Introduction: Thematization of the Imaginary and Definition of a Broadened Reality

The notion of the imaginary is pervasive in Merleau-Ponty’s early philosophy from the very beginning, but it is not thematized. In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty makes extensive use of the lexical register of the imaginary. He does so, however, not to define the special sort of representations and behaviors that we ordinarily call imaginary, but to describe perception, the body itself, and the Lebenswelt. Phenomenology of Perception does not identify a specifically imaginary domain nor a concept of the imaginary. To be sure, phenomenology must deal with this conceptual confusion, this mixture of presence and absence even in perception. But precisely in order to construct a path toward authenticity, sooner or later it must also take up the question of defining the imaginary and try to understand in more detail what characterizes the phenomena classified under the particular register of the imaginary (e.g., dream, artwork, childhood drawing, pathological behaviors of flight from reality), account for a certain continuity between these phenomena and the real, and wonder whether the latter becomes a mere shimmer [chatoiement] of nothingness or else retains a certain flesh. Merleau-Ponty will thus place the problem of the definition of the imaginary increasingly at the heart of his thinking in Child Psychology and Pedagogy, The Prose of the World, “Reality and Its Shadow,” and especially in Institution and Passivity which is, along with “Eye and Mind,” one of the most developed texts on this subject. In these 1954–55 lectures at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty undertakes a detailed critique of the Sartrean conception of the imaginary, clearly develops a completely different conception, and shows how to reconcile the imaginary with authenticity (especially in the exemplary case of love). In the next section of the book, I will examine the subtle solution that Merleau-Ponty gives to the problem of authenticity. But let us first look at the definition of the imaginary that he develops, and see what correspondingly profound redefinition of the real could thereby be established.