Excerpt
Of course, there is here a certain approximation of the concept
of the Imaginative, a concept that Aristotle was unable to define
in all its complexity. For this reason, the Stagirite appeals to a
Prime Mover of divine origin. Time and space, as conceived in
Hellenic philosophy and throughout the philosophical tradition
up to Kant, were understood as factual, material elements. This
made it impossible to comprehend the purely subjective re-creation
of the world and the a priori forms of pure sensibility–namely,
time and space as they are presented in the Critique of Pure Reason.
The Imaginative, as the essential human faculty through which
man re-creates the world out of pure transcendentality, could not
be defined in that age, and Kant himself, together with those who
followed him, failed to grasp this meaning. Within the Imaginative
are encompassed both the human being and the world, together
with everything that has been, is, or will be produced, both in
the spiritual sense–which is primary–and in the material sense,
which follows as a consequence of this Imaginative creation. Jules
Verne’s submarines, computers, and smartphones are all fruits of
this rational capacity of the Imaginative, which becomes reality
and creates out of nothing. Nothingness–not as an object, but as an
essential attribute of pure subjectivity–creates reality. This creation is
rational, because the human intellect is capable of thinking only
in terms of categories and reason.
Kant’s philosophy merely raises the question of the possibility
of a priori synthetic judgments. Yet the connection established by
the possibility of synthesizing judgments that are independent of
experience is attributed to a synthetic capacity of the inner sense
residing within self-consciousness. Here lies the key to Kant’s
philosophy, which maintains that thought is a concrete a priori…
(If you like philosophy, this book is for you)
