Secondary Imagination as a Resolution of the Tension between Human Agency and Indifference: A Comparative Study of Khayyam’s Quatrains and the Play Buddha by Kazantzakis

Abstract

This comparative study examines how “art” and the “secondary imagination” function as a resolution to the enduring tension between human agency and indifference toward a transient world in Omar Khayyam’s quatrains and the play Buddha by Kazantzakis. The point of departure of this study is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theory of the “secondary imagination,” which conceptualizes artistic creation as a conscious and unifying process, distinguishing it from primary imagination and mere memory. Within this framework, Khayyam’s quatrains and the play Buddha by Kazantzakis are analyzed in terms of their representation of impermanence, suffering, and the possibility of liberation. The study employs a qualitative methodology based on inductive analysis, drawing upon extensive library and documentary sources. Findings indicate that Khayyam, through poetic imagination, interrogates the instability of the world while enacting an artistic mode of engagement, whereas Kazantzakis, by integrating Buddhist teachings with dramatic form, depicts the conflict between social action and Buddhist detachment in a ritualistic and carnivalesque mode. In both texts, the secondary imagination mediates experience and philosophy into an aesthetically coherent structure, establishes critical distance from reality, and enables avenues for philosophical and artistic resistance. Consequently, art in these works operates not merely as a reflection of the world but as an active process that reconciles human agency with indifference, offering a mode of engagement that is both contemplative and transformative.