Iris Hennigfeld

Since Plato’s metaphor of the light of knowledge used in the “Allegory of the Cave” from his dialogue Politeia, the concepts of Anschauen or Anschauung (intuition) and their corresponding lexical field, including the terms light, sun, and eye, represent key notions and much-debated issues in philosophical thinking. In his literary, scientific, and philosophical writings, Goethe does not articulate a systematic and explicit theory of these concepts; on the contrary, most of his remarks on the topic of “intuition” are aphoristic or tacitly integrated into his poetic and scientific works. One of his main contributions to the philosophical debates surrounding Anschauen and Anschauung is that he developed and integrated into his works different modes of a specifically creative and productive—as opposed to a merely receptive and sensory—form of Anschauen. This productive form of Anschauen, for which he also uses the terms “Phantasie” (phantasy), “Einbildungskraft” (imagination), “exakte s...

In my paper, I want to focus not only on the notions of givenness and evidence in Husserl’s phenomenology, but also on phenomenological work “after” Husserl. I will elaborate on how these phenomenological key ideas can methodologically be made fruitful, especially for an investigation into religious phenomena. After giving an outline of Husserl’s notions of (self-)givenness, evidence, and original intuition (I), I want to portray key elements of Steinbock’s discovery of a generative dimension in Husserl’s phenomenology and show how this approach correlates to the field of religious experiences (II). Subsequently, I want to focus on Steinbock’s book Phenomenology of Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (2007), and elucidate how for Steinbock different historical examples of mystical experiences can serve as leading clues for the revelation of the essential, eidetic structures of “vertical experiences”—or, phenomenologically speaking, the eidos of religious experience, w...

Die phänomenologischen Prinzipien eines "Gegebenseins" und einer "Selbstgegebenheit" der Dinge können insbesondere für eine Beschreibung und Erforschung derjenigen Phänomene fruchtbar gemacht werden, die sich ihrem ureigenen Wesen nach anderen, vor allem reduktionistisch oder dogmatisch verfahrenden, Ansätzen widersetzen. Zu solchen "widerstandsfähigen" Phänomenen gehören beispielsweise interpersonale, religiöse oder künstlerische Erfahrungen. Der Beitrag möchte zunächst zeigen, wie Husserl auf dem Wege einer Erforschung des reinen Bewusstseins die Ideen einer Gegebenheit und Selbstgegebenheit der Gegenstände als phänomenologische Prinzipien entwickelt hat, die zugleich erkenntnistheoretische Relevanz haben. In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch der phänomenologisch erweiterte Begriff der Erfahrung zur Sprache kommen. Im Anschluss soll der sachliche Übergang von einer statischen und genetischen Phänomenologie in die generative Phänomenologie nachgezeichnet und methodische Kriterien für letztere herausgearbeitet werden. Exemplarisch für eine an den »Sachen selbst« orientierte, generative Phänomenologie wird schließlich unter Anthony J. Steinbocks Phänomenologie vertikaler Gegebenheiten am Beispiel mystischer Erfahrungen vorgestellt, wie diese in "Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience" (2007) zur Darstellung kommen. Ein Ausblick auf eine weitere Dimension vertikaler Gegebenheit wird am Ende mit der Sphäre moralischer Gefühle in Steinbocks Werk "Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart" (2014) gegeben.

The power of productive imagination plays an essential role in Goethe‘s scientific and poetical work. He claims that rationality, which is by nature only fragmentary, has to be exceeded by the imagination (and intuition) in order to enable a full and universal insight into the essences of phenomena. The act of imagining serves both as a creative faculty and precise scientific instrument of knowledge with a high epistemological value.
In Husserl‘s phenomenology we can find in the wider context of a structural analysis of the different modes of consciousness an early attempt to provide us with a strict and scientific renewed phenomenology of imagination in its objective and objectifying character. He devoted his research from 1904/05 until the mid 1920s to the relationships between 1.) the act of imagining (Phantasie), 2). our consciousness of images (Bildbewusstsein), and 3). the act of remembering (Wiedererinnerung). Instead of inquiring imagination as a static faculty, Husserl describes the process of imagining in its generativity and temporality.
In my paper I show Goethe's way of phenomenological thinking by using the example of imagination and by bringing it into a hermeneutical dialogue with Husserl‘s analysis of phenomenological imagination. By illuminating Goethe‘s specific usage of the power of imagination with the tools of phenomenology I argue there is not only a phenomenology about thinking and rationality, which occupies much of Husserl's attention, but also a phenomenological way to describe the creative act and a phenomenological aesthetics which marks the process of the creative act itself as originally phenomenological. As Merleau-Ponty put it, "phenomenology is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being."

"The significance of phenomenological thinking is a radical openness for different modes of givenness within the phenomenal world without reducing them to the mode of givenness in rational-discursive or representational thinking. Husserl's almost life-long investigations into the field of imagination and imagining consciousness (cf. Ideas I, Hua IX, Hua XXIII) give specific evidence of this phenomenological openness to non-discursive cognition. Husserl's rigorous and ever-renewed investigation into imagination and its methodological value for deeper insight into phenomena might serve as a leading clue for studying the phenomena proper to imagination and given only to imagining consciousness: the work of art.
I aim to investigate the significance of imagination for the possibility of radically new experiences which are neither based on any kind of 'typical apprehension' nor restricted to past experiences in the mode of re-presentational thinking (e.g., memory). The question of whether or not consciousness and the cognition of the phenomenal world is limited to the "already known" will lead me, finally, back to the specific structure of imagination which is at work especially in the mode of aesthetic-creative or poetical thinking, and which is manifested, for example, in the poem or work of art.  I want to argue that the inclusion of the aesthetic-creative account of imagination into a phenomenology of imagination might open up and extend, beyond Husserl's own limits, the phenomenal world and the realm of possible new experiences."