Não se deve passar demasiado facilmente por cima do paradoxo que surge assim que a imaginação é introduzida na fenomenologia. Ao regressar às coisas em si, a fenomenologia parece exigir exatamente a direção oposta àquela que se acredita que a imaginação tipicamente toma. A fenomenologia, ao que parece, não poderia ter nada a ver com esses voos de fantasia, essas ficções, com as quais a imaginação – aparentemente alheia às coisas em si – teria de se ocupar. Quando muito, a fenomenologia poderia empenhar-se numa análise da imaginação como um modo de comportamento a ser contrastado com outros modos, tais como a percepção e a memória; mas neste caso a imaginação seria considerada simplesmente como mais uma daquelas coisas em si a que a fenomenologia se ocuparia.
E, no entanto, as coisas nunca foram assim tão simples. Em primeiro lugar, porque a fenomenologia nunca foi uma simples retorno às coisas em si, como se essas coisas estivessem de alguma forma simplesmente aí, já colocadas perante uma visão que apenas precisaria de ser retirada da sua distração. Pelo contrário, as próprias coisas têm de ser tornadas acessíveis à medida que se mostram, à medida que se mostram a partir de si mesmas. O retorno a elas é, pois, um retorno que deve ser efetuado com rigor, de tal modo que chega a determinar o próprio sentido do rigor filosófico. É, pois, neste contexto que Husserl retoma a questão da imaginação de uma forma mais intrínseca, declarando, naquela passagem frequentemente citada de Ideias I, que “a ‘ficção’ constitui o elemento vital da fenomenologia”. De fato, pode mostrar-se que tanto a redução eidética como a redução transcendental dependem significativamente de certas operações da imaginação. Nesta medida, a imaginação revela-se essencial para a própria abertura do campo das coisas em si, dos entes enquanto tais. Não se trata ainda, de modo algum, de estabelecer a imaginação como o sentido do ser dos entes. Mas trata-se, pelo menos, de abordar uma ligação entre a imaginação e a abertura de um espaço no qual os entes podem vir a mostrar-se tal como são, isto é, em seu ser.
Is the meaning of Being not, then, a matter of imagination? Is it not imagination that in its flight opens to the shining of the beautiful? Is it not imagination that in its hovering spans the gigantic space of sense, thus gathering now what would previously have been called the horizon, the meaning, of Being? Is imagination not precisely this gathering? Is imagination not the meaning of Being?
Must imagination not prove to be the meaning of Being once phenomenology is thought through to its end, to an end that, in more than one way, exceeds the project of fundamental ontology?
Perhaps.
And yet, one will need to think phenomenology through toward its end, in more than one way, with Heidegger and also sometimes almost without Heidegger. One will need to come back to what Heidegger develops—even if largely in reference to the Greeks and to Kant—as the basic problems of phenomenology. As a first move toward reinscribing imagination.
One ought not pass too easily over the paradox that is made to appear as soon as imagination is introduced into phenomenology. Set upon returning to the things themselves, phenomenology would appear to require just the opposite direction from that which imagination is believed typically to take. Phenomenology, it appears, could have nothing to do with those flights of phantasy, those fictions, with which imagination—seemingly oblivious to the things themselves—would have to do. At most, phenomenology might engage in an analysis of imagination as a mode of comportment to be contrasted with other modes such as perception and (98) memory; but in this case imagination would be regarded simply as another of those things themselves to which phenomenology would attend.
And yet, matters have never been that simple. First of all, because phenomenology has never been a simple turn to the things themselves, as though such things were somehow simply there, already deployed before a vision that would need only to be recalled from its distraction. Rather, the things themselves must be made accessible as they themselves show themselves, as they show themselves from themselves. The turn to them is thus one that must be rigorously carried out, so much so that it comes to determine the very sense of philosophic rigor. It is, then, in this connection that Husserl takes up the question of imagination in a more intrinsic way, declaring in that frequently cited passage in Ideas I that “ ‘fiction’ constitutes the life-element of phenomenology” Indeed, it can be shown that both the eidetic reduction and the transcendental reduction rely significantly upon certain operations of imagination. To this extent, imagination proves essential to the very opening up of the field of the things themselves, of beings as such. This is not yet by any means to establish imagination as the meaning of the Being of beings. But it is, at least, to broach a connection between imagination and the opening of a space in which beings can come to show themselves as they are, that is, in their Being.
What would be required, then, in order to establish imagination as the meaning of Being?
Let me recall, now more literally, the Heideggerian determination of meaning, or, rather, that characteristic circling that produces the determination of meaning: having set out to establish the meaning of Being, Heidegger comes around eventually to a more or less rigorous determination of meaning (Sinn), a determination of what meaning is, of what it shows itself to be within the disclosive opening of the fundamental-ontological project. The determination is carried out in reference to another determination already established at that point in the text, namely, of understanding as (99) projection (Verstehen als Entwurf). Heidegger writes: “Meaning is that in which the understandability of something maintains itself (Sinn ist dasy worin sich Verständlichkeit von etwas hält)” (SZ 151). To inquire about the meaning of Being is, then, Heidegger adds, to inquire about Being itself insofar as it enters into Verständlichkeit, that is, into the domain of Dasein’s understanding. One could say, then, that meaning is a medium or space (Worin) and that, consequently, to establish imagination as the meaning of Being would require demonstrating that imagination is the medium in which the understanding of Being is maintained, the space of ontological understanding.
But how is it that understanding needs something like a medium or space? How does understanding expand into that space and maintain itself there? What is the character of its operation within that space? And how might imagination be supposed to function as such a space, as a medium of understanding?
Heidegger proceeds, almost immediately, to offer what appears to be a more precise determination: “Meaning is the upon-which of projection, from which something becomes understandable as something (das Woraufhin des Entwurfs, aus dem her etwas als etwas verständlich wird)” (SA 151). This says: meaning is that upon which projective understanding projects, that horizon from which, then, something comes to be understood. Thus, to inquire about the meaning of Being is to inquire about that horizon upon which Being is projected and from which it is understood. It is to inquire about the horizon of ontological understanding.
But how, then, could imagination be supposed to function as such a horizon? Is it not proposed from the very beginning of Being and Time — as determining its interpretive fore-structure — that the meaning of Being is time? Is it not precisely the task of Heidegger’s project to carry through, explicitly and at the level of conceptual understanding, that projection of Being upon time, that understanding of Being from time, that has always already been operative preontologically and that has secretly governed the entire history of ontology?
How, then, could imagination be supposed the meaning of Being? Only insofar as imagination proves to be essentially linked to (100) the horizon of ontological understanding. Only insofar as it can be shown to bear on the very constitution, the opening, of that horizon. In short, only insofar as imagination turns out to be in some respect identical with time.
My concern is, then, to outline a series of sites at which such identity is at issue, sites at which imagination is—though in quite different ways and degrees—established as the meaning of Being. I shall consider four such sites. The first is that of ancient ontology, as interpreted by Heidegger during the Marburg period. The second site is that of the Critique of Pure Reason, specifically, of the transcendental schematism, again in the interpretation developed in the Marburg period. The third site is constituted by Heidegger’s Wiederholung of the Kantian schematism within the project of fundamental ontology, specifically, as the problem of horizonal schema. The fourth site is one that Heidegger did not himself delimit, one that I shall attempt, in a very provisional manner, to expose by following through—perhaps a bit more radically—some of the upheavals that Heidegger’s thought began to undergo shortly after the publication of Being and Time. On this site virtually all the previously operative identities of Heidegger’s thought—one could indicate them by the following series: Dasein, time, imagination, truth—all these identities come to be unsettled, their terms forced apart, everything radicalized and in a very specific sense overturned. One of the questions that I shall want to address concerns a certain effacement to which imagination is submitted in the Heideggerian text. I shall want to ask whether the question of the meaning of Being—perhaps even in its very overturning—does not, over against that effacement, broach a certain reinscription of imagination.
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