Abstract
My aim in this essay is to engage in a philosophical exploration of the creative imagination in human beings, seeking to discern both its basic structure and its special significance for understanding what it means to be human. For it is unique in the universe, so far as we know it, to human beings: God and angels are certainly creative, but by pure intelligence, without images; animals have imagination, but principally reproductive, to conserve images of past experience, not creative, save to a very limited degree, always tied down to present particular experiences and concrete problems. Humans, on the other hand, enjoy a far wider scope of creative imagination, due partly to the power of human intelligence to abstract, and so break free of the concrete material present we find ourselves situated in — which animals cannot do — and partly from the freedom which our imagination participates in because of its association with the free will of the human spirit.
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Notes
A survey of the history of philosophy reveals that the question of the nature and value of the creative imagination in human beings tums out to be a sign of contradiction among philosophers, evoking strongly opposed opinions on several points; it thus serves as a touchstone of the thinker’s more fundamental position on the nature of the union between body and soul, or what it means to be authentically human. I have been much helped in this latter exploration by the recently published and extremely valuable Summa on the imagination by Eva Brann, The World of Imagination (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Clarke, W.N. (2002). The Creative Imagination. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 225. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_37
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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