Abstract
The aim of this monograph is to present Dufrenne's original conception of imagination and to highlight its significance for philosophical aesthetics. We focus on a critical interpretation of two alternative approaches which Dufrenne considers in his work.
The first approach is based on a noetic perspective, the other on an ontological one. In both cases, Dufrenne claims that imagination is a productive, effecting activity which in a formative manner participates in knowledge of a priori truths regarding human being in the world.
Such knowledge is most fully accomplished in the aesthetic experience. Only there a man opens oneself to the external world while maintaining with it a relation of primordial corporeity, which they both - i.e., both humans and the world - share.
Imagination and its correlate, the imaginary, in an aesthetic experience stimulate each other and enable a reverberation of the most fundamental possibilities of human being in the world. It is imagination and the imaginary which enable a man to penetrate the superficial empirical level and reach the deep level of the a priori.
On the level of the a priori, a man can experience the original corporeal unity which is of the same kind for both the subject and object.