This division of labor, which serves both parties, may be a particularly British phenomenon, but it highlights a danger of appeals to the imagination as a creative faculty. If this creative force, and the freedom it entails, is bought at the price of isolating the imaginative subject from reality, it is a rather lame freedom. The issue then is whether we can think of the imagination as a faculty that connects us with reality. But I think not. Other conceptions of mental life, such as emotion, desire and fantasy may be a source of involvement in the world, but the concept of the imagination is bound to isolate the subject. If we think of the very subtle discussions of imagination in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, we may see the difficulty of referring to the imagination as a source of involvement with the world. There are two main discussions of the imagination in Kant and both concern a notion of subjectivity. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant struggles to account for the synthesis in consciousness of sense impressions and concepts like number and identity. Sense impressions and general concepts are clearly very different mental representations and yet they conspire to form the complex experiences that we have of individual objects. Kant argues that we find a psychological route between sense impression and concept, in that we are able to produce schemata, midway between the two and this is the work of the imagination. The faculty of the imagination serves to make sense for the subject of otherwise disparate faculties. In The Critique of Judgment, Kant discusses experiences of phenomena that exceed the imagination. He thinks of experiences, which we perceive through reason as overwhelming, and when we perceive them we try, and fail, to provide for these external phenomena an adequate internal image. Reason spurs the imagination to provide an image that it cannot deliver. Thus in both cases, the imagination serves to allow the subject to make sense of experience for itself, but it does not help the subject to establish a connection with the outside.

Reidar Due teaches Film Aesthetics and is Fellow in French at Magdalen College, Oxford University. He has previously published on Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilles Deleuze, and his research centers on the ontology of modern art and the relationship between phenomenology and ethics.

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