ABSTRACT
The onto-theological outlook which conditioned the official medieval theories of imagination is distinguished by several features. Perhaps the most important of these, according to Heidegger’s controversial but suggestive reading, is the determination of existence as ‘production’. Heidegger argues that the medieval notion of reality as actualitas is intimately related to the concept of production-agere, actum.1 Accordingly, the ‘essence’ or ‘nature’ of something is understood in terms of an active making or bringing forth which permits the thing to be seen in its proper form. Unlike the pre-Socratic apprehension of Being as ‘unconcealment’ (aletheia), medieval metaphysics interprets the appearing of Being less as a dis-closure than as an act of production. The classical paradigm of ‘mimesis’ still predominates:
The model upon which this understanding of Being is based is that of the artisan, the potter, say, who aims to engender a certain form in the clay; the clay then takes on a look which conforms to the exemplar-the anticipated look-which he attempts to copy. The prototype, the exemplar, shows us how the thing is supposed to look before it is actually produced. That is why the expression quid quod erat esse, that which a thing was to be, is used interchangeably with eidos (causa exemplaris). The eidos is that from which the actual thing is descended, its kin, its genus (kind). The members of a genus form a group only because they have a common ‘descent’, belong to the same family. Hence the word phusis belongs to the same sphere of significance. Phusis (nature) means growth, to produce its own kind. The ‘nature’ of a thing is a selfproducing essence.2
