Abstract
This paper presents a phenomenological account of the imagination in its salient features for contemporary discussions concerning virtual reality and computer game experience. As I shall argue, Husserl’s conception of the imagination as a distinctive kind of intentionality offers an account that does away with any “representational” relation between the artifact and the imagined object, thus allowing for a genuinely phenomenological account of imaginary objects and their corresponding form of manifestation in experience. In this light, I shall outline a more complex notion of a virtual fictional object. I argue that fictional objects are conglomerate objects, that is, objects constituted in terms of different stratifications of objecthood: perceptual thing, imaginary object, symbol. Lastly, I shall sketch another insight from Husserl’s phenomenology of the imagination: the imagination, as a lived experience, is a “fictionalizing” or “virtualizing” of consciousness (and not just its object). The consciousness of the virtual entails a (partial) “virtualization” of consciousness itself.
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