A Study of the History of Western Imagination

HONG Myung-Hee

doi:10.21049/ccs.2012.29..113

In our days, we live in the world of image and imagination. Now we think that the images and imaginations are no more selective but indispensable elements in our life. The status of imagination is dramatically changed since 20 century. Many philosophers like G. Bachelard, G. Durand, Paul Ricoeur, H. Corbin, G. Deleuze made great contributions and we think that the studies of imagination began since 20 century. But the change of the status of imagination was not made in one day. In the long history of human life, the imagination kept his own value, and never stopped to give his influence to the human mentalities. The concept of imagination was born from the Plato’s notion of phantasia. Plato thinks that the phantasia is a kind of drawing capacity in mind in the process of recognition. But the image which phantasia makes is not real one but pseudo one. So it is necessary to banish those false images from our recognition. Aristotle thought phantasia as an afterimage of object of sense. The sense is always true, but the phantasia is very possible to be an error. After Plato and Aristotle, the notion of phantasia developed into that of imagination, but it was always a problem full of contradictions. According to G. Durand, we can say, in some sense, the history of western philosophy is a kind of struggle against the image and imagination. In Middle Age, the iconoclasm tried to exclude image from their religion. Thomas Aquinas tried to explain the image by the rationalistic christianisme. In 16-17C Galilei and Descartes solidified the exclusion of imagination from the philosophy in the name of science and reason. The empiricism and positivism was the final and the most conclusive philosophies which exclude the imagination definitively from the field of philosophy. But the imagination continued his influence in the field of art. In the age of Renaissance, the imagination found his way of liberal expression, and this trend was inherited to Baroque. From the middle of 17c many philosophical theories supported the imagination by many philosophers like J.-B. Dubos, Baumgarten, A. Becq, J.-J. Rousseau etc. The Romanticism was the first significant wave which made the imagination come forward in front the art. The romanticism broke the narrow frame of rationalism and expand human’s view of the world to the cosmos. From the romanticism, the imagination became a faculty which expresses the unity of human and nature. That was impossible by the rational thinking of rationalism. The concept of new imagination made a new future of human, ‘the imagining conscious’ and this imagining conscious provided a solid base of next generation’s symbolism and surrealism.

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