Imagination and the Imaginary

Kathleen Lennon

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317548812
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofia
• Categoria: Storia e teoria della filosofia

The concept of the imaginary is pervasive within contemporary thought, yet can be a baffling and often controversial term. In Imagination and the Imaginary, Kathleen Lennon explores the links between imagination - regarded as the faculty of creating images or forms - and the imaginary, which links such imagery with affect or emotion and captures the significance which the world carries for us.

Beginning with an examination of contrasting theories of imagination proposed by Hume and Kant, Lennon argues that the imaginary is not something in opposition to the real, but the very faculty through which the world is made real to us. She then turns to the vexed relationship between perception and imagination and, drawing on Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, explores some fundamental questions, such as whether there is a distinction between the perceived and the imagined; the relationship between imagination and creativity; and the role of the body in perception and imagination. Invoking also Spinoza and Coleridge, Lennon argues that, far from being a realm of illusion, the imaginary world is our most direct mode of perception. She then explores the role the imaginary plays in the formation of the self and the social world.

A unique feature of the volume is that it compares and contrasts a philosophical tradition of thinking about the imagination - running from Kant and Hume to Strawson and John McDowell - with the work of phenomenological, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and feminist thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Castoriadis, Irigaray, Gatens and Lloyd. This makes I magination and the Imaginary essential reading for students and scholars working in phenomenology, philosophy of perception, social theory, cultural studies and aesthetics.

Cover Image: Bronze Bowl with Lace, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, 2014. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Lelong and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photo Jonty Wilde.

1 The disenchanted world and the world of experience

Imagination and the imaginary

The concept of the imaginary is pervasive within contemporary writing concerning the self, the body and social groupings. The notion of the imaginary which is employed in this way may be broadly characterised as the affectively laden patterns/images/forms, by means of which we experience the world, other people and ourselves. This contemporary usage is distinguished most importantly by its constitutive linkage of imagery with affect, the emotions, feelings and desires which mark our engagement with the world. The images are the vehicles for such affect, the way in which it is given form. By means of these images the emotional contours of the subject’s world are revealed. They are the way in which we not only think, but also feel our way around. This use is indebted particularly to the work of Lacan, Castoriadis, and Irigaray.¹ In the important applications by Gatens and Lloyd² it is traced back to Spinoza. I will return to each of these in the discussions in later chapters, comparing them to the phenomenological writers who form the heart of this book. Sharing the constitutive link of image and affect these sources nonetheless have important differences. For Lacan the Imaginary³ is the domain of misrecognition and illusion, and it is a stage (moment) of development from which, although it remains in play, we move to the public Symbolic order. For him the Imaginary, initially an Imaginary of the self, is the illusion of a coherent and unified ego, which disguises from us the extent to which we are constituted by the working of the other within us (via the working of language, for example). For the other writers mentioned the imaginary, which extends beyond images of the self, is necessary for experience of any kind. Although we can criticise false and debilitating imaginaries, we cannot draw a sharp distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic, cognition and affect, between what is known and what is imagined. This will be the view defended here.

This book explores the links between such a concept of the imaginary and more traditional conceptions of the imagination, particularly that found in discussions of the relation between imagination and perception, for example in Hume and Kant. For Hume⁴ the imagination is the domain of mental images, faint copies of sensory impressions derived from perceptions. Here we have imagination as yielding mental or inner images; these images are distinct from sensory images and so imagination is distinct from perception, but the images are copies of perceptions or re-arrangements of elements which are copied from perception. The imagination then makes things which are absent in some way present. The imagination is nonetheless needed to supplement perception if we are to take our sensory data to be of spatio-temporal objects. For Kant,⁵ however, the imagination is at work in perception in a different way. It is the faculty by which sensory intuitions are given shape or form, without which perceptual experiences are not possible. It is not therefore simply a source of inner copies of sensory experience, but is needed to give shape to such experiences. It is the domain of images, but such images are not only items in our stream of consciousness, they provide the shape of the spatio-temporal world. Images, in this sense, weave together the sensory present with what is past, the projected future, and the spatial elsewhere. Thus imagination is that by which there is a world for us. This is the thesis which will be discussed and defended here. It will be suggested, following Kant, that the imagination is required for experiences of the world and for the creation of fictions or illusions. It is not, therefore, simply the activity of forming fictional/illusory/unreal/non-actual worlds, as some everyday usages might suggest. In Kant’s work on aesthetic judgments there is also an emphasis on the imagination as the domain of creativity, the images or forms which we experience not dictated by what we encounter, but remaining answerable to this and detectable by others. This thought will also turn out to be central in what follows.

In this book the concepts of the imagination and the imaginary, which are distilled through the chapters, take their starting point from Kant, but they are then routed through the writings of the phenomenologists. A conception of the imaginary emerges which characterises it not as a domain of illusion posited in opposition to a ‘real’, but rather as that by which the real is made available to us. (Here the real is, simply, the world, the actual, in contrast to thefictional, or illusory.) Central to this is a recognition of the imagination working within everyday experience, deriving from the characterisation of such experience provided particularly by Heidegger⁶ and Merleau-Ponty.⁷ The work of Sartre⁸ is also pivotal, although his fundamental distinction between perceiving and imagining consciousness is rejected. The working of the imagination within experience which is suggested is not, however, that of a synthesising transcendent subject delivering order to the world. Rather imagination is a (creative) capacity to experience the world in a certain way, in the form of images. This concept of image is much wider than what is sometimes taken to be its standard definition: ‘the internal [or external] representation of a sensory object in the absence of a corresponding sensory stimulus’.⁹ Instead images are conceived of in this work as the shapes or forms in terms of which we experience the world, which weave together the present and absent in a way that requires both invention and discovery, and remain open to possibilities of revision. As Merleau-Ponty points out:

The word image is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that the design was a tracing, a copy, a second thing and that the mental image was . . . belonging among our private bric a brac. But in fact it is nothing of the kind . . . They are [that] . . . without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.¹⁰

Such images can be sensory but we also have images of mathematical proofs, universals like love, the state of the country, social difference, the pattern of a life, etc. In some respect the notion of an image is close to the notion of an aspect in Wittgenstein’s discussion in the Philosophical Investigations,¹¹ and he himself says ‘the concept of an aspect is akin to the concept of an image’,¹² clarifying in relation to a puzzle picture: ‘I recognise not only that it has shape or colour but also a quite particular organisation’.¹³ However, the distinction which this remark might suggest between sensory content and organisational form is not one which will be maintained, for we shall see that to experience colour or shape also requires the imagination. To speak of images in this way, and of the imagination as that which concerns such images, is not to employ a usage quite removed from our everyday one. When we speak of people as imaginative, we do not usually mean that they live in a world of make believe, played out within their interior life. We often mean that they are particularly perceptive, sensitive to the shapes which the world around them can take.

This book therefore outlines what Merleau-Ponty coins ‘the imaginary texture of the real’.¹⁴ The imagination is at work in the everyday world which we perceive, the world as it is for us. What is important in linking this concept of the imaginary with that with which we began, the affectively laden patterns which constitute our sense of the world, others and ourselves, is to recognise that the working of the imagination within the world gives that world an affective texture. It has a salience and significance for us, suggesting and sometimes demanding the desiring and sometimes fearful responses we make to it. In the discussion in Chapter 4 this feature of images is spelt out by the suggestion that images are expressive, such that experiencing in terms of images provides normative anchorage for our desiring, fearful, etc., responses.

The treatment of imagination and the imaginary offered here is, therefore, distinct from at least two other directions of attention found in contemporary writing. There is, of course, much written about the fact that we live in the age of the image. Here, with particular emphasis on visual images, images are conceived of as representations, mostly public. Concern has been expressed that such representations have become increasingly self-referential,¹⁵ following a logic unconstrained by what they, in principle, represent; but able to be mistaken by their consumers to be a transparent copy of something beyond themselves.¹⁶ Much attention is also paid to the interpretation of such images against the background of a poststructuralist theory in which such content is contextual, indeterminate and open to indefinite reworking.¹⁷ This work will not directly address such concerns. Nonetheless the images which are the focus of such attention are a subcategory of images in the wider sense in which that term is used here. Not all images in this wider sense are representations. Nonetheless, in the account offered our experiences take the form of images, and images offered as representations can reorder the way in which we experience the world (see the discussion of works of art, particularly in Chapter 3). Moreover, the insights of poststructuralism, concerning the openness and indeterminacy of imagery, also have resonances for images in the wider sense adopted here. And such insights accrue to the saliences of our everyday experiences, as well as to the content of images offered as representations.

There is also work on the imagination within contemporary philosophy of mind, as part of its engagement with cognitive processing.¹⁸ One question concerns what is distinctive about thinking in images as opposed to linguistic thinking. Others concern how the creativity of the imagination is to be most appropriately modelled within functionalist accounts of mental processes. Another area of research involves the role of imagination in enabling us to understand others, perhaps by simulating their mental states. These concerns most commonly view the imagination as an inner mental faculty and the images it produces as part of the contents of our subjective conscious experience. Although the account offered in this book must allow for the possibility of mental images it does not take its starting points from images of this kind. These are only one type of image which the imagi...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The disenchanted world and the world of experience
• 2 Imagination and perception: the productive and reproductive imagination
• 3 Imagination and perception: the absent present and bodily synthesis
• 4 An 'affective logic'
• 5 Imaginary institution(s)
• 6 Imaginary selves
• 7 Bodily imaginaries and the flesh of existence
• Afterword
• Index