Abstract
This chapter analyzes the redefinition and reappraisal of imagination that took place in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, initiated by Immanuel Kant and developed by, for example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Imagination was redefined as a productive or creative force with several functions and sub-functions, allowing for a new, affirmative appraisal that takes imagination from the metaphor of the reflecting mirror to that of the lamp exuding a divine light from and onto the imaginer. Kallenbach here traces how imagination becomes re-evaluated as a superior faculty that is both a precondition for knowledge and the agent for aesthetic judgment. Imagination gradually becomes synonymous with ideality and the rare gift of the genius.
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Notes
- 1.
Thus Hume writes that “in the imagination the perception is faint and languid, and cannot without difficulty be preserv’d by the mind steddy and uniform for any considerable time.” A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (Kitchener, Ontario, Canada: Batoche Books, 1999), 13.
- 2.
With inspiration from Plotinus, this had largely been confined to “marginalized hermetic cults” celebrating the magical, divine powers of imagination; see Kearney, 155.
- 3.
The periodization of both Idealism and Romanticism is debatable. The starting point will here be Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). While Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1821) often marks the end of Romanticism, the idealist aesthetics, as will be evident in the following chapters, still stood strong towards the end of the 1870s.
- 4.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image trans. Jeff Fort, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 80.
- 5.
Abrams uses these “antithetic metaphors of mind” to illustrate the radical shift in the conception of the human consciousness that occurred in the late eighteenth century, with its consequences for aesthetic thought as well. In The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), Preface.
- 6.
George S. Rousseau, “Science and the Discovery of Imagination in Enlightened England,” in Nervous Acts (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 91.
- 7.
Abrams, Preface.
- 8.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], trans. Marcus Weigelt (London: Penguin, 2007), |B103, |A78.
- 9.
Sometimes also called Phantasie, Vorstellung or Perceptionsvermögen.
- 10.
Brann characterizes the different approaches as “more psychological in the earlier and altogether logical or ‘transcendental’ in the later edition”; see The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 89. Kant retracted many of his claims of the powers of imagination in the second edition. Martin Heidegger ’s 1927 study Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik], trans. Richard Taft, 5th ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), provides an interpretation of this.
- 11.
See Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 148.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
See, e.g., James Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 130. Johnson argues that Kant’s notion of reproductive imagination “is only representing the standard empiricist view of imagination as a power to form unified images, and to recall in memory past images, so as to constitute a unified and coherent experience.” 149.
- 14.
Kant, |A97. See also Johnson, 149.
- 15.
Kant, |B104, |A79.
- 16.
Ibid., |B151.
- 17.
Ibid., e.g., |A97.
- 18.
There has been some discussion as to whether the reproductive imagination is in fact transcendental or not. See, e.g., Johnson.
- 19.
Kant, |A123.
- 20.
Johnson, 151.
- 21.
“The concept of a dog designates a rule according to which my imagination can generally register the figure of a four-footed animal, without being restricted to any particular figure supplied by experience or to any possible image which I can present in concreto.” Kant, |B181, |A41. For a to-the-point account, see Johnson, 152ff.
- 22.
Kant, |A123.
- 23.
Ibid., |A124.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Engell, 133.
- 26.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement [Kritik der Urteilskraft], trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), §I, 35.
- 27.
Ibid., §9, 48.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
“[I]t can be nothing else than the state of the mind involved in the free play of imagination and understanding (so far as these are in mutual accord, as is requisite for cognition in general),” in ibid., §9, 49.
- 30.
Ibid., §17, 66.
- 31.
Kearney, 172.
- 32.
Ibid., 173.
- 33.
Kant, Judgement, General remark on the first section of the analytic, 71, my bold emphasis.
- 34.
Which for Kant primarily applies to the sublime in nature rather than art.
- 35.
Mary Warnock, Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 56.
- 36.
Ibid., 63.
- 37.
Kant, Judgement, §44, 135.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Ibid., §45, 135f.
- 40.
Ibid., §45, 135.
- 41.
Ibid., §46, 136.
- 42.
“Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (ibid.) and stands in complete opposition to “the spirit of imitation,” ibid., §47, 137.
- 43.
Ibid., §47, 138.
- 44.
Ibid., §49, 142.
- 45.
Ibid., §49, 145.
- 46.
Ibid., §49, 143.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Ibid., §50.
- 49.
Engell, 135.
- 50.
Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 186.
- 51.
Engell characterizes Coleridge as “as once a culminating and original figure,” noting that “[t]he range and profundity of his idea of the imagination make it a natural climatic point.” Engell, 366 and 329.
- 52.
In “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,” in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), §28, 278, Kant writes: “The power of imagination […] is either inventive (productive) or merely recollective (reproductive). But the productive power of imagination is nevertheless not exactly creative, for it is not capable of producing a sense representation that was never given to our faculty of sense; one can always furnish evidence of the material of its ideas.”
- 53.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. I-II, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. 7, Bollingen Series (London, Princeton, NJ: Routledge, Princeton University Press, 1983), Vol. I, Chapter 13, 304f.
- 54.
See, e.g., Jonathan Wordsworth’s discussion, “‘The Infinite I Am’: Coleridge and the Ascent of Being,” ed. Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe, Coleridge’s Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Books Online., 1985, online publication 2009), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511659324.
- 55.
Kant makes a similar distinction in his Antropologie: “The power of imagination, in so far as it also produces images involuntarily, is called fantasy.” Kant, “Antropology,” 278.
- 56.
Coleridge, Biographia, I–II, Vol. I, Chapter 4, 82. For a detailed discussion of the contemporary developments of the etymology of imagination, see Editors’ Introduction, ibid., xcvii ff.
- 57.
Ibid., Vol. I, Chapter 7, 125.
- 58.
See, e.g., Engell, 344.
- 59.
Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 188.
- 60.
Warnock, 97.
- 61.
Engell, 335.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Coleridge, Biographia, I–II, Vol. I, Chapter 9, 156.
- 64.
Ibid., Vol. II, Chapter 14, 15–16.
- 65.
Kant, “Antropology,” 279.
- 66.
Coleridge, Biographia, I–II, Vol. I, Chapter 7, 124.
- 67.
Engell, 347.
- 68.
Coleridge, Biographia, I–II, Vol. I, Chapter 12, 255.
- 69.
Ibid., I, Chapter 10, 168.
- 70.
This ability also serves to contrast it from Fancy, which has only the ability to combine.
- 71.
Coleridge, Biographia, I–II, Introduction, lxxxv.
- 72.
The substance of the brain was thought to resemble fibers.
- 73.
See Clarke, Dewhurst and Aminoff, 74ff.
- 74.
Rousseau, 88.
- 75.
Richard C. Sha, “Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination,” Configurations 17, no. 3 (2009): 15.
- 76.
Introduced by Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828).
- 77.
Termed the “Organ of Poetry” by Gall; see George Combe, A System of Phrenology, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: John Anderson, 1830), 325.
- 78.
Ibid., 513.
- 79.
Ibid., 514.
- 80.
Ibid., 325.
- 81.
Combe also cites Prospero’s concluding speech in Shakespeare ’s The Tempest as “a beautiful specimen” of the style of writing that this faculty produces; ibid., 326.
- 82.
Ibid., 335.
- 83.
Therefore, a well-developed Ideality was essential for the tragic actor: “It is necessary to a player of tragedy. The tone or note of voice suitable to Ideality is elevated and majestic, and hence it is essential to enable the actor to feel and express the greatness of the personages whom he represents.” Ibid., 330.
- 84.
Ibid., 328.
- 85.
Richard C. Sha, “Imagination,” in A Handbook of Romanticism Studies (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2012), 14. See further Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
- 86.
Sha, “Imagination,” 32.
- 87.
Ibid., 10. See also Rousseau: “The fact that Enlightenment physiologists centered their attention on the diseased rather than healthy imagination is of tremendous consequence for the development of European poetry; for it was not until culture scientifically defined the very same madness it wished to condemn that poets turned to the writing of ‘mad verse’ for catharsis and relief.” In Rousseau, 92.
- 88.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Shelley’s Defence of Poetry,” in Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry; Shelley’s Defence of Poetry; Browning’s Essay on Shelley, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith, The Percy Reprints; No. 3 ([Philadelphia]: Folcroft, 1977), 23.
- 89.
Ibid., 31.
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Kallenbach, U. (2018). From Mirror to Lamp. In: The Theatre of Imagining. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76303-3_5
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