ABSTRACT
Imagination and the associated concepts of inspiration and invention are key philosophical concepts. Their significance derives from sources outside of the Cartesian tradition. They were first espoused by Rousseau, were in vogue with the early German Romantics and Goethe, and later Schelling, Kierkegaard and beyond, and remained so right up to the twentieth century, though in a somewhat diluted form. Their focus is the artistically creative subject. Whatever else may be important in the creation of art and has come to be recognized as such in the history of aesthetic theory is essentially ignored. To this extent we have a discourse which, while not merely historical, is limited in scope. However, today the discussion centres on quite different factors, and the mental state of the artist has become eclipsed by institutions and bureaucracies, media and recording systems, materials and body cultures, sometimes even being reduced to insignificance. In current methodology the discussion of artistic productivity is marked by a multi-perspectival amalgam of discourses, whereas the discussion of imagination, inspiration and invention usually focuses on the side of the subject. This is not simply the result of the artist’s effacing himself in the furtherance of his method. In the theoretical dynamics, one of the major forces driving the discussion of imagination is the negotiation between the parts played in the artistic procreative act by the free spirit, on the one hand, and, sensory nature or circumstances which are external to the human being, on the other. 1 The free spirit can mean at least two things here: firstly the freedom of creative productivity from dependence on the physical bodily condition and determination by the senses and, secondly, also a freedom from dependence on institutionalized rules of art, as featured in the instructional poetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike the first, this second aspect certainly came to lose its relevance by the end of the eighteenth century.
