Online research in philosophy

"Imagination", says Aristotle, "is the process by which we say that an image is presented to us."1 While the OED accepts at least five other entries for the word -- including, for instance, poetic genius -- its first entry refers to the production of mental images. So in this paper, the one and only way I will use the term imagination is in reference to images.

By submitting to the primacy of the question “What?” the phenomenology of memory finds itself at the outset confronting a formidable aporia present in ordinary language: the presence in which the representation of the past seems to consist does indeed appear to be that of an image. We say interchangeably that we represent a past event to ourselves or that we have an image of it, an image that can be either quasi visual or auditory. . . . Memory, reduced to recall, thus operates in the wake of the imagination. . . .As a countercurrent to this tradition of devaluing memory, in the margins of a critique of imagination, there has to be an uncoupling of imagination from memory as far as this operation can be extended. (Ricoeur, MHF, 5–6).

The question of the imagination is rather like the question Augustine raised with regard to the nature of time. We all seem to know what it involves, yet find it difficult to define. For Descartes, the imagination was simply our faculty for producing a mental image. He distinguished it from the understanding by noting that while the notion of a thousand sided figure was comprehensible—that is, was sufficiently clear and distinct to be differentiated from a thousand and one sided figure—the figure could not be clearly pictured in our mind. The representation of its sides exceeded our powers of imagination.[i] This view of the imagination as our ability to produce a mental image fails, however, to distinguish it from remembering. Let us say that I see an object and then I close my eyes, maintaining the image of the object. Is this imagining or short term memory? What about the case when I recall this image an hour later? Am I imagining or remembering it? Such examples make it clear that imagination, as distinct from memory, implies something more than the ability to produce a mental image. It involves, as Sartre pointed out, a certain attitude towards this image. Engaging in it, we deny its reality. In Sartre’s words, imagination “carries within it a double negation; first, it is the nihilation of the world (since the world is not offering the imagined object as an actual object of perception), secondly, the nihilation of the object of the image (it is posited as not actual) ...” (BN, p. 62). Imagination, then, represents the imagined as nonactual.

Introduction -- An introduction to the crisis of spirit : technology and the Fichtean imagination -- Technology and truth : representation and the problem of the third term -- Spirit and the technology of the letter -- The spatial imagination : affect, image, and the critique of representational consciousness -- Subtle matter and the ground of intersubjectivity -- The aesthetic of influence -- The first displacement : from subjectivity to being -- The second displacement : from a metaphysical to a technological imagination.