To Dr. Mendible

See Johnson's The Body in the Mind for pertinent info:

Dr. Mendible,

I couldn't help but ruminate further on the Johnson/Kant connection I attempted to articulate during my presentation. While I was thinking, I figured a better way to distinguish between the role of imagination in Kantian idealism from Johnson's psycho-phenomenologic-empirical-gestalt-imagistic version. There's no need for you to respond to this in any sort of detail; this is more for my peace of mind than anything else.

I figure that Johnson is unsatisfied with Kant's take on the imagination because it acts solely as an intermediary between conceptual knowledge and sensory experience. Having such an intermediary necessarily implies the separation of lived experience and reason. Thus, Johnson accuses the Kantian imagination of reinforcing the Cartesian dichotomies of mind and matter, subjective and objective, etc. In Kant's view, the body (or the seat of sensory perception and experience) is a passive receptacle of an array of incoming data, and the imagination is needed to connect the raw data to the categories and concepts in our minds with which we make organized, reasoned sense of our experiences. For example, when we see a dog, we passively receive the visual representation of the shape and fur and cute cuddly face, and then our imagination acts to connect that representation to whatever concept of "dog" we have in our categorized minds. Logic and reasoning is therefore kept entirely separate from lived experience. Johnson pivots away from this by turning the Kantian scheme on its head. For Johnson, our concept of "dog" is formed by our vision of it, our lived experience of what a dog looks, smells, feels, and sounds like. Rather than acting as a passive receptacle, the body (or lived bodily experience) actively CREATES the systems of reason and cognition through which we come to "understand" what "dog" or "this dog" means. In this way, bodily experience IS cognition; the image schema related to "dog" or "dogness," which serves as the foundation of our rational or conceptual understanding of dogness, is an outgrowth of the repeated experience of dogness throughout our development. Like Kant, however, who posits the imagination as a "nonpropositional" force (that is, a malleable, interminable, creative force capable of managing multiplex systems of meaning and sense-concept connections), Johnson also views the imagination as taking on a fluid, creative role in determining rational structures from bodily experience. Johnson's imagination, though, is creative in the sense that image-schemata create and influence concepts, rather than creating a connection from image to preexisting or synthetic (a priori) concept.