Imagination and the Prism of the Inapparent

Abstract

The Introduction explores the role of imagination especially since the eighteenth century and the impact of Kant's understanding of this faculty as the mental power of the figurative synthesis between the sensible and the intelligible that is necessary to account for the very possibility of experience. The Romantic celebration of the creative force of human imagination is a direct outcome of the Kantian emphasis on the reproductive capacity of the imagination and the subservient position assigned to reason. Building on this philosophical foundation, corroborated by the role of the imagination culled from kabbalistic sources, the imagination is here portrayed as the vehicle by which we exceed our social and biological environments that rupture the ordinary and open the horizons of scientific, technological, and aesthetic ingenuity to the possibility of the impossible, the nonphenomenalizable that is the epistemic condition of all phenomenality, the unseeing that enframes every act of seeing, the negative ideal of the unreal that positivizes the recurrent patterns and perspectival mutations that constitute the contours of the world we deem to be real. The role of imagination and the theocentric proclivity of Jewish philosophical speculation is investigated through this prism of the inapparent.