Seeing How to See
“[T]hrough his imagination, Goethe could, when practising ‘active seeing’, enter into the inner being of whatever he was observing, in the way that the philosopher Bergson argued ‘intuition’ could. Here ‘imagination’ is not understood in the reductive sense of ‘unreal’ but in the sense given it by Hermetic thinkers such as Ficino and Suhrawardi, as a means of entering the Hūrqalyā, the Imaginal World or anima mundi that mediates between the world of pure abstraction (Plato’s Ideas) and physical reality (in Goethe’s case, a plant or a cathedral).”
~ Gary Lachman, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World.
Image: Plato and Aristotle in The School of Athens. Artist: Raphael (1483–1520). Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Image licence: Public domain.
