ABSTRACT
The ethical potential of beauty was obvious to ancient philosophers such as Plato, who regarded truth, beauty, and the good as ontologically interrelated, and it was also evident to modern philosophers like Immanuel Kant. Pure imagination expands existence, bringing us close to things not only in direct perception of them but also in memory and free imagination. The task is to expand thinking, make it more elastic, so that it can interpret phenomena in the light of not only what it can experience empirically and have exact evidence for but also what is on the other side of the limit of cognition. This is confirmed by the Latin word limen, which rather designates a threshold than a boundary, and according to which liminal phenomena stand on some social or experiential threshold. The limit and threshold experiences are aesthetic in as much as they stem from the power by Kant called ‘free imagination.’
