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Imagination, A priori, Depth. The Aesthetics of Mikel Dufrenne

Publication |
2019

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.