How Images Create Us: Imagination and the Unity of Self-Consciousness

This paper offers a phenomenology of the structure and scope of imagination's cognitive significance. It does so through discussing the unifying role of imagination in self-consciousness, and then the way in which this role is continued through the making of pictures in physical media such as drawing and painting. The study begins with discussion of four key features in terms of which imagination is often characterized. Particular emphasis is assigned to the quasi-sensory aspect. Part one then explains imagination as a capacity subject to the will, whose exercise enables a 'blending'between the object imagined and the subjective style in which it is imagined. Through imagining, the imaginer comes to inhabit the object. Parts two and three explore this inhabiting in relation to memory and the imagining of possibility per se. Part four explains how picturing takes imaginative inhabiting to a level of completion.