The Normativity of the Imagination: Its Critical Import 1 Andreea Smaranda Aldea Kent State University 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. Keywords: imagination, normativity, possibility, potentiability, conceivability, critique Author physical address: 2 Old Coach Rd., Norwich, VT 05055, USA Email: aaldea1@kent.edu ORCID: https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-5692-0581 1. Introduction Husserlian and Husserlian-inspired studies and discussions of the normativity of experience broadly construed (Crowell 2013, 2001; Steinbock 1995a–b) and, more specifically, of perception (Doyon 2018, 2016, 2015; Wehrle 2018, 2015, 2010) and embodiment (Wehrle 2016; Taipale 2014, 2012; Heinämaa 2013) abound. Not the same could be said about phenomenological studies of the imagination. The reason for this lacuna: of Husserl’s own making. Time and time again, across studies spanning his career, he has dismissed the view that the imagination exhibits any normative dimension. This chapter attempts to address the oversight as well as the root of the problem – Husserl misguided analysis. Only by shifting the framework of analysis (away from Husserl’s) in a manner that attempts to do analytic justice to the imagination in its own right, not privately by comparison to other forms of experience (such as perception, image consciousness, or memory), can we tackle the question of the normativity of the imagination anew. This is the overarching motivation for my discussion here. My goal in this chapter is twofold: to show that the imagination exhibits both a broad, or what I refer to as an ‘overarching’ normativity, and a narrow normativity since it can engage a