involved over and above the narrative itself. We are interested in both How the playwright composes the work and how the actors and director realize this composition. In relation to interpretation and arts that involve performance, Husserl’s comments mainly emphasize the importance of attending towards the work’s particularity, and studying the reciprocal relations of part and whole.65 However, he does not address in any detail the different kinds of apprehension that might be involved here, vis-à-vis our attention to the work itself and to the performer’s interpretation of it respectively. It is also difficult to see how his approach to artistic performance, and indeed, to the literary work as such, can escape the problem that we have already noted in relation to his general aesthetic, and the question of the visual arts. To determine the quality of an interpretation presupposes that we can relate it comparatively to other interpretations. And the significance of the work itself as literature, as opposed to mere fiction, assumes

158  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music that it stands out comparatively in terms of its originality and exemplariness as a way of writing narrative. However, let us focus more on the positive implications of Husserl’s approach. As we saw earlier, he emphasizes how the literary work involves various conflicts with reality. The important thing about this is not the simple fact of conflict, but what the conflict embodies. Now, the key point in both these characterizations is that Husserl foregrounds the synoptic-synthetic structure of literary narrative as such, and fact that this is highly selective. This leads to a contrast. In our perceptual apprehensions of the world we are tied to viewpoints limited by our own embodiment. Through thought and phantasy we can form interpretations of how the world appears in places we are not or could not be located, and a sense of other people’s motivations and feelings, but, of course, we can never actually inhabit their experiences. Neither can we travel into the past or into the future without physically traversing all the points between the locations we wish to travel to, and our present position in space and time. However, in the literary narrative, all things become possible. One can link people in times and places and delve inside their thoughts and feelings in the different descriptive synoptic-syntheses that the narrative presents. To emphasize the scope of this, it is worth recalling how Husserl characterizes realist and Idealist literature. The intent of realism: To present landscapes, human beings, human communities, destinies, and the interweaving of destinies, in the fullest possible ‘characteristic’ concreteness, as if we were seeing them, and, within a fixed frame, witnessing everything related to them in the richest possible fullness and in the substance of their being according to their innermost, though intuitive motivations.66 Idealistic fiction. The idealistic author does not merely see facts and types belonging to regions of the empirical world and empirical life; he sees ideas and ideals, and, in seeing them, values them and sets them forth as values.67 It is clear from these remarks, just how extraordinary the synoptic-syntheses of actions, events, thoughts, and feelings are in the literary narrative. The writer creates a perspective on things that ranges far beyond what the embodied subject can do in the actual world of perception and its nexus of actualities. Now, in Section II, we described how the literary work and reality conflict in four respects: (i) the way the style of literary narrative brings about quasi-signification rather than actual signification; (ii) by shifting our consciousness from the actual perceptual world to live in the fictional narrative and its hybrid of pure phantasy and the description of real features; (iii) by investing these narratives with an inherent dimension of

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  159 freedom – both in terms of the author’s compositional strategy, and the reader’s realizations of it; and (iv) by inviting the reader to engage with the narrative as if he or she were inhabiting the author’s perception of the events described. The points just made about the scope of literary narrative in ranging far beyond the limits of embodied perception provide a fifth level of conflict. The writer is not God-like in the scope of his or her creative endeavor, but it as if such a person enjoyed and dispensed trans-finite experience – based on transcending the limits of bodily experience. Of course, it might be objected that any kind of writing that addresses a broad range of human existence and its deeds (such as history and philosophy) can surely claim exactly the same status. Literature, in other words, is not unique. However, this misses the point. The uniqueness of literature consists not just in its scope but in the idiom of its operation – based on the other aspects of conflict wherein the narrative is generated in specialized language that is freely configured and is presented as if we were witnessing the situations described. The dimension of phantasy can enter into any form of writing at some point as a contingent feature, but it is the essence of the literary narrative, and offers it in a sustained form. As Husserl says we witness a situation, life’s destiny, and so forth, in the as-if, as if we were present. We are ‘spectators as it were’; we are present as it were, in the society.68 In the course of reading the literary work, we are not aware of this or the other conflicts, except through reflecting upon them, but they are implicit in what it is to read a poem or a novel – and are something that we know intuitively (in the non-Husserlian sense) insofar as we would recognize them if they were pointed out to us. This leads us to a culminating point. We saw in Chapter 2 that artistic representation of a visual kind has the power to present a quasi-eternalized moment. This effect is something unique to such art because it is based on the unity of the spatial object. Literature in contrast, is an art of temporal realization, which means that its narrative presents an extended sequence of events in a quasi-eternalized form – as indeed, do film and music. Now, there are circumstances in which we might experience this as an aesthetic feature of these arts, but it is not as manifest as the visual modes. However, the trans-finite personalized scope of the literary narrative is something that is not found directly in the visual arts, because it is something that takes place through many moments of reading and is not tied to specific ways of being realized as phantasy. In cinema and music, matters are different. Cinema involves intuitive representations (in the Husserlian) as though allowing our embodied perceptual viewpoint to range beyond the restrictiveness of its real nature. In music the

160  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music particular character of expression has a phenomenological intimacy that arises from its lack of specificity in identifying particular individuals.69 It should be noted also that theatre departs from the trans-finite dimension of the poetic or fictional literary narrative, insofar as it involves a presentational performance by living human beings. True, a play can present different scenes that in narrative terms are massively separated from one another in space and time. However, the proximity of the physical performance brings about a counter effect. We could, in principle, walk on the stage and mix with the protagonists as literal bystanders in the presented narrative, but, of course, we do not. Nevertheless, the very fact that the action ‘is live’ means that it is offers a phantasy apprehension that has more intimate relation to immediate reality than the other arts of temporal realization. Now, as was also argued in the previous chapter, whilst these conclusions are not drawn explicitly by Husserl, they are nevertheless entirely consistent with his approach. Indeed, they are embedded in it, and we have drawn them out by following clues provided by him. This leaves one final objection. It concerns the availability of the trans-finite aesthetic phantasy experience of literature. When is such an experience enjoyed? Why has it not featured more in the literature? The answer to these questions lies in the dimension of non-Husserlian intuition mentioned earlier. If asked why we enjoy literature and find it important, very few people can answer such questions, and such answers are offered will often focus on the expressive features of writing, without addressing why the expressive features are different from similar emotional experiences. One could say (in the case of the novel at least) that the fact they are features of fictional persons is sufficient to involve a difference of expression, but then this invites the question of why this changed idiom of expression should be of such significance to us. The point is that, step by step, we will be led to the important differences that Husserl characterizes as ‘conflicts,’ and only then will we achieve a satisfactory answer to our original question. Through this analysis, we enable such insights to bloom at an explicit reflective level, as something that we now take the work to exemplify in quasi-sensuous or directly sensuous terms.

Notes 1 For a thorough treatment of the possibilities of Husserl’s phenomenology in relation to the nature of film, see John B. Brough’s ‘Showing and Seeing’ – included as Chapter 9 in Art and Phenomenology, ed. Joseph D. Parry (Routledge, London and New York, 2010), 192–214. 2 Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) trans. John B. Brough (Springer, Dordrecht, 2005), 656. 3 Ibid., 706. 4 Ibid., 656. 5 Ibid., 620.

Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music  161 6 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Hackett and Co., Indianapolis, 1976), 209. The first edition was published in 1968. 7 The poem can be found at https://allpoetry.com/poem/8498499-Mirror-bySylvia-Plath (accessed 12 May 2020). 8 Husserl, Phantasy, 621. 9 Ibid., 621. 10 Ibid., 621. 11 Ibid., 621. 12 Ibid., 621–622. 13 Ibid., 452. 14 Ibid., 452. 15 Ibid., 535. 16 Ibid., 621. 17 Ibid., 623. 18 Ibid., 624. 19 Ibid., 624. 20 Ibid., 625. 21 Ibid., 624–625. 22 Ibid., 634. 23 Ibid., 624. 24 The only circumstances in which this would need to be qualified are those cases where a writer strives to present ‘what might have happened’ in such and such an actual historical event or sequence of events. Here, the narrative would have to conform to the ‘actual facts’; but, of course, it would necessarily have to depart from them also – by the very fact of wishing to recreate the words, thoughts, and feelings of those involved, when no such records of such experiences exist. 25 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1993), 113. 26 Husserl, Phantasy, 623. 27 James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, https://archive.org/details/finneganswake00joycuoft/page/n1267/mode/2up (accessed 12 May 2020). 28 Ibid., 651. 29 Ibid., 652. 30 Ibid., 652. 31 This is not to say, of course, that such things as mere travel narratives are precluded from using the first person or other ‘witnessing’ descriptive devices. The point is, rather, that in these cases, such devices are an enhancement of the communicative function of the narratives in question, and not – as in the literary kind – a necessary condition of its particular idiom of meaningfulness. It should also be noted that in some literary works, there is an actual narrator, who takes on the role usually played by the anonymous expositor (as in, for example, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, 1847). 32 Husserl, Phantasy, 652. 33 Ibid., 652. He suggests further that the notion of characteristic here involves ‘Characterizing in a time and the time itself, the level of culture, the sort of life and life-form of this quarter of the globe, of this city, and so on. The Berlin of Fontane, the Vienna of Schnitzler.’ 34 Ibid., 652–653. 35 Ibid., 653. 36 Ibid., 653.

162  Phenomenology of Literature, Theatre, Music 7 Ibid., 653. 3 38 Ibid., 653–654. 39 Ibid., 654. 40 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971), 17. 41 Husserl, Phantasy, 654. 42 Aylmer Maude translation,https://archive.org/stream/warandpeace030164mbp#page/ n181/mode/2up (accessed 29 January 2016). 43 Husserl, Phantasy, 456. 44 The exception is, of course, those plays that are written specifically for audio performance, such as Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood of 1953. However, in such cases, it might be argued that the possibility of a visually realized performance would take the drama to a higher level, and, of course, there have been many stage productions of the play (with props) since then. 45 Husserl, Phantasy, 338. 46 Ibid., 456. 47 Ibid., 585. 48 Ibid., 586. 49 Ibid., 613. 50 Ibid., 616. 51 Ibid., 616. 52 Ibid., 616–617. 53 Ibid., 616. 54 Ibid., 617. 55 Ibid., 618. 56 Ibid., 618. 57 Ibid., 619. 58 It might be objected that in some of Brecht’s plays, attention is drawn to the fact that the audience is witnessing a theatrical production, but this revelation of the work’s actual staged character is extremely rare. Indeed, the very fact that it is made available for display means that it could justifiably be regarded as an element in the play itself, rather than a genuine glimpse of the real-life conditions in which the play is performed. 59 Husserl, Phantasy, 620. 60 Ibid., 189. Here Husserl is referring specifically to the sonata, but his point concerns the music per se, rather than the specifics of sonata form. 61 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (Routledge, London and New York, 2004), 192. 62 Ibid., 192. 63 Ibid., 192. 64 Ibid., 192. 65 See Husserl, Phantasy, 190. 66 Ibid., 652. 67 Ibid., 653. 68 Ibid., 652. Here, he is referring to Schnitzler’s writing specifically, but as we saw earlier, he subsequently generalizes the point as an essential feature of art per se. 69 The phenomenology of film and of music is addressed in detail in our book The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower (Routledge, London and New York, 2019). For film, see 58–77; and for music, 113–137.

5 Final Review And Some Glimpses of the Digital

We shall now offer a few brief comments on Husserl’s phenomenology of aesthetic consciousness and phantasy overall. First, throughout our discussion, we have consistently drawn attention to a major weakness in his approach – namely that whilst recognizing the selectivity inherent in aesthetic judgment, he does not do full justice to the comparative horizon that this presupposes – a shortcoming that is hardly surprising given that his methodology is so avowedly phenomenological. Indeed, the very same criticism can be levelled at Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Dufrenne – whose methods, however, do not allow for the same excuse. Nevertheless, in all these cases, the addition of the comparative horizon could, in principle, be made in a way that is not in conflict with the respective thinker’s main position. Now, we also saw in the Introduction to this book that in the case of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, both thinkers fail to offer criteria that distinguishes art’s disclosure of philosophically significant ideas from philosophy itself. In a rough and ready way, it could be said that, for them, philosophy tries to describe things conceptually, whereas art tries to show truth by modeling it. But the problem is that both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s mature philosophies involve a ‘turn’ which comes, in effect, to see philosophy also as a means of showing our relation to being rather than simply conceptualizing it – which means that the critical question just asked is by no means answered but pushed back one remove. To answer it, both would need a well-developed account of the aesthetic which, of course, Husserl is able to offer us. It should be noted also that Husserl’s treatment of the aesthetic also deals with the limitations of Sartre’s approach, which is in so many respects amenable to Husserl’s position. The reason why Husserl overcomes these limitations is that he explains in detail how natural and non-artistic objects, become – as Sartre puts it – ‘analogons of themselves’ – and, in his explanation of conflict and unreality in the different art media, also offers a far more detailed account than Sartre was able to provide of the relation between irreality and the aesthetic object. DOI: 10.4324/9781003212553-6

164  Final Review Indeed, Husserl provides something else besides – something that rectifies a shortcoming in Heidegger’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, Dufrenne’s, and Sartre’s positions, but one that we did not mention in our original discussion. The aforementioned thinkers address art primarily as an exclusively high cultural phenomenon. They are concerned with what it reveals from its great summits, and through the deliverances of its Gods (Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, Beethoven, etc.,) rather than from the ‘ground-level’ being of such things as the physical image as such, and the fictional narrative per se, and even such things as the arrangement of objects in a room. Husserl does address these more basic phenomena, and even takes the trouble to get his mind dirty with discussions of reproductions of artworks, and mere reproductions of reproductions, and fairy tales and the like. The point is, then, that Husserl does not approach art as an already established, segregated domain of value, but as emergent from a domain of phantasy, a domain that is an integral part of our consciousness of the world and of which art is but one aspect. At the same time, however, Husserl is entirely cognizant of what phantasy can do when it does achieve aesthetic status, and his concepts of beauty and of the varieties of literature are especially important revelations of this. That Husserl approaches art and the aesthetic in such a broad way is the outcome of his commitment to phenomenological method. In Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, especially, he takes us through ceaseless investigation of the different apprehensions involved in phantasy, and how these relate to perception itself, and from these investigations generates a balanced account of the nature of aesthetic consciousness, and thereby, the character of artistic meaning. His distinction between physical images that merely refer us to their subject, and those that do so through making us dwell upon their image object’s manner of doing this, is, in itself, a sufficient basis for achieving the requisite distinction between mundane physical images and artistic ones. More importantly, it does this in a non-confrontational way. This inclusiveness is also found in Husserl’s serious attention to the aesthetics of nature and of the human body, issues that the other phenomenological approaches we have described address only in passing. Indeed, in this respect, his willingness to assign a role to putatively nonaesthetic phenomena is especially noteworthy. Husserl’s wide embrace also leads to a further important point. For (as we showed in Chapter 1), when Husserl talks about aesthetic consciousness, he often describes how it easily shifts into a non-aesthetic mode of consciousness – and perhaps even back again. Indeed, as well as the ‘still life’ example that we used to illustrate this, Husserl devotes continuous attention to switches of apprehension that occur throughout phantasy consciousness in all its idioms.

Final Review  165 Now, the existing literature on aesthetic experience usually treats it as though it were relatively straightforward – a kind of searchlight that securely illuminates its chosen object for such time as it wishes to, and then turns itself off. But, of course, aesthetic consciousness is far more elusive than this, and Husserl is the one philosopher whose aforementioned attentiveness to apprehension, in all its varieties, renders him wellequipped to disclose this elusiveness. What we are saying then, if that all across the board, Husserl’s account of aesthetic consciousness is probably the most inclusive one we have in terms of doing justice to its diversity vis-à-vis the kinds of object and idioms of apprehension involved. And this is not, of course, the end of the matter, for as we have shown, there is a wealth of highly original ideas throughout his treatments of the different individual media. In the case of visual representation, Husserl offers what is in effect a rich fourfold account of visual representation, and his emphasis on what we called the phenomenological subject is of profound import for any theory of visual representation in any context. Similar things can be said of his interpretations of the unreality of the physical image and his explanations of the role played by played by resemblance and ‘nonanalogizing’ features, including, of course, framing devices. Even a more familiar notion such as Husserl’s concept of ‘plastic form’ is recontextualizable in highly original ways through the ‘double halo’ of retention and protention. In terms of literature, Husserl’s descriptions of the specific forms of conflict that occur between perception and phantasy as realized through literary narrative, involve unusual ideas – especially in the way they foreground the importance of freedom in both the creation and reception of the work. The same things can be said of his discussion of the nondepictiveness of theatre, and the specific apprehensions and the distinctive conflicts involved in theatrical presentation. Perhaps the most important point of all to make in this final short review concerns the critical points made at the end of the relevant chapters. We have already pointed out the problem of the comparative horizon, but the more interesting fact is that – as we saw time and time again – Husserl offers us a wealth of individual ideas (even if only clues) that can be developed into arguments that are vital in explaining why aesthetic consciousness is something of such worth in human life. (The eternalization of the moment achieved in visual representation and the aesthetic significance of literary narrative as the embodiment of a quasi-transfinite view of the world are perfect examples of this.) And even more is possible. As a philosopher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Husserl could hardly have anticipated digital art. However, his ideas are in keeping with such developments in several key respects – including one already indicated that we will develop first. As we have already shown, Husserl’s phenomenological approach is

166  Final Review well adapted to the frequent changes of apprehension that permeate our perceptual life, and in particular, the different idioms of phantasy. This feature is especially relevant for digital art. Many digital artists do work involves that involves ‘printouts’ where the image object consists of inkbased three-dimensional forms with hyper-clear contours and colors, and equally precise contrasts of light and shadow. Gerhard Mantz’s ‘Avatar’ series offers a wealth of examples of this. Consider, for example, Der unsichtbare Rand (The Invisible Edge), where a red-haired teenage girl or young woman clad in a medieval costume is presented from behind, from the waist up.1 She is looking across a river with her posture suggesting apprehension (in the non-Husserlian sense) at what might be on the other side. The intense quiet green of her costume suggests some affinity with the riverbank and forest colors over the way, whilst the white illuminated areas of her costume and the ‘off-key’ pallidity of her skin reinforce a sense that she is ‘rooted to the spot’ – hovering indecisively, or even on the point of drawing back. The scene has overtones of some fairy-tale or medieval romance but no more than overtones. There is no iconographical subject as such. However, in the relation between the insistent foreground presence of the figure, and the forest beyond, an extraordinary sense of stillness is achieved. It is like one of those overcast days when a single moment can seem enhanced – heavy, even; and the sheer presence of things is amplified by the light conditions. In Mantz’s digital image, however, our apprehension of this familiar naturalness is subverted by our intuitive awareness that this really is only an image – a fact declared not only by the edge of the work but also by the unnatural pallor of the figure’s neck and exposed upper back, which, like the tones of the white fabric, declare that the image is digitally generated. This is the element of conflict or unreality that Husserl sees as basic to the physical image. But in the present case, these conflicting features are easily absorbed back into the fairy-tale overtones. They enhance our sense of it being an episode from such a tale, rather than just a picture of a female by a riverbank looking at a forest. The apprehension of unreality in other words here also engenders an apprehension of fiction of a specific kind. On these terms, then, the hyper-real dimension of the digital image means that whilst some nonanalogizing features are diminished, they emerge again through the unreal degree of clarity that is characteristically involved. The conflicts involved take on a heightened form. Such images are, accordingly, especially amenable to investigation in Husserlian terms. One imagines that Husserl himself would have had a ‘field day’ with them! Similar claims might be made in relation to one of the most distinctive features of digital art – its interactive idioms. This extends from computer games to installations where the viewer’s or (better) agent’s ways of responding actively change the flow of relevant information. In much of

Final Review  167 this, of course, our apprehensions will be geared towards realizing the specific tasks or possibilities that are made available, and thence, in such interactional contexts, apprehensional shifts will be at a premium. Nevertheless, whilst many non-aesthetic apprehensions will be involved, they take place within our sense of the parameters of the interactive basis of the work as a whole, and they will, in consequence, illuminate its aesthetic scope through the range of sensory and phantasy possibilities that it opens up. Indeed, this allows us to make an even more remarkable connection with Husserl. He was much aware of technological innovation in the sphere of phantasy presentation and, as we noted in Chapter 4, mentions film on a number of occasions. However, of more interest for present purposes are his remarks about the stereoscope. A stereoscope is an optical instrument composed of two eyepieces through which two photographs taken from slightly different points of view are combined to project a single image. The image has far more pronounced effects of depth and solidity than photographs individually considered. The device became popular in the late nineteenth century (especially through the Oliver Wendell Holmes version of it). Husserl was much intrigued by the stereoscopic image, which one can treat, like aesthetic objects, as ‘mere phenomena’, without adopting an existential stance, and yet treat them as ‘themselves’, and not as portraits of something else. It suffices that perception can pass over into a corresponding picturing (an act with like ‘matter,’ differently interpreted) yet without change in its positing character.2 Here, Husserl has noted the peculiar status of the stereoscopic image. We know that the stereoscope projects an image, and thence is in conflict with our immediate perceptual reality, but when living in the stereoscopic image we are immersed in the representation on terms that do not seem different from perception itself. Unlike mere illusion of the trompe l’oeuil kind, we do not mistake the stereoscopic scene for perceptual reality, but it has the same kind of compelling effect. Of course, at the time when Husserl was writing, those powerful means for the presentation of quasi-perceptions made available by audio-visual and digital technology had not yet emerged, and so the visual impact of the stereoscopic image and those produced by kindred instruments would have been far greater. However, what is of special interest is something that the stereoscope suggests to Husserl. He asks the question: is an apparency conceivable that has no place at all in the worldappearance, that, say, has no mode of belief or of illusion or even of doubt in ‘competition’ with another apparency, and so on? For

168  Final Review example, if we could voluntarily produce a visual hallucination in the dark, and if, in doing so all other sense apprehensions of what is sensed in the other sense fields would be without intuitive relation to what is so hallucinated? In such a way that an ‘appearance’ would hover before me without any consciousness of the situating reality, but without consciousness of the nullity surely related to it by means of its conflict with reality, as well as every other mode of belief that would give it a position in relation to the world and to the Ego.3 Husserl is hypothesizing, then, a situation when a phantasy intuition is presented without any manifestation of the ‘conflicts’ that would show it to be an image rather than the reality it presents itself as, and where it would also exclude activity from the other senses. The great interest of this ‘voluntary hallucination’ is that, through it, Husserl is, in effect, anticipating immersive digital phenomena – where the subject wears an optical visor or related device that completely shuts out any sense of the immediate world and thence immerses our vision in the quasi-world of the particular virtual reality program that it projects. An especially good example of this is William Latham and Stephen Todd’s Mutator VR (an ongoing project). Here access to the virtual reality is provided by a headset, and two hand controllers. Through this, the agent can explore a virtual world of the following kind. Starting with a simple cornucopia form, the Mutator code introduces random ‘per-mutations’ in order to generate increasingly complex three-dimensional entities that resemble fantastical, futuristic organisms. The works refer us to Giger-esque ancient fossils, molecular structures, heavy metal architecture and Escher-like spaceconundrums. Latham describes this process as ‘evolution driven by aesthetics.’4 There are some VR programs that take the dimension of immersion much further. Noteworthy in this respect is Char Davies’s Ephémère of 1998 with a user interface that involves not only a head-mounted display but a full-body body outfit that enables a sense of immersion in an enveloping 360 degree space. The head mounted technology allows the immersant’s breathing and sense of balance to direct their navigation through the virtual environment. By breathing in, he or she floats; by breathing out, he or she seems to fall. As to the virtual quasi-world involved, Davies describes an aspect of it as follows (Figure 5.1). Throughout, the various elements of trees, rocks, seeds, body organs, etc, come into being, linger and pass away. Their emergings and withdrawals depend on the immersant’s vertical position, proximity, slowness of movement, and steadiness/duration of gaze, as well

Final Review  169

Figure 5.1  Char Davies. Seeds, Ephémère (1998). Digital still captured in real time through HMD (head-mounted display), during live performance of immersive virtual environment Ephémère.

as the passage of time: for example, in the earth, seeds sprout when gazed upon for any extended length of time, rewarding patient observation with germination, inviting entry into the luminous interior space of their bloom.5 Now, because VR immersion involves the immersant acting on the virtual reality as well as simply beholding it this invites many questions about the Ego apprehensions that are involved for, in these experiences, the ‘lived-in’ aspect is of a sustained and profound kind and, in Davies’s works, overwhelmingly so. Husserl suggests that all of the Ego’s experiences are occurences actually posited in internal consciousness. Except that we do not exercise reflection and “do not have to carry out” the positing.6 However, in phantasy consciousness things are more complex. I can have a world belonging to phantasy hover before me. Moreover, since this world presupposes a center of apprehension at which I continually place myself, I will have in general and perhaps even necessarily a place in the phantasy world as phantasied Ego, quasi-seeing the phantasied world from the phantasied Ego’s standpoint. But then

170  Final Review we have precisely two Egos, the Ego of the Phantasy world, and the actual Ego, to which the act of reproducing belongs. And likewise we have the duality of Ego-experiences, those that belong to the phantasy Ego – now meagerly, now vitally and in abundance – and those that belong to the phantasying Ego.7 Applying the position that Husserl formulates here, one might say that, in the case of digital immersion phenomena, our normal pre-reflective positings of actual Ego undergo significant modification. We have the virtual phantasy Ego who ‘lives in’ a world where breathing in leads upwards, and breathing out leads down. And we have the real Ego who does the act of phantasying – except that here there is a particular complication. In literature, the actual Ego enters a temporally realized phantasying mode – but of a non-intuitive kind, insofar as a poem or novel does not involve sensory presentation in the way that visual representations or music do. In digital immersion, however, we have a temporal realization of sensory intuitions where the immersant has the power to affect how those intuitions configure themselves – in a way of course that physical images and film do not. This means that in immersive phantasy, the role of the Ego is one that will be apprehended in different ways – ways that, in part, will be dependent on the particular character of the program. Indeed, there is a further issue. Whereas our sense of the artist’s creative agency is manifest in the form of style in the other arts, in the immersive program, an entirely different awareness of the artist’s presence can be involved insofar as in this art form, the phantasy Ego will take a far more central role through the very effect of immersion. However, Husserl’s phenomenology allows us the means whereby the different apprehensions of Ego involved in such works, can be effectively negotiated. Finally, it should be emphasized that these critical developments of Husserl’s aesthetic thought by no means exhaust the further potential of his ideas. There is ample scope for addressing his discussion of the different idioms of apprehension, and in particular, the role of the Ego in aesthetic consciousness in far greater detail than we have been able to do here. In terms of solving problems in aesthetics, working with Husserl is a task only just begun.

Notes 1 See http://www.gerhard-mantz.de/avatars/avatare-2019/ (accessed 21 May 2020). 2 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol II, trans. J.N. Findlay (London and New York: Routledge Kegan-Paul/Humanities Press, 1982), 646. 3 Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 293–294.

Final Review  171 4 The Mutator VR website is at http://mutatorvr.co.uk/video/ (accessed 21 May 2020). 5 The Ephémère project is detailed on Davies’s website at http://www. immersence.com/ (accessed 21 May 2020). 6 Husserl, Phantasy, 558. 7 Ibid., 556.

Bibliography

Books Bell, Clive. Art (Chatto and Windus, London, 1914). Benward, Bruce, and Saker, Marilyn. Music: In Theory and Practice, Vol. I (McGraw Hill, New York, 2003). Bradley, F.H. Essays on Truth and Reality (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1914). Bradley, F.H. Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1893). Crowther, Paul. Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (Oxford University Press, New York and London, 2007). Crowther, Paul. Phenomenologies of Art and Vision: A Post-Analytic Turn (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Crowther, Paul. Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2009). Crowther, Paul. The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower (Routledge, London and New York, 2019). Crowther, Paul. The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2010). Crowther, Paul. The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002). Crowther, Paul. What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture (Routledge, London and New York, 2017). Dufrenne, Mikel. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1973). Elliston, Frederick and McCormick, Peter (ed.) Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1977). Ferencz-Flatz, Christian. Sehen als-ob: Husserls Bildlehre zwischen Ästhetik und Pragmatik (Traugott Bautz, Germany, 2016). Fink, Eugen. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995). Fry, Roger. Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (Chatto and Windus/ Books for Libraries Press, New York, 1968). Fry, Roger. Vision and Design (Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 1981). Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion (Phaidon Press, London, 1977). Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to the Theory of Symbols (Hackett and Co., Indianapolis, 1976).

Bibliography  173 Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche Volume One: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981). Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper and Row, New York, 1975). Hepburn, Ronald W. ‘Wonder and Other Essays (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1984). Hildebrand, Adolf. The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (G.E. Stechert and Co., New York, 1907). Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Boston, London, 1982). Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (George Allen and Unwin/Humanities Press, London and New York, 1969). Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations, Vol II, trans. J.N. Findlay (Routledge Kegan-Paul/Humanities Press, London and New Jersey, 1970a). Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenology, image consciousness, and memory (18981925), trans. John B. Brough (Springer, Dordrecht, 2005). Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1970b). Husserl, Edmund. The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. W.P. Alston (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1973). Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1966). Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, London and New York, 2000). Kind, Amy (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (Routledge, London and New York, 2016). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1993). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Prose of the World (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1973). Parry, Joseph D. (ed.) Art and Phenomenology (Routledge, London and New York, 2010). Sartre, J-P. Essays in Aesthetics, trans. Wayne Gaskin (Peter Owen, London, 1964). Sartre, J-P. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Sartre, J-P. Sartre – Key Concepts, ed. Jack Reynolds and Steve Churchill (Acumen/ Routledge, London and New York, 2013). Sepp, H.R. and Embree, Lester (eds.) Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics (Springer, Dordrecht, 2010). Steinbock, Anthony. Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1996). Wolfflin, Heinrich. The Principles of Art History, trans. M. Hottinger (Dover Publications, New York, 1950). Wollheim, Richard. Painting as an Art (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1987). Zahavi, Dan (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, London and New York, 2010).

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Online Resources Davies, Char. The Ephémère project can be found on Davies’s website at http:// www.immersence.com/ (accessed 21 May 2020). Joyce, James. Finnegan’s Wake, https://archive.org/details/finneganswake00joycuoft/page/n1267/mode/2up (accessed 12 May 2020). Kurg, Regina-Nino. Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Image Consciousness, Aesthetic Consciousness, and Art. https://doc.rero.ch/record/233307/files/KurgR.pdf (accessed 31 May 2020). Latham, William, and Todd, Stephen. The Mutator VR website is at http://mutatorvr.co.uk/video/ (accessed 21 May 2020). Mantz, Gerhard. The Avatar series can be found at http://www.gerhard-mantz. de/avatars/avatare-2019/(accessed 21 May 2020). Plath, Sylvia. ‘The Mirror,’ https://allpoetry.com/poem/8498499-Mirror-by-Sylvia-Plath (accessed 12 May 2020). Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, translated by Aylmer Maude, https://archive.org/ stream/warandpeace030164mbp#page/n181/mode/2up (accessed 29 January 2016).

Index

Page numbers followed by n indicate notes. acting 150–155; see also theatre, performance actual form (in Hildebrand) 93–94, 125 Adorno, Theodor 61n25 aesthetic appearance 30, 32–33; absorption 5, 23, 25, 48–49, 140–141, 151–152, 157; see also living in; apperception 25; complementarity with non-aesthetic content 30–32; configuration 32, 37; consciousness 23–61, 78, 91–92, 98–99, 101–102, 109–112, 119, 130, 140, 145, 157, 164–165, 170; contemplation 19, 44, 109–110; delight 27–28, 45, 91–92; disinterestedness 18, 24, 31–33, 38–39, 49, 57, 62n32, 98–101, 121; effect 37, 46, 49, 144; empathy 48, 112, 122; feeling 32–33, 36–37, 39, 91, 101, 109, 111; form 38, 60, 118–131; image 44, 46, 62n58, 91, 95; interpretation 25, 49–50, 71, 73–74, 80, 90, 97, 100, 108, 111, 137, 140–141, 157–158, 165, 167; intuition 118–120; judgment 31, 38, 41, 163; manner of appearing and the How of presentedness 24, 26–46, 54–60, 78, 82, 92, 94–95, 98, 101, 110, 112, 119–120, 130, 135, 150, 157; of nature 18–20, 31–41, 56–57, 123, 163; object 16–20, 25, 31, 33–34, 36, 41, 163; phantasy 41–52, 160; pleasure 24, 26–27, 31, 57; unity 26, 31–32, 34, 39, 60, 61n13, 78–84, 94–95, 125, 134–135, 137, 141, 148, 150, 153, 156–157, 159; valuation 24, 26, 33, 38, 119

analogizing properties 69, 76, 78, 84, 109–112 apperception 9, 138, 152 apprehension 3–4, 7, 9, 17, 28, 35, 40, 59, 65, 70, 72, 74–76, 80–88, 108, 111, 124–125, 135, 140, 145, 152, 157, 160, 164–166, 169–170 art (generally) 10–20, 23–26, 33, 36, 41–61; abstract 102–108; comparative horizon for 57–58, 131, 163, 165; see also digital work; fiction; literature; music; pictorial image; poetry; sculpture; theatre artistic 12, 14, 16, 21, 35, 42–44, 49, 53–54, 57–59, 86, 109, 112, 118–121, 130–131, 135, 138, 142, 146–147, 151, 154, 157, 159, 164; creativity 43, 112, 130; intentions 25, 34, 46, 49, 59, 70–71, 90–91, 138; materials 43, 46, 49, 93, 111, 119; objectivity 27, 53, 136, 141; originality 57, 102, 109, 158; subjectivity 137 beauty 26, 33–35, 37–38, 41–42, 53–54, 101, 123; see also aesthetic of nature; artistic 18–20, 53–55, 60, 147–149, 164 Beauvoir, Simone de 69, 72, 114 Beckett, Samuel: Not I 30, 61 Beethoven, Ludwig van 25, 155–156, 164 belief 80, 98–99, 115n37, 119, 151, 153, 167–168 Bell, Clive 118, 120 Benward, Bruce, and Saker, Marilyn 52 Bradley, F.H 60, 63n106 Brecht, Berthold 162n58

176 Index Brough, John 20n2, 67–69, 72, 113n5, 114n14, 114n15, 114n18, 114n25, 114n31, 117n110, 160n1 Burgkmair, Hans: Emperor Maximillian 1st 73 Cartier-Bresson, Henri: Simone de Beauvoir 69, 72, 114 Cezanne, Paul 13–14, 164 cinematographic 86 Collingwood, Robin 43, 61n25 comparative horizon see art computer art see digital works Crane, Walter: Glengariffe Estuary 79 Croce, Benedetto 43 Crowther, Paul 63n87, 63n101, 114n24, 114n30, 117n108, 117n111, 117n118, 133n34 The David Vases: 27–28 Davies, Char: Seeds, Ephémère 168–170 de Heem, Jan Davidsz: Vase of Flowers 29, 42 digital works 166–170 disinterestedness see aesthetic disinterestedness double halo (of protention and retention) 94–97, 101, 110, 165 drawing 43, 66, 74, 76–77, 86, 92, 110, 121 Durer, Albrecht: The Knight, Death, and the Devil 44–46, 95, 97 Ego 3, 9, 141, 168–170 Eldridge, Patrick 114n19 Ellingson, Amy: Variation (white/oak) No.2 107–108 embodied subject (the) 13, 16, 36, 84, 124–125, 143, 158–159 engraving see printed exhibiting (Husserl’s technical sense) 87–90 expression 19, 34, 36, 42, 50, 58, 93, 121, 136–137, 139, 155, 160 expressive 17, 30, 50, 113, 157, 160 fairy tale 49–50, 138–139, 145, 147, 164, 166 feeling 3, 10, 16, 18, 25, 28–33, 36–37, 39–40, 46–50, 59–60, 91, 94, 101, 109, 111, 121–122, 139–140, 148, 150, 155, 158, 161n24; artist’s 48–50, 121–122; see also aesthetic feelings

Ferencz-Flatz, Christian 20n3 fiction 49, 53, 83, 100, 135, 138–160, 164, 166 finitude 10, 14, 61, 112 Fink, Eugen 132n21 formalism 118 framing devices 50, 66–68, 77, 80, 82–83, 95, 105–106, 108, 110, 144, 146, 152–153, 158, 165 Friedrich, Caspar David: The Monk by the Sea 46–48 Fry, Roger 118–119–31, 132n18 Gombrich, Ernst 67, 74 Goodman, Nelson 114-n31, 115n36, 136–137 Heidegger, Martin 1–2, 10–12, 14, 16, 22n36, 163 Hepburn, Ronald W. 40 Hildebrand, Adolf 93–94, 113n10, 117n93, 125 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 118, 131n1 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 167 Husserl, Edmund 1–10, 17–121, 123–170; his phenomenological method and key concepts 1–10 iconic 43, 45, 50, 52, 76, 85, 90, 113n1, 134, 150; see also pictorial image iconographical 69–72, 88, 97, 114n19, 117n105, 166; see also pictorial image ideal 25, 38, 43, 55, 58–59, 61, 63n106, 70, 87, 92, 111, 113, 136, 147, 149, 156–158 imagination 5, 20n2, 26, 40, 56, 76, 115n63, 116n65, 121, 139, 153; see also phantasy immersive digital phenomena 168–170 individual (Husserl’s technical sense) 4–6, 9, 58–60, 112 infinite/infinity 5–6, 9, 58–60, 94, 109, 112, 122, 141, 149 intention 2, 4, 8, 89, 139; see also artistic intentions intentionality 2–4, 9, 17, 94, 119–120, 139, 144 irreality 17–20, 155–156, 163 Jansen, Julia 20n2 Joyce, James: Finnegan’s Wake 143–144 Judd, Donald: Untitled 106

Index  177 Kandinsky, Wassily: Landscape with Factory Chimney 104; MunichSchwabing with the Church of St-Ursula 103–104 Kant, Immanuel 2, 14–15, 22n36, 22n37, 24–27, 31–33, 38, 56–57, 61n8, 61n12, 61n25, 61n31 Kurg/Mion, Regina-Nino 20n3, 113n11, 116n65, 117n112 landscape 13, 35, 39–41, 46–47, 70, 72, 94, 100–101, 103–104, 106, 112, 122, 135, 146, 158; see also aesthetic of nature Latham, William, and Todd, Stephen: Mutator VR 168 literature 18–19, 23, 49–50, 54, 123, 134–149, 161, 165; genres of 145–149, 158; narrative 23, 49, 132, 134–138, 141, 144–146, 149, 151–152, 158–160, 165; unreality of (anomaly, conflict, contradiction, and nullity) 137–145, 158–160 living in 5–6, 23, 30, 32, 36, 40, 42, 45, 48–50, 60, 75, 135, 139, 143, 150–151, 157, 167, 169; see also aesthetic absorption Mantz, Gerhard: Der unsichtbare Rand (The Invisible Edge) 166 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1–2, 12–16, 143, 163–164 Mikel Dufrenne 2, 10, 14–17, 163–164 mood 25, 46–50; ontic 47–49, 52 music 19, 50–52, 63n81, 134, 155– 157, 159, 162n60, 162n69, 170 nature see aesthetic of nonanalogizing properties 21, 67, 77–81, 84, 86, 101–102, 109, 111–112, 115n63, 31, 150, 165–166 novel (the) 18, 49–50, 54, 134, 136–138, 143–145, 147–149, 157, 159–160, 170 originality see artistic painting 7, 9–14, 17–18, 22n44, 35, 43, 47, 65–66, 68, 76–80, 83, 86, 90, 92, 99–100, 103, 110–111, 115n37, 117n118, 119, 121, 129–130, 131n1, 150–151 Parry, Joseph D.(ed.) 21n28

perception 2–10, 13–14, 16, 21n9, 21n20, 23–26, 33, 51, 56, 58–60, 64–65, 67, 72, 74, 76–78, 80–81, 83–91, 93–94, 105, 108–110, 112–114, 154, 159, 166–167 phantasy 5–10, 23, 35, 41–42, 50; iconic 43, 45, 50, 76, 85, 90, 113n1, 134, 150; see also aesthetic phantasy; digital works; image object; literature; lived in; music; theatre performance phenomenological: aesthetics 10–20, 21n28; intimacy 52, 160; for phenomenological subject see pictorial image; reduction 3, 118–132 phenomenological subject of 20n3, 69–75, 80–81, 88–90, 97, 102, 105–106, 108, 114n24, 120, 130, 165; seeing in 67–75, 108, 113n11, 114n14, 114n19; static quality of 84, 86, 95–96, 101, 111, 125; unreality of (anomaly, conflict, contradiction, and nullity) 75–91, 109–113, 131; see also iconic; iconographic; threefoldness; twofoldness photography 6, 13, 34, 41, 46, 67–72, 74, 77, 84–86, 89–90, 94–95, 97, 101, 112–113, 116n71, 117n110, 119, 134, 167 physical imaging 6–7, 9, 21n18, 43, 54, 65, 67, 73, 76, 80, 86, 92, 116n65, 137, 152, 164–166, 170 pictorial image 64–133, 150–151; fourfold structure of 66–67, 113n9,165; image object 7, 41, 43–46, 54, 64–95, 98, 101–102, 106–113, 115n58, 115n63, 120, 151–153, 166; image subject 44, 46, 68, 71, 75–76, 84, 88, 98, 153; phantoms of 85–86 picturesque 35, 37 planarity 111, 122 plastic form 67, 74, 84, 90, 92–93, 101–104, 106, 110–111, 115n63, 125–127, 130, 165 Plath, Sylvia: The Mirror 136–137, 143, 161n7 poetry 10, 18, 23, 25, 50, 54, 58, 134–137, 143, 145, 149, 157, 159–160, 161n7, 170; see also literature portrait 70, 76, 89–90, 99–100, 117n105, 167

178 Index Poussin, Nicholas: Achilles discovered by Ulysses amongst the daughters of Lycomedon 129–130 pre-reflective 3, 5, 13, 23, 40, 75, 82, 101, 152, 170 printed word 123, 138 prints 44, 65–66, 68, 73, 86, 88, 95–97, 114n26, 110, 123, 138, 166 protention 4, 10, 36, 51–52, 57, 94–97, 101, 110, 165 protentional and retentional halo see double halo Raphael: The Sistine Madonna 95–97, 111; Theologia 65–67, 71, 88, 90 reflection 3–5, 10, 23–25, 32, 40, 84, 129, 159–160, 169 reproduction 46, 62n58, 72, 88–92, 102, 141, 150–151, 164 resemblance see analogizing properties retention 4, 10, 51–52, 57, 67, 94–97, 110, 165 Sartre, J-P 1–2, 17–20, 22n43, 134, 147, 155–157, 163–164 Schopenhauer, Arthur 61n25 sculpture 6, 43, 67–68, 70–71, 82, 84–87, 90, 92–95, 97, 101, 105– 107, 111–113, 125, 134; unreality of (anomaly, conflict, contradiction, and nullity) 85–87 sensation 4–5, 21n9, 58–59, 73–74, 80, 87, 93, 121–122 Sepp, H.R. and Embree, Lester (eds.) 21n28 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 18–20 Simmel, Georg 82–83 Stawarska, Beata 22n43 Steinbock, Anthony 1 stereoscope 167 still-life 28–29, 42, 56 subject-object relation 15 sublime 37, 71, 88–89

symbol 24, 41, 43–44, 49–50, 61, 68–69, 83–84, 95, 112, 136, 149 synthesis/synthetic 3–4, 7–10, 82, 95, 124, 144, 156, 158 temporality 4–5, 8, 15, 51–52, 58–59, 81, 108, 134, 136, 150, 156–157, 159–160, 170 theatre: performance 25, 43, 150–155, 157, 160, 162n44, 162n58, 168–169; props and scenery 30, 135, 150–151, 162n44; unreality of (anomaly, conflict, contradiction, and nullity) 150–155; see also acting threefoldness 68, 114n14 time-consciousness see temporality Tissot, James: Miss Golly Wilson 76–77 Titian: Sacred and Profane Love 70–71, 90 tokens 23 Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace 149 transcendence/transcendent 13, 16, 125 transcendental 2, 20n2 trans-finite 159–160 transperceptual (in abstact art) 105–108 trompe l’oeuil 81, 115n37, 167 twofoldness 67–68 type 23 Van Gogh, Vincent 10–12 Veronese, Paolo 98; Feast in the House of Levi 98–99 von Lembach, Franz: Portrait of Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck 99–100 Wolfflin, Heinrich 83 Wollheim, Richard 67–69, 74–76, 113n11, 114n30, 115n37