The Imaginal

There is a word we’ve lost, and losing it has cost us more than we know. The word is imaginal — and it points to something quite different from imaginary. The imaginary is what we produce: fictions, fantasies, projections, inventions. The imaginal is what we perceive — a real order of being, intermediate between the purely intellectual and the purely material, apprehensible only through a faculty we have largely abandoned. Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and scholar of Islamic mysticism, spent his life recovering this concept. His work is one of the most important and least-known resources in contemporary thought.

Core Ideas

Corbin’s concept of the mundus imaginalis — the imaginal world — was recovered from the tradition of Islamic illuminationist philosophy, particularly the Ishrāqī school of Suhrawardi and the metaphysical vision of Ibn Arabi. In this tradition, reality is not simply divided into the material (what we can touch and measure) and the intellectual (what we can think and reason about). Between them lies a third realm: the ‘ālam al-mithāl, the world of archetypal images, the realm of vision and spiritual experience. This realm is not less real than the material — in fact, for the Islamic mystics Corbin studied, it is more real, because archetypal forms are prior to their material instantiations.

The crucial move is ontological. Corbin insists that the imaginal is not a metaphor for something else, not a poetic way of speaking about psychological states, not a symbol for abstract ideas. It is a genuine order of being. The imagination — what Corbin calls the active imagination — is not a faculty for producing fictions. It is an organ of perception that perceives a real order. When Blake saw angels in trees, he was not hallucinating or speaking metaphorically. He was perceiving, through the organ of imagination, something that is genuinely there. The question is not whether the imaginal world exists but whether we have cultivated the faculty for perceiving it.

This matters enormously for how we understand modernity’s peculiar spiritual poverty. Corbin’s diagnosis: Western modernity systematically destroyed the imaginal world — not by disproving it but by losing the faculty for perceiving it. The Enlightenment’s reduction of knowledge to what can be empirically measured or logically demonstrated did not refute the imaginal; it simply made us incapable of perceiving it. We lost the middle. And losing the middle — losing the realm where ideas have living weight, where images are genuine presences, where the intellect and the body are mediated by something that has the character of both — produced the peculiar condition Corbin calls “disorientation.”

This maps directly onto what Jake’s audience experiences. They are not stupid. They have ideas — often very sophisticated ideas. They understand, intellectually, the importance of connection, depth, meaning, love. But they cannot get from the idea to the living reality. The map is there; the territory has gone silent. Corbin would say: they have the intellect but have lost the imaginal faculty that would allow ideas to become presences rather than mere concepts. The gap between knowing and being — which is also the gap between understanding and transformation — is precisely the gap where the imaginal lives.

The Romantic poets — Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth — were, from this perspective, engaged in a rearguard action against Enlightenment reduction. When Coleridge distinguishes the Primary Imagination (the living, creative perception that perceives the world as alive) from mere Fancy (mechanical recombination of mental images), he is defending the imaginal in different language. When Blake insists that “the imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself,” he is making Corbin’s claim a century before Corbin. The Romantic tradition and the Islamic illuminationist tradition are, from this perspective, expressions of the same underlying insight.

Jung’s concept of active imagination — a therapeutic practice in which the conscious ego enters into dialogue with autonomous figures arising from the unconscious — is the closest Western psychology has come to recovering the imaginal faculty as a practice. Hillman’s archetypal psychology, which drew directly on Corbin, went further: the archetypes are not merely psychological constructs but genuinely imaginal presences. Tom Cheetham’s work has made Corbin’s thought accessible to a contemporary audience in ways that Corbin himself, writing in a highly specialized scholarly register, never managed.

Key Works

• Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī (1958, English trans. 1969) — Corbin’s central text. The introduction is one of the great essays in twentieth-century philosophy.
• Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings (2012) — The most accessible introduction to Corbin’s work. Start here.
• Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel (2004) — Another accessible Cheetham entry; focuses on the imagination as organ of perception.
• Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (1971, English trans. 1978) — More accessible than Alone with the Alone; covers the visionary tradition.
• James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) — Hillman’s application of Corbin’s insights to Jungian psychology.

Connections

• Henry Corbin — The philosopher who recovered the concept; his intellectual biography is essential context.
• The Imaginal Tradition — The broader lineage of which Corbin’s recovery is the most rigorous modern expression.
• Meaning Crisis — Vervaeke’s meaning crisis and Corbin’s loss of the imaginal are diagnoses of the same condition from different angles.
• Existentialism — Corbin was a student of Heidegger; the imaginal can be read as a response to Heidegger’s question of Being.
• The Arts — The arts are the primary contemporary site where the imaginal faculty is exercised; this is why aesthetic experience matters so much in this garden.

Quotes

“The mundus imaginalis is not imaginary in the modern pejorative sense. It is the world of the soul, the world where spirit becomes corporeal and body becomes spiritual.” — Henry Corbin

“The organ that perceives the mundus imaginalis is the imaginative consciousness, the active imagination — not the fantasy that produces arbitrary images, but the imagination that perceives real presences.” — Henry Corbin

“To lose the imaginal is not to become more rational. It is to become less real.” — Tom Cheetham, paraphrasing Corbin

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.” — William Blake