All the World an Icon by Tom Cheetham

Author:Tom Cheetham [Cheetham, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-456-1
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2012-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

This particular passage was written many years later, but the idea of the mediating function of the Imagination can be found at least as early as the Avicenna book. Corbin was using the term Active Imagination at least by 1954, when in the “Divine Epiphany” lecture he footnotes Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy. The question is whether he used this term before he knew of Jung’s work. In his translation of Suhrawardi, which lay unpublished until 1986, Corbin translated the Arabic takhayyul as “Active Imagination,” but it is not certain when he adopted this vocabulary.12 In the Avicenna book he discusses Active Imagination as the organ of metamorphoses.13

Whatever turns out to be the case, as with some of the other Jungian vocabulary, this term fits neatly into Corbin’s preexisting scheme. It seems likely that the expression itself derives from Jung, but Corbin equates it with a Neoplatonic idea that he finds in his Islamic spiritual masters and indeed in the medieval West. He points out in the late Prelude to the second French edition of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth that instead of speaking of the “Active Imagination in man … one ought to say rather ‘agent imagination’ in the way that medieval philosophy spoke of ‘intellectus agens.’ ”14

To sum this up, I think that Corbin’s discovery of Jung’s work must have been the occasion for great intellectual excitement, and the revelation of a kind of preexisting harmony between aspects of his universe and that of Jung. I believe that Jung’s ideas helped to crystallize many concepts that were perhaps not quite fully conscious in Corbin’s mind, but which only needed a small impact to take on their final, and characteristically Corbinian, character. Many of his ideas are formed in reaction to Jung and given clarity by their very contrast with Jung’s concepts. For almost a decade he cited Jung frequently and with enthusiasm, and his debt to him is quite clear. Yet I do not think that Jung’s ideas altered the direction of Corbin’s thought in any significant way. It is perhaps more accurate to see Jung as providing confirmation and support for, as well as defining contrast with, ideas that Corbin had already developed, or that were nascent in his mind, and which he continued to pursue long after the initial thrill was gone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.