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To him who is compelled to pace to and fro within the high walls and in the narrow courtyard of a prison, all objects may appear clear and distinct. It is the traveller journeying onward, full of heart and hope, with an ever-varying horizon, on the boundless plain, who is liable to mistake clouds for mountains, and the mirage of drouth for an expanse of refreshing water.
coleridgeThe disembodied Kantian transcendental subjectivity of the Critique of Pure Reason, if it is to be made philosophically coherent and intelligible to ordinary thinking, needs to be re-interpreted – and thereby provided with a “structure” – as the situated transcendental subjectivity of real embodied life. As a necessary corollary of this, the in-principle-humanly-inaccessible Kantian “thing in itself” needs to be re-interpreted in terms of the embodied reality of the animate and inanimate world which we pre-consciously inhabit. Kant himself in fact leaves the various deeper questions about the nature of human imagination, and therefore about the nature of human transcendence, almost entirely unexplored within the Critique of Pure Reason. The function of “imagination” in the Critique of Pure Reason is essentially to bridge the gap between “sense” and “understanding,” by transforming whatever is given to us through our senses into something which can be grasped by the thinking part of our minds.
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- Myth, Truth and LiteratureTowards a True Post-modernism, pp. 34 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994