III. The Deeper Source (Metaphysics) of Imagination

The power of imagination is mysterious, as the object of imagination, i.e., what imagination brings, is mysterious. The poet's imagination of “the boy of Winander” (Book V, 365-398) depicts a boy being in nature, interacting with nature and the beauty of the happening and surrounding, then the solemn imaginary of the boy's death, at the bottom of the lake. The poet stands silent in front of the boy's grave on summer evenings. There is no explanation as to why. It is a mystery. The poet acknowledges imagination as a visionary power. In particular, poetic imagination with the intricate of verses can render glory to otherwise ordinary objects. Imagination is transcendental. He writes at the end of Book V:

Of mighty Poets. Visionary power Attends the motions of the viewless winds, Embodied in the mystery of words: There, darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things work endless changes,-there, As in a mansion like their proper home, Even forms and substances are circumfused By that transparent veil with light divine, And, through the turnings intricate of verse, Present themselves as objects recognised, In flashes, and with glory not their own.

(Book V, 597-607)

In these verses, nature's inspiration of imagination is mysterious. For the poet, the power of imagination reveals itself in verses. Philosophically, imagination's power to give “objects recognized” “glory not their own” goes beyond transcendence. As taught by Kant and Schopenhauer, transcendental idealism makes a distinction between thing-in-itself and appearance, with the latter being existence as we know it. In other words, what exists is what we recognize as a result of our limited intellect and senses. In turn, the thing-in-itself in its completeness lies beyond our limited intellect and senses. For imagination to give “glory not their own” to an object, the object's existence is augmented. Does this augmentation come from the otherwise unreachable part of the thing-in-itself, or does it belong to another dimension, or is it somewhere in between? The transcendental idealism as we know it, therefore, lacks an account of imagination for imagination's mystical power to augment existence. Let us represent the three potential metaphysical options of imagination in its relationship to transcendental idealism in the below figures and call them Options A, B, and C.

As the poet continues to explore the mystical power of imagination, we examine what he thinks may represent the relationship between imagination and transcendental idealism. He writes in Book VI:

Imagination-here the Power so called Through sad incompetence of human speech, That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through; But to my conscious soul I now can say— “I recognise thy glory:” in such strength Of usurpation, when the light of sense Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world, doth greatness make abode

(Book VI, 594-604)

In these verses, the imagination invokes a memory of the poet, an event in the past. From memory, the poet gains a moment of vision to recognize the glory as if a flash has revealed the invisible world. Imagination creates sublimity that cannot be expressed by human language due to the “incompetence” of human language. If imagination only reveals what is invisible, it seems plausible that the invisible world is the thing-in-itself. If each object has its own thing-in-itself that stands apart from each other, there is no reason why imagination should stay within the limit of the thing-in-itself for each object. All imagination can come from the same thing-in-itself. It makes more sense for all objects to come from the same thing-in-itself than for each object to have its own thing-in-itself. The truth has to be something similar to what is described in the Upanishads. The world we live in is one interconnected universe with a single and unifying underlying atman. With objects in existence, each having a different articulation of the atman, each articulation is a brahman. In this sense, imagination and object recognized are different articulations of the same mysterious thing-in-itself. Therefore, we can represent the metaphysical position of imagination in the below figure.

This figure represents that there is one underlying thing-in-itself for all objects. Each object recognized has its appearance, and imagination is an appearance that can be based on one or more objects recognized. One should also note that while objects can be named and described, imagination can be sublime and fail to be delineated or articulated in language.