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As the previous chapter shows, recent theory has closely tied imagination to language, and therefore also to rationality. This is a return to the conceptual topology that originated in antiquity and that has occasionally been revived in modern thought. Imagination works by marking positions in imaginative fields that are abstract with respect to ordinary experience but concrete insofar as the images are appearance–forms in a field–medium. Imagination is a (psychologically) evocative, anticipatory, abstractional–concretional activity that follows upon actual perception. It allows the imaginer to shift perspective, to incipiently and dynamically place, vary, and explore appearances in fields of concern, to attend to and mark those fields, and to exploit the results by projecting appearances of one field into others. More important than defining imagination is understanding the implied conceptual topology underlying all imaginative phenomena and acts. Perhaps all psychic activity is imaginative; if so, the long tradition of establishing a hierarchy of mind powers should give way to a more interactive conception that understands science itself as imaginative. Future work in imagination studies will need to ask further questions along these lines and explore (a) the depth psychology of imagining, (b) the consequences for our conception of the nature and unity of human being, (c) the ontology of imagination, and (d) the ethics of imagination required in a world committed to rapid change guided by scientific and technological imagination.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_9

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