The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World 9780231548168

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Thinking Imagination
1. Consciousness And Modes Of Imagination
2. Evolving Imagination
3. Imagination, Perception, And Reality
4. Revealing And Making The World
5. The Embodied Life Of Imagining
6. Envisioning In The Mind’S Eye, And Other Imagings
7. Creativity As Situated Transcendence
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T H E L I F E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

THE

LIFE O F IMAGINATION Revealing and Making the World

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna, author. Title: The life of imagination : revealing and making the world / Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018010144 | ISBN 9780231189088 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231548168 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Imagination. Classification: LCC BF408 .G636 2018 | DDC 153.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010144

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: copyright © plainpicture/neuebildanstalt/Bilderbergwerk

FOR ALDEN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

INTRODUCTION: THINKING IMAGINATION

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1. CONSCIOUSNESS AND MODES OF IMAGINATION 2. EVOLVING IMAGINATION

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3. IMAGINATION, PERCEPTION, AND REALITY 4. REVEALING AND MAKING THE WORLD 5. THE EMBODIED LIFE OF IMAGINING

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117 159

6. ENVISIONING IN THE MIND’S EYE, AND OTHER IMAGINGS 7. CREATIVITY AS SITUATED TRANSCENDENCE EPILOGUE

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Notes 257 Bibliography Index 331

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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esearch and writing for this project was undertaken at the Research Centre at St. John’s College, Oxford, and continued during an affiliation with the Balzan Foundation Project, “Literature as an Object of Knowledge,” also based at St. John’s College, Oxford. Fordham University in New York City provided faculty fellowship leave, and the University of Birmingham in the UK research leave, both of which aided the realization of this book. Reviewers provided helpful commentary on the manuscript. I am incalculably indebted to my family and to others too numerous to name for inspiration and insight on the topics considered here.

T H E L I F E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

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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INTRODUCTION

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.

1 CONSCIOUSNESS AND MODES OF IMAGINATION

M

any different kinds of experiences arise from imagination or are in a distinctive sense imaginatively endowed. Human beings project hypothetical scenarios, fantasize and daydream. We play and pretend, draw, design, and build architectural works, invent new things, perform rituals, paint and gaze at paintings, compose songs and choreograph dances, and immerse ourselves in the worlds of literature, of theatrical, cinematic, and musical works. We see the world not only as neutral matter, as data to be processed, but as evocative of aesthetic and symbolic meanings and regard things in light of their possibilities. We ponder the origins of the universe, and its vast expanses, multiple dimensions, and other matters of which we can never have direct experience. While sometimes we strain to grasp others’ points of view, on other occasions we are struck as if an echo of others’ experience were happening within ourselves and we consider their predicament in that light. We fictionalize, embellishing stories and inventing new ones, we adapt an existing object to new purposes, express new thoughts, make jokes, contrive new modes of expression, and interpret the world in novel ways. To such activities we owe much of the felicity, drama, and meaning of our human experience. A satisfactory account of imagination must recognize, and attempt to explain the grounds for, its role in such possibilities as these.

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We begin by considering as a constellation of activities those that allow human beings, by their presentation of some aspect of thought or world, to potentially alter or augment it. Imagination offers a means to reflect on and transform (whether only ideally or materially) what is or has been given to consciousness, including all our experiences in the surrounding world. Accordingly, imagination can be initially defined as the presentational and transformational activity of human consciousness, the latter understood as both intentional and embodied. Beginning here—and in turn elaborating some of its core modes of activity—will allow us to address the multiple ways in which imagination is involved in human cognition and contributes to shaping our experience.

INTENTIONALITY AND EMBODIMENT, PRESENTATION AND TRANSFORMATION Before describing imaginative activity, however, our notion of consciousness itself must be described in a way that will accommodate imagination, the evolutionary and developmental origins of which will be described in the next chapter. Consciousness, as that flow of cognitive, perceptual, and affective vitality through which we are aware of the world and ourselves, is understood here as both intentional and embodied. By intentional, a term drawn from phenomenology, it is meant that consciousness is always conscious of something. Like all modes of consciousness, imagination is not a thing or a quality of mind, but a relational activity. Strictly speaking, it would be better to speak not of what imagination is but of what imagination does, and of how and in what ways it operates and on what objects of consciousness. Where imagination is active, there is always an evoked or created object of imagining, yet this is not to be confused with a thing inhering in the mind. Imagining may be experienced in what feels to be a predominantly interior mode, such as when we think privately to ourselves about something not immediately present or actual. We can for instance imagine a sunny beach, or winning a marathon, while sitting indoors at our desk. Or our imagining may be related to something directly given to perception, such as when we see faces in the clouds or look at materials directly at hand and envision something

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we could make from them. In either case, an object of imagining is never a kind of substance in my head, as it were, but an experiential presentation of possibility, sometimes one toward which action can be directed. With embodied, we overcome the modern philosophical conception of consciousness that separates it essentially from its basis in a living, perceiving body in the physical world. Of course, much imagining happens in our thoughts alone, invisible to others, which lends itself to the idea that imagining takes place “elsewhere,” in a mind apart from physical and material life. Yet, even in this case, consciousness borrows much of its subject matter—with which it can take innumerable liberties—from direct perception or from schematically stored memories of the world perceived. Imagination draws from the world through the sensing body. Even when its operations take place mentally rather than through communicative or material expression, imagination relies upon the embodied basis of thinking, grounded both in the brain and its connections throughout the body and in interaction with the world. Embodied interaction involves perceptual, motoric, and kinesthetic processes, all of which have begun to be explored as the ground for linguistic and symbolic meaning and for the imaginative manipulation of ideas.1 Imagination is also related to cognitive resonance, our reactions to observed activities of others. In observing others perform such actions as grasping, eating, or reaching, our own neurological responses involved in such motoric action are provoked.2 Yet even imagining an action (thinking of what that action would be like or inwardly imagining performing an action) involves some of the neural mechanisms in the brain as the action itself would.3 In addition to neuroscientific evidence, recent evolutionary anthropology, as we will see in the next chapter, attests to the embodied roots of the development of human cognition, including imagination. In spite of the conceptual separation of mind and body persisting until recently in the Western philosophical tradition, imagination’s connection to the body has long offered a source of anxiety, since imagination was assigned to a mediating role. In “On the Force of Imagination,” Montaigne argued that mental operations of imagining affect the body in a myriad of ways. We can have physical reactions to interior images, as they may stimulate, for example, longing, fear, anxiety, hunger, or desire. The reverse holds, too, for we can have symbolic and imagistic responses to embodied experiences as they give rise to metaphors, imagery, and linguistic

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meaning.4 While the embodied nature of cognition itself—its intimate involvement through the body with the surrounding world—has been widely acknowledged for a few decades, the imagination as a form of embodied cognition leaves much to be explored. The fact that much imagining is experienced in the mind, without any apparent material expression, has led many philosophers to consider inner representation as definitive of imagination as such. In this mode, most human beings can think about and present, often in quasi-visual, quasiauditory, and other ways that call upon or evoke sensation, something to our minds that is not present to perception. This mode of imagining has been central to accounts of imagination throughout much of the Western philosophical tradition, for instance in Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant (in his notion of “reproductive” imagination), Husserl, and Sartre. Indeed, Eva Brann’s encyclopedic study of concepts of imagining from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century defines imagination as “a faculty for internal representations,” and these representations are predominantly regarded as sensuous in nature.5 The representations are not sensations themselves, of course, but convey something like a visual or other perception. By presenting representative images or perceptlike schemata, imagination has been thought to serve in this capacity to mediate, within the mind, between the senses and the intellect, between perceptions and thoughts. The nature of imagining “in the mind”s eye” will be discussed more fully later and connected to other forms of sensuous imagining (in chapter 6). In other chapters (especially chapters 2, 5, and 7) the origins of imagination in embodied life will be examined in relation to evolutionary cognitive development, embodied performance, as well as the less manifestly corporeal arts, and creative thought. Two terms from the definition of imagination offered previously still need clarification. Imagination is a mode of intentionality that is presentational. This evokes what Husserl called imagination’s capacity for Vergegenwärtigung, or making-present.6 By presentational is meant something that is brought to the fore or made present for consciousness. This may be in the form of visual imaging, and so reflects somewhat the traditional definition of imagination as a faculty for internal representation, or it may be materially or otherwise manifest. Yet presentation as used here has the advantage of mimetic neutrality—it can accommodate imaginings that seem wholly derived from previous experiences, or those that may at some

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level be considered a novel creation. A presentation, in other words, can be either a re-presentation or a novel presentation, or some combination of both, and it can be mental or also manifestly material. But even if what we imagine seems merely derivative in comparison to what we perceive, the imaginative presentation is not itself merely a copy of sense experience but a distinctive mode of consciousness of whatever is imagined. It has been argued that “the image is no more a faint copy of an original percept, its pale simulacrum, than a butterfly is a faint copy of a caterpillar. Images are things with creativity built right into them.”7 An imaginative presentation that draws from previous experience involves some level of transformation. What is presented or brought to presence in the mind can appear in a number of ways. An imaginative presentation can, but need not be, quasivisual in nature, such as in imagining a blue star on a white background. This is “quasi”-visual because an inner envisioned image differs in important ways from a perceptual vision—not least because perception is sustained by the presence of the object, whereas “an imagined object does not remain present to us in an abiding manner; to keep it before our mental gaze, we must constantly re-imagine it.”8 Apart from visual ones, presentations can have many other phenomenal qualities: the image can be emotional or affective (imagining grief or joy), tactile (imagining coldness or brittleness), can evoke taste (imagining biting into a lemon), can be auditory (imagining a cry or a melody), kinesthetic (imagining leaping or kicking), or interoceptive (imagining thirst or pain). Presentation can also be conceptual: I can entertain the idea of having memorized the telephone book or having been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, whether or not either imagining has any strictly sensuous component. Moreover, the presentation by imagination can be material, as in the case of artistic or other expression. Exploratory drawing, sculpting, or painting, without a preconceived plan, could involve an original presentation that is not mere reproduction of previous thoughts; the same may be the case for improvisation in jazz music, unscripted comedy, or unchoreographed dance. In this chapter we will identify several core modes of imaginative presentation—imaging, various kinds of seeing-as, hypothesizing or counterfactual thinking, entertaining a thought or undertaking an action in the mode of pretense, and creativity. In each of these modes imagination brings forth, in the interior experience or also, where expressed

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through language or physical patterns or performance or pictures or sounds, in the world for others to experience, what was not there prior to the imaginative act. But, as hinted, the presentational facility of imagination also involves at least an incipient, potential transformation, if not always a fully realized one, while some of its modes, such as creativity, are robustly transformational. By transformational is meant that the presentation initiates and executes a change in the given object or expression of imagining. When we merely call to mind the image of an object—say, of an eagle soaring—that is not present in perception, there is a phenomenal transformation, from nonappearing to appearing within consciousness. What is not present (the eagle image, drawn largely from memory), appears. This appearance is not strictly speaking merely a reproduction—for the inner image is not a visual thing in my mind, as it were, copied from a previous perception, but a schematically structured experience constructed on the basis of memory—while the possibility of further, explicit transformation is also ever latent. As one philosopher observes: “When a percept is transformed into a memory image, undergoing a genuine metamorphosis— let alone when radically novel images are generated—the mind is already operating at a high level of creativity, as measured by the distance between the percept as input and the image as output.”9 Exemplifying the further, deliberately transformative exercise of imagination, we can imagine the eagle hunting its prey, or returning to its chicks in the nest, or flying backward, or colored purple; or we can combine the eagle’s head and wings with other presentations such as of a lion’s body to make a griffin. The possibilities of combination, of course, are limitless, while transformational activity may go further to generate new ideas and may be engaged in material creativity. Before turning to such imaginative generation, the obvious fact should be mentioned that the imagination can take associative and indeed transformative flights that are not directed by the will. Dreams and hallucinations are examples of imaginings that do not involve any conscious control, but both present and transform objects of consciousness, and this has been of interest to a number of philosophers.10 Spontaneous inner imaging, in certain cases, may be mistaken for other activities of cognition, including perception and memory, and may secure belief. In any conscious mind, moreover, there may come to mind imaginings

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unresponsive to reasoned consideration, arising and persisting through anxiety, fear, or other strong emotion.11 The involvement of the will may be somewhat ambiguous, too, even in more playful flights of association. In the mental game of catastrophizing, the imagination of one seemingly inconsequential event sets off a series of associations that culminate in disaster—much as in the popular characterization of chaos theory, in which a butterfly landing on a petal sets off a causal chain provoking an earthquake across the globe. In making such associations imaginatively, the mind may seem to be both directing its own thoughts and, at the same time, to be pulled along by the train of implicit (conceptual, linguistic, symbolic) associations among the various objects of imagining that arise in sequence. In addition to its uncontrolled presentations, imaginings may fail to appear when we wish them to. Yet whenever imagination is consciously directed, or pressed onward by motivation, we are able to create experiences and thoughts that are neither prescribed by immediate reality before us, nor predetermined by prior imaginings, and thus the imagination has been long associated with freedom.12 Kant defines the productive imagination as a “spontaneity.”13 For imaginings can arise—the aforementioned associations notwithstanding—without any apparent cause, while provoking a will to imagine further; they can be freely altered, and in almost limitless ways. Such imagination can be primarily reproductive and combinatorial, but in some cases may also be considered significantly productive and newly generative.

TRANSFORMATION AND PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION Imagination can be considered productive wherever it contrives or constructs something new that, even where borrowing elements from the already known and experienced reality, exceeds it in some significant way. In the more general sense of the word (to which a more technical rendering can be soon appended), productive imagining intends and, in so doing, generates an object that cannot be said to have preexisted, or entirely preexisted, the imagining. Productive imagining thus exceeds the traditional representational model of imagination, according to

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which “in imagining we cannot claim to confront anything radically new.”14 Some element of productivity may be implicitly recognized in a view of imagination’s capacities that, even while characterized as “recreative,” allow us to shift perspective and to make leaps of thought that surprise or defy convention.15 Recently, and despite its emphasis on the combination of old ideas, conceptual blending theory describes how emergent new meaning comes to be created through new blends, and in its association with imagination lends some (albeit not unqualified) support to a productive account.16 Of course, productive activities of imagination inevitably interweave with reproductive ones, and, though imagination may “jump the tracks” along which “consecutive reason is constrained to drive itself,” even freewheeling imagining may follow associative grooves.17 In exercises of imagining, whether in mental association or in expressive creativity, we begin with ideas and images that are already known to us. If one is asked to imagine a teacup, one begins with what would be traditionally considered but a reproduction from experience. The further play of association may lead to yet further reproductions, though these can be engaged in ways that generate novelty. From imagining a teacup, what images might follow? One may point to immediate associations from everyday life—tea, milk, sugar, lemon, for instance, at the kitchen table, all of which are conjured from memory. One might then think of the delicious little jam tarts a friend always brings to tea, along with grammatical observations and gossip. I may imagine a Japanese tea ceremony, then a bonsai tree, or objects or concepts that begin with the letter t. If one has just visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the provocation of “teacup” may, instead, bring to mind Meret Oppenheim’s artwork Object, made in Paris in 1936, composed of a teacup, saucer, and spoon, all rather surprisingly lined with fur. Oppenheimer’s Object provokes unique visual attention through contrasting associations, since “a canonic form (cup) is given new meaning through the use of conflicting contextual clues (fur).”18 Whatever one’s aesthetic response to such a work, we can say that this furry teacup is at once a creative construction out of familiar ideas and, as an aesthetic object, a new creation, provocative of a novel response. The mad tea party from Louis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland could equally illustrate the emergence of novel ideas out of familiar

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ones. James Joyce, in the novel Ulysses, traces Leopold Bloom’s musing in front of the Dublin shop window of the East India Tea Company and in so doing illustrates how associative imagining can be inflected with spontaneity. Beginning with faraway places where tea originates, Bloom follows his associations to the Dead Sea and soon contemplates the law of gravity. The inexhaustible range of possibilities for productive association is hinted at in Wallace Stevens’s remark that “the whole world is less susceptible to metaphor than a tea-cup is.”19 But it is of course the case with every imagining that it may be provocative of still further imaginings. It is when these come to be formed in new ways, invigorated with possibility, that imagination does not merely “reproduce reality,” but render objects of thought that are “not bound by an original that precedes them.”20 The reproductive view of imagination, of course, has a long history. Plato, for example, regarded imagination used by poets and painters as but the reproduction of sense experience. In such modes of bringingforth as Plato describes them, there seems to be no genuine creativity involved, despite the fact that Plato referred to poets as making or producing appearances.21 Painting, which is also treated as an analogy for poetry, is criticized in The Republic for being merely a copying, and potentially a distorting copying, of the objects of sense perception and thus for Plato of perceptions already removed from the essential truth of things. Imitation gives not reality but “appearance as it appears.”22 While Plato also understands artists as subject to divine inspiration, any creativity originating in the artistic mind itself is reduced to an externalization of inner representation, that is to say, of imagination, itself but a copy of sense experience. In contrast, we can take as an example of a distinct object of productive imagining a fictional character. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while dependent upon ideas Shakespeare and his audience would need to have had about human beings, men, princes, sons, and so forth—and in that respect could be said to represent but a combination of those previously held ideas—is also a novel idea produced through imaginative expression. The character Hamlet, with his agonized self-reflection, is a fictional idea that may not be entirely reduced to the world that preexisted its invention, to what Shakespeare could have drawn from life or from other literature. Paul Ricoeur calls the work of productive imagination in such fictions “productive reference.”23 For the idea “Hamlet” refers to an idea produced

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imaginatively in and through Shakespeare’s reference to it (along with, potentially, that of the actor, audience, or reader of the play). Of course, the drama Shakespeare presents in the work was not entirely new to literature: it is well known that some psychological aspects of Hamlet’s predicament are figured in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, and the very name of the character is speculated to have been adapted from that of Shakespeare’s own son. Other elements, such as the royal fratricide, could have been borrowed from history or from Shakespeare’s literary contemporaries. Yet in Shakespeare’s drama an idea is produced that is nevertheless novel. I may of course merely reproduce this once novel idea in recalling the idea of Hamlet, available to anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s work or its iterations. But to the extent that, for instance by reading the play for the first time, or by reading it again with a new degree of understanding and insight, or by attending or even acting in a performance of the play that brings the character to life for me in a new way, I imaginatively engage the idea of Hamlet, even my receptive imagination does not only reproduce it but bring it to virtual life in what Roman Ingarden describes as a new “concretization.”24 Against the long-standing notion that literature merely represents reality, Ricoeur argued that fictions are not merely “complex ideas whose components are derived from previous experience,” but rather present us with a “new combination which has no reference in a previous original.”25 Other scholars have described the novelty of particular elements of fiction—such as a narrator’s direct access to multiple other minds—that are irreducible to anything found in reality.26 The distinction between reproductive and productive imagination can be traced back to Kant, who uses various terms for imagination in his critical works on theoretical, moral, and aesthetic cognition. The meaning of reproductive imagination in Kant seems to be the clearer of the two uses, while productive imagination is more variably employed. For Kant, reproductive imagination (reproduktive Einbildungskraft) is the capacity to bring to mind the intuition of an object in its absence and so is derivative of experience. In this respect imagination is regarded, as in much of the tradition since Aristotle, as internal representation.27 But Kant also distinguishes the productive imagination (produktive Einbildungskraft) as a transcendental condition of experience, contributing as it does to the formal construction of our phenomenal framework, a perspective from which the subject experiences the world. This productive imagination is at first

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glance more fundamental than the creative productivity with which Ricoeur associates the notion. For productive imagination is, in Kant’s view, the original capacity of the mind to bring together or synthesize sense impressions with understanding that makes human experience coherent and underlies our perception of the world. Productive imagination in this sense operates a priori, as an activity below our conscious awareness making experience as we know it possible. But Kant also considers a role for the productive imagination in the context of concrete aesthetic experience and works of creativity, and it is in this latter sense that productive imagination has been adapted more recently. Ricoeur adapts the notion of productive imagining from Kant to account for robust forms of transformation or creation such as occur in fiction, art, and the construction of utopian ideals. Ricoeur claims that “imagination is ‘productive’ not only of unreal objects, but of an expanded vision of reality,” and thus he writes that “imagination at work—in a work—produces itself as a world.”28 In the background of such a claim is also Aristotle’s suggestion about the capacity of poetic thinking to contemplate, and to construct the framework for the expression of, possibilities or of “what could happen.” For in the poetic presentation of what could happen, or the nonactual in the mode of possibility, imagination generates something new. Historical works, for example, can represent what we already know from the world or what Aristotle would call the actual or the particular. But poetry, however much it may draw from history, also evokes the possible. The integration of reproductive imagination with the productive presentation of possibility exceeds reference to the actual world and expands a vision of the possible world. When imagination is primarily reproductive, the presentation can be robust or thin, while the transformational facility can be more and less active in recombining elements drawn from previous experience. When the imagination is productive in the sense just described, the transformational aspect is vital, to the extent that we can say that a genuinely new—at least new to the imagining subject—idea or image or expression or insight emerges. This capacity for presentation and transformation in this more vital sense is neglected in traditional theories of imagination that define it wholly as reproductive representation. Nevertheless, imagination’s productive power does seem to haunt, throughout the conceptual history, those philosophical efforts to curtail or deny imagination’s

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influence. Transformative or productive imagination reflects, as Stevens described it, “the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.”29 We will describe several manifestations of this power in the chapters that follow.

IMAGINATION IN ITS MULTIPLE MODES Now that the terms of our approach to imagination have been defined, we can turn to several modes of imagination that must be included in its scope. Keeping in mind that activities of imagining may engage more than one mode simultaneously, five modes of imagining can be identified here. Inner imaging evokes, in the absence of stimuli, a quasi-perceptual or kinesthetic experience, whether visual, auditory, motoric, or otherwise. Concrete imaging—seeing-as, aesthetic, or symbolic seeing— endows perception with a symbolic, affective, or quasi-perceptual surplus. While cued to perception, imagination here supplements strictly perceptual content so that a perception is amplified by symbolic or aesthetic significance or is seen in terms of, or standing for, another. Hypothetical or counterfactual imagining affords thought about scenarios or states of affairs that may be the case or that contrast to the actual. Pretense, related to these, involves invoking the experiential aspects of such a scenario or state, as if one were undergoing it or as if it pertained to reality. Pretense is also related to seeing-as, as when props are taken as if they were the thing they represent or actors are taken as if they were the characters they play. Creativity is the transformative engagement of mental or material sources to generate new (iconic, linguistic, material, or corporeal) expressions, new ideas or objects. Creativity engages any or all of the aforementioned modes of imagining, but in elaborating them makes especial use of cognitive play. Later in this book we will describe further activities, beneath the level of awareness, that may be attributable to imagination, activities which enable us to engage a world imbued with possibilities and with contextualizing horizons that exceed the objects of our immediate experience. Philosophical taxonomies of imagination, of course, have heretofore categorized these modes in different ways and have offered further

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differentiations. Many accounts of imagination emphasize inner imaging.30 Others focus on pretense and may regard hypothetical thinking or other modes in that context.31 Seeing-as has been employed in aesthetics to describe only receptive experience,32 but has also been associated with pretense, such as when props for imagining are seen as the objects intended in play.33 For some philosophers, imagining is predominantly propositional in nature (“imagining that”), and imaging is dismissed as inessential,34 while for others imagination is primarily imaging, and pretense is excluded.35 Some modes of imagining have been categorized as “experiential” or “sensuous” imagining, such that the imaginer creates a quasi-perceptual imaging of an object or activity, as opposed to “cognitive,” “conceptual,” or “propositional” imagining, which requires no perceptual-sensuous component. Furthermore, the distinction has been made between “subjective” and “objective” imagining, depending upon whether in experiential imagining one imagines only the object or activity as such, or explicitly includes oneself as the agent thereof,36 or the evoked source of the experience is internal or external to the imaginer (such as, respectively, the feeling of hunger and the visualisation of a tree).37 While creativity is often left out of, or considered apart from, imagination,38 here creativity will be understood as the expressive elaboration of other modes of imagination, in deliberate engagement of cognitive play. Some of the modes of imagining may coincide. For example, for a dancer enacting the part of the swan princess in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, imaging may be inseparable from pretense, whether the dancer envisions a swan, or herself as swan, or the evocation of swan likeness is incorporated through movement in the dancer’s body schema. For the absorbed viewer, the pretense involved in taking the dancer for the humananimal character may engage a symbolic form of seeing-as. For the remainder of this chapter, we will take a closer look at each of these modes of imagining and then turn to a brief consideration of the lexicon of terms for imagination and its attending complications.

Inner Imaging Perhaps most pervasive form of imagining is that of inner imaging. As suggested before, this has been traditionally described as internal

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representation, but may be better described as presentational imagining with some experiential aspect. Through this mode of imagination, we can “image,” or evoke or intuit objects and experiences experientially and quasi-sensorily, where those objects or stimuli are absent. Sometimes calling to mind does not have a quasi-sensorious component—I can think of innumerable objects through primarily conceptual rather than sensuous presentation—but when such conceiving involves a quasi-sensuous element I am inwardly imaging.39 For instance, I am sitting in the kitchen looking at a cup of tea, but the content of my attention is not limited to my current perceptual input. Whether or not I must close my eyes to do so, I can image, or call to mind in a quasi-sensuous way, as if sitting with me, a British prime minister or all the actors who have played James Bond. Moreover, I can combine these recalled images. I can imagine a certain James Bond (choose your actor) at the table with Winston Churchill. I can imagine (though just barely) Winston Churchill himself attempting to play James Bond or conjure my James Bond imitating Winston Churchill. Of course, inner imaging is not only visual but can evoke other senses as well. I can imagine that we are all drinking expertly crafted martinis and I can also imagine the taste and smell of the concoction. I can imagine voices and laughter in ways that do not reproduce, but do evoke, auditory experiences. For evocations of other embodied sensations, I can imagine the sensation of balancing on a high wire, of falling, of an embrace, a kiss, a hot bath, or of hunger, all the while sitting in my chair satiated and unmoving. I can imagine running under a hot afternoon sun, swimming in a cold ocean, floating in the water, or dropping a teacup. Motor and kinesthetic imagery has recently come to be included in accounts of experiential or perceptual imagining long dominated by vision.40 While these examples of fairly simple imaging may be predominantly presentational, all such imagining is at least latently transformational: just as I can imaginatively conjure what is not there, and so have already brought about a change, I am not restricted to a given impression but can vary, combine, synthesize, such impressions toward the generation of something new. If I inwardly image the perceptual equivalents in construction of a new idea, imagination is also manifestly productive and can be elaborated in creative expression. In auditory imagining, such productivity could range from the birth of a new musical phrase or inventing a simple melody to the composition in the mind of an entirely new symphony, as Mozart was reportedly able to do.

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While we will return to inner visual imagining in detail in a later chapter, it should be mentioned here that the concept of inner imaging has been visited with controversy as to whether imagination and inner representation should be considered iconic (imagistic) in nature, or conceptual or propositional (nonimagistic), and as to whether inner imagery is relevant at all in the kinds of evocations we have described. While Descartes explicitly treated inner images as quasi-visual presentations that could be distinguished from nonvisual concepts, Gilbert Ryle denied inner images, claiming that imagining is propositional in nature41—I can imagine that I am seeing James Bond, which does not require any image of James Bond involved, but merely my pretending that I see him. But in recent decades the case for visual imagery has been revived, with researchers in cognitive psychology demonstrating that the activity in the visual cortex, similar to that involved in visual perception, can be observed as subjects inwardly imagine.42 There is not of course a “picture” in the mind, but the object of visual imaging as mode of directed consciousness both may have for the imaginer some visual-like quality and rely on some of the same neural processes as that of perceptual seeing. While the controversy has largely surrounded envisioning, inner imaging is not exhausted by visuality, but rather includes other evocations originating in perceptual, affective, motoric, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic experience.43

Concrete Imaging: Seeing-as, Aesthetic, and Symbolic Perception Somewhat related to inner imaging, are forms of what we might call concrete imaging: seeing-as, aesthetic, and symbolic perception. Both inner imaging and concrete imaging are both quasi-sensuous in nature, but while imaging sustains no connection with present perception, concrete imagings arise from and remain dependent upon an actual (rather than past) perceptual experience. In such imagining we evoke in excess of perception a symbolic, figurative, or aesthetic surplus that informs our reception of the actual perceptual object. Seeing-as, sometimes called “aspect perception,” involves, for example, seeing one object in terms of another (as when lines on a page make out the figure of a rabbit), which becomes noticeable when there is a shift in the aspect (those same lines now look to me like a duck). Wittgenstein described

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a variety of related phenomena as seeing-as in addition to his famous duck/ rabbit example, including seeing a face, first unrecognized, suddenly as familiar, seeing a triangle as a mountain on its side, and so forth. We could add seeing faces in the clouds or, as Leonardo described, seeing figures of dancers in the marks on a wall.44 Seeing-as often involves bringing a concept to bear, and may be continuous rather than only ephemeral, and thus has been described in its linguistic implications.45 Aspectival seeing maintains a perceptual element, and in some cases for Wittgenstein it explicitly “requires imagination.” Seeing-as is comparable to the experience of imaging, as Wittgenstein described: “The concept of an aspect is akin to the concept of an image. In other words: the concept ‘I am now seeing it as . . .’ is akin to ‘I am now having this image.’”46 Seeing-as is related to pictorial perception and thus treated in aesthetics, but may be also related to aesthetic seeing in more than picture consciousness.47 For seeing a landscape as beautiful, as will be described in chapter  3, involves some imaginative mediation on the part of the perceiving subject. Of course, imagination has long been held to be distinct from perception, whether as its mere echo or as a wholly different mode of consciousness, including by Wittgenstein himself.48 Yet in experiences of imaginatively amplified perception—as in seeing one thing as something else or as imbued with a certain aesthetic quality or symbolic meaning—imagination and perception are mutually implicating. The stars that are seen as making the shape of a ladle are not confused with the imagined ladle; the mountain seen as majestic or even divine can still be perceived in terms of independent, objective qualities (in its geological features or in comparing its height to surrounding mountains, for example). Yet the imagining is dependent upon the perceptual experience, while the perceptual experience may be influenced by—attuned, colored, imbued with—the imaginative.

Hypothetical and Counterfactual Thinking Through imagination we are able to entertain ideas that contradict reality or are considered in a conditional mode. I can imagine, for instance, that the earth is flat. I can imagine, on a gray rainy day, that the sun is shining. I can postulate that if the sun were shining I would go for a walk in the

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park. This may involve some quasi-sensuous evocation: imagining that the sun is shining might for many imaginers evoke warmth or bright light. Yet the experiential content in hypothetical or counterfactual thinking may vary considerably, depending on the content of the imagining as well as the imaginer. I can imagine that I had been born in the eighteenth century with or without inwardly evoking an imagined experience of the same. I can imagine that I am a descendant of Napoleon without filling out that counterfactual with attendant experiential evocations. I can imagine swimming, or imagine that I am swimming, and while the former will evoke considerable experiential aspect, the latter may or may not do so. But all such thinking involves shifting perspective from reality to consider an alternative—a capacity relevant not only to fiction and fantasizing but to scientific hypotheses and rational thinking more generally.49 Our existential speculations about the future and past, or wondering about alternatives to our own reality, also involve hypothetical thinking: how would my life change if I were to make this decision, rather than another? What would it be like if I were to quit my job and move to Paris? What would have happened if I had studied painting or theater or medicine instead of philosophy, or if I had been born in a very different place? This thinking can also yield opportunities for imagining perspectives other than my own. On the more fanciful side, imagining that I am Napoleon facing a crucial decision entails some effort at cognitive identification—taking up the perspective of another, as it were, “from the inside” or at least creating a sense of an experience in which the perspective could be that of another.50 This cognitive identification further invites some construction on my part of a fictional situation, some experiential conjuring of what it might be like. It is important that I can cognitively, even if not subjectively, identify with such a perspective—even if I am unable, that is, to imagine myself as a diminutive Frenchman from Corsica on a horse in a big hat conquering great expanses of Europe. That hypothetical thinking can involve the entertainment of other points of view than the one I am currently occupying bears relation to social empathy or identification with others in social and moral life. Resonating with others’ points of view can happen at a prereflective level, but we can also ask ourselves explicitly, “what would I do if I were in their shoes?” or “would I too react in such a way to such circumstances?” and elaborate upon these questions imaginatively.

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Pretense and Pretending Related to hypothetical thinking is pretense, but it deserves particular attention because of the avenues it opens up toward the imaginative undertaking of corresponding experiential states. By using imagination, we can entertain the thought of a given scenario or pretend. We imagine not only that such and such is the case, but how it would be experienced. Pretense involves not only conceiving of but also undergoing a form of virtual experience respective to an imagined scenario. Such imagining-how involves “an ongoing, internally developmental quality” that is absent from cases of imagining-that; the state of affairs develops “with a sense of inner movement” and is always witnessed from a position internal to that development.51 It is presentational, in creating and evoking an experiential state that is like having the corresponding experience, and transformative, both in that the constructed alternative departs from reality and alters one’s attitude and comportment toward present perceptions. Pretending is a particular exercise of pretense that is taken up through inwardly considered or manifest action: to pretend is to coordinate the pretensive actions of imagining with a projected scenario.52 Robust pretense is thus distinct from other counterfactual or hypothetical thinking in that it necessarily involves an experiential component, alters the relation to ordinary reality, and is in important ways an  embodied experience.53 Admittedly, some forms of pretense may not demand a significant exercise of imagination. In a game of poker, it suffices to feign a lousy hand by striking a certain expression, but this may be more convincing if I also imaginatively evoke for myself the appropriate affect. But more involved pretense would require ongoing evocation of the experience. Pretending to be Hamlet can be distinguished from entertaining the idea of being Hamlet in that the former necessitates an experiential construction, directs further action, and suspends ordinary participation in nonpretended reality. Whereas pretending to be Hamlet requires imagining that I am Hamlet, merely imagining that I am Hamlet does not require pretending that this is the case—does not have to require suspending, in other words, the perception and knowledge that I am not and undertaking imagined experiences or actions as if I were. The actor playing Hamlet well, and thus pretending to be Hamlet, not only speaks

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the relevant lines but also evokes the feelings and other experiential qualities that correspond to the character in a given scene. Unless the actor breaks character, he will not, while pretending to be Hamlet, respond when called by his given, non-Shakespearean name; such a Hamlet will not respond to a call for “Kenneth Branagh” or “Ralph Fiennes,” for example, or undertake actions that contradict his being Hamlet. He may entertain thoughts corresponding to the concerns of Hamlet’s world: his father’s murder, his mother’s subsequent marriage to his uncle, an inability for decisive action, a questioning of existential purpose, and so forth. Pretense and hypothetical and counterfactual imagining share a common relation to human cognitive development. Indeed, it has been suggested that pretend play allows children to develop the capacity for rational thinking.54 The activities of pretense and pretending, in the form of make-believe, have been suggested to lie at the origin of our capacity not only for play but for storytelling, creative narrative, and literature.55 In such activities, reality is not denied, but rather made reflectively available for comparison with an imagined alternative.

Creativity With imagination, we can negotiate with the given to create something new, whether an idea or an expression or a physical object. This mode encompasses, elaborates, and expresses imagining in any configuration of its modes. Creativity requires resources, which may be drawn from previous experiences stored in memory (and thus “imaged” or called to mind), perceptions from the presently experienced world, or materials at hand. Creativity demands a medium for its elaborations, whether ideas and language, material stuff, images, the movements of the body, or sound and means of making it. Creativity can be interior, such as when we conjure up an idea, “dream up” a plan or design, or construct a story in our minds. It becomes communicatively expressed as well as elaborated through some form of materialization, whether linguistic, iconic, musical, or embodied, or a combination of these. Often the realization and materialization coincide with the generation and elaboration of ideas. Creativity involves the integration of possibilities. Such creativity may be practical, as when new tools or recipes are invented, or a new method is

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discovered for executing a particular task. Creativity may be aesthetic, its expressions or products meant primarily for perceptual enjoyment or provocation. It may be scientific, as when formulating a new theory to explain known facts, designing a new experiment, constructing a new method to approach a problem. It may also be linguistic, as when new terms or metaphors are created—new combinations of existing words able to express new thoughts. Semantic innovation may offer a new way not only of expressing a sentiment or idea but also of thinking about its content.56 Creativity incorporates other modes of imagining. We can “image” (or bring to mind an image of), say, a lion, with little creativity involved. Yet the act of bringing to the mind what was not there before, the deliberate provocation of memory, initiates the latent possibility of further transformation and elaboration. If I can bring to mind a lion, why not then something else—a mouse, for instance? Nothing prevents, in my idealization or imaging, the lion from eating the mouse, or the mouse from eating the lion, or both from singing a duet. Should I as imaginer proceed to generate in some medium further elaboration of these ideas, I may produce a fable or or an animated film or a political cartoon. Our ability for creative transformations not only leads to fictions but may afford means to see reality from a different perspective. Of course, not all creating is imaginative creation or “creativity” as such. We can create a product, for instance assemble a model or bake a cake, by strictly following instructions, without any significant exercise of imagination. Imaginative creation, in contrast, integrates possibility in such undertakings, recognizing multiple alternatives in the process. Baking a cake can be strictly subordinated to instructions, but this need not be the case: one can invent a new recipe, form new shapes or integrate new flavors, alter or enhance the creation in countless ways. Repairing an air filter may not be very imaginative in an everyday setting, when the materials are simply ready to hand, but doing so only with the objects available inside a rocket, as the engineers and astronauts had to do when Apollo 13 malfunctioned in space, demands both precise technical knowledge and an urgent exercise of creativity. Creativity will be later on described in its promotion of cognitive play and in light of the broader cognitive ecology that situates creative experience.

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THE LEXICON: IMAGINATION AND RELATED TERMS In concluding this chapter, we need finally to address the term imagination itself, the etymological history of which admits some complexity. The lexical range of the concept of imagination, at least in the Western tradition, includes two groups of interrelated terms: imagination, imaging, image, imaginary, imaginative, and so forth, derived from Latin; and fantasy, fantastical, fancy, fanciful, and so forth, derived from Greek. These terms are sometimes interchangeable and sometimes used with precise technical assignment. From Plato, phantasia is the noun form of two related verbs, phainetai, meaning “it appears,” and phantazetai, meaning “it appears before one’s mind.” There is the sense of a presentational capacity—a making-appear— evoked in Husserl’s notion of presentation or making-present. Aristotle foreshadows this use when he defines phantasia as the ability to bring forth images (phantasmata) in the mind where the object is not present to perception. The Latinate term imagination comes from imago (image, or likeness, copy) and imaginari (to image or picture to oneself) and so stays close to the Greek sense of making appear. Then there are the German variations. Husserl treated imagination in terms of “presentation,” making-present, or Vergegenwärtigung, for in imagining something we elicit, indeed constitute, its appearance to the presence of consciousness, while Phantasie also allowed for the free variation on what was presented, whether in deliberate transformation or more passive flights of association. The term Vorstellungen refers to ideas or images presented in (or literally placed before) the mind, and Vorstellungskraft, for instance as used by Wittgenstein, is the capacity or power to so present. Yet another German term for imagination, Einbildungskraft, involves, in Kant’s philosophy, a synthetic power to make present a coherent image (Bild) of an object from the diversity of sense-impressions and to maintain, reproduce, and combine that image. Phantasie in Kant is often reserved for the playful inner transformation of intuitions. But in Kant’s works these terms may be sometimes used interchangeably. We may hear in our English word fantasy a demotion of imagination to the merely fictional play of inner images that have no foothold in cognition

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proper. Related to this is fancy, which in Shakespeare and Pascal (in French, fantaisie) often connotes the illusory quality of the ideas it produces. While Shakespeare interchanges imagination and fancy, in Coleridge fancy is segregated, as reproductive, from imagination, as creative, the latter term then further differentiated into “primary” and “secondary” forms. Finally, while the imagined may designate simply the object of imagining consciousness, imaginary may suggest the merely fanciful, as in not real. Yet in Sartre’s terminology the imaginary implies the power of possibility and is described not as unreal but “irreal”—ontologically distinct from, but not necessarily subordinate to, reality.57 While for psychoanalysis the imaginary may be in large measure outside our conscious reach, the imaginary for Sartre remains phenomenologically accessible. In the shadow of psychoanalysis, however, the imaginary has also come to take on a much broader but also more elusive meaning, signifying an undercurrent of human culture, and one that more or less unconsciously shapes the human perspective on the world. While Freud most often analyzed fantasy of the individual mind, its relation to repression and to fulfillment, in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud wrote of culture itself as the product of the repression and control of unconscious psychological drives and instincts, giving rise to the notion of the imaginary in a much broader sense.58 The notion of the imaginary has since been conceived as an almost mythical function as the social repository for drives of the unconscious, structuring both the individual mind and investing the culture at large through all its mimetic and imagistic activities, including myths, symbols, religion, rituals, images, visions, and narratives, but also shaping its presumptions, prejudices, and its blindness. The imaginary may be conceived as a force of production for human culture. The imaginary may be the ineffable resource from which we draw in departing from reality toward the construction of fictions.59 Indeed the notion of the “philosophical imaginary” posits the prevalent productivity of myth, imagery, and literary figuration in philosophical arguments long held to be strictly rational in nature.60 Or imaginary may stand for nothing less than what drives our social forms of existence and all our knowledge: “The imaginary . . . is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (socialhistorical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of something. What we call ‘reality’ and ‘rationality’ are its works.”61 But the imaginary is also celebrated

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as an unsettling, deconstructive, or negating force. For Blanchot the imaginary derives from the nature of the image, which “needs the neutrality and fading of the world.” It is associated with ambiguity, with isolation and nothingness, with the “power of the negative” since it opposes, and thus is free from, reality.62 While offering a rich set of ideas, the subsuming of imagination as cognitive power wholly into such notions of the imaginary—as an unconscious or undeterminable cultural force, whether of play and production or destabilization, isolation, and negation—risks rendering imagination as no one’s thought. The imagination as a cognitive and conscious activity of the human mind, of real living human subjects, may be obscured. The treatment of the imaginary in Merleau-Ponty’s last work, The Visible and the Invisible, provides some counterweight to these emphases.63 Although broadening his ontological scope beyond human perception to describe its intertwining with vital materiality, or the “flesh” of the world, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless maintains a phenomenological context for the imaginary, its ties to our consciousness of reality and possibility. For scholars working in this tradition, the imaginary can be understood as that which contributes to shaping our experience of the world, “expressive of possibilities for living affectively and effectively within it.”64 The aim in this book is to identify the imagination at play in, and subtending the possibilities for, lived human consciousness and thought. For it is the imagination, and the imaginary in this sense, that helps to endow not only the world with meaning but human subjectivity with vitality and freedom. Within this rich etymological context, imagination here will be analyzed as the presentational and transformational activity of intentional embodied consciousness. We will also need to consider underlying and implicit mechanisms of human thinking that, although below the level of our awareness, have been linked to or described as imagination, as these may provide conditions of possibility for the deliberate exercises of imaginative thinking.

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umans have imaginatively engaged with the world and expressed imaginative ideas for at least fifty thousand years. The development of imagination within human evolution is manifest through symbolic artifacts, rituals, body and tool decoration and ornamentation, and works of art. In attempting to understand the relevance of imagination in the cognitive evolution of our species, we can speculate how the minds of prehistoric humans may have evolved as they wandered across a changing landscape in search of food, made tools, evaded predators, found shelter, communicated with each other, and gradually developed a capacity for artistic expression. Such speculation can be informed by archeological evidence, anthropological interpretation of surviving artifacts, neurological and cognitive research into the modern human brain, and studies of cognitive development in human children and in our animal relatives. These resources are engaged here insofar as they may shed light on imagination as rooted in embodied experience and as the source of our transcendence of, or going beyond and transforming, the given. In this chapter we will consider the imagination and creativity as they expand the dimension of human experience and lead to adaptive, intellectual, and cultural gains for our species.

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IMAGINATION AND COGNITIVE EVOLUTION Although we are not the only species to have shown capacity for some symbolic thinking and expression, Homo sapiens is undoubtedly by far the most imaginative species to have existed on the planet, evidenced by the elaborate play of modern human children, the decoration of temples and cathedrals, myriad inventions, the creation of fictional narratives, skilled craftmaking, sophisticated works of art. Modern human beings can even imagine our own evolution, and, as Franz Kafka’s fiction shows, we can toy with the evolutionary narrative. Kafka was an admirer of Darwin’s works, yet he evoked the existential implications of evolution with considerable irony. In his story “A Report to an Academy,” Kafka’s ape Red Peter magically evolves with five years’ training to the level of the average modern human, and, in the equally impossible reversal of The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up devolved, as an insectlike vermin. Through such spectacular fictionalization, Kafka offers a self-deprecating reflection on the evolutionary development of Homo sapiens sapiens, evidencing selfreflection as an imaginative achievement. The development of our prehuman hominid ancestors from five million years ago up to the emergence of the first member of our genus, Homo, was influenced by several evolutionary factors. According to archeologists, these include the emergence of bipedalism, stone toolmaking, and more frequent meat eating, with correlative increase in brain size, up to nearly twice that of the chimpanzee,1 although in the last 20,000  years the brain of Homo sapiens has become smaller.2 Early humans, from the appearance of Homo ergaster about 1.9 million to 300,000  years ago, would have developed new cognitive capacities through the making of artifacts (such as hand axes), planned hunting, and migration to new landscapes with resulting exposure to novel conditions. From 500,000 years ago, Neanderthals in Europe and the ancestors of modern humans in Africa developed again dramatically in increased brain size, technical skills, and probably vocal communication.3 Recent discoveries have dated the earliest emergence of Homo sapiens to around 300,000 years ago in Africa (from a common ancestor with Neanderthals, Homo heidelbergensis), and by 60,000 years ago Homo sapiens wandered into Eurasia.4 It was around 50,000  years ago that Homo

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sapiens dramatically developed in intellectual capacity, including the ability not only for representational depiction but also for gradually increasing expressiveness and invention of fictional ideas. We were probably not alone in such development. Until recently, Homo sapiens were regarded as radically different from Neanderthals, the latter considered intellectually inferior and incapable of symbolic cognition. Recent genetic analysis has shown, however, that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were more closely linked than once thought and interbred when the latter migrated to Europe—thus Neanderthal DNA can be readily found in some modern humans.5 Recent dating of bones and artifacts suggests that Neanderthals lived alongside Homo sapiens for up to fifty-four hundred years, and may have learned from them.6 It is now recognized that Neanderthals engaged in symbolic activities such as body decoration and burial rituals, that they made toys, and may have made simple cave paintings. The oldest of these in Europe (nearly fortyone thousand years old, found in Spain) are characterized by “red dots, disks, lines, and hand stencils”—certainly rudimentary in terms of depiction.7 Similar hand stencils of the same age have been recently found in Sulawesi, Indonesia, suggesting a widespread development of this ability across early human cultures.8 While they roughly coincide with the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe, Neanderthals may still have been present when these cave paintings were made, and so their authorship of the paintings cannot be ruled out.9 Cave paintings of course became more elaborate over time, leading to figurative depictions and even fantastic ones. From a modern point of view, the primitiveness of cave paintings appears to express a raw vitality of original creative thinking, the childhood of human creativity, as it were. They may resonate with the use of simple lines and shapes in some modernist works of art, for instance works by Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Josef Albers, and Henri Matisse, a resonance that is not entirely coincidental. Even without knowledge of these particular anthropological resources, modern European artists rejected the sophisticated perspectival techniques developed in the Renaissance and deliberately relied on the impact of basic visual forms. They had been inspired by, and often appropriated, the maximum expressiveness and beauty of indigenous works taken by European colonists from tribal cultures that had engaged ancient depictive practices.10 Klee, Miró, and

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Vasily Kandinsky also studied children’s art in considerable depth, exploring the elemental use of lines, color, and shape for what they regarded as their superior expressive vitality.11 With the development of the brain, particularly the frontal lobe, Homo sapiens had undeniably special intellectual advantages. These were manifest in more complex social organization, required for far longer treks in search of food, and in their symbolic activities, and evidenced higher cognitive and communication skills. By about forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens overtook Neanderthals to be the only human species left on the planet. Artifacts left by prehistoric Homo sapiens evidence the further development of art and of language. Painting became increasingly more figurative as well as more inventive, involving both animal depictions and their fantastic transfigurations. The presentation of fictional forms gives evidence for the gradual emergence of productive imagination.

THE EMERGENCE OF IMAGINATION: MATERIAL CREATIVITY If we take material expressions of creativity as evidence—in artworks and other artifacts that may have been used for play and ritual—we can speculate when human beings first began to imagine in a transformative way. Creativity seems to have developed only gradually. While tools have been produced for about two million years, elaborately crafted tools with decorative designs may not have been made until around seventy thousand years ago. Artworks, such as carvings on stone, have been found that are up to sixty thousand years old. From about forty-one thousand years ago, paintings, figurines, and charcoal drawings were made. The first musical instruments were constructed about thirty-five thousand years ago. Perhaps most strikingly, symbolic works that depict imaginary scenes or objects—such as a mythical figure that is half-lion, half-human—began to appear only in the last forty thousand years.12 Rituals surrounding burial appeared around at least twenty thousand years ago—though Neanderthals may have ritually buried their dead up to fifty thousand years ago.13 From the evidence of such rituals, it has been argued that early humans thought about an afterlife or at least considered the significance

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of death. In any case these artifacts and their history tell the story of the gradual emergence of a “life of the mind.”14 We can draw from all of this the conclusion that, within about the last fifty thousand years or so, the human imagination has developed profoundly. The tasks of decorating various objects may have yielded the capacity for depiction, or presentational ability, such that early humans could make recognizable figurations of beings within their local environment. Eventually humans began to transform the objects of their depictions, and from such transformations new ideas emerged. The lion-headed human figuration, carved from a mammoth tusk with a flint knife, is thirty centimeters tall and was discovered in 1939 in the HohlensteinStadel, a cave in Germany. At first dated at thirty-three thousand years old, it has recently been revealed to be still older, made forty thousand years ago, and is thus now known as the oldest symbolic artifact. The lionman figurine has been interpreted as evidencing the human capacity for a particularly advantageous cognitive operation, that of conceptual blending: “What the figuring of the lion-man most clearly shows is the mental ability to blend different concepts. Lion and man are not merely held in the mind at the same time; they are used to create a new, blended concept, a lion-man, which is neither lion nor man exactly.”15 The combination of two ideas yields something new that is more than the sum of its parts, and it is this ability that, it is argued, gives the “human spark” to our cognitive evolution.16 Yet with the lion-man we have evidence not only of blending disparate ideas—the same could be said of combining a stick and a rock to make a new tool—but of combinations that are symbolic, and logically and pragmatically impossible in reality, and so project possibility or impossibility over and above the given. Such distinct species as human beings and lions cannot be factually combined, either reproductively or in groups of coexisting species; humans and lions would have been at odds with one another in the struggle for existence. Thus, with this figurine of the lion-man, we also witness the possible origins of fiction. In presenting a fictional creature from the combination, the human mind here constructs a synthesis incompatible with empirical reality and, as such, potentially generative of a higher symbolic meaning. A mind creating such a fiction can be regarded as capable of transcending reality. Such evidence of fictional ideas early on in the development of imagination may trouble a view of imagination in the evolutionary context as

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essentially “reality oriented,” any fictionalization being apart from its “central or typical business.”17 Further figurations, even if not constructions of imaginary beings, may evidence considerable creative expression. An exquisite carving of a female figure at least thirty-five thousand years old was recently found in Hohle Fels cave in Germany; the small ivory figurine has been named after Venus for its exaggeration of sexual characteristics. The oldest known portrait of a woman was carved from mammoth ivory about twenty-six thousand years ago and found in Moravia, in the Czech Republic. In Moravia was also found the oldest known ceramic sculpture—a plump, rounded figure of a woman—and the oldest known doll with articulated parts, carved from mammoth ivory. Findings from Russia include an exquisitely detailed bison carved from ivory and tusks carved in the figure of a reindeer. We do not, of course, know what was meant or intended by these prehistoric humans when they undertook such creative labor. Our contemporary assumptions about the very concept of art, about its makers and its purposes, cannot be projected wholesale onto these early cultures. To understand prehistoric creative works and the very kind of objects they are, we would have to take into account the context in which they were made and the audience for whom they would have been intended.18 We may make assumptions, based on modern human experience, about the makers of these works themselves—such as the idea, recently challenged by new evidence, that the majority of cave painters were predominantly male.19 Moreover, the role of the artist itself will be relative to the communicative, social, and material system to which the artist belongs.20 We have, again, no direct access to what and how early humans thought as they fantasized, reflected, compared, dreamed, played, mused, problem-solved, and created. But, from the remaining products of their creativity, we find evidence not only of technical skill transmitted across generations but also of the capacity to present, transform, or interpret a given subject matter. Interpretation of the activities of prehistoric human beings may be too narrow if conducted exclusively according to a single evolutionary principle. It is not self-evident that these presentations, transformations, and interpretations served any practical purpose directly connected to survival—though they may have aided social bonding, or had a communicative purpose—or the propagation of individual genes. The attempt to

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make sense of creative works purely in terms of some flourish, like the peacock’s tail, which might render advantage in mating choice, appears reductive in the face of the diversity of creative activities and objects we would now class under the term art and the variety of interpretive explanations they have provoked.21 Yet the imaginative activity exhibited by early creative works can be related to essential cognitive development that may aid human life in social, material, and other ways. In creative activity the material stuff— charcoal, the cave wall, pigment, ivory, clay, or wood, for example— becomes a medium of representation, expression, communication, or play. Significantly, most of the early artworks mentioned here depict not just any object, but living things and, more specifically, sensate and mobile ones—animals, humans, or nonexistent creatures resembling both. So represented through early artistic activity, the subject matter of such works becomes symbolic, and the activity itself “metacognitive.” That is, the artistic work “compels reflection on the very process that created it.”22 The Venus figure may evoke and enable thought about fertility. The reindeer may be a symbol of nourishment, or reflect on the animal’s power and velocity as it outruns the hunter, or may express the human dependence on the surrounding nature. The doll suggests the capacity for human selfrepresentation as well as enabling the practice of nurturing through play. Whatever they may be said to represent, such artworks, even if merely reproducing or combining already-held ideas, establish a material means for reflecting on the world, and potentially on the human being as one who can so reflect and create. The paintings on the cave walls in Lascaux, France, are some of the most significant and famous works in the history of art. Discovered in 1940, they are only around fifteen thousand years old—recent in comparison with the other works just described. The Lascaux cave paintings are extraordinary, however, in that they exhibit a fascinating variety and density of expressive depictions and include depictions of nonexistent beings alongside existing ones. The cave walls are adorned with images of hundreds of animals, including herds of horses, oxen, reindeer, many depicted leaping or running, along with mythological or fantastic creatures, such as a bird-headed man. Like the lion-human sculpture, the painting of a bird-headed human exhibits the creator’s capacity to express an idea beyond mere depiction, beyond the representation of reality, and beyond

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even the inclusion of the possible (what could be or could happen). These figures may illustrate “cognitive fluidity,”23 or the transfer of ideas between different regions of cognition. In particular the artifacts may manifest visual realizations of fantasy, of dream or storytelling, for they figure objects that cannot be known through reality as empirically experienced. With respect to all the depictions—of animals, imaginary creatures, sexualized figures, and other human forms—these images may not be fully understood as mere copies or facsimiles of objects in the world. They may manifest visual contemplations of the origins, sustenance, and fragility of life and, as such, would evidence human reflection both about the natural world and about the human place in it. When we consider such works of art and other artifacts—drawings and paintings, carvings and decorated tools—it becomes evident that early human beings became imaginative in radically new ways in a relatively short span of evolutionary time. Free from dependence on immediate perception for the subject matter of thinking, or even from immediately goaldirected representations, these early minds were gradually able to evoke forms of thought in which surrounding reality may be infused with or interpreted through transcendent meaning, or meaning that exceeds the world as knowable and verifiable through direct perception or other cognitive means. Their works may evidence the origin of narratives about the origins of life, the powers that maintain life, and the continuities and changes observable in nature. Gradually through imagination, the natural world comes to be seen in mythical terms, perceived not only with respect to the immediate needs of survival but according to a sense of the larger projected whole within which such experience takes place. Such perception becomes organized as myth through forms of depiction and narrative. But how did this happen? The anthropological and archeological evidence supports an account of the development of embodied consciousness intimately involved with the surrounding world that gives rise to representational and creative thought. Imagination, in this view, would not develop first and solely as inner representations within the mind to be eventually transferred to material expressions. Rather, the imagination would emerge in early humans’ active exchanges with physical reality, through their experience of sensory-motor perception

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and memory and in conjunction with material expression through objects of the surrounding world. It may be that the capacity for inner presentation or imaging developed in tandem with, or even as the result of, pragmatic manipulation of objects and materially expressive creativity. On this view, it is doubtful that early humans first had images in the mind, which they then learned to express in material ways. Rather, human cognition is likely to have developed in a material context through embodied action, and it is out of this context that imagination in its internal manifestations would have become possible. For early humans, who would have experienced an evolving material and physical relationship with things in the environment, and in conjunction with increasing facility, would have developed the capacity for internal representation, or what we have called presentation or “imaging” in the mind. It has been argued that the cognitive restrictions of early humans, for whom thinking may have been limited to task-specific domains (hunting, seeking shelter, mating, and so forth), were overcome “with the use of external supports to human thinking.” Objects in the environment, when manipulated, would take on a practical value for tools, communication, and mate attraction, and their use, in turn, may have also accelerated imaginative development. An established, socially recognized object or ritual, with symbolic or analogical significance, could provide a means to pass on and communicate occasions of transformative imagining, as well as providing new material to work with—a subject, substrate, or prop for further use and adaptation. Thus, it may be that “the objects of art, the paintings, the rituals created after 50,000 years ago are not only the products of a new way of thinking, but also their source.” On this view, the making of artworks and other expressive objects would play “an essential role in formulating, manipulating, and sharing those thoughts.”24 Just as the capacity for mental presentation is necessary for the transformation of ideas within the mind, so too material presentation enables transformative expressions and invites multiple levels of reference by providing recorded and sharable ideas that can then be the subject of further imaginings on the part of others. What may begin as depictions of objects directly observed can lead to depictions of objects imagined, with potentially limitless variation.

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IMAGINATION AND LANGUAGE IN COGNITIVE EVOLUTION AND CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT The development of language would have also influenced the evolution of imaginative capacities. Ideas can be presented in visual imagery, sculpture, and other physical works, but still more efficiently through gesture and speech, and eventually preserved and codified with the development of writing. Language, as a means of presentation of thoughts and ideas through a system of phonic or other symbols, is thought to have structurally developed in humans by about one hundred thousand years ago. Even without external implements, language would be “material” in its earliest gestural and tonal origins, arising from gesture; it would be further materialized through written forms, which emerged independently in disparate places, but as early as 3200 bce in Mesopotamia (though early symbolic marking systems are much older, such as the Jiahu symbols used around 6000 bce in China). The communication and preservation of thought through language—whether oral or written—makes possible further cognitive play and potentially imaginative transformation of the ideas it expresses. Language of any form allows for a given idea to be repeated in a new context, eventually engendering metaphorical meaning, while the transition from oral to written language has been regarded as a crucial stage in the development of imagination.25 Language, moreover, does not merely communicate ideas, but allows for the very constitution, shaping, and elaboration of human thought.26 Yet, because the earliest manifestations of language could not be preserved (as were visual artworks and tools), the role of language in the development of imagination is unclear, and accounts of its importance vary significantly. Steven Mithen argues that the absence of sophisticated language for much of the development of early humans put pressure on the imagination to develop, in gesture and mime, but also visual depiction and material creativity: “it was because of—not in spite of—the absence of spoken language, that such selective pressures may have been placed on imaginative activities.”27 Robin Dunbar similarly dismisses language from any central role in the development of imagination. He instead claims a fundamental role for the mental capacity to intuit other’s intentions or “theory of mind.” The capacity to “step back from the

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world” and imagine it otherwise arises with the capacity to see the world as another mind might see it.28 The core root of literature, according to Dunbar, is not the development of language itself—which is but a necessary medium—but rather theory of mind. On this view, literature allows us to intuit levels of intentionality, often several at once, and so provides a distinctive cognitive exercise.29 Since we can imagine stories in our minds without using words, or present them in pantomime, Dunbar claims, “while language itself is not essential for literature, advanced theory of mind is.”30 Yet, as the development of imagination accelerates dramatically in the last fifty thousand years, it is reasonable to suppose that it does so alongside an evolving capacity for language that could not but feed its further development. Another account of the relation between imagination and language is offered by the biologist François Jacob, for whom language is essential to the development of imagination—but not for its communicative features. Rather, the development of language serves the primary function of enabling the human mind, first to fix in memory, and then to work with, internal representations in richer, more nuanced, and more efficient ways. While serving communication along the way, the primary function of language would have been “the representation of a richer and more nuanced reality, a way of handling more information with greater efficiency. What gives language its unique character is less, it seems, that it helps communicate directives for action, than that it allows symbolisation, the evocation of cognitive imagery.”31 But since there is scant anthropological evidence for retracing the development of oral language, cognitive theorists must turn elsewhere and have found assistance in developmental psychology. Researchers make more than analogical use of the parallels between evolutionary development and childhood development, offering “an integrated evolutionary and developmental account of the emergence of distinctively-human creative capacities.”32 Dunbar, in articulating his view of the secondary role of language in imaginative development in human evolution, relies in part on the notion that inferring the mental states of others in children, or “theory of mind”—what was called social cognition in the previous chapter—emerges with the capacity for pretend play. At about four and a half years of age, he claims, children begin to infer the mental states of others—long after they have learned to speak. Having the capacity for

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language alone, it is implied, does not help children imagine the perspectives of others. Dunbar cites a well-known experiment with children of that age. Having been shown that pencils, rather than candies, are contained in a candy tube, they are asked what another child, who has not been shown inside the tube, will think is there. Up until four years old or so, they will respond that the other child thinks the tube contains pencils. Before the age of four, children are unable to contrast what they know to be the case with another child’s mistaken inference. They have, in this account, no imagination. In this interpretation, however, Dunbar seems to identify imagination solely with the ability to infer intentionality in others. Dunbar points to the fact that very young children cannot conceive that someone else might have a different idea than they do or imagine in another’s mind a false representation of the world. In this vein, he argues that “infants and toddlers alike treat the world exactly as they experience it. They cannot imagine that it could be other than what they perceive it to be. They lack the ability to imagine.”33 Yet even if three-year-olds tend to stick with their own representation of things when supposing what others think, it is known that children develop the skills to intuit others’ intentions from early infancy— including eye contact and staring at faces—and infants clearly evidence that they know when someone is playing with them (in peek-a-boo for instance). By the age of two or three, children use verbs in reference to others which indicate thought-processes and first-person perspectives (think, see, want, know, remember). They know what an idea is, whether or not it is their own, and so already have a sense that there is an implicit intentionality that corresponds to other perspectives to whom they relate.34 Moreover, it may be that pretending fosters imagination in ways that are not reducible to theory of mind. Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers have argued that play does not function primarily for facilitation of social schemata or developing mind-reading skills.35 They point to rapidly expanding body of recent research that “shows that children have intact mindreading capacities far earlier than the age at which they successfully pass false-belief tests, and also earlier than or coincident with the onset of pretend play.”36 Infants can show evidence of appropriate expectations about the false belief of another agent and understand that others can be misled by appearances, before the age, around eighteen months, when they begin to be capable of pretend play. Pretend play, it is

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argued, has a different function: it facilitates creative thought, for it requires both attention that is not narrowly focused and cognitive manipulation—or as I have been calling it, transformation—of a given object or idea. On this view, “the function of pretense is to enhance creativity.”37 For both pretend play and creativity involve generativity, supposing, bypassing the obvious, and selecting less obvious but valuable ideas. Creativity seems to be an evolutionary end in itself. “Pretend play in children is an adaptation whose function is, at least partly, to enhance creativity in adults. . . . A primary reason that typical human infants universally engage in pretend play is to develop the capacities that encourage and allow for creative thought.”38 Further connections have been made between the development of language and of imagination. Imagination as defined in the first chapter of this book includes inner imaging, seeing-as, hypothetical thinking (related to engaging others’ perspectives), pretense, and creativity. Very young children are in fact capable of most of these activities of consciousness, according to the developmental psychologist Paul Harris. Citing his own and others’ research with young children, Harris has demonstrated that two-and-a-half-year-olds are distinctly capable of imagining, the most obvious manifestation of which is pretense. Seeing the adult “dip” the toy monkey in a box with a block the adult has referred to as “soap,” the child will say that the (dry) monkey is now “wet.” Children of this age will wipe up spills of “pretend” liquid on a surface that is in fact dry. They can also exercise pretense by imaginatively transforming objects in the world around them into other things—a sofa cushion can serve as a “tunnel” for a “train” that is in reality a toy tractor—and so there is evidence of the capacity for a form of seeing-as. Pretend play, according to Harris, emerges in late infancy, which is correlative with the development of language, and children at this stage use in their play considerable conceptual knowledge of the world they have acquired.39 Play scenarios also show that children’s imaginative activities may extend to hypothetical thinking. On the basis of his research, Harris concludes that “two-year-olds can imagine causal transformations that do not actually take place,”40 and they do so without confusing reality with an imagined event, a point to which we will return in the next chapter. This means that they can engage in counterfactual thinking, implicitly contrasting reality to an imagined, unreal event or state of affairs.

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It is probably not merely coincidence that in children the capacity for pretend play—“one of the earliest and most obvious indices of children’s imagination”—develops around the same time as the capacity for language.41 Some scholars argue that language is essential to the development of any symbolic cognition, while others emphasize the evolutionary advantages of language.42 It is reasonable to suppose that any layered social cognition (intuiting what someone thinks someone else thinks or intends, and so forth) requires the kind of communication skills that are afforded by language development. Language, moreover, may be crucial to the shaping of human thought itself, since it is on the linguistic plane that we can grasp a thing as something and thus as an object of our intention; on this view, language is intertwined with intentionality, whether another’s or our own.43 Moreover, play and pretense, thought to be involved in the development of imagination, may be closely related to the fundamental ontology of language as a system of equivalences. In play, a given gesture or object is taken as meaning something different than it does in nonplay. For instance, play biting or pawing is not meant or taken as threat, but rather as harmless provocation to interaction, and may engender practicing the kinds of actions that are necessary for survival in nonplay situations. Analogously, a word or gesture used in communication indicates something other than itself. Wittgenstein relates seeing-as—seeing one object in terms of or as something else—to “experiencing the meaning of a word,” and continuous aspect perception has been seen as analogous to linguistic and conceptual meaning.44 Language may be regarded as rooted in pretense, for it “owed its existence to the play instinct, that old mammalian trick of ‘we do this, but we mean that.’”45 In this account, literature, poetry, and all communicative art would arise from the same play instinct “in which ordinary words and actions came to assume extraordinary meanings.”46 Harris has also argued for the interrelation of imagination and language development in the course of evolution. He proposes that the two abilities emerged together and, in fusing, thus contributed to the radical enhancement of our cognitive possibilities: “At some point in our evolutionary history, there was an explosive fusion of these two capacities. That fusion of language and imagination would have enabled us to pursue a new type of dialogue—to exchange and accumulate thoughts about a host

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of situations, none actually witnessed but all imaginable: the distant past and future, as well as the magical and the impossible.”47 Despite some divergences in the accounts of the relative primacy of language, much of this research suggests that language and imagination are not only developmentally interrelated but mutually enriching. Language may serve the development of human cognition not only in its communicative purposes, in how it allows for shared and organized effort, but also for the consolidation and manipulation of acquired knowledge and the expansion of the mind’s play with possibility. For language would allow for greater facility in manipulating, combining, and projecting thoughts, for considering alternatives, and for initiating new ideas. Insofar as language can provoke imaging, hypothesizing, aid pretense, and serve as a medium for creativity, it would dramatically enhance the range of imaginative activity. For “the flexibility of human language makes of it an unrivaled tool for the development of imagination. It lends itself to the endless combination of symbols. It allows the mind to create possible worlds.”48

THE EMBODIED AND ENACTIVE BASIS OF IMAGINATIVE DEVELOPMENT The development of imagination is also related to instrumentality, the physical and cognitive skills that developed in conjunction with tool use, toolmaking, and other embodied action. Toolmaking and use, by all accounts, are far older than both human language and any evidence of imagining manifest in art, decoration, ornamentation, or ritual. Tool use may have occasioned some of the first significant instances of cognitive substitution, where this (a stone, bone, or twig) can be used as that (something to grind, hunt, or cut with). Constructing such instruments also requires some form of anticipatory imagining, when the initial material is taken up toward a purpose at a distant goal, one not immediately rooted in the present time and place (an arrow is fashioned for use in hunting an animal which may arrive later at that particular water source, for instance). Instrumentality is thus relevant to the projection of scenarios or situational modeling. The transition from merely found tools to deliberately constructed tools also seems to allow for the furthering of culture, as

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knowledge about the making and use of the object could be handed down over generations. At the same time, the feedback from language development and the further increase in imaginative capacity would have in turn enabled innovation in tool use, decoration, and cultural transmission, perhaps in conjunction with increasing complexity of planning and orchestrating the means of survival within a social group. Imagination thus emerges not only from an intellectual or mental but also a material basis, as consciousness itself is embodied and enactive. Recent cognitive theories have attempted to identify the physiological conditions for the capacity for human consciousness to present appearances or “representations” in the mind and invoke material interaction with tools among other physical activities such as hunting. The growth of the cerebral cortex and the frontal lobe through embodied action and perception allows for the creation of “representations of events in the surrounding world.”49 When such representations can be constructed in the mind, immediate perception no longer occupies the entire attention of consciousness. The possibility emerges of an inner world in which perceptions can be interpreted, representations formed and transformed. That virtual interiority is the work of imagination, but is indebted to the experience of perception and motoric activity and their cognitive coordination in interaction with the world. To illustrate this, we can consider how visual-motor activity could be involved in the creation of inner images and more complex mental operations. Successful hunting would involve these in several ways. In order to be able to search for prey, one has to have something like an image of what one is looking for and to be able to discern it at a distance, from referential clues left in the environment to distant acoustic and visual perceptions of the prey itself. This is the sort of imaging that Aristotle attributed to animals as well as humans. Being able to cognitively “map out” the surrounding environment, then, greatly enables the hunt. Once the object of the hunt is found, it has to be killed or captured. A human being is more likely to survive this encounter with the aid of tools that are stronger and sharper than human hands alone and that afford some distance between hunter and prey. The making of such tools, as well as their use— such as being able to track prey and aim at a moving target—demand particular cognitive skills.

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Accounts of this development often emphasize visual capacity in the formation of imagining. It has been speculated that around five to six million years ago, when our earliest ancestor hominids left the thick forest to roam the vast grasslands of East Africa, they would direct their vision across an expanded vista. Rather than only objects near at hand, within one hundred feet or so, they could see things far away—herds of animals, fruit trees, springs, ledges, and so forth—and from a height, even many miles away. These details could not, at least by human senses, be heard or smelled from such a distance, but only seen, so that sight and visual attention would then become more central to early human survival on the savannah. The vision of these earliest ancestors was much the same as ours is today: binocular, with left and right visual fields overlapping to make a central straight-ahead vision surrounded by peripheral awareness. Parallax also allows for the perception of spatial depth. Our ancestors would have spent some time leisurely gazing with unfocused vision, but survival would have required their spending considerable time looking intensely about them in pursuit of food and in avoidance of predators.50 Based on fossil and current primate evidence, the primate eye has remained unchanged for some ten million years, while the human sensory system “remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands.”51 We have a central vision that is relatively sharp and peripheral vision that picks up motion. Visual focus is then constituted by a conscious and voluntary attention of central vision to objects within a larger field of which we are more recessively or peripherally aware. Episodic thinking requires further comprehension of potential positions in space and time, as would be needed by early humans, for example, to build a camp: one would have to coordinate images of where the gazelles went to drink, when predators tended to prowl, where the safety of the camp lay in relation to the hunting ground, and this would require a “mental map” of the territory.52 Akin to situational modeling, these would likely not be aerial maps as modern humans would use, but visual-motor ones, involving branching pathways and landmarks, understood in terms of embodied temporality: how long it took to walk, canter, or run to a given destination. We can further, Collins suggests, consider the neural pathways of visual processing in the human brain, including the dual pathways of dorsal and ventral streams, and their relation to our broader cognitive capacities.53

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The dorsal stream is responsible for processing spatial location and locomotion and guiding actions such as reaching, grasping, and pointing. The ventral stream is responsible for object recognition and differentiation. The coordination between them makes possible complex spatiotemporal thinking, which involves focused attention on particular objects within the larger peripheral field, both in relation to our own position in space, and our potential subject-directed actions (or their position regarded egocentrically) and to each other as objects (their position regarded allocentrically). The coordination of allocentric and egocentric perspectives may be related to other cognitive skills such as social intuition. Researchers have uncovered the neural link-up between a visual perception of another’s action and stimulation of mirror neurons in the brain related to executing the same action.54 This neural replication of the action of another may be the basis, at a physiological level, for the intuition of others’ mental states or intentions as well as moral empathy. In any case, the capacity to consider the world from another point of view than our own involves imagination that is grounded in our evolved embodied cognition. Gärdenfors offers a different but compatible account of how visualmotor coordination may lead to inner representation or imagining. In aiming a throw—for example throwing a spear at prey—the human brain engages skills that involve anticipatory calculations of physical actions rather than the much slower feedback through muscles and nerves. This explains why human beings can aim in throwing, while chimpanzees, our genetically closest relatives, cannot (despite considerably superior strength and physical prowess in other activities). In aiming a throw, signals of proprioception, in feedback about the direction hand and arm are taking during the throw, are sent via muscles and nerve fibers. However, these signals are too slow for the body to be able to adjust the position during the course of the action, taking 200–450 milliseconds. In order to compensate for this, the human brain can simulate the anticipated result of the signals via a calculation that takes only 70 milliseconds. This calculation is sent back to the cerebellum, which allows for adjusting the arm’s continuing movement during the course of the throw. Neurons in the brain will then adjust the calculations with feedback from the experience. As Gärdenfors explains: “The simulator works independently of feedback from the rest of the body—it simply does not have time to wait.

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Eventually it will require feedback to learn whether or not the guess it simulated produced the desired result.”55 The simulation—or anticipatory calculation—involved in such aiming is thought to be just a step away from another evolutionary process that lets the “simulator” work without signals. In this case, the anticipatory calculation is thought to present “an image of what will happen if a certain action is undertaken.” This may be one origin of the capacity of internal presentation or imaging, and it would form the basis of many other cognitive operations. If so, “the power of imagination is completely decisive for the development of all higher thought processes.”56 These material experiences of the human body intentionally interacting with its environment would be conditions for the development of internal presentation or imaging. While originally connected to immediately anticipated feedback from the environment, this capacity for anticipatory “simulation” may work independently of physical signals and work instead with images (of not only visual but also other kinds). The ability to construct situational models of the environment would assist in achieving better outcomes, not least by being able to plan ahead, and then to contrast and consider different possible courses of action. With this modeling, humans can try out possible actions and anticipate possible consequences without having to take the immediate risks that actual engagement would entail. Gärdenfors uses the metaphor of a general moving his troops about with markers on a map; he can use this image not only to keep track of where they are in the progress of warfare but also to consider in advance certain possible movements. The point of the metaphor is that certain animals’ brains, especially humans’, utilize representations of this kind—things we can move around in our heads before trying to move them in reality. Naturally, we do not literally have maps and markers in our heads, but there is something there that functions in the same way.57 While with this analogy Gärdenfors, perhaps inadvertently, relies here on an aerial perspective, Collins’s account of a more enactive mapping, based on anticipated movement, finds some support in studies of contemporary human cognition.58 Other animals may use such internal presentations, for instance, in maintaining awareness of an object when it is no longer in view (object permanence) and in further seeking such an object when it is not present. But in the case of nonhuman animals the

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presentations are thought to be environmentally or biologically cued from something in the surrounding situation—awakened by an associated sight, scent, sound, or other bodily sense.59 So far as we know, only human minds can elaborate upon presentations that are entirely detached from environmental cues. We can fantasize and fictionalize and pretend in ways that are not connected to the immediately surrounding reality. We can imagine hypothetical actions with objects that do not exist at all. This, of course, has demanded the development of internal imagining so that it can be managed in its divergence from sensation. This divergence has been represented as a conflict or contest between two faculties: sensation and internal representation (or imaging). Being able to use a detached internal presentation, according to Gärdenfors, “requires that one can suppress the sensations one has for a moment; otherwise they will come into conflict with the representation.”60 Yet it is not clear that such suppression is in every case necessary, for the human can engage at once disparate sources of thought, as will be described in the next chapter.

 Imagination has featured in the development of human cognition for at least fifty thousand years, and some imaginative impulse has been manifest in all known human cultures. It has been established in this chapter that the imagination, cultivated through enactive embodied experience, is a decisive factor in human cognitive evolution and plays an analogous role in the development of cognition in the childhood of modern humans. The capacity to imaginatively test an action, or envisage a situation different from the actual, and to vary that difference in countless ways, allows human beings to negotiate with reality through experimentation, innovation, and invention. With the emergence of symbolic works of creative making, imagination provides frameworks of meaning that transcend strictly pragmatic concerns and nurtures the capacities for reflection and self-reflection that become characteristic of human culture. The ability to present and elaborate not only possibilities for reality but also those which oppose reality, marks a distinct progression of imaginative development. We can trace Kafka’s transformation of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis back to the lion-headed man figure carved from

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mammoth ivory forty thousand years ago and to other early symbols, myths, and fables generated from early human imagining. It is suggestive that Kafka, just over half a century after Darwin’s evolutionary discoveries, imagines a human being devolved into a helpless vermin, rather than as adorned with the head of a powerful and majestic predator. The trajectory in human self-depiction from at least one prehistoric artist to the heights (or ironic depths) of modernism is remarkable, suggesting that Kafka himself, as Walter Benjamin put it, “did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the primal beginnings.”61 But, as manifestations of imagination, both works image the human being in an impossible figuration, opening up reflection on the place of the human being in the cosmos, whether in contact with sublime forces or in precarious proximity to a more elementary stratum of biological life. Imagination, manifest in works from the early cave painter to the modernist writer, liberates human thinking from its immediate absorption in reality, and from the limits imposed by a given configuration of it, to consider and engage it anew.

3 IMAGINATION, PERCEPTION, AND REALITY

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hile imagination, venturing far from reality, affords the special conceptions and figurations in fiction even of the impossible, it is also integrated in our dealings with reality in multiple ways. Imagination is involved not only in devising alternatives to but in recognizing potentialities of the world as it is known to us through perception and reflection on it. This chapter will consider how imagination may be involved in our perception of reality by registering its halo of potentiality and in the projection of a unified world that provides context for such perception. We will also consider potential distortions and the aesthetic, symbolic, and affective amplification of perception through imagination. We will begin by considering the background role imagination may play in perceptual experience, in shaping perception and investing it with vital potentiality and context, and the role of embodiment in that investiture. The capacity to engage deliberate imagining in productive tension between reality and imagined alternatives helps to explain both the role of play in the development of children’s conception of reality and the experience of fiction. Rather than mere escapism, or simply promoting false representations of the world, play and fiction allow split reference and attention to the real and to the possible. The capacity of imagination for distorting our grasp of reality, well-represented in historical criticisms of

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imagination, will be considered as the failure or lapse of such multimodality, and in this context we will revisit traditional philosophical distinctions between the real and the illusory. The entwining of imagination and perception also enhances our experience of the world. In aesthetic receptivity, and experiences of seeing-as, or concrete imaging, the world appears inflected with value and meaning. A consideration of these amplifications complicates the strict segregation of imagination and perception in classical phenomenological accounts and will lead us to consider the connection between imaginatively endowed perception of reality and its further creative rendering in expressive works.

THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION IN PERCEPTION The imagination, even when regarded only as the reproduction of past experiences given to the senses, is engaged in dealings with reality. Imagination—in its presentational mode of “imagining”—allows the mind to reconstruct from memory (and of course combine and transform) experiences originating in perception. Without this capacity, we would be limited in our thinking to what is immediately present in the surrounding environment, in its present state, to the current focus of our attention. This reproductive function of imagination is essential to thinking, for without it we could never develop and elaborate ideas about the present content of our thoughts by connecting or contrasting them with other nonpresent objects and ideas experienced before. Thus Aristotle, who classed imagination as a form of memory, argued that “the soul never thinks without an image” and that “whenever one contemplates, one necessarily contemplates in images.”1 Such imaging is essential for reflecting on the world as given to experience, but also for contributing generatively to it, for Aristotle further acknowledges that imagination is required for future-directed action. We must project imagings, drawn originally from experience, in our desire for goods and pursuit of goals. Apart from memory and anticipation, however, imagination may operate within a first-order grasp of the world through embodied perceptual experience. Imagination operating at this fundamental level in perception

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will need to be distinguished both from its potential distortion of experience and from the deliberate and willed use of the imagination that is the central focus of this book, as when we transform the given in the production of new objects, images, and ideas. The transformative use of imagination presupposes a coherent experience to be transformed, which in modern philosophical accounts is not inherently given in the matter or stuff of that experience, but must be facilitated or determined by the mind. But how does the stuff of the world come to appear not simply as a mass of data, of diverse and unconnected sense impressions, what James described as a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” but as coherent and meaningful reality?2 The imagination may play a role in shaping perception of the world. According to Kant, several of our faculties—sensation, imagination, and understanding—work together to give coherent form to phenomenal experience. In calling upon Einbildungskraft—one of the terms for imagination in Kant’s lexicon—Kant argued that imagination is responsible for synthesizing sensations—literally shaping an image or Bild. We experience the world not merely as a barrage of sensations or formless intuitions, but rather through distinct perceptions of objects we can conceptualize, relative to us and to each other in space and time. For experience to be coherent, as Kant puts it, “imagination is to bring the manifold of intuition into the form of an image,”3 and to bring this together with, so that it be legislated by, understanding. In this role, imagination is productive, its synthetic process underwritten automatically by the mind, yielding original presentation. Productive imagination for Kant is thus the “meeting-ground of the understanding and the sensibility.”4 Kant argues, then, that imagination is involved productively in the background of conscious experience in forming and sustaining the continuity of the perception of an object throughout its changes in space and time (or object constancy), as well as reproductively recovering it in its absence to immediate perception, by recalling its schematic form. If we accept Kant’s view, we would then have to admit, in addition to the manifest activities we have outlined so far, a more general, underlying cognitive function attributable to imagination. While the predominant concern in this book is the imagination as a transformative power subject to our conscious will, its capacities may not be adequately understood without

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considering their relations to the more fundamental operations of the mind that occur “below the horizon of observation.”5 While Kant’s transcendental approach to the imagination demands a stratification of faculties particular to his view of the mind, recent cognitive theory offers what appear to be compatible renderings of a synthetic power that renders experience coherent. It has been argued that the fluidity of the human mind is distinctive in being able to coordinate multiple kinds and sources of representations, such that they comprise discrete and unified structures, a coordination associated with imagination.6 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner attempt to explain how human consciousness can apprehend unities by compressing inputs from various sources. Object recognition, for example, involves processing information about many different aspects of an object in many different parts of the brain. In recognizing a cup of coffee as a unified object, for example, we must process the feel of its weight, the texture of its surface, the curve and shape of the cup, the colors, the handle and its fit with the human action of grasping, the taste and smell of the coffee. These aspects are “apprehended and processed differently in anatomically different locations, and there is no single site in the brain where the various apprehensions are brought together.” While we can refer to neural networks, neuroscience cannot yet fully explain how the coffee cup is regarded as a unified object. We could, of course, simply attribute the unity to the object itself. But Fauconnier and Turner point out that not all nonhuman cognition would perceive it in the same way. We have the ability to see things at a human scale and relate to them according to our needs, and they argue that this is “an imaginative achievement.”7 Such activity of imagination takes place continuously, and in the background of cognition, so that we are unaware of this process. The advantage of describing this background operation of the mind as the activity of imagination is that it indicates an underlying or implicit cognitive process to support imagination’s explicit, transformative, and deliberate modes of activity. Yet, as will be discussed later, special manifestations of creativity and imaginative thought must be distinguished from the operations of mundane experience. Kant’s view of the role of subjectivity in shaping experience is developed in a new direction by Merleau-Ponty. Grounding perception and thought thoroughly within bodily experience in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty rejected the idea that the world is received

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through disparate sensations that have to be unified by the mind. Instead, the coherence and sense that objects come to have for us emerge through the dynamic relation and feedback between embodied perception and action and the surrounding world. This view of the interconnectedness of self and world through enactive perception is inspired by Heidegger’s description of the human subject, or Dasein (literally “beingthere”), as being-in-the-world. For Heidegger, it is not some disembodied, abstract mind that comes to know a world essentially other to it. Rather we are, from the ground up, involved with the world through our needs, concerns, projects, and moods. Both the world and the human subject are, in the phenomenological sense, constituted by these involvements. While resonating also with Husserl’s attention to the body and its kinesthesis in his account of lived perception,8 Merleau-Ponty advances this phenomenology of being-in-the-world by establishing that this coemergence of subjectivity and world is a thoroughly embodied situation. So profoundly embodied is this nexus that Merleau-Ponty refers neither merely to the human subject, nor to Dasein, but to the body-subject. Because the body-subject can look and glance and move and touch and engage all manner of potential variations in its nexus of responses, a meaningful world is already encountered, one that does not have to be put together by the mind alone. “I would never see anything clearly, and there would be no object for me, if I did not use my eyes in such a way as to make a view of a single object possible. And it is not the mind which takes the place of the body and anticipates what we are going to see. No; it is my glances themselves—synergy, their exploration, and their prospecting—which bring the immanent object into focus.”9 The world is encountered by the human body-subject as we interact with it, emerging as a progressive “cohesion.”10 The coffee cup, to return to our earlier example, is approached as a cohesive object in the context of my embodied, enactive response to it. Its size and shape are physically familiar; its handle invites my grasp, its rim my mouth; its content correlates to my embodied need; I can manipulate it in any number of ways, walk around it, tip or turn it over, and so forth. All this embodied relatedness contributes to comprehension of a unified object. Correlative to human physiology and an evolved history of enactive engagement with the world, we recognize things by virtue of the possibilities for interaction with them, as objects to engage, employ, pursue, or  avoid, as shaped to or fit for particular purposes, and in terms of

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coherent spatiotemporal events through our own coordinating involvement with them—a phenomenological view echoed in affordance theory as well as contemporary theories of enactive cognition.11 The capacity for mental spatial representations is thought to be correlative to this pragmatic relationship with things.12 Neuroscience, too, connects the perception of objects with potential engagement, since “canonical neurons” fire in anticipation of action. “Looking at objects means to unconsciously ‘simulate’ an action,” and thus neurology reveals “the impossibility of drawing a sharp line between acting and perceiving.”13 Where Kant saw the mind’s faculties, including imagination, as responsible for the construction of a coherent world, Merleau-Ponty regards the body’s interaction with the world as constitutive of this coherence, and neuroscience identifies the neurological underpinnings of such interactivity. But Merleau-Ponty did not leave imagination out of the account, for imagination, most innovatively treated in considering painterly depiction in Cézanne, comes to be revealed as a dimension of embodied, enactive consciousness. Accordingly, imagination operates not simply by forming representations in a disembodied mind, but rather by engaging potentialities and possibilities through embodied interaction with the givens of perception. These potentialities and possibilities are part of every vital perception, and it is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty can refer to “the imaginary texture of the real.”14 By this is not meant that reality itself is a product of imagination, or that our apparently coherent and objective grasp of it is illusory. Nor does it imply favoring fantasizing as liberation from reality. Rather, Merleau-Ponty found the “imaginary”—the potential for reality to be taken up in the mode of possibility— an essential dimension of the real as known through embodied perception.15 The imaginary here is associated with “that by which the real is made available to us.”16 Merleau-Ponty praised Cézanne’s turn, early in his development, away from painting originating in internal fantasy to working with direct observation of the world. Merleau-Ponty’s studies of painting aim to reveal the potentiality, or assumption and projection of possibilities, that constitute the vitality of ordinary perception and the role of imagination in registering and projecting such possibility. For our perception of the world is not a registration of positive data alone, a matter simply of information processing. Coherent and meaningful perception involves both retrieval

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of actualized and possible elements of past experience and projection of anticipated possibilities. Cézanne’s painting, Merleau-Ponty suggests, seems to express this process visually. By rejecting Renaissance perspective, retaining multiple outlines for objects, rendering mass through overlaying layers of paint and modulating planes of color, Cézanne rendered the effect of a moving gaze, of a perception textured with potential perspectives, within a realized pictorial expression. Although Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of this process are more aesthetically evocative than classical phenomenology of perception would afford, the view has roots in Husserl. In the wake of Kant, Husserl aims to explain how a coherent phenomenal world is constructed, especially the sense of wholeness and continuity we have of perceptual reality. We experience a continuity and fullness of perception despite the fact that in any given instance we never achieve a complete perception of a thing. Strictly speaking, even the mere shape of an object is ever only given to us in aspects or adumbrations. Since we always perceive things from a given perspective, we see some sides of a given thing, but not others, the inside or the outside, or parts thereof, and never all totally at once; the same is the case with an object’s qualities (how it variably appears in light or in shadow, for example) and its relations among other things (whether in front of, adjacent to, or behind them, etc.). However much we vary our point of view in progressively examining an object, the variations remain inexhaustible.17 Thus, in attempting a complete perception of an object, we could be drawn into infinite potential observations. This is not only the case for an object’s potential symbolic associations—the myriad concepts with which we might blend the concept of the given object, the ways we can see the object “as”—but even for the perception of its physical properties. Phenomenology, beginning with Husserl, thus admits an irreducible element of indeterminacy in perception.18 Yet despite this perspectival limitation, we do not in fact encounter the world as made up of partial and incomplete manifestations of things. For consciousness aids perception in filling out and recognizing the various adumbrations and other sides of an object as standing in for its complete unity—a view echoed by enactivists who argue that perceptual content is “virtual all the way in.”19 Phenomenology regards this virtual or latent content as an inherent indeterminacy within the perceptual process. This is generated by our relation to the object’s potentialities—the potential or

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possible perceptions we could have of the object from other points of view, alternate distances, in other conditions, with finer or coarser grain of detail, and so forth, for “the openness prior to further determinations is precisely what constitutes the horizon” of perceptual experience as a whole.20 These potentialities contribute to our objective grasp of the thing, since they indicate any stability that would underlie the variation and what other subjects could see from perceptual perspectives other than our own. Enactivists may ascribe our capacity for perceptual recognition to our bodily skills, but this must be supplemented with the imaginative projection of possibility. Indeed Merleau-Ponty describes this involvement of potentialities in relation to an explicitly embodied subject: It is true that I see what I do see only from a certain angle, and I concede that a spectator differently placed sees what I can only conjecture. But these other spectacles are implied in mine at this moment, just as the reverse or the underneath side of objects is perceived simultaneously with their visible aspect, or as the next room pre-exists in relation to the perception which I should actually have if I walked into it. The experiences of other people, or those which await me if I change my position, merely develop what is suggested by the horizons of my present experience, and add nothing to it. My perception brings into co-existence an indefinite number of perceptual chains which, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it. My eyes and my hand know that any actual change of place would produce a sensible response entirely according to my expectation, and I can feel swarming beneath my gaze the countless mass of more detailed perceptions that I anticipate, and upon which I already have a hold. I am, therefore, conscious of perceiving a setting which “tolerates” nothing more than is written or foreshadowed in my perception, and I am in present communication with a consummate fullness.21

In Merleau-Ponty’s account there is more to the grasp of virtual content than a particular skill on the side of the perceiver that could be put to a given object. These potentialities that attend perception—the other perspectives I could have on things, the other perspectives that other body subjects have when occupying positions different form my own, the other

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sides or aspects I could see, or rooms I could enter, and so forth—are, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, implied, suggested, anticipated, foreshadowed, and, quoting from the previous passage, “written” in perception in advance. They are features of the prospective correlation between the body and the surrounding material world that is underwritten by imagination. For these other perspectives and aspects “coexist” with perception in the mode of attending hypothetical possibilities, since they would, “if followed up” and actualized, confirm and accord with perception. The potentiality itself of course presupposes the embodiment of a skilled subject who could turn things over or inspect them, who could take up other positions by moving around in space, who could enter other rooms and look at things from a different angle, but also one who could simply entertain imaginatively such positions and perspectives. Yet these potentialities precisely as potentialities also consummate and fill out perceptual experience. For Merleau-Ponty, even “what is behind my back is not without some element of visual presence.”22 This presence cannot be manifest in a capacity for a specific action in the subject without also the capacity for intuiting possibilities to be so engaged or, in other words, without imagination.

INDETERMINACY, THE HALO OF POTENTIALITY, AND THE PROJECTION OF A “WORLD HORIZON” Imagination plays an important role in perception by inviting indeterminate or potential elements into the perceptual field, contributing to the richness of a perceptual world. While there is some ambiguity in Husserl’s thought on the precise status of the indeterminate or potential elements of perception, Merleau-Ponty explicitly argues that “we must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.”23 Not merely our grasp of reality, but reality itself, in other words, must be conceived through the integration of potentiality. Yet, even while affirming imagination’s involvement in our perception of the world, Merleau-Ponty aims to affirm objectivity, to explain “the way I experience objects as transcending, or going beyond, my experience of them.”24

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But how do indeterminate potentialities come to pertain to our present actual experience, in the form of suggestion, anticipation, foreshadowing, metaphorically written on the actual content we perceive? As potentialities are not themselves perceived, they have to be projected by consciousness on the basis, but also in excess, of the actual perceptual provocations. The accounts of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty differ in their assignments of the indeterminate—it seems to be aligned by Husserl with expectation or hypotheses that attend perception, whereas in MerleauPonty it is part of the process of embodied perception itself.25 Husserl refrains from identifying imagination as the agency that achieves this projection, for the rigor of phenomenological method demands a discrimination of the noetic acts or acts of consciousness that intend different kinds of objects of consciousness. Consciousness of objects given in person, as it were, must be strictly distinguished from imagings of them presented by consciousness in their absence.26 Unlike inner imagings, perceptions are multidimensional, resistant to willed variation, examinable, and intersubjectively verifiable. In Phenomenology of Perception MerleauPonty takes pains to distinguish inner imaging and perception on similar grounds, and the projective activity of consciousness described earlier is grounded in habituated embodied interaction with the world. Yet the constant exercise of such projection as a dimension of perceptual experience may provide the underlying basis of the capacity for imaginative presentation in the mind—much in the same way that, as described in the last chapter, the act of aiming a throw requires an anticipatory projection of consciousness in advance of perceptual feedback, a process that may give rise to internal representation. One of Husserl’s terms for the provision of possibilities or potentialities—of what we could see if we turned the cup over, or looked at its other side, or regarded it from a distance or up close, and so forth—is apperception. This is a periperceptual, active rather than merely receptive, supplement to perception, and according to Husserl this supplement serves to cofunction in, and fulfill, perception as such. In this surplus to perceptual intention “the intending goes beyond the partial givenness of a perceptual object to the object as a whole” and provides “a synthetic link to future, possible, active experience.”27 For whatever is actually and positively given in experience, there resonates a halo of potentialities or possibilities—what the later Merleau-Ponty calls “a

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presence of the immanent, the latent, or the hidden.”28 This halo of potentialities, never the direct content of perception itself, gives texture, vitality, and depth to our perception of the world. What in Phenomenology of Perception is described as the body subject’s foreshadowing, anticipating, projection in advance, is more explicitly identified with imagination in his last work, where Merleau-Ponty suggests the inextricability of imagination and perception. In The Visible and the Invisible he argues that “the least particle of the perceived incorporates [the imaginary] from the first into the ‘perceived,’ the most credible phantasm glances off at the surface of the world.”29 Merleau-Ponty here hints at continuity between the necessary, automatic productive role of imagination in perception and the potential for active, transformative interjections of deliberate imagining. In this same text, Merleau-Ponty criticizes Sartre’s strict segregation between perception and imagination, as if they took place in two discrete theaters of the mind.30 For Sartre, perception is consciousness of present beings, while imagination is consciousness of objects absent, elsewhere, or nonexistent (or simply not posited as existing). As Sartre argues, “this essential nothingness of the imaged object suffices to differentiate it from the objects of perception.”31 Imagination is, for Sartre, neither merely memory nor anticipation of perceptual objects, nor is it entwined with present perception. Rather imagination produces the image (as an analogon for the nonpresent object) with a distinct ontological status—that of nonbeing or “irreality.” The function of imagination, through production of the image, “is to ‘irrealize’ the perceptual object, whether actual or possible, constituting it specifically as ‘irreal.’”32 In his study of imagination, Sartre concludes that they are of different and incompatible orders. “For the real and the imaginary, by reason of their essences, cannot coexist. It is a case of two entirely irreducible types of objects, feelings and conducts.”33 Not only does that segregation, from MerleauPonty’s point of view, fail to appreciate the scope of imaginative activity beyond its manifestation as fantasy, but it also leaves perception inadequately understood. Perception conceived as mere positive registration of determinate being—exhaustively present in immediate “observation, a close-woven fabric, without any gaps”—would never capture the vitality and potentiality inherent in the perception of a living and embodied consciousness.34

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Rather than strictly segregating imagination and perception, MerleauPonty suggests their dialogical overlapping. If Merleau-Ponty goes too far in correcting Sartre, such that imagination comes close to being rendered as “entirely an adumbration of the real,”35 his rendering allows perceptions to be described across a continuum of greater and lesser potentiality and indeterminacy, with greater or lesser involvement of projective imagination.36 For while Merleau-Ponty emphasizes how the perception of reality demands imagination, he does not entirely discount imagination—or art more abstract than Cézanne’s such as that of Paul Klee—that departs more radically from any actual perceptual context. Meanwhile, Sartre, despite his segregation of imagination from reality, recognizes that imagination can also offer to perception means to its aesthetic or other symbolic realization. In Sartre’s discussions of the experience of literature and art, and in his description of imagination’s involvement in the “concrete” situation of the mind, discussed later in this chapter, we find imagination active within the dimension of perception. In concrete experience, perception of the world may be endowed with aesthetic, symbolic, or affective value afforded by imagination. This may not change the bare perceptual features of the perceived, but significantly inflects how they are interpreted. There is a further role for imagination in establishing the vitality of perception, not only in terms of distinct potentialities surrounding the perception of objects but in light of the perceptual field as a whole. Husserl further elaborates the importance of apperception with the notions of the perceptual field and internal and external horizons pertaining to any object of perception. These horizons, never directly perceived but peripherally or horizonally projected, are constituted by possible perceptions. These possible perceptions are both of the object’s own properties, which Husserl calls internal horizons, and of potential relations to other things surrounding it, which he calls external horizons. Consciousness projects potential, not immediately perceived, aspects of the coffee cup, for example, but also anticipates possible relations of that object with other objects in the vicinity. Even before reaching it, I orient my hands toward the cup differently than I would in grasping for a rubber ball, since the brittle and delicate cup, but not the ball, would break were I to drop it on the hard floor. These interactions are informed by potentialities implicit in the actualized perception. Husserl claims that

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the projection of a totality of perceptions and their potentialities gives the surrounding environment an overall cohesion. Encompassing these internal and external horizons is a projected world horizon, one that is never fully present but only ever experienceable in the mode of potentiality. The world horizon for the phenomenologist is something akin to a regulative ideal. The horizon of the world is not an object we can ever directly actualize in our experience, but a virtual ideality, cointended in our attention to objects, that gives contextual coherence to our experience of them.37 A precedent for such a concept can be found in Kant’s notion of a regulative ideal as a focus imaginarius—an idea that, though illusory, assists reason. Kant describes the regulative ideal by which we project the world as a unity of the laws of nature, for example, as such an imaginary focal point. We do not have a view from nowhere on a unified world, or any empirical grasp of its totality, but we are guided by an idea of its ultimate unity, one projected by the mind itself. Through this transcendental illusion we project for our understanding of nature “a certain goal respecting which the lines of direction of all its rules converge at one point.”38 This focal point can be described not only as virtual but as imaginary, because “it is itself a fiction, a mere idea,” albeit one advantageous for the rational mind. On analogy with mirror vision as described in Newton’s study of optics—as, when looking in a mirror, what is behind us and otherwise out of view seems to appear before us—Kant argued that such an illusion “enables the understanding to extend its fund of knowledge beyond its present cognitions.”39 The phenomenological notion of a world horizon functions analogously as a kind of guiding conception of the surrounding world and the possible perspectival adumbrations within it, and is echoed in Heidegger’s notion of the “worldhood of the world” in Being and Time. This “worldhood” indicates for Heidegger what it is to be a “world”—not merely as the totality of all the things that exist, but as the structure of what exists for an involved and existentially aware human being, or for Dasein, which can engage possibility from the basis of, and at the same time transcend, a given (or, as Heidegger says, “thrown”) point of view. While Kant is explicit that world as a regulative ideal is an imaginary projection, and Husserl describes the horizon as cointended and apperceived with perceptual intentionality, Heidegger deliberately avoids reference to models

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of consciousness in terms of such faculties. While in the published text of Being and Time Heidegger fails to acknowledge imagination in this role, however, he recognizes the importance of imagination as transcendence, particularly in future-directed projection, in his discussion of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.40 Sartre appropriates within his own theory of imagination Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein as transcendence and understands, accordingly, the constitution of the “world” depends upon its ability to go beyond and surpass the given.41 While his predecessors insist that some kind of projection of world is necessary for the coherent experience of reality, Sartre adds that the projection of world is also necessary for the experience of irreality—for experiences arising from imagination that contrast to reality. For in order to recognize an image or imagined object as “irreal”—as of a different ontological status than reality—the world that it surpasses must too be posited. For consciousness to be able to imagine, Sartre writes: “It must be able to posit the world in its synthetic totality and, at the same time, it must be able to posit the imagined object as out of reach in relation to that synthetic whole, which is to say posit the world as a nothingness in relation to the image.”42 The freedom of consciousness to diverge from reality depends upon the capacity to project reality as a world, so that the merely imagined can appear as out of its bounds. Sartre’s insight is that we must be able to imagine the bounds of reality, in other words, in order to be able to surpass them imaginatively. Meanwhile, Heidegger’s philosophy describes human subjectivity as grounded in the surpassing of the real through engagement of possibility. Thus Heidegger’s notion of Dasein itself has been read as a “pseudonym” for imagination, as “a poetics of the possible.”43 Yet the indeterminacy and spontaneity of imagination, its irrepressible fluidity and capacity for variation, would also challenge the rendering Heidegger offers in Being and Time of Dasein’s authenticity—with Dasein fixated resolutely by the disclosure of its finitude—and the attending view of an authentically, resolutely retrieved history.44 The vital halo of possibility that surrounds the world in its “worldhood” as revealed by Dasein will be echoed in Heidegger’s later thinking in terms of the capacity of poetic language to reveal the world in its being.45 Poetry and other arts will be conceived as means of opening up and revealing world, and, as we will see in the next chapter, this notion of poetic revealing

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may stand in some tension with the creative and constructive capacity of imagination and its expression in literature and art.

MULTIMODAL THINKING AND IMPLICATIONS FOR IMAGINING Despite the broad involvement just outlined of imaginative activity in perceptual experience, the imaginative presentations that contrast to perception can be distinguished at another level. The capacity of the human mind for multimodal awareness allows us to engage contrasting registers simultaneously. In inner imaging I am able to conjure quasi-visual or other imagings that are not tied to the surrounding reality and contrast to that which I directly perceive, while still managing my perceptions of the world I directly inhabit. In imaginatively inflected perception, I can regard one object in terms of another that is not perceptually present but presented only through imagination without confounding the real perception and its symbolic counterpart. In pretense and counterfactual thinking I can conceive of or entertain ideas that depart from the situation as it is, while still coping with the reality to which it contrasts. In creativity I take what is there for me perceptively in the world or in thought and make a deliberate, discernible change with imaginative momentum. This multimodality of imagining affords the simultaneous engagement of different intentional registers. Acts of consciousness, such as perceiving, remembering, imagining, doubting, and so forth, refer in correlating ways to the objects of which they are conscious. I intend objects of perceptual consciousness in a perceptual mode as perceived, a status determined by their “in person,” or as Husserl puts it, “originary” presentation.46 I intend objects of consciousness that are imagined, and not materially present, in the mode as imagined. Of course, Sartre makes further distinctions such that imagining consciousness may intend imaginary objects as absent, or as not present but elsewhere, or as nonexistent, or simply without positing existence at all. But we can also make imaginary alterations in ideas prompted by in person or “concrete” perception. We can imagine, for example, how a clean-shaven man standing

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before us might look in a beard. In distinct registers, we are able to think in different modes at the same time, without entirely suppressing one or other mode of consciousness, and to a certain extent we may mingle our imaginings with perceptions without endangering the integrity of perceptions as perceived. This happens in everyday fantasizing, in children’s play, in projecting imagined hypotheses, as well as in complex acts of creative pretense. It has been pointed out that most people are able to imagine at the drop of a hat in ways that contrast to present perceptions. At nearly any moment in the course of nearly any kind of experience, we can and often do add to our present perceptions ideas of other, nonpresent things. As Casey writes: “Imagining is remarkably easy to enter into. It is nearly always available to us as an alternative to whatever else we may be doing at a given time, whether it be perceiving, remembering, reflecting, or whatever. The ease with which we are able to slip into . . . an ‘imaginate’ state at practically any moment testifies to the ready accessibility of imagining in the course of ordinary events.”47 This capacity to imagine under almost any circumstances is both a great cognitive advantage for human consciousness and, as it allows us access to alternative ideas unconstrained by present circumstances, contributes to human freedom. Yet while imaginings in these cases undermine the exclusivity with which any given objects of perception claim our attention, they do not, except in the case of hallucinations and the like, displace them altogether. For the mind is able to work with multiple fields of reference and inference simultaneously, even if not with perfect execution. Planning an arctic expedition, I can imagine a cold winter’s night even though, in my immediate experience, it is a hot sunny day, and I can think of what exposure to such cold might entail. Under the same conditions, if I know it by heart, I can rehearse Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snowman” and, while relying upon this memory and the images it evokes, further wonder about the mind of winter Stevens describes in that poem. While imagining may be remarkably easy, there may be more or less effort required to diverge from present perception, and the degree of effort will vary according to the degree and complexity of divergence and the facilities of the imaginer. There will be some challenges to thinking in multiple registers. It may be easier to imagine a significant diversion from reality by closing one’s

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eyes or otherwise shutting out present perceptions. It may be difficult in the case of other kinds of imaginings, such as auditory ones, if there is ambient sound that one cannot dim. The ability to focus attention on an imagined scenario may be compromised by too distinct, varying, or intense perceptual stimulations in the physical environment. For many readers, even a loud background sound of blended conversations can permit concentration, but whispered articulation distinctly overheard can prove distracting from the imaginings undertaken in reading. Similarly, the indistinct sounds of sighing or of muffled cough may be tolerable for some in a theater, but the distinct crinkle of candies being unwrapped or a ringing phone may spoil immersion in the dramatic presentation. Sensitivity to sensory stimuli, and the ability to focus on or withdraw attention from selected stimuli, will admit variation among human beings. Especially vivid or practiced imaginers may not need to block perceptual stimuli in order to simultaneously imagine. We may be able to look out onto the sunny garden and imagine it snowing there at the same time: the image does not blot out the perception, but both somehow manage to attract different strata of my conscious attention, like a palimpsest where the perception persists through a fainter overlain conjuring of the imagined. We can call to mind a situation experienced in the past—an experience skiing, for example, or the first time meeting a particular person—and, at the same time, without materially altering the memory itself, imagine that it happened differently than it did. This multimodality also occurs in modes of pretense. Good actors may evoke freezing to death even on the stage of a stuffy, overheated theater, or they may entertain the experience of roaming through forests, when in reality constrained to a small platform in a windowless interior; an audience successfully engaged will undertake correlative imaginings. Here some objects or qualities of direct perception recede to background attention, while other objects and certain qualities thereof may serve as props for imagined things.48 Readers of fiction make analogous operations inwardly, where the props are not physical objects but linguistically invoked conceptions and images. I can imagine traveling through deserts or on the high seas, though I am sitting comfortably at my kitchen table and sipping my lemonade as I turn the pages of a novel. This involves a splitting of my attention between the present and the imagined objects of consciousness. I do not have to

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suppress my perceptions of the kitchen or the lemonade, but simply regulate them to a background irrelevant for the story I am reading. In avoidance of spilling the lemonade, I will not shift my attention entirely to the imagined scenario, but will reserve some attention for that adjacent activity. If rain beats against the windowpanes, I do not confuse it for something happening in the story I am reading, nor would I take the evoked rain in my novel for real weather. This multiple registration occurs even when the experience of reading is immersive, as Marcel Proust’s narrator describes his experience of childhood reading. Hiding in the sentry box at the edge of the garden with his book, the narrator feels enveloped in the virtual interior of his narrative: “And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding hole, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside?”49 The narrator here considers both the ideas provoked by reading and the goings-on of the empirical surrounding world which form its material context. We have seen that while Merleau-Ponty and, less explicitly, Husserl both allow some involvement of imagination in perception, they outlined the differences between perceiving and inwardly imagining. Both describe the means by which we can, in a normal state of consciousness, distinguish present, in-person perception from imagings not determined by the immediate perceptual context. The splitting of attention between the imagined and the perceived requires what is more recently described as the mind’s capacity to “quarantine” inputs from different sources.50 A recollection from memory may occur during a present conversation with a friend, but I can under normal circumstances hold the two sources of my thoughts in distinction from each other (even if I cannot entirely sequester a memory from other inputs). I can gaze out the window and perceive the landscape, while also daydreaming about something entirely different, and recognize distinct sources of both objects of experience. The idea of quarantining helps to avoid an unnecessarily rigid opposition between imagination and perception. In the context of play, for example, the aim of imagining need not include the suppression of a given perception. Describing a child at play who pretends that a blanket-draped table is her house, Gärdenfors claims: “By suppressing her perception she can use her imagination instead. Her image is a deliberate false representation of the world.”51 Generally insightful about imagination’s workings

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and relevance, Gärdenfors argues here essentially that in pretending a child sets up a counterreality and in so doing misrepresents the world, and imagination allows for this distortive divergence. But this seems to confound the fictional with the false, a confounding that also appears in philosophical arguments about statements in fictional literature, recalling Bertrand Russell’s view that all statements about Hamlet are false, since there was no such person. Since the fictional scenario is contradicted by reality, John Searle for example argues that its assertion must be either a deliberately false assertion or only a pretended assertion.52 Searle’s conclusion that fictional statements, if not merely lies, are pretended assertions is a solution awkward at best, for it locates the pretense in the author of the linguistic statement, rather than in the imagining that such utterance promotes for a reader. In these cases of pretending and fictionalizing, opposing the perceived and the imagined may mischaracterize the ability of human thinking to relate at once to the fictional and the real. While a hallucinating or dreaming subject may have little recourse to reality outside the hallucination or dream, the child at play, like the fiction writer, is capable of multimodal registration of different sources of thinking, so that neither needs to suppress or deny the real in order to engage or evoke the counterreal. The girl does not need to suppress her perceptions (of table and blanket), but integrates them into an imaginary field of pretense where they substitute for something further: a house. If the blanket were to slip, she may well fix the “wall,” which she could not do if truly suppressing the perception of the pliant material in favor of a pretended solid one; or, when necessary, she may pull the blanket aside to make a “door” of the gap. Such pretense in this case approaches a deliberate mode of “seeing-as,” where one thing perceived in terms of another without its independent perception necessarily obliterated (I can see these lines as a face, while also seeing them as marks on paper). In this case the thing is regarded as if it were something else, rather than only as it is perceived. One and the same object is intended in two registers at the same time, as perceived (as blanket) and as (transformatively) imagined (as house). With linguistic rather than physical props, the writer can create the fictional circumstances of a character and entertain that character’s point of view, though occupying, and being aware of, completely different circumstances. The writing desk and the imagined scenario are two distinct

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fields of reference intended differently but simultaneously in the writer’s consciousness, and there is no direct conflict of the facts with the fiction despite their divergence. Insofar as “literary texts contain a range of signals to denote that they are fictive,” ensuring, if successfully conveyed, that the work is not mistaken for factual, the assertion itself will also provoke in the reader the appropriate attitude with which it is to be understood, namely in the mode as imagined.53 This involves “disengagement” from certain commitments of nonfictional speech, including inferring or attributing belief to the speaker.54 There is then here no confusion, and nothing false in the assertion itself; the writer does not merely pretend to assert the content of the statement, but truly asserts the statement as imagined and as to be imagined. Moreover, there are aspects of fictional narration, such as narration in private consciousness and artistic goals of narrative form, that have no counterpart in ordinary speech and cannot be explained as derivations from, or pretenses to, ordinary speech acts.55 The statements of the fictional writer are but genuine invitations to the reader to take up the activities of imagining supported by the narrative.56 While it is true that fiction has a “powerful anti-empirical thrust” in being able to depart from the observable world,57 this evocation and invitation can be undertaken with no antagonism to reality. Fiction, like children’s pretending, relies on the capacity of the human mind to suspend only an exclusive attachment to reality as perceived, in order to consider, in another mode, an imaginary alternative. Perception of the real is not, ordinarily, thereby threatened. In the case of the girl’s pretending, the presently perceived objects cue transformative presentations so that, in addition to a table and blanket (which she may be ever readjusting) the girl also imaginatively “sees” (an imaginary) house. Seeing the one thing as the other in this case is not like the case of seeing either the rabbit or the duck in Wittgenstein’s famous use of the ambiguous image to illustrate one example of “seeing-as.” In that case, the recognition of one figure occludes the recognition of the other, for the lines that make up the rabbit cannot also in the immediate instance be seen as the duck. Registration of the alternative object requires a shift that discontinues the foregoing registration. Nevertheless, in either case there is direct perception of lines on paper and a further visual recognition of a particular animal figure. Perception of the lines and imagination of the animal figure they make out cofunction. In a further

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example from Wittgenstein, mentioned in an earlier chapter, a triangle can be seen as a mountain—in which case both perception of the triangle as triangle and imaging of the mountain are coexperienced. Similarly, a child could walk into a room, see the blanket over the table, and recognize the “house” without ever losing sight of the pragmatic assignment of those objects—noticing, for example, that the blanket was pulled from her own bed, or was her favorite, or was marked with ink, all the while still regarding it, though not necessarily in a strongly committed way, as the wall of her “house.” If imagining were to merely suppress sensation, we could neither cope with reality while fictionalizing or pretending nor use fiction and pretense to suggest new renderings of reality. The multimodal capacity of consciousness is borne out by research into the development of imagination in young children. Such research counters traditional assumptions in psychology that imagination in children is somehow contrary to the growth and motives of rationality. In Freud’s account, for example, imagination exercised through play serves to satisfy children’s frustrated desires—which are expressed in adult life through daydreaming, fantasy, and fictional experiences.58 Imagination in this view is primarily an escapist outlet for satisfying present or past desires that cannot be fulfilled in reality. In Jean Piaget’s account, children while imagining turn away from genuine social engagement and suspend any objective analysis of reality. Harris’s research shows, however, that children’s imagination is not driven solely by frustration or escape from reality; that it is highly social and tuned to social engagement; and that imagining often “amplifies children’s analysis of reality.”59 Pretense in children, Harris claims, is not necessarily a distraction from reality, but rather “offers a way to imagine, explore, and talk about possibilities inherent in reality.”60 While Piaget thought pretend play by children evidenced their lack of a properly constructed understanding of reality, Harris regards pretend play as a means of investigating reality from different points of view. Describing the two-year-old boy and his sister playing at trains with cushions and a toy tractor, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Harris clarifies that reality is not denied or negated, but rather that the imaginative alternative offers another additional dimension of thought for the children to engage together. There is no confusion between reality and pretend, but rather a kind of symbolic replacement— this can stand in for (or be seen as) that—and it works through social

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interaction and agreement among those engaged in common play. Young children pretending with others make an implicit, or sometimes explicit, contract about the substitutional code in the make-believe situation. Imaginative pretenders thus do not negate or suppress reality, but rather accept the “suspension of objective truth” about reality in order to engage imaginary objects and events. At the same time, reality is a part of the material they have to work with. Not only the material props themselves but also knowledge about them comes into play. Children apply what they know from reality—such as cause and effect or the qualities of a given material—to the scenes of their pretending. They are “inspired by actual events” in their pretending and fictional constructions.61 Another psychologist taken to task is Bruno Bettelheim, who argued that children have a magical, enchanted sense of the world corresponding to the irreality of fairy tales. This overlooks the special conventions children implicitly recognize when hearing or reading the fairy tale or other genre of fantastic fiction. Rather than having a magical sense of reality that would absorb the events of the fairy tale, they recognize that what happens in fairy tales violates the regularities and evidence of normal life. In fact, it is this violation of the norm, the exceptionalism demanded by the story, that helps drive the emotional charge of the plot. This absorption of fiction as fiction would be cued by the special conventions of fairy-tale storytelling—as in the temporally indeterminate opening “once upon a time”—just as the various genres of literary novels entail conventional means to cue their fictional status to readers. Yet the boundary between reality and the magical world of fairy tales or other fictions is not absolute and is far more fluid for children than for adult minds. The boundary between them is “semi-permeable.”62 While children do not, upon hearing or reading the fairy tale, adopt magical thinking in their explanations of what happens in reality—they maintain the appropriate segregation of sources of their ideas—they may pretend and wish for such special circumstances afforded by magical thinking. Moreover, while there may be occasional infusion of reality with fantasy (such as when a child remains frightened by the idea of a monster under the bed the child knows by examination not to be there), this is an exception to the generally stable, if not absolute, separation between reality and make-believe that children, like adult writers and readers of fiction, are able to maintain.

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IMAGINATIVE DISTORTIONS Along with the cognitively advantageous role imagination plays in perception is the further potential for distortion, and our multimodal consciousness may fail sometimes to ensure distinct registers between generative imagining and other modes of conscious activity. Not only children but also adults experience some degree of imaginative infusion— for example, becoming afraid of or disinclined toward threats they know to be unreal. In the case of hallucinations, mere imaginings are confused with perceptions, subjectively imaged phenomena are taken for real things or events in objective space and time. Everyday life is interwoven with fantasies, of course, through our wishes or desires, fears or anxieties, and these can influence our relationship to the world. While imagination draws upon memory of experienced objects and events, it can also distort memory in its retrievals and presentations of them. In light of such failure, imagination has been attacked as a faculty that compromises our grasp of reality. Imagination has long been considered a threat to rational or objective thought. Plato described poets and artists as subject to divinely induced madness and associated many of their presentations with falsehood and lies. Imaginative distortion is vividly analyzed in Shakespeare’s works, where we find warnings, however wrought with irony, of how the imagination can trick or deceive us. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the comedy featuring fairies and spells and magical metamorphoses—imagination is humorously attacked as a source of error and as stimulating hysteria and obsession. Theseus, observing the misadventures of other characters, comments on the distortions wrought by the imagination of lovers and lunatics as well as poets. And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.63

Not merely himself possessed of fancied images, the poet holds power over the minds of others by giving shape to, placing, and naming, “things

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unknown” that are, in reality, “nothing.” Theseus goes on to complain that, in its synthetic activity, imagination can connect disparate ideas in misleading ways; imagination tends to fabricate causal connections for what may be coincidence and, in provoking fear, transforms neutral objects into dangers. Indeed, it is through imagination that, as Milton wrote, “the mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”64 The capacity of imagination to compromise our grasp of reality preoccupied philosophers of the early modern period. Descartes gives prominent consideration to perceptual distortions and hallucinations in Meditations on First Philosophy. While innate ideas are clear and distinct, ideas arising from imagination are merely reproduced and combined ideas from sense impressions that may be experienced as delusions or hallucinations. Descartes describes mad persons who have succumbed entirely to the imagination so that “they steadfastly insist that they are kings when they are utter paupers, or that they are arrayed in purple robes when they are naked, or that they have heads made of clay, or that they are gourds, or that they are made of glass.”65 Descartes further argues—and in sharp contrast to Aristotle—that thinking can proceed without imagination, and so imagination is not an essential part of the thinking self. In his reflections on method, Descartes argues that only epistemic vigilance—the use of reasoned judgment to curtail the influence of images— can counter imagination, such that “it is not a dictate of Reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent.”66 While Descartes commends the superiority of reason over imagination, a still more radical critique may be found in Pascal’s Pensées. Pascal was scathing in his criticisms of imagination, defining it as “mistress of error and falsehood, the more deceptive that she is not always so.” Pascal’s admonition employs an urgent tone, for imagination is not merely subordinate to reason in cognitive value; imagination is the very “enemy of reason” in that it attempts to dominate the mind and often does so.67 Not only rationalists and skeptics but also empiricist philosophers condemn imagination. For Hobbes, in Leviathan, imagination is merely a “decaying sense.”68 An image presented in the mind is but an afterimage, an echo of sense retained. With this detritus, imagination is said to corrupt sense experience, as sunlight obscures our perception of the stars. Moreover, Hobbes argues that imagination, memory, and dreams

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may be difficult to distinguish from one another, as are strong fancies from real perceptions, and confusion about these results in dangerous superstitions. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding David Hume highlights the capacity of imagination for fictional constructions, for feigning, and for rendering such appearances convincingly. Imagination, Hume writes: “can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.”69 As it does for Shakespeare, the difficulty arises for Hume with the relation of imagination and belief: the imagination’s syntheses can evoke a fictional world not only conceived as existing but believed as such “with the greatest certainty.” Beyond these older historical criticisms, the distortive potential of imagination remains a subject of more recent study. Sartre takes up the subject of hallucinations in The Imaginary, arguing that they are not perceptual confusions, but rather a distinct attitude taken to the imaginary. In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty takes pains to show how imaginatively wrought hallucinations and similar phenomena can be distinguished from genuine perceptions of reality. The neurologist Oliver Sacks describes how hallucinations and delusions, originating in neurological disturbances, can cause disastrous conflicts with reality.70 The relation of imagination to disruptive distortion of cognition—for example, in schizophrenia, psychosis, and compulsive daydreaming—is a subject of contemporary discussion in psychology and philosophy.71 With the use of brain scans and other technology, scientists have begun to connect the experience of hallucinations with specific physiological occurrences in the brain.72 Yet while physical correlates and causes can be identified for many instances of hallucination, the imagination, as the experiential capacity to present images and sensations in the absence of stimuli, or ideas that differ from reality, remains implicated as their phenomenal medium. Even healthy minds may experience imaginative distortion, as studied in recent psychology. Imaginative infusion, for example, describes how inputs from different sources of experience fail to be effectively quarantined. Despite understanding the fictional status of the monster under the bed, children may nevertheless experience real fear of it. Adults have

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shown similar susceptibility to this infusion. In one well-known experiment, subjects have exhibited reluctance to eat what they know to be sugar from a bottle they have themselves labeled with the name of a poison. It is suggested that merely imagining, or pretending, the quality of some object brings about changes in subjects’ emotional or affective experience of that object, changes that we would normally expect to occur only when such quality was actually known or believed. Moreover, pretending or imagining something happening encourages the mind to pretend or imagine—that is, to produce an imagining of—its effect. For instance, children observing an empty teapot that is pretended to contain liquid being “poured” into a cup will also tend to pretend that the cup overflows. The children do not thereby believe that the teacup actually overflows, for the mind separates the pretend causes and effects from what is believed to be the case in reality. Imaginative contagion may occur, however, when the mind processes an imaginary input in a way that overlaps with the perceptual register and does not thereby quarantine the response. Because the mind’s capacity to quarantine imaginings from real perceptions and those from beliefs is not absolute, we may experience what amounts to an “actual response to imagined content” in our thoughts.73 Findings on imaginative contagion illustrate not only affective contagion—contagion of emotional response—but also contagion with visual, motoric, and social imagining. For instance, from studies of vision it has been long known that looking at a black square for a determined period of time will give rise to the visual impression of a white square as an afterimage; but recently this has been shown to take place even in merely imagining the black square. Motoric contagion happens when imagining particular actions causes physical changes similar to those that would happen in actual movement. In one experiment the repeated mentally imagined contraction of a finger over several weeks caused measurable strengthening of the relevant muscles. Finally, imaginative contagion can pertain to moral decision-making. Social experiments have revealed that individuals are more likely to help others, and help faster, if they are alone with a person in need. When in a social group, an individual may feel less immediately called upon to act; the bigger the group, the less readily the individual responds. It is now indicated that also merely imagining that others are present has the same effect—reducing

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individual moral responsiveness—as the knowledge, belief, or perception that others are present.74 Imaginative contagion can also cross between the different forms of sensation. An imagined sound, an acoustic image, can influence visual perception, while an inwardly visualized image can influence acoustic perception. If a sound is imagined when two objects are viewed passing each other, subjects are more likely to experience an illusion of collision. Subjects imagining a white circle in a particular location will experience a bias toward the location of that object for hearing a sound.75 Such examples of imaginative contagion give further evidence that the boundary between perception and imagination is not absolute, but rather admits permeability. Memories pose a further problem, for it may be difficult to distinguish memories of the past from enhanced or altered reconstruction of past events. Imagination can provide images of objects absent to perception through memory, but the fact that we can, through similar processes, also provide images of things we have not perceived, or in combinations that depart from the original perceptions themselves, may interfere with objective recollection of the past. Wittgenstein noticed that even a present perception can be experienced with a “feeling of pastness”76—as in a déjà vu, for instance, wherein some object or event is experienced as if it were a repetition of the past. The problem of corrupted memories implicates imagination as potentially interfering with the perception of reality, albeit specifically the reality of past events. The fault of memory may lie in a failure to retrieve certain events or their details, when a memory is blocked, or in not recording them in the first place, such as when a subject is distracted, tired, or traumatized. More problematic than the failure to retrieve memories may be those memories that are recalled but tainted by suggestion or by bias.77 The consequences of this interference can be significant, for example, with erroneous eyewitness accounts in criminal prosecutions. It has been long known that the wording of questions about past events can lead to the insertion of details. The phrase smashed into each other, rather than hit each other, made participants in a now famous study recall seeing broken glass at the scene of a car accident where there was none.78 Memory, in calling up and presenting experience from the past, may be subject to imaginative distortion brought on by the specific prompts for recollection.

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DISTINGUISHING THE PERCEIVED AND THE IMAGINED Given the involvement of imagination in perception, and the potentially distortive influence of imagination on reasoning, perception, and memory, attested not only by historical philosophical critiques of imagination but by contemporary psychological studies, how does cognition distinguish the perceived and the imagined? How do we maintain these separate registers? Why does the imagination, despite its influence, not persistently undermine the perception of reality? It has been suggested so far in this chapter that imagination, operating at one level throughout and automatically in perception, contributes to the halo of potentiality and to the projection of the world horizon that provides context for our experience. This potentiality and projection are informed and thus dialectically constrained by the regularities of the material world with which we interact and by the habitual contours of our perceptual capacities. While we may further imagine possibilities that are untethered to the immediate reality, we can entertain such presentations in a distinct register of attention as inputs are introspectively monitored. The possibility of infusion or contagion of these with other cognitive states is ordinarily counterbalanced by the weight of experience and expectation, and interference is susceptible to cognitive correction. Earlier it was argued that we do not have to entirely suppress perception in order to deliberately fantasize or inwardly image or entertain such images that arise with apparent spontaneity in consciousness. Multimodal attention, in which we can intend objects in the different registers as perceived and as imagined, allows both the sustained—even if somewhat less intense or vivid—awareness of objects in our perceptual field and the presentation of the imagined at another level. We can imagine while perceiving, even if our perceptual attention is lesser during an episode of imagining, and even integrate thoughts pertaining to both perceiving and imagining without conflating them. While Wittgenstein noted that we tend to close our eyes to imagine,79 Merleau-Ponty described the way in which we can imagine and perceive at the same time without confusion, such that “constantly I weave dreams round things” that I perceive. For example, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “I imagine people and things whose

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existence is not incompatible with the context, yet who are not involved in it; they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary.”80 The imaginary that Merleau-Ponty here describes is invited in ordinary activities such as daydreaming, fantasy, and longing, which we can undertake, as it were, with our eyes open. We may imagine someone absent enjoying a presently experienced celebration, or a lovely view, or a particular musical performance, the perception of which may continue ongoing largely unadulterated by the imagining. Of course, our readiness to respond to the immediately perceived world may be altered by the diversion of some of our cognitive attention to another object of thought. Nevertheless, being but in one place, we can imagine other places and contexts without losing sight of the world around us. For example, we may call to mind a forest, imagine walking through it, while idling at the wheel in urban traffic. If lost in reverie, we may hesitate when the light changes, need prompting from the driver’s horn behind us, but we ordinarily quickly readjust to the demands of reality without much difficulty, shifting focus from the imagined back to the perceived. Yet we do not have to abandon all thoughts about the forest as we return to focus on the objects of our immediate attention, though any visionlike experience of the forest may wane, and visually imagined objects in any case are intended by most imaginers only fleetingly.81 While the attentional registers will be modulated by my need to respond to changing perceptual circumstances, it is by no means clear that we stop perceiving in order to imagine, or vice versa. For we may enjoy all manner of imaginings while continuing to drive, particularly when, on an empty road, there are fewer immediate demands on our attention. The execution of long-practiced activities such as driving, walking, or running, and the perceptual processes that attend them, rely upon cognitive habit, bodily memory, and the familiarity of the surrounding world, its usual conformity with expectation, and this regularity allows for the fluctuations of imagining at another level of our awareness. While we may become distracted enough by our imaginings to cause a problem in the world of perception (to miss our turn or fail to notice a red light, for example), imaginings more often, and for the most part, seem to accompany our perception of the world without significant difficulty. We clearly do distinguish between imagining and perceiving while undertaking them simultaneously, and on several grounds, including the

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resistance of objects of perception, but not imagination, to manipulation; the intersubjective verification of perception, but not imagination; and the far greater accessibility of most objects of perception to further examination than that of imaginings. Given the case offered previously in this chapter for the involvement of imagination in perception, it may be worth reviewing these grounds for their distinction. First and foremost, the perceived world does not yield to the interference of the mind as imagined ideas do. Perceived reality resists one’s mental manipulation. I can imagine the physical presence of persons or their voices, but cannot conjure their presence with my thought alone. I imagine the door opening upon my word, but cannot make it do so, at least in the absence of some technical intervention, without getting up from my chair. I can meditate on the inner image of a calm view of the ocean, despite walking in a busy city, yet while imagining the ocean I nevertheless have to dodge any oncoming traffic if I want to avoid being struck while crossing the street. We cannot find physical sustenance or shelter in fantasies. Despite Shakespeare’s warnings of the dangers of imagination, in Richard II the writer has Bolingbroke remind us that imagination is not equivalent to reality: Oh! who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?82

There may be some degree of contagion of perception by the imagined, as we have seen; yet there are nonnegotiable limits to imagination’s direct influence over reality. Whatever our thoughts to the contrary, physical reality—manifest in our perception of fire’s heat, of hunger and cold, and of their physical effects on matter—will normally ground our perception, even if we can to some degree alter our response to that perception by imagining its opposite. We can imagine holding a fire in our hands, but our skin and tissues will still freeze at a certain temperature; we likewise cannot prevent our hands from being burned by fire by thinking of the cold.

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Shakespeare explores the imaginative contagions and their correction by dramatic means, allowing for contrasting perspectives on a given situation. Lady Macbeth, for example, famously sees and smells blood on her hands during her nightly torment of sleepwalking. But the perceived world serves as the basis of an intersubjective experience, while her imagined ideas do not. Lady Macbeth washes her hands obsessively, but observers do not see the spots she attempts to wash away; they recognize them as the projections of a troubled mind. “You see, her eyes are open,” says the doctor, while the gentlewoman replies, “Ay, but their sense is shut.” Other people confirm the objective world—in how they walk about in it, refer to, avoid, or pick up objects as needed—in ways that cannot be confirmed of one’s private fantasies or hallucinations. Our grasp of the world receives continual confirmation or correction by the way other people engage with it. I see from one side of the room, from my own position and perspective, and I can expect that someone standing on the opposite side will take in a different view that partly overlaps with mine. Yet if we exchange places I will perceive the view the other has just seen, and that other will see what I have seen. This interchangeability of perspective was analyzed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as the intersubjective basis of objectivity and allows us to distinguish between the merely imagined and the real. Finally, perception and imagination are distinct in that when I perceive an object in the world around me I may examine it further. If I think I see from a distance someone I know, I may look closer and check to see if the person’s features confirm my initial recognition, or if they recognize me in turn. I can turn things over and look at their other side, hold them closer to my eyes or farther away, or examine a landscape from a different perspective by walking up or down the hill or crossing the bridge. Yet imagined ideas cannot be multidimensionally examined. Some have argued that images are not examinable at all: Wittgenstein argues that an imagined object gives no surprises, and Sartre claimed that “I never find anything in the image I have not put there.”83 As Merleau-Ponty describes in Phenomenology of Perception: “The imaginary has no depth, and does not respond to our efforts to vary our point of view; it does not lend itself to our observation. We never have a hold upon it. In every perception, on the other hand, it is the material itself which assumes significance and form. . . . The real is distinguishable from our fictions because in reality the significance encircles and permeates matter.”84

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There may be some ways in which we can be surprised by reconsidering a given object of imagining. We may notice the flaw in a particular plan we have envisioned, a theretofore unconsidered aspect of our own literary or artistic productions, or features of our own visualizations to which we have not theretofore attended.85 We may also reflect on a given imagining within an altered context, thereby understanding it in a new light, such as when a particular image that recurs to us seems to be newly explained by realizing its connection to a previously unreflected emotional or other preoccupation. There are, however, significant limits to the examinability of imaginings. Those experiences prompted by a novel do not expand in fictional space, time, objects, and events beyond what is directly given in the narrative, except insofar as the narrative encourages further related inferences. The reader will implicitly fulfill what Ingarden called the text’s “spots of indeterminacy”—for example, if a character boards a train London and alights in Manchester, the reader implicitly supplies a geographical crossing even if this is nowhere mentioned or described— and thus the literary text elicits the reader’s productive imagination. But the reader of a novel cannot hope to acertain what sort of engine is pulling that train if it is not already mentioned there, turn its presented objects upside-down or examine their description with closer inspection than the text has already afforded, or interrogate protagonists about their motives. We cannot follow the character recently disappeared around a corner in order see what he or she will do next, unless the text allows. If Shakespeare does not mention the color of Hamlet’s eyes, that knowledge is permanently withheld from his audience and readers, even if we come to associate the character with a particular actor. In contrast, the material world yields to countless modes of examination. We can measure an object, look at it from many different angles, open or take it apart, or submit it to chemical analysis. We can physically place it in another light or in another context altogether. Even the Great Wall of China, though it far exceeds what can be taken in through a single direct in-person perception, can be seen in different lights of day, from the ground, from an airplane window, or from the moon. We recognize the perceived thing as reality because both its features actualized in perception and its potentially actualizable details are materially embedded and always further examinable. Wittgenstein, in his Zettel, includes a few further distinctions between imagination and perception that may be more contestable.86 Wittgenstein

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argues that imagination and perception are not confusable: imagination is active and subject to will, while perception is passive and not subject to the will. Yet, although Wittgenstein excludes them, hallucinations are widely considered instances of imagining, and they are both involuntary and can be confused for perceptions,87 while even nonhallucinating subjects have been shown to confuse some imaginings for perceptions.88 Moreover, as Strawson pointed out, imagining can flout the will, for example when one is “haunted or tortured by images of recall or foreboding” or in failing to picture in one’s mind what one wishes to.89 Wittgenstein further claims that, while we can learn through perception, we learn nothing from images about the independent external world. Yet we can learn about things no longer existing or absent by recovering an image of them or attempting to imagine them,90 and we can, moreover, learn from imagining about the possibilities that pertain to our world, by envisioning scenarios relevant to action or production.91 Wittgenstein’s claim that we cannot learn from imagination is related to its being merely private, in contrast to the publicly available world of perception. The inaccessibility of images means that they are only available to introspection and thus cannot generate knowledge. However, Brann questions why introspection would be necessarily in every case a “weaker testimonial than any other descriptive report of things we can’t possibly see ourselves?”92 I can describe my imagining to you, and this at least demystifies the process: “Simply that I am engaged in my imagining whereas you are engaged in finding out about it, generates no aura of mystique.”93 We will see in the next section that Wittgenstein’s theory of aspect perception, or seeing-as, will complicate his aim, expressed in the Zettel, for an absolute distinction between imagining and perceiving.

AESTHETIC PERCEPTION, SEEING- AS, AND “CONCRETE” IMAGINING While imaginative distortion can interfere with our coping with reality, aesthetic perception feeds our cognitive and emotional preferences, our sense of vitality and integration with the surrounding world, and prompts creative expression. Through aesthetic attunement, we see

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physical objects or scenes in terms of symbolic or emotional qualities. We may see the sunrise over the water as glorious, the thunderstorm as raging, or the twilight as melancholy. Aesthetic qualities are not merely added to empirical reception, but afford a framework of attunement through which the object can be so perceived. In his aesthetic philosophy, Kant acknowledges imagination not only in its function in shaping perception but also in the aesthetic amplification and appreciation of objects of perception. In the latter, imagination is involved at a higher level of perception such that it becomes saturated with thought. Aesthetic experience allows for the reception and presentation of the world in ways that stimulate and vivify the mind—it makes the mind, Kant claims, think more, to cognize in excess of what can be contained within determinate concepts. Experience of beautiful nature, for example, allows for an intuition of freedom in the phenomenal world and stimulates a feeling of life in the receptive subject. But, of course, imagination makes possible not only the perception of beauty but also its creative presentation in art. Aesthetic creativity, what Kant calls artistic “genius,” is that power to “create a second nature from material supplied by actual nature,”94 and this theory initiates recognition of imagination as a creative power. Under the influence of Kant, Coleridge elevated imagination to a privileged cognitive power and attempted to account for the relation between aesthetic perception and artistic creation.95 The reproduction, synthesis, and arrangement of prior sensations are relegated to the notion of fancy in contrast to imagination proper. Coleridge conceived of what he called “primary” imagination as the “living power of human perception,” through the accommodation of the human mind to the order of nature. For Coleridge, this imagination, as perceptive, is informed by divine creativity. The “secondary” imagination, like Kant’s artistic genius, reflects this divine creating yet allows for the involvement of human will, for example, in creating works of poetry and art.96 By identifying these primary and secondary forms under the rubric of imagination, Coleridge hopes to bridge an aesthetic perception of the world and its creative rendering. Perception is thus not only enabled by imagination, in ways described earlier in this chapter, but may also be subject to further imaginative endowment. It is due to imaginatively endowed perception that landscapes,

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for example, may be both perceived and rendered as aesthetic objects—or, we might simply say, as landscapes rather than merely as objects of neutral observation. From a human perspective, geographical features are often appreciated from a certain height as a vista spread out before the viewer. The framing of landscape is physical and enactive, and, while receptive of the world, the subject here constructs a given scene as a distinct and inflected object of contemplation. Georg Simmel regarded landscape as constituted by human perception on analogy with artistic perception and creation.97 Rilke suggested that it was through the development of landscape painting that landscape itself first became, for us, saturated with human meaning.98 Rilke’s his own poetry illustrates a form of perception aesthetically inflected through the experience of art. The speaker of Rilke’s poem “The Apple Orchard” looks at the orchard and sees it as an etching by the great Renaissance draughtsman Albrecht Dürer. In his poem “The Mountain,” the speaker describes how a landscape painter (the Japanese artist Hokusai) became infatuated with depicting a mountain (Mount Fuji), etching it “thirty-six and then a hundred times,” and renders the mountain as a specter emerging behind that rendering.99 The possibility that the natural world could be replaced altogether by imaginatively framed landscapes is playfully considered by Wallace Stevens in “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain.” Stevens there contemplates a bittersweet victory of imagination over reality, where the poet finds, adjusting the details of the mountain so conjured, a “unique,” but also “solitary,” home.100 Mary Warnock observed that “the very concept of landscape is an aesthetic concept.”101 Sartre, too, writes of landscape as an aesthetic construction. Despite his segregation of perceiving and imagining, Sartre’s description of this process suggests the active involvement of imagination in framing perception, in rendering it meaningful through establishing relations among objects: “Each of our perceptions is accompanied by the consciousness that human reality is a ‘revealer.’ . . . It is our presence which multiplies relations. It is we who set up a relationship between this tree and that bit of sky. Thanks to us, that star which has been dead for millennia, that quarter moon, and that dark river are disclosed in the unity of a landscape.”102 The appearance of an inner relation among the objects of a landscape, their contribution to a vital and engaging whole, is seen to be due to the disclosive activities of human consciousness that turn out also

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to be constitutive. While Coleridge likens this constitutive disclosure to an echo in the human mind of divine creativity, Sartre considers it a manifestation of the autonomy of human consciousness. Both accounts support an active and creative rather than merely passive perception. The human being, in perceptive revealing, also constructs the set of relations for the object so revealed and in creativity can endow it with further significance. Imagination can endow perception with potential meaning, as it synthesizes perceptual givens with emotional attunement. This is not restricted to pleasure taken in beauty but includes other inflectors, or attitudes of interpretive perception, and more generally what Arthur Danto called an “aesthetics of meaning.”103 When a landscape is perceived as serene or magnificent, we lend meaning, as it were, to the landscape itself as we perceive it. The homogeneity of snow as far as the eye can see may provoke contemplation of vastness and a feeling of awe, as Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp experiences caught in the Alps in a snowstorm in The Magic Mountain. A river, seen from above or at a distance, may be followed by the eye with an impression of its making a journey. Thus, we speak of the snowscape’s desolation, or the river’s journeying, projecting a sense of the  distinctly aesthetic and metaphorical meanings the natural objects themselves seem to convey. Sartre writes, in the context of literary and artistic depictions of such scenes, that “the imagination has not only a regulating function, but a constitutive one.”104 Modernist writers extend the interest in endowed perception to the subject of cityscapes, where not only beauty but other inflectors are expressed through literary construction. The sense of place in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is constructed by her characters’ meanderings through the streets of London on a June day punctuated by the hourly striking of Big Ben, the bell of the clock on Westminster tower. The London of the novel is rendered as a vital, interconnected, but also fractured whole. The impressionistic rendering is achieved through the successive interweaving of perspectives as different characters crisscross the city, with parks traversed, bits of conversations overheard, observations of traffic, street music, arguments, commerce, and a plane writing in the sky, the rhythm of the bell’s striking forming the connective temporal tissue for this montage. The cityscape and the mindscape tend to merge, as the narrator describes: “As a cloud crosses the

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sun, silence falls on London and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”105 The protagonist of Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge expresses an explicit aesthetic orientation toward such a cityscape when he claims he is “learning to see.” Having found the sights and sounds of urban Paris initially distressing, Malte finds consolation in the contemplation of artworks and describes viewing a street scene through the aesthetic values of the Impressionist paintings he has studied in the museum. The painting of a Manet portrait is presented to the mind through memory, but the perception of the present perceptual scene is also transformed by its influence. As Malte reflects in his journal: What a little moon like this can do to everything. There are days when everything around one is softly illumined, not yet identifiable in the bright air but nonetheless distinct. Even what lies nearest is imbued with the tones of distance, is abstracted and only denoted, not revealed; and what relates to distance: the river, the bridges, the long streets and the squares squandering themselves among them are what this expanse has collected behind it to be painted as if on silk. . . . All are attuned to one another, are valid, are part of the whole and form a completeness which lacks nothing.106

Rather than simply seeing objects before him from a pragmatic orientation, Malte regards their arrangement, along with the balance and light, nearness and distance of things within the scene as a whole, as noticeable values of the visible world that can be imaginatively framed like a painting. These observations, in turn, become the subjects of his writing and guide his poetic approach to seeing and describing other things. With these aesthetic renderings, Malte strives to counterbalance the otherwise overwhelming impressions of urban life he experiences as alienated arrival to a modern city. While these renderings of cityscapes by Woolf and Rilke involve particular strategies of literary construction, they illustrate imagination at work in registering atmosphere and attributing a sense of a whole to our otherwise fragmentary perception of local environments. Literary description of atmosphere evokes for the world of the novel something analogous to a “world horizon,” which, as we have seen, reflects

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imagination’s contribution to our perception of a coherent and potentially meaningful world. More mundane forms of aesthetic reception also reveal imagination at work. In addition to the beauties of landscape, Kant considered in Critique of Judgment why we tend to take pleasure in free patterns, such as designs on wallpaper, feathers, or seashells. Kant regarded these kinds of objects as “free beauties,” since pleasure is taken simply in the pattern and its visual impression. Here we experience pleasure in objects that “mean nothing on their own: they represent nothing, no object under a determinate concept.”107 While static patterns may soon cease to amuse the viewer, Kant pointed out that we never tire of looking at natural movement such as that of flames in a fireplace. In this category would be the changing colors of sunrise and sunset, the moving forms of ocean waves, clouds passing across the sky, the visual effect of windstorms through tree branches, and lightning, all natural perceptual phenomena that we linger over in aesthetic perception. When we enjoy such things, Kant argues, “our imagination is playing, as it were, while it contemplates the shape,” with no determinate concept “which would restrict its freedom.”108 Yet while Kant attended specifically to beauty he regarded as free from any concept, we may observe these phenomena with the latent awareness of possibilities for interpretation. There is ever the possibility of “seeing-as,” the discernment of figures that may then stimulate further imaginative thought, and such phenomena also resound with distinctly metaphorical resonances. Strawson thus likened Kant’s understanding of the involvement of imagination in perception in general to Wittgenstein’s idea of seeing-as, such that “the visual experience is irradiated by, or infused with, the concept; or it becomes soaked with the concept.”109 Seeing-as, like other forms of endowed perception, challenges any absolute distinction between perception and imagination, as well as between imagination and other forms of cognition. We may see one thing or group of things in the shape of another so that it takes on symbolic form, as for example when we see figures in the clouds or stars. While clouds offer but fleeting shapes, a more stable invitation to seeing-as occurs with the constellations. The stars are seen both as individual points of light in a sky full of other stars and as a related grouping that makes out a figure— vaguely outlining the shape of a bull (Taurus), a lion (Leo), or a hunter

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(Orion), by cultural convention identified as such. While these symbolic perceptions may be described as merely aesthetic, our ability to make selections and symbolic associations in visual attention can also serve practical human purposes. A journey can be better navigated by reference to the stars if their recognition is facilitated through figurative perception. Moreover, once we have caught sight of a familiar constellation, the relations between individual stars seem to be regularized in our perception, such that they stand out against a background of other less distinguished phenomena. Seeing recognizable shapes in the clouds or stars as figured constellations are examples of the “seeing-as,” or aspect perception, described by Wittgenstein. Seeing-as involves a perceptual and imaginative integration that, in the case of recognizing one thing in its likeness to another, nevertheless maintains distinct objects of comparison. Seeing-as is a form of visual figuration, which has been described as “taking a perception as a picture or image.”110 A group of stars are seen as both points of light in the sky and as the hunter Orion. There is no suppression of the straightforward visual perception save its augmentation by the simultaneous eliciting of a figurative potential. Wittgenstein explains that in certain perceptual experiences, such as recognizing a likeness, we have to describe “seeing” in two different ways. There is straightforward perceptual seeing and a further kind of perceptual recognition through resemblance: Two uses of the word “see.” The one: “What do you see there?”—“I see this” (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness in these two faces” . . . What is important is the categorical difference between the two “objects” of sight. I observe a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect.”111

The first kind of seeing is something like primary perception; the second kind of seeing registers the same object seen in view of its resemblance to or association with an actualized potential aspect of another. In the same way, I can see stars straightforwardly as points of light among others, and

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also recognize their spatial arrangement as making out the likeness, figure, image of another object. The perceptual object is not itself changed in the shift from bare seeing to seeing-as, but the experienced perception is altered, as seeing-as is enabled by imagination.112 Several other examples are offered by Wittgenstein to illustrate varieties of seeing-as. A geometrical drawing can be seen as a glass cube or, alternatively, as an open box. The lines of the drawing are in either case perceived; but the interpretation shifts between one figuration or the other. In the case of the famous sketch of the rabbit/duck figure, a shift can occur so that given features literally figure differently: what would be the ears of the rabbit are regarded instead as the bill of the duck. One may suddenly recognize an object as familiar that one had not at first recognized because it was in an unusual position or in different lighting, or one may recognize in what at first may appear an unfamiliar face that of an old acquaintance. One may see a sphere in a picture as if it were actually floating in the air or see a horse in a still picture as if it  were galloping. Perception can organize items in different apparent groupings: one can see dots as four in a row or as two dots bordered by a dot on each side.113 Seeing-as may also be related to what Husserl called picture consciousness, wherein we “see” the object represented in a picture, rather than primarily the lines and physical markings that construct the representation. Wittgenstein describes this phenomenon such that we “view the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the very object (the man, the landscape, and so on) represented in it.”114 The capacity of the human visual system to recognize patterns tends to favor recognition of certain phenomena. Researchers of visual cognition have described the faster visual pathways responsible for recognizing faces and animals (as contrasted with the slower pathways for processing detail). Human vision has evolved to allow the “rapid visual categorization” of certain stimuli, given the necessity to detect predators in the environment and to ensure early social bonding. That our eyes and brains are especially adapted to recognize both faces and figures of animals may influence the registration of such figures or patterns in other objects. It has been suggested that this capacity grounds human creativity: People are surprisingly adept at seeing faces or animals in random patterns like clouds. At night, our ancestors played a similar game with the

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stars: when, connecting mentally the celestial dots, archers, or bears appeared before their eyes. On a clear night, even the man on the moon shows his face. Leonardo saw this capacity as the basis of artistic creativity and recommended to his students to stare at natural patterns and try to find people, animals, and scenes hidden inside.115

The earliest artworks are modifications of physical objects (such as bones or ivory) the shapes of which may have been, for the human perceiver, suggestive of the objects they would be made to resemble. Cave paintings found in Spain include eyes painted on a wall where a natural protrusion resembled the head of a bear.116 The faster automatic process of detecting certain figures may lead to the “overly generous recognition of random patterns that happen to vaguely resemble a particular object” and so to the propensity for imaginative seeing-as.117 This may be also relevant to comical perceptions, such as when the faces of dogs are recognized with some likeness to that of their owners—an ostensibly apocryphal phenomenon that seems to have found some support in recent studies.118 Richard Wollheim offered the further notion of “seeing-in” to  describe aesthetic consciousness of images. If seeing-as is taken to remain distinct from the underlying perception, and so according to Wollheim does not allow “unlimited simultaneous attention to what is seen and to the features of the medium,” seeing-in is meant to capture both of these at once.119 Wittgenstein argues that seeing-as “does not belong to perception,”120 and “it is indeed a different kind of experience than mere sensory awareness alone.”121 Yet the separation between seeing-as and perception becomes strained when we account for the effect of seeing-as on the experience of perception. Wittgenstein himself repeatedly suggests, in Philosophical Investigations, that seeing-as functions as a kind of interface between visual experience and thought, so that the experience of perceiving becomes thought endowed in a particular way. For Wittgenstein admits that seeing-as is “half visual experience, half thinking” and “the echo of a thought in sight.”122 When aspect perception implicitly sets the perceived into a field of comparison, it allows for the “fusion of seeing and thinking.”123 Wittgenstein repeatedly refers to imagination in this context, not only arguing explicitly that, in some of the cases we have indicated, seeing-as “requires imagination” but also likening seeing-as to “having an

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image.”124 Wittgenstein continues here by explicitly evoking the facility of imagination in conjunction with perception. Although in the context of visual imaging, Wittgenstein evokes an auditory analogy: “Doesn’t it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a particular theme? And yet one is perceiving something in so hearing it.”125 Seeing-as is then a kind of an interpretive seeing, hearing-as an interpretive hearing, and the interpretation is imaginative in nature. As Wittgenstein suggests, at least in some forms of seeing-as “it is as if an image came into contact with the visual impression and for a long time stayed in contact with it.”126 Wittgenstein distinguishes between sudden and ephemeral aspect perception, or the “dawning” of an aspect, and the continuous seeing of an aspect which is sustained or becomes conventional.127 In this latter case, seeing-as is relevant not only to the momentary experience of visual perception but to the conceptualization of our visual awareness in general and thus to “becoming discursively aware of things.”128 Seeing-as then has implications beyond perception alone and its attendance by a surplus image and relates to linguistic meaning.129 Strawson regards seeingas as an achievement of imagination whether or not it involves the production of an image: Cannot we find an analogy here with a whole host of situations in which there is some sort of departure from the immediately obvious or familiar or mundane or established or superficial or literal way of taking things; situations in which there is some sort of innovation or extravagance or figure or trope or stretch of the mind or new illumination or invention? Thus, beginning from such simplicities as seeing a cloud as a camel or a formation of stalagmites as a dragon, or a small child at a picnic seeing a tree stump as a table, we may move on to very diverse things: to the first application of the word “astringent” to a remark or to someone’s personality; to Wellington at Salamanca saying “Now we have them” and seeing the future course of the battle in an injudicious movement of the enemy; to the sensitive observer of a personal situation seeing that situation as one of humiliation for one party and triumph for another; to a natural (or even a social) scientist seeing a pattern in phenomena which has never been seen before and introducing, as we say, new concepts to express his [sic] insight, to anyone seeing Keeble College, Oxford, or the University Museum or Balliol as their architects meant

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them to be seen; to Blake seeing eternity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. And so on. In connection with any item in this rather wild list the words “imaginative” and “imagination” are appropriate, though to only some of them is the idea of an image coming into contact with an impression appropriate.130

Seeing-as in this expanded sense allows us to formulate how imagination is involved in the perception not just of coherent objects, but of meaningful ones, or of objects meaningful in particular ways. The analogy between seeing-as and linguistic meaning, moreover, allows for an imaginative experience that may overcome the problem of the purely private mental image. While the image is private, and linguistic meaning is shared, the experience of seeing-as affords some overlap or jointure between the individual and the social in human experience.131 The involvement of imagination in such perceptual experiences described by Wittgenstein is hinted at in Sartre’s description of the mind in every “concrete” situation as pregnant with the imaginary. Again despite Sartre’s strict segregation of imagination and perception, some acknowledgment of the amplification of experience by imagination is poignantly suggested at the end of his work The Imaginary. He writes: “Imagination is not an empirical power added to the mind, it is the mind itself in so far as it is free; every concrete situation of the mind in the world is pregnant with the imaginary, in that it is always present as a way of going beyond the real.”132 Sartre touches here on how the imagination can be involved in consciousness of the real world, affording the mind a means to go beyond the immediate givens of that experience through productive imagining. Experiences of seeing-as, along with the perception of landscapes and other objects laden with aesthetic value, are experiences wherein the distinction between the imaginary and the perceived is not absolute. Imagination, although not determining the perception of the world, inflects the perception of a concrete situation. This acknowledgment rests somewhat uneasily, however, with Sartre’s understanding of imagination and the mental image in terms of negation and nothingness. Much of the discussion in Sartre’s dedicated analysis of the imagination is devoted to the consciousness of absent or nonexistent objects, and going beyond the real would in such cases afford the mind’s turning to alternatives to reality, rather than augmenting it with

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possibilities tied to its interpretation. The account of imagining central to The Imaginary describes imagining that makes present to the mind something which is absent—on the basis, for example, of simply thinking of my friend Peter, who is not present, or looking at a drawing, portrait, or photograph of him. The imagination directed at Peter in all these cases allows a consciousness of Peter as absent or elsewhere. Sartre further considers the cases of imagining where a mental image, or a drawing, directs consciousness to something not absent but rather nonexistent, such as a centaur. Sartre’s interest in these examples, and in their unity as an “image-family,” allows him to emphasize the ways in which imagination allows the mind to depart from existence or being.133 For Sartre, the image is that mode of consciousness that allows the mind to consider the absent, the elsewhere, or the nonexistent: the image is thus “an object on the fringe of the whole of reality.” Contemplating the image, as Sartre writes, allows consciousness “to hold the real at a distance, to free oneself from it, in a word, to deny it.”134 Imagining might thus be considered a “disengaged state,” which allows imagining its independence and autonomy, its “indifference to the real.”135 But, more than indifference, Sartre explicitly opposes imagining and reality, often defining the activity of the imagination as reality’s negation. Imagination involves “the positing of something which is nothingness in relation to the world, and in relation to which the world is nothing . . . the process of turning the world into nothingness.”136 For Sartre, freedom consists in this denial and negation of the material world that constrains us. The act of imagination is “accompanied by a collapsing of the world,” while still using that world as its “negated foundation.”137 This view of an “uncompromising antagonism between the real and the imaginary,” however, makes it difficult to address creativity except as a flight from the world.138 But Sartre’s allowance for something like concrete imaging, or interpretive perception, is precisely not the leaving aside of or turning away from reality—not its bracketing—but a going beyond the real “that sees the real as significant.”139 Warnock identified this concrete imagining in Sartre’s own descriptions of experience, in both his literary writings and his philosophical studies, which are often distinctly symbolic and evoke seeing-as in the expanded sense described by Strawson. When Roquentin, in Sartre’s novel Nausea, looks at the gnarled dark root of the tree and

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sees it as existence laid bare, he experiences a form of concrete imaging, as originary perceptual presence is laden with existential value. Being and Nothingness relies on descriptions of reality seen inextricably in light of not only values and emotions but also ideas that are informed by our given projects. For a subject intending to climb the mountain, the “brute given” of its difficult slope is “revealed as scalable or unscalable.” Yet to the artist that valuation of scalability does not appear, and the mountain instead “is manifested as beautiful or ugly.”140 In Sartre’s description of the experience of skiing, the snow-covered mountain is regarded as elemental being and by contrast discloses consciousness in its freedom from materiality.141 Whereas Sartre’s skier in the Alps experiences, however briefly and illusorily, his own descent down the mountain as a godlike consciousness barely grazing underlying material nature, Hokusai regards his Mount Fuji as sacred. For the latter artist so attuned, this symbolic aspect would not be merely added to empirical perception but would infuse and inflect the perception itself. In all these cases endowed perception, or “concrete imaging,” sees the world as or in light of an aesthetic, existential, or symbolic value, a surplus, like the world horizon projecting a unified context for our experience, provided by imagination. We recall Sartre’s description that landscape aesthetically regarded is constituted by the observer’s imagination: by drawing connections between the tree, the moon, and the river such that they present a harmonious and meaningful unity, the imagination participates in the look the landscape comes to have for the viewer. In regarding the landscape, we do not merely see disparate objects unconnected with one another, but rather a vibrant and interinvolved whole that may appear melancholy or majestic, serene or inviting. Such concrete imaging does not rely simply on negation of the perceived in favor of the imagined—as in Sartre’s description of image consciousness—but on the productive construction of connections, a synthesis of perceptual and emotional life, a kind of perceiving through the lens of imagining. Landscape is experienced not merely in a straightforward perception but in an aesthetically enhanced form of seeing-as, where imagination offers a supplementation of vision. Sartre seems to admit that this is a latent possibility across the whole life of perception when he writes that “all apprehension of the real as a world implies a hidden reaching beyond towards the imaginary.”142 Whether in aesthetic reception, seeing-as, or other concrete imaging, imagination

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endows the perception of reality so that it is not merely experienced as informational data, but as meaningful or significant.

 In this chapter we have examined the complex relationship between imagination, perception, and reality, including imagination’s role registering the vital potentiality of everyday perception, its projection of a sense of a surrounding world or whole to which our experience belongs, and its potential amplifications and distortions of our grasp of reality. This complexity makes untenable those accounts of imagination that strictly segregate it from other modes of cognition, as merely reproducing or fantasizing a mental copy of reality. If we can, along with Kant, phenomenology, and some contemporary cognitive theories, attribute to imagination its operation in the background of ordinary cognition, it may involve further activity of this essential cognitive function that we can present and transform our experience with thoughts of possibility and even impossibility, with projections, however proximate to or remote from immediate perception, that diverge from reality. As our means of engaging possibility, imagination does not merely allow us to escape reality but also makes us aware of possible transformations of the reality close to us—an awareness enabled through multimodal thinking when we take up the real along with the imagined in different registers. That we may also misrecognize the source of imagined ideas, and imagination may infect perception and belief in distorting ways, may be best described not as the threat of imagination to rational consciousness but as a failure of this multimodal function. Aesthetic perception, seeing-as, and other forms of “concrete” imagining manifest the productive ways in which, through imagination, the world is not merely neutrally grasped as data but saturated with thought and value. Having established that imagination is involved in perception of reality as well as in its amplification and augmentation, we can consider, in the next chapter, its role in both revealing reality and in constructing new ideas that reflect as well as go beyond it.

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magination is involved in multiple ways in our grasp of reality, in its amplification or distortion, and in our ways of departing, in the mind or in material transformation, from its given configuration. Yet the association of imagination primarily with illusion and fantasy that long troubled philosophers justified its exclusion, around the end of the eighteenth century, from cultural representations of scientific thinking.1 This exclusion was reflected in the gradual alienation between scientific domains and those of literature, the arts, and the humanities that study them, as the former became associated with unadulterated facts—or what Alexander von Humboldt called “the results of observation . . . stripped of all the extraneous charms of fancy”—and the latter with creative, individual genius rather than mimetic verisimilitude.2 The tension between these domains was publicly aired through debates in the 1880s when new technical developments in science allowed ever greater precision of measurement and experimental repeatability. T.  H. Huxley represented the scientific method as the only option for grasping truth, while Matthew Arnold, though respecting the undeniable achievements of science, defended the importance of literature and the arts, for, among other advantages, their expansion of perspective beyond one’s own place and time.3 The contest was revived in the mid-twentieth century in lament over the mutual isolation of “the two cultures,” and is again echoed in recent discussions of the “crisis” of the humanities.4

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Despite ongoing debate,5 recognition is reemerging of imagination as essential not only to the more self-consciously creative domains, but to those scientific efforts to uncover facts about the world and to construct theories that explain them,6 while the arts and literature are increasingly recognized as serving human knowledge in distinctive ways.7 This chapter will consider imagination across these boundaries—how imagination may contribute both to the epistemically constrained thinking of the sciences and to the comparatively unbound expressions of artistic thinking. For even as the sciences discover and explain truths about the natural world, and the arts more freely invent new ways of depicting and perceiving reality in light of human meanings and values, both may contribute to understanding, though in different ways, both aim for validation, albeit of different kinds, and both involve imagination and creativity in so doing. The discussion will begin by first indicating, if only briefly here—the case has been made more robustly by others8—some specific roles imagination has played in the history of scientific thinking. Some examples of artistic innovation are then shown to achieve paradigmatic shifts in depictive perception that resonate well beyond the medium of painting, illuminate some aspect of reality, and bear at least some analogy to such shifts in the sciences. We then turn to accounts of art and science as modes of revealing the world or, alternatively, as world-making endeavors. The notions of “revealing,” drawn from the phenomenological tradition, and “world making,” from pragmatism, have the advantage of affording epistemic recognition to multiple and diverse activities of human thought and expression, while also inviting critical assessment in respect to the status of reality said to be revealed, and from which worlds are said to be made, and of the relative privilege granted to some forms of endeavor in these traditions. Phenomenological and pragmatic approaches may inform the debate in productive ways that may also be enlisted in describing new forms of collaborative inquiry.

IMAGINATION IN SOME EXAMPLES OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT When imagination is recognized as multiple presentational and transformational capacities of consciousness, the history of science appears rich

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with thinkers who have engaged imagination in novel ways and in ways that bear analogy with artistic innovation. The following few examples, beginning with Descartes, allow for the explication of the use of imagination in the processes of rational thinking. At the intersection of early modern philosophy and science there is some acknowledgment of imagination even by its harshest critics, hinting at the role imagination may play in scientific thought. Despite declaring imagination to be inessential to the rational mind, Descartes admits some role for imagining in both his philosophical and his scientific writings. In fact, his criticisms of imagination notwithstanding, Descartes’s philosophy, which came to be credited with inaugurating modern philosophical thinking and with contributing to the scientific revolution, could not have proceeded very far in achieving and elaborating its first principle without imagination. For Descartes engages pretense, hypothetical constructions, and imaging, all at pivotal points of his argument in Meditations on First Philosophy, among other works. With these the Meditations becomes an indisputably creative as well as rational exercise, supporting a paradigmatic shift for the selfunderstanding of the human mind as host and generator of knowledge in its ability to discover the underlying truths of nature. Descartes begins the Meditations, of course, by undertaking to describe the position of a mind detached from all accumulated opinion— particularly all ideas drawn from sense experience—in order to establish for his understanding a “firm and permanent structure in the sciences.” The clearest and most distinct idea—the thinker’s own existence as a thinking being, expressed in the maxim cogito ergo sum—is to provide the Archimedean point of reference for all further ideas to which reason can assent. In demonstrating this idea, Descartes contrasts this selfreflective thought with counterfactual possibilities. He entertains, for example, the idea that an evil deceiver makes him think that he exists, when he does not, in order to conclude that even a deceived mind is an indubitably existing one. The further demonstration of this first principle is meant to ensure the validation of a priori ideas over and against those a posteriori—and thus of what Descartes regards as strictly rational thought, rather than thought aided by the ideas of imagination or originally culled from the senses. Yet given the methodological role of doubt in this exercise—that, to arrive at the indubitable first principle, doubt is entertained through the creative fabrication and reasoned dismissal of counterfactual scenarios—imagination’s role here is not merely

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illustrative but constitutive. Even the initial activity of bracketing opinion—the casting of doubt on the foundations from which the whole edifice of opinion drawn from sense experience falls away—is indebted to imagination’s capacity to shift perspective, to undertake thinking in the mode as if. Thus, despite his critique of the faculty, the imagination is for Descartes “an analogical key to understanding even the workings of the pure intellect.”9 The imagination plays a further, equally crucial role in moving from the rational ego cogito and its innate ideas to knowledge of the world. For imagination as Descartes describes it is not only the means for the mind to bring in ideas from the world of the senses, but forms part of the mind’s facility for purposeful manipulation of those ideas.10 Descartes’s suspicion of imagination, as the source of images from the unstable world of the senses, does not diminish the imagination’s role in presenting and constructing a conception of the world. Within the framework of his rational essentialism, one scholar has argued, “it is imagination that quite literally makes the world for the mind.”11 Descartes conceded that imagination is inextricable from scientific thinking, for imagination is the power to contemplate “the shape of a corporeal thing.”12 Such presentational imagining may be essential for some forms of abstract thought and may become productive—Descartes says “contemplative”—through hypothetical consideration. Descartes’s own scientific writings on empirical subjects, for instance on optics and meteorology, rely on imaging ideas of bodies, and in their contemplation they are also transformed through hypothetical constructions. This is consistent with Descartes’s admission that imagination offers the means by  which we can present and manipulate ideas of physical bodies and forces that are not, or cannot be, immediately present to the senses. As Descartes ventures to explain the phenomenon of a rainbow, for example, he employs calculations that have to be imaginatively projected into mental space. His explanation constructs the scenario of an imagined observer, at a particular viewing position relative to the spectacle, and figures light hitting raindrops from a particular angle. Descartes’s ensuing explanation of the rainbow came to be his sole contribution to experimental science, and indeed by and large remains the standard explanation of the rainbow in scientific textbooks. Descartes comes to admit that all ideas, even those originating with imagination, must “contain in them some truth.”13

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Examples of imaginative thinking in the history of science are abundant in astronomy, including the example of Giordano Bruno, a sixteenthcentury monk who theorized in novel ways into the nature of the cosmos. His views brought him into conflict with the Inquisition—he was burned at the stake in 1600—while his scientific ideas, though largely unsubstantiated, anticipated several modern theories. Influenced by Nicholas of Cusa, who had referred to “the sun, or another star,” Bruno is thought to be the first to recognize in scientific terms the equivalence of the sun and other stars. Bruno held that the universe is not only heliocentric, as Copernicus had argued, but also infinite and composed of infinite possible worlds. In the first dialogue of On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (De l’infinito Universo et Mondi, 1584), he defends at length the claim that the universe is infinitely large and the worlds therein innumerable. Bruno had come across the idea of infinite space in the writings of Lucretius, and of God’s infinity in Nicolas of Cusa. Bruno may have been influenced by the British astronomer Thomas Digges, whom he could have encountered during his travels in England. Yet, while taking up these influences, Bruno’s elaboration of the infinity of the universe, and of other planets that he believed may support life, directly appeals to an original engagement of imagination. As in much theoretical speculation, Bruno would have to hypothesize, and to a limited extent inwardly image or otherwise posit, what he could not discover through empirical observation. The imagination itself as a faculty of thought also becomes an explicating factor in Bruno’s reasoning, insofar as he regarded imagination as the mind’s index of possibility and, by negation, of impossibility. For Bruno relies on, among other arguments, the impossibility of imagining the world to occupy no position. A hypothetical imagining of the (impossibility) of imaging positionlessness, or an inference drawn directly from failure of imaging positionlessness, was key to Bruno’s theorization of the cosmos. While such speculations were grounded in no scientific evidence, they were richly suggestive for the subsequent conceptions of the universe, and aspects of Bruno’s thinking foreshadow ideas of contemporary quantum mechanics.14 Contemporary explorations of the idea of a multiverse—the possibility of parallel, hidden universes, whether vastly distant from us in time and space or adjacent to the dimensions of our own experienced world—demand not only mathematical calculation but imaginative speculation.15

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The German astronomer Johannes Kepler denied some of Bruno’s claims—indeed, in De Stella Nova (1606), Kepler despaired over the hidden terror in the idea of an unbounded universe, without limit and thus without shape and boundary. Kepler hoped that astronomy— indeed, his own astronomical theories—could place this “madness” of philosophers “back within the bounds of the world and its prisons,” and he rejoiced at Galileo’s news that four recently discovered planets were in fact merely moons of Jupiter.16 Kepler set out to defend the uniqueness and finitude of our world, aiming to constrain astronomy through empirical knowledge, and yet he proceeded in equally imaginative, indeed distinctly creative, ways in his own thinking. While in 1543 Copernicus had presented his heliocentric view of the universe, the theory had not yet yielded a means of predicting planetary position. Kepler investigated the orbit of planets in the solar system in a novel and strikingly visual way, merging geometric structures with detailed astronomical observation. Kepler constructed a model that would reveal orbital motion of the planets, using concrete figurations of abstract shapes. Kepler did not ponder this construction only conceptually but also visually. Countering Bruno’s proposition of a limitless universe, in Mysterium Cosmographicum Kepler presented an illustration of his model of the universe and what were then the six known planets. Having realized that the regular polygons bound internal and external circles at definite ratios, he calculated interplanetary distance by nesting in one another the five Platonic solids (the five regular polyhedrons) of which he had made physical models, each encased in spherical orbs. The image Kepler constructs renders five specific geometrical shapes, each fitted inside a sphere, then nested perfectly inside one another. These, and a final encompassing sphere, were used to determine, among other things, the relative distances for the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The convergence Kepler discovered between geometry and planetary orbits astonished him, for with this construction Kepler thought he had revealed God’s secret plan for the universe—as it had been for Bruno, “the universe for Kepler was the created expression of God.”17 While Kepler later had to revise some of his conclusions—the model accounts for only six planets and did not predict the distances

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with sufficient accuracy—his work lent support to the Copernican theory of heliocentrism and led to his own discovery of the elliptical path of planets orbiting the sun. Some three centuries later, Einstein was asked how he came up with his discoveries in physics, and he consistently acknowledged the role of imagination. “I believe in intuitions and inspiration,” he famously said. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”18 This praise for the imagination is often quoted in popular psychological accounts of creativity and genius, yet Einstein expresses with this more than poetic enthusiasm for inspiration, originality, and curiosity. It is well-known that Einstein was unusually gifted with a capacity for inner imaging, specifically inner visualization.19 Einstein engaged deliberate and methodical use of inner visual imaging as well as other imaginative procedures, which he gave some care in recounting. Indeed, he used a visualization process to explain his theories and constructed fictional scenarios for illustration. Einstein’s explanation of special relativity posits such imagined situations as a person standing in a moving railway carriage dropping stones to the floor, the behavior of clocks in motion, the relative simultaneity of lightning strokes with respect to a moving train and its underlying embankment, and so on.20 In explaining multiple dimensions, Einstein asks us to imagine the following: A scene in two-dimensional space—for instance, the painting of a man reclining on a bench. A tree stands beside the bench. Then imagine that the man walks from the bench to a rock on the other side of the tree. He cannot reach the rock except by walking either in front of or behind the tree. This is impossible in two-dimensional space. He can reach the rock only by an excursion into the third dimension. Now imagine another man sitting on the bench. How did he get there? Since two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time, he can have got there only before or after the first man moved. He must have moved in time. Time is the fourth dimension. In a similar manner it is possible to explain five, six, and more dimensions.21

While Einstein here constructs visual images and attending counterfactual scenarios for conceptual explanation, he also insists that this kind of

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thinking is involved in the process of making his own original discoveries. Einstein explains how he developed his theory of general relativity by initially considering the problem of gravity through a visual thought experiment. As he described it: The breakthrough came suddenly one day. I was sitting on a chair in my patent office in Bern. Suddenly a thought struck me: If a man falls freely, he would not feel his weight. I was taken aback. This simple thought experiment made a deep impression on me. This led me to the theory of gravity. I continued my thought: A falling man is accelerated. Then what he feels and judges is happening in the accelerated frame of reference. I decided to extend the theory of relativity to the reference frame with acceleration. I felt that in doing so I could solve the problem of gravity at the same time. A falling man does not feel his weight because in his reference frame there is a new gravitational field which cancels the gravitational field due to the Earth. In the accelerated frame of reference, we need a new gravitational field.22

Hypothetical projection of a specific image orients Einstein’s initial problem: he imagines and manipulates a possible scenario. Explaining this requires both further visualization (as well as negative proprioceptive imaging) and projection into alternate frames of reference. While Einstein’s cognitive process of course may be described in linguistic terms, Einstein himself asserted in fact that, in his own discoveries, images came first and that he came up with words to express them only secondarily. The primacy of images is mentioned in a reflection on his own thinking process Einstein undertook at the request of the mathematician Jacques Hadamard. Here Einstein establishes the clear priority of images, and a productive play with their relations, before language and logical concepts are involved. The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and

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relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. . . . The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.23

Einstein contends that images, involved in what he calls a “rather vague play,” “combinatory play,” and “associative play,” lie at the source of his thinking. According to this testimony, Einstein did not first of all think in propositions or logical constructs, but had to find these in retrospect, in order to work out and communicate the insights he had achieved through the manipulation of inward visual and other imaging. While conceptual thought—or “logically connected concepts”—served as the guiding telos or aim of his thinking, its productivity is attributed to specific tasks of imagination. Such vivid visual imaging in the practical application of science is illustrated by the example of Nikola Tesla, described in a later chapter, who claimed that his inner envisioning was both impetus and source for his technical inventions. The fluidity Einstein attributes to his thinking may also reflect the close relation he experienced between scientific cognition and the contemplation or playing of music, with which his experiences of envisioning were also intertwined. Some of Einstein’s images, particularly about space, were inspired during his experience of playing music, and he sometimes made sense of others’ new scientific insights in terms of music: “I often think in music,” he claimed.24 While the relation between auditory experience and inner visualization arises most evidently in cases of synesthesia, described in a later chapter, even largely nonsynesthetic imaginers may report an interevocation between auditory and visual imagings.25 Yet it may also be that scientific intuition, in crossing the limits of visualizability, draws upon imaging of other kinds.26

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PARADIGM- SHIFTING INNOVATIONS IN THE ARTS: GIOTTO, IMPRESSIONISM, CÉZANNE Just as scientific thinking can make use of imagination in distinctive ways, artistic innovation may lead to new ways of presenting and even regarding reality. Giotto di Bondone and Paul Cézanne, the latter alongside the Impressionists, initiated paradigm shifts in the history of art. These painters were credited with initiating new movements—Renaissance linear perspective and modernism, respectively—the innovations of which resonated well beyond their direct manifestations in painting. Both were inspired, in different ways, by the incorporation of geometrical forms into the rendering of natural perception. The Italian painter Giotto di Bondone, born in the thirteenth century, was discovered by a master painter who came upon the young shepherd boy drawing in the earth with a stick. Giotto became widely celebrated as the greatest painter of his day, credited by Giorgio Vasari with initiating “the great art of painting” of the Italian Renaissance, and regarded by Leonardo da Vinci as his greatest predecessor. As a liminal figure in the history of art, the innovations of Giotto can be described by reference to his stylistic shifts from Byzantine art, which often relied on static, flattened, schematic renderings of religious subjects. While some forms of perspective had been used by earlier cultures, medieval artists had made little use of perspective, and Byzantine art had flattened out the picture plane. Decorative patterns, complex lines, and uniform, often gold, backgrounds give Byzantine art an otherworldly look, distinct from the dimensions and atmosphere of everyday experience. The abstract, timeless spaces of icons, for instance, eschew any hint of natural perception. Their otherworldliness would have been experienced as replete with a sacred aura, emblematic of the divine, as if what is “essential in the icon . . . comes to it from elsewhere, or comes to it as that elsewhere whose invisible strangeness saturates visibility.”27 In contrast to such otherworldly renderings, Giotto introduced interior light and an intuitive (if not technically accurate) perspective of worldly space into his paintings.28 In so doing, Giotto rather dramatically captured a sense of the immediate natural presence—the weight, mass, and potential movement—of his subjects. With his stunning new way of depicting not

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only nature but also the human figure and architecture, Giotto helped to initiate the Renaissance development of linear perspective.29 Of course, Giotto’s painting commences what will become a gradual development of perspectival innovation. This was perfected a century later by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and formally described by Leon Battista Alberti in Della Pittura (On Painting, 1435), a guide for painters that profoundly influenced Leonardo and many other painters of the Renaissance. With his work The School of Athens (1510), its architectural perspective aligned by a central vanishing point, Raphael is thought to have achieved the most refined demonstration of perspectival form in Renaissance painting. Yet it is in Giotto’s works that a striking new mode of painterly realism first appears for his contemporaries. Giotto’s approach to depicting the physical world is all the more remarkable when it implicitly reflects on the imagination at work in painting itself, as when Giotto’s paintings render fantastic figurations. Giotto’s images include the depiction of visions, apparitions, and dreams in the experience of St. Francis and his contemporaries. In the Upper Basilica in Assisi, Giotto’s twenty-six frescoes cycling the life of St. Francis (completed in 1304) offer many examples of the depiction of visual imaging in a religious context. In this series St. Francis’s visions of the flaming chariot and of the hovering thrones, his giving sermon to the birds, the ecstasy and ascension after death, and the dream of Pope Gregory IX offer some examples where the subject of Giotto’s painting is itself a mode of experience inflected by productive imagination. Ideas invisible to the perceptual eye and only privately imaged are projected for the viewer of Giotto’s painting, thus also granting worldly appearance and exposure to the religious acceptance of such visions. Yet Giotto’s depiction of St. Francis’s exorcism of demons at Arezzo is remarkable for bringing together two phenomena that may at first glance seem unrelated: the geometrical perspective that comes to characterize Renaissance depiction and this fantastic figuration. Just as Descartes would postulate and dismiss his evil deceiver in order to defend strictly rational a priori ideas—such as those of geometry—Giotto presents fictional demons, in fact, in the very same fresco where he is said to have initiated linear perspective in painting. The demons expelled by St. Francis appear in the form of winged monsters, and so Giotto seems to at once visually convey, and metaphorically expel, those spirits that had haunted

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medieval thought. In the same fresco, St. Francis stands between the church and the town, expelling the demons, which are shown to fly off. Arezzo itself is depicted with what the viewer of Giotto’s time, accustomed to Byzantine art, would have experienced as profound depth, as in the painting the houses ascend on a hilltop enclosed within the town wall. The church to the left of St. Francis and the rest of the town to the right are constructed to appear in three dimensions, effected by corner vertices arranged in converging parallels that recede from a central perpendicular line to two vanishing points on the horizon outside the picture plane. With this innovation Giotto’s fresco is credited with bringing painting to three-dimensional life, rendering a depth of spatial perspective more compelling than his predecessors had achieved. Giotto thus renders subjects in surrounding space in a way that seems to be intuitively continuous with the viewer’s own experience of dimension. This allows the viewer to imagine otherworldly ideas—those fantastic demons—while remaining anchored in this-worldly space and time. By means of an innovation in spatial perspective, Giotto’s painting brings together, in metaphysical terms, transcendent and immanent realms, otherworldly and this-worldly, while also grounding the immanent realm with a sense of solidity and familiarity. In retrospect, this painting seems to offer a visual metaphor for the commencement of a new era. Although historical development cannot be reduced to a single work, Giotto’s fresco can be read as a visual metaphor for a liminal moment in which the old demons of a former age are cast off and a new, immanent perspective emerges—an inaugural moment of the Italian Renaissance. This perspectival realism, while discovering means to depict threedimensional space, has also been regarded as an iconological construction which in turn informs perception itself. In Art and Illusion Ernst Gombrich suggested that the history of Western art develops according to a progressive “discovery of appearances” or an aim to “discover what things look like to an unbiased eye.”30 Yet he qualifies the idea of such progress by pointing out that one can discover only what is already there—the structure of human vision and the world as seen—and at the same time that there is increasing evidence for the influence our own depictive activities may have upon our visual experience. Our visual endowment includes the capacity to interpret the visual world, and we do so according to different purposes—making a painting and landing a

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plane will engage spatial vision in different ways. “The very idea that it should be possible to observe without expectation, that you can make your mind an innocent blank on which nature will record its secrets,” Gombrich writes, has proved “a mirage” for art as well as for science. Visual art is a process of experimentation in revealing the nature of perceptual vision, and, insofar as it succeeds, it does so relative to the possibilities of its medium.31 Since Gombrich’s study, it remains a matter of debate among art theorists to what extent perception itself, beyond its forms of depiction, must be historicized, a debate that informs the critical reception not only of Renaissance but also of Impressionist and modernist painting. The view that perception is malleable with changing representational techniques—that different epochs may in some sense perceive differently— remains in tension with recognition of the biological structure of vision, its role in our survival, and its continuity in evolutionary terms.32 Yet as discussed in the previous chapter, imagination plays an implicit role in the experience of perception, in enabling us to “see-as” and to fill in and project horizons for our visual fields, and this is a process that must be understood in the context of an embodied perceiver. Such a view allows for recognition of the interpretive nature of perceptual experience, while also recognizing the biological substrate of such capacity, even if the precise nature of their interconnection is not yet fully understood. If we regard vision itself as an embodied, enactive, and, in specific ways, imaginatively endowed process, there is no contradiction in recognizing at the same time that we can learn, through painting, to see differently, and that we rely on our stable, biologically grounded capacities in so doing. The development of Renaissance perspective in the wake of Giotto also enabled the further integration of abstract knowledge and pictorial depiction. The organization of the pictorial plane on geometric models not only resonated with but may have encouraged scientific efforts to render nature through the projection of abstract geometrical relationships. Erwin Panofsky postulated that the rise of observational or descriptive sciences was “directly predicated upon the rise of representational techniques” in Renaissance painting.33 William Ivins pointed out that the description by Leon Battista Alberti of linear perspective, in which parallel lines meet in a projected horizon, anticipates Kepler’s postulation for projective geometry that parallel lines meet at a point in infinity.34 The progressive

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development of strategies for presenting three-dimensional space on a flat surface, or what has been called the “rationalization of sight,” allowed for the “steadily increasing naturalism” of Renaissance depictions—even if strict linearity and a single vanishing point came to appear artificial from the point of view of modern painters.35 Perhaps the sole shift in the history of Western art that rivals such depictive innovation occurs with the advent of modernism. While van Gogh promoted energetic and vital expressiveness through vigorous brushstroke and innovative color, his contemporary Paul Cézanne, who lived a few years into the twentieth century, initiated another transformation. Art after Cézanne was profoundly different from art before Cézanne, because he depicted not only the object but also something of the perceptual process needed to grasp the object as a part of the physical space of the surrounding world. While Cézanne owed a great deal to his Impressionist predecessors, early critics regarded Cézanne as “the great and original genius . . . who really started this movement” of modernism.36 Compared to a legendary explorer, Cézanne is claimed to have discovered “a new continent of form” and, as much as any single painter, “can be said to inspire a whole age.”37 Whereas Giotto initiated Renaissance techniques of depicting threedimensional space, Cézanne, in revisiting that tradition for modernism, wanted to adapt geometrical formality to the living perception of nature. Cézanne wanted to capture the solidity of the object through a recognition of what he took to be its geometric substrate, while also preserving the vitality of its natural perception. For spatial organization through Renaissance perspective, ever more technically precise in the wake of Giotto, came to appear as “rigid restraint and majestic aloofness” and was to be displaced in the mid-nineteenth century by the Impressionists’ attention to the lived intimacy of the perceived, especially natural, world.38 The English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner had depicted objects through atmospheric renderings, often with swirling light and color in which lines and shapes were, if not dissolved altogether, indistinct or unresolved. Subjects such as ships in storms or naval battles, luminescent ports approached at sunrise, a steam train in motion, and the Houses of Parliament burning, were approached as opportunities to render the primacy of atmosphere, the sensation provoked by objects first of all, or, as John Ruskin put it, objects “merely as such without

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consciousness of what they signify.” Against Turner’s critics, Ruskin defended such innovations on perceptual grounds, as an achievement of genuine seeing, artistic recovery of the “innocence of the eye.”39 Turner’s innovations anticipated the Impressionist movement, though the latter would insist on painting wholly from observation. Rejecting geometric exactitude and linear orientation, Impressionists took painting outdoors, to render fields, gardens, beaches, rivers, meadows, lakes, sky, streets and parks, among many other expansive subjects depicted to exceed the picture plane. Impressionists used palpable daubs of paint to render vague shapes, blurry outlines, and objects only partially within the frame, as they are in the periphery of ordinary vision, and aimed to render the changing effects of natural light. Even solid architectural subjects would be rendered with a more atmospheric and global, rather than strictly linear, orientation. The revolutionary nature of Impressionist painting served as an important precursor to Cézanne’s distinctive innovations. The Impressionists taught Cézanne how to overcome what had become the artificiality of geometricized perspective in favor of the vitality of lived experience. The results were at first startling and strange to a public accustomed to early nineteenth-century realism. For Impressionism revealed the paradox that “the attempt to render faithfully the perceptual processes through which consciousness knows the world thwarts mimetic illusion building.”40 Of central importance for the Impressionist painter is not the likeness of the object, or the believability of three-dimensional depiction on the flat surface of the canvas, but the rendering of a point of view—not what and precisely where the object is but what the experience of it is like for a seer. These painters were able to render something closer to live vision, which is always in some degree of motion. For it has been noted that “the consequence of vision with a roving eye is that we never see a scene in uniform detail and colour. . . . Looking at details of specific objects requires us to move our eyes and head and, thus, even stationary objects move across our retina as we look around.”41 While Renaissance painters came to organize the pictorial perspective around an artificially stationary viewpoint, the Impressionists and Cézanne expressed a painterly vision that seemed to reflect upon natural, physically embodied seeing. The indistinctness of outline and distortion of linear space in some Impressionist paintings stimulates the need for the mind to focus, but it

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also registers the surrounding atmosphere, as when we look at objects through fog or mist. Impressionist techniques suspend the demand in practical vision for fixed object constancy. In conceptually regarding the visible world, we tend to automatically dismiss or eliminate differences in the appearance of an object in different moments in time and shifts in space so as to sustain a perception of a constant object with fixed contours. The mind ordinarily synthesizes what would be disparate impressions in order to fix an impression of the object, the perceived shape of which persists throughout and despite various moments and shifts of perspective, and it is this construction that informs our conceptual representation of the world. In Impressionist paintings, changes in the global cast of light or other atmospheric elements (as emphasized by Claude Monet, for example, in his series that depict the same object at different times of day), or the multiplicity of an object’s contour as seen by a nonstatic viewer (suggested in later still life paintings by Cézanne), take attentive precedence over object synthesis and fixed identification. Thus, Impressionism was from early on recognized as a holistic way of seeing: “The Impressionists proceeded from impressions of the whole, from the connexion of things, into which these things had grown and which they had created. . . . In their conception of the world and in the intention of their art, which had the task of showing that conception, the Impressionists were naturalists (using the word nature in the original sense of nasci: being born, wanting to become, growing).”42 This idea of holism is affirmed by painters themselves. The Impressionist (and Neo-Impressionist) painter Camille Pissarro recommended this approach in advising how a painter should work: “Don’t paint bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere, with brushstrokes of the right color and value, while noticing what is alongside. . . . The eye should not be fixed on one spot, but should take in everything, while observing the reflections which the colours produce on their surroundings.”43 Despite what would have been experienced by his contemporaries as the strangeness of his more pointillist renderings of objects, constructed of dots of paint in contrasting colors, Pissarro’s instructions reveal Impressionism’s dedication to the experience of natural seeing. It is not, again, resemblance to the object itself for which the painter aims, but the evocation of the experience of seeing it, or what we might now call its visual ecology. When viewing a landscape or the objects in a room, we

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do not take in one object and then another, gradually adding up a whole scene of complete and discrete identities. On the contrary, we may register some objects (for instance moving objects, faces, or those which correspond to a pragmatic need) more prominently, our vision shifting across and over a scene as we register such impressions from the whole. We perceive from throughout the scene the schematic shape of some instantly recognized details, and take in selected others, but apart from these we may register the atmospheric quality—the overcast sky, the gloomy darkness or warm lighting of an interior, or, in other words, the overall impression of a scene. Yet this revelation in Impressionist painting issues not from its retreat to some kind of original, prepainterly visual innocence, but rather from the generation of exploratory techniques: “art itself becomes the innovator’s instrument for probing reality.”44 Impressionist paintings have been studied by cognitive scientists interested in the effects of indeterminacy, blurred outlines, or other coarse visual information on human vision. Researchers have found, for instance, a heightened emotional response in the amygdala, a center of emotion, to coarse visual information, which is processed in the “fast track” of the visual system.45 In one study blurry images of faces showing fear have a greater impact on amygdala, while having weaker impact on areas of the brain responsible for conscious face recognition, than distinct images. Thus it has been argued that, given its effects of blurring and distortion, “Impressionist works may connect more directly to emotional centres than to conscious image-recognition areas because the unrealistic patchwork of brush strokes and mottled colouring distract vision.”46 Impressionist and other modern paintings can rely on the fact that the brain and mind will fill in the details even of indistinct or distorted images and will reconstruct objects or scenes only suggested by patterns “by exploiting perceptual memory.”47 The departures from precise resemblances have the effect of provoking a more emotional response to the visually perceived. “A painting with numerous distracting or, worse, inaccurate local details might hinder the rapid understanding of the subject matter by the slow pathway. The coarse information present in the work, on the contrary, finds rapid access to the emotions and areas of the brain involved in understanding the context and overall meaning of a scene.”48 Such research supports the idea that the paradigmatic shift in depiction achieved by Impressionism is not only a matter for painterly style, then, but also reveals

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something about the nature of perception itself and its relation to emotion and visual meaning. If Impressionism can also be interpreted as advancing the process of abstraction by reducing detail and line in favor of light and color,49 the pictorial strategies of Impressionism may paradoxically disclose something of how natural vision is experienced. The productive creativity of Impressionist rendering, by departing from preceding depictive styles, becomes revelatory about an aspect of reality, the reality of human visual perception. Yet Cézanne also desired to go beyond the depictions of the Impressionists, and it is this progress that arguably inaugurates modernism. These painters so emphasized light surrounding and reflected on the object—Monet’s haystacks or cathedral depicted at different phases of the day—that the object for Cézanne seemed to lack substantial presence, to be almost floating, as it were, in the atmosphere. In contrast, Cézanne aimed to anchor his subject matter, whether human figures in a wood’s clearing, jars and bowls and peaches in a still life, or the mountain in a landscape, so that they seem to command their space, and this is achieved due to his reincorporation of geometric shapes into the pictorial design. To get closer to nature, it was not enough to intuit perception; one had also to sense the solidity of a world sustained throughout the constant shifts and changes in living vision. The viewer is to be induced to intuit how, to a living perception, the objects inhabit their subtly changing color, their quivering outline, all the while anchoring a relatively stable perspective. With Cézanne, as Merleau-Ponty has argued, line, color, shape, and mass, and so forth will be engaged to construct a living vision rooted in worldly space.50 With Impressionism and Cézanne’s innovations thereupon, we might say that visual perception itself becomes the implicit subject matter of painting, while the strategies of pictorial arrangement that upheld the apparent solidities in Cézanne’s images inspired much of the abstract painting following Cézanne. For Post-Impressionism, the depiction of ephemeral lived perception is eclipsed by new forms of investiture in the overall picture plane, constructing spatial relations through mass, line, and color increasingly distinct from figuration of the perceptual world. Cubism’s geometrical tendencies and multiplication of perspectives can be seen as striking modifications of strategies initiated by Cézanne, with his reabsorption of geometrical shapes in the pictorial design. Eventually,

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some forms of abstract expressionism, such as color-field painting—for example, the luminous, contrasting regions of color by Mark Rothko— omit object depiction entirely and yet seem to evoke the underlying structure of a perceptual field and its horizons.51 Forms of abstraction in the wake of Impressionism, Ricoeur argues, may “proceed more and more boldly to the abolition of natural forms for the sake of a merely constructed range of elementary signs whose combinatory forms will rival ordinary vision.”52 But this too can be compared to other forms of abstract thinking: “With abstract art, painting is close to science in that it challenges perceptual forms by relating them to non-perceptual structures. The graphic capture of the universe, here too, is served by a radical denial of the immediate.”53 Ricoeur’s assessment is echoed in a recent study by Eric Kandel, who argues that abstraction in art serves analogous purposes to reduction in science. While scientific reduction “often seeks to explain a complex phenomenon by examining one of its components on a more elementary” level, artistic reduction—in the case of the abstract expressionism of the New York school, “reducing images to their essential elements of form, line, color, or light”—allows artists to “probe the limits of visual experience.”54 Whether or not Cézanne would have appreciated the styles his own works inspired in the twentieth century, or the eventual comparison of artists to neuroscientists in the twenty-first,55 his influence extended throughout modernist abstraction. Like the advances of the Renaissance, painterly modernism expanded the possibilities both for depicting, and for interpreting, the experience of vision. The impact of Impressionism and Cézenne’s Post-Impressionism resonated both within the world of modern painting and far beyond its confines. For generations of viewers of these artworks came to appreciate the perceptual ambiguity of experience as influenced by temporality and atmosphere, as well as by the movement of the perceiver and the consequent shifting and changing flow of impressions. Such painting opened up or revealed reality in a new way, as vitally and reflectively perceived. Ricoeur argues that Impressionism “created a new alphabet of colors capable of capturing the transient and fleeting with the magic of hidden correspondences. And once more reality was remade, with an emphasis on atmospheric values and light appearances.”56 It is with reference to such “reality remade” that Ricoeur defends the imagination involved in Impressionism as definitively productive.57 Through such remaking

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reality, the world looks somewhat different than it had before, for human consciousness is invited to new forms of attention and reflection as well as depiction. Artworks may also shift our perspective on a particular subject matter they depict. In respect, for example, to Picasso’s depiction of Gertrude Stein and its effect on the subsequent cultural perception of Stein, it has been argued that “perception is malleable,” that “it is possible to modify what we see, even when we are looking at a familiar object.” 58 Art can transform perception by making us recognize certain previously overlooked features as now characteristic of the object at which we are looking. Just as art can foreground attention to the atmospheric, art can provide models for a way of seeing by highlighting specific features and reducing others, characterizing its subject matter in new ways. But modernism also revolutionized artists’ understanding of art itself, its tasks and its possibilities. While Rothko is among those painters who reduced the perceptual field to color, horizon, and vague linearity (as in his rectangular strips made with irregular boundaries), Jackson Pollock took abstraction in a different direction. Inheriting some of the insights of early Impressionism, Pollock, with his energetic drip paintings, brought contingency and chance—and the evidence of human bodily movement—to the forefront in aesthetic consciousness of the image. Over the course of Pollock’s development, an increasing complexity of strokes—or rather splashes or pours of paint, since he abandoned the paintbrush or palette knife and with it direct physical contact with the canvas—related the progressive reduction of his idea for art itself.59 Pollock in his mature work rejected figuration of any kind, eliminating even accidental figures that may have emerged by chance. Such reduction would demand less of the viewer in the way of cognitive resolution of ambiguity—there is no need to make out objects, as Impressionist works still encourage—while potentially prompting the retrieval of scenes or patterns “that might be in any way comparable.”60 New options became manifest for practitioners of the other arts as the influence of Impressionism spread beyond the world of painting. The influence of Impressionism on music is apparent in the works of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Erik Satie, while modernist literary writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Jean Rhys were inspired to render the flow of thoughts and

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sensations, rather than fixed objects alone, as the goal of description.61 Woolf considered the task of the literary writer to capture with sincerity the reality of consciousness, and to select moments that reflect life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”62 Through this element of selection, Woolf argued in her essay “Modern Fiction,” modern novels should show life not according to some prearranged dramatic structure, but to how consciousness is really experienced: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there.”63 In their attempts to capture everyday experience of the mind—its temporality, its play of accentuation, focus, and distraction—Woolf and other modernist writers experimented with new forms of description, narration, and literary structure, for which Impressionism had offered inspiration. In the shadow of Impressionist painting and other arts, Impressionism could be attributed to human consciousness itself, describing a distinctive cognitive style in which overall atmosphere, and the impact of the ephemeral and the present, were favored. Impressionism came to be recognized—and early on criticized—as an emotional and psychological condition and as a potential orientation toward life typical of modernity.64

THEORIES OF WORLD REVEALING AND WORLD MAKING These transformative ways of shaping our relation to reality through art have been compared, with some qualification, to the construction of new scientific paradigms that fundamentally change the way we understand the physical world.65 Art can reconfigure our interpretive perception of things just as science can reconfigure our understanding of them. There are, of course, limits to the analogy, since paradigm-shifting innovations by artists allow for conflicting points of view. As Thomas Kuhn has pointed

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out, scientific advancement may disprove previous claims, but artists do not make the same kind of progress over and against their predecessors: “Picasso’s success has not relegated Rembrandt’s paintings to the storage vaults of art museums.”66 The sciences are epistemically constrained by the possibility of corroboration or falsification and by those same constraints achieve validity over and against competing claims or views. Yet revolutions or paradigm shifts in science—such as the advance of Einstein over Newton—do not always overthrow the ideas of predecessors entirely, but rather expose the limits of their framework of application. As for artists, innovations may initiate new modes of perception and expression that can, from that point onward, irreversibly inform aesthetic or artistic possibilities, whether or not they offer any greater—rather than simply different—insight or other value. As we have seen, significant moments in the history of artistic innovation have fostered fundamental transformations, rather than only incremental changes in style, such that they inform, within that tradition, possibilities for future artistic expression and reception.67 The innovations of science can be described in terms both of specific discoveries about the world, and so as revealing reality, and in the ways they allow new reflection on the place of the human being in the world, constructing a new “world” or view of what is, as can be illustrated by a few obvious examples. The ideas of Copernicus at once displaced the earth and its human inhabitants by the sun as the presumed center of creation, and in so doing affirmed human rational thinking as our primary access to knowledge. The reconciliation of sciences with Copernican astronomy provoked, as Kuhn put it, “the general intellectual ferment now known as the Scientific Revolution” and was instrumental in the transition from medieval to modern thought, since it rewrote humanity’s “relation to the universe and to God.”68 Darwin not only revealed the evolutionary principles at work in nature but the physical and evolutionary continuity of our own species with all other living beings on the planet. Darwin thus initiated “a complete rethinking” of our concept of the world and of the human place in it.69 Einstein’s theory of relativity transformed the scientific understanding of space and time, but it also became emblematic for the self-consciousness of the modern age.70 All of these ideas shaped scientific thinking, moreover influencing, in different ways, everyday culture as well as philosophy, theology, literature, and the arts. Each of

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these thinkers revealed fundamental aspects of the world and its underlying structure and can be said to have “made” worlds insofar as their ideas are frameworks for a new understanding of reality. We can speak of the “world” before and after Copernicus, or before and after Darwin, or before and after Einstein, and these are different “worlds” in the sense of the world understood in profoundly different ways. These distinctions do not only pertain to the content of scientific discovery but to how such discoveries reorient human understanding of reality at large. The provision of models for the perception or understanding of reality has been described as revealing and, alternatively, as making worlds. Both notions have been engaged to draw out the use of imagination and creativity, and their distinctive mobilizations, across different forms of cognitive endeavor. Both notions relate the activity involved in perceiving or grasping reality, but while revealing emphasizes a relationship of disclosure, rendering a distinctive access to reality as it is, or to some part of it, world making emphasizes construction or creation of a world as an interpretive framework for cognizing reality or as its rendering. Yet the idea of revealing does not entail recovery of the world as if from a standpoint pure of any interpretation at all, nor does the idea of world making indicate simply invention, but rather the production of a symbolic, linguistic, or other structure that responds to reality and describes the world anew. Drawing on the pragmatist tradition of William James and the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Nelson Goodman argued that our means of symbolizing, describing, modeling, and depicting the world should be thought of as world making. “Worlds are made by making . . . versions with words, numerals, pictures, sounds, or other symbols of any kind in any medium,” and as such these are shared and communicated versions of world.71 The sciences and the arts offer multiple ways of world making or, as it were, “remaking,” since all worlds are made by transforming—including selecting, dividing and combining, emphasizing, ordering, deleting, supplementing and distorting—aspects or elements or versions of world already there. 72 While distinguishing clearly genuine versions of world from “illusory or wrong or dubious versions,” Goodman highlights “the vast variety of versions and visions in the several sciences, in the works of different painters and writers, and in our perceptions as informed by these.” The aim is to account for the rightness of versions without

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“requirement or presumption of reducibility to a single base.” Such a pluralist view, Goodman argues, “accepts the sciences at full value,” while rejecting the idea of the eventual reduction of all forms of knowledge to one system, “such that every other version must eventually be reduced to it or rejected as false or meaningless.”73 We can test world versions within their own frameworks and against other competing descriptions, but not against a world in itself, that is, a world “undescribed, undepicted, unperceived,” or wholly unconceptualized.74 With his notion of world making, Goodman affirms both the epistemological relevance of the arts and the cultural relevance of the sciences, thus undermining the relegation of these forms of human endeavor to what C. P. Snow described in the late 1950s as not simply separate but also hostilely alienated cultures. While Snow was determined to support investment in the physical sciences then neglected by the British intellectual establishment, Goodman’s motivation, two decades later, was to support the relevance of the arts in a culture in which the scientific method may be regarded, as Huxley once put it, “the sole method of reaching truth,” if not also its affiliated reasoning the “supreme arbiter of conduct.”75 Goodman argued that “the arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of the understanding.”76 Such recognition, however, must account for important differences: where the sciences will describe and explain, the arts may depict and illuminate, with its insights generally metaphorical and indirect rather than literal and demonstrable. World versions may be incomparable, and some may be favored over others—or, in the case of incompatible versions, may disqualify others—for their greater explanatory or illuminative power. Goodman’s idea of a world, with its epistemological and cultural implications, bears some comparison to Husserl’s notion of the constitution of the lifeworld, insofar as Husserl explicitly brackets the question of the ontological status of any world outside our experience of it. The lifeworld is the totality of what is given and intersubjectively experienceable, for the world as experienceable by the individual consciousness is communally available to be experienced by others. Husserl describes the lifeworld such that in whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each human being as “I” and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the

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world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this “living together.” We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world.77

A lifeworld may be described as that reality framework shared by a human community that serves as the common background for practical, social, intellectual, and imaginative activity. In this sense world is comprised not only of the things with which we interact but also the projected total potentiality of involvement that provides a coherent background and context for human experience. The world is not merely the total content of what surrounds us, but the practical, thematic, and symbolic frameworks of orientation through which we are involved with things and others and from which we also recognize their interrelations. Within the lifeworld will arise distinctive ways of regarding and understanding the world as such. In Heidegger’s existential rendering of this phenomenological notion of world in Being and Time, the everyday practical world is emphasized. The world is there as the context by which, to use his most oft-cited example, the hammer we use in making a table has its place in the workshop and is related to innumerable other objects such as the nail and the wood, the forest from which the wood was cut, the room and house in which the table will be used, the meals and festivities inhabitants may enjoy there, the cultural memory that informs such rituals, and so on. For Heidegger, it is the “context of assignments or references, which, as significance, is constitutive for worldhood,” but this relational significance, which gives rise to further symbolic and theoretical reflections, must not obscure the “real phenomenal content” that emerges from the practical relations we have with things and the purposes they serve in our projects.78 If Heidegger tends to privilege the practical world over and against scientific abstraction, he also inherits the notion from Husserl that we must shift our outlook in order to achieve a better understanding even of the everyday world. For the phenomenologist, the world as understood in the natural attitude needs to be reflectively suspended, in a move Husserl called the epoché, in order to consider the structure and origins of our experience of world, its phenomenological constitution. This methodological shift from absorption in ordinary experience to a reflective consideration is echoed in Heidegger’s existential account, in

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the reckoning faced by the everyday individual that can shift one’s selfunderstanding as well as illuminate anew one’s relationship to being. This move toward reflection on the ordinary understanding of the world is also echoed in Goodman’s philosophy. While in the natural attitude we may take ordinary perceptual experience as if it provided an immediate access to bare reality, Goodman points out that even “our everyday socalled picture of the world,” which we may take to be the touchstone of reality, “is the joint product of description and depiction.”79 If phenomenology returns, in methodical reflection, to consider lived worldly experience, Goodman stresses the symbolic and constructed nature of world making as revealed in pragmatist reflection. In addition to the lifeworld itself, the notion of revealing is central to phenomenology. Husserl aimed to describe how forms of scientific understanding, for example, reveal through abstraction from life-worldly relations. The sciences reveal the world according to quantitative and other abstract means, while the arts reveal irreducibly experiential features of the lifeworld. Yet these modes of revealing are in important ways comparable and share also something in common with phenomenology itself. As a method of philosophical description, phenomenology itself is conceived as a means of revealing that is to “explicate the sense this world has for us all, prior to any philosophizing.”80 Phenomenology is to uncover or reveal the “things themselves,” by which is meant their respective modes of givenness, and to consider these in critical reflective analysis. While Husserl regarded phenomenology as a kind of science—in that it concerns “the possibility of a knowledge which is carried out only in subjective experiences and yet grasps an objectivity existing for itself”81— this did not prevent his recognizing, as we have seen in the previous chapter, a crucial and methodological, if also constrained, role for imagination. Husserl recognized that phenomenological revealing—and thus also, in his sense of the term, scientific revealing—can be even dispositionally compared with literature and the arts. In a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, composed during a period in which Husserl was working out the notion of phenomenological reduction, Husserl compares the phenomenological method to the aesthetic attitude of the artist.82 Both aim to consider their objects in revealing ways by setting aside “existential” considerations and regarding them in pure disinterested reflection. Both can consider what are, ontologically speaking, hypothetical

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or fictive constructions. Yet just as the imagination must be constrained in the phenomenological method, here Husserl also recognizes differences: “The phenomenological look is, thus, closely related to the aesthetic look in ‘pure’ art; but, of course, it is not a look in order to enjoy aesthetically, but to research, to discover, to constitute scientific affirmations of a new (philosophical) dimension.”83 Despite Husserl’s relegation of art to aesthetic enjoyment, the phenomenological and aesthetic attitudes are recognized as comparable forms of regard. Both the phenomenologist and the artist overcome the prejudices of the natural attitude in order to consider their objects freshly, without ontological prejudice. This form of reflection has been likened to the ancient Greek notion, represented in both Plato and Aristotle, of theoria, pure contemplation of the highest objects of thought. This contemplation is characterized by an “astonishment that comes over certain individuals which renders them speechless before the beauty of the cosmos and leads them to abandon their old dogmas and beliefs and to gain a new position on the world.”84 Such a disposition, or at least moments thereof, may be found in forms of scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic thinking alike. The views of later phenomenologists not only affirm, but favor, artistic and literary revealing. In contrast to Husserl’s relegation of art to aesthetic enjoyment—and in amplifying his later critique of the sciences as losing sight of the original lifeworld from which its forms of understanding are abstracted85—subsequent phenomenologists saw art and literature as privileged models of revealing, affording the possibility of access to an original, preabstracted, stratum of world. Sartre argued that literature, especially realistic prose, can reveal the world, holding a mirror up to reality—though he was particularly interested in social and cultural life as the subject of such revealings.86 Merleau-Ponty argued that modern art and literature, along with phenomenology, are devoted to the painstaking work of revealing meaning as it comes into being.87 While critical consideration of the disclosive practices of the sciences is found throughout Heidegger’s oeuvre,88 his later philosophy privileges poetry as not only revealing things in their being but as revealing language itself as the primary revealing relation to the world. By our naming them in language, things come to be seen and grasped as what they are for us—it enables not only conceptual identification strictly speaking but also “seeing-as”—and

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poetry, by making language strange, helps us to reflect upon this essential relation we have to the world.89 Hans-Georg Gadamer followed in this vein by suggesting that poetry contributes to the search for truth by its way of revealing the very proximity and familiarity of things which we tend to forget, a proximity itself grounded in language. By rendering apparent the role of language in how things appear to us, poetry reveals or “bears witness to our own being.”90 The notion of revealing dominates in Heidegger’s later philosophy, but it stands in some tension with a more constructive notion of founding or instituting world in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” a liminal essay that marks a shift from the existential considerations of Being and Time to the later emphasis on language. In this essay Heidegger describes the work of art as a relationship between “world” and “earth,” arguing that art sets up a world through the setting forth of earth. Art “opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force”91 by creating an earthly framework—even language and music are considered in their materiality or, as Heidegger would deem it, their earthliness—for interpreting both being and our own existence. The role for art is described here in terms that anticipate Goodman’s notion of world making, despite the existential cast. The ancient Greek temple is Heidegger’s most prominent, but not only, example. The temple both materially and meaningfully constructs a worldly space for human receptivity to what was felt by a community to be the divine presence of the gods, and it thereby enables reflection on the nature of the world and the human place in it from a certain perspective. As Heidegger puts it, the “temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to human beings their outlook on themselves.”92 Such an artwork founds or institutes a “world” elaborated in narrative, music, visual arts, and rituals that would be wound up with temple life. This founding is at once uncovering or disclosure of a world relation, of a dimension of meaning; in this way world “making,” or setting up and setting forth a world, is simultaneously a form of revealing and is associated for Heidegger with truth. Such truth takes the form, not of expressing the adequate fit between ideas and facts they describe, but rather of an event of disclosure of being, both instituting and sustaining a meaningful relation to what is through the work itself. This notion of truth is so far from that associated with objective justification or verifiability, however, that it seems no longer even

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remotely analogous to scientific endeavor. The gods once worshipped in ancient Greek temples are virtually forgotten but in classics departments, or as cultural-literary echoes, or as the subjects of historical reflection, while, in contrast, many of the scientific ideas of Archimedes still hold true today. This undeniable difference, however, does not make the world set up through ancient Greek art, its attendant cultural ideas, irrelevant. Even if we no longer recognize their source, Western culture has inherited many of themes illuminated and explored therein, however metaphorically or depictively, that remain important to us: the origins and meaning of the cosmos and our own place within it, along with ways of thinking about particularly human concerns, such as adversity, fate, honor and gratitude, justice, courage, hubris, and mortality. While several different kinds of art are examined by Heidegger, privilege is granted to poetry, and particularly what he regards as the most “essential” poetry, as the original form of such founding-revealing of world. In naming things, language manifests them as something—it gives what would be for us merely there and undifferentiated, distinctive ontic identification—and language is in this sense a primary form of revealing. Beyond naming individual beings, language allows for contexts of meaning, or worlds, not only through such identification, by its metaphorical and other figurative capacities. But while in our ordinary everyday use of language we scarcely notice this revealing relation, it is profoundly reflected in poetic language, which makes us conscious of language itself in its evocative and relational nature. The revealing function of language in general, and the further self-revealing function of poetic language in particular, justify for Heidegger the primacy of art grounded in language. While all art reveals, in essence “the nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, then, is the founding of truth.”93 The verb “founding” (stiften) here can be traced to a line from Heidegger’s most favored poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: “Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter” (“but what remains, is founded by poets”).94 Insofar as it describes revealing, this theory explains the capacity of poetry, or at least of some poetry, to express profoundly meaningful experiences, and disclose the nature thereof, in ways that would evade adequate capture in ordinary language. However, the attendant claim that poetry “founds” or “institutes” truth in an essential way can be challenged on a number of grounds. Hölderlin’s line is concerned with memory and

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forgetting and in particular with the eclipse in modern cultural memory of our relation to the divine. Here Hölderlin also echoes a classical poetic theme—found in Ovid, Shakespeare, and Goethe, among others— regarding permanence and change and the effects of poetry to stabilize the fleeting and fragile objects of experience in memorable language. In Heidegger’s rendering, however, poetry establishes truth, makes truth happen resolutely and decisively, and the poetry that so establishes truth is essential poetry. This overlooks, as I have argued elsewhere, the provisional and exploratory nature of poetry, its implicit connections to fiction by figuring the possible or even the impossible, and the ways in which the formal tensions of poetry and imagistic and other ambiguities can often defy stability and closure.95 This is aside from the considerable objection that, in “Origin of the Work of Art,” poetic revealing as founding truth is likened to historical forms of instituting, such as that of a political state—a highly problematic comparison in the context of the German nationalism of the 1930s in which Heidegger wrote the essay and which infected his interpretations of German poets such as Hölderlin and Georg Trakl.96 In his critique of Heidegger, Theodor Adorno argued that what a given poem seems to say in a literal sense is often contradicted by its formal disjointures, by what he called a poem’s parataxis, and that its truth content must be seen as illusory in a special sense.97 The truth content emerges not as resolutely founded by the poem, but through the overall work of the poem itself, which does not assert its findings as a philosophical, scientific, or political system would, but rather allows for unresolved ambiguity and contradiction. Poetry, in creating meaningful expression, also resists fixation of that meaning, and so although it can be associated with “truth content”—on one reading of that idea, we could say that poetry can illuminate aspects of life in ways that both ring true and are intersubjectively affirmed—poetry tends to resist institutionalizing such truth. Revealing can be achieved by means of contrast as well as exposure. The imaginative nature of poetry—its split reference to not only the real but to a projected, imaginary alternative—is among the critical capacities of poetry, and literature more generally, to expose reality by its very difference from it, to present the possible not only in light of but over and against the actual. It is among the more celebrated capacities of literature, by its distinction from reality, “to enable our imagination to surpass the empirical constraints that surround us.”98 In the very surpassing of

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reality, literature can be “a means of telling us about reality.”99 It is because literature “defies actuality” and has a power to “transfigure everyday realities” that it can “reveal properties that cannot be immediately observed.”100 While literary works can be enlisted to support particular versions of the world, they also tend to destabilize the absoluteness of any version, since by “prefiguring imaginative alternatives, works run ahead of reality, thereby going beyond a given order from within the histories of which they are a part.”101 The significant difficulty just identified in Heidegger’s account need not diminish the insight that world-revealing, or the fashioning of illuminating renderings of reality, can be achieved by art and literature. They may open up reflection on the world in which we dwell and on our part in shaping that world, characterizing or depicting their given subject matter in illuminating ways. While in “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger emphasizes decisive and essential truth founding, in later works, he describes poetic revealing in a more receptive, illuminating function. In the essays of On the Way to Language, for instance, Heidegger describes how poetic language may uncover a relation to the world that he regards as native to human experience and yet obscured by certain forms of cognitive abstraction.102 Heidegger describes our relation to the earth, for example, as having been transformed and constrained by modern technnology. While there are many means for revealing the world, poetry is seen as a mode of disclosing or revealing the world in a special way, because, evoking in what is revealed its own persistent opacity, poetry implicitly exposes the partiality of its own revealing, and implicitly of all forms of revealing. Poetic revealing involves a kind of implicit recognition of the possibility that what is, or, as Heidegger puts it, being, exceeds our grasp. Poetry is then contrasted to modern science and technology, in Heidegger’s view both conceived as anthropocentric in that the former reductively quantifies nature and the latter physically exposes and often exploits the natural world as a then vast resource “enframed” for human use.103 In contrast, poetic revealing encourages the orientation Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, or letting-be, a receptive stance supportive of ecological valuation.104 While Heidegger considers the poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke, and other German poets in this context, we could add poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda,

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and countless others whose works encourage ecological regard for the natural world. While Heidegger’s polarization between ecologically orienting poetry, on the one hand, and “enframing” science and technology, on the other, may be challenged on a number of grounds,105 it may be sufficient here to highlight just one challenge in particular. Heidegger’s thinking can be credited with inspiring an ecological orientation in certain branches of contemporary philosophy, along with the theoretical approaches of deep ecology,106 and with the critical recognition of poetry as a means for reimagining our relation to the earth. Yet even robust appreciation of what is now known as literary ecology need not obscure the fact that while ecological thinking admits complex, interdisciplinary origins, the sciences have been central to its development.107 It is undeniable that contemporary ecology profoundly depends upon scientific understanding, discovery, and demonstration and that solutions to many ecological problems require technological means, along with poetic inspiration and cultural transformation. The first photographs of the earth from space were interpreted by Heidegger as exemplifying the earth’s technological enframing, its ultimate objectification and surpassing by the efforts of human technology. Yet the cultural response to such images included widespread popular recognition of the planet in its interconnectedness and fragility, provoking a global identification crucial to the emergence of an environmental movement.108 Art and literature may also be associated with revealing cultural realities, which pertain to the meaning of human experiences and activities in particular. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland reveals, through its characterization of European culture in the ruins of the First World War, a radical cultural uncertainty about the fate and values of Western civilization. Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, drawing on the ancient myth of a poet whose song achieved an enchanted relation to nature, opens up a space for reflection on, among other themes, human consciousness of nature in the machine age. The poetry of Robert Frost reveals the possibilities of metaphysical and moral speculation encouraged in largely solitary encounters with nature. Such examples suggest that truths most readily “revealed by art, are truths about us, about the archaeology of consciousness” and our human ways of life.109 Of course one of the insights of cultural ecocriticism is that truths about human consciousness are of

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ecological relevance, for how we think about and describe the natural world—and whether we recognize our own thinking as part of nature— impacts our dealings with it. For Goodman, the world makings of the sciences and arts can be seen as analogous endeavors, and while some of their respective illuminations may be translated into a common framework of understanding, they cannot be reduced to such.110 For the pragmatist, no one mode of human thought and expression has exclusive domain over the shaping of human experience, nor the single key to unlocking the essence of reality. That sort of reductionism was famously dismissed by William James: There is nothing improbable in the supposition that an analysis of the world may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts. In physical science different formulae may explain the phenomena equally well. . . . Why may it not be so with the world? Why may not there be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all data harmonize, and which the observer may choose between, or simply cumulate one upon another? A Beethoven string-quartet is truly . . . a  scraping of horses’ tails on cat’s bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms, but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.111

In light of such divergence of perspective, Goodman affirms the plurality and heterogeneity of human world making. Rather than working with a conception of the world as a single totality, there are in Goodman’s view many worlds, symbolic or interpretive frameworks by which we make sense of and engage reality. In everyday life, as well as in the higher modes of reflection, we shift among and between them. No single version of the world can claim absolute dominion as the only truth, but rather “there are many true versions of the world, serving different purposes, answering to different interests.”112 While resonant of Nietzsche’s perspectivism—by which Nietzsche challenged not only our access to but any idea of a world in itself apart from our perspectives on it—Goodman’s theory does not jettison the idea of truth. Nietzsche expresses skepticism as to whether we can distinguish between truth and appearance at all. Goodman does not deny truth, or

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an underlying reality, but only that we can identify or access this single world underlying different true versions. What Goodman describes as his irrealism “is not the claim that everything or anything is ‘irreal,’ but that the world (whatever it is) dissolves into versions and that ontology disappears.”113 When the notion of world making is expanded beyond the sciences to include the arts, which may be descriptive or depictive, or exemplify, illuminate, or show rather than state, and for which truth may be more metaphorical than literal, any potential reduction to a single underlying description of the world in his view falls away. Yet this does not leave us devoid of means to distinguish, from the standpoint of any given world, right or wrong versions, and Goodman elaborates at length conditions for the “rightness of rendering” that describe standards of acceptability for world versions.114 It may simplify matters just to take different true claims as expressing different perspectives on the same reality, the same world, or, as James puts it, “different points of view for surveying it.” From a human perceptual standpoint, the earth is still. Yet from an astronomical perspective, we know the earth to be orbiting the sun at thirty kilometers per second and rotating, near the equator, at around sixteen hundred kilometers per hour, though we cannot perceive this motion directly. For James, this contradiction would be resolved by pointing out that we are describing the same world from two different perspectives. This is not sufficient for Goodman, however, who argues that the different descriptions, insofar as they are both true, are describing different worlds.115 Different versions of the world turn out to be different symbolic systems for describing reality, and in Goodman’s sense this equals different worlds per se. Any underlying reality is denied as an epistemic reference point, since we can never access that reality without the mediation of ideas, descriptions, or depictions, or, in other words, through worlds. The recognition of the plurality of world making does not entail affirming equally all worlds made or remade. Not every version or rendering of reality is equally true, fitting, right, illuminating, interesting, or useful for coping and understanding; not every vision of reality feeds and promotes further inquiry and discovery. At the same time that he is advocating a pluralistic view of reality, Goodman rejects mere relativism: While readiness to recognize alternative worlds may be liberating, and suggestive of new avenues of exploration, a willingness to welcome all

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worlds builds none. Mere acknowledgement of the many available frames of reference provides us with no map of the motions of heavenly bodies; acceptance of the eligibility of alternative bases produces no scientific theory or philosophical system; awareness of the varied ways of seeing paints no pictures.116

The theory of world making allows for distinction among multiple versions of the world, as well as rejection of those that are ill fitting, and affirmation of those that are explanatory and evidenced.117 Yet this irrealism invites some questions, which also return us to the relevance of imagination. While we can assess the fittingness of any given rendering from within its appropriate framework, or recognize one framework as more satisfactorily explanatory or otherwise illuminating than another, how do we account for the standpoint from which we regard different but equally acceptable perspectives as different worlds? In order to acknowledge and compare apparently competing world versions, we must entertain a split perspective, something analogous to the multimodal register described in the previous chapter. Just as we can entertain fictional ideas that are very different from reality without losing our grasp on reality, we can consider two standpoints, for example, physical reality as it is available to ordinary perception and reality as understood within a scientific system. Neither is regarded as fictive; both are regarded as right, and are justified, within their own frameworks. These cannot be truly different worlds, as Goodman claims, since we are able, while predominantly oriented within the experiential world, to entertain the ideas of the world described in abstraction from it. We must only be able to suspend our sole orientation to or faith in one world, to be able to consider the contrasting other world. It may be objected that, at least in such an example as the juxtaposition of the perceptually apparent stillness of the earth and its rotation and heliocentric orbit, it is misleading in the first place to designate these as actually incompatible, or even distinct, worlds. For an extended scientific explanation could encompass why, from an earthly perceptual standpoint, we cannot see such motion, yet its ongoing occurrence is evidenced in a number of ways and can be proven. One who thoroughly understands the astronomical view will also in all likelihood understand the reasons for the earth’s apparent stillness to ordinary perception—the fact that as the earth is moving we are moving along with it, and we are perceptually

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limited to our earthbound position and scale. Thus the scientifically informed world may be said to encompass and account for the everyday world. The everyday world, at least as experienced in the wake of Copernicus, may be in turn at least minimally informed regarding the implications of earth’s rotation and revolution we regularly experience, such as diurnal, seasonal, and tidal rhythms, positions of objects in the sky, and so forth. On this basis—the encompassing of the everyday world within a scientific understanding and the partial absorption of the scientific world by the everyday world—we could say, with William James, that these worlds are only apparently in contradiction and are really but one world seen from two perspectives. It may be a matter of quibbling over terms. At the same time, the recognition of something like two worlds, with the pragmatist’s qualifications, both highlights and validates their irreducibility. Astronomy may owe its origins to everyday stargazing, but it must abstract from that standpoint to achieve its profoundest discoveries. Conversely, a good deal of astronomical knowledge, even if it explains phenomena of everyday perception, cannot be integrated into the world of everyday perception. Meanwhile, we can entertain yet another world, a fictional one, in which it is possible to perceive the earth’s rotation, as does the protagonist of Nabokov’s novel The Eye. All too conscious of his own existence, Smurov compares himself to “somebody who goes mad because he begins to perceive clearly the motion of the terrestrial sphere: there he is, staggering, trying to keep his balance, clutching at the furniture.”118 Nabokov’s comic integration aside, if these are two worlds, as Goodman suggests, do we also require something like a third standpoint from which two worlds can be compared? The perceptually known world usually, in everyday experience, taken for granted as reality itself can in reflection—though we do not cease perceiving as we reflect—give way to that described by a scientific system. Rather than a third standpoint per se, this function of integration may be performed by what phenomenology calls a world horizon, the projected unification of a lifeworld as the potential but never realized totality of our experience, reflection, and speculation. We have described in chapter  3 how such a projection, as in Kant’s use of a focus imaginarius, may be considered the work of the productive imagination, an imaginative projection that for Kant assists reason in its aim to grasp reality. While we can never occupy a position from which all versions of world can be surveyed and adjudicated, our sense of

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a coherent reality—our ability for example, to affirm the truth of terrestrial motion while also undergoing our everyday experiences in perceptual confidence—would seem to depend upon a virtual, implicit world horizon within which varying true versions of the world can be multiply acknowledged. For phenomenology, the world as given to us in experience is the standpoint from which other projections of the world are elaborated, reflected, or abstracted. Phenomenology explicitly brackets, or leaves aside, the question of the ontological status of the world in itself, yet also aims for objectivity in recovering the original “sense this world has for us all . . . a sense which philosophy can uncover but never alter.”119 We can approach the plurality of perspectives by which we make sense of the world as emerging from the lifeworld grounded in our engagement with what is given. Husserl’s conception of the multiple particular contexts, the special worlds (Sonderwelten), in which we live out our experiences at different moments in the lifeworld, might help to redress the difficulties with Goodman’s account of different points of view as different worlds. The concept of special or particular worlds, never total or fully encompassing, can be experienced in plural. For even ordinary experiences in the natural attitude harbor various potential perspectives. Driving through traffic will involve an experience and a reckoning of space and time quite different from that required in discussing relativity theory, even if the former can be explained in terms of the latter. If we are competent at both driving and modern physics, we do not stumble over their difference, for “we automatically switch attitudes and usually do so with great virtuosity.”120 We may, further, undertake these distinctive perspectives at the same time: a good driver who grasps relativity theory adequately ought to be able to drive in traffic—reckoning of course with the spatiotemporal demands of so doing—while dealing very differently with ideas about space and time under discussion. Further, any number of special or particular worlds may emerge in lifeworldly experience, and in that sense, for the phenomenologist as for the pragmatist, “there must be a plurality of such ‘worlds.’”121 Husserl is careful to acknowledge that a given lifeworld is relative to a particular time and culture, such that a lifeworld “is relative to a certain society at a given moment of its history; it must be taken as it is conceived by the historical community whose world it is.”122 Thus phenomenology

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can acknowledge very different lifeworlds, differing, for example, between those ancient and modern or according to whether they are scientific or not, historical or ahistorical. In respecting such differences, we can say in one sense that the lifeworld is relative and plural and that “different people simply inhabit different worlds.”123 The ancient philosopher theorizing that the world is composed of four elements inhabits in this sense a different world than that of the Copernican astronomer. At the same time, insofar as there is a commonality underlying human experiences of the lifeworld grounded in common features of our embodiment and our evolved cognitive capacities, in the regularity and relative predictability of our interactions, and in the communicability of our abstractions, depictions, and descriptions, we can refer to the singularity of the lifeworld. The lifeworld gives rise to different versions of the world, in varying degrees of abstraction from it, and the totality itself—the singular world horizon imagined as if encompassing all possible versions— remains but a regulative ideal projected as the ultimate far horizon of our possible experience or thought. A projected coherence—never fully grasped or known—informs our experience, Husserl says, of “one, existing world.”124 Such projected coherence obviates the difficulties of irrealism since, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “to ask oneself whether the world is real is to fail to understand what one is asking, since the world is not a sum of things which might always be called into question, but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn.”125

CONNECTIONS AND DISTINCTIONS AMONG IMAGINATIVE ENDEAVORS Where world-making theory and phenomenological accounts most profoundly resonate is on the plurality of ways we may reveal or rightly render reality. Husserl likened phenomenological revealing to scientific revealing and recognized some commonalities with that of art; Heidegger associated art and poetry with a form of truth as revealing, thus challenging the epistemic exclusivity of science; and Goodman argued that art and science can in analogous ways offer right renderings. By returning to their uses of imagination, we may find still further parallels between the creativity involved in scientific and artistic endeavors. The creation of

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models in science bears some relation to the workings of artists. Scientific models are not personal, idiosyncratic, and subjective, as many artworks may be described, but results of communal and progressive efforts toward verifiable truth. But both artists and scientists may aim to find regularities in nature and must select from the totality of information what is needed—for rendering a given aspect of the world, in art, or for building a theory about it, in science. Both endeavors require selection in subject matter, in modes of exploration and of possible expression or demonstration; they both engage possibility.126 While art and literature may emphasize personal or experiential aspects of experience, and science aims for demonstrable objective knowledge that withstands scrutiny, neither has an unmediated access to reality. Both art and science must work with abstractions, build models of selected phenomena, and render these models in particular ways. The biologist François Jacob argues that “the description of the atom given by the physicist is not the exact and immutable reflection of an unveiled reality. It is a model, an abstraction, the result of centuries of effort by physicists who concentrated on a small group of phenomena in order to build a coherent representation of the world. Describing the atom seems to be as much creation as discovery.”127 The creation of models in science will be no less creative for being guided by discovery, driven by the epistemic motives of explanation, and referring to demonstrable truth. It may be that “comprehension and creation go together.”128 Artists and scientists will of course have different purposes. Both aim for validity, but the validation they seek is of different kinds. The artist wants to strike the viewer, reader, or observer of the work of art with an intuition of novel insight, yielding an experience that satisfies through communication that may be at once emotional, spiritual, psychological, aesthetic, or intellectual. The validation is achieved in the recipient’s recognition and response and in the collective responses across a given culture. Any significant, intersubjective validation is impossible without the work’s getting something right, without the proper harmonization of insight and medium of expression, without the generation of new meanings, or expression of familiar meanings in new ways. The most successful works—if that means those with the deepest or widest impact—may not only enable new perspectives on a specific content but resound across the larger context of human life and experience. The scientist devotes cognitive effort to discovering new facts, or to designing

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new theories to explain known facts better, and the validity of any claims relies upon their demonstration. The scientist may have no less an aesthetic appreciation for simplicity or elegance in models and theories, but the aesthetic value is contingent upon larger epistemic goals. Yet as in art, in no activities could the scientist make significant progress without the involvement of imagination. While scientists aim to reveal the nature of reality, profound achievement in such revealing will engage imagination in a number of ways; and while artists aim for original creation, insofar as that is achieved with sustained impact, this will inevitably reveal some dimension of reality—even if primarily in and through its possibilities—even if that of human experience itself. Of course, not every poet or artist will seek to say something true about the world. The artist may celebrate art “for art’s sake” rather than for any contribution to knowledge. Edgar Allen Poe, in “The Poetic Principle,” famously argued for the value of poetry solely in “elevating the soul” and praised “the poem which is a poem and nothing more.”129 The Symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé was explicitly devoted to the emotional effect of the poetic images, rather than any object they may describe or to which they refer. Wallace Stevens celebrated the notion of poetry as “supreme fiction.”130 But even in such cases the poet will aim for a validity consummated in the experience of the work itself, so that the poem strikes the reader with some power that draws from its correspondence to the realities, if not of the world more generally, of human consciousness, which is, after all, an emergent part of reality. The elevation and effect for which Poe, Mallarmé, and Stevens aimed rely upon and address the realities of human cognition and feeling and therefore strike, even if indirectly, at its real basis in embodied life. Even art made for art’s sake alone finds validation in concretization by living human subjects. While Adorno celebrated the illusory nature of poetry and art as the key to its truth content, he neglected to emphasize that the reality that literature may resist remains its point of departure, the repertoire from which it draws, and the horizon against which its illusoriness can be manifest as such. Even as illusory, the power of the literary issues from being “a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential.”131 For the most fantastic art or literature, reality remains that against and in light of which consciousness gains imaginative traction. The most fantastic constructions may be meaningful by shedding light, however obliquely, onto the most familiar aspects of reality.

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“Reality is not what it is,” wrote Stevens. “It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.”132 In light of the world-making theory, this would hold true not only for the artist but also for the scientific theorist and inventor. Yet, with this statement, the poet, like the pragmatist and phenomenologist, did not simply deny objective—or knowable and intersubjectively verifiable—reality. Stevens recognized in accounting for poetic imagination that reality precisely does not merely conform to human thought or to the stylings of the individual mind, but rather exerts pressure and resistance against our willed efforts. This pressure and resistance to our renderings, limiting and conditioning the rightness of a given rendering, reveals a reality that is not merely the product of our making. Scientific thinking aims to reveal reality through the most fitting and explanatory models and theories, and poetry and art may aim to reveal aspects of reality or of its appearance to us, characterizing them according to a certain point of view. Art and literature may also diverge again from the project of revealing reality as it is, construing possibilities and even impossibilities, but even such departures from reality are all the more powerful in revealing something important about it. Thus, despite their divergences, and a culture that for well over a century has opposed and divided their efforts, art and science share common reference to both imagination and reality, engaging them in different but analogous ways. As Jacob argues: It is by undoing what he or she perceives as reality in order to remake it differently that the painter, the poet, or the scientist builds up a vision of the universe. Each fashions a personal model of reality by choosing to highlight aspects of experience judged to be most telling, and discarding those that seem uninteresting. We live in a world created by . . . continual comings and goings between the real and the imaginary. Perhaps the artist draws more on the latter and the scientist more on the former. It is simply a matter of proportion, not of nature.133

 In this chapter we have described the imagination at work in some examples from the history of scientific thought and looked to art for paradigmatic innovations in some ways analogous to those of science. Theories of world making and world revealing invite analogy as well as contrast

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between artistic and scientific endeavors and can be critically enlisted in illuminating their respective engagements of imagination. The comparison of a pragmatist irrealism of many worlds with phenomenological notions of the lifeworld, revealing, world horizon, and special or particular worlds has further led to an appreciation of the importance of the notion of reality not only as the object of scientific scrutiny, and touchstone of artistic rendering, but also as that given configuration in light of which imagination may devise alternatives. The tension between revealing reality and its reconfiguration or transcendence becomes productive in all forms of creative invention, differing in whether the revealing or the transcending is the overriding telos or goal. Since the polarization of science and literature in debates of the nineteenth century, achievements of science have extraordinarily transformed the understanding of our world, and in the current century their applications are poised to transform the very nature of being human. In light of these transformations, the cultivation of multiple sources of insight about human consciousness, meaning, and possibility may be more relevant than ever, while polarization between the “two cultures” that obscures their common imaginative resourcefulness may be epistemically as well as culturally disadvantageous. Meanwhile, new forms of dialogue—in ecocriticism and cultural ecology, mentioned in this chapter, and in cognitive literary theory, neuroaesthetics, evolutionary anthropology, and studies of consciousness across philosophy and cognitive science, all of which have informed this book—are emerging against the grain of mutual alienation or incomprehension.

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he imagination has often been characterized through metaphors of ascension, as when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust appeals to the “wings that lift the mind,” William Wordsworth describes wandering “as a cloud,” and William Butler Yeats refers to “the balloon of the mind.” These departures, not only from immediate circumstances but from the confines of embodied life, seem to confirm an escapist, disembodied view of imagination. The truth in these metaphors lies in the fact that we can imaginatively exceed the bounds of our physical capacities, and of physical laws, by contemplating alternative possibilities that respect no such limits. Yet many feats of imagination engage the body itself as the medium of imagining, and all imagination ostensibly at play in the mind alone draws upon the resources of embodied life. As I will endeavor to show in this chapter, even when we imagine its transcendence, the body itself is the touchstone and medium for such imaginings. The body is not merely the worldly vessel for the immaterial mind and its imaginative capacities, but is rather the underlying basis for, and integrated into, even those activities of imagining that may aim to transcend its confines. Social experiences of empathy, and intuition of others’ experiences, rely upon the embodied imagination. Arts that rely on bodily performance as their medium thematize the body most vividly—as in dance

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and gestural and performance art—and so would be privileged in the phenomenology of embodied experience. Yet even painting, which seems to contemplate its objects from a distance, and linguistic arts, which appear to need scarcely any material medium at all in evoking imaginative worlds, rely on the embodied origins of imaginative cognition. These aspects of the embodied nature of imagining are here introduced by considering an extraordinary aerial performance that seems to offer an embodied metaphor for imagination itself.

CONCERNING THE MOVEMENTS OF OTHERS: EMBODIED IMAGINING AND EMBODIED RESPONSE One hundred stories above the street, Philippe Petit is balancing on a tightrope between two skyscrapers. The aerialist proceeds, one foot after the other, across a thin black line above New York City. Seen from the street below, he is but a vertical shadow between the giant towers, and the cable itself, 131 feet long and one inch in diameter, is nearly invisible. Even from up close, he seems almost to be miraculously hovering at cloud height. Looking down from the level where he perches—recalling that half-man, half-bird once painted on the cave wall by our early human ancestors—the streets below are but valleys of depth, the cars and taxis are minuscule, even the buses just tiny moving rectangles. Watching the tightrope artist is a tense and profoundly visceral experience. Even of a safely grounded viewer, the muscles will contract, the hands will clench, the heart will beat in a vicarious sensation of balance and exposure. For the observer, the scene is, literally, breathtaking. Watching this spectacle of Petit crossing the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, now the subject of several films, one would be not merely watching with the eyes but also imagining with the body. The viewer’s own kinesthetic awareness, the impression and sensation of a radical awareness of embodiment, would be stimulated so that one would feel a sense of balancing, and the threat of loss of balance, through every limb. When the tightrope walker steps forward, observers may feel as if they themselves are balancing on the wire, high above the city. In the mind, and perhaps even physically, one’s fingers may be pointed outward from the

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sides of the torso. One’s body would seem to be, or perhaps would be slightly, leaning forward, then back, a bit to the left, to the right. One may feel vertiginous. Even though one would only be watching the man stepping across the sky between two immense buildings—and even in the case of watching it on film—some neurons would be activated as they would in the actual movement the performer undertakes.1 To watch the highwire artist is to participate imaginatively in a physical experience, but also to experience a highly physical imagining. The extraordinary nature of this performance—for its physical realization of a seemingly impossible feat—could be described at once as the literalization of imaginative ascension and the physical poetry of embodied life. While physical sensations can of course be experienced witnessing others’ actions in everyday life, they may be most noticeable to the viewer watching exceptional performances—in addition to Petit’s aerial feat, we may witness a gymnast twirling in the air; a diver soaring up, spinning, and twisting down into the water; a ballet dancer sailing in a miraculous leap across the stage; the silken twists of tango; the sailing to slam-dunk by a champion basketball player; the power and precision of a goal-making kick in football; or the explosive yet articulated energy of hip-hop dancers. The evocations of balance, buoyancy, leaping, turning, falling, spinning, landing, striking, and rhythm within the body of the viewer of such actions reveal that imagination is not only operative in the mind and brain, as it were, but involves the body more broadly, or the embodied mind. Through such virtual distribution, an enraptured viewer would imagine the feeling of balancing or leaping or twirling or pulsating or soaring not merely allocentrically—as another out there related to other objects in space—but at least faintly from the anchorage in one’s own body, as if one could oneself potentially undertake the action in echo of another’s bodily movement. Even in merely reading about such embodied performances, physical responses are evoked. The experience of reading descriptions of physical action will activate motoric nerve cells in the reader’s brain. Sensations and responses felt throughout the body are observable both at the neuronal level and in the heartbeat, breath, pupil dilation, muscular contractions of the reader.2 Empirical study of such responses—though by no means accounting for literary meaning or displacing its analysis—helps to establish that the concretization of imagination in literary experience is not

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a disembodied mental act but an act of an embodied consciousness. Cognitive literary theorists and critics have begun to study the embodied nature of a reader’s imagining, tracing how literary evocations of embodied life, through words alone, provoke embodied responses.3 The vicarious evocation of such physical experiences in one’s own imagination involves social empathy and illuminates its embodied basis. The embodied enactive mind works to anticipate the goals and rewards of action, and our perception of others’ actions provokes motorically related cognitive responses.4 When we observe, or even read vivid descriptions of, the risky actions of others, we tense up, anticipating their potential injury as we would our own, and we recoil from their scrapes, collisions, and falls, as if the impact produced an echo in our own bodies. Although we of course do not literally feel others’ physical pain, human beings do respond in physical as well as emotional ways to observing someone else in pain and even to depictions thereof, as Aristotle was no doubt aware in identifying the pity and fear spectators experience on behalf of characters in tragic drama. Of course, human empathic responses are varied, admitting a considerable empathetic range to images of human injury, as Susan Sontag argued, and these may be also culturally coded.5 Yet while not uniformly so—and the divergences deserve serious study—human beings respond in physical as well as affective or emotional ways to the physical triumphs of other bodies as well as to their potential or real injuries and pain. A few competing models currently circulating in cognitive theory describe the conditions of mind necessary for social empathy. One such model, “theory of mind,” refers our social empathy to the capacity to infer the consciousness of others on the basis of an implicit working theory that they, too, have consciousness like I do.6 Another model aims to demonstrate a more immediate intuition—a simulation—of another’s experiences in my mind. “Simulation theory” suggests that when I perceive something happening to another person, I run a kind of simulation in my own mind of that sort of experience, based on my own previous experiences.7 A third model attempts to account for empathy wholly by reference to neurobiological functions, such as the mirror neuron mechanism discovered first in macaque monkeys, later in humans.8 This model suggests that intersubjectivity is grounded in our very neurological structure, even where the social dimension is also recognized as contributive.9

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The philosophical problem was formulated through consideration of the fact that while we have immediate introspective access to our own ideas, feelings, and intentions, we can have no knowledge of others’ minds. For some thinkers, empathy was presumed to arise through embodied responses mediated by imagination. Montaigne begins his essay on imagination by reporting on his highly sensitive empathetic responses: “The very sight of another’s pain materially pains me. I often usurp the sensations of another person.”10 Through this imaginative transference, according to Montaigne, a subject’s own throat can itch when another person coughs. Imagination itself, Montaigne elaborates, often has embodied effects: “we start, tremble, turn pale, and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination.”11 Yet within the next century Descartes would attempt to isolate, at least under critical examination, the rational mind from perceptual and embodied (as well as imaginative) sources of ideas, which eliminates any epistemically relevant access to the minds of others. Descartes offers a skeptical example in the Meditations of what would be social cognition: while he thinks he sees other persons in hats and coats outside the window, he admits, he could be wrong—the hats and coats could be clothing mere automatons. Descartes concludes that the mind only knows itself and its innate ideas with absolute certainty. Of course, in our presumptions about the consciousness of others we may indeed be wrong, and we do not know with immediacy, without some communicative effort on their part, what others are thinking. Yet most people do, in experiences of social bonding, empathy, cooperation, as well as in situations of potential or actual conflict with others, have some capacity to intuit others’ feelings, psychological states, and intentions, and this is necessary to our cooperation and survival. Theory of mind is meant to show that we do, to some extent, mind read, in that we can, contrary to Descartes’s skepticism, read off from others’ responses and actions that they have minds—we can read off something of their intentions. Our survival depends on developing such skills from early infancy—such as mimicry of others’ faces—presumably to signal to others that we have minds (and corresponding needs), as well as in developing our own skills to read theirs. Theory of mind may describe the innate capacity for the reading of perceptual clues and the making of inferences as owing to a basic operating theory about the intentions, feelings, and beliefs of others or, further, in so-called theory theory of

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mind, depict minds proceeding like scientists in making hypotheses, conclusions, and revisions of the basic theory on the basis of evidence.12 Yet this may be too abstract to describe some experiences of social intuition and seems to leave direct bodily responses, like those Montaigne described, out of account. If we witness another recoiling in pain, or staggering in disorientation, or balancing or leaping with great poise, we may respond with an immediacy and viscerality not well captured by such theoretical constructions. Our embodied perception of others may be already imbued with an intuitive sense of their experiences and may be thus already proto-responsive. The simulation theory is meant to counter this abstractness. I would on this view simulate in my mind the experiences of others based upon my own previous experiences. Such simulation is likened to an “imaginative projection” of emotions, states, beliefs in which the other person is involved.13 I see another writhing in pain, or staggering from loss of balance, and automatically run a kind of model in my mind of what they are experiencing, a simulation drawn from a schematic store of memories. This view redresses the problem of abstraction, since such simulation is both immediate and experiential. However, it may be difficult to explain how we recognize others’ experiences in the first place as candidates for our simulative retrieval—we would have to recognize what kind of experiences the other may be having in order to run the corresponding simulation, and it is just this recognition—our sympathetic vibrations “with another’s psychic motions”—that is in need of explanation.14 Another consideration is that this view on its own may not fully explain my empathetic responses to others who have experiences profoundly different from any that I have had. Paralysis, the pain of breaking a bone, blindness, dementia or amnesia, the trauma of war, drowning, may be some experiences that lie beyond my simulative reach, and yet I can respond to such suffering in profound ways. It may be that in empathetic response, immediate simulation, if not sufficient, prompts further imaginative projection and approximation. Some experiences of suffering, furthermore, have complex social components and may require more than immediate or automatic simulation, entailing some imaginative construction of a scenario and the lending of affective capacities to it. We would not in such cases merely mirror others’ experiences but would also have to project

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their interpretive context. The fact that empathy can be achieved in some measure by explicit hypothesizing about others’ situations—such as asking what I would do if I were in that other person’s shoes—has led some to claim that empathy draws upon rational rather than imaginative resources and that higher-order reflections require not just simulation but knowledge.15 Although knowledge would surely be involved in complex reflective consideration of others’ experiences, on the view of imagination defended in this book, both hypothetical projection of any alternative perspective, the entertaining of such perspective as if it were my own, involve imaginative operations. A neurobiological account avoids the abstraction of the theory or inference model and is held to provide a basis in neurology for experiences of empathy. The mirror neuron has been observed to respond in one subject to the perceived actions of others and may ground inferences about or simulations of others’ experiences. On neurobiological grounds, the human brain can be said to be structured for sociality from the outset, such mechanism having evolved through the course of evolution through the extended care of the human species for its young, and other social interaction. An understanding of the neurological underpinnings of empathy and of its likely evolutionary context may help to support an embodied account of social imagining. While the discovery of the underlying neural mechanism is illuminative, however, more is needed to explain empathy as an experience. Recent phenomenological accounts of social cognition aim to redress the residual isolationism inherent in cognitive theory.16 Accordingly, we do not in social cognition “move from the perception of behavior to the attribution of mental states,” as in theory of mind, but rather “experience the minds of others directly” by encountering their actions within the context of a shared world that contextualizes and sheds light on their actions and responses.17 The intersubjective basis of objectivity— our very sense of reality as exceeding our own perspective alone—is grounded in our awareness of the possibility of various viewpoints on the same world, viewpoints grounded in bodily and even interpretive positions with respect to the world with which we interact. The horizons within our own perceptual experience imply others’ access to the same world according to their own embodied positions. Within our shared

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context of a lifeworld, my own possibilities and those of others overlap, for what is actualizable for me is implied in others’ point of view on the same aspects of the world, and what is actualizable for others is implied in my own. Other models of social cognition may be enriched by consideration of this phenomenological context of shared embodied relations to potentiality. The inclusion, in my experiential world, of the possible viewpoints of others underlies my vicarious participation in the high-wire artist’s balancing act or in the leap of the dancer or basketball player or gymnast. This vital social dimension, which involves the work of imagination in filling our perception of the world with potentiality, is the context within which we may experience intuitive connections with others.

EMBODIED ARTS AND THE ORIGINS OF IMAGINING Even what is experienced as internal imaging begins with an embodied mind’s interaction with the world. In light of recent studies in cognitive evolution, discussed in an earlier chapter, it can be reasonably speculated that the human imagination would have developed first of all through the undertaking of material actions within the surrounding environment. The cognitive capacities developed in aiming a spear for hunting, for instance, the adjustments to new landscapes and exposure to new vistas, the physical innovations required to secure food and shelter in changing conditions, the making of tools and other objects, would have provided material support and prompted the cognitive developments required for inner imaging and other forms of imaginative thinking. This material and evolutionary basis for cognition ought to be compatible with phenomenological accounts of cognition as exchange between consciousness and its world, an exchange that occurs through the body in its nexus of involvement with things and others around us. If cognition is embodied, thinking occurs not only in the brain but also in our more extended negotiations with the world, which provide its sources of stimulation, motivation, and feedback. As Merleau-Ponty expresses, “To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance—and the body is our anchorage in a world.”18 We can imagine change, because we

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have made it happen with our bodies, and we can intentionally effect change in the world because we can imagine things otherwise than they are. Sometimes this imagining is a half-blind operation, with an intention not fully formed, as we take up matter and invest it with an idea that itself may emerge in the action. Manifestations of such material imagining are amply illustrated in artistic creativity. Merleau-Ponty offered a phenomenological explication of how the body is involved in artistic creation and yet focused not on the more obviously physical arts, such as dance or theatrical drama, but on painting. This allowed Merleau-Ponty to challenge the traditional account of mimesis predominant in the history of philosophy and to demonstrate the insufficiency of a disembodied representational model of artistic consciousness, even in those arts for which the body can seem to be merely an instrument of recording strictly mental operations. Plato, we have seen, depicts the painter as a copier of impressions, a producer of images, of which the physical activity involved is treated only incidentally. For Plato suggests that the artist has a representation of something in the mind, copied, as  it were, from perception, and copies it again onto the surface to be painted. On such a view, the painter’s hand would skillfully convey the content of otherwise disembodied imagination. Having developed a phenomenology that recognizes the embodied nature of mind, establishing embodied perception, movement, and material interaction at the basis of cognition, it is not surprising then that Merleau-Ponty argues that the painter works in a wholly different way. The painter’s effort is not the reproduction of a mental copy, but “an attempt to recapture the physiognomy of things and faces” integral to “their sensible configuration.”19 The execution of the painting does not retrace some inner mental representation, but rather visually realizes its object by translating the experience of seeing and visibility—incorporating the subject’s own sense of spatial inhabitation—into painterly forms. Of course, the hand draws and holds the brush, an instrument which, Merleau-Ponty suggests, becomes the extension of thought; but in addition to this cognitive-manual labor, there is a more global involvement of the body. Things to be painted are, for the artist, not merely depthless mental images but dimensional masses that, due to their material presence, are visible in part and in part remain unseen (as do their other sides, their insides, the aspects obstructed by other things). The body’s

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own spatiomotor interaction with the world, which allows for an internalization of the body schema, is the basis for the painter’s ability to conjure, on a two-dimensional surface, the way objects take up space, as it were, inhabit their surroundings. Most of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of painting focuses on Cézanne, who, as discussed in the previous chapter, adapted the Impressionist emphasis on aspects of immediate sensuous perception through a retrieval of some of the spatial solidity achieved by Renaissance painters. Cézanne’s negotiation of possibilities for rendering perceptual space unfolded over a lifetime of translating vision into the touch of his brushwork and lived spatiality again into painterly vision. This exchange transformed the way the painter saw nature. At the end of his life, Cézanne described in a letter to his son how his body’s position was relevant to the perception of his subject matter: “I must tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature. . . . Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study for the most powerful interest for months without changing place, by turning now more to the right, now more to the left.”20 This ongoing, active approach to the objects of visual study involves the full embodiment of the painter. Taking up a position with respect to a field of view he would paint scores of times, Cézanne would alter his gaze, with arms and hands at work, torso leaning this way and that, shifting weight onto one leg, then another, as he made continual adjustments to the landscape. This embodiment at the point of artistic execution—the physical process of painting itself—would be regarded phenomenologically as but moments within a process of exploration in the phenomenology of embodied vision. In the wake of Merleau-Ponty’s studies of painting, other visual arts have drawn phenomenological attention for what they can reveal about embodied imagination. In dance, the subject of a now classic phenomenological study, the body itself serves as the material medium for aesthetic expression, and here again it is impossible to regard imagination as only inward or of the immaterial mind.21 The art of dance, while composed of the body’s movement through space, often involves other creative media, including the relatively immaterial elements of music and narrative. Such intermediality may allow for exchanges among material and immaterial manifestations of imagining, considerations of which may also serve to dissolve any absolute boundary between interior and exterior expression.

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Dance may of course be performed without music, and one modernist itinerary for its evolution would prescribe its purification of all nonkinesthetic elements. Émile-Jaques Dalcroze, a modernist theorist of kinesthetics, or, as he called it, “studies in moving plastic,” described the emancipation of dance from music and language as the “culmination” of the art. Dance would come into its own when bodily movement could express the whole range of human emotion directly, becoming itself a form of silent music, with “a scale of gestures corresponding to that of sounds.” Dalcroze proposed that any attendant auditory music, if engaged at all, should be modeled entirely after the movements of the body. 22 Yet despite the widespread influence of Dalcroze—Sergei Diaghilev brought the Ballets Russes to Dalcroze’s institute in Dresden in 1913, with Vaslav Nijinsky incorporating some of his methods for The Rite of Spring23— choreography and dance performance throughout modernism continued to integrate music, and often metaphorical and narrative meanings, most evident when choreographers adopted poetic or literary texts. Modern dance provides rich examples of such intermediality in embodied imagining, a few of which can be mentioned here. Nijinsky choreographed and performed the role of the faun in a celebrated work premiered by the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1912. The film record of Nijinsky’s performance evidences the dancer’s quick leaps, his arm, hand, neck, and foot movements, his gestures and sliding elongations, as Nijinsky’s vivification and symbolic realization of a poetic image, the faun playing erotically among the nymphs. While the dancer’s body becomes both the central vehicle and object for aesthetic design and reflection, several media are involved. Nijinsky’s choreography accompanied a musical score by Claude Debussy that was itself inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Afternoon of a Faun” (“L’après-midi d’un faune”). While the poem provided the metaphor of animal-human embodiment that served as a basis for Nijinsky’s choreographic production, it is fitting that Mallarmé himself considered the dancing body as a model for his symbolist poetics.24 Mallarmé described dance as “a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form . . . suggesting, through the wonder of abridgements and leaps . . . with a corporeal scripture . . . a poem disengaged from all the apparatus of writing.”25 Prefiguring Dalcroze’s campaign to purify the kinesthetic medium, Mallarmé aimed to free his poetic art from the dominance of conventional aspects of written language in favor of the

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emotional impact of its rhythms and images. Mallarmé’s affirmation of dance as poetry and poetry as movement would be echoed in Nijinsky’s poetic choregraphy. The then new technique of film for which Nijinsky performed on this occasion may have also come into play, for it would have provided visual feedback that undoubtedly influenced further performances and choreographed works. A similar multimediality characterizes Martha Graham’s groundbreaking work of modern choreography, Appalachian Spring, which premiered in 1944. Graham’s work was accompanied by an original score by Aaron Copeland and staging by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi that was meant to evoke the rural simplicity of life in the Appalachian region. The musical score, the sculptural objects on stage, and the filming that captured the great dancer leading in the performance of her work, were all oriented by Graham’s innovative choreographic and performative vision. The aesthetic values characteristic of classical ballet gave way to what Graham called “significant movement” as the guiding aim of her work. Graham aimed to express, and bring to embodied form, not beauty or fluidity, but rather intense emotions “fraught with inner meaning.”26 In the same year Graham choreographed another work, Hérodiade, based on a poem of the same title by Mallarmé. The poem, chosen by the composer for the work, Paul Hindemith, provided the stimulus for Graham’s later turn from Americana themes to ancient mythology.27 Noguchi again provided sculptures for the set, three white pieces that Graham regarded as “a structure in bones of the human body.”28 The poem’s central figure is Herodias, wife of Herod, tetrarch of Galilee at the time of Christ’s crucifixion. The biblical legend also includes the figure of Salome, daughter of Herodias, who in response to John the Baptist’s denunciation of the incestuous union of Herodias and Herod, performs an erotic dance, her demanded reward for which is the Baptist’s head. Though Salome is not named directly in Mallarmé’s poem, the erotic terror she evokes seems to be conjured in its sumptuously dark images, resonant in Graham’s adaptation. While Graham did not make literal reference to some of the poem’s elements, her “physical language, with her uses of deep and high contraction and release . . . aggressive kicks with flexed feet, contorted arm movements, reversals of direction, accessed the emotional essence of the poem.”29 This affirms the spirit of Mallarmé’s own poetic aims, which, again, involved distancing from conventional aspects of

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language—here literal or referential meanings—in favor of emotional and aesthetic intensity. In a letter of September 1864, Mallarmé described his poetic intention as not directed at the object described, but rather as centered on the feelings its image evokes: “To paint not the thing, but the effect that it produces. Therefore, the verse must not, in this case, be composed of words, but of intentions, and all language must be erased in the face of feelings.”30 Graham’s adaptation of the poem into dance, while preserving some intertextuality in its layers of reference, reflects some absorption of linguistic meaning into “significant movement.” Like the high-wire artistry described at the beginning of this chapter, dance brings not only the fact of embodiment itself but enactive embodied experience to the fore of our account of imagination. Having applied phenomenology to the description of dance, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone presents the body in general as the agency of knowing, but also kinetic movement as such as “the originating ground of our sense-makings.”31 Echoing both Merleau-Ponty and the kinesthetic theory of Dalcroze, Sheets-Johnstone argues that “we literally discover ourselves in movement. We grow kinetically into our bodies. In particular, we grow into those distinctive ways of movement that come with our being the bodies we are. In our spontaneity of movement, we discover arms that extend, spines that bend, knees that flex. . . . We make sense of ourselves in the course of moving.”32 Although Sheets-Johnstone acknowledges the relationship of this original sense making to the development of language as preserved in articulatory gesture, she emphasizes the prelinguistic kinetic movement that ties human beings to all of animate nature, characterizing language as postkinetic.33 The interpretation of modern dance then allows theorization of a prelinguistic, wholly kinetic, form of thinking. This would put dance on the side of embodied imagination, leaving, presumably, the linguistic arts on the disembodied side of language. Graham’s translation of Mallarmé’s poem would seem, as the poet himself suggests is the aim of his poetics, to leave language and its referential objects somewhat behind in favor of its felt, and here wholly embodied, significance. Yet Graham’s presentation of Herodias/Salome may be inseparable from the metaphoric evocations that originate in narrative, just as Nijinsky’s faun and attendant nymphs evoke and vivify poetic imagery and attendant ideas—the faun, its mythical heritage, and its fantasticerotic contrast to the strictly human—that are not wholly eclipsed by the

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kinesthetic movement in which they are expressed. Both works integrate literary elements and motives, echoing the emergence of imaginative pretense among early humans that is likely to have originated in gesture and gave rise to storytelling among other arts. In our earlier discussion of the evolution of imagination, pretense was described as enabling innovation, allowing us to take “this” for “that,” and is practiced in play as well as in linguistic structures. While accounts of imagining grounded in inner imaging tend to disregard pretense as a fundamental form of imagining,34 a number of scholars identify pretense as the primary underlying imaginative mode in the arts more generally.35 Pretense can be manifest not only in language and poetic images but  through material creativity, anchored in the performative body, and dance is not the only manifestation of such. The creativity of embodied pretense as a medium of storytelling is perhaps no better illustrated than by the most famous tragicomic character of silent film, created by Charlie Chaplin. Here spoken language is bypassed as the narrative comes to life largely through the language of gesture and pantomine. Embodied creativity, as both material interaction and corporeal movement, is the primary medium of Chaplin’s art, whose experience as a comic stage performer was the basis for his career as an actor, producer, author, director, and composer for many of his films, including those featuring the Little Tramp. Through his recurring misadventures—Walter Benjamin called Chaplin a “genius of failure”—the tramp character expresses a seemingly universal longing for love and a mocking resistance to authority.36 Impoverished and wandering, the tramp ever attempts to make himself at home in the often indifferent or hostile modern world. The genre of silent film required almost no verbal language (but for occasional written words), and, partly for that reason, Chaplin was able to reach a global audience, not only delighting ordinary moviegoers, but fostering a cult following among avant-garde artists.37 Chaplin devised his most famous character, and along with that characterization the core theme of his many films, through material improvisation and an element of chance. Chaplin’s trademark character, “the fellow with the bowler hat, jerky walk, little toothbrush mustache, and walking stick,” as one critic described it, is said to have “first occurred to him on seeing office workers walking along the Strand.”38 Manipulating this image of the modern

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clerk turned impoverished vagrant—though Chaplin also attributed the shuffling walk to the “habitual drunkards leaning against his uncle’s public house . . . waiting for a chance to beg or earn a few cents”39—Chaplin construed the Little Tramp in the dressing room at Keystone Studios in 1914 while filming Mabel’s Strange Predicament.40 Chaplin put together various articles of clothing from the costume wardrobe and deliberately chose items of contrasting sizes. The mustache, originally meant for a villain, was cut down to toothbrush size, in part so that Chaplin’s facial expressions would remain visible. The too-big shoes and baggy trousers were found, and the too-small jacket and hat were donned, and Chaplin took up a cane. Chaplin found the costume inspiring of a personality he could then develop further through the invention of a new gestural vocabulary. The tramp emerged by elaborating the peculiar gait and gestures that amplify the qualities of this mismatched amalgam. With the tramp ever tottering in the clownish shoes, his hat could be repeatedly adjusted, as if restoring his balance, and tipped, in deference to persons offended or even objects bumped into. The walking stick, rather than maintaining the tramp’s balance on the ground, becomes “an element of instability and improvisation,” to be used in random ways, including holding up his trousers.41 Indeed, as he walks the streets Chaplin “multiplies the possibilities of his cane: he does other things with the same thing and he goes beyond the limits that the determinants of the object set on its utilization.”42 Rather than merely transferring the strategies of stage pantomime to film, Chaplin’s antics with his cane are among the “startlingly new visual tropes particular to the cinema” he introduced.43 The discrepancies in size and utility of his various props were integrated into the personality of the Little Tramp as a misfit of improvised circumstances who mimics the gestures of others, awkwardly maneuvers through practical and social life, and often inadvertently exposes its inherent contradictions. The tramp exhibits at once an old man’s gentleness as well as quirkiness and childish play, a sincerity of purpose and the ridiculousness of the clown. The character came into full characterization for the film The Tramp in 1915 and was the protagonist of dozens of films until Chaplin’s last tramp film Modern Times in 1936. Through his slapstick performance, Chaplin expresses hope for the down-and-out and evolves to offer a satirical commentary on dehumanizing aspects of modern experience. The character brought Chaplin worldwide fame and success, but

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also a medium through which to express a novel vision of the world. Chaplin did not merely master a particular genre but came to be identified with the art of cinema itself, as was eloquently expressed by the art historian Élie Faure: “The master of this new art never speaks, never writes, never explains. He has no need even to mask an ephemeral gesture in the conventional manner of the mimic. In him the human drama possesses an instrument of expression . . . nothing more is needed to draw from the heart a wave of new harmonies, a sudden realization of the inevitability of things, and of the everlasting monotonous rhythm of the passions.”44 Chaplin’s very embodiment of the tramp, Faure suggests, becomes an instrument of expression for the human condition. Yet there is something paradoxical in the fact that Chaplin’s gestural performances and his material creativity are expressed through the disembodying medium of film. Chaplin’s pretense is inherently material, interactive with props as well as staging and other characters, but it would have been the cinematographic framing and capture that provided an external perspective, an aesthetic and analytic distance for Chaplin’s cultivation of the character over multiple works—Chaplin is known to have demanded hundreds of takes for a single scene. Chaplin’s transformation for the cinematic image invites consideration of the effect of medium on the imagining body. Indeed, Chaplin’s trademark gestures seem to incorporate the medium of film for which movement is constituted through discontinuity. For Benjamin, “Chaplin’s unique significance lies in the fact that in his work the human being is integrated into the film image by ways of his gestures—that is, his bodily and mental posture. The innovation of Chaplin’s gestures is that he dissects the expressive movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations.”45 The tramp’s staccato gestures, jerky gait, the ways he raises his hat or handles his cane, Benjamin suggests, integrates the discontinuity of the cinematic medium—which is, after all, a series of still images—into “human motorial functions.”46 The embodied imagination in this way absorbs the delinquencies of its technical repesentation. At the same time, the theme of technology and its interventions in modern human experience is the subject of critical reflection in Modern Times, widely regarded as Chaplin’s greatest work and issuing the final appearance of his little tramp character.47 Here the tramp’s abrupt and fitful movements reflect and exaggerate that of workers on the assembly line, or the mechanical gears of the machine, with

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which his own motions become fused. When the tramp falls into the sprockets of the machine, “he is playing the ultimate mechanical man, since these sprockets also resemble the sprockets of a movie camera or projector.”48 Meanwhile, technological advances in the art of cinema itself, as films became able to incorporate sound, would leave Chaplin’s own silent pictures behind. When cinema incorporated soundtrack, and talking pictures became standard, the “silent music” of Chaplin’s pantomime would become, at least for popular audiences, obsolete.

EMBODIED IMAGINING IN THE LITERARY ARTS The tension between material embodiment and apparent disembodiment in the arts may also be reflected in wholly linguistic works. Miraculously, from the scant material of marks on a page—almost nothing physical at all—worlds seem to unfold for the reader of literature with experiential texture, vitality, and variety. These are imagined worlds not only surveyed from a distance, but immersive and compelling. Yet despite the material minimalism of its conveyance, literature is increasingly understood as arising from, and as engaging, embodied experience. In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard first suggested that all literary images originate in fundamental material experiences of embodied life, such as those of shelter and exposure, nesting and journeying. The earliest places we inhabit, he suggests, are written in our bodily memory, which functions as a physical repository for the imagination. As Bachelard writes: “But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the ‘first stairway,’ we would not stumble on that rather high step. . . . The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands.”49 Poetic images originate in these material inscriptions of earlier physical life. Our corporeal familiarities, our fundamental bodily interactions with things and spaces of the world, provide schematic memories that supply imagination throughout the life of consciousness. For the reader, poetic images, with all the emotional and psychological resonances they carry, bring these schema to the surface of consciousness through a process of

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reverberation. The images we encounter in poetry strike as provocations of memory, evoking in a virtual interior echoes of our own embodied life. Bachelard argues that it is through embodied imagining that we have, in the first place, a sense of an interior life and the sense that many of our imaginings take place there. We can speak metaphorically of thoughts “inside” our own minds, due to the productive dialectic between imagination and proprioception: “By following the ‘seats of fever,’ or the pains that inhabit a hollow tooth, we should learn that the imagination localizes suffering and creates and recreates imaginary anatomies.”50 The reflection on such experiences through linguistic images allows for the virtual elaboration and realization of their spaces of affect and effect. Thus the virtual interior of imagination is indebted to embodied life and to its physical contours, recesses, and articulations. Since Bachelard’s poetics, some cognitive linguists have described embodied experience as the origin of metaphor, central to literary arts but also deeply embedded in the structures of thinking. Metaphors are thought to shape our conceptual thinking, as expressed in linguistic metaphors, and “many basic metaphors arise from correlations between co-occurring embodied experiences.” For example, happy and more are associated with up, sad and less are associated with down, affection is linked with warmth, and so on. According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, several hundred primary metaphors are learned in early life that “ground human metaphor systems and more complex metaphors in embodied experiences.” The origins of primary metaphors include the repeated correlation of physical experiences (physical affection and the sensation of warmth) and the physical correlates of emotion (rising skin temperature in anger gives rise to the idea of “blood boiling” and “letting off steam”).51 We regard what we feel “inside” as distinct from what we may show “outside,” and these designations can be traced to early image schemas of containment. Thus, metaphors arising from the experience of embodied life contribute to an internal image of our world.52 Basic metaphors, including interiority and exteriority, verticality, balance, ascension and decline, serve as “organizing image schema” for our thoughts about nonmaterial things.53 We give importance to that which has weight; we understand emotional, judicial, economic, mathematical,

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and aesthetic matters in terms of balance and imbalance; we describe abstract ideas in terms of reach, flexibility, and durability. All these are conceptual metaphors grounded in basic forms of embodied experience, while the metaphoric transfer of these experiences to diverse domains has been attributed to imagination. We may, for instance, project the image schema of balance onto a painting or sculpture, a projection that is “fundamentally a centrifugal process arising in the body and spreading outwards into the world.”54 It has been argued that linguistic metaphors and other figurative language are not merely supplemental to meaning, a kind of creative flourish, but express the figurative nature of thinking itself.55 In addition to the bodily origins of metaphor, sensory and kinesthetic experience also lies at the heart of an embodied view of literature. Although literary imagination is often considered in terms of inner visual imaging, literary imagination invokes multiple senses that convey and rely upon a broader distribution of embodied imagining. In Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel conjures in memory, from the provocation of various senses, the whole world and landscape of Combray where he spent his childhood summers. In the famous passage his memory is prompted not by a vision, at first, but by the taste of a madeleine dipped into a cup of tea, served to Marcel by his mother after he comes in from the rain. Of course, memory has long been understood in connection with the sensuous imagination. As Aristotle describes it in De Memoria, images or phantasmata are impressed upon the mind like a seal in wax. Aristotle’s metaphor calls upon the visual but also tactile sense, evoking, as it does, contact with and pressure against a malleable surface. While Plato had already used the wax and seal metaphor (in the dialogue Theaetetus) to describe the acquisition of knowledge, Aristotle’s rendering may be more deliberately physical. For the phantasmata bring forth what was in some way impressed upon the body, sensation “literally stamped into the body, an impression with physiological features, a material trace.”56 Such impressions can be visual, partly visual, or nonvisual. Because of the bodily impression of memory, we can imagine the sound of a trumpet or the feel of silk or ice on our fingertips. We can imagine the sensation of running, tumbling, leaping, or scraping our knees. We can imagine, too, the taste of the madeleine, and yet this

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appeal to one sense will be conjured by Proust in a more fully embodied context. Marcel’s memory issues first of all with the physical sensation of shelter, his body finding warmth and refuge in contrast to exposure to the weather outside. The scent and warmth of the tea, the taste of the little cake, provoke what Bachelard would call the deep reverberations of memory, as they stimulate the most ancient of the senses. Marcel’s memory suddenly brings back the atmosphere and events of his childhood—and the madeleine crumbs soaked in a lime-flower infusion given to the child by his aunt—memories unprovoked by the will. Marcel then describes how he tries to reignite that initial experience provoked by the madeleine in order to pursue his recollections deliberately and with what we might call a phenomenologically reflective attention. He pursues an attempt at voluntary memory by invoking all the senses: “I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise . . . embedded . . . at great depth . . . I can feel it mounting slowly, I can measure the resistance. I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.”57 The memory of Combray initiates the unfolding narrative of Proust’s great novel, where a whole world seems to open up in imaginative recollection. Marcel’s imagination is guided by a conscious will to reconfigure the conditions that sparked his fortuitous provocation of memory, but consciousness must call upon powers distributed throughout the body. The inner attempt to envision or see in his mind’s eye the lost world from his childhood is brought about not by language or visual stimulations alone, but by physical warmth and shelter, taste, feel, and scent. Marcel attempts to inwardly image the oldest sensations and those that, like the sense of touch, cannot be held at a distance by the willing subject. Beyond sense perception, Marcel limns, in the passage just quoted, feelings of physical movement, with reference to rising, mounting, and pressure. The memory itself is described as an embodied form, starting from a position of rest and emerging against some resistance, inciting feelings of visceral tension and ascension. Marcel then describes an auditory image that also evokes physical resonance in hearing the echo, the memory’s traversal of imaginary space, that seems to create the very depths it plumbs. The inner life depicted here is an embodied dimension, a metaphoric, or

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poetic space endowed by embodied imagining, where evocations of all the senses and of kinesthesis contribute. It is not surprising then that Marcel explicitly invokes the notion of bodily memory. For Proust, as it will be for Bachelard, it is the body that remembers and maintains images of the past, for example, of all the rooms and houses in which one has slept and awoken. But this also harbors images of possible experiences. The body, Proust’s narrator suggests, contains “the memory—not yet of the place where I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be.” Such places might be recalled if the imaginer deliberately reflects upon the body, finding “the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder blades.”58 In other moments in the novel, Marcel’s memory will be jogged by such experiences as the feel of a wobbly paving stone under his foot and the rich acoustic density of a particular phrase of music. Proust’s embodied poetics complements the inner visual imagination with these otherwise distributed imaginings, calling upon the reader’s own primordial imagination of embodiment. Such manifestations of embodied imagination render woefully inadequate the Cartesian idea of the immaterial mind, essentially distinct from the body, encased in its own private virtual interior—a view of mind sufficiently discredited in recent decades in a number of fields, yet leaving residual implications in our understanding of imagination. For although the imagination may endow us with the sense of a personal interiority, and even a private sense of self, imagination respects no hard divisions between self and world. There may be a virtual inside to the imagination— or rather innumerable possible interiors—but there is no fixed outside, as suggested in Montaigne’s descriptions of feeling the pains of others and of physically responding in visible ways to imagined thoughts. However much it is felt and experienced as private—in fantasies, for instance, unknown to all but ourselves—the imagination is paradoxically without boundary. For imagination is expressed through the body, just as the body extends imagination in action, as in Yeats’s insight that “we cannot tell the dancer from the dance.” Imagination takes on significance among the objects of its interaction and in their transformation becomes embedded in them. Thus we cannot rely upon any absolute divisions between ourselves and the world, for the imagination exposes our body to the world and takes the world virtually into our own bodies.

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Indeed the living imagination worlds the mind, in those same exchanges through which it minds the world. Literature provokes further reflection on the extension of consciousness and imagination through material interactions, also the subject of phenomenological study. Merleau-Ponty understood the lived body—the body as the moving center of experiential meaning—as extendable through material means. In his study of bodily motility and perception, and of the body schema, Merleau-Ponty demonstrated how the body expresses our power of “dilating our being-in-the-world” through instruments that become part of our habitual experience. The blind man’s stick, the writer’s pen and paper or typewriter, clothing that extends our bodies, all become part of the habituated sense of our bodies within the world of interaction. Recent cognitive theories refer to “extended cognition”—for which our notebooks, calculators, smartphones, or maps, for example, can be understood not merely as props for but an integral part of human cognition.59 In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty demonstrated how the body subject could adjust practical competence under certain circumstances through modifying the self-image. A person accustomed to wearing a wide feathered hat may not need to calculate the feather’s distance from the edge of the doorway, for the implicit bodily image of personal breadth and height expands to accommodate the feather’s protrusion. A driver may get a car through a narrow opening in the same way, through a virtual expansion of the dimensions of the lived body. The hat and car are “potentialities of volume in the demand for a certain amount of free space,” as Merleau-Ponty describes it. They come to be included, in other words, in the body’s extended image of itself. Yet instruments can also be said to expand the reach of perception and thus of potential knowledge about the surrounding world. Thus the blind man’s stick becomes a part of his bodily habitus, “an area of sensitivity extending the scope and active radius of his touch and providing a parallel to sight.”60 Our motoric responses adjust habitually through the body to a schematic inner reflection that extends to include habitually engaged objects and tools. Charlie Chaplin’s playful transformations of the habitually donned walking cane manifest imaginative variation on such extension. Rilke offers a poetic metaphor for such cognitive extension through involvement with things. His poem “The Ball” describes the feeling of exploration and vicarious flight that may be experienced imaginatively in

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the activity of throwing a ball up in the air and catching it again. Rilke’s speaker addresses the ball directly: You round one . . . . . . you, who between fall and flight Are still undecided: the one that, when it climbs As though it had lifted the throw as well, Abducts and sets free—, and inclines And holds and shows the players from above All at once a new position, Coordinating them like a choreography . . .61

The ball as Rilke renders it becomes an extension of the embodied mind, allowing the thrower to project into space in ways that exceed the capacity of the human body alone. Leonardo da Vinci employed the ball in studying the mechanics of percussion, projection, and friction and analyzed the movements of the human body in throwing, such that the ball became essential to revealing something of the nature of physical reality. In Rilke’s depiction the ball extends the human reach, as though it had agency of its own. At the outset of Rilke’s poem, not fully reproduced here, the ball is depicted as carrying the warmth of the hands of the thrower along its trajectory of ascension, and with that carriage the embodied imagination is projected. The poem’s tracing of the ball’s ascension and fall also illuminates another possible perspective, showing those who are playing with the ball “all at once a new position,” a revelation that Rilke compares with a figuration in a dance.62 This relates “The Ball” to another poem from Rilke’s New Poems, “Spanish Dancer.” Here Rilke appears to find in the kinesthetic of dance a metaphor not only for poetry, as in Mallarmé, but for imagination itself. The flamenco dancer’s movements are mirrored in the turns, leaps, and enjambments of the poetic phrases. Enrapturing the audience, as do the movements of flames, the dance is equated with a flame, in a reversal of the conventional metaphor. Rilke leaves ambiguous where the intentionality lies which directs the movement and, at the end, its sudden halting—in the body subject of the dancer or the image the dance makes for a viewer (and reader). Yeats’s metaphor rendering indistinguishable the dancer and the dance is here made literal. Rilke’s speaker ascribes a

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similarly ambiguous intentionality to the object in “The Ball,” as if the object, having retained the agency of its initiating trajectory, itself choreographed the potential movements of the players who anticipate its return. In both poems Rilke evokes kinesthetic, perceptual, and proprioceptive senses, relying upon the reader’s embodied imagination for their effects, such that the responsive echoes within the reader mirror the reverberations beyond the object described within the poems themselves.63 In his poetry Rilke also offered studies of physical objects that, perhaps less obviously than Yeats’s “balloon of the mind,” may be read as metaphors for imagination. Rilke wrote a number of poems about roses, for he saw in their physical structure of overlaying petals—particularly when in bloom—a paradox of containment and openness. The petals rest upon other petals, their layers creating a vessel that, however, remains as offering as it is containing. In “The Rose’s Interior” (“Das Roseninnere”) the speaker asks, “Where, to this inside, is there an outside?”64 The rose contains and holds, and yet it remains open. The speaker compares the rose petals to eyelids and, in “The Bowl of Roses” (“Die Rosenschale”), ascribes to them an inner visual power (“eines innern Sehkraft”).65 This characterization echoes, of course, the traditional view of imagination as inward seeing, or as the “mind’s eye,” to be discussed in the next chapter. But the rose is not merely the metaphoric container for immaterial images; the image is itself material, a structure at once enclosing and proffering. The speaker describes the petals as so loose a trembling hand could disperse them, and yet by the end of the brief poem they seem to be imaginatively secured as a “room within a dream.”66 Despite Rilke’s ending, which would seem to reestablish the Cartesian model of an isolated immaterial mind, this ambiguity of the petals closing and harboring while also opening and dispersing could equally describe the embodied imagination. The imagining subject both harbors an interior life and a world of inwardly pondered, private thoughts, and is ever externalizing, exposed and open because also physical and connected, in touch with the surrounding world, drawing from and always of the world. There is no external boundary to imagining, no outer limit, just as the living body, moving in space and time, is endlessly connected with the world.



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Given the embodiment of imagination, as these considerations of performative, visual, and literary arts have suggested, it may seem paradoxical that imagination’s most explicitly embodied manifestations can be interpreted as efforts to transcend embodied life, to leave the physical world behind. Petit’s aerial walk, the literalization of embodied imagining described at the outset of this chapter, echoes the dream that inspired the myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun on wax wings, or that of Leonardo da Vinci as he worked tirelessly toward the aim of human flight, or of the ancient Nazca artists of Peru, whose monumental carvings of birds, animals, insects, and other patterns could be properly viewed only from the sky. Throughout human history, in our ancient mythologies, our imagination has engaged the dream of outwitting the rootedness of our material existence. Wordsworth’s wandering cloud, and even Rilke’s more mundane rendering of a ball in flight, echo such imaginative ascensions. Yet however much imagination virtually frees us from material constraints, it emerges from embodied life and is in turn experienced through an embodied mind. The body serves as the ground of human imagining in multiple ways, evidenced most manifestly in the arts for which embodied performance is central, dance and theatrical gesture, among others. Imagination is embodied not only when we undertake but also when we witness physical performances, as much as when we feel empathy on behalf of others, probe through painting the visual presence of the world, undergo the kinesthetic and sensory evocations of literature. Creative expressions of imagination may generate perspectives that transcend, but thereby index as well, the limitations of embodiment. While the body conducts its ordinary exercises of habitual life, it may be engaged in other transformative activities of imagining. Whereas in ordinary everyday experience the body is “restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life,” as Merleau-Ponty suggests, we can find the body “at other times elaborating upon the primary actions and moving from their literal to their figurative meaning”—and when it does so “it manifests through them a new core of significance.”67 While our ordinary embodiment underlies the vitality, coherence, and form of human experience, the body may also extend us, in and through activities of imagination, beyond ordinary life.

6 ENVISIONING IN THE MIND’S EYE, AND OTHER IMAGINGS

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o far in this book we have defined imagination, traced its evolutionary origins, its role in and informing perception, its engagements in making and revealing the world, and its embodiment, demonstrating how the imagination is engaged with the material world and with others around us. Yet while imagination is never wholly isolated from the world, imagination is also responsible for the generation of a virtual interiority, the inner world in which much of our imagining seems to take place. Such imagining is experienced with no easily perceptible outward manifestation. Even if the fact of our imaginative responses can be physically measured or observed—Montaigne’s blushing, paling, trembling, and the like, or those responses that can be instrumentally measured— the content of our imagining (unless in some way expressed by us) remains available only to us. Inner imaging allows consciousness to present, often with perceptlike quality, ideas and experiences in the mind. While imagination has been long defined as the ability to bring to mind images of things not present to perception, the visual quality of such presentation is often identified with the imagination as such. We can, in the visual imagination, or “the mind’s eye,” consider images drawn from memory, transformed or generated in the mind, or prompted by literary reading. Yet while visual imaging is often thought to be the most pervasive form of inner imagination, it is also the most controversial. Within the

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last century the place of visual images in a theory of imagination has been contested and defended.1 In this chapter we will consider both introspective and empirical evidence for this form of experiential imagining, along with critical considerations of the image itself. The nature of visualization may be illuminated by considering the most vivid of imaginers, those imaginers who experience synesthesia, and those imaginers who have lost the capacity for perceptual vision. Despite the dominance of envisioning in the cultural representation of imagination, the capacity to bring to mind may be supported by internal presentations drawn from other perceptual or kinesthetic sense, as we will see in light of some literary examples. Evidence of the variance among human imaginers in both the quality and perceptual register of inner imaging is growing, as is evidence of the neurological relation between visual imaging and visual perception. The phenomenon of envisioning, the role of images in literary reading, and the controversy surrounding the status of the inner visual image may be better understood in light of this evidence.

IMAGINATION AS THE MIND’S EYE AND THE PROBLEM OF MENTAL IMAGES The notions of the “mind’s eye” and mental imagery enjoy a long history. Envisioning, or inward perception of visual images, is central to classical theories of the mind. Plato mentions the “eye of the soul” in several dialogues, including Symposium, to depict knowledge as a kind of inner intuition that is apparent to the knower with self-evident clarity. In the fourteenth century Chaucer makes use of the metaphor of an inner eye, suggesting in “The Man of Law’s Tale” that a blind man sees with the “eyen of his mynde.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells Horatio—who has struggled to make sense of the apparition of the dead king—that he sees his father “in my mind’s eye.” Of course, we need not reach a state of perfect knowledge, be physically blind, or be haunted by dead kings to experience the full richness of inner visual imaging. Aristotle referred to the “eye of the soul” and regarded the retrieval of inward images as necessary for all thinking.2

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For many people, inner envisioning is so persistent an activity of consciousness, it is hard to conceive of conscious life going on without it. Envisioning may characterize our experiences of memory, our expectation for what is impending or projection of possibility for the future, or the wandering of our consciousness to thoughts wholly unconnected to our immediate experiences. Those who are primarily visual imaginers—it will be suggested in what follows that not all human beings are so—can call up examples at will from countless possible images rooted in memory. I may recall a particular moment from the past, with some degree of visual detail. The face of a person long missed may be haunting. I may revisit, and linger in visual contemplation of, places I have not been for many years, consider the snowy slopes of the Alps, an especially colorful garden, or the details of the rooms in a childhood home, all of which may appear as a deep familiarity inwardly glimpsed. In being called up, these visual imaginings are not merely reproductions, faded copies of perceptions, but constructed evocations on the basis of past perceptual life. Such memories can also be integrated into new projections—imagining, for example, a person long absent enjoying a particular event we are now experiencing. Anticipating the future may also feature envisioning. One may think of the week ahead and may visualize possible scenarios, people one looks forward to seeing or whom one would rather avoid. One may envision outfits to wear for an upcoming occasion, furniture that might suit a new house, the route we must take to cross a city, a baby whose arrival is anticipated. We may wonder how we would look in a different hairstyle or how our faces will change when we grow old. Of course, envisioning can also be untethered to any past or current reality of our lives. We may, if we are vivid imaginers, entertain audience with people we will never be able to meet and imagine to ourselves what that might look like. We may cast wishes or desires, or playful ideations, across our mental spaces in ways that evoke sensuous experiences. Erotic imagining is for many a predominantly visual evocation. Inner imaging in the visual mode, or “envisioning,” is a vital dimension of conscious experience and provides an inward complement as well as contrast to the life of perception. Inner imaging, though also filling out dreams and hallucinations, and otherwise occurring unsummoned by any effort, can be undertaken voluntarily and directed at will. Most of us can imagine with some visual

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quality, say, a tropical island that is not a direct memory of any island in particular we have visited but is “only imaginary.” We can then inwardly fill this imaginary island with magnificent flora and fauna, with graceful palm trees, and spectacular sunsets—drawing up our own personal postcard from the imagined tropics. Or, if we wish, we can make of this place a more fantastical invention: we can populate this imagined island with an imagined rare species of blue turtle, and with lawyers drying their foreheads at their desks on the beach while eating ice cream cones. We can imagine that the ice cream is pink, and that all the lawyers’ suits are striped. We thus envision what, in principle, could be perceived, as they are imagings of possible beings or of possible arrangements of existing ones. All this could be merely conceptualized—imaginatively constructed out of ideas that have no sensuous or quasi-visual content. But insofar as imaginers do experience an inner visualization, an aspect or scene or parts or flashes thereof with momentary color, extension, shape, texture, pattern, or other perceptual detail, we can speak of sensuous and specifically visual imagining. As Casey points out, such inner visioning may be ephemeral, such that an imagined object “does not remain present to us in an abiding manner,” and our attention to it may require effortful and directed maintenance.3 But this ephemeral and directed nature of envisioning itself renders difficult the metaphor of “the mind’s eye,” suggesting as it does an analogy with the physical eye and real seeing. The physical eye, in observing its object, focuses and transforms available light into electrical impulses to be conducted by the optic nerve for the brain’s interpretation; the eye can move, of course, but has no other influence over its source of input—which is not, of course, to deny the influence of embodiment more broadly considered on the global experience of vision. Yet the imagination, since it is in envisioning untethered to any perceptual object, is involved in constructing what it imagines and allows for multiple sources of input and their manipulation in myriad ways. Along with the metaphor of imagination itself as an inner eye, mental images have been conceived as reproductions, as pictures in the mind, like photographs. But visual images are in many ways also unlike pictures or photographs—they are ephemeral, they may be more indeterminate, they can be manipulated by will alone as photographs cannot. Imagining may enact thinking in visual form, about possible or absent objects, but there is not a “picture,” as it were, in the mind.

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While there is little agreement on what these images are, it is broadly accepted that images are not things in the mind, indeed not things at all.

RECONSIDERING THE VISUAL MENTAL IMAGE We can advance beyond the idea that the mental image is a thing, or a picture in the mind, by treating the image not as a mental substance but as a particular mode of intentional consciousness, intending an object in the mode as imagined. To say that consciousness is intentional means that it is conscious of, that is to say, it is directed at an object other than itself (consciousness can also, at a reflective level, turn upon and be aware of its own activities, but these activities will in turn be directed at objects of consciousness). Husserl treats imagination in several forms, and an important one is picture consciousness (Bildbewußtsein), which leads to a consideration of mental images. In the first volume of his Ideas, Husserl discusses an engraving by Albrecht Dürer of “The Knight, Death, and the Devil” (1513), describing our consciousness of the image as transcending the physical paper and ink that constitute it physically. Picture consciousness is of course more than just taking in sensory data, but rather akin to seeing-as. While we perceive the physical picture (the artist’s marks on paper), we are able to imagine the object of the picture (the figures those marks make of a human in armor on horseback, a figure holding an hourglass and a horned creature), and the subject matter of the picture (a knight, the figure of death, and the devil). The physical picture serves as the basis for imagining the pictorial image and what that represents. Husserl then also discusses imagination without the physical picture, as imagining in the mind. He describes this as the presentification (Vergegenwärtigung) of something that is not present in perception at all—for example in imagining a centaur playing a flute—making it available to consciousness as an image, available to be freely varied in fantasy.4 Sartre, inspired by Husserl’s comments on imagination, puts these two ways of thinking about imagination together, imagining as intending in a certain presentational mode and understanding mental imagining on the model of the representative picture: both the mental image and the pictorial image are referential.

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Sartre devoted two studies to imagination, and in them rejects the tendency of earlier theories to reify the mental image as if it were a kind of thing in the mind. As Sartre describes it: “The word image can . . . indicate only the relation of consciousness to an object; in other words, it means a certain manner in which the object makes its appearance to consciousness, or, if one prefers, a certain way in which consciousness presents an object to itself.”5 The image is not a mental thing, but rather the image is simply a mode of intentional consciousness—a way of presentationally intending an object—as absent, elsewhere, or nonexistent, or without any positing regarding existence at all. Just as marks drawn on a page point or refer to something that transcends that physical substrate—those marks might make out, or indicate, the face of a person, or the relative location of places on a map, for example—so too is the mental image referential. The mental image, Sartre claims, is nothing but the way consciousness points to an object beyond the mind in a certain ontological mode: the image I have of my friend Peter is but a way of intending or bringing to mind the Peter I am imagining in his absence. A mental image of Peter, a schematic drawing or caricature of him, a portrait, and a photograph of Peter all belong to an image family, ranging from no reliance on an external support (merely thinking of Peter) for the image to considerable dependence (in the case of the photograph of Peter) of imagining on an external substrate. While relying heavily on the picture model, however, Sartre, as we have seen previously, draws an absolute line between imagination and perception, such that the real and the imaginary are of different essences and “cannot coexist.”6 In Sartre’s view, to perceive is to encounter a real object as present; to imagine is to engage, in the mind alone, a consciousness of absence or nothingness. Although, as we saw in chapter  3, Sartre’s position is tempered by his admittance for concrete imagining, Sartre relies on this argument to make a radical distinction between perceptions and images: images are not merely faded copies of perceptions lingering in the mind, but are of a wholly different order. To perceive a chair is to grasp it visually in its full bodily presence; to imagine a chair that is not present is not to inwardly “see” an image of the object, it is to imagine the object “as if” it were present, or rather to intend it in the mode of its absence. To imagine Peter in the mind is not to “see” him but to be conscious of him, or present him, as absent or elsewhere; to look at a photograph of a face

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and to imagine Peter on that basis is to intend Peter as absent on the basis of a consciousness of a wholly different order, the present perception, which in this case Sartre argues serves as an “analogon” for imagining. In imagining unassisted by such a perceptual object, Sartre regards the mental image itself—although it is but a mode of consciousness and not a thing—as such an analogon. Yet the notion of the analogon presents a difficulty for Sartre’s theory.7 Sartre’s concession that mental imaging, though involving no image in the sense of a thing in the mind, has to be based on some material vehicle— some “physical data”—that serves as the analogon for the absent object is difficult to square with the insistence on the image as pure intentionality and as nothingness.8 “The material nature of the mental image,” Sartre admits, “is difficult to determine” and in any case should not be confused for the object of imagining consciousness itself.9 In the case of imagining unprompted by any external object, or inner imaging, Sartre speculates that the analogue is supplied by some kind of inner physical movement and by emotion, both conceived as bodily experiences or, in his terminology, psychic material, which operate as a kind of “proxy” for sensation.10 Although Sartre’s philosophy in a number of respects opposes an embodied view of consciousness such as that offered by his contemporary Merleau-Ponty, this notion of a substrate of envisioning could be interpreted to anticipate more recent evidence from neuroscience that identifies common brain activity across envisioning and perceptual vision, pointing to a material process in the brain underlying envisioning. Sartre’s reference to inner bodily sensation resonates, too, with attempts in recent literary theory to account for the embodied and distributed nature of literary imagining, as we will see shortly. Yet if Sartre by way of the notion of analogon ends up treating “the image as if an object,”11 this threatens the coherence of his own view of the imagination as intending nothingness. Not only the nature but the relevance of mental images has been challenged. Gilbert Ryle, in rejecting the idea of pictures in the mind, also discounted the idea of mental images. Ryle did not deny that there are imagined mental experiences, such as hearing a tune in one’s mind or envisioning a mountain.12 Yet Ryle renders images at best redundant when he argues that their relevance is exhausted in their description, and insofar as Ryle describes imagining as propositional in nature, images

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themselves become irrelevant to imaginative experience. On Ryle’s view, imagining the room in which one played as a child was merely having a conception, not an image, of such place; the experiential dimension of imagining could be explained as the activity of pretending to observe it.13 To claim that one had a mental image of the childhood room is to commit a fallacy of immanence—that something was there lodged in the mind—as well as to misdescribe the mental act of regarding it. For half a century after Ryle, mental imagery remained marginalized, as mental images were also difficult to accommodate in the emerging view of the mind structured by linguistic forms of representation.14 In this spirit, it was argued that “imagination does not imply imagery,” since we can imagine even where no imagery is possible.15 Even within the scope of literary theory, some accounts only ambivalently admit envisioning or dispense with it entirely. Despite his considerable interest in images of absent or nonexistent things—as indexes of “nothingness”—Sartre himself denied any fundamental role to images in literary experience. Sartre did not deny the fact of envisioning in light of reading, but rather argued that mental imagery occurred to the reader only in the gaps and pauses of the reader’s attention: “when the reader is engrossed, there is no mental image.”16 Sartre’s reluctance to afford inner envisioning any important role in literary experience does not detract from the importance he attaches to literature and art generally, an assessment reflected in his later appraisal of literature as an engaged act of revealing the world. Literature, at least in the kind of prose Sartre appreciates in What Is Literature?, draws attention not to itself, to its language, or to its own linguistic features (such as imagery), or to the reader’s experience as such, but to the world or possible world it reveals for the reader. Literary value for Sartre consists precisely in the transparency of its language: that the world (or some possible version of it) appears to the reader through language. As such, literature may prompt engagement, providing motivation to change that world. For this reason, Sartre praises the transparent language of prose and criticizes modern poetry that renders language, through its imagery, opaque—presumably prompting the reader to consider the poetic images, rather than the world itself as described or revealed. It is on other grounds, however, that later scholars have argued that mental imagining provoked by literary reading is not visual or perceptual in nature. For William Gass, literary language is

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conceptual, made up not of images but ideas. “There are no descriptions in fiction,” he argues, “only constructions.”17 Another critic writes similarly that in literature “all composition is construction. We do not imitate the world. We construct versions of it.”18 In this construction, not images, but ideas and concepts, are required for the production of literary worlds. We can, of course, imagine without images, such as in pretense: when an actor takes up a role and imagines being, say, Hamlet, he does not necessarily envision himself as Hamlet. We can conceive of being Napoleon without necessarily envisioning ourselves as Napoleon. The difference between inner envisionings and imaginative presentations without a visual aspect is also obvious when perceptual and conceptual imaginings are contrasted. A classic example is offered in Descartes’s Meditations, where Descartes endeavors to illustrate the distinction between mental images from nonvisual mental concepts. He gives the example of the triangle and the chiliagon: the triangle, with its mere three sides, can be mentally pictured—its visual evocation can be easily produced—but the thousand-sided figure cannot. We can conceive of, but not inwardly visualize, or at least not adequately, a thousand-sided object. We can further say of the triangle that while we may have something like a mental image— for we can envision, let us say, a neon green equilateral triangle or an orange isosceles triangle—we can also have an idea of one that is not inwardly visual in nature but merely conceptual. We can refer to the idea of a triangle that is neither colored nor colorless, but we cannot envision such an object. The fact that there are forms of nonvisual imagining has been taken to discount the idea of visual (or quasi-visual) imagining altogether.19 But if imagination need not be identified as one core essential activity, but rather as a constellation of modes of consciousness that are presentational as well as transformational, that particular objection disappears. That we can conceptually imagine does not in itself disqualify visual imaging. Moreover, to deny images experienced inwardly, it has been argued, “is to give a distorted picture of reality,” at least for that majority of imaginers who do experience something like visually imagistic inner experience.20 Further inspection of the cases where some kind of visual imagining seems to be required, renders problematic the wholesale dismissal of images. Some mental thought processes seem to invite envisioning as an element of understanding. The children’s story “How Doggie and

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Pussycat Wash the Floor,” by the Czech writer Josef Čapek, presents, as the title suggests, the two titular characters keeping house. Having used their own furs as, respectively, brush and mop, they are themselves in need of a wash, after which Doggie hangs up Pussycat on the line to dry, and Pussycat then gets down and hangs up Doggie, and “there they both hung and the sun shone on them brightly.” When it then began to rain, the narrator tells us, “they both quickly jumped down from the line and hurried home,” only to repeat the process again and again, between rain showers, until evening. If they need each other’s help to get up on the line, how are they at any point both hanging on the line to dry? The incongruity is revealed not only by logical reasoning and sequential thinking (what Gotthold Lessing called, in reference to verbal arts, their nacheinander, or temporal unfolding), but by visual, specifically spatial, imaging of adjacent presentations (what Lessing called, in reference to painting, the nebeneinander, spatial extension). Here the discrepancy between a description and a visualization is illuminating. We can also attempt to contrast two images, asking, for example, whether the yellow of a ripe lemon is brighter or darker than the yellow of a ripe banana, or to consider mentally their explicit spatial arrangement. Steven Pinker offers this thought experiment to illustrate the difference between what we have called imaging, or mental envisioning, and abstract propositional or conceptual imagining that does not require an inner visualization: Visualize a lemon and a banana next to each other, but don’t imagine the lemon either to the right or to the left, just next to the banana. You will protest that the request is impossible; if the lemon and the banana are next to each other in an image, one or the other has to be on the left. The contrast between a proposition and an array is stark. Propositions can represent cats without grins, grins without cats, or any disembodied abstraction: squares of no particular size, symmetry with no particular shape, attachment with no particular place, and so on. . . . Spatial arrays, because they consist only of filled and unfilled patches, commit one to a concrete arrangement of matter in space. And so do mental images: forming an image of “symmetry,” without imagining a something or other that is symmetrical, can’t be done.21

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The essential difference Pinker highlights is the visually determinate nature of the image as opposed to the abstractly (nonvisual) conceptual content of the proposition. As mentioned in chapter 1, recent accounts of imagination allow for the distinction between experiential or sensuous imagining and propositional or conceptual imagining, and both may be included in the heterogeneous imagination. The latter sort of imagining allows for our entertaining hypothetical or counterfactual ideas—a mode of imagining in our account—that do not have to involve inner visualization as such. For phenomenologists, inward or mental envisioning maintains its currency even in light of the dismissal of the idea that the image is a thing inherent in the mind. In addition to imagining the content of pictures, Husserl devoted attention to the capacity for mental imaging, both in presenting images from memory and in free fantasizing, and recognized this as essential to phenomenological reflection. Husserl’s assistant Eugen Fink devoted a phenomenological study to the world of images in the mind. Merleau-Ponty, while rejecting representational views of consciousness in favor of an enactive model, maintains investment in inner experience or interiority and in its visual characterization. Envisioning is for Merleau-Ponty the inner dimension, as it were, of perceptual vision: “for the imaginary . . . is in my body a diagram of the life of the actual . . . it offers the gaze traces of vision, from the inside.”22 In Sartre’s analysis of imagination, despite his rejection of images that would be substances inherent in the mind and his demotion of images in literary reading, envisioning is privileged as the mode of intending that frees consciousness from the determination of the external physical world. Although offering a sympathetic critique of Sartre’s particular view of the mental image, Casey considers the activity of mental imaging in phenomenological as well as psychoanalytic terms, his interest renewed by attention to the fact that “we are irrepressible imaginers in everyday life.”23 In recent decades, evidence for visual and other mental imagery is growing, and interest in the mental image has grown in cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and literary theory.24 Mental imagery, even if considered subordinate to linguistic structures, has reemerged in discussions over the last several decades by cognitive linguists, in order that they might account for mental representations with perceptual content. On the basis of recent empirical science, the case has been made for acknowledging the

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heterogeneity of mental representation to include not only linguistic and conceptual but also iconic representations, all of which can be used in flexible ways.25 There is, however, as yet no consensus on the precise nature of envisioned imagings. What we inwardly “see” is not a picture, yet the inner evocation of envisioning will have some inwardly perceived visual dimension and engage the visual cortex.26 Cognitive theorists thus may describe the mental image as a pattern or a schema. It can be described as “simply a pattern” that engages both memory and the visual part of the brain, one that would be “loaded from long-term memory rather than from the eyes.”27 We may regard inner images, including visual imagining, as a mental pattern charged with a sensory modality.28 Similarly, the image may be described as a schema, as the mind is directed “inward to intuit the there-and-now of introspected percept-like appearances that emerge from some inner store.”29 Such descriptions avoid reifying the image as a thing or picture in the mind. To different degrees, they are able to describe the effect of a presentational capacity that, through stimulation of the visual sense, enables an experience in ways evocative of visual perception. Yet such presentation must also afford potential transformation. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, an imagelike situational modeling is considered necessary for cognition, and scenario visualization has been regarded as crucial to the development of human thinking.30 Visualization here involves the ability to form and manipulate something like mental imagery or a representation that “functions in the same way” as a map, image, or picture.31 Recent neurological evidence suggests that mental envisioning provokes activity in the brain structurally devoted to vision itself.32 Yet if vision has been regarded as a constructive process, now seen in light of an enactive view of cognition,33 so too envisioning has been argued to be a constructive process and not merely a picture of former perceptions.34 In The Case for Mental Imagery Stephen M. Kosslyn, William L. Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis define the mental image in terms of perceptible properties of a representation that give rise to a “subjective experience of perception” and argue for the role of such images in many kinds of cognition. We use mental images, it is argued, in comparative perceptual recollections, such as in comparing the green of pines and of peas, in recalling in which hand the Statue of Liberty holds her torch, and in activities such as parallel parking that require explicit spatial localization.

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They define a mental image as occurring when “a representation of the type created in the initial phases of perception is present but the stimulus is not actually being perceived; such representations preserve the perceptible properties of the stimulus and ultimately give rise to the subjective experience of perception.”35 It may be that mental images, when visual in nature (rather than acoustic or evoking another sense) are comparable to pictorial seeing in some ways (insofar as they evoke perceptual qualities and engage brain activity associated with visual aspect) but unlike seeing in other ways (where there is indeterminacy, for example, or ephemerality). Despite the long-standing critique of the notion of mental images as pictures, these researchers regard inner envisioning as at least quasi-pictorial, as does Eva Brann in her study of imagination.36 In literary theory, reflecting renewed attention to phenomenological accounts of the acts involved in literary reading, as well as recent acknowledgment of imaging in cognitive and linguistic studies, the need has become recognized to account for “the mental images that are being produced in the minds of people when they read literature.”37 One way to think of images in the mind that gets around the picture problem also stems from literary theory. This is the view that mental images are evocations of perceiving, not internal resemblances or pictures of things perceived. The evocations of perceiving may yield objects of consciousness that are fainter and less stable than perceptions of things present to the senses, having an “airy indeterminateness.”38 Elaine Scarry promoted the term perceptual mimesis, by which is meant that what is presented is not a picture of the thing, but rather a recreation or simulation of the process of perceiving it.39 The notion may be of considerable use to literary phenomenology, for on this view, it is not, as Ryle suggests in offering an alternative to mental images, that, in envisioning the room in which I slept as a child, I merely entertain the concept of it and pretend to observe it. Rather, I may mimetically evoke, or generate, something like the experience of seeing it, and this evocation or generation seems to accord with many descriptions of how literature is experienced. Detractors from envisioning notwithstanding, literary theorists have gone on to describe the nature of visual images evoked by literature, often in the context of particular strategies of imagistic depiction by literary authors. While there remains little agreement in philosophy on the precise nature of the visual image, arguments have been advanced to defend the role of the image

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in philosophical accounts of imagining more generally, primarily on the basis that the resemblance between imagining and perceiving “stems from the phenomenology of the experiences.”40 Philosophical accounts of imagination, moreover, can now be revisited in light of recent scientific advancements that allow empirical observation of the physical correlates for mental imaging.41

THE VARIETIES OF IMAGINATIVE EXPERIENCE Some element of the controversy surrounding envisioning may be due to the fact that its phenomenology—what it is like for subjects to inwardly imagine—is considerably more variable than the phenomenology of perceptual vision. It is not surprising that subjects who report weak visualization in their own experience express more skepticism about the idea of mental imagery than those who report stronger ones, while the latter also express more support for imagery research.42 William James noted well over a century ago that there is significant variation in individuals’ capacity for what we think of as mental “seeing” in the “mind’s eye.” James, who himself admitted weak envisioning capacity, reasoned on some evidence that there are several types of imaginers—those whose inner visual capacities are robust, those whose inner visual capacities are weak, and those (overlapping with the second group) whose inner evocations are not primarily visual but more auditory or motoric. This difference may explain some radical divergences in theories of imagination—those that rely strongly on the idea of vivid mental imaging and those that discount the existence or relevance of mental images. James articulates the problem this way: “A person whose visual imagination is strong finds it hard to understand how those who are without the faculty can think at all. Some people undoubtedly have no visual images at all worthy of the same, and instead of seeing their breakfast-table, they tell you that they remember it or know what was on it. This knowing and remembering takes place undoubtedly by means of verbal images.”43 Here James evokes a study conducted by Francis Galton in 1880. Galton set his subjects the task of imagining their breakfast table: “suppose it is your breakfast-table as you sat down to it this morning—and consider carefully the picture that rises

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before your mind’s eye.”44 Galton went on to inquire whether such a “picture” was dim or clear, whether its objects were uniformly welldefined, and whether their colorings were distinct and natural, and so forth. Galton was astonished at the responses from the particular scientific minds he queried, the “great majority” of whom “protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words ‘mental imagery’ really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of colour.”45 Had Galton been able to include Einstein and, as we will see shortly, the inventor Nikola Tesla among his scientifically mined subjects, he would have found reports of lively and even extraordinary inner envisioning. But the minds “of science” Galton did query claimed not to rely upon robust inner envisioning, whereas Galton found a completely different result when inquiring among a more diverse general public. Many people he queried “declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it was perfectly distinct to them and full of colour. The more I pressed and cross-questioned them, professing myself to be incredulous, the more obvious was the truth of their first assertions. They described their imagery in minute detail.”46 The results of Galton’s further research suggested that human ability for visualization ranges over a wide spectrum, from a very few at either end with no visualization, and with perfect visualization, respectively, and with most subjects ranging in between. On the basis of such studies, James defends “a great personal diversity” in capacities for such operations as inner imaging, concluding that the capacity for “sharp mental pictures” is not equal in everyone.47 If it is true that human minds can vary in having more auditory, motoric, verbal, or visually oriented experiences of imagining, this would necessitate a revision of any view of imagination as a single faculty narrowly defined on the metaphor of the inner eye. James concludes that our understanding of the imagination itself must be diversified. Until very recent years it was supposed by all philosophers that there was a typical human mind which all individual minds were like, and that propositions of universal validity could be laid down about such

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faculties as “the Imagination.” Lately, however, a mass of revelations have poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. There are imaginations, not “the Imagination,” and they must be studied in detail.48

James’s suggestion of the variability as well as multiplicity in imagining seems to be confirmed by more recent research into the range and quality of inner visual acuity. Some people can call to mind details of the face of someone they have met years ago, the detailed appearance of a particular room, titles of books on a shelf they have merely glanced, a nearly complete visual recall described as “hyperphantasia.” Others, with the condition of “aphantasia,” cannot imagine specific faces, paintings, or other visual objects at all. It has been demonstrated that subjects may lose, through injury or illness, capacity for inner visualization, while a small percentage of the human population has no innate capacity for imagining.49 Divergences have also been identified between envisioners who favor primarily movement, velocity, and orientation and those focused on object visualization, including the shape, color, texture, and detail of objects.50 It has been argued that envisioning may indicate a “range of experience so vast that the term ‘visual’ can no longer suffice.”51 The phenomenal experience of inner envisioning for the majority of human imaginers will be far less vivid than perception. Inner imagining of an object or a scene may be insubstantial in comparison to vision itself. Sartre described the fragility and flimsiness of inner visual imagings, while also celebrating their freedom from physical reality. Mental envisioning admits degrees of fulfillment, density, and determinacy. Scarry examined how literary writers are able to provoke more robust imagining on the part of their readers through various techniques, for instance superimposing certain kinds of material images upon one another (as in a description of a shadow crossing a hard surface). But this strategic imaging merely compensates for the ordinary feebleness of envisioned images for the majority of readers, for “the imagined object is not ordinarily vivid,” and, indeed, the fact of its “not being vivid is tautologically bound up with its being imaginary.”52 The striking verbally induced imagery in some works of literature functions, it seems, against a more nebulous background.

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One historical case of hyperphantasia is worth considering in light of the recent reassessment of visual imagery. Like Einstein, the inventor Tesla, who had over seven hundred patents to his name across the major fields of science and technology of his time, evidenced not only an unusual power of visualization and memory—he could recite entire books by memory—but also a central role for envisioning in his discoveries and inventions. Tesla developed a method that relied not only on inspiration, but on “perceiving the invention in his brain in precise detail before moving to the construction stage.”53 To begin with, his inventive thinking operated entirely inwardly, as he explained in an interview: “Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind, I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch, I can give the measurement of all parts to workmen, and when completed these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made accurate drawings.”54 The capacity he described was not only inward, however, but also distinctly visual. Tesla understood his ability to have been a development of an unusually vivid visual imagination native to his thinking since childhood. Because the intensity of his visual imagination was often disruptive to his peace of mind, he devised ways of conducting his imaginings. His reflections are worth quoting at some length: During my boyhood I had suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images. . . . When a word was spoken, the image of the object designated would present itself so vividly to my vision that I could not tell whether what I saw was real or not. If I had witnessed a funeral, or perhaps come close to some wounded animal while on a hunting trip, then inevitably in the stillness of night a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist, despite all my efforts to banish it. Even though I reached out and passed my hand through it, the image would remain fixed in space. In trying to free myself from these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on some peaceful, quieting scene I had witnessed. . . . Then I began to take mental excursions beyond the small world of my actual knowledge. Day and night, in imagination, I went on journeys—saw new places, cities, countries, and all the time I tried very hard to make these imaginary things very sharp and clear in my mind. I imagined myself living in countries I never had seen,

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and I made imaginary friends, who were very dear to me and really seemed alive. This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then, to my delight, I found that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings, or experiments. I could picture them all in my mind.55

Imagination here is clearly identified as visual in nature; the objects of such visualization are described as images; and these, extraordinarily vivid, determinate, and detailed, are likened to pictures. This facility is put to determined and directed use in Tesla’s inventive thinking. While studying at the polytechnic institute, Tesla came upon the initial idea for an induction motor, “trying to visualize the kind of machine I wanted to build, constructing all its parts in my imagination.” For four years he made various inner renderings until, walking in the park reciting Goethe to a friend, “the vision of my induction motor, complete, perfect, operable, came into my mind like a flash. I drew with a stick on the sand the vision I had seen. They were the same diagrams I was to show six years later before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.” After discovering the rotating magnetic field and inventing his induction motor through this mental operation, Tesla continued to use what had become a distinctive method of visualization: I gave myself up more intensely than ever to the enjoyment of picturing in my mind new kinds of machines. . . . In less than two months, I had created mentally nearly all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name. . . . By that faculty of visualizing, which I learned in my boyish effort to rid myself of annoying images, I have evolved what is, I believe, a new method of materializing inventive ideas and conceptions.56

While from an epistemological point of view, Tesla’s use of imagination has been considered the “ideal” use of visual imagining, as submitted to constraints leading to knowledge, 57 it may be less the curtailing of imagination than its directed generativity that most aids his inventions. Although himself exceptional in the range and intensity of this capacity, Tesla offers robust testimony to the human faculty of inner visual imaging as such.

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ENVISIONING AND OTHER INNER PERCEPTIONS IN LITERARY READING As suggested earlier in this chapter, there has been some debate about the role of images in literary reading, just as there has been debate about the role of images in cognition more generally. The variability of human subjects’ capacities for inner envisioning also applies to such envisioning in the process of literary reading.58 We may keep this in mind when considering the strikingly different accounts of the role of images in literature and the complement of other forms of imaging along with the quasi-visual perceptions literature may evoke. The role of envisioning in the productive literary process has been long defended. Wordsworth is not alone among writers who thought of imagination as “that intellectual lens through the medium of which the poetical observer sees the objects of his observation modified in form and in color.” In an account of the deliberate visualization practices of writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Goethe, Coleridge, among others, Rosamond Harding concluded that “a practice that is of great advantage in creative thought is working up the imagination as nearly as possible to the state of vision.”59 The empirical basis for envisioning in literary reading is supported by recent research on the visual aspect of imagery induced by literary texts.60 In contrast to Sartre and Gass, who both dismissed images as central to literary experience, Vladimir Nabokov insisted on intense inner envisioning in both reading and studying a novel. Nabokov argued that envisioning a character’s face, eye color, and the layout of the rooms he or she inhabits is an essential part of understanding (and presumably writing) a fictional work. Nabokov was insistent on the primacy of inner envisioning in the reading experience, of no matter what writer or what literary works. In Lectures on Russian Literature Nabokov argues that in order to understand Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for example, we must have a studied visual impression of key scenes, such as Anna’s trip in a train car: To comprehend certain important aspects of Anna’s night journey, the reader should clearly visualize the following arrangement:. . . Anna sits facing north, in the right-hand (south-east) window corner, and she can

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see the left-hand windows, across the passage. On her left she has her maid Annushka (who this time travels with her in the same section, and not second-class, as she had on her journey to Moscow) and on the other side, further west, there is a stout lady, who being closest to the passage on the left-hand side of the section, experiences the greatest discomfort from heat and cold. Directly opposite Anna, an old invalid lady is making the best she can of the sleeping arrangements; there are two other ladies in the seats opposite to Anna, and with these she exchanges a few words.

Nabokov even advocates making diagrams to aid in such visualization. He argues further, in contrast to Gass, that literature is not about ideas, but the evocation of worlds that writers have visualized. Literary reading is a means to bringing that vision to life. He argues that “the admirable reader does not seek information about Russia in a Russian novel, for he knows that the Russia of Tolstoy or Chekhov is not the average Russia of history but a specific world imagined and created by individual genius. The admirable reader is not concerned with general ideas: he is interested in the particular vision.”61 Nabokov makes clear in his lectures on the works of Tolstoy as well as other literary authors that this “vision” is more than metaphorical. In literary creation and literary reception, Nabokov regards envisioning as a core practice of imagining. In fact, Nabokov’s insistence on envisioning the content of a literary work persisted even, at least in one case, in contradiction to the expressed wishes of the author. When teaching Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, Nabokov insisted in drawing for his students an image of Gregor Samsa, the young traveling salesman transformed into an insect—or, more literally, a horrible vermin (Ungeziefer). Although he made illustrations for some of his other writings, Kafka did not himself, so far as we know, ever draw Gregor Samsa and insisted to his publisher that the story appear without any illustration of his protagonist—that the metamorphosis should be by no means visually depicted. The insect was not to be drawn, or even to be rendered from a distance, and accordingly the first edition appeared only with a drawing of a man covering his face in a pose of distress. Although Willa and Edwin Muir’s well-regarded translation renders Gregor as an insect, Ungeziefer is more generic than that, designating pests or vermin, including insects and small mammals such as mice and rats. However, in offering detail for visualizing something

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like a beetle—multiple legs, hard shell, segmented belly, and antennae— Kafka has prepared the reader’s capacity for visualizing Gregor’s transformation, while preserving a provocative degree of indeterminacy that reflects Gregor’s own bewilderment in the experience. Kafka describes Gregor Samsa, here in the opening paragraph of his novella: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back, and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.62

Kafka’s description, on the one hand, limits the possibilities for fully envisioning his creation. Should the reader enjoy a visual image of Gregor Samsa, it will be determinate in some respects—the round or “domelike” belly with its segments, for example—but, like Samsa’s own visual perception of himself, it will be also indeterminate. Gregor must lift his head to see himself, and it is evident that he will not have a complete image of his new body—for instance of his armor-plated back. We do not know how many legs Gregor has, for example, only that they are “numerous,” and we may surmise that Gregor, quite taken by surprise in his transformation, would not know either, at least not initially. Similarly, the reader cannot know at first exactly how large his body is, only that it is too big, or too round, to be covered securely by the bed quilt. Literary envisioning, however, may be complemented through the evocation of other senses, as we saw in the previous chapter in illustrating the embodied imagination evoked by Proust and Rilke. Auditory, tactile, or kinesthetic evocations may help to facilitate a more robust imaging than incomplete visual descriptions alone afford. The hardness of Gregor’s “armor-plated” back evokes rigidity and heaviness. The awkwardness of the quilt relates to physical movement and seems to express and amplify the awkwardness of Gregor’s bodily position and the ungracefulness of his new form. That the quilt threatens to fall off gives a distinct visceral sensation for the reader, an anticipation of the falling or dropping movement, and that of exposure, that may extend the sensations of the body beyond its physical contours, while the awkward lifting of the head

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and the helpless waving of the legs evoke the feel of Gregor’s predicament along with sensations attending actual movement. Literary envisioning is connected to multiple responses, as one scholar writes: “The reader’s brain does indeed process information in the form of verbal representations, but, equally important, it responds to them with its own internally generated nonverbal representations, which manifest themselves as images, motor simulations, empathy, and a rich spectrum of affects— moods, feelings, and emotions.”63 In Kafka’s novella the rendering of sensory, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic experience also serves to illustrate Gregor’s devolution into a more primitive state of animality. In the following passage, for example, Gregor cannot see well, for it is dark as he makes his way to the meal that has been placed in his room. The darkness forces Gregor to notice the physical sensations afforded by his insect body, which aids, too, the reader’s orientation to a strange phenomenology: “Down below, where he lay, it was dark. Slowly, awkwardly trying out his feelers, which he now first learned to appreciate, he pushed his way to the door to see what had been happening there. . . . He reached the door before he discovered what had really drawn him to it: the smell of food . . . and he dipped his head almost over his eyes straight into the milk.”64 Gregor’s feelers—presumably antennae—and his sense of smell now compensate for the darkness. The highly physical description of Gregor’s head dipping into the milk “almost over his eyes” at once preempts the visualization of the submersed object and indicates the eclipse of Gregor’s own visual perception. His eyes are nearly covered, so Gregor of course cannot see, but the reader vividly “envisions” the impossibility of Gregor seeing, with his head dipped, as it were, into the milk. Here the evocation of nonvisual senses—smell and tactility and perhaps the proprioceptive feeling of hunger and thirst— complement both the visual image and its compromise.

BLINDNESS AS INSIGHT: EVOCATIONS FROM LIFE AND LITERATURE Some of what is known about inner envisioning comes from those people who have never had, or have lost, a capacity for vision. Blindness been metaphorically associated with a form of inner sight since at least the

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ancient Greeks. Homer’s blindness was understood as a condition for—or an “inaugural symptom” of—his inspiration by the Muses.65 Blindness figures large in the dramas of Sophocles, who invokes the mythological prophet Tiresias, blind and clairvoyant, to foretell the downfall of Oedipus. When he comes to possess the truth of his deeds, when he comes to see his own life clearly, as it were, Oedipus too becomes blind, by gauging out his own eyes. Contrasting sensuous confusions with the clarity of inner, rational thought, Plato has Socrates condition inner seeing on the diminution of perceptual sight in the Symposium. “The mind’s eye,” says Socrates to Alcibiades, “begins to perceive critically and distinctly only as the bodily eye fails in strength,” and in The Republic intuition, or inner knowledge of the soul, is described as outweighing the power of “ten thousand eyes.”66 Plato’s famous parable of the cave, in which prisoners are positioned so that they can look only at shadows on the back of the cave wall, stands for the metaphorical blindness of the human soul in the empirical world, for sensuous experience is the “deeper dark of ignorance” compared to “a more luminous world” outside the cave. Entering the realm of ideas, the former captive finds that “the greater brightness dazzled its vision.”67 In Shakespeare, too, physical vision of the eyes is contrasted with metaphorical seeing. The sonnet “When I most wink, then do mine eyes best see,” in which the speaker describes dreaming of his beloved, repeatedly privileges the “sightless” and “unseeing” eyes of inner imaging over perceptual vision. Chaucer, as aforementioned, refers to what a blind man inwardly “sees.” But the experiences among those without the physical capacity for visual sight are more varied and nuanced than these literary and philosophical idealizations may suggest. Blind people who once had the capacity of vision, but subsequently lost it through accident or illness, may have rather different experiences of inner imaging, and again these will differ from those who had never experienced any visual perception. Divergences in the imagistic quality of inner landscapes or worlds of the blind were described by Oliver Sacks in The Mind’s Eye. Sacks records that some blind people experience extraordinary inner visual sensations and can think in complex, moving, three-dimensional images. They may be able to design a working machine or tie complex virtual knots through mental envisioning. Some can distinctly remember, and maintain in memory, faces of the people they have known and the appearance of places and objects they have enjoyed. Others gradually lose all sense and

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memory of inner vision. Their inner worlds become particularized by more intense attention to perception from other senses and inner evocations thereof. This does not necessarily mean that blind people, as is often assumed, have a better sense of hearing or other sense than sighted people, for their auditory capacity itself is not affected by their blindness. Yet blind people may make different use of auditory information than sighted people do, with some able to make out spatial distances, shapes, and dimensions through the auditory processing of echolocation.68 The theologian John Hull has movingly described the experience of going blind in his book On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness, and his meditations may offer some insight into inner visual imaging and its relation to perception. In young adulthood Hull began to go blind and describes being very gradually swallowed up by darkness, first in one eye, then the other. Once he was fully blind, Hull became particularly distressed about the changing quality of his inner world. After an initial period of intense, almost hallucinatory, inner visualizations, he began to lose all his imagistic memories, including the faces of people he knew and loved. Gradually, Hull became immersed in a world entirely without images, at least those of a visual kind. Sounds (wind, raindrops, breathing, voices), movement, and touch constituted the whole “feel” of the world’s experiential contours. He became an observer of minute detail, where knowledge of the world gradually came from alternative sources than sight. As he describes: “It is in the presence of the wind, of the rustling leaves of trees, in meditating upon the inexhaustible beauty of rain, in being awe-struck and terrified by the tumult of waves on the seashore that I have built up, bit by bit, the world of blindness.” In Hull’s experience, blindness became what he calls “a world-creating condition.” For blind people live, Hull explains, in a world as complete as, though smaller than, the world of sighted people. Hull was able to cope with the darkness of his inner world by the gradual recognition of other kinds of world making in the blind imagination. Blindness at once can eliminate the visual world, but also create “a new world,” and, he says, “a new consciousness” that is tactile, acoustic, and meditative.69 Rilke’s depiction of blindness in his poem “The Blind Man” may achieve more insight about poetically induced envisioning than about the loss of visual perception, but it offers a means to imagine the potential limitations to the shared intersubjective basis of our common world. The blind

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man as described in Rilke’s poem seems to harbor a closed interior, inaccessible to the speaker not only for being the inner world of another person, but for being that of one who has no visual access to his surroundings as do the speaker and any sighted reader. The intersubjectivity of worldly perception—that the other’s perspective would supplant mine, and mine the other’s, if we changed places—is not wholly denied (for nonvisual senses still pertain to a common world), but it is restricted in this case. The blind man wanders the city as if, from the speaker’s perspective, interrupting the fabric of shared-worldly experience, a fracture Rilke’s speaker describes with the metaphor of a crack in a porcelain teacup. The speaker’s, and thus reader’s, attempts to imagine the interior life of the blind man evoke not only darkness but a break in the presumed totality of the visible world depicted in the poem. From the speaker’s point of view, the blind man is a surface against which visual perceptions—described here as images—are deflected. That the blind eye cannot absorb them renders visual perceptions voided, in contrast to the primacy of what can be inwardly perceived: And like on a blank page the reflection of things is painted he does not take them in. Only his feeling stirs, as if it caught the world in small waves.70

While the description of the blind man for much of the poem is oriented by the sightedness of the speaker, the reference to a world perceived with tactile immediacy shifts from this perspective and resonates with the world described through movement and sound by John Hull. Rilke may not perhaps achieve extensive insight into the world of the blind person in his poem, but he manages an acknowledgment— perhaps rare in literature—of the nontotality of a dominant mode of experience. Rilke’s imagining of blindness intervenes upon the presumed exhaustiveness of the sighted world, as if the perceptual surface of reality were rendered discontinuous by others who perceive primarily with other senses. In another poem, “Going Blind,” Rilke’s speaker describes a woman adjusting to the gradual loss of her sight, leaving a tearoom. Although

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somewhat sentimental in the description, Rilke’s speaker evokes the sense of a world built from tactility and movement: She followed slowly and she needed time as though something still were not surmounted, and yet: as though, after a crossing-over, she would no longer walk, but fly.71

Such attempts to imagine blindness, again, may not capture with any accuracy the experience of blindness such as first-person testimony offers. But these literary imaginings also engage envisioning both actively and as the object of reflection. The attempt to imagine a blindness without images exercises distinctive envisionings on the part of the poet and reader. The depiction of blindness in Rilke’s writings aids reflection on the diversity of relations between exterior senses and lived interiority. Blindness as metaphor has also been considered hermeneutically or psychologically as a complement to insight or intuition. In Paul de Man’s literary theory, blindness and insight are not opposed, but correlative conditions of understanding. On this view, the critic’s not seeing, or being metaphorically “blind” to, some elements of a literary work condition the possibility of interpretive illumination of other aspects. While describing literary interpretation, such a view reflects the hermeneutic principle that experience itself is interpretive, that it is against a horizon of expectation or inquiry that certain features of the world may become visible. In recent psychology, the notion of “blind insight” or “blindsight” has been used to describe unconscious knowledge or awareness, including that of a visual nature, by subjects who do not have capacity for visual perception.72 Not only in literature, but in life, may the condition of blindness be complemented by another mode of intuition that supplements inward sense.

SYNESTHESIA, INNER ENVISIONING, AND REMEMBRANCE Envisioning may also be directly implicated in the other senses. In the condition of synesthesia, the stimulation of one sense can evoke those of

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others. Synesthesia often relates nonvisual perception, such as hearing or taste, through visual imaging, or vice versa, and thus may suggest the convergence of multiple sources of embodied experience under the aegis of visual imagination. Although there is no scientific proof of his condition, it is thought that Mozart had a form of synesthesia through which he associated music with colors. This may at least partly explain his exceptional memory for music—that he could inwardly image in visual as well as auditory ways, and so commit to memory, complex music heard on a single occasion. In 1770 Mozart heard for the first time Giorgio Allegri’s Miserere, which was performed for Easter in the Sistine Chapel. According to his father, Mozart was able to write out the whole work in one sitting upon returning to the inn.73 The composer associated different musical elements with different colors and used least four colors of ink in notating some of his compositions. It has been suggested that Mozart was able to inwardly envision a symphony in his mind all at once, as a threedimensional object, having reportedly described musical composition as if building a pastry in crumbs of point and counterpoint or a sculpture of a human form with proportionate limbs.74 These are visual images, but they also invoke sensations of weight and balance, suggesting that other senses and kinesthetic experience here come to support a predominantly visualizing form of cognition. It is perhaps not incidental that, as recent research shows, the neural mechanisms of synesthesia may be connected with musical talents, such as the capacity for perfect or absolute pitch.75 While Mozart remembered sound through inwardly evoked color, the painter Wassily Kandinsky directly associated visually perceived color with inwardly experienced sound. Kandinsky not only described painting in terms of music but also recommended that they be learned in conjunction. In his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky compares painting to the performance of music: “Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” In Kandinsky’s idiosyncratic perception, color is inextricable from sound, just as for Mozart sound came to be represented through color. For Kandinsky, vision is also connected to the other senses. Kandinsky describes how color evokes taste, tactile sensations, scent, and feelings that tend to involve the whole body. He argues that “color can

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exercise enormous influence upon the body as a physical organism.”76 Refusing the idea that we simply link certain feelings with various colors from past association, Kandinsky claims that color innately produces a both physical and psychic effect. But even for those who are not profoundly synesthetic, vision and visualization can be linked to other senses. For example, experiences of nonvisual phenomena may provoke internal correspondences of envisioning. In a deliberate process of auditory imagining—trying to imagine the cry of a flamingo—Casey finds visualization unavoidable even when effort is made to dissociate the sound from the image. As he writes, “strangely enough, there is at the same time a quasi-visual sense of the sound’s shape, a kind of linear arabesque that is traced out as the sound runs its characteristic course.”77 Such connections among the senses, between the senses and the inwardly evoked perceptlike appearances, and between the senses and memory are recurring themes in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past. As we found in the previous chapter, the protagonist Marcel experiences memories that are provoked by various sensations, tactile and auditory, taste and smell. The feeling of a wobbly paving stone under his foot, the phrase of violin music, and, most famously, the little cake dunked in his tea all bring about memories that open up a whole world of recollection otherwise lost to him. Dipping his madeleine into a cup of tea one day provokes the recollection of his childhood life in Combray. Here is another part of the famous passage, which evokes multiple senses: I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. . . . I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?78

The taste and smell together, along with the sensation of warmth, will bring to his consciousness with a shudder long-forgotten visual images

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and, with them, a whole world. But in Proust’s rendering, this provocation of inner imaging through the stimulation of the other senses and their connection to memory also elicits questions about the nature of memory itself, of the imagination, and of what takes place in what we have been calling the “mind’s eye.” Indeed, Marcel’s experience of memory defined by the senses encourages him to examine the nature of memory and internal imaging in their emergence and structure. Marcel’s attention turns inward to examine the nature of his own thoughts and sensations, scrutinizing the sort of contemplation invoked in Shakespeare’s sonnet from which Proust’s title derives: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.” Marcel does not only give us the past that unfolds from the initial memory, or the “sweet silent thought” prompted by and associated with the madeleine, but he also describes his further attempts to summon the same in “voluntary memory” through introspection. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.79

Marcel tries to willfully recapture that initial rush of memory by stimulating the senses with further occasions of the cake and tea. While he is less successful in his deliberate effort to prompt such memories, he comes to understand something about the nature of recollection. For the experience of recapturing these memories demands productive imagination. First of all, Marcel must conjure the conditions for the reemergence of the past in part through inner sensations and evocations. Furthermore, voluntary memory is not only a matter of looking to find what is already there. “Seek?” Marcel asks. “More than that: create.” Proust suggest that memory, in this robust sense of bringing back to life things past (or lost time, temps perdu), is a generative act. The spaces which

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memory must traverse are spaces which have to be inwardly constructed. Earlier in this book it was suggested that the presentational capacity of mind to bring forth something absent is in itself, to some extent, a transformative process and laden with potentiality for further transformation. For consciousness must bring to the fore an appearance against a background of nonappearance or, as Marcel describes it, “something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance.”80 In Proust’s view, the original experience itself does not equate to or guarantee a memory; remembrance must be created on the basis of the stored sensations that are reignited by present sense experience and discovered or rediscovered through an original creation. To use Aristotle’s metaphor, the impression upon the wax tablet must not only be read and interpreted; rather, its pressure must be newly felt through an embodied inner imagining in the present. The stored vestiges of experience must be brought to life by the process of remembrance, a process that, for Proust, is active, creative, and productive. Yet for all his emphasis on the various senses, Proust, or his narrator’s, examination of the process of remembrance leads back to the image in the mind’s eye. Taste and smell and tactility are ancient senses, literally inscribed in the body, that serve, for Proust, to keep alive the possibility of reviving the more fragile and fleeting visual image. The visual image is ultimately what must be both sought and created at once: “Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind.”81 The image, at first vague and indeterminate, is consciously sought out and brought to life. Visual images of the house, the garden, the street, and the town rise up “like the scenery of a theatre.” Marcel describes these images taking shape: And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of

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its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.82

The image or “visual memory” is at first without distinct form or even color. Yet, with the help of provocations from the other senses and the productive imagination, it gradually takes shape and comes to life. Fortified by the other senses, the image eventually blossoms to achieve what Benjamin called its “fragile, precious reality,” opening up the place of Marcel’s childhood and so serving as a portal into the world of the novel.83 Inner envisioning, the protestations of Sartre and Gass notwithstanding, may be as central to some literary experience as it is in fantasizing and memory. Yet invoking the images from memory, bringing them to life, is not merely a matter of finding what is already there, buried from the past in the subconscious, and bringing it to the mind’s eye. Seeking is, if we follow Proust here, also a form of creating. Proust’s description of remembrance is inseparable from the construction of the world of his novel, and so he emphasizes the creative element even of imaging in the mind’s eye, and invokes all the senses in his creative evocation of that inner visual world.

 Despite controversy surrounding the status of the visual image, there is accumulating evidence for the relevance of inner envisioning as a distinct mode of imagination and for some of the accomplishments of human thinking more generally. The relatively recent history of skepticism about mental images cautions against reifying them as things or objects in the mind. Although envisioning involves some of the same processes of the brain as engaged in visual perception, the objects of such envisioning need not be referred to as mental pictures. They may instead be regarded as evocations, in the mind, of perceptual experience that will be like pictorial experience in some ways, but, as an active construct of imaging consciousness, unlike it in others. The relationship of inner envisioning to imaging of other senses and to motoric and kinesthetic experience—examined here in the contexts of literary reading, blindness, and synesthesia—may help to explain the richness of inner imaging. Emerging evidence of the variation in inner imaging facility among human subjects should inform

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debate about images in philosophy and cognitive science, insofar as these variations are likely to influence theorization about the mind that relies even implicitly on introspection. While imaginers may differ in capacity, both in degree and orientation of envisionings, imaging of one kind or another is central to the life of the human mind, having evolved alongside and in continuity with embodied interactions with the world.

7 CREATIVITY AS SITUATED TRANSCENDENCE

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reative insight manifests the most celebrated, but also most mysterious, mode of imagination and of human cognition more generally. The spark of genius or inspiration from which ideas emerge, the generation of novel expression, the productive transformation of thought and material into art or invention, were traditionally attributed to mythical and mystical sources. Contemporary accounts of the mind have taken up the task of demystifying creativity, and related notions of inspiration and genius, by reference to the combinatory activities of cognition. In these models, cognition works through the ubiquitous operation of a core skill or set of skills, much of it below the level of awareness, for example by the integration of old ideas through conceptual blending to make new ideas, or pattern recognition and the strategies of information processing. On such models, inspiration or creative genius reflects but an especially successful case of the same cognitive skill we use everywhere in mundane thinking. The merit of such theories relies on their domestication of otherwise seemingly exotic sources of creative thought, and their recognition of creativity’s continuity with thinking in general. If creativity results wholly from a core skill ubiquitous across cognition, however, it remains to be understood how special thought is motivated and emerges, how a vital and generative divergence from the usual may become manifest, or how creativity manifests in different ways

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in different kinds of thinking. In this chapter will be demonstrated the situated nature of creativity and its cognitive ecology, and how, through cognitive play, creative thought may diverge from the habitual grooves of thinking. Two related, apparent paradoxes of creative imagination invite broadening the context for understanding creativity beyond the skills identified by combinatory models. The first is that creative thinking, its transformative manipulation of images or ideas toward the creation of something new, is both indebted to the given context in which it is situated and motivated by a projection or transcendence beyond it. The second is that creativity may simultaneously emerge and break from cognitive habits, as the creative thinker, sparked by a given problem or influence, overcomes sedimented characterizations or conceptions of a given subject matter and integrates a diverging possibility. These paradoxes may be illuminated by considering theories of cognitive play in creative thought and practice. While many manifestations of creativity have been described throughout this book, here some further, very different examples will be considered in order to illuminate the idea of situated transcendence: the applied geometry of Archimedes in classical Greece and the modern aesthetics of jazz music and the arts jazz has inspired.

CREATIVE THINKING FROM INSPIRATION TO CONCEPTUAL BLENDING THEORY Traditional theories of inspiration attribute the phenomena of creativity and inspiration for novel ideas to a source external to the human mind or outside its conscious awareness. Such sources include the muses of Greek antiquity, the Roman genius loci, or the presiding spirit of a place, held to inspire its artists and thinkers, the privileged receptivity to nature on the part of Romantic genius, and the id-riddled unconscious, its seething excitations identified by Freud as the origin of creative thought. Despite rejecting the idea of any external source of inspiration, T. S. Eliot offered “an analogy between mystical experience and some of the ways in which poetry is written.”1 Even Ricoeur, while aiming to

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explain the imagination as generative of new meaning, identified a “kernel of opacity” in creative thinking.2 Departing from the traditional view, the mid-twentieth century saw an explosion of research in the field of psychology into the phenomenon of creativity, observed largely through the assessment of personality traits and psychological habits associated with the creation of novel, useful, and efficient ideas, often at the level of everyday tasks and problems which can be empirically observed. More recent cognitive theory has aimed to grasp more fundamentally the underlying mechanism of creativity that would be basic and ubiquitous in human cognition. Combinatory models claim to disclose the core and key of creative thinking and, with that, reveal the “central engine of human meaning.”3 Identifying creativity with a core skill such as conceptual blending, analogy making, or pattern recognition, these cognitive accounts of creativity aim to naturalize and systematize its workings. Eliminating reference to mystical or ineffable sources of inspiration, and to psychological disposition or subjective habit, such theories refer to common cognitive function across arts and sciences, in exceptional idea formation and at nearly every level of everyday thinking.4 Because genius and inspired creativity are exceptional, the popular characterization may persist—even without quasi-mythical allusions— that these phenomena express some unknown, obscure process apart from normal cognition. Yet advocates of combinatory models insist that the genius or the inspired creator exercises the same capacities that have evolved in every human mind. To understand creativity, we need no recourse to “exotic processes” of thinking, but only to know that the innovative person has access to more sources of knowledge to combine than the one who fails to innovate.5 It is argued that the “genius creates good ideas because we all create good ideas; that is what our combinatorial, adapted minds are for.”6 Fauconnier and Turner argue for the continuity of exceptional cognitive operations in the arts and sciences with those that take place in everyday experience.7 Our evolutionary ancestors eventually developed the capacity to come up with new ideas, and “in the course of human culture since then, we have used that spark to invent new things and pass them on. It is how we live every second.”8 Conceptual blending, a “basic, not exotic” skill, is seen as the core of creativity and identified as “a common, everyday process indispensable to the most routine workings

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of the modern human mind.”9 A related argument has been made for analogy, the “fuel and fire of thinking” active “at every moment of our lives.”10 Creativity has been also described in terms of pattern recognition, the activity of collecting, gathering, condensing, and sorting information, a skill that pertains to everyday learning as much as to special inventiveness. Innovation in this view is but a “highlight” of “information processing.”11 While the creative ideas may seem to come as if from nowhere, it is argued that they may be entirely “the result of psychological processes continuous with those involved in more mundane cogitation.”12 The most widely adopted of these models has been conceptual blending theory, for which the blending of concepts is seen as the underlying mechanism of cognition. Conceptual blending is “a basic mental operation,” and it is held to occur at multiple levels, from language and grammar to higher-level creativity.13 Ubiquitous in human thought, conceptual blending is held to be “a fundamental instrument of the everyday mind, used in our basic construal of all our realities, from the social to the scientific.”14 This account of creativity describes the mind as able to draw from and combine different mental spaces and so create novel ideas. This combination of old ideas requires a degree of cognitive fluidity, where the mental activity devoted to one range of problems can absorb not only other concepts but potentially other cognitive frameworks as well. Conceptual blending would allow the concept or representation relevant to one problem to integrate with that of another in a new “blended” space and yield a new meaning.15 The new blended space can be fleeting and ephemeral or become stabilized in a new conceptual convention. Not only discrete concepts, but the mental frameworks and spaces to which they belong, can be blended.16 The integrative process involves selection and compression, as only those relevant features of the first input are projected onto the blend with the second. The blend, then, is not merely a matter of adding two or more ideas together, but of their selection from different mental spaces, reduction of relevant aspects into a generic space, and compression of those aspects into a new emergent idea. A new mental space then “dynamically develops emergent structure.”17 The new blend may be completed as the pattern is filled out through the resources of long-term memory and elaborated in being newly applied to other domains.18 This may in turn provide a new mental frame with which other inferences and connections can be drawn.19

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Combination alone may yield innumerable, indeed potentially infinite, ideas, but will not guarantee that any of them are good ones— particularly illuminating, useful, or inspiring ones. The notion of conceptual blending is meant to explain successful combinations that yield not only new but epistemically or aesthetically valuable or interesting products of thought. In creativity, as Turner puts it, “people do a great deal more than abstract from perceptions or make connections between ideas. Instead, people blend what they already know and thereby create new, tractable ideas.”20 Of course, many ideas will not gain traction or spark further thought or initiate creative activity. Not only do ideas need to be taken up, unfolded, or elaborated in further stages of thinking. Crucial to useful combination is, to begin with, recognition of likeness: perceiving the similarities among what might appear as disparate objects, structures, images, or ideas and then constructing a new framework in which their convergence can be expressed. Thus there is a metaphoric dimension to conceptual blending, while linguistic metaphor itself has been studied as an important species of conceptual blend, and counterfactual reasoning and analogy have been seen to require it.21 Recognized as central to linguistic creativity in everyday speech, metaphor, and parable, and so to literature more broadly, to mythical thought and religion, to the development of scientific concepts, to dance, art, and music, conceptual blending has been regarded as extraordinarily widespread in human culture, as the source of its diversity of meaning.22 That the theory has been adapted in many fields is due to the “open-ended and all-encompassing nature of the cognitive process of conceptual integration proposed by the theory.” 23 Yet some difficulties arise with this vast scope of application, with the apparent ability of conceptual blending theory to explain all forms of creativity and at every level. The identification of creativity with the ubiquitous operation of a given cognitive skill obscures the distinctiveness of especially valuable new ideas and their emergence within the otherwise ordinary flow of thinking. It may be desirable to grasp exactly how valuable novel ideas stand out against the background of countless other possible combinations or patterns, in what ways exceptional moments of creativity diverge from or even disrupt ordinary cognitive habits, and why the possession of knowledge from varying domains itself guarantees no creation of new knowledge. To serve a

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theory of creativity, not only the content and skills identified in already created blends but also the experience of creative thinking as it unfolds and generates new ideas, needs to be understood. Conceptual blending theorists acknowledge embodied and situated views of cognition, but this would involve the vagaries of attention, motivation, and affect, while embodiment connects a creative thinker with the larger cognitive, social, and cultural contexts, or a cognitive ecology. With such combinatory skills at our disposal, we come to focus on certain ideas rather than others, register new and indirect resonances between remote sources, disperse attention more or less provisionally across multiple ideas drawn from memory, perception, and reasoning, come to project hypothetical ideas over actual objects of attention, discern the signal of the rich new combination from the noise of the humdrum. The affective elements of this process, themselves not represented conceptual content, may motivate conformity or divergence, consistency or experimentation in the creative subject. Creativity may admit heterogeneous processes: it may be characterized by a sudden insight, be motivated by metaphoric dissonances, whether in a single creative work or cultivated over time and across several media of expression, may involve the exoticization or “defamiliarization” of familiar paths of thinking, may manifest the spontaneous energy of play. Pattern recognition and strategies of information processing, too, have considerable explanatory value, but theories of creativity that reduce it primarily to these skills fail to attend to the conditions which make creative experience possible. Our minds are capable of managing extraordinary amounts of stored information, organizing and combining it in ways that are useful, predictive, and sometimes novel. Computational processing may offer a satisfactory structural analogy to explain how much of this happens. But it does not follow that “data analysis is the overriding purpose of our inner world” or that creativity can be exhaustively explained by its particular tools.24 Predictive pattern recognition working at highlevel analogies may be indeed an essential part of creative intelligence.25 Yet if we want to appreciate its role in living and embodied human consciousness, we must turn to creativity as an experience and to the world of our cognitive ecology, to the site of human creative initiative and response.

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EUREKA!: SUDDEN INSIGHT AND SITUATED CREATIVITY In reference to Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell wrote that a good poet is someone who manages, by “standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning.”26 Creative thought is often characterized as such a “eureka” moment, a sudden rupture of the ordinary flow of cognition by a fully formed realization or an idea immediately grasped in its significance. Yet such characterization pertains not only to poetic inspiration, for the expression “eureka!” to describe creative inspiration is thought to have originated with Archimedes, an inventor of machines and the greatest mathematician of ancient Greece. Of course, the self-understanding of ancient Greek literature, art, and science was dominated by the idea of inspiration from without, and thus Archimedes was described, in Plutarch’s words, as “being possessed by a great delight, and in very truth a captive of the Muses.”27 Yet if we are no longer content to rely on reference to a mythical, extrahuman source, the cognitive context of sudden insight must be explained in other terms. The notion of conceptual blending would connect such special moments of thinking to ordinary cognitive operations. The image of being struck by lightning as a metaphor for sudden insight may itself serve an example of conceptual blending. However, just as the real phenomenon of lightning relies upon a range of meteorological conditions, the cognitive context for creativity for living subjects is broader than its conceptual content. This context may include the background fields of ideas that surround a given innovation, the inchoate and implicit stages of a realization, provocations from the cognitive environment, clues and resources triggered by the surrounding circumstances and one’s interaction with them. The story of Archimedes himself may provide an illustration. Among his accomplishments, Archimedes had calculated the ratio of the volume and surface area of a sphere to a cylinder, explained the function of a lever, and invented devices (like the screw bearing his name) that are still in use today. In his essay The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes attempted to determine the upper limit of number of grains of sand that would fit into the universe, for which task he invented a system for naming large numbers

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and estimated (however inaccurately) the size of the universe. Plutarch tells us that Archimedes devoted his efforts to practical inventions and mechanics at the request of King Hiero. The king wanted Archimedes to turn his attention from abstract thinking—about the immaterial objects of geometry, in which he made his greatest contributions to ancient mathematics—to more practical and mundane matters. Upon one occasion, according to an account by Vitruvius, Archimedes was asked by King Hiero to determine whether a crown he had had made from gold had been adulterated by the jeweler with an admixture of inferior metals. While submerging himself in the baths, Archimedes considered that he could measure the volume of an irregular object by measuring the displacement of water when the object is submerged. Archimedes subsequently may have compared the displacement of water in a bowl by a piece of silver to that displaced by a piece of gold of equal weight. Alternatively, it may be that Archimedes realized that he could use the principle of buoyancy, where the density of an object is measured with a hydrostatic balance, to solve the king’s problem. In any case, so the legend goes, Archimedes figured out how he could reach a solution, jumped out of the water and ran into the street, pronouncing his now famous exclamation. Of course, Archimedes may have been delighted not only by his immediate findings but by yet another successful application of abstract ideas to concrete problems, for even to a practiced scientific thinker, as one commentator puts it, it is “far from obvious” why abstract ideas such as those of mathematics should be able to provide “so satisfying a description of the world.”28 Through his subsequent test, Archimedes would find that the gold in King Hiero’s crown had been adulterated. While the narrative surrounding Archimedes’ “eureka” moment suggests the triggering of an illumination that in his time would be attributed to divine inspiration—equivalent to the modern poet’s flash of lightning—a contemporary cognitive account would dispel such mystifications. Keeping in mind that Archimedes’ discovery was portrayed by Vitruvius some centuries after the event, it is nevertheless fairly obvious that, if the legend has any truth to it at all, such a cognitive event would have involved Archimedes’ spontaneous recognition of analogical likeness between two objects of thought prompted by the surrounding cues—the experience of his own body’s submersion in and redistribution of the water in the baths and the density of the crown and its metals. The

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notion of a conceptual blend could describe this moment of recognition where two ratios are likened, the relevant elements of both integrated into a new mental space of an analogy. While such an approach can explain the conceptual content of Archimedes’ finding, the experience of creativity may be underserved by its reduction to conceptual blending alone. The term blending itself (while often used synonymously with integration) may be problematic, for blending denotes a homogenization of the component elements, whereas the process of recognition would presumably arise from an enactive experience that is not homogeneous, involving the to-and-fro comparison of distinct scenarios which are themselves not integrated in the result. Further, conceptual blending theory describes available conceptual content, its spaces and frameworks. Creative thinking is, however, not only immaterial and conceptual but also embodied, perceptual, and interactive. The theory is meant to be compatible with acknowledging the embodied nature of the consciousness involved, and applications of conceptual blending theory can engage embodied examples.29 Yet while the image of Archimedes in the baths could serve up a caricature of the enactive, embodied consciousness, conceptual blending—the projection of a solution on the basis of two conceptual input spaces—could describe his moment of insight with no reference to this embodiment at all. Along with the embodied processes, it may be that some contextual constituents of creative thinking are not directly represented in the mind’s mental spaces, provided instead through the inhabited environment—the cognitive ecology—with which a creative thinker interacts. The theory is “overdetermined” if “all aspects of complex cognitive processes need not be explicit enduring representations” of inputs, but are instead distributed through interaction with the surrounding environment.30 The role of embodiment can be invoked here at two levels. There is, of course, the immediate occasion, the physical experience of Archimedes in the baths and his interaction with real physical objects (the crown, metals, his own body, water). More fundamentally, there are the origins in embodied life of the concepts (balance, volume, proportion, density, mass, and measurement, as well as the conceptual schemas of containment, surface, interior, and the like) that Archimedes applied to the objects of his attention. Husserl has described origins of abstract and ideal concepts, arguing that these are generated through abstraction from lifeworldly

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experience. Geometric ideas, for example, are initially abstracted and idealized from our empirical notion of space, which in turn “depends upon our kinesthetic systems and the orientation of the body . . . on forms of bodily movement in our relation to objects.”31 Husserl argued that the prescientific world as given to embodied experience is the basis for abstract knowledge—even if the abstraction leaves that world behind—and thus that the “sciences grew through understanding and documenting the regularity of the world’s pregivenness.”32 Husserl argues of this lifeworld: “It is this world that we find to be the world of all known and unknown realities. To it, the world of actually experiencing intuition, belongs the shape of space-time together with all bodily shapes incorporated in it; it is this world that we ourselves live, in accord with our bodily, personal way of being. But here we find nothing of geometrical idealities, no geometrical space or mathematical time with all their shapes.”33 Rather than reverting to a Cartesian notion of innate ideas to account for geometrical idealities which transcend empirical experience, Husserl argues that the mind must generate them. The imprecise and indeterminate shapes of sensory objects, and the morphological essences cognitively drawn from them, cannot yield the exact, determinate shapes of Euclidean geometry. These essences, according to Husserl, have been generated in human cognition gradually by processes of abstraction and idealization and stabilized through symbolic and linguistic means.34 This insight finds amplification not only in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of the origins of rational concepts in embodied perception but also in more recent embodied cognition theory that points to bodily experience as the “prime source for concept formation” and to image schemas “grounded in the perceptive spatial relationships between objects” as the basis for conceptualization.35 It has been argued that even the ideas of mathematics must originate in our embodied situation, for “the detailed nature of our bodies, our brains, and our everyday functioning in the world structures human concepts and human reason. This includes mathematical concepts and mathematical reason.”36 Equipped with the available concepts, the creative subject may experience insight in a moment of surprise, expressed in the exclamation of Archimedes’ “eureka!”—whether or not the geometer in fact ever actually leapt from the baths into the street oblivious for that moment to his surroundings. Even for a mind accustomed to discovery and invention,

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the moment of insight is distinctive, its sudden dawning expressed too in Jarrell’s use of the lightning metaphor to describe the experience of the modern poet. But is the break with ordinary thinking only a consequence of novel conceptual blends, or required for the innovation they initiate? Fauconnier and Turner, recognizing that conceptual blending is “simultaneously conservative and innovative,” lean toward the former. All along, we have stressed creativity and novelty as consequences of conceptual integration. But creativity and novelty depend on a background of firmly anchored and mastered mental structures. Human culture and human thought are fundamentally conservative. They work from the mental constructs and material objects that are already available. Conceptual integration too has strong conservative aspects: it often uses input spaces, blending templates, and generic spaces that are anchored in existing conceptual structure; it also has governing principles driving blends in the direction of familiar, human scale structures; and it readily anchors itself on existing material objects.37

No thinking happens in a vacuum, of course, and no new ideas would form from out of nothing. Creativity relies on familiarity, regularity, and existing material and structure in its production of novel ideas—and this will be as true for the innovations of a jazz musician as it is for the geometer. Given this emphasis on the familiar and available, however, and the “strong conservative aspects” of the activity of integration, the phenomenon of creativity can only be the result of conceptual blending from available resources, rather than an innovating source of vitality of human consciousness itself. On this view it would be as if, in relying on what is available and blending it, we simply happen upon creativity when a particularly novel and efficient blend arises. Yet if Archimedes’ thinking expresses the same operations that take place in human cognition “every second,” as Turner argues, why would he have been surprised, indeed perhaps startled, by his discovery? What would distinguish his recognition of the analogy at hand from the possibility of having overlooked it? It remains to be explained on the combinatory skills model how shifts in perspective on what is familiar and given would be initiated or motivated, and how we would recognize and elaborate their value. Conceptual blending seems to

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be the best available theory for idea adaptation and meaning generation, but creativity demands a broader approach, perhaps all the more necessary in reference to less epistemically constrained activities, such as in exploratory art or free invention. Even progress in mathematics “does not consist in making new combinations with mathematical entities already known,” argued the mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré.38 For significant experiences of creativity will draw from domains that lie far apart and generate a novelty that the creator had not thought possible before. Despite application to a wide variety of examples of creative thought, and conceptual blending theory’s account of meaning creation and emergent structures in new blends, combinatory models end up endorsing a reproductive notion of imagination. The skills involved in the combination of ideas, and their novel products, do not explain the reach toward possibility, and the shifts in perspective, necessary for creative transformation of existing ideas. This involves the crossing of distance from the actual to the possible, from the known to the not yet known, and the traversal of disparate regions of familiarity. While undoubtedly enabled by particular cognitive skills, this transcendence endows what D. W. Winnicott, in describing play, called “a colouring of the whole attitude” to reality, such that it invites not merely our compliance but our creative involvement.39

CREATIVITY AND COGNITIVE PLAY Early cave painters, lacking what Fauconnier and Turner would call, as in the passage cited in the previous section, “firmly anchored and mastered mental structures” for any kind of image making—lacking perhaps even the very concept of an image (unless derived from dreams, reflections in water, or experiences of “seeing-as” such as in star and cloud formations)—experimented with pigments on the surface of the cave wall and eventually made depictions. On archeological and subsequent historical evidence, we can trace something like an evolution of image making in painting as technique, involving at various stages the making of handprints on a surface, using other objects to make marks with pigment, the composition of patterns, integrating qualities of the surface suggestive of

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an image, and eventually freestanding mimetic depiction and fantastic figuration. With conceptual blending theory, we can describe the integration of concepts or conceptual frameworks inherent in any resulting representations. Yet we may also wonder about the motivation for, and experience of, such image making in the creative process itself. The notion of cognitive play may help to illuminate the origins of creative thinking. Such play, whether in children’s pretending or in the representational arts, or in Einstein’s description of his manipulation of mental images, sustains mental tarrying with the actual and the imagined, engages the known in light of the projected, and sustains multimodal thinking with split or multiple registers or frames of reference. The creative attitude involved in play, insofar as it allows the mind to engage freely with reality, can be contrasted to an attitude of compliance, “the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation.”40 It was suggested earlier in this book that children’s play, their engagement with imaginary ideas and objects, may be central to the development of rational cognition. The inheritance of this play in developed minds, and its kinship with curiosity and experimentation, may be found in creative thinking across human experience. Several philosophical conceptions of cognitive play—from Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Iser—may help to distinguish special moments of creative thinking from what may be predominantly compliant moments of noninnovative cognition. These theories of play afford description of the suspension of habitual or ordinary understanding, the drive to experience diverse material sensations in tension or accord with formal order, the enabling of free, productive variation on given objects of thought, and the shift among multimodal registers of attention necessary to evoke and figure fictional ideas. While these accounts of cognitive play arise in specific philosophical and aesthetic contexts, they may offer clues to how creative experience both emerges and diverges from ordinary modes of thinking. The free play of the faculties in aesthetic experience as described by Kant, for example, can be read as an account of an enlivening interruption of cognitive habit. According to Kant, in ordinary cognition two  faculties, the imagination and understanding—which for Kant concern the shaping of sensuous intuition and conceptual thought,

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respectively—operate in a hierarchical relation that Kant describes in juridical terminology. Conceptual understanding legislates the intuitions from sense experience supplied by imagination so as to ensure the perception of a coherent and knowable reality. Yet when confronted with a beautiful object, the subject experiences a transformation of this usual state of cognitive affairs. Kant describes a “state of a free play of the faculties of cognition with a representation through which an object is given.”41 Seeing a magnificent sunset, for example, will stimulate imaginative activity that enlivens the mind, affording, Kant says, a feeling of life that has no purpose other than its own prolongation. Although I may remain aware of the usual cognitive determinations of the object— identification of the kind of object that it is, the causes to which it can be connected, and so forth—the phenomenal appearance, insofar as it strikes me as beautiful, is not dominated by this determinative knowledge. The imagination, in presenting this intuition, is not compliant with the laws of understanding, but freely “plays” with it. The setting sun is of course recognized and conceptually identified, but this recognition and identification does not determine my lingering attention. Rather consciousness experiences for a moment a state of play with the intuited phenomenon, which as beautiful gives pleasure by provoking a feeling of life. The beauty of the sunset may harmonize my perception of the object with a sense of the purposefulness of nature as a whole, without the mind’s supplying any concept of what this purpose may be. The pleasure we take in this free purposiveness, in this suspension of conceptualization, Kant writes, “has a causality in itself, namely that of maintaining the state of the representation of the mind and the occupation of the cognitive powers without a further aim. We linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself.”42 While this describes but a moment in conscious life, it is a consequential one for Kant’s understanding of the mind. This cognitive free play sustains within the subject a different orientation to the world than the ordinary processing of experience would dictate: the material causality through which the world is known cannot be wholly exhaustive of my understanding of it. Beyond contemplation of the beautiful, such free play may stimulate further creative activity that can be marshaled in creative thinking of all kinds.

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The notion of free play from Kant’s aesthetics is echoed in Friedrich Schiller’s account of aesthetic education. What Schiller regards as the competing drives of human cognition—feeling and reason, imagination and intellect, our sense of freedom and knowledge of the necessities of nature—may be harmonized through what Schiller calls the “play drive” (Spieltrieb). The play drive promotes harmonization between two other drives, a material drive that directs our engagement with contingent sensuous matter and a form drive directing our pursuit of arrangement and necessary order. This harmonization, expressed in art, but presumably also in many other forms of play, allows us to negotiate between the arbitrariness of our sensuous experience and the potentially rigid formality of rational thought. Through play, human consciousness gives structure or form to experience while presenting and affirming sensuous multiplicity. In artistic play—such as in dance, music, painting, and poetry—we encounter “dynamic and dialectic structures of experience where our perception of the world is independent both of contingency and of closed structures.” The play drive can thus be said to allow for the “free representation of nature.”43 But if the play drive supports not only the formalization of sensuous experience but also the fluidity of rational experience, it is relevant beyond artistic and aesthetic experience alone. While Schiller’s discussion of play relates to aesthetics, its implications pertain to human nature more broadly. For Schiller, it is “precisely play and play alone, which in every human condition makes human beings whole and unfolds both sides of their nature at once.” Play turns out to be definitive of human nature, for “the human being . . . is only fully a human being when playing.”44 Schiller’s notion of the play drive has found echoes in the hermeneutics of Gadamer, for whom play is conceived as nature’s self-representation, and expressed especially in the human being: “Play is so elementary a function of human life that culture is quite inconceivable without this element.”45 Kendall Walton’s notion of make-believe play as a model for mimetic representation in the arts also echoes Schiller’s notion of the play drive as free representation. Kant’s idea of a playful cognitive vitality can also be found in Nietzsche, for whom the ordinary processes of conceptualization can be contrasted to a retrieval of preconceptual experience. The ordinary processes of conceptual thought, Nietzsche argues, mask a richer, more vital form of

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thinking that is imagistic in nature and endowed by a sensuously rich perception. In an early essay, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche describes metaphoric thinking—recognizing likenesses among different images generated by perception—that precedes their fixation into words and concepts. While the fixing of perceptual experience by language, concept, and eventually abstract philosophical ideas may be inevitable for a rational mind, Nietzsche argues that this is preceded by a vital creativity at the heart of cognition: Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that the human being is an artistically creating subject, does the human being live with any repose, security, and consistency.46

Nietzsche speculates that the human mind, originally provoked by a rich, precognitive world of sensuous experience, generates images that correspond with repeated sensuous provocations recognized in their likeness. This process dismisses differences as it relays these images into generalizing concepts—every leaf is different, but the differences are subordinated to the likenesses, such that the image, then concept, of a leaf emerges. We would presumably be cognitively paralyzed by fascination with the perceptual world and with our own imaginings, did we not rely on the stifling of generative association, on the elimination of infinite differences, achieved by conceptual ordering, classification, and the regularization of cognitive processes with the aid of language. Coherent experience, and classificatory knowledge of the world, requires what Kant called the legislation of imagination—and thus of sensuous intuition—by the understanding. Yet this also leads to idealizing abstraction, such that we may grasp the invariant essence of a leaf, the general concept underlying all actual and possible leaves, as somehow more real than any of its inevitably variant manifestations. The idea of a world “in itself” or its essence known by reason alone comes to be regarded in idealist philosophy as more valid than the shakier world of original

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perception and its initially diverse images. Nietzsche suggests that such idealism can be overcome by breaking with the “petrification” of cognitive habit. Presumably this may happen through the invention of potentially new, striking metaphors, but also through other forms of creative experience that exercise cognitive fluidity, variation, and unfettered imaging. Philosophical discussions of cognitive play are not only relevant to the concerns of aesthetics. Husserl’s phenomenology, with its strategy of free variation, involves a methodological use of cognitive play. While the initial phenomenological reduction, by which the phenomenologist regards the world as phenomena, already describes a departure from the usual cognitive attitude, the phenomenologist aims to go further in introspective description to reveal the internal structure and underlying regularity of what is phenomenally given. The phenomenologist seeks to grasp not merely the particular that happens to be given in any actual experience, but the essence or eidos that underlies it universally. Not merely this table or desk, for example, but an intuition of the essence of material objects as such, or the idea or eidos of material object, is sought. While Nietzsche criticized just such abstraction which would favor ideas or essences above and beyond the world of concrete experience, effected through the conceptual reduction of multiplicity and difference, Husserl’s eidetic reduction seeks essences in the opposite direction—in and through variation on the “things themselves” as given in experience. This would be achieved by the phenomenologist’s freely varying the given, through imaginative manipulation of a perceived or otherwise presented phenomenon. The potentially unlimited generation of related, imagined variations thereof would allow the phenomenologist to identify the common element among them. Starting with a concrete fact, the imagination is prompted to generate any number of possible variations upon it, so that “the fundamental step in this procedure is the formation of an open, endless multiplicity of variants of an experienced or imagined object.”47 Husserl writes that, for example: “I can in fantasy imagine the brown bench as painted green; then it remains an individual existent in this lecture hall, only imagined as changed. But I can as it were transform each and every fact into a fiction in free arbitrariness. I can imagine as a pure fiction a bench with a mermaid sitting on it, in no place and in no time, free from all weight of actuality, free from any restriction to the factual world.”48

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Transforming facts into fiction, with fluency, freely and arbitrarily, turns out to be a necessary moment of phenomenological discovery. Beginning, for instance, with the bench in the lecture hall as an example of a material object, the phenomenologist will go on to vary that in any number of ways—such as its color, size, material, mode of givenness, such as perceived, remembered, or merely imagined—and will then present to imaginative consciousness any number of benches with different qualities and any number of other material objects, not merely at hand, but also in pure fantasy—for example a ship I may dream of sailing—so long as they all exemplify in some mode a material body. There are no limits to the kind and number of variations, the constraint being only that the given variations must overlap in the relevant way (in this case, as material). As for the specific object, the brown bench, with which the process began, “the point is to regard it as merely one more possible material body among other possible material bodies.”49 The variations are random, and freed from any actuality, so that the eidos is generated not by facts but rather by the examination of possibilities; the shift is made from the register of actuality to possibility. As one scholar observes of this methodological process: “The contribution of our imagination is of great importance because it is precisely our aim to produce random variations that do not remain bound up with experience and the experienceable world; the variants must remain free from positing the actuality of the object or act in question. This is evidently best accomplished in imagination.”50 Through this process, the invariant element of the variation, or the eidos common to them, is said to be given to “a kind of rational intuition.”51 Yet in this cognitive play imagination takes precedence, for Husserl argues that in seizing upon essences “presentations, and, more precisely, free fantasies [Vergegenwärtigungen, und, genauer gesprochen, freie Phantasie], acquire a position of primacy over perceptions.”52 Without imagination’s presentational play of possibilities in their potentially limitless transformation, phenomenological reflection could not discover the nature of phenomena. This imaginative activity, this free variation as a form of cognitive play, has been compared to play in an anthropological sense.53 What seems to connect this cognitive play to other notions of play is its primary engagement of possibility, its splitting off from actuality, and its relative freedom, such that “in a free doing a certain indifference comes here into play in

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regard to reality and in this way that which manifests itself as real becomes transposed into the domain of imagination.”54 The engagement with possibility must be both free and arbitrary, not limited to the known, such that essence or concept is to be achieved with “no hidden reference to the limits of actuality.”55 Whereas Kant’s notion of free play described a break with ordinary conceptually dominated cognition in the receptive experience of beauty, and Nietzsche hearkens to a preconceptual vitality where images remain unfixed by concepts, and Schiller afforded a play drive that freely unifies diversity of impressions with formal structure, with Husserl we find a notion of play that, also in a departure from ordinary thinking or the “natural attitude,” is deliberate and directed, as well as productive, though constrained by a particular epistemic goal. Accepting this critical role of imagination in phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty argues in Phenomenology of Perception that “we can elucidate singular fact only by varying it somewhat through the agency of imagination, and then fastening our thought upon the invariable element of this mental experience.”56 While Husserl admitted the use of directed fictionalization in the phenomenological method through this play with possibilities, the experience of fictional literature will amplify this unconstrained mental play as a goal in itself. Mental play in the construction and experience of fiction has been described by Wolfgang Iser as involving various “to-and-fro” movements of imaginative cognition. These movements include, first of all, oscillation, which we may think here in terms of movement of attention to different sources of ideas, involving split reference to the actual world and to the projected possibilities of fiction. Further, consciousness, in entertaining fictional ideas, endures a sliding and tilting of emphasis from one register of thought to another that “leads to changes in attitudes of consciousness.” Iser identifies a kind of counterflow of alterity, which would describe the novel idea emerging from fiction as it forms against the pressure of thought tied to reality. Finally, the activity of productive figuration, echoing Schiller’s play drive, would give shape to emerging and novel ideas.57 What we can draw from these various descriptions of cognitive play is that play allows for a productive cognitive disruption, where distancing from the actual and suspension of fixed assumptions interrupts the usual habits of thought and disturbs the usual dominance of one cognitive facility over others. This bears some relation to the notion of divergence used

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in psychology, which is meant to measure the potential for particularly original creativity. Creativity was first described in psychology as divergent thinking in the 1950s by J. P. Guilford, who measured, among other features of divergence, fluency, flexibility, and originality, or the ability to produce multiple, lateral, and novel responses to a given problem that could not be completely determined by the terms of the prompt.58 Associated with divergent thinking is Arthur Koestler’s notion of “bisociation,” which anticipated conceptual blending theory in describing how elements from distinct and different matrices of thought could be brought together in various ways in all kinds of creative thinking.59 The notion of ideational flexibility distinguishes creativity from intelligence and anticipates the conceptual fluidity proposed by Mithen and adapted by Fauconnier and Turner.60 All these ideas suggest the value for creativity of difference, variability, and deflection as well as combination, integration, and blending. Insofar as cognitive play promotes divergence from predominant epistemic modes, however, it offers what seems to be a natural counterbalance to epistemic conservatism. It may be that the interest we take in fiction and art is not primarily their representation of known and familiar worlds, or their presentation of possibilities, but their shifting our perspective on the habitual and familiar. Sometimes this shift is provoked through the presentation of worlds and experiences that by virtue of distance in time, place, or cultural circumstance, are radically different, whereas some art deliberately estranges its otherwise familiar subject matter from ordinary context and category. Victor Shklovsky identified the experience of “defamiliarization” in modern art, where the available ideas, mental constructs, or material objects cease to be taken in their usual manner, as familiar elements of the familiar world, and are exoticized, among other ways, by their insertion into a new context. Phenomenology, in its break from the natural attitude, relies upon an analogous process of distance from and reorientation to the given. As I have shown elsewhere, such literary and phenomenological divergences from ordinary thinking draw upon possibilities latent within the cognition of everyday life.61 Divergence and variation may also be explored for its own sake, apart from any strictly epistemic goals, as evidenced in some modern literature. Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” gives no realistic account of the announced object of the poem, but rather

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striking free variations on ways of conceiving and imagining it. The repetition of the motif—the idea, associations, and appearance of a blackbird—is subjected to perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic play, inducing the reader into the possibilities of imaginative variation. Inheriting such a strategy is Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, which similarly induces cognitive play through free variation. In Calvino’s novel, Marco Polo is depicted in conversation with Kubla Khan, who demands accounts from the explorer of his vast and expanding empire, thought to be “the sum of all wonders.” Polo offers a description of fiftyfive fictitious cities, each exuberantly unique, but connected by the “tracery of a pattern so subtle” it can scarcely be discerned.62 All these places, it turns out, are imaginatively constructed through different descriptions of or free variations upon the city of Venice. Of course, cognitive play is not relevant only for aesthetic experience, for the arts and literature. Novel thinking in any field may require a suspension of habitual conformity to the existing arrangements, conceptual divisions, pragmatic or epistemic assignments, in order to appropriate ideas in the first place as candidates for new integrations. Explaining the creation of mathematical theories, Poincaré observed that the analogical discovery involves not only the moment of positive recognition of relation between ideas but also overcoming or negating an initial belief, originating in the habitual cognitive situation, that two ideas “are strangers to one another.” This disruption of ordinary belief is especially important if, as the mathematician claims, the most fertile new ideas are “those formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart.”63 Inventing a new relation may require what T. S. Eliot described as the “breaking down of habitual barriers” that impede novel analogies.64 Einstein’s self-described cognitive play, described in a previous chapter, enabled the cognitive shifts necessary to make his astonishing discoveries.

COGNITIVE PLAY AND SITUATED TRANSCENDENCE: LESSONS FROM THE JAZZ AESTHETIC Cognitive play has been associated no more readily with a modern form of creativity than with jazz music, with its tradition of dispensing with

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musical notation, its spontaneous improvisation, and its further promotion of creativity across the arts. It is then appropriate to consider jazz and its aesthetic in order to understand creativity, while the case of jazz will invite attention to the both situated and transcending nature of creative consciousness. Improvisation in jazz affords simultaneous evocation of and divergence from established and familiar versions of musical works or, in free improvisation, the composition, continuously and unedited, of new musical ideas in real time.65 Improvisation involves “reworking precomposed material and design in relation to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped, and performed under the special conditions of performance, thereby adding unique features to every creation.”66 Like other creative production, such aspects of jazz, sometimes in its integration with other artistic forms, have been described in terms of conceptual blending theory.67 Jazz improvisation itself is said to establish “a conceptual blend on the level of musical structure by referencing existing musical constructs and by extending or augmenting those mental and sonic spaces in performance.”68 Adaptation and variation are described as the integration of different mappings or musical domains: “Unhinged from the process and products of standard music notation, this type of music . . . encourages different cross-domain mappings and different ways of engaging with musical sound and meaning, while at the same time not completely dispensing with those mappings that are already established.”69 Yet while formal analyses of creativity in jazz music—particularly in computational studies of improvisation—have tended to treat jazz in isolation from cultural or even any human context, other cognitive accounts stress its social meaning within “the world of jazz as a tradition.”70 A few examples from jazz music and art and literature influenced by jazz will be engaged here to highlight the situated nature of its creativity and its cognitive play, and the importance of their recognition for a study of creativity itself. Along the way, evidence of diversion and metaphoric dissonance in the jazz aesthetic will be seen to resist exhaustive reduction to the conceptual blending model. The term jazz aesthetic will be somewhat flexibly used here, having a number of relevant references. The term has been taken to reference specific elements of jazz music, such as “polyrhythmic structures, dissonance, harmony, bebop lyricism, and improvisation,” that have become inflected in other forms of art.71 The jazz aesthetic may highlight its spontaneity,

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its negotiation of tradition through novelty. Finally, the jazz aesthetic may focus on the cultural context of its invention and performance as a social encounter that is at once “rupture, collision, and passionate response” to striving for freedom and equality on the part of its inventors and practitioners.72 Without aiming to offer a more constraining definition—even the term jazz itself admitting a complex social and conceptual history73— here we will to touch on a few aspects of the jazz aesthetic, especially those that feature in examples of metaphor in jazz music and in its intermedial influence on other arts. Of course, this metaphoricity and intermediality may too be described as cross-domain mappings, or the blending of mental spaces or structures, with features established by one artistic practice adopted and integrated into another. Yet the meanings of these practices are also inextricably tied to their social and cultural origins and may involve dissonance and rupture that evade the integrative or blending model. Jazz music as an expression of human creativity demands attention to the social and cultural aspects of its history, performance, and adaptation, which exceed accounts of creativity that define it as computational and combinatory skills untethered to social, or even human, conditions. Amiri Baraka (publishing then as LeRoi Jones), when criticizing the tendency of white music critics to overlook the attitudes and social philosophy of black American culture that gave birth to new jazz forms, cautioned that the “jazz aesthetic, to be fully understood, must be seen in as nearly its complete human context as possible.”74 Other scholars have criticized the “reduction of the significance of jazz” by definitions that make no reference to its cultural roots.75 It is widely recognized in both music-historical and literary contexts that the invention of jazz, its practice, evolution, and aesthetic sensibility, are inseparable from African American culture.76 At the same time, its identification in ethnomusicological terms includes its integration of musical traditions from Africa, the African diaspora, and Europe, as well as its relation to multiple other forms of music and cultural practice.77 With the history and musical practice of jazz the subject of ample scholarship, the discussion here aims primarily to highlight importance of the situatedness, at multiple levels, of the creativity jazz manifests and inspires and its engagement of cognitive play. Jazz musical performance is, to begin with, constitutively bound up with, rather than only factually situated in, real time. In the performance

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of jazz music, the musician, particularly in collaboration, capitalizes on the opportunities of the present moment in the context of a history of studied and practiced skill. Rather than blocking out the world in concentration, the jazz musician is open to influence from the present surroundings, responsive to the manifest moods, calls, and innovations of fellow players and even the audience. Jazz performance thus troubles a standard account of creativity in psychology that relies upon a distinction between what has been called its generative and exploratory phases, or the Geneplore model.78 In that model, creativity is defined by stages in which new ideas are first generated, their implications and applications thereafter explored. These activities, however, coincide in spontaneous variation and improvisation, as in unchoreographed dance, wherein “novel actions are undertaken immediately, coincident with the activation of the corresponding motor plans, without prior rehearsal or evaluation.”79 Yet while improvisations of jazz may spark ideas on the fly, experimentally and in the ephemeral moment, its creative skill is enabled by rigorous practice and retrospective evaluation. Research in jazz improvisation has demonstrated that “experimental improvising with a set of known model phrases reveals precise transformational processes at play, shedding light on ruminations of the musical imagination and such potentially enigmatic matters as the difference between intention and realization in the articulation of ideas.”80 Jazz improvisation may call on technical and historical understanding as much as it does on momentary inspiration, and while jazz celebrates freedom from constraint, it also relies upon formal structures and established expectations. The repetition of the beat, chorus, and melodic patterns, the harmonic framework and call-and-response dialogue between players are among those features that ground the “relative freedom” of jazz improvisation.81 The play between structure and spontaneity, continuity and novelty, expectation and deliberation, tradition and innovation is rooted in jazz not merely as a product of creativity, but in and through creative performance. These features of jazz performance may resonate evocatively with, if not map precisely onto, descriptions of cognitive play discussed in the previous section. Improvisation—in which a familiar melody or standard may be referenced and departed from spontaneously and in novel ways— highlights the idea of divergence and its implicit interruption of familiar

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paths of thinking. Innovative variation and improvisation in jazz may resonate with the structure of the imagination’s “free play” first described by Kant. Where Kant described the harmonious activity of imagination with understanding in suspension of conceptual legislation, here we might by way of analogy describe engagement with musical structures that does not eliminate, but is not strictly constrained by, their formal regularity. Jazz improvisation may be associated with Schillerian “play drive” that formally unifies diverse sensuous material, as a performer cross-references a variety of present impressions and recollected influences toward a “free representation” of a form of life. Improvisation involves what Husserl described as the potentially unlimited “free variation” or imaginative variation on a given phrase or motif, constrained only by the repetition of some essential element and the evolving structure of the performance as a whole. Jazz themes—expressed linguistically in lyrics and titles and nonconceptually through mood, rhythm and style—draw from life experience, while generating new musical expressions that transcend its confines, affording, like the fictional literature described by Iser, shifts of attention between reality and its possible transfigurations. The performance involves the shifting “to and fro” between sameness and difference, expectation and surprise, attention and inattention, and the registration of alterity as novelty emerges. As we shall see shortly, the metaphoricity of jazz lyrics and themes may also admit difference and divergence, as Nietzsche highlighted in his theory of metaphor. Jazz is situated not only in terms of its physical performance but in its cultural association with the striving for freedom. This is due, first of all, to its role in the historical evolution and self-determination of black and African American culture. Thus improvisational “jazz consciousness” has been described as an “awareness, mindset, worldview” forged in creative response to oppression.82 This association is merited, secondly, by the musical strategies of jazz, which, in cognitive play, embody resistance to compliance, rejecting a fixed and externally determined representation or version of the world, of the expressive self, or of musical structure and purpose. But these strategies have been linked, thirdly, to a radical epistemology at work in improvisation that cannot be recognized without reference to its cultural realities. For jazz and its improvisation, as a historical practice emerging in reflection on racial oppression and segregation, have been argued to express an anticipatory knowledge, a

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distinctive engagement of possibility, what Fred Moten has identified as a form of knowledge—of freedom—in the absence of experience thereof.83 What combinatory theories of creativity would call the inputs from which jazz musicians and composers have drawn, and their resulting integrations, are thus not exclusively conceptual and structural, but tied to political, affective, and communicative aspects of embodied social life. The complexity, materiality, and vitality of this context may resist strict conceptual representation while remaining constitutive of creative production. The cultural and historical situatedness of jazz is often reflected in the content of jazz lyrics, in which linguistic and musical metaphors consider and express a given cultural context. Conceptual blending can describe some, but not all, of the achievements of such lyricism. One such example is offered by the train motif in a classic jazz tune originally composed by Billy Strayhorn. “Take the A Train” (1939) became a standard of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, later recorded by many other artists, and manifests a creative expression that both involves and exceeds what could be described as its conceptual blending. With its invitation to the implied listener (“Hurry, get on now, it’s coming / Listen to those rails a-thrumming”), the lyrics reference, and the rhythm seems to echo, the speed and clattering of the A line subway train, running under Manhattan northward to Harlem. “Take the A Train” offers an example of metaphoric integration, wherein the patterns of sound and movement of the train are reflected in the musical and lyrical rhythm, while the linguistically and rhythmically evoked train moving on its tracks bears analogy to the material track of recorded song. “Take the A Train” was drawn from lived experience of its present, its title having been the first line of Duke Ellington’s directions to Strayhorn for how to get to Sugar Hill in Harlem, where Ellington lived.84 Reference to the train may carry multiple metaphorical meanings, for the A train, with what would be for many its destination in Harlem, can be associated with artistic and social freedom for black Americans, while the implicit reference to an underground train route may evoke the historical memory of the Underground Railroad, the metaphorically named abolitionist network aiding those escaping slavery to the North. The metaphorical associations of Harlem, also thematized explicitly in the lyrics, are central to the song’s significance. Long before the Jazz Age of the 1920s, Harlem was home to many black American artists, and it

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became the site of emergence for a distinctly black artistic culture celebrated as the Harlem Renaissance. Although emerging in other cities including New Orleans, Chicago, and St. Louis, jazz became emblematic for the Harlem Renaissance and its era and was associated with a communal cultural achievement, one which Duke Ellington himself held to be inseparable from black American experience. The imperative in “Take the A Train” serves not only as metaphor for jazz music itself but for the intellectual, social, and cultural transport jazz achieved, supported and accompanied. This composition, and others inspired by the train motif, made jazz the emblematic music of modern urban and interurban life, evoking the destination of cities and departure, escape, wandering, freedom via journeying between them. The train motif appears repeatedly over decades of jazz music in different emerging styles, including Ellington’s own earlier composition, the thrillingly accelerating “Daybreak Express” (1933), and the more lingeringly intermittent “Happy-Go-Lucky-Local” (1946), both evocative of movement and freedom. Jimmy Smith’s “Midnight Special” (1960), renders the mood of a slow-crossing nighttime freight hauler. John Coltrane’s “Blue Train” (1957) can be contextualized within this tradition of musical reflection on the physical and spatial, as well as metaphoric and inward, journey. “Blue Train” invokes a further metaphorical association, with the evocation of blues music and the political as well as personal suffering to which the blues gave expression. The dual metaphor of train and music as forms of transport from the catastrophic oppression of slavery is enveloped in “Song of the Underground Railroad,” recorded in 1961 by Coltrane. While situated distinctly in concrete historical events and developments, then, jazz music also generated new creative methods, a varied yet distinctive aesthetic, the influence of which reached far beyond the medium of music. Just as Impressionism influenced music and literature, jazz music reverberated throughout the arts. Jazz composers and musicians such as Ellington and Louis Armstrong were themselves not confined to a single form of expression but were highly versatile, adapting literary sources, writing poetry, and making visual art.85 Jazz, moreover, resounded with an artistic and cultural sensibility that could be appropriated by many artists and expressed across artistic media. The historical influence of jazz music on modern visual art is well documented, and

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helps to highlight the jazz aesthetic as distinctly nurturing of creativity as such.86 It has been argued that in “jazz’s improvisatory core underlies a wide creative spectrum that uniquely exemplifies this principle within and beyond the arts.”87 The influence of jazz can be seen in major modernist painters. Kandinsky’s use of modified repetition and energetic play of color and line for his various numbered “Improvisation” paintings unmistakably evokes jazz music. The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, like many other European artists arriving in New York, became both fascinated with jazz and influenced by its artistic strategies. Mondrian, in his involvement with de Stijl, or the neoplastic movement, developed the technique of using only primary colors and black and white, presented in geometrical lines and shapes, attempting to go “always farther” in pursuit of the universal, and in this pursuit he aimed to leave behind any reference or representation to reality.88 Thus it is all the more remarkable that in some of his last paintings, including Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), Mondrian makes reference to a specific genre of jazz music associated with dance, as well as spatial reference not only to the particular city but indeed to a specific street, Broadway, that runs through Manhattan from the southern tip of the island up through Harlem. Evocations of the traffic and lights of Broadway, the grid of subway lines, and the rhythm of jazz music seem to converge in the image, as the dominant yellow lines criss-crossing the white canvas are intermittently broken by blue, white, and red squares. Mondrian’s New York paintings reflect a jazz aesthetic, with scholars resisting a wholly “optical” interpretation, which would neglect the paintings’ percussive and pianistic rhythm,89 and finding a “structural trace of boogie-woogie piano in Mondrian’s improvisatory, revisionary compositional practice.”90 Mondrian’s final, unfinished work, Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), made in anticipation of the Allied victory in the Second World War, manifests a novel divergence from his own established practice of strictly linear design and primary color. Mondrian revised the painting repeatedly. The resulting syncopated, somewhat uneven movement, and, within strong black delineations, the verging of primary colors into mixed blues and ochers, has been celebrated as Mondrian’s final recognition of the “incalculability of human action” and as reflecting the liberation and celebration of nondominant culture.91 Moten interprets Mondrian’s last work in distinctively social and cultural terms: “The many colors that are

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absorbed and reflected in the color black, and in and as black social life, on the other hand, flow with an extraordinary theatrical intensity. . . . The texture and landscape of black social life, of black social music, are given in Victory Boogie Woogie.”92 On this reading, the advance in Mondrian’s final innovation can be traced directly to the cultural vitality of jazz and the dynamic social context of its forms of creativity. A very different manifestation of jazz inspiration can be found in Jackson Pollock’s paintings, which echo the spontaneity, rhythm, vitality, and liberty of free jazz, an avant-garde development that dispensed with fixed chord changes and varied tempos and often engaged unusual sounds. Pollock’s abstraction yields pleasure and even inchoate meaning through impressions of chance and serendipitous effects. Pollock’s technique for rendering energy and motion by splashing or dripping paint on the canvas developed while he listened to then contemporary jazz music, the spirit of which Pollock seems to express. The painting Autumn Rhythm (Number 30, 1950), for example, reflects creative energy of free jazz through a harmony that arises from seemingly chaotic drips of paint, as it were, drizzled, splashed, and dripped across the canvas from above. In Autumn Rhythm the splashes—buoyant and calligraphic—are gray, black, and white, with an earthy tone, creating the impression of an ongoing, spontaneous event that the work’s title likens to music. Jazz musicians themselves noticed the resonances between jazz and the paintings of Pollock. Ornette Coleman used a Pollock image, White Light (1954), for the cover of his 1960 album Free Jazz and, in the liner notes to Change of the Century (1959), described his own music as “something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock.” At a Pollock exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2006, Coleman recognized the painting in terms of free improvisation: “It’s something that he created as he did it. The act of creation is the creation.”93 The Harlem-based artist Romare Bearden depicted jazz and blues musicians as well as lyrical jazz themes as the subject of some of his extraordinarily vivid collages, while he likened his process, with its rhythmic treatment of color, texture, and figuration, to the spontaneity and improvisation of jazz and blues. His collage method involved the fragmentation and integration of multiple photographic images with other materials, such as in The Block II (1972), a vertically extending depiction of a block of Lenox Avenue, which offers a rhythmic visual meditation on the goings-on of

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everyday life in Harlem. One of his most haunting and lyrical works is the double portrait Tomorrow I May Be Far Away (1966–67), its title taken from the song “Good Chib Blues,” recorded in 1929 by Edith Johnson. In this collage a couple gazes longingly upward, one looking out from inside the window frame and one seated outside the house under it, while a train passes in the far distant background, evoking the passage toward “faraway” freedom in the North. While their expressions and posture evoke the singularity of an isolated longing, both figures are composed of fragments from photographs of multiple individuals, thus evoking a wider cultural and collective meaning, perhaps echoing Ralph Ellison’s claim in the epilogue to Invisible Man that in America “our fate is to become one and yet many.”94 In Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings (1964), largely in black, gray, and white with ocher tones, Bearden has again situated the image of a train engine conspicuously in the landscape behind the central figures, and the same image appears in the more anguished depiction of rural poverty in The Train (1974). Locality and transport, community and liberation, rootedness and freedom are evoked both formally and thematically in Bearden’s paintings in ways that both implicitly and explicitly quote the music of jazz and blues. The influence of jazz on Bearden’s work was reciprocated when Branford Marsalis produced Romare Bearden Revealed, music reflecting the influence of Bearden’s visual art, to accompany a major retrospective in 2003 of Bearden’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.95 If the jazz aesthetic is characterized by dynamic and spontaneous energy, the ephemerality and divergence of improvisation, present-tense vitality and atmosphere, and rejection of conformity to prescribed forms, the scope of its influence extends to modern literature. Influences of jazz have been traced in the writings of many major writers including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, August Wilson, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison. T. S. Eliot recognized The Waste Land—which integrated a mosaic of references from the Western literary canon, lyrics of jazz songs, and imagistic impressions from his London surroundings to meditate on the fate of Western culture in the wake of the First World War—as formally influenced by jazz music. The recognition of jazz in the rhythms of Eliot’s poem in turn inspired the writer Ralph Ellison, himself a player of jazz music, to take up literary writing.96

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Ellison’s protagonist in the novel Invisible Man describes his experience of racism as having been rendered invisible by the blindness of white society, and he finds in jazz and blues music a voice both to express and to resist this condition. After having fallen down a manhole during a riot, which is covered up by white police officers, Ellison’s protagonist decides to live underground. There he burns over a thousand lightbulbs and listens to a phonograph recording of Louis Armstrong singing “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” originally composed for a musical in 1929 by Fats Waller. The song is thematic for the novel’s critical reflection on the racism of its time—sadly still relevant for what Moten describes as a “fiercely urgent now”97—while jazz is deliberately inflected in its narrative style. The ostensibly simple title of this song (with lyrics by Andy Razaf and Harry Brooks) itself offers an ingenious play among interlocking metaphors and idioms, the multiple and discordant meanings of which offer a powerful critique of racism. The combination “black and blue” in both the song’s title and lyrics draws on an idiom for bruising that has been in use since the late Middle Ages, despite the fact that bruises manifest a number of other colors, including red, yellow, and green (and rarely black as such). The idiom can be profitably described in terms of a conceptual blend, where the integration of two terms project a new conceptual space of meaning that is not contained in the individual inputs alone. But the metaphoric play of the title is dissonant and multiple and not accounted for entirely by such integration. Like Nietzsche, Ricoeur has emphasized the difference or dissonance inherent in metaphor’s generation of new meaning. For Ricoeur, metaphor has the power to “redescribe” reality, not only though the new complexes of implication that it creates but also through the tensions it keeps in play and expresses.98 These tensions include, for example, those differences between the primary and secondary subjects of the comparison, between literal and metaphorical interpretations of statements, and between identity and difference in the jointure of terms. Recalling Nietzsche’s suggestion that metaphor holds an original difference and multiplicity of imagistic thought eliminated in conceptual generalization, we might say here that the use of the metaphor “black and blue” allows for the productive maintenance of differences, for dissonance in its disruption of literal meaning. In this example engaged in Ellison’s novel, we find dissonances and disruption among

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multiple metaphors within one lyrical phrase, a disruption that aims at revealing a deeper truth. The idiom black and blue is of course a metaphor for flesh which has bruised, bearing the marks of direct physical injury, and also denotes inflicted emotional and psychological damage. But here the terms black and blue also retain meanings that are not integrated in the blend, so that the metaphoric use of the idiom works on several levels. Blue again connotes emotional suffering and sorrow, echoed in the song’s lyrics, which describe loneliness and exclusion, but here also deliberately calls up the tradition of blues music with which Louis Armstrong strongly identified.99 In the blues, suffering is not transcended by the vision of another, higher world or reality—as in spiritual or gospel music—but transformed into self-reflective meditation, where sorrow is expressed intensely, and its transformative expression savored as a form of life itself. As Ellison describes it, “the blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it” by making it into an intensely expressed art.100 In addition to this personal expression, there is a further cultural criticism: if the individual terms of the conceptual composite “black and blue” also retain distinct meaning, the “I” of the song interrogates how being black—a term that in its racial designation has been considered from many theoretical perspectives101—comes to be joined with being black and blue and with being blue, as if by a necessary natural cause rather than a contingent cultural imposition, a social infliction by one group upon another. The state of being “black and blue” is revealed in the song’s original lyrics (omitted in Louis Armstrong’s later, truncated version) to be caused by the oppressive racism on the part of (white) others, and the song brings aesthetic cohesion to the speaker’s reflection on this suffering without thereby eliminating it. The metaphors do not so much as effect blends of disparate concepts but maintain the tension and critical dissonance between multiple meanings as essential to the experiences they express. Toni Morrison plays on this multiplicity, and echoes the specific song, when her narrator, in the novel Jazz, describes a sidewalk singer in 1920s Harlem as “Blues Man. Black and bluesman. Black therefore blue man.”102 Jazz and blues songs, moreover, are among those that became what one scholar, evoking W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, has

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called “sites of doubleness” for those who composed and sang them.103 Resonating with such doubleness, the song will evoke multiple levels of meaning that strike with varying degrees for different audiences. Not merely the integration of, but dissonances between, these multiple metaphors and layers of meaning generate an expressive critique, the creativity of which calls upon a distinct, though mobile, cultural location. If, as Paul Austerlitz has argued, “jazz consciousness creates a virtual space where we can confront, learn from, and even heal the contradictions resulting from social rupture,”104 such consciousness, in the case of “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” would be expressed by virtue of an ingenious use of metaphorical dissonance. Not only the title of Morrison’s novel but the narrative structure deliberately evokes the cognitive play of jazz as well as its index to cultural history, and in these respects Jazz may be the most prominent as well as explicit literary experimentation with the jazz aesthetic. Jazz music itself has been characterized as hovering at the edge of language, while writing inspired by jazz may strive for its distinctive energy, for its shifting and vital contours.105 Gayl Jones described several ways in which literary writing may evoke or imitate the structure and style of jazz music: “The writer’s attempt to imply or reproduce musical rhythm can take the form of jazz-like flexibility and fluidity in prose rhythms (words, lines, paragraphs, the whole text), such as nonchronological syncopated order, pacing, or tempo. A sense of jazz—the jam session—can also emerge from an interplay of voices improvising on the basic themes or motifs of the text, in key words and phrases.”106 Several of these features come to characterize Morrison’s novel, and the author herself described the importance of improvisation in the work. Morrison compares her own use of plot to the presentation in jazz of a familiar melody that is then departed from and hidden, as the musician continues in meandering directions, the melody then surfacing again “not so much in the original line as in all the echoes and shades and turns and pivots.” Jazz presents and unfolds the story of a disastrous love triangle experienced by inhabitants of Harlem in the 1920s. From the beginning, the reader knows that someone has been killed, and by whom, and that another will be shot. The novel gradually unfolds its account of these events, shifting to peripheral characters, plots, and meditations on the city and the rural origins of the main characters along the way. Having put “the whole plot on the first page,” plot being

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“the melody of the piece,” Morrison’s narrator returns to this melody in different ways. As Morrison explains: That was the real art of the enterprise for me: bumping up against the melody time and again, seeing it from another point of view, seeing it afresh each time, playing it back and forth. . . . I wanted the story to be the vehicle which moved us from page one to the end, but I wanted the delight to be found in moving away from the story and coming back to it, looking around it, and through it, as though it were a prism, constantly turning.107

This submersion and resurfacing of the plot its digressions and flashbacks reflects, Morrison claims, the novel’s “playful aspect,” the deliberate “jazzlike structure,” which “wasn’t a secondary thing,” but rather “the raison d’être of the book.”108 The physical and communal context of Harlem, called the City in the novel, also provides a familiar frame of reference or structure against which variation and meandering can be manifest. The City is associated with freedom, but this freedom is relative to and afforded by the physical and social constraints, which need to be heeded. As such, it provides a backing “frame” of continuity and restraint for otherwise limitless play of possibilities in the narrator’s imagination. Morrison’s narrator describes the freedom afforded by the City as dependent upon its inhabitants heeding its “design”: I like the way the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it. . . . Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do. And what goes on on its blocks and lots and side streets is anything the strong can think of and the weak will admire. All you have to do is heed the design—the way it’s laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow.109

The design of the City, it is suggested, offers a stable template for divergence and digression, for anticipation, need and desire, for future projection and possibility. Not only in plot and setting but also in narrative structure and dialogue, Morrison’s novel invokes features in literary language that call

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upon jazz and its aesthetic. The polyphony of voices in the narration of the novel, along with specific conversations between the characters, are analogous to the call-and-response communication among different jazz musicians in a group session.110 For Jones, even “plot structure may demonstrate this call-and-response pattern: one scene may serve as a commentary on a previous scene while a later scene becomes a commentary or response to that one,” and this would describe the shifting of perspectives and settings, the play of foreshadowing and retrospection, in Morrison’s novel.111 But here again the formal strategies are inextricably connected to the inheritance of a distinctive cultural moment. For Morrison explains that her work aimed to capture “the essence of the so-called Jazz Age,” which she defines thus: The moment when an African American art form defined, influenced, reflected a nation’s culture in so many ways: the bourgeoning of sexual license, a burst of political, economic, and artistic power; the ethical conflicts between the sacred and the secular; the hand of the past being crushed by the present. Primary among these features, however, was invention. Improvisation, originality, change. Rather than be about those characteristics, the novel would seek to become them.112

The jazz aesthetic is described by Morrison as located in a distinct cultural reality, in a historical dynamic with spiritual, emotional, economic, and political dimensions, yet as vitally poised for creative transcendence: improvisation, originality, change. In light of one critique of the “mishearing” of jazz in the novel—among other objections, jazz requires the revision of something already in existence113—it has been argued that we do not need to insist on the “structural and strategic affinity of the novel with the music” but can regard jazz rather as a metaphor for stories and narrative language itself.114 This, however, requires understanding language and its creative unfolding as situated practices both enabled and disrupted by the emergence of new meaning. The jazz aesthetic affords divergence and creative digression as much as it also involves repetition and tradition. Its revision, innovation, variation, and change draw from concrete time, space, and history, from distinctive human communities and experiences, even as its creativity is incessantly transcending, overflowing, and challenging any given and imposed,

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legislated boundaries. The situated transcendence of jazz and its cognitive play are both distinctive—not quite like anything else humanity has created—and paradigmatic of the vitality of creative imagining as such.

 While examples of creative thought and practice have been considered throughout this book, in this chapter we have taken a closer look at creative imagination, diverging from mystifying accounts of inspiration and those which reduce creativity entirely to the product of combinatory skills. The eureka moment of sudden insight, the lightning strike that seems to come from elsewhere, may be traced to interactions with a worldly environment of an embodied consciousness, while even the abstract ideal concepts with which Archimedes comprehends the underlying principles of material reality can be regarded as evolving from forms of worldly experience. The irrepressible innovativeness of jazz and its aesthetic reverberating across the arts ingeniously illuminate creativity as situated transcendence enabled by cognitive play. While conceptual blending and other combinatory models can help to explain the innovative application of abstract ideas by Archimedes and some of the formal innovations of jazz and the arts it inspired, these cannot be fully understood without reference to a broader cognitive ecology, to the vitality of creative consciousness, and to the heterogeneity, difference, and variation held open and maintained in cognitive play. Rooted in active embodied performance, and in a distinctively embodied social and cultural life, jazz is at once retrieval and upheaval, repetition and innovation, and may be the art form most expressively emblematic of the life of imagination itself. The paradoxes of creativity—its divergence and connection to ordinary cognition, its emergence and divergence from the situated roots of thinking—become manifest in the jazz aesthetic as the simultaneous expression and transcendence of the situation of individual, historical, and cultural consciousness.

EPILOGUE

T

he life of imagination shapes our thinking and indeed our whole cognitive ecology. Imagination in its exceptional development in human beings allows us to consider reality as endowed with possibility, to shift perspective and construct alternatives to what we already experience and know. While imagination has been described in this book as relevant throughout much of our cognitive experience in the broadest sense, I have endeavored to show how its involvement in ordinary thinking gives rise to, and can be distinguished from, its special, sustained, and exquisite uses. Imagination is neither wholly mundane nor otherworldly; it is no more and no less marvelous or mysterious than human consciousness itself as an emergent phenomenon of nature. Imagination, as both embodied and as virtually transcending corporeal limits, as rooted in and going beyond reality, as both engaged in and projecting a world, and as cultivating a virtual interior for human consciousness, resists reductive explanation. As I have aimed to demonstrate in this book, imagination is not a single skill, but involves multiple modes that may overlap and works at a number of levels. Its revelation of possibilities involves generative construction, its retrievals from experience are also transformative, and the reality from which the “merely” imaginative is typically distinguished is itself known and grasped in part through imaginative contributions to cognition. That some opacity may

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remain in this demonstration of the breadth, complexity, and workings of imaginative experience would be inevitable to the extent that human consciousness itself—its embodiment and the connection between its material substrate and its emergent qualities—is not yet fully understood. The view of imagination defended in this book recognizes its contribution not only to the arts, literature, and play but also to forms of thinking traditionally reserved for rationality alone or considered immune to imaginative influence. The inclusion of imagination in thinking more broadly may be seen to threaten any neat segregation between objective thought and more unwieldy subjective aspects of embodied consciousness. But objective thought that would exclude imagination would be severely limited, for imagination enables engagement of the possible involved in any significant study of reality. Just as we are sometimes misled by imagination, we may on other occasions fail to understand complexities because we fail to adequately imagine how things could or might otherwise be. As the power of rationality and the authority of science in the culture of the new millennium are challenged—by political interests, fundamentalist ideologies, or other cultural pressures—it may be tempting to reject imagination along with confabulation, fiction, escapism, and fantasy untethered to reality. Magical thinking, it may be suggested, may enrapture us emotionally, but any wider distribution of imaginative influence could undermine our ability to cope with reality and defend demonstrable facts. Or it may seem reasonable, in light of the dangers of its misuse, to refuse any praise for imagination that does not in the same breath caution for its disciplined constraint, as if the value to be found in imagination lies only when its transformations and its engagements of possibility are subordinate to explicit epistemic or pragmatic goals. It may seem reasonable likewise to diminish the importance of literature and the arts, as if their indulgence of the fictive and their appeal to the subjective offer nothing useful for coping with the world as it really is. Manifestly imaginative pursuits may be pursued then solely as forms of entertainment, or as material for economically productive creative industries, while creativity may be appreciated where it has commercial impact or injects superficial vitality into institutions otherwise indifferent to human interests. Yet as demonstrated throughout this book, the value of imagination is broader than these applications. As an inextricable dimension of human thinking, imagination’s multifactorial engagement is essential for understanding ourselves, our forms of life, and our future possibilities.

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Beyond scholarly interest, humanitarian, existential, and ecological concerns are dependent upon the life and health of imaginative cognition. We live in a time of rapid cultural, technological, and ecological change, much of which involves advances that reflect remarkable use of imaginative innovation. While the world grows smaller through ever more extensive communicative connection, the frontiers of human inquiry are expanding. We reach farther into space and further back in time to the origins of the universe, deeper into the earth and sea, plumb with ever greater nuance the subatomic world, measure the workings of the human brain and experiment with the intricacies of genetics. Just as much as art, literature, dance, film, and music do, all of these pursuits owe much to the power of imagining as it assists human minds in their surpassing of existing knowledge. Yet the same capacities to manipulate and transform the world that lead to knowledge and progress may also change the very nature of what it is to be human and our relation to the surrounding world. Our technologies—some incalculably beneficial, some disastrously detrimental for life—proliferate faster than we can reckon with their effects. More than ever, it seems, we need to cultivate imaginative dimensions of our thinking. Considering imagination in terms of a cognitive ecology invites consideration of its conditions of life, of its flourishing. If there is a present challenge to the health of imagination in many human contexts today, it may lie less in the suppression of unscripted imagination, as attempted by the totalitarian powers of a previous century, than in the colonization of imaginative thought, its commercialization and commercial saturation, and its educational neglect. Even in the context of inexhaustible sources of stimulation, an ailing, poorly nourished, or atrophied imagination within a human community could presumably lead to the impoverishment of our phenomenal spaces, our world-bound experience as well as our elsewheres, and our forms of attention. The cognitive environment of many modern humans is now characterized by almost constant access to information, images, social connections, and entertainment, whether enriching or distracting. It may be advantageous to reflect upon how such abundance is engaged and experienced. We may find ways to invest in the sources of cognitive vitality that come from and are manifest in deep curiosity, tolerance for the complex, implicit, or not yet understood, stamina for gradual, sustained inquiry or attention, the cultivation of an inner or reflective landscape, and the value of direct encounter and lived,

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embodied dialogue with others. Imagination is a living dimension of human consciousness, nurtured not only by exposure to apparently endless variety and fantasy but by our presence to the living reality before us, what may be previously unnoticed divergences within it, and the possibilities that may arise from it. To understand our cognitive ecology, it is necessary to understand imagination as our multifaceted relation to possibility, both for its index to elsewhere and otherwise and for the vitality of the here and now. The imagination is not a distinctly human function—there is considerable evidence that animals in various ways do imagine—and yet human beings need imagination, among other cognitive resources, to solve the present and future problems we alone have created as a species. In order to develop new solutions to problems facing our world, we have to be able to imagine multiple alternatives to the status quo and new ways to reflect on as well as protect what is worth preserving. Science and respect for its findings are crucial for ecological understanding and action, to name just one example, but the progress of science itself depends in part on imagination, while any sense of connection with nature, and our motivations to heal and preserve it for the present and future, may not be secured alone by the presentation of facts. It is a matter not only of information, but also of knowledge imaginatively cast, what we take the natural world to be and with what connection to ourselves. How we regard and relate to nature— whether we see ourselves as inextricably interwoven with or essentially, pragmatically, or spiritually apart from it—involves a kind of seeing-as that extends beyond perception alone to interpretation, understanding, and valuation. An ecologically stable future may require us to shift our self-conceptions as human beings, devise new conceptions of our existence on the earth, and balance a different understanding of nature with exigent as well as future human concerns. We may require new ways to cast a world horizon in light of the sources of its vitality, new ways to regard and relate to a living future. Of course the potential contributions of imagination do not pertain only to environmental concerns, but to many of the difficulties we face, not least by countering the unimaginative nature of some of our most persistent errors. As a power of consciousness that affords human thinking both possibility and transformation, imagination is essential both to the flourishing of life around us and to our own.

NOTES

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2.

3.

4.

Aristotle argues that images are necessary for animal consciousness in De Anima (On the Soul), trans. J. A. Smith in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 429a5–8. In more recent philosophy, Merleau-Ponty suggests that animals have an interior life in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis (New York: Routledge, 2004), 75. Such evidence is described in, for example, Robert. W. Mitchell, ed., Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Richard Dawkins, “The Evolved Imagination: Animals as Models of Their World,” Natural History 104 (September  1995): 8–11, 22–23; M. L. A. Jensvold and R. S. Fouts, “Imaginary Play in Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes),” Human Evolution 8, no. 3 (1993): 217–27; Thomas Suddendorf and Andrew Whiten, “Mental Evolution and Development: Evidence for Secondary Representation in Children, Great Apes, and Other Animals,” Psychological Bulletin 127, no. 5 (2001): 629–50; Crickette M. Sanz, Josep Call, and Christoph Boesch, eds., Tool Use in Animals: Cognition and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, “The Imagination of Animals,” in The Animal Inside: Essays at the Intersection of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies, ed. Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun, and Thomas Kiefer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Mark Turner, ed., The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Colin  M. McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Cambridge:

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

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Harvard University Press, 2004); Arnold H. Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012 [1991]). On the ecstatic possibilities of everyday experience, see Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Currie and Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds, 2, 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1781]), A141:B180–81. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), 24. Amy Kind, “Putting the Image Back in Imagination,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62, no. 1 (2013): 141–59; Francis Sparshott, “Imagination: The Very Idea,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 1 (1990): 1–8; Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, 2d ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 7. Alexander Schlegel et al., “Network Structure and Dynamics of the Mental Workspace,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 40 (2013): 16277–82. Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: Harper Collins, 2011); Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015 [2007]); Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), 164. See Stephen Mulhall, “Seeing Aspects,” in Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader, ed. H. J. Glock (Oxford: Blackwell 2001); Richard Eldridge, “Wittgenstein on Aspect-Seeing, the Nature of Discursive Consciousness, and the Experience of Agency,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect-Seeing, ed. William Day and Viktor  J. Krebs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2008 [1974]). J. Dokic and M. Arcangeli, “The Heterogeneity of Experiential Imagination,” in Open MIND (11), ed. T. Metzinger and J. M. Windt (Frankfurt: Mind Group, 2015), 1–20; Colin M. McGinn, “Imagination,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann, and Sven Walter. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Currie and Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds; Zeno Vendler, The Matter of Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). For example, Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-Modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); Brann, The World of the Imagination; Mary Warnock, Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

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Brann, The World of the Imagination, 785. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 2, 19. Roger W. H. Savage, “Criticism, Imagination, and the Subjectivation of Aesthetics,” Philosophy and Literature 29, no. 1 (2005): 166. See Michael Wheeler, “The Rest Is Science: What Does Phenomenology Tell Us About Cognition?” in Subjectivity and the Social World, ed. Tom Feldges, Josh N. W. Gray, and Stephen Burwood (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2014); and Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, The Phenomenological Mind, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012); Thompson, Mind in Life. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), par 110. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1940]), 183. Sartre, The Imaginary, 182. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 194–95. Casey, Imagining, 10. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism as a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007 [1945]). Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 87. See Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 92–94. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 665. Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 85. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 739. See Berys Gaut, “Educating for Creativity,” in Philosophy of Creativity, ed. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Marjorie Taylor, ed., Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Elliot W. Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting, ed. Martin Kemp, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 222. Gregory Currie, “Creativity and the Insight That Literature Brings,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, ed. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (London: Routledge, 2007); Gerhard Lauer, “Going Empirical: Why We Need Cognitive Literary Studies,” Journal of Literary Theory 3, no. 1 (2009): 145–54. Michael Burke, “The Neuroaesthetics of Prose Fiction: Pitfalls, Parameters, and Prospects,” Frontiers of Human Neuroscience 9 (2015): 442.

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35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

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Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013); Gabrielle G. Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013); Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013); Andrea Kantrowitz, “The Man Behind the Curtain: What Cognitive Science Reveals About Drawing,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 46, no. 1 (2012). Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford University Press, 1999); Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Zeki, Inner Vision, 2. Gerhard Lauer, “Spiegelneuronen: Über den Grund des Wohlgefallens an der Nachahmung,” in Im Rücken der Kulturen, ed. Karl Eibl, Katja Mellmann, and Rüdiger Zymner (Paderborn: Mentis, 2007). Lauer, “Going Empirical,” 147. Katrin Reisea, Mareike Bayer, Gerhard Lauer, and Annekathrin Schacht, “In the Eye of the Recipient: Pupillary Responses to Suspense in Literary Classics,” Scientific Study of Literature 4, no. 2 (2014): 211–32; Maria Bartolussi and Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Peter Dixon and Maria Bortolussi, “The Scientific Study of Literature: What Can, Has, and Should Be Done,” Scientific Study of Literature 1, no. 1 (2011): 59–71. Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2012), xii. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain, chapter 5. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?, 4; Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 322. Zeki, Inner Vision, 1. Semir Zeki, “Neural Concept Formation and Art: Dante, Michelangelo, Wagner,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, no. 3 (2002): 54. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?, 4. John Haugeland, “Mind Embodied and Embedded,” in Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, ed. John Haugeland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 237. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1945]). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962 [1927]). For example, see Zahavi and Gallagher, The Phenomenological Mind; Wheeler, “Reconstructing the Cognitive World”; Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). See Frédérique Vallée-Tourganeau and Stephen J. Cowley, ed. Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity, and Human Artifice (London: Spring, 2013); Mark

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52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

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Rowlands, The New Science of Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010). Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” in The Artful Mind; Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 173. Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Victoria Pitts-Taylor, The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); A. Todorov, L. T. Harris, and S. T. Fiske, ‘Toward Socially Inspired Social Neuroscience,’ in Brain Research 1079, no. 1 (March 2006): 76–85. Moheb Costandi, Neuroplasticity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016); D. Ruge, Li Liou, and D. Hoad, “Improving the Potential of Neuroplasticity,” Journal of Neuroscience 37, no. 17 (2012): 5705–6; Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002). Ruge, Liou, and Hoad, “Improving the Potential of Neuroplasticity,” 5705. Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015); Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, “The Mimetic Dimension: Literature Between Neuroscience and Phenomenology,” British Journal of Aesthetics 54, no. 4 (2014): 425–48; Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” 11; Amy Ione, “Examining Semir Zeki’s Neural Concept Formation and Art: Dante, Michelangelo, Wagner,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, no. 2 (2003): 58–66. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884), repr. Partial Portraits (New York: Macmillan, 1888), 390. Paul B. Armstrong, “What Is It Like to Be Conscious? Impressionism and the Problem of Qualia,” in A History of the Modernist Novel, ed. Gregory Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 66–83, here 82. Thompson, Mind in Life, 16. Sartre, The Imaginary; see also Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949). Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993). See Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Spring Academic, 2005 [1898–1925]); Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen Zweiter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und der Erkenntnis (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1901). Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary; and The Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962). Casey, Imagining. Mikel Dufrenne, Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 366. See Richard Thomson, Vincent van Gogh: The Starry Night (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 28.

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70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82. 83.

84.

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See Albert Boime, Revelation of Modernism: Responses to Cultural Crises in Fin- deSiecle Painting (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008); Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, “Van Gogh, Two Planets, and the Moon,” Sky and Telescope 76, no. 4 (1988); Charles A. Whitney, “The Skies of Vincent van Gogh,” in Art History 9, no. 3 (1986). Vincent van Gogh, Painted with Words: Letters to Emile Bernard, ed. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker (New York: Morgan Library and Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2007), 339–40. Thomson, Vincent van Gogh, 28. Dufrenne, Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 340. See Noël Carroll, “The Creative Audience: Some Ways in Which Readers, Viewers, and/or Listeners Use Their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, ed. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 62–81; see also Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). Casey, Imagining, xix. Casey, Imagining, 191, 188. Casey, Imagining, 4. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s account of imagination, see Kathleen Lennon, Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2015); Gail Weiss, ed., Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008); James B. Steves, Imagining Bodies: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Imagination (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004); and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, “Phenomenology and the Imagination of Modernism,” in Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, ed. Ariane Mildenberg (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Casey, Imagining, 3, 9. But for a recent discussion, which appeared just as the present book was concluded, see Stephen T. Asma, The Evolution of Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Christopher Collins, Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Peter Gärdenfors, How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Marc Jeannerod, “The Representing Brain, Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994): 187–202. Christopher Collins, Neopoetics: The Evolution of the Literate Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Robin Dunbar, The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 15.

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1. CONSCIOUSNESS AND MODES OF IMAGINATION 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

Some views of embodiment as the basis for linguistic and symbolic thought can be found in Marc Jeannerod, Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); The Representing Brain; and “The Representing Brain, Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery”; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1945]); George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). G. Rizzolatti et al., “Localization of Grasp Representations in Humans by PET,” Experimental Brain Research 11, no. 2 (1996): 246–52; G. Rizzolatti, L. Fogassi, and V. Gallese, “Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of an Action,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2, no. 9 (2001): 661–70. Jeannerod, Motor Cognition, 28. As suggested by Arnold H. Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2007). Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), 5. Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Spring Academic, 2005 [1898–1925]). Colin M. McGinn, “Imagination,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann, and Sven Walter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10. Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, 2d ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 7. McGinn, “Imagination,” 10. See Colin M. McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Gregory Currie, “Imagination, Delusion, and Hallucinations,” in Mind and Language 51, no. 1 (2000); Casey, Imagining; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 389–402; JeanPaul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1940]). See P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2008 [1974]), 68. For example in David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888); Sartre, The Imaginary; Casey, Imagining.

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27. 28. 29. 30.

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Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1781]), B152. Casey, Imagining, 8. Currie and Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds, 9–10. See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Brann, The World of the Imagination, 783. Robert Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 244. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 179. George H. Taylor, “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination,” Journal of French Philosophy 16, nos. 1 and 2 (2006): 97. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 599a 2–3. Plato, Republic, 598b. Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario  J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012 [1991]), 134. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 352. Paul Ricoeur, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” in Man and World 12, no. 2 (1979): 125–26. See Lubomir Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B152. Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, 123. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1954), 136. See McGinn, Mindsight; Casey, Imagining; Alastair Hannay, Mental Images: A Defence (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1971]); Sartre, The Imaginary; René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations in First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998 [1637/1641]). See Christopher Collins, Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Gregory Currie, “Pretense, Pretending and Metarepresenting,” Mind and Language 13, no. 1 (1998): 35–55. See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987); and Art and Its Objects: With Six Supplementary Essays, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Virgil C. Aldrich, “An Aspect Theory of Mind,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26 (March 1966): 313–26; and Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963). See Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers, “Imagination and Pretense,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. Amy Kind (New York: Routledge, 2016); Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Alan R. White, The Language of Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin, 2000 [1949]). Casey, Imagining; and “Imagination: Imagining and the Image,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (June 1971): 475–90. Zeno Vendler, The Matter of Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). J. Dokic and M. Arcangeli, “The Heterogeneity of Experiential Imagination,” in Open MIND (11), ed. T. Metzinger and J. M. Windt (Frankfurt: Mind Group, 2015). For example, Casey in, Imagining, regards imagination and creativity as contingently connected. See also Dustin Stokes, “The Role of Imagination in Creativity,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, ed. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See Casey, Imagining, 41. Discussions can be found in Raymond W. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Aymeric Guillot and Christian Collet, ed., The Neurophysiological Foundations of Mental and Motor Imagery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Tamar Szabó Gendler, “Imaginative Contagion,” Metaphilosophy 37, no. 2 (April 2006): 183–203; Peter Gärdenfors, How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Ryle, The Concept of Mind. See Joel Pearson and Stephen M. Kosslyn, “The Heterogeneity of Mental Representation: Ending the Imagery Debate,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (2015): 10089–92; Stephen M. Kosslyn, William L. Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis, The Case for Mental Imagery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See Marc Jeannerod, “The Representing Brain, Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994): 187–202; Jeannerod, Motor Cognition; Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Science of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Currie and Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds; Christopher Peacocke, “Imagination, Possibility, and Experience: A Berkeleian View Defended,” in Essays on Berkeley, ed. J. Foster and H. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 19–35. See Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 40. See Richard Eldridge, “Wittgenstein on Aspect-Seeing, the Nature of Discursive Consciousness, and the Experience of Agency,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect-Seeing, ed. William Day and Viktor J. Krebs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Stephen Mulhall, “Seeing Aspects,” in Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader, ed. H. J. Glock (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); and On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (New York: Routledge, 1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Shulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 207. See Wollheim, Art and Its Objects; White, The Language of Imagination; Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1970). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), par. 621–27.

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Similar claims are made by Tamar Szabó Gendler, Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ruth M. Byrne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); P. N. Johnson-Laird and R. M. J. Byrne, “Conditionals: A Theory of Meaning, Pragmatics, and Inference,” Psychological Review 109 (2002): 646–78. Peacocke, “Imagination, Possibility, and Experience,” 21; see also M. G. F. Martin, “The Transparency of Experience,” Mind and Language 14, no. 4 (2002): 40; Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 43. Casey, Imagining, 46. Brian Upton, The Aesthetic of Play (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 185; Currie and Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds, 126. Picciuto and Carruthers, “Imagination and Pretense,” 323. Paul L. Harris, The Work of Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 118. Collins, Paleopoetics; Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe; D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005). On the creative function of metaphor, see Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny et al. (New York: Routledge, 1977); and “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” Man and World 12, no. 2 (1977): 123–41; and Max Black, “More About Metaphor,” Dialectica 31, nos. 3–4 (December 1977): 431–57. Sartre, The Imaginary, 125. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961 [1930]). Iser, The Act of Reading. Michele LeDoeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary (New York: Continuum, 2003). Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institutions of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 3. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 253. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968 [1964]). Kathleen Lennon, Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2015), 11.

2. EVOLVING IMAGINATION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Steven Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination: An Archeological Perspective.” Substance 94/95, 30, nos. 1–2 (2001): 36–37. Bruce Hood, The Domesticated Brain (Gretna: Pelican, 2014). Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination,” 42–43. Jean-Jacques Hublin et al., “New Fossils From Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the PanAfrican Origin of Homo Sapiens,” Nature 546 (June 2017): 289–92. Sriram Sankararaman et al., “The Genomic Landscape of Neanderthal Ancestry in Present-Day Humans,” Nature 507 (March 2014): 354–57.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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Tom Higham et al., “The Timing and Spatiotemporal Patterning of Neanderthal Disappearance,” Nature 512 (August 2014): 306–9. A. W. G. Pike et al., “U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain,” Science 336 (2012): 1410. M. Aubert et al., “Pleistocene Cave Art from Sulawesi, Indonesia,” Nature 514 (October 2014): 223–27. Pike et al., “U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain,” 1410. See Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth- Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry, Primativism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press with the Open University, 1993). See Jonathan Fineberg, ed., Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism, Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). D. Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origin of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). William Rendu et al., “Evidence Supporting an Intentional Neanderthal Burial and Chapelle-aux-Saints,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 11, no. 1 (January 7, 2014): 81–85. Robin Dunbar, The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 6. Mark Turner, The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 11–12. Turner, The Origin of Ideas, 12. Timothy Williamson, “Knowing by Imagining,” in Knowledge Through Imagination, ed. Amy Kind and Peter Kung (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 114, 123. Richard Bradley, Image and Audience: Rethinking Prehistoric Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Dean Snow, “Sexual Dimorphism in European Upper Paleolithic Cave Art,” American Antiquity 4 (October 2013): 746–61; R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” in The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, ed. Mark Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–20, here 6. See Denis Dutton, “Art and Sexual Selection,” in Philosophy and Literature 24 (2000): 512–21. Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” 5. Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination,” 48. Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination,” 49–50. Christopher Collins, Neopoetics: The Evolution of the Literate Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination,” 50.

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Dunbar, The Human Story, 68–69. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011); Robin Dunbar, “Theory of Mind and the Evolution of Language,” in Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases, ed. James R. Hurtford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, and Chris Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92–110; Dunbar, The Human Story; Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). Dunbar, The Human Story, 162. François Jacob, “Imagination in Art and in Science,” trans. Tracy Ryan, Kenyon Review 23, no. 2 (2001): 117–18. Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers, “Imagination and Pretense,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. Amy Kind (New York: Routledge, 2016), 199. Dunbar, The Human Story, 44. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 330. Picciuto and Carruthers, “Imagination and Pretense,” 220. Picciuto and Carruthers, “Imagination and Pretense,” 211. Picciuto and Carruthers, “Imagination and Pretense,” 212. Picciuto and Carruthers, “Imagination and Pretense,” 220. Paul L. Harris, The Work of Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 27. Harris, The Work of Imagination, 29. Harris, The Work of Imagination, 8. Barbara Dancygier, “Language, Cognition, and Literature,” in Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 420; Pinker, How the Mind Works. Taylor, The Language Animal. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Shulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 214d; Stephen Mulhall, “The Work of Wittgenstein’s Words: A Reply to Bas,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect-Seeing, ed. William Day and Viktor J. Krebs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 249–67; Stephen Mulhall, “Seeing Aspects,” in Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader, ed. H. J. Glock (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Richard Eldridge, “Wittgenstein on Aspect-Seeing, the Nature of Discursive Consciousness, and the Experience of Agency,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Christopher Collins, Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 20. Collins, Paleopoetics, 20. Harris, The Work of Imagination, 195. Jacob, “Imagination in Art and in Science,” 118. Peter Gärdenfors, How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25. See Collins, Paleopoetics, 84.

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Robert Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 49. Collins, Paleopoetics, 87. Collins, Paleopoetics, 88–100; and Collins, Neopoetics, 112–13. See Vittorio Gallese et al., “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119 (1996): 593–609; Vittorio Gallese, “The Inner Sense of Action: Agency and Motor Representations,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (2000): 23–40; Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola, “Social Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons Discovered in Humans,” Current Biology 20 (2010): 353–54. Gärdenfors, How Homo Became Sapiens, 49. Gärdenfors, How Homo Became Sapiens, 49. Gärdenfors, How Homo Became Sapiens, 49. Rick Grush, “The Emulation Theory of Representation: Motor Control, Imagery, and Perception,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (2004): 377–442; Marc Jeannerod, “The Representing Brain, Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994): 187–202; Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). There are varying accounts of the similarities and differences of human and animal consciousness. See, for example, “Animal-Human Comparisons,” in Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. Richard L. Gregory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Dante Mantini et al., “Evolutionarily Novel Functional Networks in the Human Brain?” Journal of Neuroscience 33, no. 8 (February 2013): 3259–75. A challenge to the distinctiveness of human consciousness is offered in Felipe Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Gärdenfors, How Homo Became Sapiens, 50. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2: 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1999), 428.

3. IMAGINATION, PERCEPTION, AND REALITY 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Aristotle, On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000), 431a, 432a. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1950 [1890]), 462. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, rev. ed., trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1781]). Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991). Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Steven Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination: An Archeological Perspective,” Substance 94/95, 30, nos. 1–2 (2001): 28–54 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 8.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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See Taylor Carman, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” Philosophical Topics 27, no. 2 (1999): 205–26; John Drummond, “On Seeing a Material Thing in Space: The Role of Kinesthesis in Natural Perception,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40, no. 1 (September 1979): 19–32. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1945]), 474. On affordance theory, see James J. Gibson, An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), 127–44; on enactivism, see Noë, Action in Perception; Susan Hurley, “Perception and Action: Alternative Views,” Synthese 129, no. 1 (October 2001): 3–40; and Consciousness in Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Marc Jeannerod, “The Representing Brain, Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994): 187–202. Vittorio Gallese, “The Inner Sense of Action: Agency and Motor Representations,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (2000): 23–40. Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 126. I discuss this in “Distributed Cognition in Modern Poetry and Painting: Rilke and Cézanne,” in History of Distributed Cognition: Modernism, ed. Miranda Anderson (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, forthcoming); and “Phenomenology and the Imagination of Modernism,” in Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, ed. Ariane Mildenberg (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Kathleen Lennon, Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2015). Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), 10. See Gail Weiss, “Ambiguity, Absurdity, and Reversibility: Indeterminacy in de Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2010): 71–83; and Sean D. Kelly, “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 74–110. Noë, Action in Perception, 193. Joseph J. Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994), 103. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 394–95. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 6. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 7. Kelly, “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,” 77. Kelly, “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,” 78–81. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 4, 10–12. Daniel Dwyer, “Husserl’s Appropriation of the Psychological Concepts of Apperception and Attention,” Husserl Studies 23, no. 2 (2007), 84.

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See Lorraine Daston, “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science,” Daedalus 127, no.  1 (Fall 2005): 16–30. See also Dean Keith Simonton, “Hierarchies of Creative Domains: Disciplinary Constraints on Blind Variation and Selective Retention,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, ed. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014).

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Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos, trans. E. C. Otté and W. S. Dallas, 5 vols. (New York: Harper, 1850–1859 [1844]), 2:19. For discussion, see Daston, “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination,” especially 84–85 and 89–90. See T. H. Huxley, “Science and Culture,” a lecture first given in 1880 and printed in Collected Essays of Thomas H. Huxley (New York, 1889), 3:148, 152; Matthew Arnold, “Literature and Science,” in The Works of Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 13 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1903). A reconciling interpretation of Huxley and Arnold on the subject of imagination is offered by Paul White, Thomas Huxley: Making the “Man of Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 94–97. C. P. Snow’s essay “The Two Cultures,” presented as a lecture at Cambridge in 1959, deplored the scientific ignorance of literary intellectuals; the essay provoked a famously scathing response by F. R. Leavis. Both essays have been recently reprinted. See Snow, The Two Cultures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Leavis, The Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For reflections on the debate, see Stefan Collini’s introductions to both volumes; Roger Kimball, “The ‘Two Cultures’ Today,” New Criterion 12, no. 6 (February 1994): 10; and Raymond Tallis, Newton’s Sleep: The Two Cultures and the Two Kingdoms (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). Discussion of the “crisis” of the humanities is reflected, for example, in Martha Nussbaum, “The Silent Crisis,” in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–10; and the distinctive relevance of the humanities is defended recently in René Van Woudenberg, “The Nature of the Humanities,” Philosophy (2017): 1–32; and in Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). For example, Lewis Wolpert argues that “one should treat claims for similarity between scientific and artistic creativity with deep suspicion,” in The Unnatural Nature of Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 57. His critique of a science-themed art exhibit at the Science Museum categorically declares that art, unlike science, “has nothing to do with understanding how the world works.” Lewis Wolpert, “Which Side Are You On?,” Guardian, March 10, 2002. Greg Currie rejects the association of literature and knowledge, even of a moral or psychological kind, in “Creativity and the Insight That Literature Brings,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, ed. Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See Arthur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Visual Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000 [1996]); Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 28–32; Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 78–102. See, for example, Eric Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Joseph L. Goldstein, “Paradigm Shifts in Science: Insights from the Arts,” Nature Medicine 18, no. 19 (October 2012): iii–vii;; Catherine Z. Elgin, “Art in the Advancement of Understanding,” American Philosophical Quarterly 39, no. 1 (January 2002): 1–12; Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 79.

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ed., The Cambridge Companion to Giotto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2–3; E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 292. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 292. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 326, 314, 321. For a defense of natural perception, see Arthur Danto, “Animals as Art Historians: Reflections on the Innocent Eye,” in Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in PostHistorical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992). For a conventionalist view of visual perception, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Patrick A. Heelan argues for the hermeneutic nature of visual perception—what we interpret as visually significant varies within different epochs—and that visual experience reflects both our own physical nature and that of the perceptual world. See Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). This debate is discussed in Steven Crowell, “Patrick Heelan’s Innocent Eye,” in Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, van Gogh’s Eyes, and God, ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 239–50. Erwin Panofsky, The Renaissance: Six Essays, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1962), 140. William Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: Da Capo, 1975 [1938]), 10. Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight, 7, 12. Roger Fry, “Introductory Note,” to M. Denis, “Cézanne,” in Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992 [1910]), 41. Clive Bell, Art, 2d ed. (London, 1928 [1914]), 207, 199. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 62. Cited Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 296. Paul B. Armstrong, “What Is It Like to Be Conscious? Impressionism and the Problem of Qualia,” in A History of the Modernist Novel, ed. Gregory Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 67. David Melcher and Patrick Cavanaugh. “Pictorial Cues in Art and in Visual Perception,” in Art and the Senses, ed. F. Bacci and D. Melcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 385. Kurt Badt, cited in Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 47. John Rewald, Pissarro (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), 118. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 324. P. Vuilleumier and G. Pourtois, “Distributed and Interactive Brain Mechanisms During Emotional Face Perception: Evidence From Functional Neuroimaging,” Neuropsychologia 45 (2007): 174–94. Patrick Cavanaugh, “The Artist as Neuroscientist,” Nature 434 (2005): 301–7, 305. Melcher and Cavanaugh, “Pictorial Cues in Art and in Visual Perception,” 366. Melcher and Cavanaugh, “Pictorial Cues in Art and in Visual Perception,” 367. Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, 69.

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Julie Grézes and Beatrice de Gelder, “Social Perception: Understanding Other People’s Intentions and Emotions Through Their Actions,” in T. Stranio and V. Reid, eds., Social Cognition: Development, Neuroscience, and Autism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 67–78; Vittorio Gallese, “The Inner Sense of Action: Agency and Motor Representations,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (2000): 23–40; Marco Iacobini, “Neural Mechanisms of Imitation,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 15, no. 6 (2005): 632–37; G. Rizzolatti, L. Fogassi, and V. Gallese, “Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of an Action,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2, no. 9 (2001): 661–70. See Michael Burke, “The Neuroaesthetics of Prose Fiction: Pitfalls, Parameters, and Prospects,” Frontiers of Human Neuroscience 9 (2015); and Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (New York: Routledge, 2011); Peter Dixon and Maria Bortolussi, “The Scientific Study of Literature: What Can, Has, and Should Be Done,” Scientific Study of Literature 1, no.  1 (2011), 59–71; and Katrin Riese, et al, “In the Eye of the Recipient,” Scientific Study of Literature 4, no. 2 (2014): 211–31. See, for example, Terence Cave, Thinking With Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Karin Kukkonen, “Presence and Prediction: The Embodied Reader’s Cascades of Cognition,” Style 48, no. 3 (2014): 367–84; Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016); Marco Caracciolo, “The Reader’s Virtual Body: Narrative Space and its Reconstruction,” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3, no. 1 (2011), 117–38. See Grézes and de Gelder, “Social Perception.” See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Penguin, 2004), 7. See Peter Carruthers and Peter Charles Smith, eds., Theories of Theories of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For example, Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Science of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See Vittorio Gallese et al., “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” in Brain 119 (1996): 593–609; Vittorio Gallese, “The Inner Sense of Action: Agency and Motor Representations,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (2000): 23–40; Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola, “Social Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons Discovered in Humans,” Current Biology 20 (2010): 353–54. See Massimo Ammaniti and Vittorio Gallese, The Birth of Intersubjectivity: Psychodynamics, Neurobiology, and the Self (New York: Norton, 2014); Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Jeanne C. Watson and Leslie S. Greenberg, “Empathetic Resonance: A Neuroscience Perspective,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 125–37; C. Sue Carter, James Harris, and

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INDEX

Abstract Expressionism, 136, 245 Abstraction, 134–35, 155, 224–26 Abstract thinking, 224–26 Action: anticipatory calculation of, 66–67; embodiment and, 23; freedom and, 11; hypothetical, 68; perception and, 76; pretense and, 42; symbolic, 51 Adorno, Theodor, 146 Aerial performance, 160–61 Aesthetics, 39–40; art and, 143; creativity and, 104; experience, 8, 35, 37; imagination and, 104; of jazz, 24, 218, 238–39, 246, 249, 251, 252; Kant and, 7; landscape and, 104–6, 113, 115; of meaning, 106; perception, 44, 103–16; play and, 237; receptivity, 14, 20, 72; response, 32; Sartre and, 105 Affordance theory, 76 “Afternoon of a Faun,” 169 Aiming, 66–67 Alberti, Leon Battista, 127, 129 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 32–33 Allegri, Giorgio, 211

Analogies, 219 Analogon, image as, 190 Analytic philosophy, 9 Animals: cognition of, 74; consciousness of, 257n1; environment and, 68; imagination of, 2, 256; imaging of, 64–65; interiority of, 257n1; vision and, 110–11 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 203–4 Aphantasia, 200 Appalachian Spring, 170 Appearance, truth and, 149–50 Apperception, 80, 82 “The Apple Orchard,” 105 Archimedes, 145, 218, 223–26, 227, 252 Arendt, Hannah, 11 Aristotle, 2, 34, 64, 143, 162, 177, 186, 257n1; imagination and, 3, 6, 72, 94; phantasia and, 6, 45; poetic thinking and, 35 Armstrong, Louis, 243, 247, 248 Arnold, Matthew, 117 Art: advancement of, 137–38; aesthetics and, 143; for art’s sake, 156; body and, 167; brain and, 15; of children, 51–52; creativity and, 2; exploratory, 228;

332

INDEX

Art (cont.) fantasy/fantasizing in, 56; geometry and, 126; innovation in, 118, 130, 138; language and, 145; modern, 51, 236; neuroscience and, 14, 16; objects and, 111; objects of, 57; perception and, 18, 136, 137, 167; play and, 231; presentation and, 29; Renaissance, 51; revealing in, 154; science and, 140, 155, 157–58. See also Prehistoric art Art and Illusion (Gombrich), 128 Artistic genius, 104 Aspect perception, 39–40, 109, 112 Associative imagination, 31–32, 109 Astronomical imagination, 19 Astronomy, 19–20, 121, 122, 150–52, 154 Atom, model of, 155 Attention, 16, 87–88, 98, 99, 116 Auditory imagining, 38, 208 Austerlitz, Paul, 249 Autonomy, of imagination, 11 Autumn Rhythm (Number 30, 1950), 245 Bachelard, Gaston, 17–18, 175, 176, 179 “The Ball,” 180–82 Baraka, Amiri, 239 Bearden, Romare, 245–46 Beauty, 235 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 115 Being and Time (Heidegger), 16, 83–84, 141, 144 Belief, 30, 60, 95, 143 Benjamin, Walter, 69, 172, 174 Bernard, Émile, 20 Bettelheim, Bruno, 92 Biology, 5, 15, 129 Bisociation, 236 “Black and Blue, (What Did I Do To Be So),” 247–49 Blake, William, 113 Blanchot, Maurice, 10–11, 47 “The Blind Man,” 208–9 Blindness, 206–10 The Block II, 245–46

Body, 27, 76, 79, 159, 167, 174–80, 183, 226. See also Embodiment Body-schema, dance and, 37 Bondone, Giotto di, 126–28, 129, 130 “The Bowl of Roses,” 182 Brain, 5; art and, 15; cerebellum, 66– 67; consciousness and, 15; dorsal and ventral streams in, 66; empathy and, 165; experience and, 165; of Homo sapiens, 52; imagination and, 13–14, 21, 254; reading and, 206; size, 50; vision and, 66, 196; visualization and, 5. See also Mind Brann, Eva, 8, 28, 197 Broadway Boogie Woogie, 244 Bruno, Giordano, 121 Buoyancy, 224–25 Burial rituals, 51, 52–53 Byzantine art, 126, 128 Calvino, Italo, 237 Čapek, Josef, 193–94 Carroll, Lewis, 32–33 The Case for Mental Imagery (Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis), 196 Casey, Edward, 11, 20 Cassirer, Ernst, 139 Catastrophizing, 31 Causality, 230 Cave paintings, 51, 53–54, 55 Cézanne, Paul, 18, 76–77, 82, 126, 130–31, 134, 168 Change of the Century, 245 Chaos theory, 31 Chaplin, Charlie, 172–74, 180 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 207 Children: art of, 51–52; consciousness of, 61; counterfactual thinking in, 61; development of, 58–63; fantasy/ fantasizing of, 86; imagination in, 91; imaginative contagion in, 96; mental states and, 59–60; mindreading of, 60; play and, 2, 60–61, 91; pretense and, 61;

INDEX

rationality in, 43; reality and, 71; representation in, 60; seeing-as and, 61 Cityscapes, 106–7 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 46 cogito ergo sum, 119 Cognition: of animals, 74; biology and, 15; conceptual blending and, 223; creativity and, 217–18, 218–22; development of, 27, 28, 43, 49, 55; distortion of, 95; embodiment and, 28, 166; enactive mapping in, 67–68, 76; flow of, 223; freedom and, 10; image and, 57; imagination and, 4, 9, 68, 160; Kant on, 229–30; language and, 62–63; mind and, 22; models of, 16; modes of, 5, 13; phantasia, 6; phenomenology and, 166; poetry and, 18; science and, 125; visualization and, 211 Cognitive disruption, 235 Cognitive ecology, 2, 13, 23, 44, 218, 222, 225 Cognitive evolution, 49–53, 58–65, 166 Cognitive fluidity, 56, 220, 233 Cognitive habits, 3, 218, 233, 237 Cognitive imagery, 59 Cognitive imagination, 8 Cognitive play, 12, 23, 36, 44, 218, 228–38 Cognitive psychology, 39, 195 Cognitive style, Impressionism and, 137 Cognitive theory, 9, 16, 74, 162, 165 Coleman, Ornette, 245 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3, 7, 46, 104 Collins, Christopher, 64 Color, 211–12. See also Synaesthesia Coltrane, John, 243 Complementary relation, 8 Complexity, of imagination, 3 Comprehension, creation and, 155 Computational processing, 222 Conceptual blending, 22–23, 32, 53; bisociation, 236; cognition and, 223; creativity and, 218–22, 225; definition of, 220; jazz and, 238, 242; meaning and, 227–28; theory, 32, 221, 225, 229

333

Conceptual imagination, 194–95 Conceptual integration, 221, 227 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 211–12 Concrete imaging, 36, 39–40, 72, 85–86, 103–16 Concretization, 34, 162 Consciousness: acts of, 85; of animals, 257n1; brain and, 15; of children, 61; ecology and, 148–49; embodiment and, 15–16, 23, 26–31, 47, 56–57, 63–68, 75–81, 156, 159–83, 191, 205, 214, 216, 222, 225–26, 252, 253–54; enactive, 16, 23, 63–68, 75–76, 105, 129, 162, 171, 195–96, 225; freedom of, 84; hallucinations and, 30; of images, 18; imagination and, 4, 5, 10, 26, 84, 113, 256; imaging, 215; Impressionism and, 137; intentionality and, 189; literature and, 180; multimodal thinking and, 90–91; neuroscience and, 15; of objects, 81, 190; objects of, 26–27, 30, 80, 85; perception and, 81; philosophy and, 27; picture, 40, 110, 189; play and, 230, 231; presentation and, 28; projection of, 80; senses and, 214; transcendence and, 238; transformation and, 119–20; world, 141 Copeland, Aaron, 170 Copernicus, 121, 122, 138, 139, 152, 154 Counterfactual imagination, 36 Counterfactual thinking, 5, 29, 40–41, 61, 85 Counterreality, 89 Creative intelligence, 222 Creative process, 229 Creativity, 5; aesthetic perception, 44; aesthetics and, 104; art and, 2; artistic, 2, 8; cognition and, 217–18, 218–22; cognitive ecology and, 44, 218, 225; cognitive play and, 44, 228–37; conceptual blending and, 218–22, 225; definition of, 36, 240; demystifying, 217; development of, 52; divine, 104, 106; embodiment and, 172, 225; experience of,

334

INDEX

Creativity (cont.) 222; expressive, 32; film and, 174; image and, 29, 44; imagination and, 1, 3, 9, 12, 20, 23, 43–44, 104, 139; Impressionism, 134; interiority and, 43; jazz and, 238–39, 249; language and, 221; material and, 52–57, 58; medium of, 43; narrative and, 43; Nietzsche on, 232; perception and, 85; prehistoric, 53–54; pretense and, 86; psychology and, 236; resources of, 43; scientific, 7; semantic innovation, 44; situated, 223–28; transcendence and, 3; transformation and, 30 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 108 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 84 Cubism, 134 Cultural transmission, 64 Culture, 12, 46; imagination and, 12, 68, 186; jazz and, 242–43, 245, 248, 249, 251, 252; mental structures and, 227; scientific thinking and, 117; toolmaking and, 63–64; Western, 145 Dalcroze, Émile-Jaques, 169 Dance, 37, 159–60, 168–72, 179, 181, 231 Danto, Arthur, 106 Darwin, Charles, 21, 50, 69, 138, 139 Dasein, 75, 83–84 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 12, 21–22, 23, 126, 181, 183 Daydreaming, 25, 88, 95, 99 Debussy, Claude, 169 Decision-making, 96 Della Pittura (On Painting) (Alberti), 127 Delusion, 94, 95 Descartes, René, 6, 39, 94, 119, 120, 163, 193 Description, visualization and, 194 De Stijl, 244 Development, of children, 58–63 Diaghilev, Sergei, 169 Dimensions, 123, 129–30 Displacement, 224–25 Distortion, 23, 71–72, 93–97, 103, 193

Divergent thinking, 86–87, 89–90, 200, 218, 236–37, 240–41 Dolls, 54 Dreams, 5, 30, 56, 89, 187 Drives, 46, 231, 235, 241 Du Bois, W. E. B., 248–49 Dufrenne, Mikel, 18–19, 20 Dunbar, Robin, 58 Dürer, Albrecht, 105, 189 Early humans, 21, 65 Earth, world and, 144 Echolocation, 208 Ecocriticism, 148–49, 158 Ecology, 255–56; cognitive, 2, 13, 23, 44, 218, 222, 225; consciousness and, 148–49; poetry and, 147–48 Ecstatic experience, 2 Einbildungskraft, 45, 73 Einstein, Albert, 7, 123–25, 138, 139, 201, 229 Eliot, T. S., 148, 218, 237, 246 Ellington, Duke, 242, 243 Ellison, Ralph, 246–48 Embodiment, 24; abstraction and, 224–26; action and, 23; cognition and, 28, 166; color and, 212; consciousness and, 47, 56, 64, 162; creativity and, 172, 225; dance and, 168–69, 171; geometry and, 226; imagination and, 21, 27, 63–69, 159–60, 182–83; imaging and, 175–83; intentionality and, 26–31; literature and, 175–83; memory and, 176–78; MerleauPonty and, 21; metaphor and, 176, 178–79; mind and, 15, 181; painting and, 19–21, 167–68; perception and, 18, 76, 80, 163–64, 226; poetry and, 181–82; potentialities and, 78, 166; Pretense and, 172; response of, 160–62; role of, 71; vision and, 64–66, 168 Emotions, 104, 106, 133, 156, 169 Empathy, 14, 41, 66, 159, 162–65 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume), 95

INDEX

Environment, 12, 68 Envisioning, 7; blindness and, 206–10; inner, 125, 195, 200, 203–6, 210–16; interiority and, 4; in literature, 24; memory and, 187; objects of, 215; in reading, 203–6 Episodic thinking, 65 Escapism, 71, 159 Etymology, 45 Eureka, 223–28, 252 Evolution, 21, 23, 26, 49–53, 58–65, 69, 110–11, 166 Experience: brain and, 15; of creativity, 222; ecstatic, 2; of empathy, 165; of imagination, 4; imagination and, 12, 198–202; of objects, 79–80; of perception, 78, 110, 111, 129, 197; of reading, 17, 87–88; of seeing-as, 228; virtual, 42 Experiential imagination, 8, 37 Experimentation, 68, 129 Expression, 55–57 The Eye (Nabokov), 152 Eyewitnesses, 97 Face recognition, 133 Fairy tales, irreality/irrealism of, 92 False assertion, 89 Fancy, 46 Fantasy/fantasizing, 1, 25, 41, 45, 68, 117; in art, 56; of children, 86; free, 18, 195, 233–34; imagination and, 10; reality and, 76, 92 Fauconnier, Gilles, 22, 74, 227 Faure, Élie, 173 Fiction, 33–34, 50, 87–88; facts and, 233–34; narrative in, 90, 102; poetry and, 146, 156; pretending and, 90; reality and, 71, 91. See also Literature Film, 11, 24, 172–75 Fink, Eugene, 195 Focus imaginarius, world horizon as, 83, 152 Freedom, 3, 47; action and, 11; cognition and, 10; of consciousness, 84; human, 4,

335

86; imagination and, 10–11; jazz and, 239, 240, 242, 250; material and, 114–15; reality and, 12; Sartre and, 11, 114–15 Free fantasy, 18, 195 Free jazz, 245 Free play, 7, 231 Free representation, 231, 241 Free variation, 45, 233–34, 236–37, 241 Freud, Sigmund, 46, 218 Frost, Robert, 148 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 144, 231 Galileo, 122 Galton, Francis, 198–99 Ganis, Giorgio, 196 Gärdenfors, Peter, 64, 88–89 Gass, William, 192–93, 204, 215 Gelassenheit, 147 Genetics, 255 Genius, 217, 218, 219 Geometry, 24, 126, 129, 131, 134, 218, 226–27 Gesture, 58, 62, 172–74 God, 121, 122 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 146, 159, 202 “Going Blind,” 209–10 Gombrich, Ernst, 128–29 “Good Chib Blues,” 246 Goodman, Nelson, 139–40, 149–51 Graham, Martha, 170, 171 Gravity, 124 Gregory IX (Pope), 127 Guilford, J. P., 236 Hallucinations, 5, 89, 94, 101, 103, 187; blindness and, 208; Consciousness and, 30; objects and, 86; perception and, 93; Sartre on, 95; Wittgenstein on, 103 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 33–34 Harlem Renaissance, jazz and, 242–43 Harris, Paul, 61 Heaney, Seamus, 11

336

INDEX

Heidegger, Martin, 16, 75, 83–84, 141, 144, 145, 147, 154 Heliocentrism, 122–23 Hérodiade, 170 Hiero (King), 224 Hindemith, Paul, 170 Hobbes, Thomas, 94 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 142 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 7, 145–46 Holism, 132 Homer, 207 Homo sapiens, 50–51 “How Doggie and Pussycat Wash the Floor,” 193–94 Hull, John, 208 Humanities, 13–14, 117–18, 275n4 Human will, 104 Humboldt, Alexander von, 117 Hume, David, 3, 4, 95 Hunting, of early humans, 64, 65, 166 Husserl, Edmund, 28, 75, 77, 83, 85, 110, 153, 195; apperception and, 82; on poetry, 18; presentation and, 45; Wissenschaft, 17 Huxley, T. H., 117, 140 Hyperphantasia, 200, 201–2 Hypothetical action, 68 Hypothetical imagination, 36, 121 Hypothetical thinking (hypothesizing), 1, 5, 7, 25, 29, 37, 40–41, 120 Idealism, 233 Ideas, 22, 27, 40–41, 58, 224 Illusion, 6, 83, 97, 117, 156. See also Hallucinations Imagery, 27, 38, 59, 197, 200, 206–10 Images, 38; cognition and, 57; consciousness of, 18; creativity and, 29, 44; Einstein on, 124–25; inner, 196; intentionality and, 191; irreality/ irrealism and, 84; making, 18; nature of, 47; objects and, 191; perception and, 103, 109, 190; phenomenology and, 195; primacy of, 124; production of, 112;

reading and, 87, 161, 185–86, 192–93, 195, 197, 203– 6, 215; recognition, 133; Sartre and, 101, 114; seeing-as and, 90; seeing-in and, 111; visual, 123–24. See also Envisioning The Imaginary (Sartre), 95, 113–14 The “Imaginary,” 3, 46–47, 76 Imagination. See specific entries Imaginative contagion, 96–97, 98 Imaginative distortion, 23, 93–97 Imaginative infusion, 95–96, 98 Imaginative transference, 163 Imaging: of animals, 64–65; concrete, 36, 39–40, 72, 103–16; consciousness, 215; embodiment and, 175–83; inner, 5, 36, 37–39, 68, 80, 123, 125, 166, 177, 185, 187, 201–3; origins of, 166–75; perception and, 186; presentation and, 72 Imagining (Casey), 20 Impressionism, 129–37, 131 Improvisation, jazz and, 238, 240, 241, 244, 245–46, 249, 251 Indeterminacy, 79–85 Inference model, 165 Infinity, universe and, 121 Information processing, 217, 220, 222 Ingarden, Roman, 34 Inner envisioning, 125, 195, 200, 203–6, 210–16 Inner imaging, 5, 36, 37–39 Inner representation, 1, 5–6, 28, 33, 34, 38, 39, 56–57 Innovation, 24, 68, 112, 255; in art, 118, 130, 138; jazz and, 240, 251–52; in painting, 52, 131 Inquisition, 121 Insight, 223–28 Inspiration, 217, 218–22, 223 Intellect, 6, 120 Intentionality, 26–31, 59–60, 62, 83–84, 189, 191 Interiority: of animals, 257n1; blindness and, 210; creativity and, 43; envisioning and,

INDEX

4; imagination and, 10, 23; as virtual, 42, 64, 176, 179, 185 Intermediality, dance and, 169 Interpretation, 20, 110, 112, 128, 139, 277n32 Interpretive perception, 5 Intersubjectivity, 101, 163, 165, 209 Introspection, 16, 103, 213, 216 Intuition, 159, 166, 186, 207, 226, 230; of objects, 34; rationality and, 234; scientific, 125; sensuous, 229, 232; social, 66, 164 Invention, 23, 68, 158, 173, 201, 202, 224, 226, 228, 233, 239, 251 Invisible Cities (Calvino), 237 Invisible Man (Ellison), 246 Irreality/irrealism, 10, 46, 81, 84, 92, 150, 151, 154 Iser, Wolfgang, 11–12, 235 Ivins, William, 129 Jacob, François, 59, 155, 157 James, Henry, 16–17 James, William, 139, 149, 152, 198–200 Jarrell, Randall, 223, 227 Jazz, 227; aesthetics of, 24, 218, 238–39, 246, 249, 251, 252; cognitive play and, 237–38; conceptual blending and, 238, 242; creativity and, 238–39, 249; culture and, 242–43, 245, 248, 249, 251, 252; divergence and, 240–41; freedom and, 239, 240, 242, 250; Free jazz, 245; geometry and, 24; Harlem Renaissance and, 242–43; history of, 239; improvisation and, 238, 240, 241, 244, 245–46, 249, 251; innovation and, 240, 251–52; jam session, 249; literature and, 241, 243, 246–48; metaphor and, 247–49; performance, 239–40; poetry and, 246; as situated transcendence, 24, 218, 237–52; social context of, 239; visual art and, 243–46 Jazz (Morrison), 248–51 Johnson, Edith, 246

337

Johnson, Mark, 176 Jones, Gayl, 249 Joyce, James, 17, 33 Kafka, Franz, 50, 69, 204–6 Kandel, Eric, 135 Kandinsky, Wassily, 211–12, 244 Kant, Immanuel, 3–7, 31, 34–35, 45, 73–74, 108, 152, 229–30 Kepler, Johannes, 122–23 Kinesthetics, 38, 160, 171–72, 181, 226 Klee, Paul, 82 “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” 189 Koestler, Arthur, 236 Kosslyn, Stephen M., 196 Kuhn, Thomas, 137–38 Lakoff, George, 176 Landscape, 20, 104–6, 113, 115 Language: art and, 145; childhood development and, 58–63; cognition and, 62–63; cognitive evolution and, 58–63; communication and, 62; creativity and, 221; development of, 61, 62; Einstein on, 124–25; evolution and, 62; gesture and, 58; imagination and, 57–59, 63; intentionality and, 62; literature and, 59; memory and, 59; metaphors and, 177; oral, 59; physical aspects of, 170–71; play and, 62, 63; of poetry, 145, 146, 147; pretense and, 62; primacy of, 63; role of, 144; thought and, 58; visual imagery and, 58; written, 58, 169–70 Lascaux paintings, 55–56 Lectures on Russian Literature (Nabokov), 203–4 Lessing, Gotthold, 194 Leviathan (Hobbes), 94 Lifeworld, 140–41, 153–54, 158, 166 Linear perspective, 126–28, 129 Linguistic meaning, 7, 62, 112–13 Linguistic structures, 172 Lion-headed man sculpture, 53, 69

338

INDEX

Literary description, 16–17, 107–8 Literary theory, 192, 195 Literature, 43; consciousness and, 180; core root of, 59; divergent thinking in, 89–90; embodiment and, 175–83; envisioning in, 24; imagery in, 102, 107, 175–82, 192–94, 200, 203–6, 210, 215; of The “Imaginary,” 3; imagination and, 17; Impressionism and, 136–37; jazz and, 241, 243, 246–48; language and, 59; reality and, 146–47; responses to, 14–15; Sartre and, 143, 215; vision and, 204 Logic, 17 Lucretius, 121 Mabel’s Strange Predicament, 173 Magical thinking, 92 The Magic Mountain (Mann), 106 Make-believe, 43 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 156, 169–71, 181 Mann, Thomas, 106 “The Man of Law’s Tale,” 186 Marsalis, Branford, 246 Mathematics, 224–26, 228, 237 Meaning, 23, 68, 72, 76–77, 106, 183, 227–28 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes), 94, 119, 163, 193 De Memoria (Aristotle), 177 Memorization, 29, 201 Memory, 30; body and, 175, 177–78, 179; corrupted, 97; distortion and, 93; embodiment and, 176–78; envisioning and, 187; imagination and, 3, 72; language and, 59; perception and, 97, 133; power of, 201–2; productive imagination and, 213; Proust and, 212–15; senses and, 212–14; visual, 215; voluntary, 178, 213 Mental image, 24, 186–89, 190, 192, 195–97, 199, 229. See also Envisioning Mental states, children and, 59–60 Mental structures, culture and, 227 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 15–16, 80, 95, 101, 180, 235, 257n1; embodiment and, 21;

painting and, 18, 167–68; perception and, 47, 74–80; Sartre and, 81–82 Mesopotamia, 58 Metacognition, 55 The Metamorphosis (Kafka), 50, 69, 204–6 Metaphor, 27, 33, 232; basic, 176–77; blindness as, 207, 210; embodiment and, 176, 178–79; imagination and, 182; jazz and, 247–49; language and, 177; linguistic, 177, 221; origin of, 176; Stevens on, 33; vision and, 207 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 93 Mimesis: painting and, 167; perceptual, 197 Mind: body and, 27, 174; cogito ergo sum, 119; cognition and, 22; disembodied, 75, 76; embodiment and, 15, 181; imagination and, 1, 20, 113; Mind’s eye, 182, 185, 186–89, 198–99, 213; representation and, 74; Sartre and, 113; theory of, 58–59, 162–63; world and, 74–75 Mindreading, of children, 60. See also Theory of mind The Mind’s Eye (Sacks), 207 Mirror neurons, 14, 66, 162, 165 Miserere (Allegri), 211 Mithen, Steven, 58 Modeling: scientific, 155; situational, 63–64, 65, 67, 196 “Modern Fiction,” 137 Modernism, 126, 130, 134, 135, 136 Modern science, 6, 147. See also Scientific revolution Modern Times, 173, 174 Mondrian, Piet, 244–45 Monet, Claude, 132, 134 Montaigne, Michel de, 6, 27, 163, 185 Morrison, Toni, 248–51 Motivation, 16, 31 Motoric action, 27, 66–67 Motoric contagion, 96 Motoric neuronal response, 160–62 “The Mountain,” 105

INDEX

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 211 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 106 Multimodal thinking, 72, 85–92, 116, 151, 229 Mundane thinking, 2, 23, 74, 112, 217, 220 Music, 125, 136–37, 169, 175, 231. See also Jazz Mysterium Cosmographicum (Kepler), 122–23 Myth, 46, 56 Nabokov, Vladimir, 152, 203–4 Narrative, 20, 43, 50, 56, 90, 102 Naturalism, 130, 132 Natural movement, 108 Natural world, 56, 105, 147–48 Nature, 83, 132, 231 Nausea (Sartre), 114–15 Neanderthals, 50–51 Negation, 9, 12, 47, 113–15 Neural networks, 5, 15 Neuroaesthetics, 14, 15, 158 Neurology, 196 Neuro-nihilism, 15 Neurons, 14, 66, 76, 162–63, 165 Neuroplasticity, 16 Neuropsychology, 195 Neuroscience, 8, 13–16, 27, 76 New Poems (Rilke), 181 Nicholas of Cusa, 121 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 149, 231–32, 233, 247 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 169–70, 171 Noguchi, Isamu, 170 Nonvisual mental concepts, 193 Nonvisual perception, 211 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke), 107 Nothingness, 10, 47, 81, 113, 190, 192 Novelty, 32–33, 227, 228, 237, 241 Numbers, 223–24 Object, 32 Object constancy, 6, 73 Objectivity, 37, 79, 92, 101, 155, 165, 254 Objects: of art, 57; art and, 111; body and, 226; of consciousness, 26–27, 30, 80, 85;

339

consciousness and, 190; consciousness of, 81; of envisioning, 215; experience of, 79–80; hallucinations and, 86; image and, 191; imagination and, 29, 190–91; Impressionism and, 132; intuition of, 34; Kant on, 108; multimodal thinking and, 89; in neuroscience, 76; perception and, 73, 77–78, 81, 86; permanence, 68; potentialities of, 77–78; qualities of, 77; recognition of, 74; symbols and, 77; transformation and, 30, 230; transformation of, 61; unreal, 35; visualization, 200 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 34 On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness (Hull), 208 “On the Force of Imagination,” 27 On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (De l’infinito Universo et Mondi)(Copernicus), 121 On the Way to Language (Heidegger), 147 Oppenheim, Meret, 32 Optics, 83, 120 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 144, 146, 147 Others, 162, 163, 164, 179 Ovid, 146 Pain, 162, 163, 164, 179 Painting, 57; abstract expressionist, 136, 245; aesthetic receptivity and, 20; cave, 51, 53–54, 55; dimensions in, 129–30; embodiment and, 19–21, 167–68; geometry and, 134; geometry in, 131; imagination and, 19–20; Impressionism in, 131–33, 137; innovation in, 52, 131; interpretation and, 20; linear perspective and, 126–28, 129; Merleau-Ponty and, 18, 167–68; mimesis and, 167; modernism and, 130, 134, 135, 136; play and, 231; poetry and, 33; Renaissance, 12, 131; representation in, 129; spatial perspective in, 128; vanishing point, 127, 130; visual perception and, 76–77, 130–31

340

INDEX

Panofsky, Erwin, 129 Pantomime, 59, 172 Parataxis, poetry and, 146 Pascal, Blaise, 6, 46, 94 Pattern recognition, 220, 222 Patterns, 111, 112, 196, 217 Pensées (Pascal), 94 Perception: action and, 76; aesthetic, 44, 103–16; art and, 18, 136, 137, 167; aspect, 39–40, 109, 112; belief and, 30; concrete, 85–86; consciousness and, 81; creativity and, 85; embodiment and, 18, 76, 80, 163–64, 226; emotions and, 106; experience of, 78, 110, 111, 129, 197; hallucinations and, 93; Husserl on, 82–83; image and, 103, 109, 190; imagination and, 8, 11, 40, 71, 72–79, 81–82, 88, 96, 98–103, 113, 190; imaging and, 186; inputs, 38; integrity of, 86; intentionality and, 83–84; interpretation and, 110, 277n32; interpretive, 5; meaning and, 76–77; memory and, 97, 133; Merleau-Ponty and, 47, 74–80; nonvisual, 211; objects and, 73, 77–78, 81, 86; perspectival, 76–77; phenomenology of, 18, 77; pictorial, 40; productive imagination and, 6; reality and, 23, 71, 72, 77, 82, 90, 98, 100, 116; Sartre and, 81, 113; seeing-as and, 40, 108, 111, 256; sensory-motor, 33, 56–57, 178; sensory stimuli and, 87; structuring, 6–7; subjectivity of, 196, 197; symbolic, 25, 39–40; virtual content of, 77–79; visual, 29, 38, 39, 66, 76–77, 130–31, 277n32; of visual art, 14; vitality of, 82; world and, 74–75, 85. See also Apperception Perceptual horizon, 78 Perceptual mimesis, imagery and, 197 Perceptual space, 168 Performance art, 160–61 Perspectival perception, 76–77 Perspectival realism, 128 Perspective, in Renaissance, 126–27

Perspectivism, 149 Petit, Philippe, 160–61 Phantasia, 6, 45 Phantasie, 45 Phantasmata, 177 Phenomenology, 9, 116, 142, 153; cognition and, 166; of dance, 171; image and, 195; imagination and, 17, 235; method of, 17–18, 143; of perception, 18, 77; philosophy and, 17; play and, 233–34; of revealing, 142; science and, 142 Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Dufrenne), 18–19 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), 15–16, 74–75, 80–81, 95, 101, 180, 235 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 111 Physics, 153 Piaget, Jean, 91 Picasso, Pablo, 136, 138 Pictorial perception, 40 Picture-consciousness, 40, 110, 189 Pinker, Steven, 194–95 Pissarro, Camille, 132 Planets, 121–23 Plato, 3, 4, 6, 33, 93, 143, 167, 207 Play, 52, 55; aesthetics and, 237; art and, 231; children and, 2, 60–61, 91; cognitive, 12, 23, 36, 44, 218, 228–38; consciousness and, 230, 231; context of, 88; dance and, 231; drive, 231, 235, 241; free, 7, 229, 230, 231, 235; human, 231; imagination and, 4; language and, 62, 63; mental, 235; multimodal thinking and, 229; music and, 231; painting and, 231; phenomenology and, 233–34; poetry and, 231; presentational, 234; pretending and, 60–61; pretense and, 43; spontaneity and, 222; theories of, 229. See also Fantasy/fantasizing Poe, Edgar Allen, 156 “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” 105

INDEX

Poetic images, 18, 156, 169, 175, 192 “The Poetic Principle,” 156 The Poetics of Space (Bachelard), 175 Poetic thinking, 35 Poetry, 6, 35; cognition and, 18; dance and, 170–71, 181; ecology and, 147–48; embodiment and, 181–82; fiction and, 146, 156; Husserl on, 18; illusion and, 156; imagination in, 146; jazz and, 246; language of, 145, 146, 147; natural world and, 147–48; painting and, 33; parataxis and, 146; play and, 231; reality and, 11, 12; revealing in, 84–85, 143–44, 145, 154; science and, 147; sensory-motor perception and, 33; Stevens on, 156; Symbolist, 156; truth and, 144, 146. See also Literature; Metaphor Poincaré, Henri, 228 Pointillism, 132 Pollack, Jackson, 136, 245 Post-Impressionism, 134, 135 Potentiality, 77–78, 79–85, 98, 166 Pragmatism, 23, 118 Prehistoric art, 53–56, 111 Presentation, 5, 26–31, 38, 57, 67–68, 72; Husserl and, 45 Presentational play, 234 Pretending, 42–43, 60–61, 90, 91–92, 96 Pretense, 1, 5, 29, 42–43; action and, 42; children and, 61; dance and, 37; Embodiment and, 172; imagination and, 193; language and, 62; play and, 43; pretending and, 42–43; reality and, 36, 85, 91; robust, 42; seeing-as and, 89 Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings, 246 Primary imagination, 104 Production, of image, 112 Productive figuration, 235 Productive imagination, 3, 4, 6, 9, 52, 127; Impressionism and, 135–36; Kant on, 31, 34–35, 73, 152; memory and, 213; perception and, 6; reading and, 102; reality and, 35; reproductive imagination

341

and, 34; in Shakespeare, 33–34; as spontaneity, 31; transformation and, 31–36 Projection, 80, 83, 84, 98, 115 Projective imagination, 82 Propositional imagination, 8, 37, 195 Proust, Marcel, 17, 88, 177, 179, 205, 212–15 Psychoanalysis, 3, 46 Psychology, 13, 219; cognitive, 39; creativity and, 236; developmental, 59; of imagination, 17–18; neuropsychology, 195; Sartre and, 17–18 Psychosis, 95 Quantum mechanics, 121 Racism, 247, 248 Raphael, 127 Rationality, 6, 9, 91, 116, 119, 254; in children, 43; intuition and, 234; knowledge and, 138 Reading, 17, 87–88, 102, 203–6 Realism, 17 Reality, 253; access to, 139, 142; air of, 16–17; alternatives to, 41, 71, 113–14; children and, 71; counterfactual thinking and, 85; distortion of, 71–72, 193; fantasy/ fantasizing and, 76, 92; fiction and, 71, 91; freedom and, 12; ideas and, 22, 40–41; imagination and, 10, 11–12, 22, 76, 100, 157; interpretation of, 139; literature and, 146–47; negation of, 114; objective, 6; perception and, 23, 71, 72, 77, 82, 90, 98, 100, 116; possibillity and, 84, 116, 155, 253–55; potentiality and, 71, 76, 79–98, 116; pretending and, 91–92; pretense and, 36, 85, 91; productive imagination and, 35; revealing and, 157; scientific thinking and, 157; Stevens on, 157; transcendence and, 53; world and, 150 Reductionism, 149 Relativism, 150–51 Relativity theory, 124, 138, 153

342

INDEX

Rembrandt, 138 Remembrance, 210–16 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust), 177, 212–15 Renaissance, 12, 51, 77, 126–27, 129, 131 Representation, 51; in children, 60; construction of, 110; false, 88; free, 231, 241; inner, 1, 5–6, 28, 33, 34, 38, 39, 56–57; linguistic forms of, 192; medium of, 55; mind and, 74; of nature, 231; in painting, 129; reproductive, 35; spatial, 76 Reproductive imagination, 3, 28, 30, 33, 34, 228 Reproductive representation, 35 The Republic (Plato), 33, 207 Resemblance, 3, 109, 132, 133, 197. See also Mimesis Response: of embodiment, 160–62; empathy, 162–63, 164; motoric, 27, 162, 180 Revealing: in art, 154; phenomenology of, 142; in poetry, 84–85, 143–44, 145, 154; reality and, 157; science and, 118; world, 137–54 Richard II (Shakespeare), 100 Ricoeur, Paul, 33–34, 35, 135–36, 219 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 105, 107, 148, 180–82, 205, 208–9 The Rite of Spring, 169 Rituals, 51, 52, 57, 63 Romare Bearden Revealed, 246 “The Rose’s Interior,” 182 Rothko, Mark, 135, 136 Ruskin, John, 130–31 Ryle, Gilbert, 39, 191–92, 197 Sacks, Oliver, 95, 207 The Sand Reckoner (Archimedes), 223–24 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 46, 95, 215; aesthetics and, 105; freedom and, 11, 114–15; on hallucination, 95; image and, 101, 114; imagination and, 10, 12, 20, 82, 84, 113, 189–92; literature and, 143, 215; Merleau-Ponty and, 81–82; mind and,

113; perception and, 81, 113; psychology and, 17–18 Scarry, Elaine, 197, 200 Schiller, Friedrich, 231, 235 Schizophrenia, 95 Schlegel, Friedrich, 7 The School of Athens, 127 Science: art and, 140, 155, 157–58; cognition and, 125; humanities and, 117–18, 275n4; imagination in, 7–8, 118–25; paradigm shift in, 138; phenomenology and, 142; poetry and, 147; revealing and, 118 Scientific creativity, 7 Scientific discovery, 14, 23, 139 Scientific intuition, 125 Scientific method, 140 Scientific revolution, 119, 138 Scientific thinking, 17–18, 117, 118–25, 157 Sculpture, 54, 58, 177 Searle, John, 89 Secondary imagination, 104 Seeing-as, 5, 39–40, 103–16; aesthetic experience and, 37; children and, 61; experiences of, 72, 228; image and, 90; imagination and, 7; interpretation and, 112; linguistic meaning, 62, 112–13; perception and, 40, 108, 111, 256; pretense and, 89 Seeing-in, 111 Self-consciousness, 138 Self-reflection, 3, 50, 68 Semantic innovation, 44 Senses, 6, 27, 94–95, 206, 212–14 Sensory-motor perception, 33, 56–57, 178 Sensory stimuli, 87 Sensuous imagination, 8, 28, 37, 195 Sensuous intuition, 229, 232 Sensuous perception, 168 Shakespeare, William, 95, 146, 186, 213; distortion in, 93; fancy in, 46; imagination and, 100–101; productive imagination in, 33–34; vision in, 207 Shklovsky, Victor, 236

INDEX

Silent films, 172–74 Silent music, 175 Simmel, Georg, 105 Simulation theory, 162, 164 Sistine Chapel, 211 Situational modeling, 65 Slavery, 242 Smith, Jimmy, 243 Snow, C. P., 140 “The Snowman,” 86 Social bonding, 54 Social cognition, 59, 62, 66, 163, 165–66. See also Empathy Social intuition, 66, 164 Socrates, 207 Solar system, 122 Sonnets to Orpheus (Rilke), 148 Sontag, Susan, 162 Sophocles, 34, 207 Spatial depth, 65 Spatial localization, 196 Spatial representation, 76 Speech, 90 Spontaneity, 2, 20, 31, 222, 238, 239, 245–46 Starry Night, 19–20 Stein, Gertrude, 136 De Stella Nova (Kepler), 122 Stevens, Wallace, 86, 236–37; imagination and, 11, 12, 36, 105; Jarrell and, 223; on metaphor, 33; on poetry, 156; on reality, 157 Stone toolmaking, 50 Storytelling, 43, 56, 92 Strange liberty, 10–11 Strayhorn, Billy, 242 Subjectivity, 37, 47, 75, 155, 196, 197, 254 Sudden insight, 223–28 Suffering, 164 Survival, 64, 65, 129 Symbolic action, 51 Symbolic expression, 1 Symbolic imagination, 21 Symbolic perception, 25, 39–40

343

Symbolism, 109 Symbolist poetry, 156 Symbols, 77, 104 Symmetry, 194 Symposium (Plato), 186, 207 Synaesthesia, 186, 210–16 “Take the A Train,” 242, 243 Technology, 148, 175, 255 Tesla, Nikola, 125, 199, 201–2 Theoria, 143 Theory of general relativity, 124, 138 Theory of mind, 60, 162–63, 165. See also Mindreading Theseus, 93–94 Thinking. See Cognition “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” 236–37 Thompson, William L., 196 Thought experiments, 124 Tolstoy, Leo, 203–4 Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, 246 Tool use, 63–65 Toys, 51, 61, 91 The Train, 246 Trakl, Georg, 146 The Tramp, 173 Transcendence, 21, 49; body and, 159; consciousness and, 238; creativity and, 3; Dasein and, 84; imagination and, 253; jazz as situated, 24, 218, 237–52; objectivity and, 79; reality and, 53; reconfiguration of, 158 Transference, 163 Transformation, 26, 73, 116; consciousness and, 119–20; creativity and, 30; imagination and, 4, 5, 73; of objects, 61; objects and, 30, 230; presentation and, 26–31, 57; productive imagination and, 31–36 Truth: appearance and, 149–50; imagination and, 120; objectivity and, 92; poetry and, 144, 146; scientific method and, 140

344

INDEX

Turner, J. M. W., 130, 227 Turner, Mark, 22, 74 Ulysses (Joyce), 33 Unconscious, 46 Underground Railroad, 242 Universe, 121, 122 Validation, 23, 155, 156 Van Gogh, Vincent, 19–20, 130 Vanishing point, 127, 130 Vergegenwärtigung, 28, 45, 189 Victory Boogie Woogie, 244–45 Virtual: content of perception, 77–79; experience, 42; interiority as, 42, 64, 176, 179, 185 The Visible and the Invisible (MerleauPonty), 47, 81 Vision: animals and, 110–11; biology and, 129; brain and, 66, 196; early human, 65; in early humans, 21; embodiment and, 64–66, 168; emotion and, 133; evolution and, 110–11; focus, 65; imagination and, 7; Impressionism and, 132–33; interpretation and, 128; literature and, 204; metaphor and, 207; in Shakespeare, 207; spatial depth, 65; structure of human, 128; survival and, 129 Visual art: experimentation in, 129; jazz and, 243–46; perception of, 14. See also Art Visual cortex, 39, 196 Visual image, 24, 58, 123–24, 188–89, 201–2. See also Envisioning; Mental image Visual imagination, 39, 185, 201–2 Visual imaging, 185–86 Visualization, 37, 102; brain and, 5; cognition and, 211; description and, 194; inner, 18, 20, 123, 188, 194–95, 200; nature of, 186; neurology and, 196; objects, 200; power of, 201–2; in scientific thinking, 123;

senses and, 212; weak, 198; writing and, 203 Visual memory, 215 Visual perception, 29, 38, 39, 66, 76–77, 130–31, 277n32 Visual processing, 66 Vitruvius, 224 Voluntary memory, 178, 213 Vorstellungen, 45 Vorstellungskraft, 45 Waller, Fats, 247 Walton, Kendall, 231 Warnock, Mary, 105, 114 The Wasteland (Eliot), 148, 246 What Is Literature? (Sartre), 192 White Light, 245 Winnicott, D. W., 228 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7, 10, 39–40, 90, 97, 102–3, 111 Wollheim, Richard, 111 Woolf, Virginia, 17, 106, 137 Wordsworth, William, 159, 183 World: body and, 76, 79; consciousness, 141; earth and, 144; imagination and, 185; mind and, 74–75; perception and, 74–75, 85; plurality of, 153; projection of, 84; reality and, 150; revealing, 137–54; special, 153; subjectivity and, 75; versions, 150; worldhood of, 83, 141 World horizon, 79–85, 83, 98, 107–8, 115, 152, 154, 158 Worldmaking, 23, 118, 137–54, 157 World War I, 148 World War II, 244 Writing, visualization and, 203 Yeats, William Butler, 159, 179 Zettel (Wittgenstein), 102–3