Imagination | Encyclopedia.com (original) (raw)

IMAGINATION

Imagination is generally held to be the power of forming mental images or other concepts not directly derived from sensation. In spite of the popular usage of the term, the majority of philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant considered it in relation to knowledge or opinion. They conceived it either as an element in knowledge or as an obstacle to it—as in Plato's attack on art—or as both an obstacle and an element. David Hume is a representative of the last view: "Nothing is more dangerous to reason than flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers." Yet in the same place he wrote of the understanding as "the general and more established properties of the imagination" (Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sec. vii). The fancy, the power of the imagination to combine ideas in fantastical ways, is to be avoided, but nevertheless imagination is vital to knowledge.

This latter element in Hume's view had its greatest development in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, where the imagination is described as a "blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious." Kant thought that the imagination has two tasks to perform in giving rise to knowledge, though it is not always easy to separate them. First, it completes the necessarily fragmentary data of the senses: it is impossible to perceive the whole of an object at once, yet we are seldom aware of the partial nature of our perception. For example, we cannot see more than three sides of a cube at one time, but we think of it as having all six sides. This completion of perception is the work of the "reproductive" imagination (called reproductive because it depends on prior experience for its operation). Kant contrasted this with the "productive" imagination, which has an even more important role to play.

The two names mark different functions of the imagination, rather than imply that it is twofold. The productive imagination gives rise to the transcendental synthesis of imagination, which combines our experience into a single connected whole. Kant called this operation "transcendental" because it is prior to experience, not subsequent to it; without such a synthesis no coherent experience of a world would be possible. So central is the work of the imagination to the first Critique that it is sometimes hard to separate from the understanding; Kant even said in one passage: "The unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of the imagination is the understanding ; and this same unity, with reference to the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the pure understanding " (A 119).

Artistic Imagination

In spite of Kant's emphasis on the productive nature of the imagination and the importance he gave to it, his view of it in the first Critique is still as a faculty for forming images, images that are at the service of the cognitive powers of the mind. It is our normal apprehension of the world that is mainly at issue in that work. Consequently, it is hard to see how this use of the term is related to that by which we talk of writers and artists as "imaginative." Many critics and philosophers have written as if the artist or writer were a person especially good at imagining, in the sense of visualizing, scenes or events that had not occurred, which he then transmitted to the public by means of his art. The mental operations were of the "fancy" in Hume's sense of the term, the imagination recombining materials it had previously received from the senses into new forms that were not reproductions of previous experiences. The degree to which an artist could do this was the measure of his imaginative powers, while the reader or viewer reproduced in his own mind what the artist had had in his. Two contemporary literary critics have attacked this view:

But much great literature does not evoke sensuous images, or, if it does, it does so only incidentally, occasionally and intermittently. In the depiction even of a fictional character the writer may not suggest visual images at all. … If we had to visualise every metaphor in poetry we would become completely bewildered and confused. (Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, pp. 26–27)

It has even been suggested that the term imaginative has now come to fill the place in the critical vocabulary left by the general abandonment of the term beautiful in aesthetics; a "work of imaginative power" would previously have been called "beautiful." Clearly it is inadequate to equate "imagination" with the power of the mind to produce images. Interestingly enough, the germ of a better theory of the imagination might be seen in Kant's discussion of teleological judgment in his Critique of Judgment : to think of nature as if it had a purpose is an imaginative activity, though there do not seem to be any actual images involved in the process.

coleridge

One of the most important contributions to the theory of the imagination in the nineteenth century was that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, put forward in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere. He strongly contrasted the Fancy and the Imagination; the former he defined as "no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and place." It operates almost mechanically and is responsible for the production of verse, whereas the Imagination is the source of true poetry. This he divided into two: the Primary Imagination, which is the equivalent of Kant's productive imagination and is responsible for all human perception, and the Secondary Imagination, which is the source of art. Coleridge described the operation of the Secondary Imagination as follows: "It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create … it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead." This vital nature of the imagination meant for Coleridge that it is a way of discovering a deeper truth about the world; he would have agreed with John Keats's "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth," and thus he went beyond the Kantian original of this theory. In this he sided with the romantics, for whom art and science were alternative ways of reaching the real world; previous writers had tended to think of science and philosophy as superior to art in this respect.

Ryle on Imagination

Coleridge and those who followed him, including both Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood, still thought of the Imagination as a single faculty or power of the mind. Gilbert Ryle, in his chapter on imagination in The Concept of Mind, stresses that there is no one thing that can be called "imagination" but rather a variety of activities that are imaginative, among which are pretending, acting, impersonating, fancying, and so-called imaging. His arguments clearly establish his central thesis, though his subsidiary denial of mental images, which is not essential to the main point, is open to doubt. A child shows his imaginative ability, Ryle maintains, not by what goes on in his head but rather by the way in which he plays—for instance, the manner in which he pretends to be a bear. An actor, again, demonstrates his ability by the way he performs on the stage, his public appearance, to which mental accompaniments are largely, if not entirely, irrelevant.

Many of the activities called "imaginative," Ryle says, are "mock-performances"; he talks of boxers sparring as "making these movements in a hypothetical and not a categorical manner" (p. 261). This is closely connected with supposal, the running over in the mind of a future possibility. Indeed, in ordinary speech the word imagine is often synonymous with "suppose" or "think"; the instruction "imagine what it would be like if" is equivalent to "think what it would be like if." In both cases the evidence that the instruction had been carried out would be a report in words; even the operation itself might have been purely verbal, without any "images" passing through the mind. Hence, Ryle can argue that there is no need for an artist or writer—or, indeed, for anybody at all—to have "mental imagery."

Imagination and Truth

Because there is such a close connection between "imagining" and "supposing" or "fancying," it is easy to see why what is imagined is often thought to be unreal or false. In fact, "I must have imagined it" is a common form for the admission of a mistake of some kind. Hence, it is natural for epistemologically minded philosophers to assume that all imaginative activity is false or unreal. Ryle, in spite of the overall excellence of his account, may be criticized on this score: Such forms of expression as "mock-performance" and the use of quotation marks stress this element. However, the falsity of the imagination may, by philosophers of other persuasions and interests, be welcomed as a sign of the mind's freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre would appear to be of this number. E. J. Furlong, in his book Imagination, agrees with Sartre on this point: "to act 'with imagination' is to act with freedom, with spontaneity; it is to break with the trammels of the orthodox, of the accepted; it is to be original, constructive" (p. 25). But, as has already been mentioned, artists and writers about art often want to go further than this, to stress the "truth" of imaginative works. Collingwood, for example, in a section of The Principles of Art titled "Imagination and Truth," has said, "Art is not indifferent to truth; it is essentially the pursuit of truth" (p. 288). It is clear that the truth in question is one somehow connected with the imagination rather than with the ordinary cognitive powers of the mind.

The difficulty of assessing this claim is increased by the fact that the idealist theory of art, of which Collingwood and Croce are the chief representatives, places the locus of the work of art not in its physical manifestation, the painting or poem, but in the imagination of the artist and spectator. The real work of art is an experience in the mind of the artist, and the spectator is moved to re-create the experience of the artist in his own imagination when he contemplates the picture. The picture is thus connected with the work of art but is not the work itself. The main difficulty here lies in the fact that it is an imaginative experience, not a statement, which is said to be true. A subsidiary problem is that such a view leads to the undervaluing of the actual product of the artist, the picture, novel, or poem. But the stress on the part played by the imagination in appreciating art is shared by some writers not normally thought of as idealists. For instance, Sartre says, "In a word, reading is directed creation" (Situations II, p. 96). The writer, he argues, has only provided a series of clues that the reader has to "solve" and complete by his own activity. Sartre even goes so far as to talk of reading as a "dream under our own control" (ibid., p. 100), which assimilates the appreciation of art even more closely with activities normally thought of as imaginative—for example, daydreaming.

One aspect of the idealist account of art clearly fits in with our normal thinking on the subject, for a person said to be "imaginative" is frequently one who is capable of appreciating works of art or of fiction. A man who could not read novels because "they are not factual" would be unimaginative. But the antithesis imaginative-factual that is here employed would seem to contradict the idealist claim that art is connected with truth. In ordinary conversation a novel may be described as "true to life" or "realistic." A child pretending to be a bear may also be praised for the realism of his performance, as may a young actor playing the part of an old man. In these and similar instances no one need be deceived by the novel or the performance; the readers or spectators can be fully aware that they are not reading a factual account or seeing a genuinely old man. Indeed, if they were not so aware their reactions would be different. The spectator who responds to the stage performance as to an actual event has made a serious mistake; many events on the stage would be too painful to contemplate if they took place in real life. This kind of awareness has sometimes been described as "aesthetic distance," but it is the same feature that was above described as the "unreality" of the imagination. Sartre expresses this fact by saying that the image "contains a certain nothingness." He continues: "However lively, however affecting or strong an image may be, it is clear that its object is non-existent" (L'imaginaire, p. 26). For Sartre, when someone imagines the face of an absent friend he is supposing that the friend is present to him, which ex hypothesi he is not. A person who forgets that he is imagining, that his thought is supposal, not fact, has made the same mistake as the spectator who thinks a real murder has been committed on the stage. The sense in which imagination may provide, in works of fiction, for example, a "truth" that is not conformity to actual fact can thus only be that the world which is supposed is a possible one, in the sense that it is self-consistent. Those who claim that the imagination gives another "truth" must be extending the meaning of the word in a way that requires justification, or at least explanation.

What has just been said also serves to point to a solution of the difficulty of the idealist account, that of the actual mode of existence of the work of art, whether it is in the mind or is the physical object it is ordinarily taken to be. Against the idealist view it is normally asserted that what is criticized in a work of art is the work itself, not its effects on the imagination, which would be private to each person; the critic thinks he is talking about a public object. The solution lies in the ambiguous nature of the work of art, as Sartre stresses, in that a picture, for example, can be viewed either as paint on canvas or as a picture of an absent friend. The picture does not produce an image of the absent person, but, as Sartre says, we respond to the picture in some of the ways in which we would respond to the friend himself, albeit we are aware that he is not present. The ability to respond in this way is the imagination, but the response does not require a flow of imagery in the mind. To have established this is one of the merits of Ryle's account.

Mimesis

It is now possible to see the connection between many of the various, apparently disparate uses of "imagination." The man who is thoroughly immersed in reading a story, who is almost dreaming it, is very like the child who is fully occupied with pretending to be a bear. These are in a position similar to that of the man who is taking the behavior of a young actor on the stage for that of an old man. There is a common element in the behavior of all three, which is shared by the man who is supposing that something is the case, though his activity is less full. This man, again, is not dissimilar to the person having a mental image, who is fancying or supposing that he is seeing or hearing something he is not seeing or hearing, although aware that he is not.

All of these notions are related to an earlier account of art, the Greek mimesis, or imitation, although it has often been thought that there was a radical difference between them. Aristotle's idea of an "instinct of imitation" in the Poetics (IV, 1) is not entirely unlike Ryle's account of the imagination. In both cases there is something unreal about the activity, as Sartre has tried to indicate by his talk of "nothingness" as a feature of imagination; in these areas the implications of normal life do not hold. Thus, in spite of the apparent diversity of usage, there is a "family likeness," in Ludwig Wittgenstein's phrase, between the various terms, which makes talk of "the Imagination" legitimate.

Bibliography

classic works

Aristotle. On the Soul.

Aristotle. Poetics.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by J. Shawcross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.

Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. I.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York, 1951.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. Kemp Smith. London, 1929.

modern works

Cameron, J. M. "Poetic Imagination." PAS, n.s., 62 (1961–1962): 219–240.

Carritt, E. F. The Theory of Beauty. London, 1914.

Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938.

Croce, Benedetto. Estetica come scienze dell'espressione e linguistica generale. Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1902. Translated by D. Ainslie as Aesthetic. London: Macmillan, 1922.

Furlong, E. J. Imagination. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Gombrich, E. H. "Meditations on a Hobby Horse." In Aspects of Form, edited by L. L. Whyte. London: Lund Humphries, 1951.

James, D. G. Scepticism and Poetry. London: Allen and Unwin, 1937.

Koestler, Arthur. Act of Creation. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

Langer, S. K. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribners, 1953.

Levi, A. W. Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.

MacDonald, M. "Art and Imagination." PAS, n.s., 53 (1952–1953): 205–226.

Mischel, T. "Collingwood on Art as 'Imaginative Expression.'" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 39 (1961): 241–250.

Price, H. H. Thinking and Experience. London: Hutchinson, 1953.

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 1949.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. L'imaginaire. Paris, 1940. Translated by Bernard Frechtman as The Psychology of the Imagination. London and New York, 1949.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Qu'est-ce que la littérature." In Situations II. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Translated by Bernard Frechtman as What Is Literature? New York: Philosophical Library, 1949; London: Methuen, 1950.

Shorter, J. M. "Imagination." Mind, n.s., 61 (244) (October 1952): 528–542.

Wellek, R., and A. Warren. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.

Ziff, P. "Art and the 'Object of Art.'" Mind, n.s., 60 (1951): 466–480.

A. R. Manser (1967)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy Manser, A.