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The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the

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 INTRODUCTION

Thinking Imagination

I
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
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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 imag-
ination 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 accord-
ingly 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

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
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 2 INTRODUCTION

perhaps also more audacious: to understand the place of imagination in

our cognitive ecology, its role in ordinary cognition as well as its exqui-
site 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 ani-
mals do imagine in a number of ways,2 and human imagination, under-
stood here as arising from our evolved, embodied life, will share some-
thing 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 constitu-
tively to the full dimensionality of human consciousness and our rela-
tions 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
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

imaginative activity here, we will trace exceptional moments of imagi-

native 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 discov-
ery, 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

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
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 INTRODUCTION 3

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 funda-
mental 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 depic-
tion of imagination as essentially reproductive reigned in philosophy
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

almost uninterrupted from Plato to the mid-eighteenth century and

remains characteristic of many contemporary views of the mind. Imman-
uel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic writers, and Friedrich
Nietzsche offered alternatives, yet the impact of their exploration of pro-
ductive 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 read-
ily 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 imagi-
nation does can be considered in reproductive terms. Aristotle classi-
fied 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

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
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 4 INTRODUCTION

from previous experience. Insofar as new ideas seem to occur to us, imagi-
nation 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 dimen-
sion 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 imag-
ination, as Jean-Paul Sartre aimed to show, is essential to human freedom.
Yet the obstacles to an adequate grasp of imagination remain consid-
erable 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 promi-
nent faculty of human consciousness it remains opaque. Kant describes
imagination as “a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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 phi-
losophers 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 imagin-
ing 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

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
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 INTRODUCTION 5

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 under-
way,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 con-
sciousness 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 per-
ception, hypothetical or counterfactual thinking, pretense, and creativ-
ity, which makes use of the other modes. Operations in the background
of conscious awareness that have been attributed to imagination as con-
ditions of possibility for experience will also be considered. This defini-
tion of imagination—and the necessity of a multifactorial account and
reference to several strata—will be elaborated through the first three chap-
ters in light of imagination’s evolutionary, scientific, and phenomeno-
logical contexts. The exercises of imagination especially important in this
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

study involve its integration of possibility with the given. Thus, despite
their importance, dreams, hallucinations, and other largely passive expe-
riences 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 real-
ity, in others to depart from and transcend it.
When imagination is understood as the presentational and transfor-
mational 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 persis-
tently identified as the capacity for internal representation of previous

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
Created from jhu on 2019-08-10 10:45:03.
 6 INTRODUCTION

perceptions retained in memory. For Plato, this was imagination’s irre-

vocable 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 imagina-
tion, Aristotle countered that no thought is possible without some involve-
ment of imagination. Imagination—in the form of mimetic creativity—is
also aligned in Aristotle’s poetics with the thought of possibility. Aristo-
tle 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 Des-
cartes, and Blaise Pascal, the imagination was demoted again to an ines-
sential 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 control-
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

ling the activity and influence of internal representation. While imagina-

tion 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 percep-
tion, 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 philosophi-
cal 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

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
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 INTRODUCTION 7

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 impres-
sions 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 can-
not 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 aes-
thetics, 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 cen-
tury these somewhat mystifying treatments of imagination were rejected
for more tempered assessments. Ludwig Wittgenstein recognized imagi-
nation at work in aspect perception, or “seeing-as,” for instance recogniz-
ing 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 per-
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

ception 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, envi-
sioning, 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 contem-
plation 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.

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
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 8 INTRODUCTION

Yet recognizing imagination as relevant not only to artistic creativity and

aesthetic experience but also to scientific thought strains narrowly con-
scribed definitions of imagining. In order to grapple with the heteroge-
neity of imagination, some philosophers have distinguished between
the “sensuous,” “perceptual,” or “experiential” imagination—the capac-
ity 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 imagina-
tion’s role in the evolution of our humanity or accounts for the role of
embodiment in imagining. Even Eva Brann’s monumental study of imag-
ination, 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 anthropol-
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

ogy, 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 imag-
ination’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 cogni-
tive states, or rely only on a reproductive view of imagining, or demand
empirical verification beyond introspective evidence. While a method-
ological skepticism in this approach yields clarity along with epistemic
conservatism, it risks underappreciating the imagination in its full dimen-
sionality, its relevance across human life and thinking. This tradition,

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
Created from jhu on 2019-08-10 10:45:03.
 INTRODUCTION 9

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 tradi-
tion 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 tex-
tual interpretation without concrete reference to the experience of actual
human subjects and what we can know about them. While there are mer-
its to these approaches, the imaginary remains undefined, often deliber-
ately 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 oth-
erness, 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
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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 cog-
nitive 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 idiosyn-
crasies that often render arguments unapproachable outside these special-
ist traditions.
While philosophical in substance and method, this account finds inspi-
ration 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

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
Created from jhu on 2019-08-10 10:45:03.
 10 INTRODUCTION

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 imag-
ining, 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 imagina-
tion’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 trans-
formational activity of consciousness can operate at several levels of our
cognitive life. The special, sustained, or highly developed transforma-
tions of imagining contribute to the construction of fictional worlds and
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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 consider-
ation. 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

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
Created from jhu on 2019-08-10 10:45:03.
 INTRODUCTION 11

liberty” of literary and artistic experience as entering a “void,” a space radi-

cally 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 possi-
bilities for their own sake, such as “when we speak of imagining Pegasus
flying through the sky.”23 Because what we imagine is ontologically dis-
tinct from reality, imagination does allow us to seem to escape reality, at
least in inward thought, contemplation, and feeling. Beyond indepen-
dent 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 con-
sider 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
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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 con-
figuration 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

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
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 12 INTRODUCTION

intersubjective goal: namely, the imaginary correction of deficient real-

ities.”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 con-
trast 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 expe-
rience 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
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

of experiences that are singular, in which the way is off-piste, the proce-
dure 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 rele-
vant 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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 INTRODUCTION 13

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 pre-
scribed activities: choosing among various images on a screen while lis-
tening 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.
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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 implica-
tion 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 neces-
sarily 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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 14 INTRODUCTION

complex activities of imagining such as undertaken in the context of lit-

erature 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 deter-
mined in advance, may be more difficult to submit to observation. Con-
siderable knowledge about the brain may be perhaps obtained if we could
observe in detail the physiological events occurring during the most con-
centrated, 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
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and cognitive patterns underlying our experience of vision. Thus the per-
ception 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 neu-
roscientists: 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 under-
stand literature as grounded in mirror neurons, in which synapses fire in
observing others’ actions. Such a neuronal basis can account for our capac-
ity 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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 INTRODUCTION 15

to literary works through measurement of pupil dilation and other empir-

ically observable responses.40
This cross-disciplinary reach may hold intuitive appeal to those seek-
ing 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 conscious-
ness 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 cau-
sality (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
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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 emer-
gent 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 struc-
ture 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 embed-
ded in its world,”47 a view prominent in the phenomenological tradition
since publication of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Percep-
tion.48 The idea that cognition is not only brain- or even mind-centered,

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 16 INTRODUCTION

but distributed throughout a network of pragmatic action and its imple-

ments 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 sur-
rounding 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 cog-
nitively 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 neu-
rological context. For the brain is not only determining but also respon-
sive; neuroplasticity allows the brain to reorganize its functional opera-
tions 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
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situation cannot be adequately described as giving orders in a straight-

forward causal action of the brain determining experience. Rather, neu-
rological 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 chal-
lenged on these and other grounds.57 What may elude reductive interpre-
tations 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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 INTRODUCTION 17

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 writ-
ers 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 viv-
idly as possible, approaching it through a variety of literary strategies
to be tested by the responses of readers. Literature may offer descrip-
tions 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 signifi-
cance” thereof.60 Because it engages a first-person descriptive point of
view, phenomenology offers a method for describing imaginative expe-
rience, including poetic or aesthetic experience. But the limits of the
phenomenological approach alone, and of available phenomenological
theories of imagination, must too be considered.
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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 provo-
cations 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 phenome-
nological 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 percep-
tion, 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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 18 INTRODUCTION

originally working in the physical sciences—adapted the phenomenolog-

ical 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 cap-
ture 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 cogni-
tive 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
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for a brief treatment in The Imaginary) the consideration of creativity,

though he discussed the work of writers and artists in many other writ-
ings, and therein associated imagination with the possibilization of real-
ity. Sartre’s philosophy locates in imagination the source of human free-
dom 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 Phenome-
nology 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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 INTRODUCTION 19

work of art spares us the expense of an exuberant imagination.”67 In per-

ceiving 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 imagi-
nation 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 con-
veyed by describing an aesthetically stimulating painting. To choose a
familiar example, Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), with its whirl-
ing explosions of starlight across a dark sky, its wind-waves above a sleep-
ing 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
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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 bal-
anced 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 visual-
ize 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 intu-
ition of the interdependence of sky and earth, though van Gogh could not

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 20 INTRODUCTION

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 tread-
ing 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 nat-
uralist landscapes van Gogh sent along with it.71
In any case, van Gogh’s work is both intensely communicative and pro-
vocative. The painter does not hide his labor, but makes his brushstrokes
visible and vivid, rendering what can be imagined as the painter’s inten-
tionality 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 imagi-
nation with its expressive exuberance, inviting new possibilities of see-
ing, 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 concretiza-
tion, of the attentive viewer.73
Casey, in his fine book Imagining, approaches imagination as “auton-
omous mental act,” and in the context of “its ordinary, even banal, modes
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of activity.”74 He explores the implications of Sartre’s insight that imagi-

nation involves spontaneous activity not only distinct from, but in some
ways surpassing, perception. Yet Casey requires imagination’s “strict inde-
pendence 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 paint-
ing offered earlier, for example, relies on evocations of balance, mass,

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 INTRODUCTION 21

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 phenom-
enology 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 envi-
ronmental 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
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gradual evolution of imagination,81 while the capacity for internal repre-

sentation 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 experi-
ences, 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 con-
nects 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 imagin-
ing, hypothetical thinking, seeing-as, as well as material creativity, and

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 22 INTRODUCTION

directly engage environmental interest and human concern. Leonardo’s

studies of the flights of birds and of the human body are, in his note-
books, enfolded together within his plans for flying machines such as the
ornithopter and helicopter. His thinking on the topic of flight blends sci-
entific observation, mathematical reasoning, geometry, anatomy, visu-
alization, and drawing. With thousands of pages of drawings and writ-
ings 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 over-
all structure of the human body, and methodical observations of birds
and insects in flight. An account of imagining that would exclude Leon-
ardo’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 iden-
tifying 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, embod-
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ied, 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 dif-
ferent kinds of problems, which may seem counterintuitive:

Common sense suggests that people in different disciplines have differ-

ent ways of thinking, that the adult and the child do not think alike, that

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 INTRODUCTION 23

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 “gen-
eral 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 cog-
nitive 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
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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 phe-
nomenology, 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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 24 INTRODUCTION

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 contempo-
rary 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 Mon-
drian, 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
Copyright © 2018. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

examples in mind, and engaging the resources of multiple disciplines, we

may understand the life of imagination anew, demonstrating its contribu-
tion to human thinking and its shaping of the human dimension.

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. <i>The Life of Imagination : Revealing and Making the World</i>, Columbia University Press,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=5552413.
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