theme

The triumph of imagination in the new critique of reason

Imagination — for more than three decades our cry has been that imagination is the pivotal point of our human reality and thus the open sesame by which to obtain the novel insights, pointers, harmonies by which to bring our philosophical queries out of the limbo in which they are lost at the end of Modernity and so restore-rejuvenate-reorient Western philosophy.

As it is, Husserl’s crisis-diagnosis of our culture — a diagnosis of the outcome of the previous centuries of Western thinking and experience — has now been radically left behind by the tremendous surge of transformation in the sciences, our societies, and in culture in the last decades, all of which calls for rethinking the entire inherited philosophical apparatus. Our research aims at just that. Indeed, philosophy, although never oblivious to other fields of knowledge, has at this juncture to enter deliberately into dialogue with the new perspectives that have been opened there.

Blindered and lost in a narrow circle of speculation, some philosophers have announced the “end of philosophy.” But the truth is that we are now at its rebirth.

In accord with the present-day orientation in the sciences, the evolution of attitudes in human society, our present appreciation of the animal sphere of life, and the thrust of technological progress, human creativity has come to the fore in our reflections. That primogenital key insight is effecting a radical turnover in philosophy in that the priority that modernity gave to intellective reason now belongs to creative imagination.

Humanity has, indeed, entered a “new world” of life, and our philosophy vigorously follows.

With the dynamic surge in human discovery of the laws of nature and of the universe and the accompanying and relentless technological invention that employs them, humanity advances further and further, seeking to overcome the hurdles that elementary nature within and around us place before our unfolding and so comes to master more and more the conditions of life and well-being. Technological progress opens new pathways to new places in the vast panorama of earth and cosmos, but it also leaves contemporary human beings breathlessly trying to adjust to these transformations. The pace of revolutions now altogether disorients us. What is our status within life? What may we expect of the future? This onward rush that the human being, like the “sorcerer’s apprentice,” has himself unleashed, only to be carried along by its course, forces us to leave behind the traditional certitudes and securities of so-called “human nature,” the “life-world,” etc. The traditional philosopher first sought to find out the composition of reality, the makeup of the universe as it appeared to the ingenious human mind, to disentangle its elements in that crucible and grasp them within a stable conceptual schema. To corroborate this schema, he turned then to the nature of the human mind as holding the key to the cognitive approach and so as being capable of solving the puzzles that reality presents. Modernity, of which the present day is inheritor, in attempting to adjust to new situations with piecemeal approaches, has in the prevailing philosophical view left us with the conviction, which spreads too into the fabric of our understanding of life, that the human being is primordially a “knower” — and that the world/ourselves/the cosmos is the “known,” and that the “known” is a system of “essential,” stable features, laws, rules, structures. But today the dramatic enlargement of the “known” challenges this basic assumption. Human industry seeks new and better means by which to live, and the unquenchable human thirst to advance, to progress, to invent, to construct dominates our new world as never before.

It is a new challenge to philosophy to acknowledge this novel emphasis, to enter into the relentlessly advancing course of knowledge and its application and to reinterpret, accordingly, its own perennial formulation of and convictions about the human being and the universe of life. And so homo creator as the living being within the unity of everything-there-is-alive, in other words, the human condition as we now apprehend it, is the focal point of the new interpretation of the perennial philosophical issues that we advance in the work of the World Phenomenology Institute. Our charge is to rekey philosophy to the evolutionary transformations of the world in which we live, with the human creative imagination being seized as the dizzying Archimedean point that gives us purchase at last on philosophy’s issues. This is the project that I have been pursuing and unfolding over the last three decades.

Indeed, having got beyond the alleged crisis of modernity that Husserl diagnosed, philosophy, far from being exhausted, finds itself at the dawn of a rebirth. Informed by the past as well as challenged by the unprecedented mass of new knowledge, to say nothing of how novel approaches and views contrary to many traditional convictions and concepts have obliterated the habitual furrows of querying, philosophy requires a fresh unprejudiced look at the novel data that the sciences, social life, personal attitudes, etc. offer. Philosophy at large lies at the threshold of a radical revamping. But such a “radical” new assessment calls for a penetrating intuitive grasp of the new as well as of the old. We have seen how the “deconstruction” of the old alone has not brought any ray of insight into the “new” allowing reconstruction. Deconstruction leaves the philosophical approach to the universal discourse in limbo. In our view it is insight into human and cosmic creativity that is missing.

There can be no doubting that human knowledge belongs to the basic instruments that life employs in the constitution of reality. It serves also to conduct life, to untie the tangled knots of propitious or noxious segments of events, situations, needs. It helps us to appreciate the surrounding objectivity, as well as the intrinsic life of other beings. It offers an essential schema of reference for conducting the business of life. However, the stability sought over the centuries has been shattered by the sciences and by human unfolding. We are now brought to recognize not by speculation alone but by practice as well that life is a dynamic flux that resists and eludes the chains of intellective Cartesian reason. This business of life, of emergence, of growth, of unfolding amid struggles with obstacles would not be accomplished, nor even launched, by cognition alone — it requires action.

In our present age of extraordinary discovery, invention, and relentless search into the unknown, we are fully unrolling the spheres of the creative human spirit.

And so it was that already at the World Phenomenology Institute’s first Paris conference in 1975 I proposed a radical overturn of philosophical priorities from cognition to action as the royal road out of the philosophical morass. (See The Human Being in Action: The Irreducible Element in Man, Analecta Husserliana VII [1978].) This was the programmatic statement of the incipient phase of the World Phenomenology Institute (initiated with the founding of the International Husserl and Phenomenological Research Society in 1968 — see The Later Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana II [1972]).

This project did not merely seek to bring into focus the traditional definition distinguishing the human being from the animal as homo faber. Delineating the arguments subjacent to excavating the primeval role of human — specifically human — action as pivotal in our constructing a coherent world of life, and in our constructing all “possible worlds” in all their mutations, a work that is the result of our freedom (an insight that would particularly come to the fore a quarter of a century later), I proposed at the 1975 Paris conference that to understand this wondrous transformative status of our world — or worlds — we have to look even deeper into the nature of this transformability. We have to seek the “creative process” as a system of transformation in sensibility, a new source of meaning at the “primogenital origin of the world” (Analecta Husserliana VII, op. cit., p. 193), one that extends from the Elemental to the highest mental faculties of the human being (ibid., p. 178). What is more, we have to recognize that the human creative function is the prototype of moral action tout court.

Here lies the key to the very passage from animality to humanity, the creative force. Indeed, with fabricating, making, acting, the radical transformation of living beingness occurs. Where in the animal sphere the course of the individual’s vital affairs is instinctively sustained by the recognizing of a fit between the individual’s vital needs and the circumambient conditions and when those needs are met the dynamism of vital striving is extinguished in a dull state of satisfaction, now radiating synergies prompt an acting living being onward. We may argue that cognizing is an indispensable prerequisite for this transformative move from direct, aim-oriented instinctual striving to more remote telos-oriented action, that that is the crux of the propulsion that carries — that gathers into itself and carries within itself — the very intent, the virtual intent of its movement. It is the very nature of this prompting force that differentiates it from those vital strivings illuminated only by instinctive indications. As my analysis of it has always concluded, the creative force that surges at this juncture of the animal and the human is pregnant with a sui generis propensity to be dissatisfied with mere acquiescience to the status quo and to see in the world about potentialities, virtual transformative capacities. It this apprehension of the potential/transformative virtuality of the “present” state of things that marks the radical passage from the absorption with survival and the submissive acquiescience of animal life to the undertaking spirit of the human being, which is based in animality but has known the surging of a sua sponte fulgerating force. What other expression of life could free itself from subservience to the business at hand and bear such an arsenal of intimations, comparisons, and discriminating recognitions allowing for forecasts, adjustments, projections? What other force could summon up such an overwhelming resolve not to acquiesce to the given but to attempt to transform it, such an enlightened discrimination between what there is available and how it might be adjusted for life’s betterment, for the convenience of life’s progress, and even be made more pleasing to our senses? None other than Imaginatio Creatrix.

As I have voiced for the last three decades, to be an acting being, to be homo faber, a living being has first to be homo creator.

In a succinct work, Eros et Logos, introduction á la phénoménologie de l’expérience créatrice (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1972), the first work I presented to the public, I vigorously opposed the supremacy of the Husserlian intentional system in constituting reality and outlined a new contextual framework for effecting that, the framework of creative experience. Subsequently I would bring out that it is Imaginatio Creatrix that is the fulgurating force within that experience (see my “Imaginatio Creatrix, the Creative versus the Constitutive Function of Man and the Possible Worlds,” in The Phenomenological Realism of the Possible Worlds, Analecta Husserliana III, [1974] pp. 3-41). This was actually a strong vindication of an intuition of Kant’s, for he saw in Einbildungskraft a crucial factor in the constitution of human objectivity and a meeting point between Nature and Culture — an intuition utterly neglected since his day. (Husserl, who acknowledged the important role of imagination in constitutive operations, saw it as being subservient to the intentional schema and its directions.) This precious intuition had, however, to be interpreted quite differently than in any way that could have been surmised in Kant’s schema (see the dialogue with Kant in the just cited study, pp. 16-36ff).

From the outset I have proposed to be faithful to the aim of Husserlian — and also of post-Husserlian — phenomenology in investigating the human universe of discourse in terms of meanings reaching to the very origin of sense, but we have forthrightly sought to seek this through the itineraries that are traced out not by the conscious operations of intellective reason but by Imaginatio Creatrix, the prime force inspiring human endeavors. Thus emerged our novel project in history, namely, a critique of reason limned by the span of creative imagination.

At present we are carrying out a full-fledged inquiry into the primogenital ciphering in which the specifically human significance of life emerges and unfolds. This critique proceeds in tandem with the first gift that the recognition of creative experience in its full power gave us, namely, a descent into the self-individualizing genesis of life that has uncovered the long sought but always missed ultimate level of reality. Within the evolutive genesis of life imagination emerges and makes itself a nest at the phase of the human-condition-within-the-unity-of-everything-there-is-alive. Hence the new critique of reason takes wing. Indeed, in pursuing the workings of creative imagination as they infuse the meaningfulness of human life into “exemplary” works of art (of literature, performance, the plastic arts), I had to promptly ask, “Could Imaginatio Creatrix bring its novel and original inspirations into human existence without being operative at the primogenital phase of the human self-individualizing progress, in which forces of life and the human genius diversify and commune? To what urgencies of life is the imaginative creativity of man a response? In what forms do these urgencies confront the human being with respect to the Human Condition? How do the Human Condition, on the one hand, and the human genius, on the other hand, reveal themselves in the interplay of life-forces?” (See “The Theme: Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition,” in Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: the Sea, Analecta Husserliana XIX [1985], p. xi.) With this conception of the query we are far beyond the original project of Husserl as well as beyond  his last efforts and those of his followers too.

We were deliberately pointing beyond the spheres where monadic intentionality reigns to that sphere from which it may originate as such. To effect the plumbing of the sphere of primogenital life, I proposed the notion that the play of the “elements” within the human are key to these questions (ibid., p. xii): “It is suggested that the Human Condition unfolds its virtualities precisely from the encounter of the elementary forces of life with Imaginatio Creatrix. Imaginatio Creatrix as the principal virtuality of the Human Condition, inspires and directs the constructiveness of this encounter.”

It is thus by uncovering this primogenital sphere of life-significance that we have been proceeding in our research through the ciphering of the Elements. The fruits of this research program are displayed in Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: the Sea, Analecta Husserliana XIX (1985); The Airy Elements in Human Imagination, Analecta Husserliana XXIII (1988); The Elemental Dialectic of Light and Darkness, Analecta Husserliana XXXVIII (1992); The Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of Life, Analecta Husserliana XLIV (1995); in a number of other collections in the Analecta Husserliana series besides; and in my own work, “Tractatus Brevis: The Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the Onto-poiesis of Culture” (in The Elemental Passions of the Soul: Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Analecta Husserliana XXV [1990], pp. 3-141).

Then we took one giant step further — through a thorough analysis of human creative experience, we uncovered the basic architectonics of the human mind from this creative perspective (See my Logos and Life, Book 1: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Analecta Husserliana XXIV [1988]). There the blueprint for our vast investigation is laid down.

To do our reality justice called for a schema of the constitution of the human significance of life that sees imagination at the vortex of the fulgerating life forces that carry the manifestation of human reality — a vortex within existence yet free of its bounds while lifiting it upwards.

As declared above, proceeding from the classical Husserlian project — but keeping an open mind and listening to voices other than that of the great master — and following and deeply participating in the life of our world with its constant whirl of progress, it was possible to trace the main lines of a novel interpretation of Occidental philosophy. For three decades now this framework for philosophizing has sustained the groups of scholars around the world affiliated with the World Phenomenology Institute and, what is more, has informed the philosophical world at large, with echoes then coming back to us.

With the revelation of the creative context of human functioning an immense field of human inquiry lays open. There is so much to substantiate, elaborate, and follow, this in a dialogue in which not only the various expressions of phenomenology proper participate, but also the multiple perspectives offered by other philosophical horizons, the arts, literature, the human sciences, the natural sciences, the whole sweep of human investigation and endeavor, with each correcting the others, opening new vistas, undertaking deeper probes.

This task has been undertaken and carried on for over thirty years by groups of scholars gathered under the auspices of the World Phenomenology Institute, with the first of its affiliated societies, the International Husserl and Phenomenological Research Society taking the lead. Thus far the fruit of this undertaking has been published in eighty-three volumes of the Analecta Husserliana series. The present collection shares the latest insights and formulations of this vast work.

However, our task of exfoliating the workings of the human creative/inventive logos to their full extent is as vast as life itself. It is a continuing work that neither one human being, nor several, may fulfill in one life; it is a task for philosophy to come.

The studies of this collection represent an important chapter in the progression of this novel inquiry having so vast a circumference. We gain profound insight here into the new assemblages of knowledge and linkages in significance in today’s arts, the sciences, social attitudes, human conduct, and individual approaches to life. These studies bring to light the multifaceted inventive rationalities that the logos of life projects in the course of its carrying our lives and our world-in-transformation.

Witnessing the crucial role of Imaginatio Creatrix in discovery and invention, an impetus that bewilders our traditional worldview, we are both spurred and enabled to investigate the new horizons of reality-in-transformation. Having made the move from the predelineated to the open, from the intellectually sclerosed to the dynamic and fluctuating world of life, we refuse to feel lost or abandoned to hazard. On the contrary, we hope to find rationale in the ontopoiesis of life and find our bearings between the the two infinities: the boundless universe and unfathomable transcendence.