overcoming the world 83Th e need for transformative engagement with the world as a require-
ment of vitality is not confi ned to practical activity. It already arises in
the work of the imagination. Th at work relies on two recurrent moves.
Th e fi rst move— the only one acknowledged by Kant— is distancing. Th e
phenomenon must be evoked in its absence; an image is the memory of
a perception. Th e second move is transformation; to understand a phe-
nomenon or a state of aff airs is to grasp what it can become under cer-
tain conditions or by virtue of par tic u lar interventions. Insight into
what can happen next is internally related to insight into the existent;
the latter deepens in proportion to the advance of the former.
In all these respects, the imagination accompanies and outreaches our
practical activities. In its evolutionary setting it serves the purposes of a
mindful organism that must solve problems in par tic u lar circumstances,
equipped with a limited perceptual apparatus, and contend with uncer-
tainty, contingency, and constraint. Th us, in its origins and evolutionary
uses, it already stands in the ser vice of life and of power.
However, the imagination soon goes beyond its immediate ser vice to
practical problem solving. It develops our understanding of what is in
the light of our insight into what may come to be. Its focus is less the
phantasmagorical horizon of ultimate possibilities, which we are pow-
erless to discern, than the content of the proximate possible: of what
can happen, or we can make happen. Th e commanding principle of the
imagination is its affi nity to action, grounded in their shared element:
enacted or anticipated change. Openness to transformation, in bio-
graphical and historical time and in a world in which the diff erences
among phenomena are both real and subject to change, is part of what
we mean by life.
Th e religion of the overcoming of the world is hostile, both as a vi-
sion and as a project, to the enhancement of life. In tempting us to don
a coat of armor against the suff erings induced by our mortality, our
groundlessness, our insatiability, and our diffi culty in living as beings
who transcend their contexts, it cannot in fact make us more receptive
to the people and to the phenomena surrounding us. It cannot do so
because it denies us the means and the occasions by which to imagine
them. It fails to strengthen the sentiment of life within us because it
prefers serenity to vitality.