Alexander Schlutz. Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2009. ISBN 9780295988931. Price: US$30

Alexander Schlutz’s Mind’s World is not so much the history of the Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism its subtitle suggests, as it is a series of deeply intelligent, detailed readings of the imagination and its influence on theories of subjectivity in the work of René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottleib Fichte, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From chapters that function largely as independent engagements with the imagination and subjectivity in a given writer’s work, a series of complex critical interrelationships emerge. Wisely eschewing any sort of unifying statement about the imagination, Mind’s World begins from the premise that “one cannot hope to establish a stable meaning for the concept of the imagination through a study of its history. Nor should one expect to uncover a teleological development that might unify such heterogeneous assessments by relating them to the overarching logic of a historical plot”(5). Thus Schlutz’s study implicitly sets itself apart from James Engell’s landmark The Creative Imagination (1981). Yet, if Mind’s World avoids the totalizing threats implicit in a history of the imagination, it does provide a selective genealogy of one of romanticism’s most infamously vexed terms. Leaping forward over 1,300 years, Mind’s World traces René Descartes’ shifting position on the role of the imagination in the production of the autonomous subject. Focusing on Meditations on First Philosophy and the Discourse on Method as they developed out of earlier work such as Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Mind’s World finds that modern subjectivity develops initially “in direct relation to the Cartesian concept of the imagination,” even if Descartes ultimately opposes the cogito to the imagination (36). As far as the development of Descartes’ career goes, Schlutz observes, “Descartes, in different stages of his life, is very much a man of [two very different] epistemological ages” (59). What is admirable in this chapter is Schlutz’s challenge to the common assumptions about Descartes’ emphasis on reason and reservations about the imagination. In Mind’s World, Descartes’ struggle to exclude the imagination from a first principle in philosophy is never completely successful. Indeed, it is Descartes’ failure to recognize how much his first principle owes to the imagination that sets the stage for the imagination’s forceful return at the center of German idealism. For Schlutz’s reading of Descartes, the autonomous subject of reason is fractured at its very inception by the lawless imagination. Highlighting this tacit persistence of the imagination in Descartes’ development of the cogito, Schlutz identifies what he calls a “peculiar double relationship with regard to the imagination as an essential condition of modern subjectivity” (37). Thus while the cogito is, for Descartes, the fundamental fact that can be discovered about one’s existence, nevertheless “[it] is discovered by pushing a method of imaginary, fictional construction to its seeming extreme end point” (78). While Schlutz’s argument for the imagination’s persistence in the emergence of the cogito is, as he puts it, outside of “Descartes’ field of vision,” it nonetheless allows for a proleptic gesture towards the real center of Mind’s World: its discussions of Kant, Fichte, Hardenberg, and Coleridge. Admirably balancing clarity and complexity, Mind’s World’s treatment of the place of the imagination in Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy is where Schlutz’s project truly finds its subject. Beginning with an exploration of the imagination’s role in Kant’s argument for a first principle in philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason, Schultz engages with some of the central problems concerning Kant’s critical project. The imagination is essential to Kant’s attempts to theorize the unity of consciousness, even as it is a potential threat to the …