Mark, if by “imagination” Avens means what Coleridge says on the subject I agree:
“The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
”FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.”
Archetypal Psychology really is a useful approach for seeing through Western positivisms and literalisms, for those that need it. I myself prefer going directly to the poets Hillman likes to cite, certain philosophers, and sacred Scripture.
As for “there is no spiritualization without imagination,” well, that is ridiculous. The goal of philosophy, says Plato, is direct knowledge of Being. And Being is beyond all representation, therefore beyond images. The traditional teaching, as Hillman often mentions, is that the soul is the mediator between body and spirit. Not that all experience can be reduced to the psychic image.
The Neoplatonist Proclus said there are three lives of the soul: first, the mystic life, the desire of the highest part of the soul to be united with the One (Plotinus’s “flight of the alone to the Alone). The second is the expression in figurative language, myth and symbol, the intelligible essences, i.e., the spiritual realities. In the third, says Proclus, “it accords with its inferior powers, and energies with them, employing fantasies and irrational senses, being entirely filled with things of a subordinate nature.”
Is this “Western positivism”? I don’t think so. I think it is a subtle and profound insight.
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