The question that Sallis answers for me is one that, admittedly, I had never asked, but upon reflection, maybe I should have asked. That question is, what if Husserl's notion of internal time consciousness was interpreted BACK into the preferentially spatial notions of Kant's idea of imagination as the internal, transcendental synthesis of apperception?
That is not as technical a question as the philosophical terms seem to imply. It is a question that we engage in many ways, and in ways that still reflect how uncertain we are about the status of knowledge, what is worthy of being called "true" and what kind of a being we are such that these are concerns of ours to begin with. Sallis is placing his bet on the capability of imagination as the locus for making our dreams of being a valuable being that can elicit the most salient and powerful force of the cosmos into worthy works, works that keep us going into that vastness without losing our place, from moment to moment.
In my reading of this book, Sallis wants to remain faithful to Husserl's prime directive, "to the thing itself,"and also remain within a phenomenologically temporally unfolding domain, while also, at the same time, honor Kant's directive of limiting reason to what our instrumental, practical and producing minds construct. By the time he had written his third edition of the first Critique, Kant had elevated transcendental synthesis of the Imagination to being the locus of engendering energies out of which the understanding sorted and consolidated its categorically based constructions of knowledge. Husserl explored how that engendering was a matter of temporal elaborations of engagements with what, in an apperception, is the "given" and thus the parameter-giving limiting factor that qualifies something as real (versus what has no such parameters and, although similarly apprehended, has no limitations, and is a "phantasm.")
Sallis accomplishes his habitation of human perspicacity by deflecting our attention from the workings of imagination conceived as being a faculty, to being that of a psychic/somatic "force" that works at its site of engaging occurrences to gather up a plentitude of dynamics -- in the world as well as in the mind -- so as to render not just starkly reduced knowledge of the understanding, but fully fledged knowledge that we feel, that makes us into selves, and enables us to effectively engage our worlds. The particular force, psychic/somatic/spiritual force, that he names and valorizes, is of course, that of the imagination. This is not a fantasy-producing image-maker, but a resource of the Kantian/Husserlian status that engenders the real -- lock, stock and barrel.
This is fruitful exercise, enabling the reader to roam about in moments of perceptive realizations that no psychology would allow, and that from the time of Merleau-Ponty, we have hoped that phenomenological accounts would encourage. On its own terms, this is a valuable sojourn that expands the vectors of our post-Husserlian vocabularies.
But -- and you knew this was coming -- Sallis's work remains safely ensconced within those parameters as defined by the Kantian-Husserlian question with which we started this reflection.
Sallis is still oriented toward knowledge conceived as being instrumental and useful -- even though he wants to restore to it some of its "artistic" luster and spiritedness. But, alas, Sallis is no Derrida or Blanchot, or even a Deleuze. His deductions are not "deconstructions" that break free of the need for "presence" and so drive us to forming "objects" for our "subject" selves.
And then, I come away with the feeling that "imagination," and even the "force" of imagination is too small a notion, too constricted a standpoint from which to elucidate even what Sallis wants to accomplish. When we come to those moments when the discourse wants to show its most productive outcomes, the language becomes so tightly involuted and introverted that our momentum to a conception of occurrences that is more expansive is deflated and reduced to matters of self-reference. While remaining true to Kant's restrictions and to Husserl's prime directive, it disappoints one -- this one reader, that is -- who was hoping for that release, that being relieved of bounded solipsism, which our pre-Hegelian notions had demanded of our knowledge (with the notable exception, possibly, of Spinoza).
Imagination does do and work as Sallis depicts it. But it is not imagination alone, even its forcefulness, that sets us into deconstructive thinking that connects us to the emergent wonder of knowledge, thought and aspiration. Conceiving, desire, and the brute force of increasing complexity -- notions of supplementation, the trace, the absent, in Derridian terms of deconstruction -- underlie whatever imagination renders up for our knowing (however emotionally enriched by art, drama, poetry it might be).
So, while Sallis accomplished something worthwhile here, to be sure, for this reader it claims to accomplish too much for what its frame of reference offers.
That said, I want to read more of Sallis's efforts. He is worthy and valiant company in this effort we make so as to restore the human endeavor to its most expansive aspirations.
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2013
