JSV Saturday Series on-line zoom Tom Cheetham

Henry Corbin argued that modern technological society suffered a catastrophic loss of soul with the abandonment of active, creative Imagination as a source of knowledge. We see the results of this all around us. In Corbin's theological psycho-cosmology, the supreme and archetypal act of creative imagination is the event of theophanic prayer.

The dynamic he discovers there between the two poles established by the terrestrial soul and its celestial twin applies universally to every real encounter between and among all beings. I suggest that although Corbin, Jung, Hillman and others are not wrong to assign this cognitive function to "imagination" we tend to be led astray by a tendency to associate imagination with human agency. 

Better is to follow Corbin in centering on the "cognitive function of sympathy." In order to make this clear, concrete and immediate I will give a brief overview of the analogical cosmologies of Lou Andreas-Salomé and her brilliant contemporary interpreter Kaja Silverman. The implications of their development of a cosmology of kinship are breath-taking.

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