In characterizing primary imagination as the“prime agent of all human
perception,”Coleridge means that human beings take in the world through
the senses as other animals do, but in a distinctive way. (The emphasis in his
remark should fall on the wordhuman. Coleridge is here transcribing Kant’s
theories of apperceptive awareness and of productive imagination as he
received them partly by way of Fichte and Schelling.) Somehow, as we grow
up out of infancy, our taking in of the world comes to be interfused with a
sense of ourselves as subjects, able to conceptualize objects in a variety of
ways, not simply to discriminate them. Our sensory awareness, unlike that of
other animals, includes both conceptual structure and always available (if
implicit) self-awareness. Unlike animals, we can always step back in percep-
tion and say not just“this peach is ripe”but also“I see thatthis peach is ripe.”
Unlike animals, we can conceptualize this objectasa peach, a fruit, a project-
ile, a seed, or a favorite of Joan’s, as occasion suits. Our capacity to be aware
of ourselves and to see the same object in various ways–under various
descriptions or aspects–is central to our lives as beings who freely make
and live in human culture, not merely under the necessities of nature.
Objectsmeanvarious things to us as subjects. Primary imagination–sensory
world intake that is interwoven with conceptualization–is essential for this.
Without it we would not be human subjects with a human culture.
Secondary imagination possesses the same kind of agency as primary
imagination. It, too, is a free“seeing”of things: an awareness that is not
merelysensory and not altogether determined by the laws of nature. It is to
some extent voluntary, or under the control of the will. As Kirk Pillow notes,
in many cases“the content [of what we imagine] is stipulated by our imagin-
ing.”^70 In this it resembles voluntarily taking up an attitude toward a prop-
osition: one can decide to imagine, wish for, pretend, and so on that this or
that be so. Noting this similarity, Kendall Walton has analyzed imagining as
making believe,^71 and Gregory Currie has argued that imagining is like
simulating or“running”beliefs“offline.”^72 Pretend beliefs are isolated from
ordinary beliefs about the actual world. They preserve, however, many of(^70) Kirk Pillow,“Imagination,”inThe Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed.
Eldridge, pp. 349–68 at p. 351.
(^71) See the discussions of Walton’s work in Chapters 2 and 8.
(^72) See Gregory Currie,“Imagination and Simulation: Aesthetics Meets Cognitive Science,”in
Mental Simulation, ed. Martin Davies and Tony Stone (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 151–69.
138 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art