Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content
Nigel J.T. Thomas
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Source: http://cogprints.org/5018/1/im-im-cp.htm
3.1 Imagination, reason, and creativity
During most of the history of Christendom, imagination was generally considered negatively, a dangerous faculty, liable to lead us into sin and error, and opposed to reason, which would lead us to God (Kearney, 1988). This attitude persisted into the early modern period, even as reason was coming to be linked with science rather than religion. Imagination was associated with the kind of magical thinking which the new "mechanical philosophy" was struggling to overcome (Pagel, 1958; Yates, 1966). Blaise Pascal (1670/1973), mathematician, physicist, and devout Christian, was particularly vehement in this regard, characterizing imagination as "that mistress of error and falsehood," an "arrogant faculty, the enemy of reason".
The Romantic movement completely overturned this negative evaluation. For Wordsworth (1850/1971) imagination is "Reason in her most exalted mood". For William Blake, "the human imagination . . . is the Divine Vision and Fruition/ In which man lives eternally," and the hero of his Milton announces:
"I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration,
"To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour,
"To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration,
"To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion's covering,
"To take off his filthy garments & clothe him with Imagination,10.
Wordsworth was presumably using "reason" as a generic term for cognitive power, of which imagination is one species. Pascal and Blake, however, were contrasting imagination with another species of cognitive power, discursive or "mathematical" reason. John Keats made the contrast explicit when he compared imagination favorably with "consequetive reasoning"11, and Shelley (1840/1954), in similar vein, distinguished reason, the "principle of analysis", from imagination, the "principle of synthesis". In fact, the distinction between imagination and discursive reason,phantasia and dianoia, is as old as Aristotle (De Anima 427b 15-16), and, perhaps because satisfying positive characterizations of imagination have always been hard to come by (Brann, 1991), the contrast between them has long been a key constituent of ordinary understandings of the concept of imagination (Kearney, 1988). The distinctive Romantic achievement was not to establish this contrast, but to sharply invert the relative valuation placed on its two terms.
But the Romantics valued imagination so highly not because of its non-discursiveness per se, but because they held it responsible for artistic creativity ("inspiration"). The idea of creative imagination did not originate with the Romantics, in fact it has a very long history (Kearney, 1988; Brann, 1991; Cocking, 1991), but it was the Romantics who gave it its modern prominence and significance. Largely because of their continuing influence, creativity remains one of our culture's most important values, in science as much as in the arts.
3.2 Mental Pictures and Creative Imagination
There has, however, been a tendency amongst 20th century analytical philosophers to deny the connection between imagination as creativity and imagination as the production of imagery. A widely used Dictionary of Philosophy (Flew, 1979) warns us firmly against confusing them. Philosophers routinely treat "imagine" as polysemous, as if its usages were a collection of homonyms, sometimes equivalent to "form (or experience) imagery", but, in other cases, to "suppose", or "pretend", "believe", "think creatively", and so on (Thomas, 1997a). This orthodoxy, however, has been powerfully criticized by White (1990). White, however, holds that although there is only one sense of "imagination", it has nothing whatsoever to do with imagery! As I have argued in detail elsewhere (Thomas, 1997a; see also Thomas, 1999a), White makes a persuasive case against the polysemy view, but he fails to make the case for dissevering imagination from imagery. A more plausible view is that "imagination" is a "family resemblance" term (Wittgenstein, 1953) whose prototypical (but not exclusive) application is to the production of imagery.
Anyway, there can be little doubt that the Romantic writers who so valorized the creative imagination still, like others before and since, thought that they were talking about a unitary faculty deriving its name from its responsibility for image production; they clearly thought mental imagery and creativity were intimately bound up with one another (Warnock, 1976; Robson, 1986; Brann, 1991). This opinion should be taken seriously. It is surely no accident that these views struck such a lasting chord in the minds of the Romantics' contemporaries and successors. Even recent psychologists, seemingly little burdened with Romantic ideology, still assume imagery must be a key factor in creative thought (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Weisberg, 1986).
Where it goes beyond mere distaste for Romantic posturing and metaphysical extravagance, the motivation behind the prevalent philosophical uneasiness with the Romantic notion of creative imagination arises, I suspect, from a not unreasonable suspicion that the theory of imagery which the Romantics inherited from their forebears, and which remains the "default" conception today (i.e. the picture/copy theory), is quite inadequate to explaining creativity.
Admittedly, picture theorists of the associationist tradition had an account of how we might imagine things never seen; through the separation and recombination of parts of pictorial images drawn from memory. Matthews (1969) disparagingly calls this "mental carpentry". We can, so the story goes, imagine a sphinx, for example, by taking the head from some memory image of a woman and sticking it onto the body from an image of a lion. Likewise, more modern technology suggests that we might also be able to "morph" our mental pictures, stretching, squashing, and bending their components into new forms. No doubt we really can in some way separate, shuffle, distort, and recombine features of our imagery, and no doubt the ability has its cognitive uses (Finke, Pinker, & Farah, 1989; Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992). However, this is hardly plausible as the fundamental basis of artistic and scientific creativity. Artistic creativity is not mere inventiveness, and it certainly does not amount to the reshuffling (or distortion) of bits of copies of former sense impressions. Perhaps because picture theory seems to have little more to offer, and because until very recently (on the philosophic time scale) picture theory was the only serious imagery theory around, æstheticians have grown skeptical about making any deep linkage between imagery and creativity.
But the Romantics clearly did not equate creativity with some capacity to shuffle and recombine image parts. Coleridge (1817/1975) called this latter ability "fancy", sharply distinguishing it from true imagination. Imagination was the initial capacity to form images, and, indeed percepts. Its role in artistic creativity was "secondary". In the "primary" sense of the term, imagination was "the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception" (Coleridge, 1817/1975), and the "principle of synthesis" (Shelley, 1840/1954): the capacity to comprehend the meaningless welter of incoming sensation, synthesizing it into a coherent, meaningful whole: the secret ingredient that turns mere mechanical receptivity into mental apprehension. This, in fact, was essentially the received, traditional philosophical understanding of imagination, deriving most directly from Kant, but ultimately from Neoplatonic expositions of Aristotle (which Coleridge knew well [Baker, 1957]), or, very arguably, from Aristotle himself (Nussbaum, 1978; Thomas, 1987, 1999a).
Unfortunately, nobody, from Aristotle onwards, had ever been able to give any naturalistic account of how this wonderful synthetic, meaning-creating capacity might work. Kant, at least, admitted the fact. He described it as "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover" (Kant, 1787/1929). Coleridge and the other poets left us instead with a mixture of warmed-over associationist notions, clearly inadequate to the demands being placed upon them, and fragments of grandiose idealist metaphysics, ripe for mystificatory appropriation. Perhaps in the age of cognitive science we can at last do better.
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