Abstract

The Introduction outlines how the topic of imagination developed in Kant and German Idealism. Bates focuses on Fichte’s establishing of imagination as the primary dynamic structure of consciousness itself, and on Schelling’s transformation of this epistemological conception into a metaphysical one, interpreting imagination as the very self-sundering of the Absolute. Chapter 1, “The Sundering Imagination of the Absolute,” then looks at Hegel’s early, Schellingian interpretation of imagination. In Hegel’s Differenzschrift and in Faith and Knowledge, philosophy is construed as a self-conscious reconstruction of the acts of imaginative synthesis by which the factual world of experience was generated.