Five Lectures: From Language to Image is the title of the first edition of a series of lectures that Paul Ricoeur gave in Paris, at the Centre de Recherches Phénoménologiques, between 1973 and 1974. It is a short and valuable book that reveals the importance of the issue of imagination within the broad and complex body of Ricoeur's works. Imagination represents a sort of leitmotiv both in his major works (from The Philosophy of Will to Histoire, mémoire, oubli), and in his minor ones. Significantly, this reflection on issues concerning the notion of imagination and of the image reemerges at every important theoretical shift, at every turn of Ricoeur's path. The five lectures included in From Language to Image can be positioned between Ricoeur's hermeneutics of metaphoric language (which dominates Live Metaphor) and his analysis of the relationship between language and praxis (that was was presented in From Text to Action and, later, in the Time and Narration trilogy).
Ricoeur's lectures, which in the present volume are edited and with an introduction by Rita Messori, foreground the reciprocity that exists between a philosophy that is practiced as a mediation (a mediation between what is voluntary and what is involuntary, between meaning and image, belonging and distancing, discourse and action) and the analysis of imagination. The greater the effort to understand the relationship between differences, the stronger the need to rely on the imaginative power of thought. Analogously, the more one investigates the nature of imagination, the more one is led to a careful analysis of that which appears to be the product of imagination: the image.
The semantic working of metaphoric language, moving beyond the empirical definition of the image as a weak impression, as a sign that replaces a presence, opens the way to a joint reinterpretation of meaning and image, suggesting that the image does not simply accompany or illustrate meaning, but rather constitutes its body, its contour, its form. The image thus leaves the realm of impressions and enters that of language. This is indeed the most original aspect of Ricoeur's approach: to move from language to image, and not vice versa.