Abstract
The history of imagination raises different constellations of questions, with few definitive answers. Is imagination the source of creativity (as popular culture has held since Romanticism) or a producer of falsehoods (perhaps the majority position in premodern and early modern thought)? Is it essential to all kinds of thought (as Aristotle and medieval Aristotelians believed) or is it transcended by rational intellect? Is mathematics a form of intellect or a form of imagining? Is imagination a function of memory or memory a form of imagining? Is it slavishly dependent on sensation or does it transcend it? What boundaries can be drawn between imagination and other powers of the human psyche: sensation, intellect, will, feeling, emotion, desire? Wherever one looks—to the remote past, to contemporary psychology and philosophy, and everywhere in between—there is little agreement about the answers, and often more confusion than clarity. This book provides a new framework for investigation by identifying key features of the basic phenomena of imagining and addressing the question of why philosophy and psychology have hitherto failed to do this. It also reconstructs both recent and remote history to show that there is an important tradition of thinking about imagination in major thinkers—chiefly Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, but with important themes from Hume, Hegel, Peirce, Saussure, and Wittgenstein—that has identified the key features of imagination. But that tradition, occluded and occulted, has been repeatedly overlooked, concealed, and forgotten, for more than two millennia.
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Notes
- 1.
In ultimate matters of the human spirit, the concept of greatness is essential. Although that is a subject for another day (as is also the discussion of spirit—I, too, have read Derrida!), one can make the case briefly. Greatness in philosophizing does not necessarily imply social power, morality, or even evident truth, but it does mean that someone has tried to think up to the level demanded by the phenomena in question and has to some ample and therefore inspiring extent succeeded.
- 2.
I do not mean to be simply dismissive of scholarly work. About every subject and author there are many good and even excellent studies, and even lesser ones have merits from which one can learn. Imagination is more difficult than most subjects, however, and in the indispensable authors it is necessary (as I will show) to understand what they say about imagination against the background of their highest philosophical ambitions. The best and most stimulating of the encyclopedic sources is without doubt Brann 1991.
- 3.
As will become clear, this kind of imagining is too limited and atypical to serve as a paradigm.
- 4.
This sentence may be taken as the positive leitmotif of the book.
- 5.
This sentence may be taken as the critical leitmotif of the book. An example of unfocused, ungrounded reason is the notion that rationality can be purely procedural. There are no processes of mind and soul more rigorously and logically procedural than psychological compulsions.
- 6.
It is this conceptual isolation of psychological powers from one another, rather than the concept of psychological powers per se, that is the principal source of the disrepute of so-called faculty psychology.
- 7.
This is true even of the rare cases when a new matrix or topography is invented by an individual. It is almost invariably produced against the background of already existing topologies, and therefore even what is new in it is shareable or actually shared in action, work, and speaking.
- 8.
By associating our best knowledge with pride I am not trying to diminish the modern sciences, which certainly embody some of the amplest and most accurate knowing human beings have achieved. It is instead to remark the ambition inherent in all claims to knowledge, and to intimate that the more strongly we assert claims, the less likely they are to be adequately supported by what we can show. More than knowledge—more even than the desire for knowledge—is at issue. In Chap. 4 we shall return to this theme, in the philosophically familiar form of the Socrates who knows that he does not know, and see that this Socratic trope in fact comes to a head where reason has to work with, place, and delimit images.
- 9.
That is, it takes the grammatical object of the preposition “of” (imagination) as our object of study. But if we take imagination as the subject, as the possessor and practitioner of a conceptual topology (the subjective genitive), we view it as intrinsically occupying the conceptual topology that is proper to it.
References
Brann, Eva T. H. 1991. The world of the imagination: Sum and substance. Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. Fait et à faire. Les carrefours du labyrinthe, 5. Paris: Seuil.
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Sepper, D.L. (2013). Beginning in the Middle of Things. In: Understanding Imagination. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_1
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