James Deery

This paper aims to contribute to the growing interest in the role of imagination in Merleau-Ponty’s thought by exploring how the phenomenon of mental imagery would be characterised under Merleau-Ponty’s framework, and questioning whether or not his conception of mental imagery is of relevance to contemporary research and debates on the topic. To frame the investigation, I will introduce what I will call the problem of imaginary presence, that is, the problem of accounting for the perception-like phenomenology that accompanies acts of ‘forming’ or ‘entertaining’ a mental image. I will then pose this problem to contemporary accounts of mental imagery. Firstly, to representationalist accounts that conceive of the image as a perceptual representation in the absence of corresponding sensory stimuli and then to embodied and enactive accounts that think of imagery as a simulation or re-enactment of a perceptual experience. I argue that neither has an adequate solution to the problem of imaginary presence before presenting an alternative account of mental imagery that can be derived from Merleau-Ponty. One that overcomes the issues faced by contemporary accounts and provides a solution to the problem of imaginary presence.

Although it is far from uncharted territory, some contemporary thinkers have been pushing the idea that imagination plays a central role in perception; specifically, as that which explains the phenomenon of perceptual presence. I agree with this general idea. However, there is a tendency among thinkers to place the vague notion of mental imagery at the core of their understanding of what it is to imagine; and attempts to explain perceptual presence in imagistic terms are incompatible with the phenomenology. I will consider another view that attempts to explain perceptual presence in terms of our possession of a form of implicit bodily knowledge of the ways one can access the world. Although it does not encounter the same issues as the imagery view, I will argue that there is much more to the phenomenon of presence than can be accounted for on the access view. I will propose an alternative that can be attributed to Merleau-Ponty. This alternative involves both appeal to a form of bodily knowledge and an imaginative capacity for entertaining the possibility of being situated otherwise; that, when exercised, gives rise to the presence of objects in experience as the objects that they are.

The imagination seems to enjoy a conceptually unstable double‐life within Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Oscillating between a Kantian use of the term, as a ‘necessary ingredient of perception itself’ and a Sartrean depiction of what appears when say, viewing a painting or visualising an absent friend, as a nothingness that is of an entirely different ‘flesh’ to that of the perceived. If we take the Phenomenology in isolation and try to extract an account of the imagination, we do not emerge with a unified picture that incorporates both accounts. In this paper, I will demonstrate that when we turn to Merleau‐Ponty's later works, specifically his analysis of paintings in Eye and Mind, we see that his view on the imagination is fleshed out and his position with respect to Sartre has been clarified. I will offer an interpretation of Eye and Mind that picks up on implicit themes that connect back to the Phenomenology and argue that, for Merleau‐Ponty, paintings disclose something about how we come to obtain an awareness of ‘things’ in the world, which I will elucidate through appeal to his notion of style and his implicit treatment of Kantian imagination in the Phenomenology. I will argue that, for Merleau‐Ponty, it is only through understanding the role of the imagination in making the world present in perception, that we can make sense of our capacity to imagine (in the more commonsense, Sartrean use of the term) and the quasi‐presence of what appears when we do so.

For some, the states and processes involved in the realisation of phenomenal consciousness are not confined to within the organismic boundaries of the experiencing subject. Instead, the sub-personal basis of perceptual experience can, and does, extend beyond the brain and body to implicate environmental elements through one’s interaction with the world. These claims are met by proponents of predictive processing, who propose that perception and imagination should be understood as a product of the same internal mechanisms. On this view, as visually imagining is not considered to be world-involving, it is assumed that world-involvement must not be essential for perception, and thus internalism about the sub-personal basis is true. However, the argument for internalism from the unity of perception and imagination relies for its strength on a questionable conception of the relationship between the two experiential states. I argue that proponents of the predictive approach are guilty of harbouring an implicit commitment to the common kind assumption which does not follow trivially from their framework. That is, the assumption that perception and imagination are of the same fundamental kind of mental event. I will argue that there are plausible alternative ways of conceiving of this relationship without drawing internalist metaphysical conclusions from their psychological theory. Thus, the internalist owes the debate clarification of this relationship and further argumentation to secure their position.