The Conflict Phenomenon: Perception, Imagination, and Ficta

In his 1905 lectures on the phenomenology of images, Husserl not only distinguishes the three levels that characterise images, but also attempts to explain the reasons why the object of the image is perceived as a mere appearance that does not claim a place in reality. At the root of the non-positional character of image, perception is a particular form of that class of phenomena which Husserl calls conflict phenomena (Widerstreit). In the analysis of conflict phenomena, descriptive considerations – the only ones possible on the phenomenological terrain – assume an implicit explanatory value. From an explanatory point of view, conflict phenomena are an example of bad psychology. However, freeing ourselves from a false explanation of the psychological dynamics of image perception should not prevent us from grasping the descriptive significance of conflict phenomena in order to understand the nature of images and the relationship between real and figurative space, on the one hand, and to grasp their applicability to a broad family of phenomena, on the other: those phenomena in which perception gives rise to ficta that are given as such and that can only be unravelled and made explicit by arranging themselves on the imaginative terrain.