Hans Vaihinger's ghostly presence in contemporary literary studies

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Barry Stampfel

In the third chapter of The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993), Iser describes the evolution of the fiction as a concept in empirical philosophy from Francis Bacon through Jeremy Bentham and Vaihinger to Nelson Goodman. The narrative that emerges divides into two stages: first, it is that of the fiction's rehabilitation, and, finally, it is that of the fiction's rebirth. Condemned as an "idol" by Bacon, the fiction is positively thematized by Bentham as an unavoidable and useful byproduct of discourse. Subsequently, in Vaihinger, the fiction receives a further promotion, standing revealed as the hitherto unacknowledged prime legislator of thought. Thus, the first part of Iser's story reaches completion.

The key position occupied by Vaihinger in Iser's reconstruction of the fiction's progress implies considerable appreciation for Vaihinger's power of illumination. Iser notes that under the direction of the "as if," "comprehension is guided by the effort to subsume the unknown under the known" (147). Submitting "what is given"--that is, "the real"--to imaginative processing, the "as if" represents "a kind of relay, insofar as it forces the imaginative into a form in order to open up the full range of possibilities" (146). Or, shifting metaphors, Iser sees the "as if" as, "the region within which imagination and consciousness work on each other, although the practical purpose requires that consciousness remains dominant, so that the imaginative is present in the structure of consciousness only as an empty space. The empty space marks the possible influence of the imagination on the activities of consciousness--an influence brought about by the need to compare the incomparable" (146). The "empty space" to which Iser here refers is that which "lies between [the] two references" made respectively by "as" and "if": "On the one hand [this empty space] is part of a comparison, and on the other hand it is the common ground between the very different elements of the given and the feigned. The empty space of the As-if brings together the existing reality and sensations that guide the approach to it. It proves to be a source from which imaginative intuitions may penetrate consciousness" (145-46). Vaihinger's "as if" thus appears to be an important form of the fictive thinking that Iser celebrates throughout The Fictive and the Imaginary as a Promethean enterprise making possible the crossing of boundaries (4).

Iser is careful, however, to qualify this high valuation with a commentary emphasizing Vaihinger's philosophically retrograde implications. For while a position zeroing in on the reduction of all mental activity to fiction-making might seem well-suited to postmodern/ poststructuralist emphases, Iser insists that that which is stubbornly premodern in Vaihinger's thought causes his insight to be forced "through the barriers of the old vocabulary" (152). In short, it is evident that Vaihinger's argument, as Iser puts it, is "still based on the epistemological subject/object split, which Vaihinger ... did not discard" (152). And this survival is clearly evident in the mechanism of as-if thinking itself, with its unexplained power to draw the line between that which is "given" and that which is "impossible" or "unreal." Iser consequently is right to characterize Vaihinger's fiction as "a peculiar hybrid" (152)--parasitic, in its falsity, on the category of truth, and therefore compatible with the entire hierarchy of logocentric distinctions.