Excerpt from "imagination"

Thomas, Nigel JT, Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind

https://sites.google.com/site/minddict/imagination

imagination

Traditionally, the mental capacity for experiencing, constructing, or manipulating 'mental imagery' (quasi-perceptual experience). Imagination is also regarded as responsible for fantasy, inventiveness, idiosyncrasy, and creative, original, and insightful thought in general, and, sometimes, for a much wider range of mental activities dealing with the non-actual, such as supposing, pretending, 'seeing as', thinking of possibilities, and even being mistaken. See representation.

Introduction

Despite being a familiar word of everyday language, imagination is a very complex, contested, and evaluatively loaded concept. It, like many cognate terms, often appears to have radically different senses and connotations when used in different contexts. Furthermore, although it plays only a small overt role in most contemporary theories of the mind, it has played a much more prominent part in the past. The concept will thus best be understood through its history.

Ancient and Medieval Conception

The concept of the imagination seems to have been first introduced into philosophy by Aristotle, who tells us that "imagination [phantasia] is (apart from any metaphorical sense of the word) the process by which we say that an image [phantasma] is presented to us" (De Anima, 428a 1-4). It has been questioned in recent times whether the Greek words phantasia and phantasma are really equivalent to "imagination" and "(mental) image" as heard in contemporary usage. However, there can be little doubt that, at least until very recent times, theoretical discussions of phantasia, its Latin translation imaginatio, and their etymological descendants, continued to be rooted in the concepts introduced by Aristotle and the problems arising from his rather elliptical explanation of them. Very arguably this is true of all Western philosophical schools: Stoics, Epicureans and Neoplatonists quite as much as avowed Aristoteleans; Muslims as much as Christians; and, come to that, Empiricists quite as much as Rationalists.

According to Aristotle "The soul never thinks without a mental image [phantasma]" (De Anima, 431a 15-20). It would appear that, for him (and, again, for most of successors, until very recently), such images played something like the role that is played in contemporary cognitive theory by "mental representations". In this tradition, imagery, and thus imagination, has an essential role to play in all forms of thinking (with the possible exception of direct intuitions of Platonic forms, or of the divine). It has no special connection with inventiveness or creativity.[???]

It does, however, have a special connection with desire. Aristotle argues that our desire for (and, thus, pursuit of) anything not actually present to the senses must be mediated by an image of the desired object. Aristotle's treatment is morally neutral, but his notion of desirous imagination may later have become conflated with the Hebraic concept of yetser, the willful (but also semi-divine) faculty in humanity that led to Adam's (and, indeed, all subsequent) sin. At any rate, in the Judaeo-Christian intellectual tradition (from ancient to relatively recent times) imagination, although recognized as indispensable to cognition, was usually profoundly distrusted. Unless strictly disciplined by reason it would soon lead us into concupiscence and sin.

But, of course, the connection between imagination and perception is the more fundamental.

Aristotle's conception of phantasia/imagination seems to be closely bound up with his postulation of what came to be called the "common sense" or sensus communis. This is the part of the psyche responsible for the binding of the deliverances of the individual sense organs into a coherent and intelligible representation, and for apprehending the so called "common sensibles", those aspects of the world (broadly, the spatio-temporal aspects) that can be known through more than one sense mode without being the characteristic proper object of any of them (Aristotelian common sensibles are broadly coextensive with Lockean "primary qualities"). In fact, it is plausible to interpret phantasia and sensus communis as different aspects or modes of a single faculty, depending on whether it is regarded as receptive or productive, or on whether it is operating in the presence or the absence of whatever is being mentally represented. Phantasmata are generated in either case, but when their immediate cause is an object directly before us the tendency is to refer to them as percepts, and to the process as perception; when memory of previously observed things is the source, reference will more likely be to imagery and imagination. Thus imagination came to be particularly associated with thinking about things that are not actually currently present to the senses: things that are not really there.

Some of Aristotle's successors tended to lay the stress on the conceptual separation of the notions of imagination and sensus communis. Thus Early Christian and Medieval anatomists often located sensuscommunis at the front of the brain's first ventricle, ready to receive sense impressions, whereas imagination was placed at the rear of this ventricle (or even in the second ventricle), and was responsible for holding and perhaps consolidating the resultant images, and passing them back to the other ventricles and faculties (where they could be used in thought or stored in memory). Imagination might also, sometimes, be held responsible for the recombining of various image parts into chimerical forms.
 

This latter type of process would allow the individual mind a degree of freedom and a scope for idiosyncracy that would hardly have been available from the other traditional faculties, constrained as they were by reality and the laws of logic. It would also, of course, give rise to images even more removed from present actuality than images retrieved intact from memory, and thus even more quintessentially imaginary. In this vein, we sometimes find modern writers making a distinction between "memory imagery" and "imagination imagery", or even restricting the use of "imagination" (and, a fortiori, "imaginary") to thoughts about things that have never (or never yet) been actually experienced. (For some reason, words derived from the original Greek term, such as "fantasy", "fancy", or "phantasm", seem to have come to connote unreality even more strongly than "imagination" and its cognates. It is worth noting that some medieval authors, finding both the Greek and the Latin terms available, did attempt to draw functional and anatomical distinctions between imaginatio and phantasia, but no clear consensus on how this distinction was to be drawn is apparent, and these attempts seem unlikely to have significantly influenced more recent usages.)

Modern Usage

Other ancient and medieval authors, however, were more inclined to stress the underlying identity of the imagination and the common sense, and this interpretation probably became more widespread with the increased availability of more accurate Aristotelian texts and translations in the later middle ages and renaissance. We find this tendency even in such a consciously anti-Aristotelian figure as Descartes, who, in the Treatise on Man, explicitly identifies both the sensus communis and the imagination with the surface of the pineal gland, upon which images (ide�s) both of sense and of memory or fancy are inscribed. Although it is important not to confuse these "corporeal ideas" with the "clear and distinct ideas" that play so prominent a part in Descartes' epistemology, it is surely not coincidental that the site of the Cartesian imagination/sensus communis, the pineal surface, is also the privileged site of mind-body interaction, the lynchpin that holds together the two metaphysical worlds of Cartesianism. As it had done for Aristotle, the imagination/sensus communis mediated between the bodily senses, and the (now incorporeal) rational mind.

After the conceptual revolutions of the 17th century the Aristotelian concept of sensus communis largely disappeared from philosophical discussion, and, inasmuch as the functions that had been ascribed to it were considered of interest, they were likely to be directly ascribed to imagination. In the Empiricist tradition, images, under the rubric of "ideas", came more than ever to be seen as the preeminent, even the only, form of mental content. Hume, indeed, frequently uses "imagination" as a virtual synonym for "mind." This is reasonable enough inasmuch as he regards the mind as no more than a bundle of images (impressions and ideas), and cognition as a matter of their vicissitudes and associative interactions. But even for Hume, imagination has a special perceptual role to play. It bears the responsibility (through the way in which it automatically associates similar and contiguous impressions) for our natural tendency to believe in the existence of real and persistent objects existing outside the mind. Likewise (because it also tends to associate similar impressions or impression complexes with certain words) it is responsible for the way that we categorize things into kinds (seeing both Rover and Fido as dogs, for example).

In a sense, for Hume, these latter functions of imagination are defects of the human mind. Philosophical analysis (he argues) shows that our natural belief (engendered by imagination) that the world contains various objects of various kinds cannot be rationally grounded.

Kant assigns similar functions to imagination [einbildungskraft], but without such a skeptical twist. Imagination makes knowledge of the phenomenal world possible, by synthesizing the incoherent sensory manifold into representational images suitable to be brought under concepts. The Kantian imagination, in this regard, seems, broadly speaking, to fill much the same role as the Aristotelian sensus communis. However, it has by now become clear just how poorly we understand how any such faculty could possibly work. Kant rejects Hume's purely associative account, and argues that the imaginative synthesis must be governed by a priori rules or schemata, but how they operate is "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover" (Critique of Pure Reason A141-B181). The question as to how meaningful mental representations can arise in us remains obscure (or, at the least, very controversial) to this day.