Abstract

This tale of imagination begins with the old testament Hebraic understanding and culminates with Kierkegaard. Along the way Greek myth, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, late medieval and early modern thought, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and romantic philosophers and poets are discussed. Main themes traced throughout are the trust--or lack thereof--in the imagination , its reputed power to make something new , and its relation to nature and to God . Kierkegaard's understanding of the imagination profoundly reflects the historical ambivalence towards imagination within a decidedly Christian framework. It can lead to the synthesis of the infinite and finite that makes one an authentic person or it can lead one despairingly astray. Kierkegaard describes the imagination as the "infinitizing faculty" and insists that "whatever feeling, knowledge or will" one has "depends on imagination" and that the "intensity" of imagination determines the "intensity of the self." The interaction between intensity and the two kinds of infinitization--qualitative and quantitative --is explored and a description of an intense imagination develops. The intense imagination has a penetrating, broad, and inclusive view of the possibilities for existence presented by imagination which combines the vivacity of immediate perception with an idealistic rendering through its vision of both the instantiation within the temporal realm and the spiritual substructure of that possibility. Selfish possibilities can not remain concretely 'viable' under its sharp resolution. Thus the intense imagination moves toward--and operates at its highest capacity within--the Christian conception of love; it moves toward 'letting itself go' while operating "transparently before God." This operation puts itself in tune with itself--with the Infinite Love-at-work-within which makes imagination possible by intensifying all that one says or does. An exploration of the intense imagination operating at its less than full capacity within the spheres of existence outside the Christian realm reveals that the imagination is as dangerous as it is infinite, as much the problem as the solution