Imagination and Aesthetic Response in Rhetoric

One of the most philosophically interesting dimensions of Asrar al-Balaghah is its account of why figurative language creates aesthetic pleasure and why some instances of it are more pleasurable than others. Al-Jurjani did not treat aesthetic response as irrelevant or merely subjective; he treated it as evidence of linguistic achievement that demanded explanation. When a reader finds a metaphor or simile beautiful, what exactly is happening, and what features of the expression are responsible?

Al-Jurjani's answer drew on the concept of khayal — imagination or the imaginative faculty. Figurative language works by activating the imagination: it asks the reader to see one thing through the lens of another, to hold two conceptual domains simultaneously and perceive their resemblance. The quality of the experience depends on the quality of the imaginative invitation — how vivid, how apt, how surprising the resemblance the figure exploits. A figure that activates a vivid, surprising, yet genuinely apt resemblance creates a more powerful imaginative experience than one that activates a pale, obvious, or strained one.

This psychological account of aesthetic response was genuinely innovative. Earlier Arabic rhetoric had described figures and their varieties without explaining why they produce the effects they produce. Al-Jurjani's turn toward the cognitive and psychological dimension of rhetorical response gave the discipline a new explanatory depth. It became possible not just to say that a given figure was beautiful but to explain what properties made it beautiful — what it demanded of the reader's imagination and why that demand was productive rather than frustrating.

He also addressed the phenomenon of habituated versus fresh figurative language — what modern linguists call 'dead metaphors' versus live ones. When a metaphor becomes so familiar through repeated use that it no longer activates vivid imaginative engagement, it loses its rhetorical force. The Arabic language is full of such habituated figures — terms that were originally metaphorical but have become so conventional that their figurative origin is no longer perceived. Al-Jurjani argued that fresh, living figures — ones whose imaginative dimension is still active — achieve their aesthetic effects more fully than habituated ones, and he analyzed how poets renewed stale figures by providing fresh contexts that reactivated their imaginative dimension.

These discussions of imagination, aesthetic response, and linguistic habituation make Asrar al-Balaghah something more than a rhetoric manual. It is a work of literary aesthetics that engages seriously with questions about how language creates beauty and what the experience of that beauty consists in.