22 - Imagination and the Theolatrous Impulse: Configuring God in Modern Jewish Thought

Summary

In Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental, John Sallis observed that

philosophy was always compelled also to exclude imagination, to set it at a distance, and even to reserve a refuge in which finally there would be protection from the threat of imagination. The dynamics of the relation of philosophy to imagination remained one of ambivalence and, though a semblance of reconciliation, even appropriation, was repeatedly made to veil the tension, it invariably broke out again in new guises.

That philosophers have looked upon the imagination with suspicion is understandable, since by obfuscating the boundary between the real and the illusory, it is more liable to luring one into erroneous beliefs and fostering impetuous behavior. The mimetic nature of the imagination was already understood by Plato as a sophistic attempt to imitate truth, which can be compared to the human predilection to erect idols that are deemed to be false copies of reality, simulacrums that are no more enduring than images in the mirror. From that vantage point, imagination would seem to represent philosophy's quintessential and unassimilable other, the faculty that needs to be expunged or at the very least marginalized. Countering that aversion, philosophers have also recognized that in the absence of imagination, there is no memory, and in the absence of memory, there is no perception or cognition.