CHAPTER 1
Imagination: the missing mystery
of philosophy?
Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations and
impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured to baffle the logician, to perplex
the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity.
(Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no.125, 28 May 1751)
In much of western thought, the imagination has an ambiguous status,
seemingly poised between spirit and nature, mediating between mind and
body 鈥? the mental and the physical 鈥? and interceding between one soul and
another. For Aristotle, the imagination 鈥? or phantasia 鈥? was a kind of bridge
between sensation and thought, supplying the images or 鈥榩hantasms鈥? without
which thought could not occur. Descartes argued that the imagination was not
an essential part of the mind, since it dealt with images in the brain whose
existence 鈥? unlike that of the mind 鈥? could be doubted. Kant, on the other
hand, held that the imagination was fundamental to the human mind, not only
bringing together our sensory and intellectual faculties but also acting in
creative ways, a conception that was to blossom in Romanticism and find
poetic expression in the works of Coleridge and Wordsworth. More recently,
the role of the imagination in empathy has been stressed: the ability to identify
with our fellow human beings and with fictional characters being regarded as
crucial in accessing other minds, enriching our own experience and
developing our moral sense. In fact, in the history of western thought, the
imagination has been seen as performing such a wide range of different
functions that it is problematic whether it can be understood as a single faculty
at all. In imagination we are able to think of what is absent, unreal or even
absurd, and so it appears to grant us almost unlimited conceptual powers. Yet
it also seems to inform our perception of what is present and real and everyday,
and so permeates the most basic levels of our daily lives. In this first chapter,
we will be concerned with some of the different ways in which the imagination
is talked of and conceived, exploring just what the imagination might be and
what philosophical issues it raises.
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