The Three Faces of Imagination

Dissertation, University of Dallas (1998)
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Abstract

The dissertation sets forth Samuel Taylor Coleridge's meaning of the imagination. It does not offer a critical analysis. Rather it identifies an implicit pattern in his meaning, and renders it more explicit. To accomplish this task, the dissertation combines Coleridge's "universal" and the "hermeneutic" methods. It begins with Coleridge's overall meaning of the imagination in his "main result," presented in chapter XIII of his Biographia Literaria. Detailed statements from his other writings are then used to answer the fourteen questions that are drawn from his "main result." This approach thus initiates the rhythmical movement between a whole and its parts for which the hermeneutic circle is known. With this procedure the following conclusions are reached: Imagination serves as our invisible means of contact. It bridges the distance between our future, past, and present, between that which we are "yet capable," that which we have "left behind," and the "greater whole" which confronts us in the immediacy of the moment. However it is not enough to contemplate the invisible: powers of the imagination, for we must also apprehend them in their visible form, as they manifest themselves in, say, works of art. Three such works are studied: Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse manifests the power to connect us with our future, as it serves as a beacon to unrealized possibilities. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner manifests the power to unit us with our past, as it acts to retrieve "ancient" connections. William Blake's Auguries of Innocence manifests the power to apprehend the primordial Being that contains us and is Us. As such, it encompasses both future and past in the embrace of the present. Accounting for the non-linear nature of time and the imagination is Martin Heidegger's "authentic temporality," which serves as a means of disclosing the three faces of imagination in their true unity--as an integrated whole. The reverberation of imagination in the quantum physics of David Bohm shows how art and science have come full circle such that they are saying the same thing: We are inseparable from the organic whole of which we form a part

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