Spirit and Soul

In a clear and vivid manner, EDWARD S. CASEY, one of America’s finest thinkers, takes up the great themes of imagination, remembering, perceiving, and place. A brilliant and useful account of basic philosophical problems, which are also major mysteries of the soul. Casey asks, How are we to join—or to rejoin, or to see as already conjoined—spirit and soul? For Casey, spirit and soul are “held together ... above all, by the images that imagining and remembering share.” First published in 1991 and expanded in 2004, this revised edition adds a comprehensive bibliography.

“For Casey, philosophy itself would not be possible without the imagination. Like emotion, imagination is ‘a spontaneously unifying factor in human experience, first linking body with soul ... and then connecting soul with spirit.’ For Casey, like for Hegel and Giegerich, this linking is not an external process that starts with two different objective entities: body and soul, ‘but of an indefinite plurality of modes of existing between which imagination moves in its Mercurial manner.’ If, for Casey, imagination is an upward linking already in process, a binding adhesive that is active at a subtle level, it is also not the only process at work as a synthesizing force. Imagination's upward movement is matched by memory's downward movement from spirit to soul” (STANTON MARLAN)