The Romantic Imagination in Action

subject’s action. Many works of his time period were sculptures that were meant to be

Imagination is an intrinsic part of the human experience. It has the power to mold reality by defining the limits of possibility and affecting perception. Both Alan White and Irving Singer examine aspects of this power in their respective works The Language of Imagination and Feeling and Imagination. White delineates how imagination is a necessary precursor to possibility (White 179) while Singer primarily illustrates imagination's effect on human relationships, such as love (Singer 29-48). Despite their different focuses, White and Singer demonstrate the impact that imagination has on human perceptions of reality. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Amelie explores this facet of imagination: the film

Although some may not have the mind that other do, imagination is a wild thing. King states “sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations?” I take this as if that basic skills building up can create or make an imagination grow to its full potential. The better you get at something and the more it is practiced the better you become at it. With building stronger skills comes a stronger imagination and put those skills to the test. Imagination allows us to create things unimaginable.

question John Berger, critic of art and author of the Ways of Seeing, raised in his essay, and it is

I am referring to what might be called the 'arts of existence.' What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (10-11)

“From the sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a meditative mood.” (2) (paragraph 31).

Schelling wrote that the raising of the deepest centrum into light does not occur in any other known creature except mankind . Nonetheless, because peoples' principles are severable, they can be different from God, and this represents peoples' spirit. Human beings darkness is transfigured not light, although not completely. Schelling names this tension in human being's their Selfhood. According to Schelling, a human being is an egoistical, particular being distinguished from God . Selfhood and a person's spirit are united so long as selfhood stays unified with understanding and light. Selfhood, similar to spirit, is different from the ruling principle of light as well as the grounding principle of darkness. Selfhood can cause disruption by pushing the self-will away from one's centrum, where it really is subordinated to universal will . The instant this centrum is disturbed and also the equilibrium and ground and existence, corruption and unrest starts to develop. An individuals’ centrum where self will dwells eternally, is connected to the universal will of God. This is because self-will owes its formation to that universal will. It is not possible to differentiate darkness and light from one another. They are equip-primordial. Rational subordination is equally hopeless due to the unity in God. These principles are severable in people,

What really does imagination mean? People have different definitions about imagination. In the article, “The Reach of Imagination,” Jacob Bronowski, a worker at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, wrote, “To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one’s head in new arrangements.” People use imagination differently, but some use imagination exactly alike. Recreating the past, creating the future, and making words and symbols come alive.

The term ‘imagination’, in turn, is used originally used by Mills (1959) (rather than ‘perspective’), because the concept also fits with cultural and literary understanding. It seeks to combine some of the qualities of art that it prizes (capturing and expressing the needs of the individual), and some qualities already in literature (presenting the social norms that shape individuals), with a “social and historical reality”, a “big picture in which... [individuals] can understand themselves” (Mills, 1959: 20). In this way it hopes to blend “the scientific and the humanistic” (Mills, 1959: 16) to form a comprehensive basis for the study of the social sciences.

In his text entitled “Modernist Painting”, Greenberg focuses on the development of painting between the 14th and 19th century and emphasizes on what distinguishes Modernist painting from previous forms of painting, particularly those of the Old Masters. Greenberg begins by relating Modernist art to Kantian philosophy claiming that, the same way Kant used reason in order to examine the limits of reason, Modernist art is when art became self critical because it uses the technique of art to draw attention to its status as art. Indeed, he explains how without this self-examination similar to that of Kant’s reflection on Philosophy, art would’ve been “assimilated to […] therapy” like religion, because

The exploration of the mind and the way our conscious mind perceives the symbols of our subconscious minds was new ground and it gave art a new voice with which to sing.

The art is unreflective and gestures towards higher thought, but does not achieve it. Morton says this is because Hegel is “simply unable to see the spiritual content of non-European art.” The Classic Phase is a sweet spot in which objects and spirit appear to perfectly coincide in beautiful symmetry. Hegel relates it to Greek art. It collapses when humans begin to know too much. We arrive at forms that communicate despite the artist or begin having awareness of inner infinitude. The Classical Phase collapses into the Romantic Phase, in which, the art’s content outstrips its substance and infinite inner space is opened up. Hegel says this is the end of art, but Morton sees it as the beginning. When the nonhuman, objects, begin to speak for themselves. Consciousness, no longer a void, but a “substance”, is the great discovery of the Romantic Phase. Hegel’s theory ends at phase three, Morton adds phase four, the Asymmetric Phase, as an amendment to Hegel’s theory. In this phase, art’s content surpasses its substance through increasing knowledge about reality through science, but the substance of art can also surpass the content. Morton calls this revenge of the objects. Morton’s Theory contains many parallels to Hegel’s. Phase one, Symbolic, is similar in that objects have enormous power and clarity. However

'It quickly emerged that the proper and unique area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered 'pure', and in its 'purify' find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. 'Purity' meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition, with a vengeance.'

Modernism has found new expressions in art which in turn have changed how people critic and understand art, in this essay I am going to focus more on abstract expressionism. Debates in this movement have gone as far as influencing many artists and the two well-known critics who have made this movement more remarkable and have changed the art world completely are Clement Greenberg and Ronald Rosenberg. On the writings of these two gentlemen about art I will try to draw out the differences in the idea of what abstract expressionism is and what it is supposed to be, compare and outline the similarities and the differences between the two critics.

According to Eagleton “imaginative” is what the mind can create using its originality and exceptionality, it is something that has not occurred in real life, or cannot be claimed as something factually true. It is conceived in the minds of individuals, but not projected into real life. He uses terms like “did not exist” “literary untrue”, “inventive” to further state his opinion on what “imaginative” is. Imaginative for the Romantics had three main functions; the capability to transcend reality, to recreate memory, and to notify the creation of art.