Imagination in perception and art (original) (raw)
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Aesthetic A Priori and Embodied Imagination
This paper discusses the modern idea of imagination and its various transformations in the phenomenological conceptual frameworks of Edward Casey, Mikel Dufrenne (1910-1995), Max Scheler (1874-1928) and Vasily Ses-emann (1884-1963). I would like to raise and critically assess questions regarding the role of imagination in our consciousness: whether imagination is a productive or reproductive activity; and how, if at all, aesthetic expression limits the imagination. Casey criticizes Dufrenne for his attempt to unite imagination with aesthetic expression. He argues for the autonomy of the imagination but leaves the question of the relationship between the imagination and perception unan-swered. Dufrenne partially shares his theory of imagination with Sesemann. Both philosophers claim that imagination is a reproductive activity rather than a productive one in the sense that it is limited by the forms of the material a priori. In other words, aesthetic expression has to obey the principle of correlation between percipiens and perceptum. Creativity becomes possible when the creator is able to reproduce in his expression another subject's possible perceptivity. Max Scheler emphasized the correlative connection of spiritual activity with the world. He linked the concept of imagination to the practical being in the world. In Ses-emann's aesthetics the role of embodied imagination in artistic creation and the perception of aesthetic objects were also considered. Both authors argued that the connection between imagination and the essential modes of the world's givenness is guaranteed by the mode of embodied imagination. Both acknowledged that imagination is related to unconscious desires and drive. Both authors stated that the schematisms of imagination express the style of the perception of the world. The fact that imagination is an embodied phenomenon is illustrated by the way it exists in the world, since imagination is essentially a free activity restricted only by "the style of the world's horizon."
Imagination: Imagining and the Image
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Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences
Mind and Language, 2002
A number of philosophers have argued in favour of the Dependency Thesis: if a subject sensorily imagines an F then he or she sensorily imagines from the inside perceptually experiencing an F in the imaginary world. They claim that it explains certain important features of imaginative experience, in brief: the fact that it is perspectival, the fact that it does not involve presentation of sensory qualities and the fact that mental images can serve a number of different imaginings. I argue that the Dependency Thesis is false and that, in any event, it does not have the explanatory credentials claimed for it. Some of the features of imaginative experience are incorrectly specified, namely the absence of presentation of sensory qualities. With a more precise idea of what we need to explain, I argue that the explanation should proceed by noting that imagination and perception have phenomenally similar contents and that this is to be explained in terms of the similar kinds of representations in play. I trace the consequences of my discussion for disjunctivist theories of perception, Berkeleian Idealism and the characterisation of knowing what an experience is like.
The Constructions of Imagination
Seeing as Practice, 2019
The power of imagination plays a part in each and every act of perception. Perceptual world disclosure is an interpretive, picture-making process. This applies not only to materially present pictures but also to immaterial images. Pictures that are generated by and at the same time inform perception are perceived and imagined images that contribute to the idea we have of ourselves and the world. This pictoriality in acts of perception is explained with the help of a concepts of images and their genesis, as discussed by Kant and Fichte.
There is Something about the Image: A Defence of the Two‐Component View of Imagination
dialectica
According to the two‐component view of sensory imagination, imaginative states combine qualitative and assigned content. Qualitative content is the imagistic component of the imaginative state and is provided by a quasi‐perceptual image; assigned content has a language‐like structure. Recently, such a two‐component view has been criticized by Daniel Hutto and Nicholas Wiltsher, both of whom have argued that postulating two contents is unnecessary for explaining how imagination represents. In this paper, I will defend the two‐component theory by arguing that it has three explanatory advantages over its competitors. First, it makes explicit a widely acknowledged distinction between engaged imagination and mere supposition. Second, it explains how imagination is constrained by objects’ perceptual appearances. Third, it explains how imaginings can be exploratory.
Imagination - Phenomenological Approaches
When phenomenologists investigate the imagination, they approach it by examining how objects are experienced when they are imagined (rather than, for example, perceived) and what the experience of imagining is like (as opposed to, for example, the experience of perceiving). Their inquiries into the imagination are thus part of the greater phenomenological project of clarifying the different modes in which we can experience, or be conscious of the world (or some objects in the world) and the correlating modes in which the world (or some objects in it) can appear to us. Mostly, phenomenologists consider what is often called 'sensory' imagination, that is, the experience in some sensory mode (such as the visual or the aural) of something not actually present. In order to emphasize its sensory and embodied dimension, they typically distinguish imagining something from entertaining its possibility merely in thought, which in other discourses is often referred to as 'propositional imagination', or 'imagining that'.
Imagination beyond Representation
Le Journal des Laboratoires d' Aubervilliers, Paris, 2010
Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? (Clarice Lispector) For some time now we have been considering questions related to the political potential of a work of art, or, put somewhat differently, about freeing the revolutionary potential of art from its social and political forms of representation and from the limitations of its communicative medium. Jacques Ranciere, for one, talks about the emancipation of art from its representative regime. But what does this actually mean? When we consider the political potential of an artwork, we are usually attentive to the possible changes in the social field that this work can stimulate or evoke. We think about the devices in an artwork (such as the motives, the narratives, or "meaningful spectacle" as Ranciere put it) that contribute towards raising political awareness in a social and economic order. We can even say that it is all about certain political pedagogy. But what we are actually talking about are the ways politics conditions art and not about art's emancipation from the representational regime. What we are interested in, then, is something else: the unmediated experiences, acts of creation, operations of desire or even insights, which are not yet formalized knowledge but thoughts in their purest formation, passing the field which has been liberated from the institutionalized rationality. Translations of these operations into the so called representative regime of art are never unproblematic, since they stimulate anxiety, incite new reactions and interruptions of the already-known and if not, they remain hidden until they reach their "extractive conditions". But how does one recognize the moment of moving beyond the subjective territory of the "not yet" into the plane of transversal linkage? How can radical imagination contribute towards crossing that threshold in question, bridging the gap between subjectivity and the representative regime of art? In order to attempt to answer these questions we should not only reconsider the meaning of imagination and creativity but also the long tradition of conformity to forms of expression and content which resulted in representation coming to dominate our way of thinking. It has been suggested (Simon O'Sullivan) that under different circumstances the art history practice as it is known now might disappear; that is, the kind of practice which positions an artwork as a representation, as a hermeneutic activity.
Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique, 2019
Some argue that photographic and cinematic images are “transparent”; we see objects “through” photographs as we see objects in mirrors, through telescopes, etc. However, it has also been suggested that seeing photographic images does not provide us with the kind of egocentric information seeing proper does, so photographs cannot be considered transparent. There is also a disagreement about the kind of imagining cinematic images induce. Some think that watching fiction films involves imagining seeing the depicted events from the point of view of the camera, while others hold that such a process would involve imagining the complicated, and at times impossible ways of gaining the kind of epistemic access suggested by the shots. In my paper I argue that the controversy concerning transparency and imagining seeing is misguided, for the differences between these positions become mainly terminological, once the nature of the cognitive architecture, the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms a...
Art, Imagination, and Experiential Knowledge
Synthese, 2023
In this paper, I argue that art can help us imagine what it would be like to have experiences we have never had before. I begin by surveying a few of the things we are after when we ask what an experience is like. I maintain that it is easy for art to provide some of them. For example, it can relay facts about what the experience involves or what responses the experience might engender. The tricky case is the phenomenal quality of the experience or what it feels like from the inside. Thus, in the main part of the paper, I discuss how art can provide us with this as well. I conclude by situating my view in the context of the broader debate over transformative experiences. I maintain that art can solve some but not all of the problems that arise when deciding whether to undergo a transformation.