ABSTRACT
The histories of the terms ‘art’ and ‘imagination’ trace peculiarly parallel lines. Empiricists, rationalists, Kant, and post-Kantians all tended to think of imagination as a fundamental and unified human faculty, essentially enmeshed in conscious life. Similarly, early aestheticians thought that all the questions of art – its definition, its appreciation, its value, and its judgment – could be subsumed under one theory. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the trends have been toward fragmentation
and particularity. The ambition of giving a single theory of art has been thwarted by its prolific diversification. Within the European artistic tradition, movements such as minimalism and conceptualism have challenged general claims about the nature of art. Awareness of other traditions, such as the Chinese and Native American, has brought further challenges. Art is now made in forms far beyond the traditional categories such as music, literature, and painting. And genres continue to multiply. All this adds to the complexity of the task, and various large-scale distinctions within the domain of art (between, for example, representational and nonrepresentational art, or fine and popular art) further complicate the picture. Similarly, the idea that imagination is a single, unitary faculty has been challenged by the
recognition that philosophers and folk alike ascribe to imagination a highly heterogeneous set of features, capabilities, and applications. One might thus doubt that a single sort of mental state or capacity is identified by the word “imagination” (Stevenson 2003; Kind 2014). Accordingly, attempts to tease out the intuitively intimate links between art and imagin-
ation have become more modest. Where philosophers might once have used a general notion of imagination to underpin a grand theory of art, they now tend to argue that a specific kind or application of imagination can help to explain some particular element of art or artistic practice. And certainly, there are many questions of aesthetics where this is a promising approach. Making art is typically conceived of as the paradigmatically imaginative activity. We often praise works and artists for being imaginative, while criticizing others for being unimaginative (Grant 2012). The appreciation of art forms such as painting seems to involve something imagination-like: the appearance of things that are not really before us. Other works of art such as literary fictions, which do not seem to essentially traffic in these sorts of quasi-perceptual experiences are, nevertheless, typically understood as engaging and enriching our imaginations (Walton 1990; Nussbaum 1998).
