Classical Imagination: Un-Necessary Mediator

The role of imagination in philosophy and thinking has been variously understood but also obscured by an ambiguity. This ambiguity arises from the fact that imagination, as an agency of human mind, is both employed and downplayed in philosophical inquiry. I argue that this ambiguous status of imagination can be apprehended in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Pico and Kant. I also suggest that their conceptions of imagination are shaped by its function as a “mediator” between the senses and reason. By examining the views of imagination in evidence in these thinkers, I aim to show that imagination has had a complex and ambivalent role in the Western metaphysical tradition. However, I also claim that Kant’s radical rethinking of imagination as the transcendental faculty of synthesis opens up new possibilities for a more positive appreciation of imagination in philosophy, especially in the field of phenomenology. To achieve these goals, I will briefly revisit the classical accounts of imagination. In so doing, I reappraise its position in classical Western metaphysics and open up, albeit only preliminarily, a possibility for a renewed evaluation of its role in philosophy and thinking in light of the post-Kantian developments such as Husserlian phenomenology.