analele universităţii de vest din timişoara annales universitatis ...

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Alexandru Petrescu
not in this sense self-activating, always requiring an external intuition in
order to allow a plurality of images involuntarily emerge).
A new Aufhebung introduces the next mode of imagination: as
associative self-activating Intelligence. As such it manifests itself as
universalizing function: it relates (though still externally, according to
merely ontical, but not yet ontological criteria) images to one another,
thereby making one image out of many. But now, as John Sallis
remarks,
“the one is not itself simply another [singular] image, but rather is a
representation elevated to the level of universality”.
Although still external, this association or inter-relation of a plurality
of images is not, however, done purely arbitrarily, indifferently with
regard to the contents related; on the contrary, in its actualization it takes
into account the specific contents of the diverse images that it unifies.
The single images are thus related according either to the common
element present in them, or to the concrete universal, genus. This
deliberate move of imagination liberates to a certain extent its objects
from their empirical contingency,
“it introduces a conscious and deliberate reference to the relating
universal – to the common content upon which the transition is
based”.
The question now is explicitly asked: how does imagination - as
phantasy – provide a further liberation for the objects?
A preliminary, etymological clarification is indeed helpful. At the
present level, Hegel does not use any longer the German
Einbildungskraft to designate the power of imagination; instead, he
introduces a new term, “Phantasie”, coming from the Greek phantasia,
built on the stem pha, like phos, the “light”, that which is bright, and in its
brightness makes things manifest; but in its very making things manifest,
the light itself has been brought to light, has become visible, visible in
itself. This must be kept in mind in order to see how the products of
phantasy reveal or bring something to the light of the day.
Hegel ascribes a central ontologically revealing role to the
imagination conceived as phantasy; as phantasy, it is indeed
ontologically disclosing in that it shines its light through its products –
symbols, allegorical and poetical representations and signs - upon the
Being of beings. The ontically creative activity that phantasy in the
production of symbols and signs is ontologically revealing; for in it Spirit
comes to know itself as unity of the Subject and Object in the identity of