Abstract
Abstract The term ‘the intermediate world’ is a key concept in Den skønne tænkning (Beautiful Thinking) and the metaphysics of experience presented by this book. The metaphysics of experience is about the experiences of transcendence and beautiful thinking that take place in the intermediate world. In the article “The Intermediate World,” this subject is introduced through a discussion of thoughts and concepts formulated by Paul Klee (Zwischenwelt), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (beautiful thinking), Aristotle (phantasia), Immanuel Kant (expanded thinking), Mark C. Taylor (imagination), and Eugenio Trías (the limit). The text depicts the intermediate world as the level of experience at which the understanding does not yet distinguish between subject and object. The intermediate world is thus not a realm between human and world, nor is it something outside the world we know. The intermediate world is rather the present world in its most original state: the ‘place’ where we find the source of all experience and cognition, a source called ‘basic experience’ characterized by sensation, faith, and comprehension. In this realm, imagination is active and takes the form of an objective force rather than a subjective mental power. Imagination opens mind and world, thus allowing not-yetactualized possibilities to become perceivable.
Highlights
The expression ‘beautiful thinking’ derives from §1 in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica
The term ‘the intermediate world’ is a key concept in Den skønne tænkning (Beautiful Thinking) and the metaphysics of experience presented by this book
In the article “The Intermediate World,” this subject is introduced through a discussion of thoughts and concepts formulated by Paul Klee (Zwischenwelt), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Mark C
Summary
The expression ‘beautiful thinking’ derives from §1 in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica. The Intermediate World: A Key Concept in Beautiful Thinking 51 object are connected in an original way before they are separated intellectually.[3] In as early as the 18th century, Baumgarten initiated a philosophical exploration of the intermediate world by introducing his philosophical aesthetics With his aesthetics, he founded a new epistemology that anticipated the hermeneutic phenomenological philosophy of experience of the 20th century, and he founded a new metaphysics that, unlike traditional metaphysics, revolved around ‘sensitive cognition,’ ‘beautiful thinking,’ and ‘aesthetic truth.’. Baumgarten’s thought still originated in rationalism; essentially, his aesthetics belonged to the dualist philosophy of mind It was formed as a philosophy of human faculties that, thanks to its notion of sensitive cognition, which bridges sense perception and abstract thinking, tended to burst the subject/object-paradigm, but was prevented by its rationalist origins from conducting a proper exploration of the intermediate world. Having the ‘intermediate world’ as its key term, this chapter deals with the following questions: 1) in which dimension of the world does transcendence occur? 2) Which faculties are involved when we are present in this dimension, that is, the intermediate world? 3) How might we conceive of the limit implied in all ideas of transcendence, and in the notion of an intermediate world associated with experiencing transcendence? 4) What is the intermediate world, if it is not a locatable domain of the empirical world or a container for experience? 5) How can philosophy access the poetic dimension of the world with which the intermediate world is synonymous when interpreted as sensitive subjectivity?
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