Abstract
Contemporary studies of imagination tend to go off track because of two inveterate presuppositions and a problematic attitude. One presupposition, a heritage of Romanticism, is that imagination is the power of creativity; the other is that the prototypical case of imagining is calling to mind and holding there a visual image of something absent. If imagination can be creative, it can also be banal, routine, and conventional, and an adequate theory must come to terms with this. The second presupposition, imagination as visualization without a real object, is as old as inquiry into imagination. Its shortcoming is that it leads to treating imagination as a feeble cognitive function and confusing it with memory. The problematic attitude is “antipsychologism,” a tendency that has strongly influenced philosophers and psychologists for more than a century. Antipsychologism avoids investigating, and sometimes categorically denies the existence of, private psychological powers and events that appear to resist objectification by scientific methods. Recent psychological experiments (which might easily have been performed a century ago) have shown that verifiable investigation is possible here. More fundamental, however, is that imagination is a power of emergent and mobile appearance rather than finished cognition, and in that sense even memory and cognition are dependent on it. By experimenting with other modes of imagining than the visual, especially smell and hearing, the reader can see that, and how, such presuppositions and attitudes have produced a misidentification of the most basic phenomena of imagining.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course it does not matter that it is an oak tree. Other series of questions, too, are possible. For example, one might begin asking how detailed the remembering–imagining is, whether it includes leaf shape and bark texture, whether having an oak in mind differs from having a chestnut or a maple.
- 2.
Theseus’ description in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (act 5, scene 1) captures this last point with perfect tone and emphasis: “And as imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen/Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”
- 3.
The imaginative cash withdrawal was described in terms of your doing it. Repeat the exercise by imagining that a friend does it, then just an anonymous “someone.” Ask yourself where you are in the latter two situations. There are likely to be surprising differences in your overall experience of the imagined scenario. Questioning like this is pursued in Husserl 1980.
- 4.
This sentence puts the apparently objective description of the previous paragraph in a new light: no intentions were mentioned there, and fine and gross motor skills were no more than implicit. By calling specific variants to mind one can begin explicitly imagining the cash withdrawal in new ways.
- 5.
See Sect. 2.3, below, for a discussion of the Bergson–Deleuze–Agamben line of criticism of the inadequacies of the photographic image for understanding both static and mobile visual phenomena.
- 6.
Notice that this does not necessarily raise the epistemological issue of how you would know the aroma is or is not the same, nor whether the difference from remembering would be explicable in terms of a weakening or strengthening (of vividness).
- 7.
Let me offer a general apology for this kind of authorial importunity. But remember: Books and articles about imagination lacking evidence of the author’s acquaintance with the power are legion. One might even rank this as another insidious and inveterate misunderstanding of imagining: that it can be understood without doing. It is crucial to experience imagination actively in order to understand it. That you once did some relevant imagining—or dismissing claims because you recall having once previously thought about them—is not good enough.
- 8.
Husserl apparently intended to produce a study of imagination, but his many reflections on the topic, beginning quite early in his philosophical career, were occasional and for the most part unsystematic. Some of his notes over several decades have been gathered by later editors into Husserl 1980. The kind of phenomenology of imagination most familiar to contemporary scholars is to be found in Sartre’s two books on imagination, written in the middle and late 1930s, one historical (Sartre 1936), the other systematic (Sartre 1940). For a more recent phenomenological approach, see Casey 2000.
- 9.
Sartre’s irrealism does not, however, have to accompany phenomenological work on imagination per se. It is not, for example, particularly pronounced in Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and Casey in fact takes Sartre to task for the one-sidedness that issues from it (see Casey 2000, 2–3). At his most irrealist, Sartre abandons phenomenology for ideology. There is more than a little irony in the fact that a professional philosopher who was also a novelist and dramatist produced a theory of imagination that could scarcely even begin to come to terms with works of literary imagination.
- 10.
As reflected, for example, in the claim of many twentieth-century philosophers that imagination is properly captured as an attitude to an object (in particular, a propositional attitude, for example “supposing,” to a proposition P), or in the Lockean notion that the understanding takes an experienced idea and compares and contrasts it to others.
- 11.
These last sentences suggest that, even in very careful formulations of what differentiates imagining from perceiving, there is more than a hint of the conventional model of imagining as forming and holding a fixed view. Is the act of imagining a telephone intrinsically isolated from successive imaginative views conceived as variations on the original one? Is it not conceivable that the original act of imagining ordinarily or even always intends a subsequent amplification and proliferation of possibilities?
- 12.
- 13.
Matters are further complicated if one adds to these “ordinary” imaginative functions the transcendental functions found in Kant: that the very having of a spatio-temporal imaginative field, whether for sensation, imagination, or memory, requires a prior, more primordial, unifying act of imagining.
- 14.
Alain 1926, 338. The passage is part of the second of nine “Notes” appended to the second edition; titled “Sur les images,” it serves as an appendix to book 1, chapter 3 (“Des Images et des Objets”). “Alain” was the pseudonym of Emile Chartier (1868–1951), philosopher who taught at the Lycée Henri–IV (opposite the Panthéon) from 1909.
- 15.
Shortly we will take up the rest of this passage from Alain. Note that the present example is another case in which the relationship between remembering and imagining is unclear.
- 16.
- 17.
See Shepard and Cooper 1982 and Kosslyn 1994. One must not assume that simply reducing these rotations or circumambulations to a combination of memories (e.g., memories of the photographic representations of the different statue positions plus memories of rotating or walking around objects) explains much. The combination is not itself a memory—though whether imagination inevitably works with or combines memories is certainly open to discussion—and why the “rules of propositional combination” take precisely twice as long to follow in the circumstances would still be a mystery.
- 18.
Nigel Thomas has argued that, because of work like Shepard’s and Kosslyn’s, theories of imagination more or less aligned with traditional approaches were on the verge of a renascence in the early 1970s. But there intervened the rapidly evolving successes of the cognitive sciences (modeled on computation) and neurobiology, using the latest in high-technology brain and neuron imaging devices, and attention quickly shifted to mental functions, like vision and memory, that were technically, experimentally, and conceptually more tractable. See Thomas 1997.
- 19.
The latter is basically a development of David Hume’s contention, in a famous appendix to the Treatise of Human Nature (Hume 1739–1740), that he could find nothing corresponding to the I or ego beyond the experienced sequence of impressions and ideas. Bergson’s early writings preceded the emergence of phenomenology, but his criticisms clearly apply to it as well, even if the ego is only a coconstitutor of experience.
- 20.
Translation slightly emended. For Deleuze’s investigations of the image, one might begin with Deleuze 1986. Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), a British expatriate to the United States, invented techniques for the photographic capture of moving subjects (he produced, for instance, the photographic sequences of running horses that proved there are moments at which all four hooves are off the ground).
- 21.
One could easily alter this thought experiment to include the previous seeing of images, or contrariwise to restrict the kind of “seeing” we have done to the experience of photographic images of just the façade.
- 22.
How many columns are there? The answer depends on where you stand and whether you are counting all the columns of the façade or only the frontmost ones. The Panthéon’s portico has a front rank of six columns; but there is a second rank of six columns immediately behind the first, with the column at either end set outside the extreme columns of the first rank and thus, at a sufficient distance, appearing to belong to the first rank. Therefore one might plausibly say six or eight columns; and this is not to mention two additional ranks of columns behind the second. Few people would be able to recall the Panthéon with this accuracy of detail! Yet once one is aware of these complications and marks them—not necessarily in explicit propositions—one can more easily arrive at accurate remembering and reimagining of the building. Image and proposition are not an either/or but reinforce one another.
- 23.
I say “likely” because prodding by another or even ourselves sometimes helps us remember details we could not at first recall. Yet we also know from research that memories can be shaped and even induced in experimental subjects, to produce “false memories.”
- 24.
One must beware of categorically ruling out possibilities when the grounds for impossibility are not clear. If someone has experienced certain smells and noted characteristics that allow him to align them or place them in series, he might be able to imagine “positions” between or among them. See Sect. 3.1, below, for the case of the missing Humean blue.
- 25.
One might of course object that perhaps I am not managing to imagine cinnamon smell in most cases but only a simulacrum. Perhaps so: but is success in achieving an exact representation of something real or remembered the proper criterion of imagining? If to Alain’s request that I recall the façade and portico of the Paris Panthéon I responded that I had succeeded but then proceeded to describe a building that exists nowhere, he (speaking colloquial English) might remark that I wasn’t remembering the Panthéon at all but only imagining something else, something purely imaginary—an indication that in ordinary English usage (it works the same in French) we do not think that imagination has to have arrived at any particular real, fixed, or remembered object in order to be imagining.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
This abstraction–and–resituation is, by the definition I gave in the introductory section of this chapter, the action of imagination. This is not the last time that a move to the scientific attitude will prove to be an act of imagination. Here and elsewhere in this book I take “context” in the first instance to refer to relations of things to one another, whether the things are texts or nontexts. “Contexture,” by contrast, refers to the textures of a situation—which is to emphasize the qualitative characteristics of the situation, the qualities of the relations of things. The link between the two terms derives from the root metaphor: that of weaving. Texts weave words together; textures are the characteristics of both the pattern and the materials of the weave, characteristics that sometimes reflect a template according to which the weaving takes place. This dual character of text and context joined in contexture gives rise to a greater complexity than is usually betokened by the slogan “everything is text.”
- 29.
In the first instance, the ancient Greek word ēthos/ethos means “accustomed place” or “ambience.”
- 30.
Language as imaginative phenomenon is where we conclude this study, however.
- 31.
Letting sound wash over us can even occur with linguistic experience. Although it is almost impossible to focus on just the sounds being made by someone who is speaking our native tongue, if we hear a language we are totally unfamiliar with we can attend just to the sound. “Attending just to the sound,” by the way, is a voluntary imaginative act that coconstitutes the perception.
- 32.
A distressing amount of psychological research (and related philosophizing) tacitly privileges the notion that our sense organs ought to be (or would be better if they were) accurate data-recording instruments. This is a peculiar, distortive presupposition, or rather prejudice.
- 33.
I would not positively say that the marking of an imaginative field of experience absolutely differentiates human beings from animals, but instead that this might be a fruitful dimension for inquiry into ways human beings are like and unlike other animals. An adequate phenomenological inquiry into this comparative question may, of course, be beyond the capability of merely human beings.
- 34.
This means, as I suggested before, that any image can be at least temporarily the standard in relation to which others will be differentiated, marked, or measured.
- 35.
I have no objection to saying that this is a behavior oriented to prediction or production, but that is to overlook the fully concrete phenomenon for the sake of capturing just one aspect of it.
- 36.
In an obvious sense I mean, for example, that color saturation was not nameable and thus not describable until quite recently. What was needed was a theory of color and a practice of color making that could break color down into different aspects capable of comparison and even measure. We have no reason to think that we have reached the point in history that has finally achieved the full theoretical and practical understanding of color. Comparing the state of color science 100 years ago to today makes it clear that there was progress to be made; we have every reason to expect that 100 years from now further, often unpredictable progress will have taken place. Doubtless we will retrospectively be able to identify antecedents of the new discoveries among today’s artists, scientists, and critics who, in some partial way, will have anticipated the future developments. That means that some will have already gotten there ahead of science, if only in imagination.
- 37.
He made it the culmination of the externalization of thought itself. See in particular Schelling 1978 [1800], pt. 6.
- 38.
It should go without saying that the word false here is more likely to mean something like misleading, partial, or insufficient, rather than “assigned zero probability” or “designated F.”
- 39.
Latin radix, root, is of course the root of “radical.”
- 40.
If there is a second, square-bracketed date, it indicates the year the work first appeared in its original language.
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Sepper, D.L. (2013). Locating Emergent Appearance. In: Understanding Imagination. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_2
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