[Mark Allinson]

Thanks, Andrew.

Yes, Hillman's Imagination is the same as Blake's, and Coleridge's "primary imagination."

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.

For Hillman, the Kantean noumenal is entirely collapsed into the phenomenal - "archetypal psychology rigorously refuses even to speculate about a non-presented archetype per se. Its concern is with the phenomenon: the archetypal image." AP, p 13

And for Hillman, an image is not only an object of experience, but the quality of the being of the observer ... "an image is not what one sees but the way in which one sees." The experience may be beyond representation, ineffable, as the mystics say, but the state of being of the psyche is itself an image. And so the "direct knowledge of being" is thus a psychic image, in Hillman's extended sense.

Experience of the void, while it may have no representable images, is itself an archetypal image. And if something is beyond all experience, then how can we say it exists at all? Nothing can exist unless it becomes an image experienced by a psyche. Even imagining a world entirely devoid of observers is an image to a psyche.

So I agree with him that even the most exalted spiritual state is still happening within Psyche, even while the fantasy of the pneumatic transcendence of the Psyche is experienced. The idea that the mystical observer has somehow escaped from the psychic realm, into wordless and imageless experiences of "pure being" is for Hillman a literalism of yet another psychic image.