Abstract
What imagination is cannot be answered apart from understanding its conceptual topology, the articulated framework of basic phenomena and concepts that govern our thinking about it. The second step toward this goal is to grasp how Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) exploited and revolutionized the basic “topography” or “matrix” of being–and–soul that his master Plato had laid down. Aristotle made a claim that became the “default position” about imagination for two millennia: that there is no thinking (thus also no knowing) without images. He shifted the center of gravity for imagination studies from the ontology of images that Plato had emphasized to a physiologically based psychology of imagining, which he first embedded in the psychology of animal being and then modified in the human animal by the presence of reason. Although parts of Aristotle’s philosophy of imagination are elusive—in particular the radical distance between animal and human imagination—and were distorted by later traditions, it makes a great deal more sense when it is seen against the background of his physical theories. An exploration of these connections not only explains his theory’s influence and durability but also why it still provides a unifying basis for understanding contemporary cognitive and biological approaches. Moreover, his theory offers hitherto unexploited resources for more accurately conceiving images as emergent, as variable phenomena that are indispensable for acquiring knowledge and guiding human action.
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- 1.
Labeling Aristotle as “empiricist” or “rationalist” usually says more about what those using these descriptors want to make of him than about Aristotle himself. There is no contradiction between Aristotle’s “empiricism” and his “rationalism,” if we leave behind modern acceptations of these terms. The experience we acquire from sensation is for him the source of everything we remember, imagine, and know, although the concepts we acquire from experience have a rationality and logic that we can recognize and elaborate. Our cognition begins with what we experience, and imagination (phantasia) is the essential mediator between sense and reason.
- 2.
The word is a learned sixteenth-century invention not attested in classical Greek or used in classical or medieval Latin. The Latin form, psychologia, was (perhaps) introduced in Germany ca. 1579 (see the etymology and etymological note under “psychology” in the Oxford English Dictionary) and became commonplace in the seventeenth century.
- 3.
Peters 1967, 166–176, distinguishes 36 senses in which the word was used in Greek popular, religious, and philosophical thought. It is by far the longest entry in the book.
- 4.
See, for example, how he analogizes the example of the progressive development of lyric poetry to the history of investigations into truth in Metaphysics II.1 (993b12–19). I cite Aristotle’s writings by the chapter or book–and–chapter numbers (Roman numerals for books, Arabic numerals for chapters) and/or the Bekker page–column–line numbers (thus 993b12-19 is p. 993, column b, lines 12–19).
- 5.
Under the transitive uses of the verb “bespeak,” the OED notes two. “To speak to, address” is marked as “chiefly poetic” usage; the other, “to speak of, tell of, be the outward expression of; to indicate, give evidence of” is last attested in the 1860s. My use tries to meld these two senses: we address, and thereby express, (things in) the world, and thus we become spokesmen for the world.
- 6.
I am using these two terms synonymously. The Greeks did not have an independent term corresponding to our “perception.” In this chapter I will, for the most part, use “sensation” to render aisthēsis, since for Aristotle (in contrast to Plato) it encompasses everything from inchoate awareness of sense qualities apart from their objects to acute, intelligence-infused perception.
- 7.
The undertaking of On the Soul is extended in several other, shorter works that collectively go by the name Parva naturalia. We shall occasionally refer to some of these, in particular those on sensation and on memory.
- 8.
As late as the early nineteenth century Hegel commented that On the Soul and the Parva naturalia exceeded all more recent psychological works in scope and success and provided a model for his own comprehensive undertaking in Philosophy of Spirit, part 3 of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (see Hegel 1840–1845, esp. sect. 387). In a 1923 lecture course, Heidegger agreed about the scope of the work but denied that it is psychology: Aristotle’s Peri psuchēs “is not psychology in the modern sense but treats of the being of the human being (or of the living being simpliciter) in the world.” Aristotle would thus be the founder not so much of psychology as of the phenomenological analytic of Dasein! See Heidegger 1994, 6 and 293.
- 9.
To mention only three: Avicenna (ca. 980–1037; this is the latinization of ibn Sīnā) in Persia, Averroës (ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) in Spain, and Moses ben Maimon or Maimonides (1138–1204) in Morocco and Egypt. All were polymaths and masters of philosophy and medicine, and all wrote (in some cases extensive) commentaries on Aristotle’s writings.
- 10.
- 11.
The first founding was Plato’s situating the soul and its powers with respect to the good and the levels of being, the second Aristotle’s conceiving the soul as the unity of the whole physical organism.
- 12.
See n. 4, above, on citations from Aristotle.
- 13.
The term in question is entelecheia. It has long been considered a (near-)synonym for energeia, actuality or being–at–work, when (as in living things) the principle of actuality is internal to the thing that is in act.
- 14.
Even in modern academic and intellectual circles it is often assumed that soul is an immaterial ghost enclosed in a bodily container—what is sometimes, but also rather inaccurately, thought to be Plato’s and Descartes’s dualistic conception. People strongly influenced by the medieval Scholastic tradition would consider themselves beyond this unsophisticated image. But as someone who has taught generations of bright young Catholic undergraduate and graduate students, I can affirm that, when they have a clear notion of soul at all, it is more likely to be the ghost in the body (if not the machine) than the first actuality of an organized body.
- 15.
Aristotle did not think that the human soul was immortal, although he did think that the active intellective aspect of soul was unchanging and immaterial. In the middle ages of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, this ambiguity gave rise to the most various, highly conflicting interpretations of Aristotle’s soul doctrine.
- 16.
A caution: in at least one important sense, Aristotle did not clearly and unambiguously consider things made by human art to be substances in the proper sense. See Metaphysics III.4 (999b17–20), VIII.3 (1043b18–23), XI.2 (1060b16–28), and XII.3 (1070a13–20), and the painstaking analysis of them in Katayama 1999, 25–40. A major reason for Aristotle’s doubts about artifacts as substance is tied to his conception of the being of things: they are, in general, formed matter, a composition of matter and form, in which the form is self-preserving. Natural things have a persistent intrinsic form, whereas artificial things have their form imposed on matter by human plans that do not persist by nature. On the other hand, when Aristotle gives examples of how the four causes contribute to the being of things, he almost always refers to artifacts like bronze statues!
- 17.
Again there are complications, more apparent than real. Just because a word can appear after “is” does not necessarily make it a predicate: “The man speaking to Plato is Socrates” can as easily be turned around, so it is an identification rather than a predication; and “Angered by the poet’s song was Mycenae’s prince” reflects an English word order allowable by poetic license, but “prince” remains the subject. That Socrates, Plato, and Glaucon can constitute a three-person committee of which Socrates is part is not an exception because the committee is not a substance: it is rather a relation among the substances Socrates, Plato, and Glaucon. An arm severed from a human body is not a substance because it no longer has the natural functions it had as part of a substance. Thus not all things are substances.
- 18.
Categories 4 identifies the categories as substance plus quantity, quality, relation, somewhere, at some time, being in a position, possessing/having, acting, and being acted upon. Metaphysics V.7 gives the same listing with the omission of “being in a position” (perhaps reducible to “somewhere”) and possessing/having (perhaps reducible to the other categories as collectively the ways that substance can have or possess attributes of any kind).
- 19.
My formula uses “relatively independent” because kinds of dependency can always be identified. A tree is a relatively independent individual that cannot be predicated of other things and is not a categorical part of anything else: but that does not mean it is not related to the ground, by its roots, from which it gets its water and nourishment. Thus Aristotle’s formula that defines substances in terms of “not being predicable” and “not being present” (as an attribute or part) is more complicated but also more precise.
- 20.
For example, Metaphysics VI.1, 1026a27–33. Aristotle of course “proves,” in both Physics VIII and Metaphysics XII, that the physical universe would not be possible as it is if all there were were material beings. The proofs depend crucially on understanding the relationship between potential being and actual being in the process of change.
- 21.
Later in this chapter we shall reconceive this distinction as the difference between precision (which absolutizes aspects or parts of things) and abstraction (which understands aspects as further determinable in particular respects—indeed, in respect to appropriate fields of possibility).
- 22.
It is based chiefly on contemporary renderings of Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle, and therefore might also be called a conventionalized neoscholastic or neothomistic psychology.
- 23.
- 24.
Obviously synesthesia, the phenomenon of (for example) a person’s experiencing sound in viewing colors, complicates this claim.
- 25.
See Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals II.7, 652b4–7 and 17–27; and II.10, 656a14–656b7. Already in Greek antiquity many physicians argued that the brain was the seat of sensation and thinking. The internal-senses theorists located common sensation, imagination, and memory in the ventricles of the brain, hollows enclosed by the two hemispheres of the brain. The medium of communication between external sense organs and the ventricles was animal spirits, which were traced back to the heart; the theory of these spirits was developed in antiquity chiefly by the Stoics. For an account of the internal senses and their localization from antiquity to the middle ages, see Steneck 1970, Harvey 1975, Carruthers 2008, and Karnes 2011.
- 26.
“Common sensation” avoids the ambiguity of “common sense,” which is used also for the supposedly universally available knowledge that all unimpaired human beings should possess (sometimes called “horse sense”—what even an animal is smart enough to know). There is nevertheless a connection between the two: without common sensation we would still experience only colors, sounds, smells, flavors, and tactile feelings, but not an articulated world of familiar things.
- 27.
Objects moving in the field of vision, for example, produce moving colors in the eye, but the eye detects colors primarily and motion only in a secondary sense, whereas motion as the object’s motion is experienced at the level of common sensation. Perhaps Aristotle was obscurely suggesting some kind of feedback mechanism between common sensation and the external senses, especially since the third kind of sensible, the incidental or concomitant sensible (“seeing,” for example, that a white-clad figure over there is Diares’ son—Aristotle mentions it before common sensation), adds some particular knowledge (our acquaintance with clothing and with Diares and his son) to what we perceive by sense (white).
- 28.
This is actually too conceptually dominated a way of bespeaking what happens. We might gain a better approximation by trying to imagine how a dog or a squirrel or a frog would experience the event (no identification of ball, floor, or rolling as such, yet with the ability to focus on a single object or action) or, alternatively, how we might experience it in a groggy or psychologically impaired state. We might see, for example, a kaleidoscopic array of color without even the beginning of conceptualization or any definite experience of unities—the latter are what common sensation, in contrast to proper sensation, supplies.
- 29.
See Steneck 1970, 13–16.
- 30.
This means, of course, that the sensation and its qualities constitute an articulated topological field (as explained in Chap. 2, above) that can be “navigated” by the relevant discriminating powers and their own topology.
- 31.
In the next section we will question whether this kind of abstraction is really to be found in Aristotle.
- 32.
Eventually I will insist on the plural of “species” here: a species is not brutely given but is seen against the background of a field. But that is already far too complex for the conventionalized psychology, which is more likely to assert that intellect illuminates and accepts the essential species of the thing, its whatness (e.g., the squirrelness of the squirrel).
- 33.
The ironic quotation marks are necessary because reason was considered to be immaterial and nonorganic, thus a literal touching was not possible. On the cogitative power in Thomas, see Peghaire 1943.
- 34.
For an account of these and other matters concerning the history of Aristotelian psychology in Western and Middle Eastern philosophy, see Harvey 1975, Marenbon 1987, Kessler 1988, Park 1988, Park and Kessler 1988, and Karnes 2011. For the best analytic account of Aristotle’s imagination within the context of his theory of mind, see Wedin 1988.
- 35.
“Faculty” in the first instance means nothing other than “power,” but over the centuries it came to imply that the power had independent, even modular status.
- 36.
The translations from On the Soul and On Memory and Recollection are drawn, with slight emendation (for example, “sensation” for “perception”), from Joe Sachs’s translations, in Aristotle 2001.
- 37.
Memory (along with time as a common sensible) is treated in the two chapters of On Memory and Recollection. Chapter 1 of that work briefly summarizes what Aristotle takes to be established about imagination in On the Soul. In particular, he reasserts that there is no thinking without phantasms; he conceives the beholding of an image as like sense-perceiving a picture that refers to what it resembles; after emphasizing that thinking requires something extended and temporal, and thus must be dependent on acquaintance with the “primary power of sensation,” he remarks that “memory, even memory of intelligible things, is not without an image, and the image is an attribute of the common sensation power, so that memory would belong incidentally to the intellect, but in its own right it belongs to the sensitive power” (450a12–14); and he expressly attributes memory to the same power of soul that “is the very one to which imagination also belongs, and the things remembered in their own right are those of which there is imagination, while as many things as are not apart from imagination are remembered incidentally” (450a23–26). I shall return to this passage later in this chapter.
- 38.
Aristotle understands all being as an activity, and matter as the underlying principle of what can change. In material things, change is always either motion of matter with respect to place, called local motion, or accompanied by it. See On the Motion of Animals, ch. 5, and Physics, VIII.7–8. We shall further discuss the kinds of change, besides local motion, below.
- 39.
That is, the soul as dianoia, discursive thinking, which joins term to term, as opposed to noûs, which (for example) apprehends the simple meaning of a single term.
- 40.
See Castoriadis 1997. The French version dates from 1978 and is based on an earlier one in Greek.
- 41.
This third kind is more typically known as “accidental” sensibles—in modern terms they might be called “things sensed by association.” Castoriadis translates Greek sumbebēkos as French comitant, which Curtis, his translator, renders in English as “comitant.” I will use “concomitant.” In any case, it is long past time that the misleading “accident/accidental” be abandoned. The concomitant sensible corresponds, roughly, to the pseudo-Platonic definition of imagination: that one has a sensation (e.g., of a white-clad figure) plus an opinion (e.g., the white-clad figure is your friend). When we almost immediately identify the person coming toward us in white as our best friend, we say that we have sense-perceived the friend in the accidental or concomitant way. See Sect. 5.7, below.
- 42.
Aristotle’s conclusion in III.1 is that, if earth, water, air, and fire are the basic material elements, then the five enumerated senses exhaust the relevantly possible combinations in the material constitution of the senses and their media of transmission. The conclusion depends on particulars of his (and ancient Greek) matter theory that by modern scientific criteria are quite wrong. Nevertheless, the argument provides an instructive example of how one should try to establish not only that one’s descriptions and theories are plausible but also that they are complete and consistent with respect to other, more basic theories.
- 43.
This is a hierarchy predicated on different levels or planes, from and through which one can look to other planes and to world objects (whether real or possible). In this sense Aristotle builds his psychology on Plato’s precedent.
- 44.
A weak way of interpreting this claim is that proper sensation is one of our sensitive and cognitive powers least subject to error. Since Aristotle distinguishes common from proper sensation, he clearly does not mean that, when we taste a powdery substance and it tastes sweet, we know that the substance is sugar or even that the substance itself is sweet—such judgments require more than proper sensation, since they presuppose the unification of the proper sensibles into a common experience and include the identification of kinds or species. The claim seems virtually unobjectionable if it is taken to mean that, in such cases, we are not deceived in thinking that the taste is sweet—sweetness is the appearance to taste as such—though virtually anything we say about it in a logical judgment might be in error (e.g., we might confuse meanings of words in our utterance). Even if this turns out to be a very limited claim about only the most basic sensations, it nevertheless justifies distinguishing proper sensation from other kinds of sensation and other forms of mentality that are more prone to error.
- 45.
Phantasia had already made cameo appearances, in particular in the chapter on hearing, in the course of discussing the difference between voice (meaningful sounds) and mere sound (II.8, 420b29–32): “for not every sound of an animal is a voice, as was said—for it is also possible to make a noise with the tongue or in the way people do when they cough—but it is necessary for the part that causes the striking [of the air against the windpipe] to have soul in it and some sort of imagination [phantasiai] with it, since the voice is some sort of sound that is capable of carrying a meaning.”
- 46.
Hupolēpsis is usually translated by “belief,” sometimes “judgment”; but the former is too generic and the latter too definite, and it does not capture an incipient aspect implied by the Greek. The long phrase that Joe Sachs’s translation employs, “conceiving that something is the case,” comes closer to the phenomenon, especially if we keep in mind the actional, ongoing sense of the gerund “conceiving.” Caujolle-Zaslawsky argues that we must interpret hupolēpsis against the background of the verb from which it is derived, hupolambanein, which suggests a sudden coming–upon or taking–hold–of from below; see Caujolle-Zaslawsky 1996, esp. 352–356. In the passage from III.3 quoted above, hupolēpsis is used as the genus of epistēmē, doxa, and phronēsis. Perhaps what Aristotle was remarking with the word was the phenomenon, whatever its specific modality, of the first moment of being struck by, or recognizing, the ways things are in an appearance, the moment when things appear thus and so—sometimes wrongly, as when we mistake what we see (e.g., take a red traffic light for an orange one).
- 47.
The first attestation of these imaginative memory-assisting techniques derives from a story told about the poet Simonides of Ceos (ca. 556–468 B.C.): right after the collapse of the roof at a party he had been attending, he was able to apply the memory technique he practiced (of associating things with locations) to recall who had been sitting at each place around the table. This technique of remembering according to places (loci, plural of Latin locus) is the central practice of the art of local memory, which was a staple of ancient rhetoric. For example, rhetors memorized speeches not by repeating words over and over but by associating the themes, elements, and even words of the speech with visual images, then arraying those constructed images in a familiar and thus easily remembered space that could be mentally traversed in a convenient sequence (say, attached to architectural features along a path through a public building they knew well).
- 48.
It is possible that elsewhere indicates the treatment of the intellectual virtues in book VI of Nicomachean Ethics. At any rate, Aristotle is putting aside the detailed account of the different species of conceiving something to be the case (hupolēpsis). On the Soul instead discusses only the basic powers of soul, which of course may also be combined into more complex or derivative functions.
- 49.
The verb here, gignesthai, in its most basic sense means “come into being.” Thus Aristotle here marks the incipience of the image as the distinctive topic to be addressed.
- 50.
For example, in some versions of empiricism thinking would in essence be the series of images we entertain, making the distinction between thinking and imagination moot.
- 51.
I take this to mean not that, with our eyes closed, we can see reddened light or afterimage colors—both of which would be an actual perceiving of colors—but that we can close our eyes and (for example) imagine the face of a distant friend or a favorite but remote landscape. In On Dreams, ch. 2, Aristotle addresses the continuation of affections of the sense organs even after the perception has ended (for example, the procession of afterimages when we turn from light to darkness); he explains them as analogous to the continuing motion of a projectile after it has left the hand of the thrower or the continuing presence of heat in something after the heat source has stopped heating. An oddity is that—although chapter 2 in On Dreams runs to just over four pages in the Loeb edition, and although the end of chapter 1 (a) reminds us of On the Soul’s definition of phantasia, (b) calls dreams a kind of phantasm, and (c) concludes that “it is clear that dreaming belongs to the sensitive power, but qua imaginative [phantastikon]”—the terms phantasia (in the meaning “imagining act” rather than “power of imagination”) and phantasma/phantasmata occur exactly once each in chapter 2, in the last half of the chapter’s final paragraph. There the situation of a feverish person who sees patterned marks on a wall is contrasted with that of a person who sees the sun as a foot across (this is referred to as a phantasma) but by another power knows a truth that contradicts this imagining (phantasian). This and most of the other subject matter discussed in this chapter of On Dreams—which does not in fact treat of dreaming!—are thus sensations, not phantasia proper.
- 52.
This conception of imagination is strongly suggested but never quite stated outright in Plato’s dialogues. See the formulations in the Timaeus, 52A, and the Sophist, 264A–B. Its inadequacy as a definition of Plato’s true understanding of imagination should be clear from our previous chapter; see esp. Sect. 4.4.
- 53.
Perhaps, in contemporary terms, we could say that the pseudo-Platonic definition, viewed in light of the different kinds of sensibles and the different levels and kinds of possible opinion about those sensibles, creates problems of recursion: how is an opinion about a concomitant sensation related to the proper and common sensations and the opinions about them, which are included in the concomitant sensation as parts?
- 54.
Aristotle here appears also to implicitly criticize Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of imagination; see Sect. 2.1, above.
- 55.
“Presumably,” but not certainly. One can of course detect motion, or learn to detect it, through changes in sound. We can, by moving our heads or bodies, often gain information about the source of a smell. But it is not clear at all how motion detection might function with respect to taste. The issue would not seem to be addressed by the fact that different flavors are sensed on different parts of the tongue. Insofar as motion requires time, however, the “blossoming” of a flavor or the alternation of flavors one after another might qualify as motion that is perceived by taste; and something similar could be said of aroma. But it would almost certainly require conceptual acrobatics to show that shape is perceived by taste (the tongue can, of course, feel shapes, but not by means of its flavor receptors) and smell. Perhaps what Aristotle really means, or should have said, is that a common sensible is detectable by more than one sense, but not necessarily all.
- 56.
This is one of the points of the first-paragraph discussion in On the Soul II.2.
- 57.
As usual, the more one looks into these matters the more complicated they become. One point is that Aristotle did not think that if you detached an organ from the rest of the body it could still perform its functions. This provides an opening through which a modern Aristotle could easily talk of a visual system rather than just an organ. Another point is that, in human beings at least, one does not have proper sensation apart from common sensation, except in rare or pathological moments. Perhaps something like a pulsing of light and colors in delirium or the brief swirling of light upon waking from a deep sleep—in neither case are we seeing things in a well-defined place and sequence—is the closest thing we have to proper sensation without common sensation.
- 58.
The point is sometimes made, for example, that for Aristotle and his contemporaries the sensible qualities of things (wetness, solidity, heat, and the like) were strongly connected to the theory of physical elements, and that this continued well into the early stages of the modern scientific revolution. The modern sciences, arguing that these sorts of qualities were secondary sense qualities and thus reside in the mind rather than in things, no longer felt an obligation to explain them at the level of physics or chemistry. With a more detailed and integrated scientific understanding, however, there has come a renewal of efforts to more strongly correlate physics, chemistry, and physiology with psychological events.
- 59.
Beyond the form (the essential form) that accounted for the specific being of matter formed into a substance, later Aristotelians added various sensible forms to explain what is transferred from thing to sense organ. But that created an otherwise unexplained hierarchy of forms in the substance. I thus prefer to speak in terms of the less reifying and more authentically Aristotelian term, “activity.”
- 60.
Nowhere in the discussions of III.1 and III.2 of On the Soul does Aristotle say that there is an organ of common sensation. See especially III.1, 425a14: “it is impossible that there should be a special sense organ [aisthētērion] to perceive common sensibles.” To have a special sense organ would be in essence to have another organ of proper sensation. But there is some kind of unification of the proper senses in common sensation, and Aristotle’s discussions in other works suggest that this unification or interaction occurs in the heart or in its vicinity. See On the Parts of Animals, II.1 (647a24–32), II.10 (656a28–30), and III.4 (666a11–13), and On Sleep and Sleeplessness, I.2 (455b34–456a5).
- 61.
A discussion of the rights and wrongs of these and similar judgments require independent investigation. One might begin by recognizing that “global” repudiations of theories often throw out babies with bathwater by rejecting a more basic conceptual topology they share. The aspiration of many seventeenth-century thinkers to a total reduction of the understanding of nature to simplistic mechanics and kinematics was never an adequate approach to all the phenomena of physical and chemical matter, much less to living matter. As Immanuel Kant, no enemy of mechanical science, wrote in §75 of the Third Critique, there was never going to be a Newton of the blade of grass—that is, living organisms would never be exhaustively explained by particle–and–force mechanics.
- 62.
According to a summary Aristotle gives in the first chapter of On Memory and Recollection, both imagination and memory belong to the power of common sensation. The reactivation of the appearance thus does not need to actively involve the external sense organs, and the source of the motion responsible for the reactivation would thus come from elsewhere in the body. (The later inclination to locate the potential for reactivation in other places or organs was thus a development of the topology Aristotle laid out.) This difference would seem to be sufficient to account for why the images of imagining are not typically perceived as though they were actually being sensed (if they were, they would be hallucinations).
- 63.
The mandate comes just after the account of astronomy in book VII of the Republic, where Socrates points out that astronomy is a science of what is seen and that every other sense might similarly have its own science, though he goes on to discuss just one more: hearing’s science, harmony.
- 64.
Cockroaches can detect motion from slight air currents that disturb fine hairs on their legs.
- 65.
“Place” is in quotation marks because it implies far more than three spatial dimensions. Aristotle’s differentiation between space and place is in any case not just a peculiarity of the Greek language.
- 66.
Is this Aristotle anticipating Kant? Yes, in a very weak sense, and no, in a much stronger one. If theories are propositions, then the answer is no. But if propositions attempt to articulate conceptual topologies, one can easily say that understanding Aristotle’s common sensation in detail requires asking the question of the emergence and status of time and space (which would in no way diminish Kant’s innovations or his difference from Aristotle).
- 67.
I hesitate to say that he makes them “internal” to the soul, if only because of the modern tendency to dichotomize the internal as subjective and the external as objective. Yet there is no doubt that Aristotle understood these processes as both physical and psychological. According to his physics and physiology, the physical processes that communicate themselves to the external sense organs become ever more physiologically internalized; at the same time they serve to inwardize the form–activities of things perceived in the external world. The objective-subjective dichotomy is an option for differently situating the basic topology of the Aristotelian theory of sensation.
- 68.
Aristotle points out in On the Soul and On Sense and Sensible Things the existence of several different sets of contrarieties for sound, taste, and tactility. See especially his remarks in On the Soul II.11, 422b17–33. We now, for example, would routinely distinguish in colors the contrarieties of light–dark, blue–yellow, red–green, and matte–glossy. The Metaphysics account of contrariety is in V.10.
- 69.
See On the Soul II.12, 424a25–33.
- 70.
Whether Aristotle meant that we can simply mix black and white pigments to obtain chromatic hues is doubtful; given the overall “actualizing” tenor of his physics, it is more likely that he meant something more dynamic. In the last half of the twentieth century, semipopular accounts of color vision began emphasizing that, although the retinal cones are divided into three kinds by differences in maximum spectral sensitivity (short, medium, and long according to whether they are maximally sensitive to short-waved blue, middle-waved green, or long-waved red), color determination occurs at a higher level of neural processing according to the networking of the cones into the contrary pairs of the red–green and blue–yellow systems plus the contribution of the light–dark system of the rods. Although it is not part of my brief here to discuss, much less to settle, how far Aristotle’s conceptions are compatible with these matters, it seems to me important to insist on the plausibility of his topological orientation in the context of recent science. For an approachable introduction to contemporary color science, see Hardin 1988.
- 71.
More specifically, “a change within the same kind but with respect to the more and the less is an alteration; for a change from a contrary or to a contrary is a motion, whether unqualified or qualified” (226b2–4). Compare On Generation and Corruption I.7, 323b33–324a3: “it is a law of nature that body is affected by body, flavor by flavor, color by color, and so in general what belongs to any kind by a member of the same kind—the reason being that ‘contraries’ are in every case within a single identical kind, and it is ‘contraries’ which reciprocally act and suffer action.” And Metaphysics V.14, 1020b9–12, where poion, quality, is defined as “all modifications in moving primary beings (such as heat and cold, whiteness and blackness, heaviness and lightness, and the like), in terms of which bodies change, when they are said to be altered.”
- 72.
We must beware of categorically asserting that there are infinite pitches, since human hearing has not only upper and lower frequency limits but also, between these limits, a finite ability to discriminate between variations in vibrations per second. Nor should we think of this as an unfortunate limitation, for precisely such limitations make hearing and music not vibration detectors but the phenomena they are.
- 73.
Thus these relations are not simply additive-linear (as, for instance, most criticisms of Aristotle’s theory of color as a “mixture” of white and black assume).
- 74.
Recall that it is a fundamental tenet in Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics that for there to be change of any kind there must be contraries and a substrate (or subject, to use another common rendering of hupokeimenon); see Sect. 5.8, above. In the conceptual topology of Aristotle’s psychology, then, one is justified in searching for the substrate, field, or plane in which appearances change, both in the real-world object and in the physiological organ. This makes him, with Plato, the founder of the notion that images are located in a substrate/field (for Plato, a level of being). In addition, for Aristotle the existence of different sets of contraries in what appears to a sensitive or cognitive power increases the number of field dimensions—thus of subfields—in which one can perceive and imagine. See the paragraphs that follow for explanation.
- 75.
Aristotle is saying here that the term phantasia is derived from the Greek word for light, phaos. This etymology is considered basically correct.
- 76.
Both because there is sense appearance and because there are three causes in addition to matter, form, goal/end, and efficiency. The “efficient” cause, more precisely the fundamental condition that is the source of the motion or change bringing the thing into being, points back to whatever that source is, and not just to the material of the thing brought into being.
- 77.
As I noted earlier (n. 68), Aristotle quickly concludes that there are in fact many more contraries also in the other senses than we typically count.
- 78.
Perhaps, more accurately, we might have to say that something like phantasia must commence even before common and concomitant sensations are constituted. Yet we might hesitate about calling it phantasia in the strict sense, because the object being sensed will still be present while the motions originating in the activity of the external senses (and thus corresponding to the definition of imagination) are on their way to being taken up into common sensation. Perhaps it would be serving a function something like Kant’s transcendental imagination. See n. 60, above, on whether common sensation has an organ.
- 79.
For example, Caston 1996.
- 80.
This does not mean that Plato’s theory was without effect on tradition. It typically goes without saying, for Aristotle as much as for anyone else, that images are recognized as x-like appearances, so that in phenomenological terms one must say that conceiving an image i bears within its conception an intention toward the x of which it is an image. For Plato, this is an essential characteristic of images of all kinds.
- 81.
These things, the first or primary noēmata, include the most fundamentally intelligible of all intelligible concepts.
- 82.
At the very beginning of On Sense and Sensible Things, which follows immediately after On the Soul both traditionally and according to its opening sentence, Aristotle makes clear that he thinks that “memory, passion, desire, appetite, and pleasure and pain belong to the more particular study of living things” and belong to both soul and body (436a9–11). They would all have to be incorporated into a detailed theory of purposive activity, but most of them are not necessary to account for the principal sources (archai) of such activity that he treats in On the Soul.
- 83.
The distinction Aristotle is making here will be discussed in the next section.
- 84.
This is precisely where the inherence of the premisses in the same field or plane of concern is relevant, indeed necessary.
- 85.
An updated version of this analogy could use x-rays instead of light. Agent intellect would be the x-ray emitter, the potential intellect would be the x-ray film or detector, and the phantasm would be the physical body placed between the two. The x-rays of agent intellect could then be said to impress on the film of potential intellect the intelligible structure of the phantasm—its skeleton, as it were. But this version probably introduces too much isolated fixity to both the elements and the results of the process, and furthermore it suggests that, ultimately, the concepts persist independently of the phantasms. For Aristotle, if there is no phantasm, there is no thinking, where thinking is recognizing the phantasm’s intelligibility.
- 86.
“In this way one thinks the mathematical things, which are not separate from matter, as though they were separate” (On the Soul, 431b16–17). Books XIII and XIV of the Metaphysics develop at length Aristotle’s conception of the being of mathematicals along these lines. See Philippe 1948.
- 87.
This is, formulaically, how the doctrine is often presented in modern neoscholastic thought. The use of the alternative “productive intellect” can further contribute to the sense that the result of the process, conception or intelligibility, is reified in an independent product. The notion that the intelligible species impressed in the receptive intellect are simply retained there runs up against 450a12 of On Memory and Recollection, where Aristotle expressly states that there cannot be memory of intelligibles without phantasms.
- 88.
The difference between experiencing a fleshy thing and the being flesh of the thing is certainly relevant to the question of essence; but rather than highlight the being flesh as essence, Aristotle emphasizes that the two experiences involve different ways of having intelligence of the phantasm’s intelligibility. Neither is achieved by leaving the phantasm behind.
- 89.
Those who have been asked to sketch what they have observed through a microscope will easily recall the difficulty of locating the plane of focus that reveals the structures the instructor wants them to see.
- 90.
In any case, a nose is not a substance for Aristotle, but rather a part of the substance called human being.
- 91.
This seems to be related also to the account of indemonstrable truths about particulars in Nicomachean Ethics, VI.8.
- 92.
If this sounds Kantian, that does not mean it is a false imposition on Aristotle. Good history of philosophy is not just a matter of finding the same words and parsing them, but even more fundamentally the thinking through of a problem in the contexture of its topology. And definitions serve no purpose unless one recognizes what things and world situations they can be true of.
- 93.
For example, Metaphysics IV.2, 1004a10–32. The importance of Metaphysics IV.2 for understanding the project of the Metaphysics can hardly be overemphasized.
- 94.
This term is not to be assimilated to “imaginary field”; the latter term suggests that we are in the realm of the fantastic, unreal, or impossible, whereas “imaginal field” presupposes simply a field in which images take place.
- 95.
Some readers will balk at this term and insist that there is no resemblance between a curved line and a landscape directly presented to the eye. That there might well be a sense-perceivable feature highlighted within an image in the example could be illustrated by recalling how such topographical maps are made: by mapping a landscape’s plan from above, then superimposing on it the contours that have been measured with surveyor’s equipment and can be experienced by walking a path that neither rises nor falls.
- 96.
The first person ever to conceive of a map was in process of originating a conceptual topology by way of conceptual topography. Marking features of a place—by signs, words, or symbols in any way whatsoever—is already conceptual topography, the writing up of place by writing it down (even if one has noted these things only mentally, that is, in a schema of imagining). Whatever in the topography is repeatable in similar circumstances becomes conceptual topology, which is a network of concepts articulated by contrarieties against a background of a typical substrate–field.
- 97.
See Sect. 3.3, above. The abstraction in question here is neither Aristotelian aphairesis nor medieval abstraction, but it is still easily understandable. If the reader prefers, he can reread the preceding paragraphs with “model” substituted for “field.” But that would obscure to some degree the very distinction I want to draw between imaginal fields and fictional imaginary fields. The latter is, or starts as, a model; the former is the conceptual topology that presently deepens our experience of the familiarly real. Not all models or imaginary fields have a specific density sufficient to place us familiarly in a field of experience, which is to say that they will not lose the aura of weightlessness and unreality characteristic of arbitrary fantasy. The field of experience, which is a substrate for articulations according to contraries, must appear to be a plausible “cross section” of the world, the contextural context against which intellect places a previously noticed phantasm. Perhaps a working definition of imaginal field, then, is that it is what commences with how things strike us and that we judge to be so (the first part of the predicate clause corresponds to Aristotle’s hupolēpsis) and that is brought to fruition according to how intensively it permits us, in amplified and developed form, to inhabit and experience the world as world. In either case, whether we are talking about the imaginary or the imaginal, it is a biplanar experience, in the sense developed in Sect. 3.8, above. See also the next note.
- 98.
Later, especially in Sects. 8.1 and 8.2, I shall present imaginary fields as fictionalized imaginal fields. But that, in turn, requires some conception of how the fictional is contrasted with the real. It will not be sufficient simply to invoke the putatively real as a hedge against (for example) the epistemological threats of fiction. Wherever we confront a fiction with reality—whether it is Crime and Punishment set against an actual case of murder, a scientific hypothesis being tested in a laboratory, or a lie discovered by the testimony of witnesses—we have already begun schematizing the real situation according to what we consider an immediately relevant conceptual topography. Without yet having laid a basis for it (although this section begins that task), here I will only assert that the real is what can be sectioned into innumerable, variably dense fields, and that what is real is marked as a kind of maximum implicitly measured by the scope, textures, aspects, and specific densities of such fields.
- 99.
Hume makes an exception for mathematics, of course, because, he says, it is based purely on relations of ideas. But what I have been suggesting here and earlier is, in effect, that Hume’s presentation needs to be absorbed into a theory of a vastly greater number of substrates/fields of appearance than pure mathematics requires. I should also remark here that Hume’s explication of imagination in the Treatise is far more subtle and profound than the later, simplified version of the Enquiry. That the latter is more frequently read and taught by philosophers has deeply shaped the tradition of imagination.
- 100.
British empiricism after Hobbes approached epistemology without reference to physiology; see Locke’s disclaimer in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, ch. 1, sect. 2 (Locke 1690). But Hobbes and the so-called rationalists always considered both, and that is a mark of superiority.
- 101.
Neurophysiological studies, for example, have demonstrated the importance of boundary detection in the constitution of the configuration of space and objects in the visual field. Boundaries in the field of vision, which are common sensibles, are constituted by light–dark contrasts and contrasts of colors, which are matters of proper sensibles. There is no reason to think that locating contrarieties in substrates à la Aristotle is incompatible with contemporary research.
- 102.
Prescind (praescindere) gave rise to the terms precision and precise, which etymologically suggest being cut away from something, as if by a very sharp blade. Praescissio (there are various spellings), precision, is often explained as a variety of abstraction, but that invites misunderstanding. Thomas Aquinas discusses the difference in his short metaphysical treatise De ente et essentia (On Being and Essence), ch. 2, par. 6–7 (Aquinas 1968, 38–40). An abstraction is a concept understood as necessarily subject to further determinations in order to be real, whereas a precision is a concept treated as though its referent exists really and absolutely, apart from further determination. When we treat body and soul as though they were in themselves two complete things that can be compounded together, we are talking about both with precision. We abstract if—observing Aristotle’s understanding of soul as the first activity of a body and all materials of a body as already possessing some form before they are taken up by the body—we recognize that when we talk of body it always has further essential determinations and forms. For example, it will be animate or inanimate, carbohydrate, fat, or protein, red, blue, or green. When we talk of soul, it does not exist apart from the body but only as the activity of body. Similarly, when we treat the nose as though it were something complete in itself, we prescind; when we recognize it as part of a face and a human being’s whole body (even if at the moment we do not highlight that fact) we abstract. Precision might be described, then, as abstraction followed by absolutization or reification (but then it is no longer properly abstract). Abstraction always keeps in view (possible) background relationships while focusing concern on a foreground plane. Precision does not necessarily lead to falsehood, except when the mental difference, the difference in the way a thing is taken by intellect, is ontologically absolutized. Aristotle’s aphairesis, which isolates the spatial aspect of material existence, is a form of precision rather than of abstraction that is nevertheless controlled by the fuller knowledge that geometrical forms never actually exist outside the material world. Reductionisms, by contrast, are all precisions.
- 103.
See Sect. 5.5, above.
- 104.
In chapter 1 of On Memory and Recollection Aristotle says that we can look at a picture either as a picture or as an image of an original, and that when we move from the experience of the picture as picture to the recognition of the person pictured there we move from an instance of (simple) thought to memory. He also expressly points out the many contexts in which we can draw or view a diagram in geometry: a drawing of a triangle is of a definite size, but one can use it even if the triangle being conceived has no definite size; “and in the same way, one who is thinking, even one who is thinking of something that is not a quantity, sets a quantity before one’s eyes, though one does not think it as a quantity, but if the nature of it is among things that have a quantity, but an indefinite one, one sets out a definite quantity, but thinks it just as a quantity” (450a3–7).
- 105.
And similarly for other virtues. This means that examples of virtues one has actually seen and the possibilities one can imaginatively entertain are not identical from city to city, only similar. In some cities brave actions might typically be accompanied by verbal display, in others by taciturnity.
- 106.
There are fairly obvious affinities here to the later Wittgenstein’s language–games as forms of life.
- 107.
It is important to recognize, however, that applying (that is, qualifying) such truths requires imagination, and their truth can be seen only in light of phantasms (since there is no thinking at all without them). The principle of noncontradiction is an especially illuminating example, since it can be violated only when there is no difference in time or respect. The appearance of a contradiction therefore is, in the first instance, an invitation to situate the formula in an appropriate variety of substrates with the aim of locating possible differences of time or respect (aspect) that would make the contradiction only apparent.
- 108.
A unit of water added to another unit of water gives two units of water, and similarly for alcohol; but one unit of water added to one of ethanol yields less than two units of liquid.
- 109.
Hippocrates G. Apostle, in Aristotle 1981, 179, n. 30. Joe Sachs, in his translation of On the Soul, renders Aristotle’s “later” as “in the next chapter.” Only the last sentences of III.8 possibly just raise the question, however, and although there Aristotle asserts that the simplest intelligibles are not themselves phantasms he fails to present an argument. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle presents a vision of the happiest human life as one of the pure activity of thinking the fully and always actual highest being (i.e., true divinity). It is clear, however, that even if this is possible, for human beings such activity cannot last for long.
- 110.
This analysis in the Theaetetus presupposes that knowledge proceeds by comparing image–impressions in different planes of memory.
- 111.
After frequently raising the question whether intellect has an organ earlier in On the Soul, he finally gives this answer (and makes the argument about matter and universality) in III.4 and III.5.
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Sepper, D.L. (2013). Aristotle’s phantasia: From Animal Sensation to Understanding Forms of Fields. In: Understanding Imagination. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_5
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