The Gathering of Reason: Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the First edition In this text I trace a way to the issue of imagination. It is intended to be a way around that closure of the issue, which, in play throughout the history of metaphysics, now obtrudes in the utter conflation of the difference that once separated imagination from fancy and in the allied displacement of them, indistinguishably, into an innocuous selfentertaining activity of conjuring up mental images. Radical measures are required in order to elude that closure: They must be capable of measuring out to imagination a space in which the traditional conceptual oppositions predetermining it can be thrown out of joint, infused with indeterminacy, anarchy. The particular way traced runs through reason, through the problem of reason (in its Kantian form), which coincides with the problem of metaphysics. Or rather, it is a matter of treading carefully along the edge of a certain deforming of reason—a phenomenon which, at a different level and in that unconditioned form manifest today, might well be called “nihilism.” At certain decisive turns on this way I shall also allude to certain other elements belonging to the relevant conceptual configuration , e.g., the oppositions between reason and experience and between reason and madness; and I shall take some steps toward transposing them in a direction that gives space to the issue of imagination, e.g., that of the oppositions between presence and absence and between selfpossessed positing and self-dispossessed ecstasy. In a sense this way remains peripheral, a merely “historical” complement , a critical preparation for a direct approach to the issue itself. xi xii THE GATHERING OF REASON But is it merely a matter of restoring the issue, of reopening the question of imagination within a new, indeterminate space? Would not even the most rigorous direct approach to the issue be compelled by its very rigor to reproduce within itself a movement within the same torsion in which the present critical preparation is almost directly engaged—the torsion between reason and imagination, the movement between a (rational) theory of imagination and an application of imagination to itself, a releasing of imagination’s own intrinsic reflexivity? Is it yet possible even to envisage the radical measure that such movement would require? Portions of this text were presented in a paper, “Imagination and Truth,” which I delivered at a colloquium in memory of Martin Heidegger that was held at Pennsylvania State University in April 1977; in a paper “Immateriality and the Play of Imagination,” read at the meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in April 1978; and in several graduate lecture courses given at Duquesne University. For their generous contributions at various stages and in various ways I am grateful to the Sankt Ulrich scholarly community, David Krell and Kenneth Maly, Charles Sherover, James Risser, Karen Barson, Marshell Bradley, and my wife. I owe special gratitude to the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for support during the year in which the present text first began to take shape. Mill Run, Pa. August 1978 ...