The Life of Imagination, by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (introduction)

THE

LIFE OF IMAGINATION Revealing and Making the World

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

INTRODUCTION Thinking Imagination

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magination arises in and through conscious life and aims toward material and symbolic expression. Imagination does not only operate in the isolated mind, as one fantasizes, eyes shut closed to the world, or in the rare ecstatic moment only. Imagination allows us to take up the stuff of the world and of the mind and transform it, and as such it is essential to human flourishing. Yet imagination, perhaps more so than any other mode of consciousness, seems to elude our grasp. For despite over two millennia of thought on the subject of imagination, we have yet to fully understand the breadth of its activity, the depth of its roots in our cognition, and the scope of its influence in shaping human life and experience. The aim of this book is to offer a new understanding of imagination that accounts for the ways imagination invests our experience with possibilities for thinking and for acting, feeling, and being.

Imagination is involved in many kinds of human endeavor, and accordingly this book is aimed at a wide readership and draws from many fields of inquiry. The approach here diverges from the tendency, typical of much of the philosophical tradition, to treat imagination as one species of cognition segregated from others and as separate from creativity in general. Philosophers have often shed light on imagination by focusing on one specific capacity—for instance, inner representations, fantasizing, hypothesizing, or pretense. The ambition here is more encompassing and

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perhaps also more audacious: to understand the place of imagination in our cognitive ecology, its role in ordinary cognition as well as its exquisite and distinctive manifestations in some of the most special of human experiences. The focus here on the human imagination is not meant to deny the role of imagination in nonhuman animal life, recognized by philosophers since at least Aristotle.1 For there is ample evidence that animals do imagine in a number of ways,2 and human imagination, understood here as arising from our evolved, embodied life, will share something with that of other species.3 The main focus of this book is imagination as a transformative power, which both helps human beings to reveal the world, or to come to understand it in light of possibilities, and to make world, or to shape the reality before us by regarding it and changing it in new ways, integrating possibilities with what is given. That human beings need imagination to cope with the challenges we face— many of which are due to the activities of our own species alone—also motivates this effort to grasp its depth, breadth, and relevance in human life.

The imagination is not a single mental phenomenon or skill, but multifactorial, a constellation of related activities contributing constitutively to the full dimensionality of human consciousness and our relations to the world. This book shares an approach with those studies that, against the grain of a long tradition, suggest that imagination pervades many aspects of thought and action.4 Examining some of the modes of imaginative activity here, we will trace exceptional moments of imaginative intensity—such as occur in art, literature, scientific discovery, and invention—to their roots in everyday human thought and practice.

Of course, imagination may often be associated with the unharnessed and lively wandering of children’s play, with eureka moments of discovery, or with artistic creativity—experiences distinct from the humdrum and the ordinary that may not seem to have much to do with everyday pragmatic life. Distinctly imaginative experiences differ from mundane thinking in that usual expectations and habits are ruptured by something unpredictable, by some inner impulse of spontaneity. Yet just as ordinary, quotidian life may harbor possibilities for extraordinary, even ecstatic experience,5 I suggest that such spontaneity is latent within the common flow of human consciousness. Far from being merely a private theater for ineffectual and incommunicable fantasizing, imagining may be prompted

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by our surrounding influences and inspirations, by communication with others, by worldly and cultural provocation, as well as by the existential momentum that arises in human self-reflection.

When trying to grasp imagination as both pervasive across thinking and capable of special exertions, some apparent paradoxes arise. For its workings are both natural to ordinary consciousness and, in its most heightened expression as in complex creative activity, depart from the ordinary, sometimes exceptionally so. Imagination draws from fundamental cognitive capacities but also breaks with our cognitive habits, our routine ways of thinking about the world or aspects of it. Creativity—which I regard as an imaginative mode that draws upon several of its facilities—is both situated in our relations to surrounding circumstances and enables their transcendence. Further augmenting the complexity of imagination, imagination has what has been called a reproductive facility—based on and presenting images and ideas from previous experiences—as well as a productive facility—which is meant here that, though drawing from prior experience, imagination generates something new.

This emphasis on the productive imagination, its generativity, sets this study apart from the many accounts that define it primarily in terms of its capacity for reproducing or recreating ideas—making resemblances, copies, or simulations of other experiences and merely recombining them—in short, as a second-order operation of consciousness. The depiction of imagination as essentially reproductive reigned in philosophy almost uninterrupted from Plato to the mid-eighteenth century and remains characteristic of many contemporary views of the mind. Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic writers, and Friedrich Nietzsche offered alternatives, yet the impact of their exploration of productive and creative imagining has been largely confined to the fields of aesthetics and literary theory or to the literature of the “imaginary,” a notion often evasive of clear definition and for the last century most readily associated with the cultural appropriations of psychoanalysis. The reproductive view still holds sway, even where the combinatory power of imagination is emphasized. Of course, a great deal of what the imagination does can be considered in reproductive terms. Aristotle classified imagination as a form of memory, and David Hume iterated that, despite its apparent freedom—and its crucial role in connecting our otherwise unconnected ideas—its power lies in combining impressions

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from previous experience. Insofar as new ideas seem to occur to us, imagination retrieves and mixes impressions of states and objects we have experienced before, leading to the commonplace idea that imagination, or creativity, is nothing more than putting old ideas together in new ways.

Imagination can indeed be conceived in terms of “the having of states that are not beliefs, desires or perceptions, but are like them in various ways,” and those states can be thought as “recreations” by the mind. But since in so doing we can also “project ourselves into another situation and to see, or think about, the world from another perspective,”6 a further dimension of this task—the shifting perspective, projecting possibility in excess of actuality, taking up a point of view on an alternative—is not exhausted by reproduction or resemblance, but involves excess and transformation.

This surplus of imaginative play beyond reproduction and combination merits serious consideration, for it is in transcending the actual that imagination, as Jean-Paul Sartre aimed to show, is essential to human freedom.

Yet the obstacles to an adequate grasp of imagination remain considerable and contribute to a convoluted and dramatic conceptual history.

Since Plato, philosophers have alternately revered, chastised, mystified, or suppressed imagination as an element in human cognition. Throughout this history there is little consensus on what the imagination actually is, and even in the works of philosophers for whom imagination is a prominent faculty of human consciousness it remains opaque. Kant describes imagination as “a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty.”7 For Hume, despite his combinatory explanation, imagination remains a “kind of magical faculty . . . inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding.”8 It has been pointed out that philosophers have so variously defined imagination that it may be difficult to show how its many forms are related, and that imagination as a mental activity is an “extraordinarily elusive phenomenon.”9 While the products of imagination—such as works of art and literature, myth and cultural narratives—are communally available, as an activity of consciousness, the imagination is experienced primarily subjectively, through whatever is imagined and our introspective reflection on the process of imagining it. Our capacities for specific efforts of imagining—for instance, inner envisioning—differ considerably among individuals, so much that some may deny that there are such modes of consciousness at all. Recent

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scientific investigations have focused on relevant brain events (such as measuring neurological activity when we visualize and mentally combine objects), yet in complex activities of imagining, scientists have found the involvement of widespread neural networks across several regions in the brain.10 While progress has been made in identifying such networks, it is still not understood how complex imaginative experiences operate on a biological level. The effort to bridge empirical knowledge about the brain and the phenomenal or subjective levels of experience is underway,11 but the phenomenal side of that experience, too, still leaves much to be explored and explained.

The imagination is here defined as the presentational capacity of consciousness which can meaningfully transform what is thereby given. The aim here is an encompassing and multifactorial grasp of major modes of imaginative cognition that define human thinking and being. These include inner imaging, seeing-as and related modes of interpretive perception, hypothetical or counterfactual thinking, pretense, and creativity, which makes use of the other modes. Operations in the background of conscious awareness that have been attributed to imagination as conditions of possibility for experience will also be considered. This definition of imagination—and the necessity of a multifactorial account and reference to several strata—will be elaborated through the first three chapters in light of imagination’s evolutionary, scientific, and phenomenological contexts. The exercises of imagination especially important in this study involve its integration of possibility with the given. Thus, despite their importance, dreams, hallucinations, and other largely passive experiences of imaging are more or less set aside in order to focus on the exercises of imaginative consciousness that enable the human mind in grasping reality or in deliberately generating alternatives to it. Chapters 4 through 7 will show how different modes of imaginative activity allow us to take what is there before us—in thought or materially—and transform it in a meaningful way, sometimes toward an effort to know or reveal reality, in others to depart from and transcend it.

When imagination is understood as the presentational and transformational capacity of consciousness in multiple modes of activity, its role in our dealings with reality as well as in our departures from it can be equally recognized. Historically, imagination has been most persistently identified as the capacity for internal representation of previous

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perceptions retained in memory. For Plato, this was imagination’s irrevocable flaw—that imagination merely, and often inaccurately, copied sense perceptions, themselves at a remove from the essential truth of things that could be grasped only by reason. Thus imagination, especially as liberally engaged by poets and artists, was thought to undermine knowledge. Yet Aristotle recognized phantasia as a necessary process of cognition, important for object constancy (persistent acquaintance with things despite their intermittent absence), as well as for teleological thinking (aiming for not-yet-present goals). To Plato’s critique of imagination, Aristotle countered that no thought is possible without some involvement of imagination. Imagination—in the form of mimetic creativity—is also aligned in Aristotle’s poetics with the thought of possibility. Aristotle recognized this relation between the imagination and exploratory thought, by arguing that poetry is more philosophical than history, because it includes a presentation of what could happen and its creative expression toward maximal meaning for human life and action. In this respect imagination can be considered productive, contributing to the presentation and figuration of possibilities.

In the early modern philosophy of Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and Blaise Pascal, the imagination was demoted again to an inessential role, and a renewed anxiety arose about imagination’s impact on thinking. For early modern philosophers, our grasp of objective reality— along with the foundations of modern science—depended upon controlling the activity and influence of internal representation. While imagination was held to mediate between the senses and the intellect, and was therefore necessary for thinking, it must not have undue influence on the mind. To perceive is one thing, to imagine is another. Rational thinking and productions of the fancy are assigned to distinct faculties, with the former alone considered essential. To confuse imagination and perception, cognition proper and fantasy, is to court illusion, error, and even madness. As we will see, however, even in this early modern context, imagination is engaged in surprising and important ways in philosophical meditation and discovery.

Later philosophers came to recognize imagination as inextricable from other modes of thinking. By the late eighteenth century, Kant argued that imagination, at the level of underlying cognitive synthesis, plays a role in structuring perception and in the construction of a continuous point of

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view from which a human subject perceives the world. This structuring role manifests the productive work of imagination, going beyond the capacity to recreate or recombine the stuff of previous experiences and synthesizing what would otherwise be too diverse and unstructured impressions in space and time. Kant thus recognizes imagination in the very configuration of our experience. Of course, Kant will attribute further roles to imagination. In the perception of beauty and other aesthetic qualities, the imagination allows for an element of experience that cannot be entirely captured in conceptual thought. The mind engages a cognitive “free play” between imagination and understanding, and this allows the mind an inner experience of freedom in a world otherwise understood as materially determined. Coleridge, inspired by Kant’s aesthetics, hailed imagination as the force of creativity, comparing it to divine creation, while the German Romantics, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Hölderlin, found in imagination nothing less than an access, however indirect, to the unity of life itself. By the twentieth century these somewhat mystifying treatments of imagination were rejected for more tempered assessments. Ludwig Wittgenstein recognized imagination at work in aspect perception, or “seeing-as,” for instance recognizing a certain figuration (a mountain, for example) from the bare data of perception (the triangular lines on a page). While Wittgenstein focused primarily on perceptual puzzles, or seeing-as as a kind of “imaginative vision,” this use of imagination has been understood as relevant to perception more generally and as relevant to linguistic meaning.12 Imagination plays a role not only in perceptual life, and in its elaborations in poetry and art, but also in science, through hypothetical thinking, envisioning, and creativity. While modern scientific inquiry, of course, must conform to standardized procedures of observation and demonstration, its questions must be borne in a mode of projection that necessarily ventures beyond what is already known. The achievement of significant breakthroughs will require leaps of speculation, or reframing of ideas within a new context, in which the thinker must venture beyond the already explicable, and this activity owes something to a cognitive play, one that enables a shifting of perspective and a projection and contemplation of possibilities. Albert Einstein repeatedly recognized the power of imagination in the exploratory thinking of the sciences and described in detail the role of imagining in his own solutions to problems in physics.

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INTRODUCTION

Yet recognizing imagination as relevant not only to artistic creativity and aesthetic experience but also to scientific thought strains narrowly conscribed definitions of imagining. In order to grapple with the heterogeneity of imagination, some philosophers have distinguished between the “sensuous,” “perceptual,” or “experiential” imagination—the capacity to create the inner sensation of perceptual or kinesthetic experience— and the “cognitive” or “propositional” imagination—the capacity, for example, to entertain the thought or idea that such and such is the case.13 The latter allows a role for imagination even where there is no simulation from sense experience; but in complex activities of thinking, including in science, both forms may be involved.

Despite an explosion of interest in various aspects of imagination in recent decades, there is little scholarship available that offers a genuinely interdisciplinary view of its role across human experience. There exist a few excellent historical surveys,14 yet none of these attempts to synthesize the diverging accounts presented or offers an understanding of imagination’s role in the evolution of our humanity or accounts for the role of embodiment in imagining. Even Eva Brann’s monumental study of imagination, despite its elegant and abundant insights into imagination, argues for the “complementary relation” of imagination and thought, rather than for the role of imagination in human thinking as such.15 It should be said that these accounts predate important new developments in neuroscience, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and evolutionary anthropology, among other fields of inquiry, which can enhance our understanding of imagination and our recognition of its depth and breadth across human thinking, its rootedness in embodied life.

In recent philosophy, discussion of imagination is somewhat divided along methodological lines. Philosophers in the Anglo-American or contemporary analytic tradition are careful to avoid overinflating imagination’s powers, and in respect of that aim tend to confine inquiry on imagination narrowly. They may single out one type of imagination for analysis, or describe imagination by way of distinction from other cognitive states, or rely only on a reproductive view of imagining, or demand empirical verification beyond introspective evidence. While a methodological skepticism in this approach yields clarity along with epistemic conservatism, it risks underappreciating the imagination in its full dimensionality, its relevance across human life and thinking. This tradition,

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moreover, tends to segregate from its account of imagination the more unwieldy notion of creativity. In contrast, in Continental or what is often called post-Kantian European philosophy, the productive imagination is widely accepted and its significance more boldly affirmed. In this tradition imagination or “the imaginary” can be variously identified with desires or drives, with a cultural excess of otherness and difference, with the poetic and aesthetic—ideas appealing to intuition about the potential depths of imaginative life, resourceful for cultural analyses. However, these forms of the imaginary are often designated in direct opposition to rational thinking, thus again inadvertently segregating imagination from other kinds of cognition, or they are analyzed wholly through textual interpretation without concrete reference to the experience of actual human subjects and what we can know about them. While there are merits to these approaches, the imaginary remains undefined, often deliberately so, left as “accessible to experience without ever being pinned down, let alone exhausted, by a semantic definition.”16 When seen as a cultural repository of drives, or an unconscious force of destabilizing otherness, difference, or negation, rather than within a cognitive dimension, it may be more difficult to assess “the power of imagination exercised in individual works.”17 The phenomenological strand of the Continental tradition, however, allows for an approach to imagination as an experience of thinking for a human subject, and can be engaged in the context of a contemporary understanding of the mind. Increasingly some researchers have aimed to overcome the methodological differences between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive theory.18 I will draw here pluralistically across these traditions, particularly upon phenomenology and cognitive theory, as they contribute to our understanding of imagination as a cognitive power. In so doing I hope to avoid both the narrow constrictions of some analytic accounts of imagination and the mystifications of some Continental approaches, while steering clear of the procedural idiosyncrasies that often render arguments unapproachable outside these specialist traditions.

While philosophical in substance and method, this account finds inspiration in literature and literary theory, poetry, the arts and aesthetics, anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and the history of the physical sciences, along with examples from everyday life. Readers will

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find here not a codified taxonomy of imagining, but a conceptual and phenomenological analysis along the main axes of imagining to be described in chapter 1, as well as experientially sensitive explorations throughout the book of imaginative life and thought. The imagination as understood here is relevant to any human experience in which we reflect on the world and accordingly transform it, whether in thought alone, in material, iconic, or linguistic expression, or in embodied action.

Given the differentiation in what follows among major modes of imagining, recognition of their potential interrelation, and the varying levels of imagination’s involvement in cognition, we need not mistake the scope of imagination for its uniformity. Not all forms of thinking are equally “imaginative,” and not all are imaginative in the same way. Wittgenstein argues that thinking is “a concept that comprises many manifestations of life,” the phenomena of which “are widely scattered,”19 and this can be equally said of imagination as a cognitive power. Recognizing imagination’s broad relevance does not preclude recognizing the specialness of cultivated, concentrated, or exquisite uses of imagination any more than the recognition of the fact that thinking pervades our consciousness would preclude recognizing rare, profound, and elaborated thoughts or their special cognitive shape. Imagination as a presentational and transformational activity of consciousness can operate at several levels of our cognitive life. The special, sustained, or highly developed transformations of imagining contribute to the construction of fictional worlds and scientific theories, artistic expressions and practical inventions.

This account resists imagination’s dismissal as a form of escapism, though that is one important use of imagination that deserves consideration. The characterization of imagination as fantasy, or even exclusively as the autonomous consideration of things absent to perception, may lead to a view of imaginative life as sequestration from reality. The capacity for us to inwardly imagine, in abstraction from our surroundings, of course, may be a source of cognitive freedom. Sartre, for example, argues that “for consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free.”20 Imagination’s freedom for Sartre is due to its restriction to “irreality,” dealing as it does with images that are nothing more than consciousness itself intending “nothingness.”21 Maurice Blanchot describes, in similar terms, the “strange

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liberty” of literary and artistic experience as entering a “void,” a space radically separate from and incompatible with the world.22 Edward Casey defends both imagination’s autonomy—its irreducible independence from perception—and its freedom to contemplate pure possibilities, or possibilities for their own sake, such as “when we speak of imagining Pegasus flying through the sky.”23 Because what we imagine is ontologically distinct from reality, imagination does allow us to seem to escape reality, at least in inward thought, contemplation, and feeling. Beyond independent fantasizing, human beings seek out the assisted contemplation of possibilities enabled by fictional literature, film, art, forms of virtual reality, in order, through vicarious experience, to find relief from the real world and from its material limitations.

Yet if the imagination is intrinsically connected to freedom, the latter is not achieved by mere independence from the world or the absence of external constraints. Freedom can be conceived as freedom for action and creation within the context of our material and cultural circumstances, as Sartre himself admits.24 Freedom, of course, requires the capacity, in ref lecting on what we have experienced, to “withdraw” from and “de-sense” its immediate effects, as Hannah Arendt puts it, and to consider it from another point of view.25 Freedom requires the capacity to stand back and reflect on our potential actions, and even on the desires that may assail us, so that we can consider what attitudes we might adopt to them and how to proceed in light of them.26 Imagination contributes not only to freedom but to the ethical responsibility freedom entails, allowing us reflection on our possibilities so that we can imagine being or acting or even feeling otherwise than we are and do. Imagination allows us to consider different potential modes of response, rather than merely to react immediately, unreflectively, to pressures of a given situation. In so doing, imagination may provide us the liberty to shape our interactions, to change ourselves or the surrounding world—not with some wave of a magic wand but in and through the circumstances at hand.

Yet even “mere” imagining in the mind has a potential pragmatic power. The poet Wallace Stevens argued that imagination liberates us by “pressing back against the pressure of reality,” by relativizing its given configuration in light of other possible alternatives.27 Seamus Heaney evoked a similar idea in calling upon poetry as a redress to reality.28 Wolfgang Iser argued that the transformative nature of literature can support “an

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intersubjective goal: namely, the imaginary correction of deficient realities.”29 This kind of imaginative relativization may be the necessary first step to negotiation and transformation of the given. Sartre’s point is not merely that imagination allows us to escape from reality to la-la land, but rather that without the distance imagination creates we could not have any freedom in our relationship to reality. Yet I will emphasize, in contrast to Sartre’s rather persistent focus on negation, how the productive capacity of imagination to generate alternatives—to transform the given by integrating possibilities—enables us in our relations with the world.

Not just for the problems of art but also for those of ordinary life, Stevens wrote, we need “everything that the imagination has to give.”30 Understanding imagination requires a sense of its role in human experience more generally and of how it is cultivated toward special uses in creativity. Stimulations from culture and environment surely help foster imaginative thinking, and scholars have aimed to study how this can happen in educational contexts.31 Imaginative activity is natural to the human mind, and yet even as naturally gifted an imaginer as Leonardo da Vinci recognized that “arousing the mind to various inventions” could be provoked through techniques—such as when he advises painters to gaze at the stains on a wall and seek out figurative images.32 At the same time—and despite the recent explosion of popular literature promising to unlock the imagination and harness its creative value—imagination may be most essential, and most productively manifest, in just the kinds of experiences that are singular, in which the way is off-piste, the procedure yet to be discovered, and wherein the inspiration comes without instructions. Imagination is exerted in thinking for oneself by way of distancing from a presumed or dominant point of view, and can be relevant in overcoming adversity, in finding the less obvious solution to a problem, in finding new ways to communicate and understand others when the available ones have broken down. Creativity in particular seems to require not merely a drive to dominate our environment—as its narrow evolutionary interpretation may suggest—but also some tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, the not-yet known, and for divergence, enabling cognitive play. Imaginative thinking is creatively engaged as the familiar is thrown into an unfamiliar light and the imaginer crosses into unchartered terrain. It will be argued in chapter 7 that creativity, while expressing particular cognitive skills, cannot be entirely accounted for by

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combinatorial models of cognition, for we must understand its broader cognitive ecology—its rootedness in forms of life.

In recent decades imagination has become a subject of intense study in a number of disciplines outside the humanities, including neuroscience, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary anthropology, among others, and I will draw on them frequently in this book wherever they illuminate various aspects of imagining. Yet there are disciplinary limitations to these studies which caution against embracing any single approach as an exclusive access to imagination. In the empirical sciences, imagination is to be manifested in activities that can be observed in a laboratory, in experiments that are repeatable and in which imagining subjects are interchangeable. Research journals offer statistical findings about subjects (often university students) observed undertaking prescribed activities: choosing among various images on a screen while listening to music, watching a film while under a brain scan, guessing the objects inside a box, and so forth. Studies have included observing the physical effects on the brain when a subject passively hears a word and sees an image at the same time or draws a stick figure while listening to a speech, or observes a role-play scenario, or reads a literary description, or plays the guitar while counting backward, and so on. Such activities have some imaginative component, and we can learn something from study of them; but they do not evoke a meaningful imaginative context and cannot address spontaneity, individual motivation, or inspiration.

Restriction of thinking about imagination to only empirical laboratory study, as even some recent scholars in the humanities have demanded,33 would reduce the inquiry to those activities of imagining about which that kind of data can be gathered and could seem to support the implication that imagination outside those parameters—indeed the imagination as we experience in our own life-bound thinking, being, doing, and making—warrants no serious or scholarly consideration. Yet it is hardly disputable that our most meaningful imaginative experiences do not occur under “the unnatural and unavoidably obtrusive nature of the laboratory setting.”34 We can make good use of the empirical knowledge available without reducing the whole subject of our inquiry to the necessarily narrow methods of a given discipline.

More promisingly, scholars have begun to synthesize the observations of empirical sciences with that of the humanities in studying more

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complex activities of imagining such as undertaken in the context of literature and the arts. For practical and methodological reasons, much of this research concerns aesthetic receptivity—one can with relatively little difficulty pair experimental subjects to existing and finished works of art, or reproductions of them, and observe in various ways their responses.

Complex activities of creativity, where the subject is actively involved within a particular context, and the product of activity cannot be determined in advance, may be more difficult to submit to observation. Considerable knowledge about the brain may be perhaps obtained if we could observe in detail the physiological events occurring during the most concentrated, layered, or heightened activities of imagining, for instance in various stages of a scientific discovery, the writing of a significant literary work, or the construction of an innovative painting—but such complex activities are elaborated and episodic and are not generally undertaken in the context of laboratory observation. Yet even if our observational reach were exhaustive in empirical terms, knowledge of the brain activity, if it is to explain imagination, would need to be integrated with other kinds of knowledge about human experience and the culture that contextualizes and informs it. Some recent scholarship brings together neuroscientific knowledge with humanistic, literary, and artistic insight into the nature of the experiences the scientist may wish to explain.35 It may be most straightforward in the case of perceiving visual art. The field of neuroaesthetics has yielded results in explaining the neurological and cognitive patterns underlying our experience of vision. Thus the perception of visual art, for example as it involves cognitive registers for abstraction, visual constancy, and ambiguity, has been described in brain studies in terms of its neural organization and its functions of knowledge acquisition.36 In this light, artists themselves have been described as neuroscientists: by pursuing their art they implicitly learn about, and rely upon, the general “neural organization of the visual pathways that evoke pleasure.”37 In a similar context, it has been argued that we can understand literature as grounded in mirror neurons, in which synapses fire in observing others’ actions. Such a neuronal basis can account for our capacity to imitate—and all mimetic activities such as literature—as well as feel to empathy for others.38 The mirror neuron system itself is said to explain “why we are able to cry for Anna Karenina.”39 Literature has been the subject of further empirical studies that assess the intensity of response

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to literary works through measurement of pupil dilation and other empirically observable responses.40 This cross-disciplinary reach may hold intuitive appeal to those seeking to recognize the relevance of the arts and sciences to each other. Yet the interpretive explanations offered about empirical data vary to the extent that they can relay complex human experiences and whether they are compatible with attention to the richness of the experiential and social aspects of cognition. Neuroscientific accounts may focus on consciousness entirely as “a product of the brain,”41 and some have been criticized for neglecting the wider distribution of the neural system and the cultural aspects of cognition that affect the neural system.42 Correlations between the brain and experience are sometimes described as unidirectional causality (rather than, for instance, in dialectical terms) and articulated as deterministic laws. As one scholar put it: “the dominant idea in modern neuroscience is that a full understanding of the brain will reveal all one needs to know about how the brain enables mind, that it will prove to be enabled in an upwardly causal way, and that all is determined,” a view that has been criticized as “neuro-nihilism.”43 Because art is dependent upon the activity of the brain, it is thought that art “must therefore obey the laws of the brain, whether in conception, execution, or appreciation.”44 For such a neuroaestheticist, at any rate, “all human activity is dictated by the organization and laws of the brain.”45 While neuroscience may have much to offer in studying aesthetic experience, such reduction of the whole scope of human experience to a single material cause, and indeed with what are essentially legislative metaphors, invites objections from both cognitive and philosophical perspectives.

First of all, it is not a foregone conclusion that the mind as an emergent phenomenon can be explained entirely at the level of brain events.46 The biological foundations of cognition can be described in terms of a wider distribution than in the neural networks alone. Current discussions in the philosophy of mind and cognitive theory address the fact that the brain and its neural organization are intimately connected with the structure and activity of the body as a whole. In the last two decades it has been argued that the mind is “intimately embodied and intimately embedded in its world,”47 a view prominent in the phenomenological tradition since publication of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.48 The idea that cognition is not only brain- or even mind-centered,

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but distributed throughout a network of pragmatic action and its implements was also anticipated by the notion of being-in-the-world and its “ecstatic” model of the human subject in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.49 These phenomenologically grounded views of human cognition have been recently adopted in contemporary cognitive theory.50 We may thus describe consciousness as influenced by the materiality of the surrounding physical world and enactive or constituted by the ways it acts, reacts, and adapts to that world,51 as well as by the cultural and social context that in part shapes such embodied experience.52 The exclusive focus on the brain has also been challenged, in favor of more extended or distributed models of cognition, by describing the use of instruments in the surrounding world (the map or the smart phone, for instance) as cognitively constitutive.53 Brain-based explanations of human interaction, moreover, may need to take into account the cognitive relevance of social context and cultural differences.54 Moreover, in neuroscientific explanations of aesthetics unidirectional connections may be drawn between the empirical basis in the brain and experiential phenomena without sufficient recognition of the wider neurological context. For the brain is not only determining but also responsive; neuroplasticity allows the brain to reorganize its functional operations in order to compensate for injury or in response to new stimulations from the environment.55 The idea that the brain legislates experience unidirectionally is insensitive to this responsiveness; our neurological situation cannot be adequately described as giving orders in a straightforward causal action of the brain determining experience. Rather, neurological activity “can be experienced-driven, is time-sensitive, and is influenced by the environment and internal states, such as motivation and attention.”56 Explanations of art exclusively through neuroscience have been challenged on these and other grounds.57 What may elude reductive interpretations of empirical data is the lived and living nature of imaginative experience, its subjective and qualitative specificity, and these must be addressed in other ways. Experience otherwise accessible only through introspection may be expressed, for example, in literary description. Yet a direct grasp of experience, of what it is like to undergo something, evades immediate capture not only by empirical science but also by literature.

In its efforts to convey what Henry James called an “air” of reality,58 even

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literature has to contend with its own conditions and qualities of medium—most obviously, the experience it may aim to describe is not made up entirely or even predominantly of words. Modernist literary writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf aimed to capture the feel and flow of conscious impressions, but they too had to undertake their own “stylistic experimentation” in order to do so, and their approaches and results varied.59 Yet if we abandon naive realism, the illusion that literature somehow captures the subtleties of experience directly, we can nevertheless conceive its relation to experience as one of evocation and conveyance, of rendering experience selectively and as vividly as possible, approaching it through a variety of literary strategies to be tested by the responses of readers. Literature may offer descriptions of imaginative life that we can consider and test against our own experience.

In philosophy the method devoted to the close study of experience is phenomenology, which describes the subjective experiential dimension that empirical research may not be able to capture directly, providing “a philosophical framework for assessing the meaning and significance” thereof.60 Because it engages a first-person descriptive point of view, phenomenology offers a method for describing imaginative experience, including poetic or aesthetic experience. But the limits of the phenomenological approach alone, and of available phenomenological theories of imagination, must too be considered.

The phenomenological approach entails a descriptive method and a focus on first-person experience, attention to experience in its own right as it appears to us or as phenomena. The phenomenologist can describe subjective imaginative experiences—attempting to grasp their general structures—or engage the intersubjectively available imaginative provocations of poetry, literature, art, and even scientific thought processes and accounts thereof. This descriptive and critical task can be undertaken in more and less formal ways. Edmund Husserl inaugurated the phenomenological method as a rigorous Wissenschaft, if an introspectively based one, applying it to mathematical thinking and to logic, and then again to the analysis of many kinds of conscious experiences including perception, experience, judgment, and scientific thinking more broadly. Sartre adapted the method for a psychology of imagination that aimed in particular to account for inner imaging.61 Gaston Bachelard—himself

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originally working in the physical sciences—adapted the phenomenological method established by Husserl to describe the cognitive effects of poetry, the reverberation of a poetic image in what feels like the reader’s innermost soul.62 Merleau-Ponty, whose major work is devoted to the phenomenology of embodied perception, also adapted this method to describe what he found as a new way of seeing in modern painting, such as by Paul Cézanne, describing how that painter’s renderings of simple objects, like peaches on a tablecloth, seemed not merely to capture the objects’ likeness but to translate into an image the feel of living perception.63 Phenomenologists have long studied aspects of imagination, but they have not yet offered an encompassing theory of imagining across cognitive life as a whole. Husserl described imagination in several ways, as the capacity for image making in the mind, as the consciousness of images through pictorial representation, as free fantasy, and, in general, as the modification of a nonimaginative mental state.64 Importantly, Husserl acknowledged at least one role for imagination in the method itself: the philosopher, in considering his or her experiences, must imaginatively vary them and alter them in order to discover their “essence” or what is common to and underlies all such experiences of the type. Inspired by phenomenology, Sartre offered two studies of imagination, with his most original contributions focusing primarily on images, such as in inner visualization and depiction.65 Sartre excluded from his formal study (but for a brief treatment in The Imaginary) the consideration of creativity, though he discussed the work of writers and artists in many other writings, and therein associated imagination with the possibilization of reality. Sartre’s philosophy locates in imagination the source of human freedom and, as the subject of a sympathetic critique by Casey, inspires the latter’s account of imaginative autonomy.66 Aesthetics would seem to be the field most congenial to an exploration of imagination in phenomenological terms. Mikel Dufrenne’s Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience returned aesthetics from an overly formal analysis of art and beauty as it had evolved since the late eighteenth century back to its original meaning—the study of sensation and perception—in the context of artistic objects. Dufrenne focused on the reception of the finished work of art and deliberately left little place for imagination in his analysis. Since the meaning of the work of art, he thought, is sustained by its own world, Dufrenne claimed, “the genuine

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work of art spares us the expense of an exuberant imagination.”67 In perceiving the work of art, the viewer’s imagination is satiated by the finished object before it and does not need to spring into action. This view exposes one of the limitations of classical phenomenology on the topic of imagination and the need to consider imaginative experiences anew.

For contemplative reception of an artwork can be shown to both require and stimulate imaginative activity, an initial sense of which can be conveyed by describing an aesthetically stimulating painting. To choose a familiar example, Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), with its whirling explosions of starlight across a dark sky, its wind-waves above a sleeping town and black cypresses traced with swirling staccato lines, may provoke imaginative looking on the part of the viewer. The night sky is rendered in blues and blue-greens to effect recession into the distance, yet light from the stars and moon vibrates in warm yellow and ocher tones that provide a sense of proximity. The upward movement of the copse of cypresses dominating the left side of the painting amplifies the delicate vertical of the gray steeple in the middle, midground, as if nature echoed boldly, and without human artifice, the church’s index to transcendence.

Although cypresses were traditionally planted at Provençal cemeteries, in this painting, as evergreens, they may be more suggestive of life than of death.68 The mountains in the back right of the painting darken as they recede and rise, counterbalancing the prominent dark trees on the left.

The orchard to the right of the town, and the hills behind it, seem to roll toward it like waves from the distance so that the town is swallowed up on all sides by nature. The intense moon in the upper-right corner is balanced out by the brightest star in the lower-left area of the sky, while the other stars, still riotously bright, hang like pearls on an invisible net.

Van Gogh’s emphasis on glow and movement contrasts with the very private nature of the scene—which would have to have been gazed upon from an isolated spot on a hill just above the town—and seems to visualize astonishment at the ancient, inorganic, but seemingly vital presence of the stars above. In fact, van Gogh’s painting has drawn the attention of astrophysicists for its evocation of an astronomical imagination,69 though the position of his stars would have diverged from any accurate depiction of the sky on the night it was painted and need not evidence any grasp by the painter of the popular science of his time. Nevertheless, it is tempting to see in Starry Night some symbolic astronomy, an intuition of the interdependence of sky and earth, though van Gogh could not

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have known that the very atoms that make up our own material world— indeed our own bodies—were once generated from exploding stars. In a letter written to his friend Émile Bernard on November 26, 1889, van Gogh himself referred to the imaginative nature of the work, with its exaggerated stars departing too much from natural observation, as treading on precariously “enchanted ground.”70 His brother Theo worried about the effect of imaginative painting on van Gogh’s mental health, passing over Starry Night in silence and praising only the other more naturalist landscapes van Gogh sent along with it.71 In any case, van Gogh’s work is both intensely communicative and provocative. The painter does not hide his labor, but makes his brushstrokes visible and vivid, rendering what can be imagined as the painter’s intentionality forever present in the work; the viewer may feel touched by and through the physical medium of the painting. Far from sparing one the need for intense imagining, or even repressing imagination, as Dufrenne’s argument might suggest,72 this work would ignite the viewer’s imagination with its expressive exuberance, inviting new possibilities of seeing, stimulating a metaphorical or even narrative impulse toward the interpretation, or even production, of meaning. Aesthetic reception does not require passive submission, but provokes imagining, or concretization, of the attentive viewer.73 Casey, in his fine book Imagining, approaches imagination as “autonomous mental act,” and in the context of “its ordinary, even banal, modes of activity.”74 He explores the implications of Sartre’s insight that imagination involves spontaneous activity not only distinct from, but in some ways surpassing, perception. Yet Casey requires imagination’s “strict independence from other mental acts, from its surroundings, and from all pressing human concerns” and Casey thus excludes creativity from a theory of imagining, claiming that they “are only contingently connected.”75 His focus is imagination as experienced in the mind when it turns away from reality, such as in inner visualization. Yet he too shows how “imagining remains inseparable from the life of the mind as a whole, essential to its welfare, indeed to its identity and very existence.”76 Meanwhile, the role of imagination in a human subject’s interaction with material reality or ideas about it, and the embodied nature of that subject, remain to be examined. The description of the van Gogh painting offered earlier, for example, relies on evocations of balance, mass,

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heaviness and lightness, ascension and descent, coolness and warmth, all metaphorical descriptions that originate in primal experiences of the body.77 Inquiries into this bodily origin may also draw from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, who engaged the embodiment of the human subject in analyses of imaginative and creative acts.78 Casey, adhering to a strict phenomenological method, looks to claim for imagination only “what a detailed description allows us to claim, no more and no less,” also eschewing recourse to the natural sciences and other disciplines.79 Yet to try to understand the origins of imagination, its embodiment, and how it may work at the periphery of our conscious awareness, phenomenology will have to be brought together with other contemporary approaches.

The segregation of imagining from the material world and from other facilities of human cognition becomes untenable when we attempt to work out its evolutionary origins— about which the philosophical tradition since Darwin has remained almost entirely silent.80 The development of the human brain would have coincided with early humans’ need to explore territory in search of sustenance and to find solutions to scarcity and environmental and predatory exposure. The manipulation of the material world becomes much more efficient and advantageous when it can be first practiced imaginatively, when potential actions can be tried out in the mind before being physically enacted. According to recent theories, the very structures of human vision and motility, for instance as supporting the capacity to aim while throwing an object, are foundational for the gradual evolution of imagination,81 while the capacity for internal representation has been linked with motor action.82 The origins of symbolic imagination—as evidenced in the artworks and other objects made by early humans—would be inexplicable if not evidencing some act of communication, ritualization, or invention connected to practical experiences, even as they also may suggest human transcendence, through the mind, of the limits of the surrounding reality.83 When we consider scientific thought and invention, we will find that imagination helps to enable both inquiry and experiment. This connects imagination inseparably to the surroundings and concerns to which some theories would render imagination indifferent. Within the scope of a theory of imagination, we should be able to describe, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions as experiences that involve inner imagining, hypothetical thinking, seeing-as, as well as material creativity, and

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directly engage environmental interest and human concern. Leonardo’s studies of the flights of birds and of the human body are, in his notebooks, enfolded together within his plans for flying machines such as the ornithopter and helicopter. His thinking on the topic of flight blends scientific observation, mathematical reasoning, geometry, anatomy, visualization, and drawing. With thousands of pages of drawings and writings on subjects of his interests, his notebooks evidence integrations of imagining with other kinds of cognition, observation, and knowledge and suggest the essential rather than merely contingent relation between imagination and creativity. Leonardo’s efforts to make machines that allow humans to fly were generated by an interest in gravity as a problem to be overcome, a studied analysis of the distribution of weight and overall structure of the human body, and methodical observations of birds and insects in flight. An account of imagining that would exclude Leonardo’s inventions in this field as not imagining proper—because it occurs not merely in the isolated mind but in material interaction with reality— cuts the definition too narrowly. To say that imagination is involved only in the autonomous moments of this process—when ideas break free from the considerations of gravity and soar in the mind in contrast to embodied experience—is to deny the exercise of imagination in identifying in reality itself a problem to be solved in the first place. If the human body could already fly, the imagination would not need to soar.

The fact that the human body is limited in this way is a concrete, embodied, situational condition for the exercises of imagination by Leonardo and later inventors inspired by the possibility of flight. The capacity to bring together ideas untethered to reality with the reality before us, in order to overcome the limitations of the latter, is an imaginative achievement.

Some recent accounts of the human mind describe cognition as grounded in combinatorial processes and, as these underpin a variety of cognitive experiences, help to explain creative thinking. For example, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner propose a theory of “conceptual blending” that helps to explain the adaptability of human thinking to different kinds of problems, which may seem counterintuitive: Common sense suggests that people in different disciplines have different ways of thinking, that the adult and the child do not think alike, that

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the mind of the genius differs from that of the average person, and that automatic thinking, of the sort we do when reading a simple sentence, is far beneath the imaginative thinking that goes on during the writing of a poem. These commonsense distinctions are unassailable, yet there exist general operations for the construction of meaning that cut across all these levels and make them possible.84

The idea that imagination, as these theorists argue, is among these “general operations for the construction of meaning,” supports an inquiry into how imagination works both in heightened experiences and in ordinary ones, and how ideas from one region of thinking or experience are brought together with others. Even exemplary minds such as those of Leonardo exploit the possibilities available to and made possible by the common processes of human thought. In its ordinary as well as its extraordinary accomplishments, imagination draws upon evolved, deeply rooted cognitive skills. The advantage of such an approach, described in chapter 7, is that it can identify imagination at work across a wide spectrum of kinds of thinking, from artistic expression to scientific discovery and invention.

Yet I will show that conceptual blending will not alone account for how special moments of creativity both emerge and diverge from mundane thought, how the creative subject is both rooted in and transcends a given situation. For that we must consider the creative imagination as a form of cognitive life, within a wider cognitive ecology, enabled in its deviations from habitual thinking by cognitive play.

In this book the imagination is initially defined, and some of its major modes are explicated according to an embodied and enactive view of human consciousness (chapter 1). Imagination is traced in evolutionary and developmental origins and in light of the contribution of embodied action to internal imagining (chapter 2). Imagination is considered in its relation to perception and therefore to reality, both in our grasp of it and in its distortion (chapter 3). The convergence of scientific and artistic thinking in their reliance on imagination is explored in light of their differing epistemic constraints and forms of validation (chapter 4). This convergence is addressed in terms, drawn from pragmatism and phenomenology, of how both may aim to reveal, or alternatively to make, versions of the world and in consideration of the challenges posed by a multiplicity of world-revealings and world-makings. Imagination is

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shown (in chapter 5) to be inseparable from embodied life through the examples of explicitly embodied imagining in performance art, dance, and the making of film, as well as the evocations of embodiment through painting, literature, and social responsiveness. Envisioning in “the mind’s eye,” and the controversy surrounding mental images, both in thinking in general and in literary reading, are considered in light of contemporary evidence for visual imaging, accounts of its embodied origins and its variability (chapter 6). Finally, creativity is newly understood, with examples from the applications of geometry to the aesthetics of jazz, as situated transcendence enabled by cognitive play (chapter 7).

Examples of imaginative thinking, or reflection on such experience, are drawn from many sources throughout this book, including the scientific or technical inventiveness of Archimedes, Einstein, Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, and Nikola Tesla, the performance art of Philippe Petit and Charlie Chaplin, the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky and Martha Graham, the literature of Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Stevens, Vladimir Nabokov, Woolf, Ralph Ellision, and Toni Morrison, cave paintings and carvings left by early Homo sapiens, paintings by Giotto, Cézanne, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, and Romare Bearden, the music of jazz, including Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, and the arts it has inspired, among other sources. Many descriptions of imagining are drawn from the possibilities surrounding everyday life. With such examples in mind, and engaging the resources of multiple disciplines, we may understand the life of imagination anew, demonstrating its contribution to human thinking and its shaping of the human dimension.

Praise for THE LIFE OF IMAGINATION “This book provides the most insightful, nuanced, and expansive phenomenological account of human conscious imaginative activity I have had the pleasure to read. It probes the ways imagination arises from our bodily engagement with the world to make and transform meaning. These creative imaginative enactments are beautifully illustrated with examples from science, painting, poetry, dance, music, and fictional narrative.”

MARK JOHNSON , author of The Meaning of

the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding

“A bold, breakthrough book. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei guides us with lucidity and force through the many ways in which imagining invests our lives—in dancing, sauntering on the land, in artists’ re-imagination of ordinary experience, and in countless other ways. The result is a breathtaking contribution to the understanding of imagination as ingredient in all that we feel, think, and do.”

EDWARD S. CASEY , author of Imagining: A Phenomenological Study

“A monumental achievement. GosettiFerencei creates a philosophy of productive imagination that is precedent-setting. Her inviting, nuanced writing ranges across the history of philosophy, the arts, and literature, arriving at a beautiful discussion of the creativity of jazz. It will be the essential benchmark for all future studies.”

GALEN A. JOHNSON , author of The Retrieval of

the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics

“In a compelling synthesis of ideas from many disciplines—including archaeology, developmental psychology, philosophy, literary theory, cognitive science, and art history—Gosetti-Ferencei offers an eloquent and inclusive account of how the human imagination not only penetrates our conception of reality at ground level but also enables us to soar upward in our creative endeavors, scientific as well as artistic.”

PAUL HARRIS , author of The Work of the Imagination

“Gosetti-Ferencei patiently, critically, and imaginatively engages with expressions and analyses of the imagination drawn from a variety of philosophical, artistic, and scientific sources, in order to develop an original and thought-provoking characterization of that elusive human capacity.”

STEPHEN MULHALL , author of The Self and Its Shadows: A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts

“Gosetti-Ferencei argues with style and insight for the ubiquity of imagination in human life from the arts and sciences to ordinary perception. The book is engaging and accessible, remarkable for its crossdisciplinary and historical reach and for its depth and clarity of vision.”

PETER LAMARQUE , author of Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art

“No other book in this field treats the imagination so thoroughly and rigorously.”

PAUL ARMSTRONG , author of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art

ISBN: 978-0-231-18908-8

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