Eva T. H. Brann: The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 17, Number 1, April 1993.
Imagining takes up so much of our mental life, yet so little of the ‘philosophy of mind,’ that Eva T. H. Brann calls it “the missing mystery of philosophy” (3). Understandably so: How can the ‘mind’s eye’ look at itself? She undertakes to clarify if not to ‘solve’ the mystery by examining six topics: the cognitive nature of the imagination, the psychological function of imagery, the logical status of the image, literary imagining, pictorial imaging, and the way imagination works in the world, i.e., in the practices of religion, politics, and private life.
With Aristotelian deliberateness, Brann canvasses an extraordinary range of learned opinion without ever losing sight of commonsense opinion. (The book is “dedicated… to the salvation of the obvious” [5].) Her learning is so wide and her thoughtfulness so unflagging that her book at the very least can serve as a comprehensive reference work on each topic—as a guide to and of further study. But it is much more than that, as the sum of her erudition does not confuse the substance of her argument.
In classical philosophy imagination is a faculty of the mind. Imagination is indispensable to cognition because images “have a middle status between the being proper to a form in matter and the being proper to a form that has come into the intellect through abstraction from matter” (62). In its work of abstracting ideas from perceived materials, the intellect needs images. By contrast, according to Descartes and his successors, willing motivated by the passions is the preeminent attribute of the human mind. Imagination loses its function as an aid to understanding nature, and becomes an incitement to the conquest of nature. In Kant, for example, the human self is as hidden and unknowable as the Biblical God, and in its own way as creative—its mental faculties imposing forms upon appearances. Modern philosophy tends either toward dismissing imagination as useless for this constructive task (Locke, Hume, modern rationalism generally) or, at the other extreme, exalting it above all other faculties (Romanticism).
Modern psychology reflects this difficulty. Psychologists try to “extract measurable evidence” (209) from interior experiences that are “behaviorally inaccessible and formalistically inarticulable” (222). “Claiming that the brain imagines is like saying the mouth eats—a suggestive metonymical figure but not a sufficient account” (266). Still, recent psychologists have turned up evidence that the imagination does indeed exist—a point denied by many of their predecessors.
Brann’s consideration of the relation of images to logic reinforces the psychologists’ discovery. She discusses Plato’s Sophist, showing how an image, the product of the imagination, is even while it is not the original of that which it is the image. Even a lie is something, albeit not what the liar wants his auditor to believe it is. The image is other and less than the original, but it does exist, with its own center of gravity. “Fictions have force” (246).
The force of those fictions called literature arises from the complementarity of sight and speech, the human power to represent sights in words that bring out the significance of the sights they conjure. If too far separated from originals, however, sight and words deceive—as in Romanticism, which Brann describes as imagination’s “fateful attempt at self-sufficiency” (520). The imaging of nonverbal depiction—whether mathematical, as in geometry, or painterly—requires “the fit of thought and space” (596). In modern, non-Euclidean, geometry a sort of Romanticism creeps in, as the mathematician posits or wills delimitations of infinite space; axioms or intuitions disappear, replaced by arbitrary concepts. Interestingly, Brann does not make this charge with respect to modern painting; abstraction there starts with imaging (641), and therefore with originals. Modern politics is another matter, as Brann cites the ill-fated exhortation written on a wall in Paris in 1968: “Let the imagination seize power” (712). Utopias are, paradoxically, powerful only when they are not willed, as may be seen by contrasting the longevity of Plato’s ideal city with the evanescence of the dreams of Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
If the imagination serves as sort of pivot between the senses and the intellect, spiritedness (the Greek thumos)—that part of the soul that get angry, that loves honor and victory—serves as a pivot in the soul “between the gross desire for things and the love of truth about them” (767). Imagination and spiritedness are related, as even social workers see when the speak of the ‘need for a positive self-image’ as indispensable to ‘self-esteem.’ Brann discusses this relation succinctly, and might have done more with it. It may have been quite significant in the transition from ‘ancient’ to ‘modern.’ It is surely significant in the academy today, where so many of the confusions in literary criticism and political activism evidently arise from a sophistic-Romantic inclination to conflate intellectual eros with a polemicized imagination.
This book represents a lifetime’s observation, reading, thoughts, and imaginings. Thankfully, there can never be a definitive work on the subject. There is now a just and wise one.
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