Thinking Through the Imagination by John J. Kaag (review)
- Thinking Through the Imagination by John J. Kaag
On Peirce’s terms, the history of philosophy is a vast field of mind, a complexifying network of general ideas that contribute to the formation and valorization of human civilization through the expressions of individual authors and schools in their culturally specific times. The [End Page 384] accumulating legacy of philosophical wisdom underwrites these individual expressions. But while for short term good reasons contemporary scholarship trends towards the exegesis of individual authors and schools, the “professional” practice runs the danger of being narrow-gauge in scholarly focus. The excitement of Peirce, and for that matter any major author, consists in adjudicating his place in the “cosmical” or public space of philosophical mind. Such an approach requires a methodological concern to situate his career-text in historical relation to his major predecessors, and thereby to evaluate the degree to which his achievement comprehends and is illuminative of the gamut of authors who can be identified as the first-tier representatives of the legacy of philosophical thought.
John Kaag’s Thinking Through Imagination is a solid contribution to this kind of broader and essential evaluation of Peirce’s place in the history of philosophy. A kind of new prolegomena to Peirce studies, it presents the heart of Peirce’s career-text as the originary philosophy of American Pragmatism grounded in his doctrine of the primacy of abductive inference qua the ampliative connatural imagination. Kaag’s method of thinking is itself ampliative. His motivating agenda transcends chauvinistic and scholastic trajectories in Peirce studies, rather having its own breakthrough character in establishing Peirce’s direct link with the German Enlightenment, and especially with Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Kant’s third Critique was its own bombshell expansion of the scope and problematics of his first two Critiques (1781, 1787). Kaag’s work takes Kant’s categorical reformation in tow, while arguably amplifying Peirce’s own education as to the depth of his conscious and unconscious transformation of Kant’s achievements in the third Critique.
Reprising Peirce’s concern to train himself in pure phenomenological perception of an artist kind, Thinking Through the Imagination opens with a persuasive discussion of “The Cultivation of the Imagination” (chapter one). “Cultivation” is both creative and receptive, a responding to the invitations of nature. Emerson owned this thought and bequeathed it to Peirce. “Cultivation” in this American context “mounts the stairway of surprise,” in the words of Emerson, and yields “sudden rightnesses” of the imagination, in the words of the poet Wallace Stevens. Kaag develops this theme to provide inside access to Peirce’s entire theory of “the logic of inquiry” with regard to both scientific and artistic discovery. There are important links here to Goethe as well as to Kant.
In “Cultivation of the Imagination” Kaag recollects in Wordsworthian and Proustian tranquility a scene in his own childhood when his mother set him and his brother to “work-play” in the backyard. “This gardening may have been free play, but it was also serious business that deserved our full attention. In being imaginative, my brother and I [End Page 385] came to understand the rules of play, the guidelines that determine the arrangement of shrubs and hosta, as they emerged unexpectedly in the interaction with a variety of plants and in a particular garden” (p. 2). He aptly cites Dewey’s foundational doctrine of experience as transaction of the imagination and environment. And, once again, the rightness of this interpretation takes us back to the “American” legacy of Emerson and Peirce.
But Kaag takes it back to Kant as well. Building on a background of scholarly literature that has adumbrated Peirce’s theory of the hypothetical imagination as the heuretic (truth-discovering) edge of inquiry, Thinking Through the Imagination plows a figurative ground in exegesis of Peirce’s conception of abductive inference as an isomorphic interpretant of the third Critique’s “reflective judgment” which Kant articulated as transcendental presupposition as to “the systematicity of nature in general” and thus as the “regulative principle” of...
