Cyclical Time and Personal Space – Henry Corbin’s Angelic Psychocosmology
Dr Tom Cheetham
Monday 9 March
In the chair Professor John Carey
Venue The Royal Asiatic Society Doors open at 6.30pm
Lecture begins promptly at 7 pm Concludes 8.30 pm
Henry Corbin (1903–1978) described spiritual transformation in terms of the interiorization of the world and the metamorphosis of things into symbols. He explains in detail that this refiguring of experience requires freeing ourselves from the limitations of both linear time and three-dimensional space. We will explore some of the consequences and implications of this cosmology for everyday experience and for our understanding of the categories of time, space, matter and the person. Corbin was not alone in reimagining the fundamental conditions of human experience in the early twentieth century. The lecture will attempt to situate Corbin’s philosophical anthropology in the context of the thought of some of his contemporaries, and suggest how it might help free our own lives from the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ of modern life. Tom Cheetham is the author of five books on the imagination in psychology, religion, science and the arts – The World Turned Inside Out (2003), Green Man, Earth Angel (2004), After Prophecy (2007/2019), All the World an Icon (2012) and Imaginal Love – The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman (2015) – and one book of poems, Boundary Violations (2015). He is a Fellow of the Temenos Academy.
Admission £8 or £5 Members of the Temenos Academy/Concessions Full-time students with student ID card FREE.
