In recent years, the phenomenological approach to empathy becomes increasingly influential in explaining social perception of other people. Yet, it leaves untouched a related and pivotal question concerning the unique and irreducible intentionality of empathy that constitutes the peculiarity of social perception. In this article, I focus on this problem by drawing upon Husserl’s theory of image-consciousness, and I suggest that empathy is characterized by a “seeing-in” structure. I develop two theses so as to further explicate the seeing-in structure in (...) question: first, empathy as a phenomenologically sui generis act is an intentional fusion of both presentation and re-presentation; and second, empathic intentionality is in essence twofold in that it is at once directed at both the other’s sensuously given body and the other’s non-sensuously given mentality. In this light, I argue that empathy is better conceived as a quasi-perceptual act that is fundamentally different from external perception simpliciter and other complex acts such as signitive, recollective and imaginative intention. (shrink)

Although better known for his phenomenology of perception and the perceived world, Merleau-Ponty’s writings also contain the outlines of a rich and unique account of the imagination and the imaginary. In this paper, I explicate the phenomenology of the image that Merleau-Ponty develops throughout his work. I show how Merleau-Ponty develops this account of the image in critical response to Sartre and in a way that follows from his own descriptions of what painters do when they paint and of what (...) we experience when we look at their paintings. The investigation of the particular mode of being of images leads to a consideration of the body and Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology. (shrink)

This article deals with a phenomenological standpoint on paradoxicality of image-consciousness, i.e., an analogical representation in which an image possesses material support. Contrary to tradition, E. Husserl thought of imagination as being both an intuitive and a mediate act. Husserl’s opinion results from paradoxical nature of an image itself: an image appears but it doesn’t exist, while the exhibited thing does exist but doesn’t appear in proper sense. The paradoxicality of an image results in its double conflict — with actual (...) present and with Bildsujet. Initially, Husserl considered that the more analogous features an image possesses the less conflict exists between it and Bildsujet, but then his own experience made him change his mind. Examining a wax figure example, he came to the conclusion that this perfectly human-like object is rather a fiction than an image for it is constituted in a position-taking intention, not in a neutralized one. However, despite we’ve got knowledge of illusory nature of such an object our consciousness keeps on fluctuating between an imaging intention and a perceptual one. Unlike Husserl neither J.-P. Sartre nor M. Richir draws a distinction between an image and an illusion. Sartre considers the imaginary in its radical form to be a world of schizophrenic. As for Richir, he supposes the imaginary to be a mass-consumption product being used for ideological manipulations. He follows Plato’s intellectual strategy and characterizes an image as εἴδωλον which represents the reality instead of reaching it. Being saturated by visible an image lacks any gap that would give an impulse to a work of imagination. At the same time, Richir admits that simulacre does relate to art, whereas an artefact doesn’t. An artefact is made by technical device which imitates not reality but consciousness. Thus, an artefact in its turn is not a reality illusion but an illusion of a reality illusion. Its hallucinatory effect makes us believe that we look into a mirror of reality as if a technical agent had better access to it than a human eye does. (shrink)