Imagination, Sense-Formation, and the Problem of Truth

Abstract If we agree with Enzo Paci that history is the progressive self-revelation and self-realization of what is hidden in human life, imagination has a critical role to play in this process that unfolds at several levels of our experience. In this paper, I examine imagination’s intervention in this historical disclosure, with an attention to its eidetic function and to the affectivity manifested in images, gestures, and human forms of life. With Edmund Husserl and Marc Richir, I discuss the way in which “figural moments” prefigure phenomenological essences and the sense-formation of our experience. I move next to examining the relationship between gestures and images, and end by highlighting how they can guide us in the phenomenological investigation of human forms of life.