The Imaginary Texture of the Real: The Role of the Imagination in Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception

Abstract 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.