ABSTRACT
The chapter argues, by departing from Husserl’s privative-comparative framework of analysis, that, as a basic stance of consciousness (not merely a kind of presentification or as-if consciousness), the imagination exhibits a rich normative dimension. I contend that there are two broad senses of normativity at play in imagining consciousness – exploratory, which pertains to the imagination’s “open” mode, and evaluative, which pertains to its “critical” mode. Furthermore, through these two broad or “overarching” senses of normativity, which color imagining experiences irrespective of the attitude and register they are unfolding in, the imagination is able to engage a wide array of norms, be they practical, valuative, ideal, etc. What transpires is that the critical-evaluative normativity of the imagination holds heretofore untapped and unexplored potential for understanding the conditions for the possibility of both everyday self- and world-critique as well as theoretical critical methods, including phenomenology itself.
