Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground (Columbia Series in Science and Religion) by Wallace B. Alan

Author:Wallace, B. Alan [Wallace, B. Alan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science/General, Religion/General, REL000000, SCI000000
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2003-05-06T03:00:00+00:00

The intertwining between imagination and perception can now be explored in greater detail, in terms of the dynamic relationship at their emergence in any moment of experience. Husserl realized that imagining as the presence of the nonpresent is, in essence, a property of how the living, specious present is constituted. In every moment of now there is surely the just present, which is full of the perceptual content. But one of the subtleties that a careful phenomenology of the present reveals is that together with that perceptual or (as we shall say) impressional consciousness of inner time there is also another time consciousness that is proper to imagination, remembrance, and fantasy, which we will refer to as reproductive consciousness (in Husserlian terminology this is called presentificational5 consciousness, but the term is awkward for the nonspecialist). In other words, the very core of our temporality is an inseparable mixture of these two modes of apprehension.

The mixture of these two concurrent forms of consciousness means that they are constantly (at every present moment) emerging from a background that is prereflexive or prenoetic, that is, unconscious. From this floating background a constant self-constitution shapes a living present where the impressional and the reproductive coexist. This background’s capacity for such recurrent manifestations is reflected in its affective or emotive quality, rather than being a neural or mechanical process. This can be cast also as the performative nature of the memories acquired over a life of habits or intense learning (Squire and Zola-Morgan 1996; Squire and Kandel 1999) and is, as we saw, also intrinsic to the generation of imagery from a neuroscientific point of view.

However, such a dynamic view of the emergence of a lived present should not make us forget the essential ways in which imagination and memory (as reproductions) are also different from perception (as presentations). In memory an object appears in the present but as belonging to the past. It is thus an aspect of inner consciousness that mixes the past and present without collapsing their temporal distance. Thus it is as if consciousness doubles itself, which is why remembrance, or recollection, is very close to reflection altogether. Imagination and visualization are manifestations whose relation as a reproduction of a previous perception is neutralized or suspended, as if presentification never happened. In the same sense that imagination cannot be reduced to perception, perception cannot be derived from pure imagination. But it is fair to say that any perception is codetermined by the possibility of its imaginary modification.

Thus, while memory and imagination are close cousins, they can be distinguished in inner consciousness. And what is interesting is that both equally express, in an active fashion, the prenoetic background from which they came. In other words, reproductive consciousness is the privileged place for the manifestation of unconscious, sedimented habitus and desires. The implications of this observation are very important (see Bernet 1996).

Once again, the conclusions of phenomenological analysis converge with those of cognitive neuroscientific analysis, for both avoid the extreme of ascertaining identity and difference and each discovers in its way their common ground with other mental capacities.

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