

Edmund Husserl: Phantasy, Image Consciousness,
and Memory (1898–1925)

Translated by John B. Brough (Edmund Husserl, Collected
Works, vol. XI), Dordrecht: Springer, 2005, 723 pp,
ISBN-101-4020-2641-2 (HB)

Eduard Marbach

Published online: 1 August 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Arguably one of the most astonishing abilities of human beings is our capacity to

refer to and to occupy ourselves with things, people, events and states of affairs that

are not at all actually present here and now. We do so in our private thoughts, in

imagining, remembering, planning, or publicly by means of images, plays,

languages and other sign systems. In all such activities we normally understand

without especially having to reflect that we do not simply perceive something

present with our senses, but that in one way or another we have something as it were

in view or in mind that is not itself present. At the same time, while knowing that we

are occupied with something that we do not take to be really present, it nonetheless

feels like we are standing in the actuality here and now. Even what we merely

present in thought as not at all itself being really present here and now, or what we

likewise experience as being represented in an image, as played, described, or

otherwise signified, is given to us only in contrast to that which counts as being

really present. If we were to lose this consciousness of contrast, we would be

dreaming, or be subject to an illusion or hallucination, and in the process we would

take the things, people, events and states of affairs to which we would be turned to

be really given—instead of taking them to be merely imagined, remembered, or to

be presented as merely possible, as represented in an image, in a symbolic play, or

verbally, and so on.

In short, we human beings do not only live in the present, perceiving it with our

senses, we are also able, in manifold ways, to transcend the always present sensory

actuality and to be active in one or another form of re-presentation (Vergegenwärti-
gung). In his lectures of 1904/1905, the third main piece of which on ‘‘Phantasy and
Image Consciousness’’ makes up Text No. 1 of Phantasy, Image Consciousness,
and Memory, Husserl says:

E. Marbach (&)
Institut für Philosophie, Universität Bern, Länggassstrasse 49a, Bern 9, Switzerland

e-mail: eduard.marbach@philo.unibe.ch

123

Husserl Stud (2012) 28:225–237

DOI 10.1007/s10743-012-9110-9


Everyone knows what it means to re-present an object to oneself, to bring it

forward in an internal image, to make it hover before one. Everyone uses the

expression ‘‘to imagine’’ [einbilden], and thus knows to some extent what
is essential to the case. But only implicitly, I am sorry to say (Hua XXIII,

p. 17/18).

The point of the texts in the volume of Edmund Husserl’s Collected Works1 here
reviewed is primarily to clarify, by way of reflective analyses of consciousness,

diverse phenomena of re-presenting (Vergegenwärtigen) as against perceiving.2 In a
wide usage of the term, Husserl often understands phantasy (memory included)
quite generally as ‘‘consciousness characterized as re-presentation (Vergegenwärti-
gung)’’ (Hua X, p. 45/47); he also says:

Consciousness of what is not present [Nichtgegenwärtigkeits-Bewusstsein]
belongs to the essence of phantasy. We live in a present; we have a perceptual

field of regard. In addition, however, we have appearances that present

something not present lying entirely outside this field of regard (Hua XXIII,

p. 58f./63).

The texts in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory pertain to a topic that had
been central for Husserl from early on, namely to elaborate for given species of

experiences the typically phenomenological definition of essentially different modes
of consciousness, that is, of the intentional relation to something objective. More

precisely, in the texts of this volume it is a matter of determining within the class of

presentations (Vorstellungen)—in contrast to the classes of judgments and
emotions—the specifically different characters of the intention of the intuitive
(anschauliche) presentations in contrast to conceptual (begriffliche) presentations.
One of the chief tasks for the analysis of the domain of intuitive mental acts consists

in setting off the diverse forms of intuitive re-presentations (anschauliche
Vergegenwärtigungen)—perhaps better ‘‘representifications’’—from the basic form
of intuitive consciousness, namely, perception or presentification (Gegenwärti-
gung), by bringing into relief the intentional characteristics of these various forms.

It is generally characteristic of intuitive presentations that in them an object
appears (erscheint), and this is either the presented object itself (selbst) or an image
(Bild) of the latter. This stands in contrast to the consciousness of signification
(Bedeutungsbewusstsein), in which an object or a state of affairs is meant or
signified (gemeint), without having to appear. It can only be mentioned here that for
Husserl all these investigations into the forms of intuitive and conceptual or

significational presentations stand in a foundational connection. It was Husserl’s

view from early on that the higher-level conceptual and categorial acts of meaning,

signification and judgment, in which cognition comes to pregnant expression, are

founded in the sensuous, intuitive acts of perception and their modifications. The

1
Originally published from the handwritten, mostly shorthand Nachlass in German as Hua XXIII.

Throughout this review, references to this volume and its translation will be given as Hua XXIII followed

first by the German pagination and then the English pagination, separated by a slash.
2

Parts of the text of this review are taken over and translated into English from my ,,Einleitung des

Herausgebers‘‘ in Hua XXIII and from my ,,Einleitung‘‘ to Husserl (2006).

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analysis of these intuitive acts and their intellective structuring is crucially involved

in Husserl’s studies on the theory of meaning and judgment.
3

In his philosophical phenomenology, as is well known, Husserl argued that prior
to all causal-explanatory, psychological, and (increasingly nowadays) cognitive and
affective neuroscientific investigations of our experiential life and actions, the
phenomena themselves as they occur in our conscious life are to be subjected to a
differential analysis. This is the task of ‘‘a description not at all appreciated for its

true importance and difficulty’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 13/12). Time and again Husserl

stressed the difficulties and peculiarities of the reflective descriptive analysis

required for doing phenomenology. Descriptively he attempted step-by-step to

define the conceptual nature of conscious experiences of distinct kinds on the basis

of those inner characteristics that give rise to essential generalizations and thus to

concept formations. In Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, for example,
when he starts examining the—at first glance plausible—‘‘notion that phantasy
presentation can be interpreted as image presentation’’ in his lectures of 1904/1905
(Hua XXIII, Nr. 1, §8, note 1, p. 16/note 2, p. 18), he points out:

To begin with, we compare as far as possible the two sorts of imaginings and

seek to make clear to ourselves the common element in image presentation.

We want to begin gradually and with the greatest possible caution. For as easy

as the analysis at first appears, the difficulties that subsequently come to light

and gradually require many modifications in what we earlier accepted and

many new distinctions in what we earlier took to be simple are just as great

(Hua XXIII, p. 17f./19).

And Husserl immediately adds the following general remark:

Indeed, this is universally the peculiarity of phenomenological analysis. Every

step forward yields new points of view from which what we have already

discovered appears in a new light, so that often enough what we were

originally able to take as simple and undivided presents itself as complex and

full of distinctions (Hua XXIII, p. 18/19).

It is a philosophically most intriguing and absorbing experience (though no doubt at

times a quite frustrating one), when dealing with the shorthand manuscripts from

Husserl’s Nachlass, that we as readers are able to attend to creative thinking and
writing processes in unadorned form, to clarifications gradually reached, but also to

their failures and aporias. In a letter of October 1904 to his teacher Franz Brentano,

Husserl wrote:

I am certain in advance that a large part of what I have written is erroneous;

but equally certain that there were errors that had once to be tried out, once to

be ventured. We will not find definite truth in the foundations without having

seriously thought through all possibilities. But only he thinks through a

possibility wholly seriously who believes in it (quoted in Hua XXIII, p. lii).

3
See, e.g., Hua XL, especially Sect. B. Urteil und Vorstellung, p. 249ff. and Sect. D. Urteil und

Anschauung bzw. Wahrnehmung, p. 353ff. Also Husserl (1954).

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Such a putting to the test of possibilities is typical of Husserl’s ‘‘analytic

phenomenology’’ (Hua XIX/1, p. 17) and it is also very much at work in Phantasy,
Image Consciousness, and Memory. Both understanding and evaluating the
argumentation in these texts require a high degree of reconstructive thinking. In

the course of this enactment it is not only a matter of checking the logical

consequences among the statements. In order to assess their veracity it is also

necessary that one perform for oneself reflective observation of the objects of

phenomenological analyses, that is, of the phenomena of consciousness with which

the statements are concerned and which are exemplified by means of suitable

instances.

John B. Brough’s admirable translation into English of all of Husserl’s texts and

appendices of the German edition of Husserliana XXIII is a most generous gift to
the philosophical community worldwide. The translation is also valuable to readers

able to understand the German originals. Judging from this reviewer’s case, it can

indeed be an illuminating experience for a native German speaker somewhat

familiar with Husserl’s often highly convoluted texts to reacquaint himself or

herself with Husserl’s exploratory thinking when it is made available in such a well-

considered translation. Brough had already produced a highly acclaimed translation

into English of Husserl’s demanding texts On the Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), first published 1990 as volume IV
in Edmund Husserl. Collected Works, and accompanied it with a very informative
and philosophically challenging introduction. His Husserl expertise, already evident

there, is borne out again in Brough’s new translation and in his impressive

‘‘Translator’s Introduction’’ to Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, in
which he discusses a number of issues also addressed below. Far beyond the narrow

circle of Husserl scholars, students of the philosophically closely related topics

treated in Husserl’s texts should count themselves lucky to have them made

available in such excellent translation. I cannot help but wonder what, for example,

Colin McGinn’s fine study, Mindsight. Image, Dream, Meaning (2004), might have
become if the author had already known of Brough’s translation, published one year

later. Perhaps it would have prompted McGinn to draw on Husserl’s analyses and

include him among the ‘‘philosophers as diverse as Sartre, Wittgenstein, and

Collingwood’’ who, ‘‘in the twentieth century […] paid extensive attention to
imagination’’ (McGinn 2004, p. 1)!

In the ‘‘Einleitung des Herausgebers’’ to Hua XXIII I provided an account of the

history of Husserl’s texts in the volume, of the historical origin of the

phenomenology of intuitions (Anschauungen), and in particular of the development
of problems in Husserl’s phenomenology of intuitive re-presentations (representif-

ications) (Hua XXIII, pp. xxv–lxxxi). Within the limits of the present review, let me

seize the opportunity of singling out two problem areas which, even after more than
thirty years, strike me as being among Husserl’s philosophically most interesting

contributions to consciousness studies, the analytical subtlety of which can be

gathered from this collection of texts.

With an eye on Husserl’s development after his lectures on phantasy and image

consciousness of 1904/1905, it is indeed very intriguing to see that some of the main

results with which Husserl seemed to be happy at the end of the lectures were quite

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radically put into question by himself shortly afterwards and were gradually and

substantially refined in later texts included in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and
Memory. The analytical distinction between two forms of presentation—phantasy
and image consciousness—provides, I think, a lasting gain of insight into the
phenomenological situation, undercutting the initially assumed parallelism of

phantasy and image consciousness which took them both to be an image
presentation (Bildlichkeitsvorstellung). This is not the case, however, either (1)
with regard to the determination of the phantasy presentation in itself and as such, or

(2) with regard to the determination of the image presentation in itself and as such.

Regarding (1), the phenomenology of phantasy: Towards the end of his analysis
in 1904/1905, after decisively arguing in favor of ‘‘the essential distinction between

imagination (Imagination) in the proper sense (perceptual imagination), and
imagination understood as phantasy (Phantasie)’’ (Hua XXIII, Chap. 8, p. 82ff/
89ff.), Husserl concludes: ‘‘The phantasy appearance, the simple phantasy

appearance unencumbered by any imaging built on it, relates to its object just as

straightforwardly [einfältig] as perception does’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 85/92). And
especially first with regard to ‘‘clear, perfectly adequate phantasies’’ or memories—

that is, ‘‘without troubling ourselves about obscure phantasies’’—he added:

Now it is true of clear phantasies that a pure re-presentational consciousness
[reines Vergegenwärtigungsbewusstsein] is brought about in them on the/basis
of phantasms and the apprehension objectivating the phantasms. Objectivating

the phantasms does not constitute, in advance, an image object that hovers
before one and even appears as present; on the contrary, what appears is

immediately something that is not present4 […]. In itself […] the phantasy
presentation [Phantasievorstellung] does not contain a manifold intention
[keine mehrfältige Intention], re-presentation is an ultimate mode of intuitive
objectivation [Vergegenwärtigung ist ein letzter Modus intuitiver Vorstel-
lung], just like perceptual objectivation [Wahrnehmungsvorstellung], just like
presentation [Gegenwärtigung] (Hua XXIII, p. 85f./92f.—emphasis partly
mine).

However, precisely this result will be reversed by Husserl just a few years later. On

the basis of a deeper analysis of the phenomena, taking into account internal time-

consciousness, he will elaborate a radically new description of the intentional

structure of phantasy as consciousness of re-presentation, with the help of the

concept of reproductive modification of experiences. The texts grouped in No. 2,
‘‘From the theory of representation [Repräsentation] in phantasy and memory to the
introduction of the doctrine of reproduction or double re-presentation [doppelte
Vergegenwärtigung],’’ together with the texts No. 3 through No. 13 and the
corresponding appendices, all written between about 1904 up to about 1912 (Hua

XXIII, pp. 170–300/207–361), permit us to see into Husserl’s search for a more

differentiated analysis of pure re-presentational consciousness. The new analysis is

then clearly brought to bear in research manuscripts from 1911 and 1912, published

4
Translation slightly amended from ‘‘what immediately appears is something that is not present’’ (p. 93);

the German text reads: ‘‘das Erscheinende ist unmittelbar das Nichtgegenwärtige’’ (p. 86).

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in the volume as Nos. 14, 15 and 16 and corresponding appendices (Hua XXIII,

pp. 301–485/363–579).

To illustrate this achievement of clarification in Husserl’s analyses of the

consciousness of re-presentation, consider for example the following passages:

‘‘Hence we must say: Every experience admits of a fundamental modification. It is

called the reproductive modification, and in relation to it the unmodified experience
itself is called impressional experience’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 330/402), explicated in a
note thus:

Internal consciousness is impression in relation to every experience: every

experience is impressional. Every reproductive modification is the reproduc-

tion of an internally ‘‘impressionally conscious’’ experience; the reproduction

itself is impressionally conscious (Hua XXIII, p. 330, note 3/p. 402, note 4).
5

This new description is based on analyses of internal time-consciousness, which

Husserl began to study seriously in the last part of the lectures of 1904/1905. At the

outset of this part, after referring to ‘‘the most peculiar difficulties, contradictions,

and confusions’’ in which one gets entangled as soon as one attempts to give an

account of time-consciousness, Husserl had pointed to ‘‘the most intimate

connection’’ between the intuitive acts of perception, imagination, memory, and

image consciousness, which had been dealt with in the previous parts of the lectures,

explaining in this deleted passage that

it is obvious that an analysis of the consciousness of perception, the

consciousness of phantasy, memory, expectation is not accomplished as long

as temporality [Zeitlichkeit] is not also included in the analysis, and that
conversely an analysis of time-consciousness presupposes to a large extent

that of the said acts (Hua X, editorial supplement, p. 394).

If not at once, then in the course of only a few years, when he turned to the

‘‘clarification of diverse basic kinds of the modification as well as of all kinds of

‘re-presentation’,’’ Husserl elaborated an ever more refined insight into the ‘‘most

remarkable intentionality of the ‘modifications’.’’
6

The main result clearly

contradicts the finding from 1904/1905 where Husserl had stated that ‘‘in itself’’

(an sich selbst), phantasy does not contain ‘‘a manifold intention’’ (keine
mehrfältige Intention). A few years later, in contrast, Husserl was able to pinpoint
the description of the re-presentational modification, which he came to see as itself

‘‘an event belonging to internal consciousness’’ (Hua X, p. 368/379) or to time-

consciousness as follows:

[…] every ‘modification’\is[characterized thus that in it itself the relation to
another consciousness is contained of which it is called modification, a

5
Translation partly amended from ‘‘is the reproduction of an experience of which there is ‘impressional

consciousness’ internally; there is impressional consciousness of the reproduction itself’’ (p. 402, note 4).

The German text reads: ‘‘ist Reproduktion eines innerlich ‘impressiv bewussten’ Erlebnisses, die

Reproduktion selbst ist impressiv bewusst’’ (p. 330, note 3).
6

Quoted in Hua XXIII, p. lxiii; see also p. lxx. Subsequently the entire manuscript from 1917/1918 was

published in Hua XXXIII, Text Nr. 9. The quote is found there on p. 176.

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consciousness, which is not really contained in it and yet is graspable for a

suitably directed reflection. […] And with it are then still connected specific
reflections on the corresponding act-correlates.

7

Henceforth, what Husserl will emphasize in his analyses of the main types of

re-presentational acts is their ‘‘wondrously interwoven intentionality’’ (wundersam
ineinandergeflochtene Intentionalität; see Hua VIII, p. 128; emphasis partly mine).
A remarkably two-sided version of this subtle result is already described in a text

from 1911 or 1912 with regard to the example of memory, which is included in

Husserl’s wide concept of phantasy as re-presentation. On the one side:

Memory is a reproductive modification of perception, but it has the remarkable
peculiarity that it is also re-presentation of perception and not simply
re-presentation of what was perceived. I remember lunch. ‘‘Implicit’’ in this
memory, however, is also memory of the perception of lunch (irrespective of

the direction of my act of meaning) (Hua XXIII, no. 14, p. 305f./367;

emphasis mine).

And on the other side, a little later in the same text:

The external perception is perception. And if the modification of the

perception is then a corresponding memory, we have the remarkable

circumstance that the corresponding memory is not only memory of the
perception but that the modification of the perception is also memory of what
was perceived (Hua XXIII, p. 308/370; emphasis mine).

Texts like these clearly show Husserl’s discovery of the duality (Doppelheit) in the
re-presentational consciousness itself and in its intentional relation to something

objective, respectively. This duality is involved in the essence of the reproduction as

reproduction of an impression, and it requires a double-sided reflective description,

directed (a) at the re-presented object (e.g., lunch) and (b) at the re-presented—
namely reproductively modified or intentionally implied—perception, i.e., the

experience that is ‘‘contained’’ in a re-presentational act.
Moreover, Husserl recognizes that description of the ‘‘modes of reproduction’’

must also take into account the phenomena of position takings (Stellungnahmen),
cognitive acts that are expressed in judgments as well as affective position takings,

aesthetic evaluations, etc. Such phenomena reach beyond the domain of the intuitive

re-presentations belonging to phantasy, image consciousness and memory and lead

into the domain of the theory of judgment, of ‘‘suppositions’’ (Ansätze) and
modifications of merely thinking-of. All these developments and descriptive

refinements are based on the theory of the reproductive modification or the

intentional implication of consciousness and confirm the general point that what, in

phenomenological analysis, could originally be taken ‘‘as simple and undivided

presents itself as complex and full of distinctions.’’

Regarding (2), the phenomenology of image consciousness: In approaching this
topic—to which, as Brough also observes in his ‘‘Translator’s Introduction,’’ ‘‘some

7
See note 6. The quote is from Hua XXIII, p. lxx, or Hua XXXIII, p. 176; emphasis mine.

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of Husserl’s most fascinating and cogent analyses are devoted’’ (p. xliv)—it strikes

me as particularly important to emphasize that the seemingly achieved clarity in the

analysis of ordinary image consciousness in the lectures of 1904/1905 is repeatedly

put into question in later texts. In the course of the lectures, ‘‘intent on

distinguishing between phantasy presentation and ordinary image presentation,’’

Husserl confidently states: ‘‘Image presentation became perfectly clear to us’’ (Hua
XXIII, p. 54/59, emphasis mine). For he once more insists that:

One thing is indeed clear from the beginning: The ‘‘image’’ in the case of

physical imaging—that is, the image object—is a figment, a perceptual object
but also a semblance object. It appears in the way in which an actual physical

thing appears, but in conflict with the actual present that conflict-free

perception brings about. Now this figment, or rather this fiction consciousness,

is permeated with representational consciousness [Bewusstsein der Repräsen-
tation]. Hence imaginative consciousness arises here. And it arises in the new
conflict between the figment and what is imagined (Hua XXIII, p. 54, similarly
p. 79/59 and 85f.).

The really moot point in Husserl’s analyses of image consciousness concerns the

mode of givenness of the image object. When he, in his early investigations, says
things to the effect that ‘‘the image object appears in the midst of perceptual reality

and claims, as it were, to have objective reality in its midst’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 47f./51),

or when he describes this way of givenness as ‘‘an image object appearing as present

[…] an object that deports itself as a member of the objectivity of one’s field of
regard’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 83/90), or as ‘‘a figment, a perceptual object but also a

semblance object’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 54/59), then at least at first glance it may look as

if Husserl argued that imaging (Bildlichkeit) were at bottom constituted as
consciousness of a figment in the sense of an illusion—as if, conflicting with other
perceptual positings at the level of perception, the image figment (Bildfiktum) turned
out to be a mere semblance, ‘‘a nothing’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 46/50), though still as a
presently appearing perceptual object, analogously to a ‘‘sensuous semblance’’ (Hua
XXIII, p. 32/33).

Contrary to such a view that lets image consciousness appear to be a matter of

sensuous perception and conflicts among perceptual positings alone, there are,

however, several passages already in the lectures of 1904/1905, where Husserl

clearly argues that for image consciousness to come about, a consciousness of re-

presentation (Vergegenwärtigungsbewusstsein) is fundamental, thanks to which the
relation to the image subject is constituted. Thus, for example, with regard to
ordinary image consciousness:

If the conscious relation to something depicted is not given with the image,

then we certainly do not have an image. This conscious relation, however, is

given through that specific consciousness belonging to the re-presentation of
what does not appear in what does appear […] If two objectivating
apprehensions were not interwoven with one another, it would be a miracle, or

nonsense, how a consciousness of this kind is possible, since only the image

and certainly not the subject falls into the appearance. The making intuitive in

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the image, which in the image-appearing possesses the consciousness of the
image subject, is not an arbitrary characteristic that adheres to the image.
Rather, the intuition of the image object awakens precisely a new conscious-

ness, a presentation of a new object […/…] Yet this new presentation does not
lie next to the presentation of the image object either; on the contrary, it
coincides with it, permeates it, and in this permeation gives it the

characteristic of the image object (Hua XXIII, p. 31/32f., emphasis partly

mine).

Here and elsewhere in the early lectures, Husserl emphasizes that ‘‘phantasy

consciousness,’’ i.e., consciousness of re-presentation, ‘‘makes up the most essential

moment even in common imaging’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 87/93f.). This consciousness of

re-presentation or phantasy, in contrast to ‘‘the pure and simple phantasy function’’

(p. 94, line 35—reading ‘‘phantasy function’’ instead of ‘‘phantasy object’’), ‘‘is,

however, permeated with a presentational consciousness’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 86/93),

and this permeation bestows in effect the ‘‘characteristic of unreality’’ (Un-
wirklichkeit) (Hua XXIII, p. 47/51), i.e., the ‘‘characteristic of the image object’’
(Hua XXIII, p. 31/33) upon that which perceptually appears, however not the
characteristic of an annulled and illusory semblance object.

That the consciousness of semblance or of unreality in the case of an image can

indeed not be understood as a figment consciousness in the sense of an illusion is
made even clearer in later texts from about 1912 (Hua XXIII, Nr. 17, p. 486ff./No.

17, 581ff.). Husserl now explains that the characteristic of unreality in the case of an

image rests on the circumstance that something is projected into reality from
phantasy (hineinphantasiert), something that is not at all given in the immediately,
perceptually appearing present. The image does not genuinely ‘‘‘appear’’’ in the
unity of reality, ‘‘but in its own space, which in itself has no direct relation to real

space’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 480/570). The image figment does appear ‘‘without having

the characteristic of reality, without ‘laying claim’ to reality, a claim that would first

have to be cancelled’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 480/571—reading ‘‘first’’ instead of ‘‘only’’).

As Husserl describes it in the present context, the difference between phantasy and

image consciousness

consists only in the fact that the ‘‘phantasy image’’ is a reproductive image, the

seen image a perceptual [perzeptives] image. Both are cases of imagination.
This must never be forgotten and is absolutely certain. I was entirely correct
when I sought again and again to take image apprehension as imagining

[Imagination]. It is imagining. The image turns into something null only
through a connection with reality. As soon as I take it in this connection (or

take it as having this connection; for example, take the image subject, where

the frame begins, in spatial relation to real space, and so on)—as soon as I thus

suppose it—it turns into something null (Hua XXIII, p. 480/570).

As already hinted, the truly puzzling and at the same time philosophically

particularly challenging aspect of Husserl’s analysis of image consciousness,

variably pursued over many years, concerns his wavering views of the mode of
givenness (Gegebenheitsweise) of the image object. It is an elating experience to

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think through all the nuances of the relevant texts in Brough’s excellent translation.

Not only in the early texts, but still, for example, in No. 18, probably from 1918,

Husserl presents the situation as if the image object were a perceptual givenness
which stands there ‘‘as present actuality.’’ But ‘‘this present and this actuality,’’ he

then remarks, is ‘‘just actuality as if,’’ adding ‘‘the image only hovers before us

perceptually’’ (Hua XXIII, No. 18, p. 506/607). And in No. 20, written in the first

half of the nineteen-twenties, where Husserl discusses the concept of phantasy in

relation to the universal concept of neutrality and ‘‘mere presentation,’’ with brief

references to Aristotle, Hume, and Brentano, as well as to his own Logical
Investigations (1901) and Ideas (1913), there is this passage:

‘‘Mere’’ phantasy signifies, then, that no ‘‘actual’’ [‘‘wirklicher’’] performing
of an act takes place—‘‘mere presentation’’. But matters no doubt become

more complicated in the case of the ‘‘image object’’, which, appearing as

present ‘‘in person’’ [leibhaftig], can nevertheless also be designated as
‘‘fiction’’, though one must no longer speak of a re-presentation [Verge-
genwärtigung] in this case. Indeed, it is presentation [Präsentation]. Here, too,
the ‘‘positing’’, the believing in something [das In-Geltung-Haben], is
‘‘missing’’ (Hua XXIII, No. 20, p. 575/693; see also No. 20, p. 580/697f.).

Then again, in No. 16, probably from spring 1912, Husserl notes with regard to

image consciousness:

Must we not say: ‘‘Exhibiting’’ [‘‘Darstellung’’] belongs to the essence of
image consciousness; image consciousness is not simply perceptual con-

sciousness and, in any event, not a perceptual consciousness that is combined

additionally with a reproductive consciousness (namely, a phantasy con-

sciousness)? That is not correct (Hua XXIII, p. 471/560).
8

Starting the analysis anew, Husserl continues:

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, as we do in the case of

reproductive phantasy, that the appearances are obviously not merely

perceiving appearances. On the contrary, they are imagining appearances:

that is to say, the sensation content in the appearance exhibits something, and

the appearance itself exhibits appearance. The apprehension is not simply
apprehension, but the exhibiting of apprehension (Hua XXIII, No. 16,
p. 471f./560f.).

Pondering upon several other possibilities of understanding the status of the image

object in image consciousness in the same text, Husserl also offers the following

8
The translator’s note is to the point when he observes that ‘‘Husserl seems to mean here that it would

not be correct to say that image consciousness is simply perceptual consciousness, etc.’’ (p. 560, note 6).

234 Husserl Stud (2012) 28:225–237

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self-criticism of his former view developed in the lectures of 1904/1905, noting that

‘‘these are important [folgenschwere] questions’’:

The distinctions I have been studying here, though perhaps I have not yet

given them a perfectly accurate interpretation, ought not to confuse us. We can

understand by image object the actually perceived […] object as opposed to
the object exhibited. If we look more closely, however, we have distinctions in

connection with images. My example of Raphael’s theological painting
9
: 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. If we look more closely, however, the following view offers itself: The

little figures are indeed exhibited objects (Hua XXIII, p. 473/562).
10

All of these considerations result in a number of conceptual clarifications in the text

from 1912:

In summary, therefore: (1) We must separate the apprehension of an image object
and the consciousness of a perceptual illusion \inserted later: ‘‘(something
null)’’[. The former is nonpositing, the latter positing. (2) In union with the
image-object apprehension we have the exhibiting (Darstellung). […] Now
exhibiting as exhibiting has certain things in common with reproduction \i.e.
with re-presentation[, […] (5) […] namely, precisely the fact that we have in
every component of the exhibiting (of the genuine exhibiting) a reference to

‘‘something corresponding’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 474f./563ff.).

In concluding his many reflections about modes of reproduction, phantasy, image

consciousness with simultaneous consideration of the phenomena of position-taking

and abstaining from it in the texts no. 15 and no. 16 and the related appendices,

Husserl emphasizes:

We must therefore universalize the concept of phantasy (let us say, the concept
of re-presentation). There are two fundamental forms of re-presentation:

(1) reproductive re-presentation;
(2) perceptual re-presentation, that is, re-presentation in image, in pictorial

exhibiting. Since reproductive modifications correspond to every experience,

the perceptual re-presentation then also enters into reproductive re-presenta-

tion, there arises pictorializing re-presentation in the phantasy re-presentation

(or in memory).
11

9
See Text No. 1, §21, p. 47: ‘‘For example, if I contemplate the picture of Raphael’s theological subject

hanging above my desk […].’’ Husserl writes ‘‘Bild der Raffaelschen Theologie’’ (Hua XXIII, p. 44),
referring to Raphael’s painting ‘‘Theologia’’.
10

‘‘Exhibited’’ in the last sentence was somewhat later changed to ‘‘merely presented’’ (bloss
vorgestellte), to be understood as re-presented (vergegenwärtigt) (ibid.).
11

Translation partly amended: ‘‘enters into’’ instead of ‘‘passes into,’’ and ‘‘there arises’’ instead of

‘‘grows into.’’ Both changes seem to me better to convey Husserl’s point, namely that perceptual re-

presentation, i.e. image consciousness, can also be reproductively modified, yielding a more complex
reproductive re-presentation of a perceptual re-presentation—for example, a phantasy or a memory re-
presentation of a re-presentation in image, as in everyday cases of phantasying of seeing, or remembering

of having seen, a picture.

Husserl Stud (2012) 28:225–237 235

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One must separate these modifications from those that convert positing into

nonpositing. (Intersection of the two kinds of distinction.) Furthermore, one

must not confuse nonpositing perceptions with experiences that exhibit

something in an image: with re-presentation, therefore (Hua XXIII, p. 475f./

565).

To round off the review of John B. Brough’s translation, permit me to propose a

more unified English terminology for some of the basic German terms in Husserl’s

writings on the topics at hand. The German term ‘‘Vorstellung’’ is notoriously

ambiguous, as is no doubt ‘‘representation’’ in English. Unlike what I myself have

practised in Marbach (1993) and elsewhere—for example, in the Encyclopedia of
Phenomenology (Embree et al. 1997, p. 603ff.), under the heading ‘‘re-presenta-
tion,’’ and unlike the translator of the volume under review, I would now like to
suggest, taking a clue from Nicolas de Warren’s recent paper ‘‘Tamino’s Eyes,

Pamina’s Gaze’’ (2010), the following terminology as perhaps the least confusing:

Vorstellung, vorstellen presentation, to present

Gegenwärtigung, gegenwärtigen presentification, to presentify (NdW)

Vergegenwärtigung, vergegenwärtigen representification, to representify (NdW)

Darstellung, darstellen representation, to represent

Phantasie phantasy or imagination

As I presently see it, this would take care quite elegantly of the various semantic

nuances and one could even avoid hyphens, which disappear in any case all too

often when a word has to be separated.

To be sure, I am fully aware of the practical difficulties of making such a

proposal universally acceptable. And let us not forget that terminology is just

terminology; the most important thing is conceptual lucidity, and Brough’s
translation of Husserl’s terminologically often bewildering texts testify to his

masterly handling of them at the conceptual, properly philosophical, level.

References

De Warren, N. (2010). Tamino’s eyes, Pamina’s gaze. In C. Ierna, H. Jacobs, & F. Mattens (Eds.),

Philosophy, phenomenology, sciences, Phaenomenologica 200 (pp. 303–332). Dordrecht: Springer.
Embree, L., et al. (Eds.). (1997). Encyclopedia of phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hua VIII. Husserl, E. (1959). Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen

Reduktion. R. Boehm (Ed.). Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
Hua X. Husserl, E. (1966). Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917). R. Boehm

(Ed.). Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff; On the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time
(1893–1917). J. Brough (Trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

Hua XIX/1. Husserl, E. (1984). Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band, Erster Teil. Untersuchungen
zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. U. Panzer (Ed.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Hua XXIII. Husserl, E. (1980). Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der
anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). E. Marbach (Ed.). The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Hua XXXIII. Husserl, E. (2001). Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/1918).
R. Bernet and D. Lohmar (Eds.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Hua XL. Husserl, E. (2009). Untersuchungen zur Urteilstheorie. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1918).
R. D. Rollinger (Ed.). Dordrecht: Springer.

Husserl, E. (1954). Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. L. Landgrebe (Ed.).
Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag; Experience and judgment: Investigations in a genealogy of logic.
J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Husserl, E. (2006). Phantasie und Bildbewusstsein, Studienausgabe. Text nach Husserliana Band XXIII.
E. Marbach (Ed.). Philosophische Bibliothek Band 576. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.

Marbach, E. (1993). Mental representation and consciousness. Towards a phenomenological theory of
representation and reference. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

McGinn, C. (2004). Mindsight. Image, dream, meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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	Edmund Husserl: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898--1925)
	Translated by John B. Brough (Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, vol. XI), Dordrecht: Springer, 2005, 723 pp, ISBN-101-4020-2641-2 (HB)
	References