Imagination and the Imaginary: The Cultivated Imagination in Phenomenology and Goethean Science

In the sciences that apply qualitative methods, the imagination is not merely a producer of poetic ornaments, but a mental tool that can be schooled and applied when analyzing qualitative data. As a legacy of Husserlian phenomenology, we have the procedure of the imaginative variation as an investigative step in the phenomenological method. In Goethean phenomenology, as well as in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, the imagination is intimately entwined with perception. The exact sensory imagination , as Goethe calls it, “is actually a refinement of the natural process of perception, which is always already infused with memory and the imaginative projection of future possibilities” (Robbins, 2005, p. 120). The following essay traces the conceptual region that the schooled imagination occupies in Husserlian phenomenology and Goethean science, and the kind of refinement of perception that it can provide. It also suggests a more elemental imaginary in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, which is the animating force of the imagination.