Corbin wasn’t having it. In his own specific (Platonic) terms, he understood the imaginal to name a noetic organ or intellectual-spiritual capacity that was mediating an actual dimension of reality, whose appearances were nevertheless shaped by what he called the imagination créatrice, or “creative imagination,” an astonishing imaging or mythmaking dimension of consciousness that acts well outside any conscious control or apparent human agency—hence the phenomenology of revelation as something given or shown. As Cheetham has argued, Corbin used this key category in his own very specific ways,
...more
