Abstract
This collection of papers has its origin in a conference held at the University of Washington in May 2007, and constitutes the culmination of a three-year research collaboration between two of its editors. As Richard T. Gray notes in his introduction, the preposition ‘of’ in the title can be read as either an objective or a subjective instance of the genitive − the imagination as the object of various (re)inventions, or as itself the creative agency − and the aptness of this ambiguity is illustrated by the diversity of the essays that follow. In the opening contribution, Wolfgang Welsch (Jena) posits the notion of an ‘essential image’ (p. 18), championing an imagination that is ‘in league with reflection’ (p. 25). For Georg Braungart (Tübingen), the constructive imagination played a significant role in the history of geology, exemplified by Cuvier’s theory of ‘catastrophism’ or Goethe’s ‘discovery’ (as Wolf von Engelhardt has argued) of the Ice Age. In her analysis of Kant and Spinoza, Beth Lord (Dundee) examines the function of the imagination in the Ethics, and (more briefly) in the first and third Critiques, arguing (against Kant and for Spinoza) that a recognition of the complementary relation between philosophy and fiction lies at the heart of Romanticism. And Michael N. Forster (Chicago) explores the roles of Einfühlung in Herder’s theory of interpretation, illustrating what it adds to our interpretation of experience through a contrast between Walter Burkert’s and Walter Otto’s accounts of Greek religion.
In a letter of 23 August 1799 Blake wrote that ‘to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself’ and that ‘this world is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination’ (p. 69). By way of an explication of this passage, Hazard Adams (Washington) teases out the relation between imagination, vision, inspiration and intellect in Blake’s work, concluding that ‘the real is what the imagination literally envisions, intellectually and spiritually; and it is always an image’ (p. 75). In a chapter with the programmatic title ‘Imaginative Power as Prerequisite for an Aesthetics of Freedom in Friedrich Schiller’s Works’, Wilhelm Voßkamp (Cologne) examines the political implications of Schiller’s conception of beauty. Four essays are devoted to German Idealism, specifically Hegel and Schelling. Klaus Vieweg (Jena) discerns three stages of the imagination in Hegel (reproductive imagination, productive/associative imagination or fantasy, and sign-making fantasy), while Robert B. Pippin (Chicago) takes Hegel’s (mis)quotation of Schiller at the close of the Phenomenology as a starting-point to question the relation between art and philosophy in his Lectures on Aesthetics. Then, Tilottama Rajan (Western Ontario) uses Schelling’s Ages of the World to reinterpret and deconstruct Hegel’s conception in his Aesthetics of symbolic art in the light of the Schellingian notion of a ‘primal traumatic creativity at the origin of the world’ (p. 137), while Richard Block (Washington) reads Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism − whose contention that in nature one starts from the unconscious in order to raise it to the conscious, whereas in art one proceeds from the conscious to the unconscious so upset Schiller (see his letter to Goethe of 27 March 1801) − through the perspective of Hölderlin’s poem Andenken, on which Heidegger wrote an extensive commentary. Finally, an essay by Christoph Bode (LMU Munich) considers the continuity between Romanticism and Modernism (Blake, Keats, Shelley, Robert Frost, H.D. and Wallace Stevens).
This is a stimulating collection of papers, foregrounding the role of the imagination at a time when its lack can be almost palpably felt across the educational curriculum and in the political arena. Given that its subtitle is ‘Romanticism and beyond’, it also prompts a number of questions (over and above the immediate remit of this project) about the importance of the imagination for later thinkers. Is the power of an essential image what Ludwig Klages meant by die Wirklichkeit der Bilder? How did Herder’s theory of Einfühlung, so central to his thought, feed into the psychology and aesthetics of Theodor Lipps? And what is the link between Hegel’s notion of the symbol and the aesthetic systems of Friedrich Theodor Vischer or Johannes Volkelt, not to mention the various schools of psychoanalysis? Or to put it another way: are we any closer today to realizing what, according to the Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism (see p. 4), we most need − ‘a monotheism of reason and the heart, polytheism of the imagination and of art’?