The Thought of John Sallis: Phenomenology, Plato, Imagination

Introduction

xi Introduction The thought of John Sallis dwells not only on imagination, but within imagination. The gently eloquent bearing of his writing has a seductive pull, and the reader who thinks along with him finds herself suddenly in the midst of the deepest philosophical ideas, and very often with the means to address them. While their intrinsic rigor is never in question, neither is the role of the reader as fellow thinker and as implicit dialogical partner. Sallis’s treatment of the most abstruse thinkers allows his reader to experience them as lucid, just as his most radical thoughts flow with an ease that makes them seem inevitable. This melodic aspect of his writing is also rooted in the conviction that the limits of reason are so firmly established that human insight must take its departure from other sources as well. It would be misleading to characterize these other sources negatively , that is, as “non-rational.” This is so because there is nothing privative at all about them. It would more nearly capture their nature by calling them imaginatively inspired resources, though this description only hints at their complexity. Some of these resources are poems; of these poems, some are complete theatrical works. Others belong to the visual arts. Still others are cryptic fragments offering their own tantalizing attraction . The reflective and inspired dimensions of Sallis’s thought are not two separate strains. Rather, they are united in a philosophical talent that is exemplary and novel at once. The home of his thought in imagination drives Sallis to visit many and different places. However, as Heidegger said of Schelling, rarely has a thinker fought so passionately since his earliest periods for his one unique standpoint. The history of philosophy also lives in Sallis’s work. The thought of his ancestors, both near and remote, is neither overcome nor left behind . Rather, it is appropriated in such a way that it retains its force in the very way that it is creatively transformed. “Appropriation” is a translation of the much better German term Aneignung. But even here, care must be taken; “appropriation” can be a misleading word. It can suggest the acquisition of something for oneself. This is most emphatically not the xii I N T R O D U C T I O N case for Sallis. Rather, it involves a bequest to the ever-renewing originary matter for thought to which this thinker always returns. With these considerations in mind, I shall delineate the elements of the thought of John Sallis as if they could be separated in deed from one another. Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1932) is an important precursor, but it serves as a launching pad for Sallis’s singular persevering meditation. Heidegger’s Kant book struck as a bolt from the blue for twentieth-century Kant scholarship, offering the still controversial claim that imagination is the concealed root of sensibility and understanding , and still further that Kant withdrew from his own discovery after having glanced into the abyss opened up by it. Its basic claim of the centrality of imagination gains greater force within readers of Kant who return to the Critique of Pure Reason often. To provide my own modus tollens proof: subtract imagination from the Critique of Pure Reason. What else would have to be subtracted? One would have to subtract the following: §24 of the B-Deduction, titled “The Application of the Categories to Objects of the Senses in General” (i.e., the key step, and the entire goal of the deduction); the Schematism, by means of which concepts are applied to pure intuition; and the Principles of the Pure Understanding, which incorporate the Schematism and Pure Intuition in their role as making experience possible. And more decisively yet, synthesis itself, “a mere product of imagination,” could not take place. That is, if imagination is subtracted, the entire Critique of Pure Reason disappears. This proof does not address Heidegger’s more radical claims, namely that imagination is the unknown root of the two stems, and that, having glimpsed the abyss to which his thought led him, Kant withdrew into the metaphysics he sought to rescue. However, it strongly supports the claim concerning the textual priority of imagination, and suggests a role for it that involves investigations of a different nature. Sallis’s many investigations establish, enhance, and expand the priority of imagination beyond even those of Heidegger. Even in Sallis’s first book, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings...