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Understanding ImaginationAfter Kant: Appropriating the Conceptual Topology of Imagination

Understanding Imagination: After Kant: Appropriating the Conceptual Topology of Imagination [Kant’s legacy to the nineteenth century was twofold. In the aesthetic realm, he presented imagination as engaged in interplay with other psychological powers. This led, through Fichte and Schelling, to the Romantic overgrowth of imagination conceived as not just artistic but creative and higher than reason. Baudelaire, developing a theory of works of art as images that are their own originals, brought more sobriety to the conception of art by taking careful account of the painstaking psychological and technical processes involved in artistic production. Kant’s idea of the interplay of psychological powers eventually led to the Freudian theory of dream symbols and the Lacanian understanding of the unconscious as structured like language. This notion of the connection between imagination and language was the second, more cognitively important Kantian legacy. His theory of the schema, a transcendental function of imagination uniting concepts with images, raised the question of the imaginative-conceptual character of language, although Kant himself scarcely addressed it. This question was in essence a return to Plato, who had understood logoi, words in discourse, as a fundamental kind of human imagining. Hegel tried to derive words from images using dialectical reason, but his claim that the process removed all sensory character obscured his other insights into imagination. By contrast, the language theories of three thinkers most responsible for the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, Peirce, Saussure, and Wittgenstein, conceived language as originating in productive imagination and the fusion of fields of imaginative appearance.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Understanding ImaginationAfter Kant: Appropriating the Conceptual Topology of Imagination

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References (44)

Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Copyright
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
ISBN
978-94-007-6506-1
Pages
399 –481
DOI
10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_8
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Kant’s legacy to the nineteenth century was twofold. In the aesthetic realm, he presented imagination as engaged in interplay with other psychological powers. This led, through Fichte and Schelling, to the Romantic overgrowth of imagination conceived as not just artistic but creative and higher than reason. Baudelaire, developing a theory of works of art as images that are their own originals, brought more sobriety to the conception of art by taking careful account of the painstaking psychological and technical processes involved in artistic production. Kant’s idea of the interplay of psychological powers eventually led to the Freudian theory of dream symbols and the Lacanian understanding of the unconscious as structured like language. This notion of the connection between imagination and language was the second, more cognitively important Kantian legacy. His theory of the schema, a transcendental function of imagination uniting concepts with images, raised the question of the imaginative-conceptual character of language, although Kant himself scarcely addressed it. This question was in essence a return to Plato, who had understood logoi, words in discourse, as a fundamental kind of human imagining. Hegel tried to derive words from images using dialectical reason, but his claim that the process removed all sensory character obscured his other insights into imagination. By contrast, the language theories of three thinkers most responsible for the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, Peirce, Saussure, and Wittgenstein, conceived language as originating in productive imagination and the fusion of fields of imaginative appearance.]

Published: Apr 1, 2013

Keywords: Language Game; Human Psychology; Elementary Proposition; Oedipus Complex; Conceptual Topology

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