ABSTRACT
Phenomenology has devoted extensive study to the act of perception, and a perception aimed at perceptual realities; and yet Husserl himself took some pains in elaborating the method of imaginative variation in order to disclose phenomenological essence. Surrealist movies offer us the opportunity of varying before our eyes the fundamental principles by which we constitute what we call the real world. Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is suffering attacks from various sides precisely on the grounds that it is not politics—from Marxists such as J. P. Sartre and H. Marcuse, and a wide variety of individual moralists who more or less stem from S. Kierkegaard. It is clear that the surprising and marvellous effects of the surrealistic domain result from its reference to the common domain of reality; after all, it is a distortion or variation of that real world. If the surrealist domain seems frivolous to existential seriousness, it is essential to the transcendental interests of phenomenology.
