Imagination in perception and art

Bodily dynamics of sensing and perception

Although the body is an ordinary term, its use in this context requires some words of explanation, especially since it affects how we understand prereflection. We lean on the distinction between Körper and Leib—the material and the lived body, respectively—a distinction widely used in phenomenological writings (e.g., Husserl, 1952/1989, p. 152 ff; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 77 f.; Plessner, 1928/2019, p. 273). When speaking of the lived body or one’s own body, as Merleau-Ponty also calls it (e.g., 1945/2012, p. 49), we speak of more than the concrete physicality of the body. The lived body signifies the interrelated nature of the corporeal and the mental, prereflective as well as reflective. It is not a rejection of the psyche on behalf of the body, just as it is not a uniform focus on prereflection over reflection. It denotes an interdependence between the physiological and the psychical. The term embodiment is an attempt to express this encompassing bodily foundation for our very being. It is an epistemological outset for our analysis, which means that we understand the behavior of things and people around us through the primordial experience of our own body and its movements. Movements, however, are not only concrete movements but also potential movements. That is, movements are also the possibility of engaging with our surroundings in certain ways. This signifies a prereflective and virtual use of the body, or as Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) phrases it, a way “to make use of it in my imagination” (p. 115). The constant prereflective awareness of our virtual body is the backdrop for every concrete movement, such as when a glass of water on a table signifies something we can drink or a tree signifies something we can climb. The temporal character of perception and our bodily movements is important to note because it signifies change and variation as a foundational aspect of perceptual experiences. This inherent play of differences in perception is part of the reason why Merleau-Ponty speaks of perception’s lacunary nature: in temporal change, possibilities of alteration are always indicated.

These possibilities of action arising from our encounters with our surroundings have been conceptualized as affordances (Gibson, 1979/2014, p. 119), referring to perceptual qualities that signify what the material surroundings offer a perceiver, for example shelter, support, or danger. As qualities whose meanings are bound to the ways we may or may not act bodily, they rest on a virtual use of our bodies. Embodiment, then, is a basis from which our experiences develop and gain part of their meanings. The way we meet our surroundings is affected by the limits of our movements, both concrete and potential. That is why we can say that an object’s horizon corresponds to our kinesthetic horizon (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011). As the phenomenological use of the concept of horizons refers to the boundaries of what is directly given in experience, set by our particular standpoint, we see how concrete and potential kinesthetic boundaries are the experiential limits for engaging with objects.

The bodily self-awareness that the concept of the lived body signifies is important for the notion of prereflectivity. We are not consciously aware of the body all the time. Rather, our movements, both concrete and virtual, are prereflectively self-given (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 140). This means that we perceive an object and the potentials for bodily engaging with it without actively reflecting on the experience of perception, but, at the same time, a minimal, prereflective self-awareness has to be present for us to experience anything. Prereflectivity thus signifies a state of consciousness in which we do not actively reflect on ourselves as bodily acting in the world, or experience ourselves as subjects separated from the objects surrounding us. The lived body is not something we can abstract from the investigation of consciousness or subjectivity. “Consciousness is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body,” Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012, p. 140) writes, and we perceive things through the body’s degree of “familiarity” with them (p. 221). A consequence is that we cannot distinguish between mind and body when describing real experiences. Further, in our analysis of imagination we cannot distinguish between imaginings in our minds and imaginings with our bodies without at the same time conceiving of the body as the concrete body only.

The concept of the virtual body that we treat here arises conceptually from the idea of the lived body, which is foundational in the corporeal turn and describes how mind and body intertwine. Our imagination can certainly be expressed through the concrete use of our body, as has been shown and discussed empirically (e.g., Gfeller & Zittoun, 2021). However, as we analyze imagination at an experiential level that in many ways underlies such imaginary uses of the concrete body, we miss foundational prereflective aspects of embodied imaginings by maintaining a distinction between mind and body. The intertwinement of mind and body means that if we are to experience anything as meaningful—an object, a person, a text—the tacit cogito of the body is the basis: “I could not even read Descartes’s text, were I not—prior to every speech—in contact with my own life and my own thought, nor if the spoken Cogito did not encounter a tacit Cogito within me” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 424). The body is the prism through which every experience emerges.

Because a description of imagination entails a description of how imagination and perception differ from one another, we need to describe how perception is also embodied. At a very fundamental level, the bodily prism of our experiences means that perception is characterized by having certain limits. As Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) notes very early on in Phenomenology of Perception, “the perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of some other thing, it always belongs to a ‘field’” (p. 4). The field of perception is a space made visible from our bodily point of view. This makes every perception opaque: we never experience the object with full disclosure. However, the unseen sides “are not imaginary, but only hidden from view,” as Merleau-Ponty notes (1964c, p. 14). To grasp an object as a totality does not involve images representing hidden sides but, rather, is perception through and through (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 314). Perception of totalities depends on our embodied relation toward our surroundings rather than actually seeing everything there is to an object. Husserl (1900/2001) perhaps stated this most clearly when he wrote that the unseen sides of objects are co-intended but “not themselves part of the intuitive, i.e., of the perceptual or imaginative content, of the percept” (§14(b), p. 220). This co-intention not only tells us something important about perception but about imagination as well. Firstly, if we perceived everything about an object in the perceptual act, there could only be a single way to perceive an object. We need only move our bodies in order to realize that this is not the case, as the appearance changes whenever we move. Secondly, if we were able to experience the backside of a perceived object as if it were there and if perception relied on imagination, completing what we only knew partially, the perceptual process would consist of sensory inputs collected in a unity by the aid of what we actively add to it.

This intellectualist view of the perceptual process defies what phenomenology shows us. Phenomenological studies, such as Merleau-Ponty’s, show that perception does not come about through an intellectual completion of what our senses only partially give us. Rather, we experience objects through the lived body as our medium of engagement with our surroundings. The kinesthetic possibility of moving around an object informs us of its totality, and imagination is not involved as the glue that holds an incomplete perception together. Imagination and perception are distinct types of consciousness, separated intentionally by the basic question of the actuality or nonactuality of the objects in question, as Husserl writes (1893–1917/1990, 1898–1925/2005). However, the embodiment of our experiences shows how perception and imagination figure closer together than strict structural distinctions might lead us to believe.

Meanings in perceptions

So far, we have treated the appearance of what reveals itself in experience, but our experiences also present themselves with certain meanings. Phenomenologically, meaning is part of intentional acts, coming about as a quality or affinity of what presents itself to consciousness. Merleau-Ponty argues that these meanings are closely tied to the materiality of the object in question. How to understand this emergence of experiential meaning has been discussed at length elsewhere (see, e.g., Drummond, 1990; Fink, 1933/2009, p. 363; Føllesdal, 1984; Gurwitsch, 1984; McIntyre & Smith, 1984; Sokolowski, 1984). We argue that objects are given in perception with other manners of givenness prereflectively present, making perception and imagination closely related.

These other manners of givenness are a catalogue of possibilities, varying according to the specific experience. The possibilities arise as an immanent part of our perceptual experiences and we can imagine along their lines, thereby engaging in imaginative acts that shift the weight between perception and imagination. The prereflective presence of these possibilities means, we argue, that they are present as subtle and nonpictorial openings to perception rather than as visual images depicting alternative ways for an object to look. Philosopher David Morris (2018) proposes that, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, experiences of meaning entail norms of meaning. The meaning of the concept of norms derives from Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/2012, p. 61 f.) own use of the word as the identity of a thing based on the experience of both its exterior appearance and its interior meaning. The meaning of a thing comes about by the disparity of the thing in which it is not given fully, compared to its own norm, and in which the norm itself is not entirely stable. The instability of the norm comes about by the changes inevitably occurring over time, and thus, temporality is the ever-changing background against which a meaningful object and its norm occurs. In other words, the meaning apprehended in the perceptual experience is a positive given, which, in being something at the same time indicates a difference by not being something else.

This does not mean that perceptual norms are intellectual concepts. Rather, norms and givens depend on each other, just as a background is essential for us to see a figure. As an example, Merleau-Ponty writes about the norm of blue, which can be thought of both as the general norm of “blue” and the specific blue of, say, a carpet. That we perceive the carpet as having the same color despite the light falling on it in different ways has to do with our embodied know-how of the world. This bodily know-how is also called our body schema (see e.g., Gallagher, 2005; Matherne, 2016; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, pp. 100, 155; Noë, 2004) and points to the simultaneity of actual and virtual motricity that we touched upon in regard to the concept of the lived body. In other words, norms of meaning have the body as an epistemological frame of reference. Whether we refer to the nonobservables of our perceptual world (Merleau-Ponty, 2003/2010) or the invisible content (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968), the “beliefs,” which are part of every perception, “are due to the action of our body as ‘focusing’ on things or others” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003/2010, p. 147). While understanding meaning as occurring by norms of the object and the variance of specific objects from those norms, we also need to take into account the body schema of the experiencing subject. There is an intricate simultaneity of the demands from the object as well as the subject, and the embodiment of subjectivity means a constant prereflective awareness of virtual dialogues between subject and object. The glass on the table that we envisaged earlier probably invites different virtual and embodied dialogues, depending on whether it is placed safely in the middle of the table or dangerously close to the edge.

When we argue that imagination obtains a role in the experience of meaning in perceptions, the statement rests on the analytical difference between an object’s spatio-temporal characteristics and the possible “behavior” of the object as it offers us a range of potential ways to perceive it. It is in the experience of behaviors that the “dialogue” between the embodied subject and object is especially important. Perceived objects are not simply made up of their tops, bottoms, fronts, and backs but also the ways we can potentially engage with them—their possible uses, the way they make us feel, the sensory qualities of their material, and the atmosphere they bring about when we experience them. This is part of how we experience an object as meaningful. When it comes to ordinary objects of use, these behavioral qualities might only be felt weakly and briefly, but things surrounding us, nonetheless, affect us beyond their materiality. This prereflective awareness of an object’s potentiality is more than the experience of how an object will look in the moment immediately following a perceptual now. In a Husserlian framework, such an awareness is called protention: the future-oriented aspect of every perception, which, along with the primal impression as the now of experience and retention as our awareness of the immediate past, presents objects as temporally enduring (Husserl, 1893–1917/1990). The potentiality we are discussing here is not the protentive awareness that constitutes an object as a phenomenon or an “individual,” as Husserl terms it (1898–1925/2005, p. 602). Rather, it has a specific content, as when we perceive a vase of flowers with a dim awareness that, in time, they will bend and turn their red heads toward the table. In other words, the latent depth of perception denotes a style, which is more than object permanence. The potentiality goes beyond the awareness of the temporal permanence of the flowers, as it has to do with how the flowers might come to look or “behave” in relation to us as perceiving subjects and other objects in our perceptual field. In fact, the notion of temporality that Merleau-Ponty develops, both in Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012) and later in his notes on institution (2003/2010), can be seen as a way of connecting the style of objects, the embodied nature of experience, and the temporality that makes possible variations an implicit part of experience. When Merleau-Ponty (2003/2010) writes on institution as “those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimension, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense” (p. 77), it is in some ways an echo of the phrase from Phenomenology of Perception in which he considers “time as subject and subject as time” (1945/2012, p. 444). It is a notion of temporality that depends equally on the object and the subject. The past informs the present moment and decenters the subject from the present facticity, which further means that a horizon of future possibilities opens. It means that an experience contains aspects of future meanings or possible meanings, which rest on the mere temporalization of the experience—the fact that the experience is in process. What we have argued is that this processual aspect of meaning depends on the prereflective embodied imagination that brings forth a play of possibilities in our surroundings. The temporalization that Merleau-Ponty describes with the concept of institution and the imaginary play of possibilities that we have described as part of an object’s style thus relate to each other as mutually dependent aspects of experience. It is a dynamic interplay between subject and surroundings, through which an experience emerges with a latent sense. It means that any distinct identity or meaning that we experience as belonging to objects in our perceptual field consists partly of its inherent possibility for alteration. This characteristic of perception denotes the basic idea that “reflection never has the entire world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 62), in that our reflective awareness of our surroundings is never exhaustive.

We argue that the open ends to our perceptual experiences are part of how we experience objects as having habituality. Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty speak of the style or habit of an object as a certain characteristic belonging to it. Husserl (1936/1970) writes that the intuitable world of objects “has even as a whole its ‘habit’ i.e., that of continuing habitually as it has up to now” (p. 31). Such habits are the interplay between sedimented experiences that influence every new experience. In a similar vein, Merleau-Ponty describes the style of an object as a characteristic way of behavior belonging to the object, discovered through the body. It can be described as the dynamic identity of what is experienced, meaning that the object’s way of being rests on the way it can affect the experiencing subject as well as be affected by the subject. Every act of doing something is “an operation according to a style, response to the Sache” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003/2010, p. 7). Therefore, he writes that “it is impossible to describe fully the colour of a carpet without saying that it is a carpet, or a woolen carpet, and without implying in this color a certain tactile value, a certain weight and a certain resistance to sound” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 337). For Merleau-Ponty, the style is a plenitude of significations, known through our bodies and containing within them the potential for variation of meaning, use, and appearance. The play of differences, which is part of every perception, rests on the temporal character of the perceived, and makes the style evident in experience. We do not mean to say that the experience of style is purely imaginative. Style belongs to the object, binding it together in experience. It is the principle of the actual, as Merleau-Ponty writes (1964/1968, p. 152), meaning an expressive principle belonging to an object. Style thus comes about in perception.

We argue, however, that the experience of an object’s style, although being part of perceptual experiences, rests in part on imagination. We experience the style belonging to a perceived object, and this style evokes certain responses. The nature of these responses can vary, as when we feel inclined to move bodily in specific ways, to laugh or cry when looking at an object, or when we imagine things based on the style experienced. What we imagine regarding an object is not detached from our experience of that object, but rather informs it in new ways. This fluctuation between perception of an object and prereflective imaginings of possible behaviors of what is perceived, means that the experience in its entirety is affected by both perception and imagination.

What we have come to see is how prereflective instances of imagination, evoked from the way we perceive our surroundings as having habitual characteristics, point toward alternative modes of givenness. These modes of givenness are not detached from the real, perceivable objects, but rather, relate closely to them. They show openings toward alternatives in the perceived and are therefore experiences of imagination as we defined them initially: presentations of content experienced as inactual, even if not evolving into complex images. We must ask, then, how this inactual content manifests in experience.

Potentiality in actuality

The interchange between actuality and potentiality varies according to the experience. The prereflective acts of imagination that we discussed above are involved in many perceptual experiences, taking part in informing us of the experienced object’s meanings. In that way, imagination and the real are codependent. What we experience as real stands out against a background of how it could possibly look or behave. The possibilities are neither caused directly by the perceived object nor imposed on it by the experiencing subject. Rather, they are an implicit content in the specific experiential situation emerging in the meeting between the subject and the objects in a phenomenological field. This structure of potentiality and actuality resembles the structure of movement discussed earlier, to which Merleau-Ponty devotes considerable attention. He conceptualizes bodily movement as consisting of both a centrifugal and centripetal aspect (1945/2012). Concrete movement of our limbs is termed centripetal movement. It relies on centrifugal movement, which is the abstract, possible type of movement, described by Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) as a function of projection. By this projection, “the subject of movement organizes before [themselves] a free space in which things that do not exist naturally can take on a semblance of existence” (p. 114). Hence, projection in this sense is the capacity that makes the relation between our bodies and the world one in which we see things as signs guiding our own actions. The body is “a center of virtual action” (p. 111), Merleau-Ponty writes, and the projection that takes place is a way of making use of the body imaginatively (p. 115). Both the actual (centripetal) and potential (centrifugal) movements rely on each other as a figure relies on a ground for it to appear.

Not only does this structure of bodily movement show that a capacity for making use of our bodies imaginatively in a realm of virtuality prefigures every concrete movement, but it also shows that what we conceive of as real is only conceived of as such because it stands out against what is not real or actual. “The normal person reckons with the possible, which thus acquires a sort of actuality without leaving behind its place as a possibility,” Merleau-Ponty writes (1945/2012, p. 112). This somewhat vague formulation of the interweaving between the actual and inactual is a good expression of how possibility remains a prereflective and dim awareness in our everyday perceptual experiences. Just as virtual and concrete movement rely on each other, a plurality of possible experiences rests within our singular actual experience (a notion defended by Lennon, 2015). This also shows how the inactual signifies a latent sense in perception, rather than being completely distinct from the perceptual real. The way that potentiality is part of the actual is not only as imaginative excursions, but also as prereflective ways of experiencing how the perceptually present can always be different.

Prereflective imagination within perceptual experience

The lived body is the datum of a constant prereflective awareness of how things might figure, how they might behave, how we might affect them, and how they might affect us. This constant maybe at the heart of perception unfolds as prereflective imagination. It is not necessarily a maybe about uncertainty but a maybe that leaves the door open for difference. When we call it a prereflective imaginary awareness, it must be understood in relation to the epistemological framework of embodiment within which we have described it. In some ways, this framework challenges any strict distinction between perception and imagination as two types of consciousness, but we hold that we can maintain such a separation while being sensitive to the way that perceptual style gives rise to imaginative awareness, which again affects the entirety of the perceptual experience and its meaning. When we run on a rocky mountain trail, we must imagine how our movements will bring us from one rock to the next without falling, just as we must imagine potential movements when dancing. Sensory illusions, such as when a stone in the distance presents itself as a living animal, is an example of the perceptual field and our embodied relation to our surroundings being “confused,” as Merleau-Ponty terms it (1945/2012, p. 310). This means that “my body is not geared into it and I cannot spread it [the perceptual field] out before myself through some exploratory movements” (p. 310). Our bodily perspective allows us to see the object in a way that makes us judge it as such and such, but, through another bodily perspective, the object and its meaning appear completely different. The painting The Ambassadors, by the medieval German painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1533), provides a good aesthetic example. A human skull figures at the bottom of the painting, but, by the painter’s use of anamorphic perspective, it is only when the painting is approached from high on the right side or low on the left side that a skull can be seen. In other words, the experience is altered in accordance with how the body can inhabit the object. This is possible because the experience of the object has the potential to be different. If not, doubts or corrections would never occur.

What we have come to see is the ever-present rabbit holes of our perceptions, which figure as awareness of possibility but not as evolved imaginings. These “openings,” however, obtain limited experiential space in perception of ordinary objects as compared to other types of experience—one of which is the experience of art. The way that openings of perception unfold with limited quality compared to when we enter an imagined world as part of an experience of art, applies both to the form and content of the openings: prereflective imaginary openings toward potential differences must be conceptualized as an awareness without a clearly defined content but still one that has imagination as a prerequisite. In that way, the tacit and dim awareness can very easily tip over into an act of pure imagination deprived of an obvious relation to anything perceived here and now. When this awareness of potential differences of the object does not unfold in the same detail as, say, a daydream consisting of more elaborate imaginings, imagination plays a different structural role in the experience. In the case of a daydream, the experiential focus is on actively contemplated imaginings. The imaginative content is fleshed out with an experiential solidity. While we can speak of prereflective aspects to imaginings, such as the implicit situation figuring as a contextual background to what is “seen” imaginatively, these forms of imagination unfold in a much more comprehensive manner than is the case with imaginings prereflectively present in the perception of ordinary objects.

An implicit consequence of our analysis is that we must understand imagination in wider terms than as mere make-believe. Merleau-Ponty regularly returns to the notion of the depth of perception (e.g., 1964b, 1964/1968, 1945/2012) as that which is indicated, yet not visible in the same way as the physical object encountered in perception. In his latest writings, this is termed the invisible (1964/1968): a latency of meaning that informs the perceptual experience in its entirety. Accordingly, the visible aspect of perception is “the surface of a depth” (1964/1968, p. 136). We have argued that the embodied and prereflective imagination is part of how this depth unfolds in experience. Our analysis means that imagination and the real go hand-in-hand; the phenomenological variety of imagination affects what we consider as real. The real as a “certain ensemble of significations” (Dufourcq, 2015, p. 42) along with an object’s horizons, intersubjective availability, past, future, and possible aspects means that “the quest for the ‘truly real’ leads to the explosion of the concept of the real” (p. 42). In other words, the real is complex and consists of more than perceivable objects. The real is infused with possibilities.

Aesthetic potentials

As a different way of experiencing imaginative possibilities in the real, we will now turn to how they present themselves in experiences of art. Aesthetics and philosophy of art are, despite their close connection, different fields. As aesthetics or esthetics is the study of beauty and taste in general, we restrict ourselves to the study of experiences of works of art, more specifically, visual art. In Merleau-Ponty’s (1964b) discussions of paintings in “Eye and Mind,” the notion of vision is of particular importance. He describes vision as a specific form of bodily thinking that decodes the bodily felt signs (p. 132). Even though both the content and form of art have developed since Merleau-Ponty’s time, his accounts contain important contributions. In showing “the very secret of their substance” (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/2008, p. 69), paintings demonstrate the inherent power that art has in engaging us in radically different experiences of imagination, compared to our everyday use of objects surrounding us.

In phenomenological theories on aesthetics, the work of art is often deemed expressive, entailing a conception of the object as forming a world of its own (e.g., Dufrenne, 1953/1973; Husserl, 1898–1925/2005; Merleau-Ponty, 1948/2008). The experience of such a world does not serve the function of referring us “back to the natural object” (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/2008, p. 71). Rather, it consists of contemplating the aesthetic world. This happens, Merleau-Ponty argues:

by way of the silent signals which come at me from its every part, which emanate from the traces of paint set down on the canvas, until such time as all, in the absence of reason and discourse, come to form a tightly structured arrangement in which one has the distinct feeling that nothing is arbitrary, even if one is unable to give a rational explanation for this. (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/2008, p. 72 f.)

Whether we call the expressive gestures silent or invisible, they, along with the material composition of the work of art, form the structure that we experience. It is in receiving these signals that we engage in the experience in a certain way. In that way, works of art are similar to ordinary objects in that they are perceivable objects with a style, calling for our imaginary engagement.

We argue that the experiential unfolding of the artwork relies largely on imagination (see also Cupchik, 2016; Husserl, 1898–1925/2005; Vartanian, 2020). Further, we argue that this imaginary component obtains a more influential role in the aesthetic experience than in ordinary perception. This may seem uncontroversial, but, in his book Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953/1973), Dufrenne expresses a different view. For Dufrenne, the experience of art is ultimately defined by a certain quality of affective responses. They are virtual affects experienced without any incentive to actually act in the present situation. Further, they evolve without any involvement from imagination. This is the case even though he defines these affects as the guiding principle of the aesthetic object’s expression (p. 415 f.) and as that which “reveals a world” (p. 378) in the work of art.

The analysis that we outline above counters this, and hereby offers arguments for an inclusion of imagination in phenomenological aesthetic theories. Imagination can affect every perceptual experience, and, in experiences of art, it is especially prominent. Restricting an experience of art to an “affective essence” (Dufrenne, 1953/1973, p. 520) ignores some of the constitutive aspects of such experiences. When Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) writes of the experience of an aesthetic expression that it is a “little world that opens up within the larger one” (p. 338), it is not only an affective response nor an experience of the images representing affects. Rather, we argue, it is an experiential field, consisting partly of imagination, which opens in close connection with the materiality of the work of art. When standing in front of Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool (1971), we perceive the colors, lines, and blurry figures. These properties inevitably invite us to imagine something: maybe the sounds of the crowded swimming pool, the screams and splashes, what it must be like to be a child in that scene, how the air must be heavy and damp, how it must smell of chlorine, and, further, who these people are and why they are all at the swimming pool. Whether we call this a world of its own or the depth of the work of art, we can understand it as dimensions unfolding in experience. These are dimensions of perception, affect, empathy, judgments, and, not least, imagination with its capacity to show what is not physically present and yet indicated in the expressive work of art. Descriptions of aesthetic experiences are therefore partly descriptions of imaginative experiences.

Intensification of expression

Referring to the expressive value of works of art is often done as a way of signifying that “the painting ‘says’ more than what the simple exercise of our senses could teach us” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 409). For Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012), “sense precedes existence” in the work of art (p. 338), meaning that the work’s expressive value is primary. The materiality of the work of art exhibits an excess (pp. 338, 409) that calls for an elaboration carried out by a perceiver. This elaboration is one of the primary aspects of experiences of visual art. In our experience of art’s expression, a qualitative difference between ordinary objects and works of art become evident. One difference is that the experience of the work of art in most cases involves a fictive world unrelated to the particular context (e.g., the museum). Whether or not we agree that the work of art has an “ontological self-sufficiency,” as Dufrenne (1953/1973, p. 91) states, we experience a dimension or a world that belongs to the work of art, but is not physically present. In other words, we experience an as-if situation. This imaginary experience can manifest in a vivid manner as a detachment from the real situation (e.g., Stenner & Zittoun, 2020; Zittoun & Gillespie, 2015b, 2015c), but it also has a prereflective dimension, which is experienced differently from such a step outside of perceptual reality. As the lived body denotes a structure of our being, which is necessary for any experience to take place at all (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012; Sheets-Johnstone, 2009), the prereflective dimension of embodied imaginary experience is the ground from which any other structure of imagination necessarily builds. It is at the prereflective level of the lived body that we take up the aesthetic world in our imagination, an event that manifests as an engagement with the imagined world that involves our embodied being in its entirety. A presence in the imagined world precedes any concrete imaginings of seeing, touching, or hearing, just as perceptual experiences entail abstract and virtual movement that indicates the space in which our concrete movements can take place. This embodied imagined presence in the imagined world happens with an immediacy and a lack of distinct sensory form, making it an experience that evades any attempt to contemplate it while it takes place.

Here, we have reached a crucial point in our understanding of what imagination is and what embodiment means for imagination. If imaginary experiences are described as acts of “contemplating” or “seeing” images, they implicitly defy what the corporeal turn tells us about experiences in general, including imaginary ones. Such descriptions relapse back into a language that belongs to a mind–body dualism. Experiences are conceived of as spectated acts of looking at objects displayed before us rather than as bodily relations with our surroundings, which themselves have bodily presences and styles. However, neither perceptual nor imaginary experiences are spectatorships, although we could easily be led to believe so when imaginings are described in terms of image watching, implicitly meaning contemplating from afar.

Despite embodiment being a structural characteristic for perception of both ordinary objects and works of art, the experiences of one and the other vary, as we state above. This is not because works of art are expressive and ordinary objects are not. As we argue here, there is a style and habituality to every perceived object, but the perceived quality of expression can be an important distinguishing factor between the two types of objects. We argue that, in the interdependence between the work of art and the person experiencing it, the imaginary engagement is more intense in experiences of art and the unfolding of the experience rests on imagination to a larger extent than in experiences of ordinary objects. Further, the way that the expression of the work is experienced relies on a multitude of consciousness types. To restrict the significance of the experience to a purely affective value is not only theoretically limited, we argue, but also potentially defies what phenomenological analysis tells us. Although a profound affective response can occur in the meeting with the work of art, and most likely often occurs in psychologically important experiences of art, it is not all that happens. Imagination is a necessary aspect of the dynamic way that works of art unfold because “expression is never total,” as Merleau-Ponty writes (1964a, p. 89). Further, we can view imagination as deepening the experience rather than creating mental excursions that deviate from the work of art. Our experiences do not necessarily detach themselves from the objects through imagination but rather venture into the openings of the works of art. If the expression of an artwork comes about in a time–space interplay of the canvas, the perceiver, and their spatiotemporal settings, experiences can be understood by their interrelations between former experiences, future anticipations, and present responses of various kinds. Such interconnectedness gives weight to the lived life of the experiencing subject.

The interconnectedness between types of consciousness is also recurrent in Merleau-Ponty’s (1964b) analyses of paintings, such as in “Eye and Mind.” Here, his concept of vision as an embodied engagement with a visual work of art plays a key role. Vision takes part in forming the experience that surpasses the mere material properties of the painting while still being experienced as belonging to it: “Quality, light, colour, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them,” he writes (p. 125). By relating bodily to the painting, we experience not only its material properties but also the style and possible meanings in the figures and colors. This is probably why Merleau-Ponty writes that a mental image is only “a likeness” according to one’s own body (p. 126). It is an internal figuring of something external, meaning that we grasp it through the tacit cogito that the lived body signifies. In the same way, the painting is an expressive and external figuring of something experienced by the artist. This expression is recognized by the experiencing subject in a perceptual process similar to the one involved in the grasping of ordinary objects, although relying on different intentional states. One of the differences is the call for an enhanced involvement from imagination. Imagination develops as a component in the expression of the object. In the often-cited words of Merleau-Ponty, imagination “gives vision that which clothes it within”(p. 126), meaning that the experience of art rests on the object unfolding within us with a multitude of relations to imagination and other types of consciousness.

Imagination, expression, and the real

Why then does Merleau-Ponty (1964b) write that “the painter’s world is a visible world, nothing but visible” (p. 127)? We must remember that visible appearance and invisible content are not independent entities, but intertwined aspects in experience. The painter’s job is to show “what is making itself seen within [themselves],” as Merleau-Ponty quotes Max Ernst (p. 129). It is invisible yet expressive content felt in the painter through the embodied act of vision. Expression lives in the colors, lines, contrasts, and time of the artistic medium. According to Merleau-Ponty, the artwork comes to be its own world in this process, and the perceiver experiences a world through their own engagement. To experience the air in a painted landscape as warm and dry, emanating silence as in the middle of the day, is to provide an imaginary context to the perceived. The experience takes place instantly and with a quality much more developed and dense than the dim awareness of variation that we experience in our dealings with the everyday objects in our well-known surroundings. In experiences of visual art, imagination does more than point toward potentially alternating uses and appearances of an object in front of us. Rather, it develops and forms the complex aesthetic “world” in co-operation with the work of art. The work of art outlines its own world, and imagination makes it habitable.

We can describe the aesthetic relation as one in which something foreign with its own expressive value is met at the same time as our own embodied imagination is engaged. That our imaginary engagement in experiences of visual art in many cases is more elaborated than when we experience ordinary objects of use does not mean that experiences of art are deprived of any relation to the real. Even though art offers us what Husserl (1898–1925/2005) calls “an infinite wealth of perceptual fictions” (p. 620), art is also an expression of the actual world, and imagination thus brings us closer to those parts of the actual. As Annabelle Dufourcq (2015) argues with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s writings, the imaginary field, when it is involved in the aesthetic, “is more lively and closer to the very principle of the presence of beings” (p. 46). In other words, through imagination, a painted scene, person, or object is given a body through which its style and way of being can be exhibited with greater clarity. The perception of a bowl of lemons on our kitchen table might entail a prereflective awareness of their feel or how they sound or smell if they are zested. These are possible variations of the object; they are open ends to perception.

Experiencing works of art involves the same open ends. However, the lemons in a painting are not situated in our own kitchen, in the bowl that we know, nor are they lemons for us to eat. Instead, they are lemons in a setting that we inhabit by way of our imagination’s capacity to situate us in this setting. This is one of the peculiarities of the work of art: its uncertainty. Taken concretely, it is a very limited display of objects or lines, shapes, and colors, but rarely do we experience it as only that. Rather, we see it as a view into a world that we can come to inhabit by way of our imagination.

Conclusions

Prereflective imagination is part of making perceptual experiences what they are. It is part of shaping our experience of the object’s meaning—its “accent” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 333) or particular habituality (Husserl, 1936/1970, p. 31). By providing a prereflective awareness of how objects could be different in accord with their use, feel, and appearance, imagination reveals the open ends of perceptions and has the potential to alter how we conceive of an object’s meaning. As such, the experience of objects in our perceptual field can be affected by our awareness of potentialities. We experience objects, whether they be ordinary or aesthetic, as meaningful against a background of possible variations. This does not mean that perception is an imaginary endeavor, but that imagination figures closely with perception in the way we actually experience our surroundings. Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the body provide an epistemological framework that allows us to see that prereflective imagination rarely develops into very complex structures in the perception of ordinary objects of use but is, rather, a dim awareness of variation. Prereflective imagination marks out the ever-present rabbit holes of perception, into which we do not necessarily jump. If we do, we imagine rather than perceive. Experiences of art provide a different case, one in which we see that the experience itself rests on a greater involvement of imagination. Here, prereflective imagination provides more than a dim awareness of possible variations of the perceived. The work of art indicates a world, and imagination makes it habitable. The expansion of what is given by the work of art is part of constituting what is often described as the expression of the aesthetic object. An experience of such an expressive world rests on imagination as a capacity to elaborate on the present and to show us what is not present. Further, these variations in experience show us how different experiences involve different types of engagement from prereflective imagination. But whether it is a matter of slight potential differences in appearance or use, as in perception of ordinary objects, or if it is living an aesthetic world in our bodies and our minds, imagination shows us that which is not present. It shows us what could be, and it is part of making our experiences what they are.