FROM IMAGINATION TO INDIVIDUATION

1. Imagine, imaginary, imagination, imagery, imagined - such variations on a common theme have reference to appearances, since that which is imagined from the imagination as an image is purely apparent, and therefore of the will as opposed to the spirit, the ego, or the soul.

2. Imagination may be an adequate, even crucial, starting-point for literary creativity but, except possibly in the case of poetry, it would hardly be a suitable finishing-point, bearing in mind its confinement to images.

3. With television one is also confined to images, reduced to an appreciation of life from the standpoint of appearances, the surface superficiality of materialism.

4. Thanks to media like television, modern life is obsessed by images, as by the imagination, which, being superficial, is capable of virtually anything ... in surrealist-like vein.

5. Painters are, like poets, obsessed by images, since imagination is their stock-in-trade, without which there would be little or no art.

6. But just as there is a painting of the imagination, a painting of appearances, so, by a contrary token, there exists a painting of individuation, a painting of essences, which is no less abstract, or noumenal, than imaginative painting, but profoundly subjective rather than superficially objective - in a word, round as opposed to square.

7. And this individuational painting, like its imaginative antithesis, stands absolutely above the concrete, and therefore phenomenal, realm of representational painting, be that representation realistic or naturalistic, concerned, in watery vein, with civilization or concerned, in rather more vegetative vein, with nature, including, not least of all, human nature.

8. If materialism is best characterized by imagination, that faculty of the will, and the metachemical will most especially, then the leading characteristic of idealism can only be individuation, that faculty of the soul.

9. Beneath the appearance-obsessed materialism of imagination and the essence-obsessed idealism of individuation, however, stand what may be called the quantity-obsessed realism of inspiration and the quality-obsessed naturalism of intuition.

10. For if imagination is an attribute of the will and individuation an attribute of the soul, then inspiration is most assuredly an attribute of the spirit, particularly of the chemical or per se spirit, and intuition an attribute of the ego, not least of all as it bears upon physics.

11. As one might associate materialistic painting with the faculty of imagination and idealistic painting with the faculty of individuation, viz. the will and the soul, so one should associate realistic painting with the faculty of inspiration and naturalistic painting with the faculty of intuition, viz. the spirit and the ego (mind).

12. Thus imagination and inspiration line up against intuition and individuation, pretty much as females against males, the will and the spirit against the ego and the soul, with appearance and quantity characterizing the objectivity of the one side, but quality and essence characteristic of the subjectivity of the other side.

13. Such, too, can be said, oddly enough, of the distinction between scooters and conventional enclosed cars on the one hand, and ... open-topped cars and motorbikes on the other hand, since the dichotomy in this instance is also between female and male alternatives - the former objectively divisible, as with paintings, between materialism and realism; the latter no less subjectively divisible between naturalism and idealism.

14. Thus from the appearance-based materialism of scooters to the essence-centred idealism of motorbikes via the quantity-oriented realism of conventional enclosed (family) cars and the quality-oriented naturalism of open-topped (sports) cars, as from imagination to individuation via inspiration and intuition, or, in simple elemental language, from fire to air via water and vegetation (earth).

15. Which would indicate that whereas scooters and motorbikes, conforming to noumenal abstraction, are upper-class modes of road transportation, with scientific and religious implications respectively, family cars and sports cars, conforming to phenomenal concreteness, are lower-class modes of road transportation - analogous, in their political and economic implications, to realistic and naturalistic kinds of painting.

16. And such kinds of painting, like their transportational counterparts, are of course rather more the worldly rule than the (otherworldly) exception, bearing in mind the phenomenal natures of most people, less categorizable, as we have found, as devils or gods than as women and men.

17. Although I consider myself first and foremost a philosopher, I have striven, in my PC-based paintings, to develop noumenal abstraction as subjectively as possible, and therefore to symbolize the triumph of individuation on as consistently metaphysical a basis as is commensurate with transcendentalism.

18. My PC-based paintings are, in that sense, beyond imagery or imagination; for they are antithetical to the noumenally objective type of abstraction, in which appearance is king or, rather, queen.

19. With my paintings, on the other hand, essence is king, because they are emblematic of the soul, not the will.

20. And, being emblematic of the soul, they strive, whenever feasible, to symbolize transcendentalism as idealistically as possible, as due testimony to the ultimate 'kingdom within', the metaphysical kingdom of respiratory sensibility, wherein idealism has its transcendentalist throne.