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3 Polishing a Dirty Mirror: The Philosophic Imagination VISION, THE STRONGEST OF OUR SENSES, IS CENTRAL TO OUR ENGAGEMENT WITH and in the world. Without vision, we encounter the world in only two dimensions, unable to process the fullness of the world in all of its richness and diversity. Since the currency of the imagination is images, its main activity is often associated with a type of visualization. This vision, however, is not external and directed toward what physically exists before us; rather it is internal, bringing into existence that which is no longer present. For this reason, the medieval thinkers often refer to the imagination as the inner eye (Ar. al-ayn al-bat t .iniyya; Lat. oculus imaginationis ). The imagination is, thus, a creative faculty responsible for the formation of images of things or concepts that the senses have apprehended but that are now no longer visible. This presencing of the absent is both the blessing and the curse of the imagination in the history of Western philosophy. Because of its ability to make the absent present, many philosophers in both the ancient and medieval worlds regarded this faculty as unreliable and unpredictable, responsible for the formation of inauthentic expressions. For example, the image of a beautiful object is not the same thing as the object itself, which, in turn, is but a pale imitation of a formal and incorporeal beauty. Images, then, are twice removed from the really real. For reasons such as this, philosophers distrusted the productive or mimetic aspect of the imagination: in a system that gives priority to intellection, production must always be derivative. To imagine something, then, is secondary (or even tertiary) and inferior to our ability to encounter it physically and in such a manner that we can study, analyze, and know it. But if this is the curse of the imagination, the philosophers who are the subject of this study also appreciated that this faculty could, in phenomenological parlance, grant access to a mode of being otherwise 26001-03.qxd 10/8/03 16:14 Page 82 POLISHING A DIRTY MIRROR 83 inaccessible. When properly conditioned and when working in tandem with the intellect, the imagination has the potential to bring forth our engagement with the world in such a manner that we can experience and apprehend that which exists without form. The imagination, in other words, becomes the faculty with the potential to create internal impressions of that which exists incorporeally. The imagination, thus, becomes the locus in which the individual can experience the divine presence.1 As I conceptualize it here, the imagination is essentially a hermeneutical faculty. Presenting one thing in terms of another, it translates the unknown into the known, the unfamiliar into the familiar. It does this by actively producing images that permit the individual to visualize and conceptualize spiritual entities. The imagination is not simply a passive faculty; rather, it enriches the individual’s engagement with the world, mediating his or her experience with the divine. I concur with Elliot Wolfson who, in his analysis of the role of the imagination in ancient and medieval Jewish mysticism, argues: “In the absence of imagination there is no form, and without form there is no vision and hence no knowledge.”2 So even though the medieval philosophers were critical of the imagination, I think it is no coincidence that the telos of many of their systems is often an elaborate discussion of the philosopher’s gaze into the divine, which is described in terms of rich and highly visual imagery. This is made all the more telling by the fact that these philosophers argued that God was neither a body nor bound by corporeal extension. From where do these images to describe the divine come? Are they metaphors used to suggest what the experience might be like? Do they represent the translation of the encounter with the Ineffable? Or do they constitute the quiddity of the actual experience? The goal of the present chapter is to examine the role and function of the imagination as it specifically relates to the initiatory tale. In particular , I wish to examine how our three authors made sense of the philosophical import of the imagination in light of a specific ontology and epistemology. The problematic that these philosophers faced and that this chapter investigates is: How can an individual in this ephemeral world gain access to the eternal world that exists above the moon? Or, put somewhat differently, how can a...

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