Poetics of Imagining _ Richard Kearney

1. It(imagination) is the wager of philosophy, however, that we may come to know more about it by asking questions of it. Not that knowing is everything. But it can, at best, heighten our appreciation. And better to appreciate what it means to imagine is, as I will argue, better to appreciate what it means to be. _ 1p

2. The biblical tradition of commentary identifies imagination with the knowledge of opposites. ... It corresponded to the specifically human experience of temporal transcendence as an imaginative capacity to recollect a past and project a future - that is, the capacity to convert the given confines of the here and now into an open horizon of possibilities. ... the power to transmute nature into culture, to transform the wilderness into a habitat where human beings might dwell. _ 2p

3. Imagination ... by Plato and the Greek thinkers, is roundly condemned as a pernicious strategy of simulation : one which tempts mortals to take themselves for omniscient gods, whereas in fact they are merely playing with reflections in a mirror. 

    Most classical and medieval thinkers considered imagination an unreliable, unpredictable and irreverent faculty could juggle impiously with the accredited distinctions between being and non-being, turning things into their opposites, making absent things present, impossibilities possible. Or as Thomas Aquinas observed in resonant phrase, imagination makes 'everything other then it is'. _ 3p

4. Modern philosophies developed the basic understanding of imagination as present-in-absent - the act of making what is present absent and what is absent present. ... For Kant and German idealists such as Schelling and Fichte the imagination is celebrated as a creative transforming of the real into the ideal. _ 4p

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing directly under their philosophical influence, was to set the agenda for Romantic poetry when he defined the 'primary imagination' in the following quasi-divine terms: 'It is the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM'. But it was no doubt the French poet Baudelaire who delivered the crowning accolade of Romanticism when he nominated imagination 'the queen of the faculties... which decomposes all creation and creates a new world, the sensation of novelty'. _4p

6. ...the plurality of terms for imagination ... have at least one basic trait in common: they all refer, in their diverse ways, to the human power to convert absence into presence, actuality into possibility, what-is into something-other-than-it-is. _4p

7. So doing, imagination ceases to take itself for granted and comes to reflexively to acknowledge its own pre-reflective engagement with everyday lived projects and preoccupations. In addition, therefore, to bringing the life of imagination to the light of reflection, phenomenology simultaneously reminds us that all radical questioning takes its point of departure in our pre-conceptual experience of the life-world. _ 5p

8. This means, in respect of our present concerns, that our investigation of imagination will take its measure from particular culture and historical conditions that prevail in our century. _6p

9. This 'crisis of identity' is compounded, in turn, by a 'crisis of faith'  in the modern aesthetic of the productive imagination. The triumphal rise to supremacy, since the Enlightenment, of technological reason dwarfed the status of Romantic imagination to such a degree that the subsequent post-modern subversion of its claims to 'originality' and 'genius' was greatly facilitated.