The Imaginal as Bridge Between Bodily Experience and Propositional Thought

The imaginal, as articulated in the tradition running from Corbin through contemporary cognitive science, is not an ornamental or merely metaphorical register but a genuine functional domain — the bridging field between propositional and non-propositional dimensions of selfhood. Primates possess rich perspectival and participatory cognition: sophisticated social intelligence, gestural communication, and powerful problem-solving, all without narrative or Propositional Justification systems. The question is how the transition to propositional personhood occurred. Drawing on Arbib's work on pantomime, the answer lies in the mimetic function — the capacity to take sensorimotor schemas of action and transform them into intersubjective communication. This mimetic capacity is the imaginal register in its most basic form.

Corbin's insight was that the imaginal glues together the sensual and the conceptual, the internal and the external. Spatial metaphors for inner states — "inside," "outside," "above," "below" — are not loose analogies but imaginal operations, pantomiming realities that resist direct propositional capture. This explains the efficacy of practices like Internal Family Systems, which work not through narration but through dramatization: creating an imaginal field in which parts of the self can dialogue and coordinate.

The deeper implication is that the imaginal is the phenomenological and possibly functional field within which narratives themselves evolve — the medium in which propositional and participatory knowing coordinate. Dialogos, genuine philosophical dialogue, can be understood as an attempt to return language to this imaginal field, reactivating gesture, drama, and musicality so that Logos operates not merely propositionally but participatorily, gathering things into intelligibility through embodied, intersubjective encounter.