Abstract

JOHNSON, David E.. Counting on the Imagination. Ideas y Valores [online]. 2020, vol.69, suppl.6, pp.49-70.  Epub May 10, 2021. ISSN 0120-0062.  https://doi.org/10.15446/ideasyvalores.v69n6supl.90092.

This essay demonstrates the structural relationship between testimony and aesthetic judgment. The implications of this discovery are several, the most important being the relationship between the lie and truth, implicating that lie indicates the irreducible possibility of truth. The essay explains the necessary impossibility of the testimony as a condition of its possibility, an argument anticipated in Jorge Luis Borges’ beautiful phrase, “There is not a single beautiful word, with the dubious exception of witness, that is not an abstraction”. The argument is based on Husserl’s theory of the syncategorem (“incomplete” words whose meaning depends on the context) and on deictic words (“essentially occasional” words); as well, it takes from Kant, the role of the imagination and the effects of the “as if”.

Keywords : E. Husserl; I. Kant; imagination; lie; testimony; truth.

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