Art and Experience, Utrecht, © 1996. All rights reserved

Imagination is the mental power to present things to the mind even without their presence to the senses. Only those details pertain to an image of imagination that have been put into them by imagination--this stands in sharp contrast with images of perception which can be further detailed by taking in more details through the senses.

Perceptual imagination provides the intermodal translation of the various spatio-temporal structures provided by the sense modalities needed for perception to be a coherent whole. It also introduces a temporal dimension into the experiences at stake, making perception empathetic . For instance, it is perceptual imagination which introduces the idea that some person's sadness should be 'tragic'--by introducing memories and anticipations. In all this perceptual imagination forms an integral part of perception and is not spontaneous--which is why Kant calls it reproductive and understands it as part of understanding. (VIII:3).

Pre-perceptual, empathetic, imagination is activated by art's restricted address of sense modalities and relevant intimatory devices. In the arts, therefore, empathy is an effect of this spontaneous--productive--power of imagination. The objects of empathetic imagination, represented tertiary qualities, cannot polymodally be proven to exist, nor even can their phenomenality be explained--there are no samples of tertiary qualities. This is what explains why in the aesthetic domain we hold the principle of acquaintance.