ELEVEN

The Philosophic Centrality of the
Imagination: A Postmodern Approach

In this presentation I would like to take an imaginative look at, draw a picture of, what the imagination might or should look like in the postmodern, postmetaphysical age we are now entering, an age whose primary characteristic is perhaps that it has divested or is divesting itself of the insistence that the old metaphysics of presence placed on the primacy of the image, the imago, the eikon, the picture, the primacy of referentialist-representationalism. Philosophy, in the traditional metaphysical sense, officially began when Plato defined being in the supreme sense as eidos, or idea. Being is that which shows, reveals itself in all of its self-originating, radiant splendor. It is what is immutably and forever simply there, to be simply looked at and taken in by means of a disinterested, purified gaze. This definition of being prescribed a corresponding definition of man, anthropos. Man is essentially noesis, rational intuition. To lead a truly human life, as the philosopher does, is to lead a life of contemplation, as Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, tells us in the last book of his Nicomachean Ethics. Philosophy, in this context, is an ethical-religious undertaking, the ascetic purification du regard. Man’s vocation is to reflect, mirror, that being whose essence is to be there and to show, reveal itself. Between being and man there is, or should be, a perfect coincidentia or adequatio, a showing-reflecting mimetic correspondence. Man, as thinkers were later to say, is the Microcosm which mirrors the Macrocosm. Present-day scientists, Plato’s metaphysical heirs, are people who seek to have a highly polished, nondistorting mirror for a mind. Like their metaphysical forefathers, they are obsessed with the fear that their representations may be only eidola, mere phantasm-ic semblances, simulacra.

The metaphysics of presence has thus perpetuated itself up until our times, though not without notable metamorphoses. The form it assumed in modern philosophy could perhaps best be labeled representationalism, the metaphysics of re-presentation. For indeed with the advent of Cartesianism man is thrown back upon himself, the “subjective” emerges as that which stands over against and is cut off from the “objective,” true being is no longer directly present to the mind’s eye but needs to be re-presented to it by the senses. The immediate objects of man’s knowing, of his reflective gaze, are no longer the things themselves in their true being but the “inner” contents of the closet of his consciousness, his own subjective mind, cogitationes or ideas, as they were fondly called by the English-speaking empiricists. The notion of presence continues to dominate modern man’s thinking, but what is now present to him is no longer being but his own mental states, the idea in a purely subjectivistic sense. In accordance with this mutation in the metaphysics of presence, reason, the essence of “man,” is henceforth no longer noesis, rational insight, but rather method, rational procedure. Indeed, motivated by a nostalgic desire somehow to coincide with being “as it is in itself,” modern man believes that he may be able to know that reality which is not directly present to him if only he orders his own ideas in accordance with the unquestionable laws of logic. If only he can string his ideas together in the right way, the result will supposedly be that they will form a true representation or likeness of “objective” reality—though to be sure this is something, the modern philosopher will likely admit, that he can never ever really know, be absolutely sure of. In any event, representationalism has been the name of game from Descartes up to our twentieth-century positivists.

It is, however, a game which an increasing number of thinkers are declining the invitation to play. Thinkers as diverse as Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Foucault and Rorty have raised enough questions to make us doubt seriously whether the epistemological game is one which is worth playing at all. Est-ce que la mèche vaut la chandelle? I for one have come to believe that there is no worthwhile prize to be won from playing the metaphysical-representationalist-foundationalist game, and accordingly I would like to deal with my assigned topic—the imagination—in a different context altogether. I would like, in what follows, to speculate on what we might say about the imagination were we to set aside the rules of the epistemological language game as they have been worked out over the course of several centuries. Since in any event traditional philosophy has never had much of any great interest to say about the imagination (even though most of the great traditional philosophers were, like Plato or Descartes, quite adept at imagining things, such as ethereal Forms or malin génies, let us see what could be said about it were we to take up a nontraditional approach. I will begin with a brief outline of the traditional approach to the issue.

About ten years or so ago, when I was doing background research for my Understanding book, I decided to give a special graduate seminar on the imagination. It seemed to me at the time that this was likely to become a hot topic for philosophers, just as that of action had become. Obviously, however, it took much longer than I had anticipated for it to catch on, witness the fact that we here assembled are only just getting around to discussing it publicly. My graduate seminar took the form of a workshop; each student was sent out to scour a particular domain or period to see what he or she could drag up. Like the American constitutionalists when they undertook their unprecedented task, we ransacked our cultural archives to see what we could come up with. The results were, in a sense, mediocre and disappointing. What we discovered was that throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers, on the whole and by and large, have never had anything of much worth or interest to say about the imagination. This is an observation that Ed Casey makes in his book Imagining (one of the few good ones on the subject), which was published subsequent to our seminar. Casey notes “the tendency on the part of many Western philosophers to belittle imagination—or, still worse, to neglect it altogether.” The fact is, as he says:

The reason for this curious state of affairs also readily became apparent to us. The “tradition of condemnation and neglect,” as Casey puts it, is due to a considerable extent to the overwhelming but thoroughly regretable influence that Aristotle has had on our intellectual tradition. On the whole, philosophers have never properly understood the importance of imagination, for they have followed in the footsteps of Aristotle and have relegated the imagination to a chapter in their treatises on psychology. They have taken the imagination to be that lower faculty, which men share with the brutes, whose business it is to coordinate and to reproduce sense impressions. To be sure, this is consistent with the basic rationalist or metaphysical prejudice that there exists “in itself” a fully determinate reality and that the function of human understanding is to form a correct picture of this reality (the function of the imagination, qua sensus communis, being to fit together the fragmentary bits of information received through the different, individual senses into one unified picture).²

A revealing document in this regard is the entry on imagination in Dagobert D. Runes’s Dictionary of Philosophy. It reads:

Take careful note of what this implies. The creative imagination in philosophy or science consists in nothing more than combining elementary sense impressions into new patterns. What could be more absurd? How could the General Theory of Relativity ever be derived from sense data? As long as we view the imagination as having essentially to do with images, we will never understand what it means to speak of the creative imagination in the arts and sciences. It is not without significance, I think, that the devalorization of the imagination whereby it is reduced to a faculty for producing mere senselike images (eidola) goes hand in hand, in the hands of the father of metaphysics, with a devalorization of the arts, and that this double devalorization is consequent upon conceiving of the mind in general as that whose business is to form images (eikones) of things (material or ideal). It is not surprising that Plato should have likened the painter to someone who does not really produce anything, except a mirror out of his pocket which he holds up to the sun and all the things in the sky and on earth, reduplicating them in this effortless, sham way.⁴ To understand properly the creative imagination, it would be necessary to transpose discussion of it from an eidetic or imagistic context to another one altogether. I shall return to this pivotal issue in a moment.

Right now let us just note that in the mainline, orthodox, traditional view of the matter—whether in Aristotle, Hobbes, or Kant—the imagination is a mere transitory stage, a mediator between sensation and knowledge. The position that Hume took in regard to the imagination is eminently typical of modern representationalism. Hume represents both a high point and a low point, the zenith and the nadir of modernism, of the tradition instituted by Descartes’s foundationalist project which seeks certainty in the knowing subject. In his works we find representationalism carried to its logical, albeit absurd, conclusion. For here we see how the Cartesian, modern emphasis on the “subjective” leads to an internal undermining of the whole representationalist project. I am referring, of course, to Hume’s celebrated skepticism (which has nothing whatsoever to do with classical, Pyrrhonian skepticism, which knew nothing of “subjectivity” in the modern sense). We find in Hume a copy-relation view of the imagination; imagination is a mere mode of perception or, to be more precise, a secondhand copy of perception: “all our ideas,” he says, “are copy’d from our impressions.”⁵ This is, as Casey says, a supremely “reductive” view of the imagination. “ . . . the content of imagining,” Casey says, speaking of Hume, “is ineluctably a repetition or recombination of what we have already perceived; hence a complete analysis would reveal a close correspondence between any given imagined content and the content of some previous perception or set of perceptions.⁶

Kant adds nothing radically new to the representationalist, imagistic view of the imagination, although, after having been awoken from his dogmatic slumbers by reading Hume, he does add a new twist to the epistemological undertaking. This is, of course, his transcendental turn, his Second Copernican revolution, whose purpose was to circumvent the skepticism which Hume had shown to be the logical outcome of modern representationalism through the invention of a Transcendental Ego as the ultimate underwriter of the objectivity of objects. The foundationalist enterprise continued subsequently undaunted in the exuberant excesses of German Idealism and in the later, lower-keyed Erkentnisslehre of the Neo-Kantians, finding its purest expression in Edmund Husserl, who quite rightly viewed his transcendental phenomenology as responding to the deepest longings of traditional philosophy for apodictic certainty. As we know now, of course, in the pursuit of the Platonic-Cartesian quest for a philosophical science of reality, Husserl came up with a philosophical device—the phenomenological reduction—the use of which by Husserl and his errant disciples has resulted in the deconstruction of the entire epistemological project (and in the consequent demise of “sense-data”).⁷

The modern, representationalist view of the imagination finds perhaps its fullest, but also most banal, expression in what today goes under the impressive epithet of “cognitive science,” the technological understanding of human understanding. Those with a penchant for serious-minded scientific inquiry but who can no longer subscribe in good conscience to metaphysical system building of the old-fashioned, traditional sort will find in cognitive science a means of pursuing with sophisticated technicity the old metaphorics of the mirror. “Algorithmic metaphysics” might not be a bad name for present-day cognitive science, for its presuppositions are fully those of traditional metaphysics and its image-making, mirror view of the mind. KA (knowledge acquisition) theory, for instance, works with a “mental models hypothesis.” In the words of two specialists in the field: “The mental models hypothesis states that an individual understands the world by forming a mental model, that a cogniting [sic!] agent understands the world by forming a model of the world in his or her head.”⁸ When computer people and cognitive scientists speak of language, they generally mean “representation languages,” by means of which humans or machines (there is no essential, cybernetic difference between the two), “know what is ‘out there in the world,’ ”⁹ form an inner representation (“mental model,” MM) of outer reality.

In the traditional, orthodox, or received view, “cognition,” in which imagination plays an often necessary but nonetheless always minor role, is the means whereby the epistemological subject transcends himself, steps out from the inner sphere of his “mind” and makes—somehow—contact with what is so charmingly called “the external world.” In this context, imagination is generally viewed as a merely “internal” process; it is the generator of “subjective,” “private,” “mental” images which may or may not subsequently pan out, i.e., be a means of enabling us to form adequate representations of “reality.” The imagination finds its worse press in British empiricism, for which, as Casey aptly puts it, it is but warmed-over sensation or, as Hobbes said, “decaying sense.”¹⁰ Let us note, finally, that in the traditional view meaning is in one way or another generally viewed as something somehow “objective,” as a certain determinate state of affairs which has to be copied, pictured, mirrored, reproduced, replicated, re-presented, reflected on the inner, glassy surface of the mind’s eye.

After having himself rehearsed the history of the subject in his book, Casey writes:

Casey sought “to view imagination as nonderivative, as a phenomenon to be evaluated on its own terms.” My goal here is much the same; even more, I wish, in opposition to all treatments which marginalize it, to bring the imagination forward to center stage and to argue for its philosophic centrality. The strategy I shall adopt is nevertheless not the one favored by Casey. In his attempt to do justice to the imagination, Casey follows the classical Husserlian method of eidetic insight and seeks simply to describe its (supposedly) essential traits. As a deconstructed Husserlian who does not believe in essences, who, indeed, unlike both Husserl and Casey (at least at the time of the writing of his book), believes that “essential meanings” are not something which can be seen in an eidetic insight (Wesenschau) but are, rather, spoken meanings, linguistic in nature through and through, I find this tactic is not one that appeals to me.¹² The strategy I shall adopt instead is dictated by the deconstructive nature of postmodern thought itself.

What, we might ask, happens to the imagination when there is no longer any “objective” nature that it would be the essential business of the “mind,” in its more important functions, to mirror? How are we to view the imagination once the great mirror of nature has been deconstructed and we turn to “doing philosophy without mirrors,” as Rorty would say? The answers to these questions will readily become apparent if we simply ask ourselves what the most salient characteristic of postmodernism is. It is, I think it safe to say, the emphasis that has come to be placed on language, die Sprachlichkeit, le discours, textuality. When the modern epistemological paradigm is deconstructed, when, that is, the natural bond that modernism assumed to exist between les mots et les choses is broken, language, as Foucault has noted, assumes a unique and special status. Fully representative of postmodernism is also Gadamer’s famous statement: “Being that can be understood is language.”¹³ Adapting this to our context, we could say: Being that can be imagined is language.

Directly related to the emphasis that postmodernism places on language is the renewed interest that has begun to be shown in rhetoric. Postmodernism happily revives the Greek defininiton of man as zoon logon ekon, the speaking animal. As the greatest of the Greek rhetoricians, Isocrates, said, the distinctive trait of man is that he is the being which has the logos.¹⁴ The Latin translation of the Greek—animal rationale—is less felicitous, because it is less polyvalent and thus says less. And yet it is not without its own semantic resources. For if there is any one thing that seems most manifestly to characterize human beings, it is that they are constantly engaged in the business of rationalizing, i.e., in devising rationes, in coming up with reasons for what they do, giving accounts, récits of their actions. “Man” (to use the classical linguistic term for the entity in question) is the narrating, storytelling animal. Language is not just another ability (“faculty”) alongside others. To speak quasi-metaphysically (i.e., mythically), the advent of language in the course of human development was not just another significant development alongside others, such as the invention of tools. The advent of language represented rather a complete, “essential” transformation of the man-animal. It represented a complete transformation of man’s animality in that it completely sundered him from nature. The advent of language is the advent of reflexivity. Thanks to language, man becomes a potential object for himself, and thus the subject matter of selfunderstanding. “Know thyself!” is a dictate of language. What as humans we are is in fact something that is constituted by means of language. We understand ourselves by narrating ourselves. Man is not a natural given but a cultural, i.e., linguistic, construct.¹⁵ Because it is language which makes what humans call “thought” possible in the first place, language must not be viewed, as modernism viewed it, as merely the “vehicle,” the “expression,” of thought. Language is (human) thought. It is also reality, at least that reality which, phenomenologically-pragmatically speaking, is there for us as the object of our “thinking,” since, as Rorty has pertinently observed, “there is no way to think about either the world or our purposes except by using our language.”¹⁶

So what I want to do here is to argue for a view of the imagination, that most human of human faculties, as something essentially linguistic in nature. I don’t want to deny that we humans have the ability to call up mental images of things, in some sense or other (usually, though, just a word suffices; you don’t have to expend all that mental effort of actually picturing something). I suspect that we imagine, in the sense of forming mental, mere sensuous presentations of absent things, a lot less than we imagine that we do. Much more important, occupying a much more significant position in the life of understanding (I will not say our “mental” lives), than what Casey calls “imaging” is that other form of imagination which he labels “imagining-that.”¹⁷ He very pertinently observes that when we imagine that such and such a state of affairs obtains in its own imaginary space, this form of imagining “does not have to assume a sensuous guise.”¹⁸ He remarks, of course, that it may, but, even if it does, it is something I would want to downplay, since I am inclined to believe that even in this case the sensuous imagery is mostly a function of certain semantic values, is essentially semiological.

It seems to me that Casey inadvertently concedes this point. In any event, to the trained eye of the postmodern deconstructionist, certain admissions seem to transpire through the links in his modern discourse. He says, for instance, that in the case of imagining-that:

Could such a state of affairs be imagined without language? If not, language is, at the very least, the necessary condition for the possibility of imaginingthat. Consider also the following case of imagining which Casey brings forward: imagining what it might be like to follow a certain law. Casey writes (take note of the internal quotation marks):

Although Casey uses such terms as “appear” and “envision,” these are obviously purely metaphorical. An imagining such as this is linguistic through and through. Although I am prepared to grant that my dog is capable of imaging, I do not imagine for a second that he, lacking as he does the logos, is capable of imagining what it would be like to be a rational being acting in accordance with the third formulation of the categorical imperative.

Again, and finally, Casey writes:

Since I cannot imagine what it would be like to “specify” something with any “degree of descriptive precision” without language, I really cannot imagine how one could have any imaginings worth talking about without language, what they would be if in fact they were not linguistic through and through.

In accordance with the Husserlian, essentialist approach that he takes in this book, Casey wants clearly and distinctly to demarcate imagination from, and to situate it properly with regard to, other kinds of “mental acts.” Let us simply note what he says of the relation between imagination and perception. Speaking, as he says (as indeed he is at this point), from an “epistemological viewpoint,” the imagination, he says, presupposes perception. I could not imagine if I were not first of all a being who perceives.²² Imagining “is dependent on the prior existence and exercise of perceptual powers.”²³ This may be true “epistemologically speaking,” but what exactly is the situation hermeneutically speaking? Can perception itself, human perception, be divorced from language? Is not perception, as Lacan says of the unconscious, “structurée comme un langage”?

Speaking of what Husserl called the “internal horizon” of a perceptual object, Casey says that it is “determinate as to type. It gives itself,” he says, “as the internally delimiting horizon of a particular kind of object: as the horizon of a house and not of a horse, of a table instead of a tree.”²⁴ To speak of “houses,” “horses,” “tables,” and “trees” and, a fortiori, of “types” and “kinds” is, it seems to me, to be engaged in a thoroughly and irremediably linguistic sort of activity. One thing we have learned in this century is that words are not mere labels that we simply stick onto things willy-nilly. Or as Heidegger has expressed the matter: “ . . . words and language are not wrappings in which things are packaged for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.”²⁵ Things would not be what they are in the first place, would not be perceived the way they are perceived by us, if we did not have the kind of linguistic dealings with them that we in fact do have. To be a being who perceives is to be a being who interprets, who is engaged in the playing of particular language games. The notion of “brute data,” of things which are simply what they are, waiting around “out there” for an epistemological subject to come along and mirror them (“ . . . realities in themselves are just what they are regardless of subjects that refer to them . . . ”),²⁶ is a notion which evaporates along with epistemological foundationalism. As one of the first philosophical postmoderns, William James, asked so exquisitely when he tried to imagine what it would be like to be a thing and to have a mind “come into being from out of the void inane and stand and copy me”: What good would it do me to be copied, or what good would it do the mind to copy me?²⁷ The notion of brute data is one which analytic philosophy has also made a stab at deconstructing in the person of Wilfred Sellars when he attacked the “myth of the given.”²⁸ It is, again, one which an avowed deconstructionist such as Derrida is discarding when he discards the very notion of “perception.” As he says:

Long before Derrida, Hegel had already realized that we have to have recourse to universals even to begin to describe sensory experience. As we shall see shortly, the linguistic imagination has to do with the application of universals, with the way particulars are categorized. To see something is to see it as this or that (this is the “hermeneutical as” [as opposed to the apophantic or judgmental “as”]). To see something in an imaginative (here meaning creative) way is to see it otherwise than it has been seen before; it is to integrate it into a new semantic context. So rather than saying that we would not be imaginative beings were we not first of all perceiving beings, it might be closer to the truth to say that we would not be perceiving beings were we not first of all imagining beings, beings who, thanks to the free play of their language, can imagine that such and such is the case—and who also have a tendency to take their interpretive constructs for reality itself.³⁰

The general point I am trying to make could perhaps best be made with the aid of an example, one which suits my purposes superbly, since it is drawn directly from the metaphorics of textuality. It is an example which I recall Michael Riffaterre as having made in the course of a public talk and is one which I found useful in an aesthetics course I gave recently, since it displaces a persistent misinterpretation of what is involved in the interpretive process, the act of reading. Most of my students, I found, seem to think that when one reads a novel one forms a series of mental pictures of the action described—as if reading novels were merely a poor substitute for watching TV. The following example is an argument to the effect that this is not, or is not primarily, the case.

In his novel Salambō, Flaubert, in accordance with his program of fictional realism, sought to depict a completely lost civilization about which little is known, that of ancient Carthage, with unerring historical accuracy. He even traveled to the site and studied archaeology with great diligence in the attempt to paint as accurate a picture as possible of what life was like in the ancient city, one which has left absolutely no vestiges of itself. In a letter to the critic Sainte-Beuve, who had charged that the archaeological detail was fictitious, Flaubert responded vehemently that it was not and furnished chapter-and-verse references justifying all of his material. Now, at one point in the novel, in order to enable his readers to visualize the particular scene, Flaubert describes a camel in the process of lying down. A description is obviously called for, since the quasi totality of his readers would never have seen a camel and would have only the vaguest of ideas of what they’re supposed to look like (does a camel have one hump or two?), let alone the motions they go through when they lie down. So Flaubert writes: “The camel lay down, like an ostrich” (or words to that effect). Does that enable you to visualize the scene? Of course not. Unless you’re an avid watcher of The Wonderful World of Nature or have hung around the African Lion Safari near Hamilton, you don’t have the slightest idea of what an ostrich does when it lies down. So when you “picture” the scene to yourself (“a camel lying down, like an ostrich”), you really don’t have any determinate picture going through your mind at all! A remark of Wittgenstein’s could be used perfectly in the present discursive context (if only you use your imaginations). What he said was: “When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expression: the language is itself the vehicle of thought.”³¹ Like all literary “representations,” Flaubert’s “description” does not provide his reader with a determinate picture but is, as Roman Ingarden might say, schematic and indeterminate. You do not have a factually accurate picture of an ostrich lying down (let alone that of a camel) when you read the sentence, and yet it is not meaningless for you as a reader. You read the sentence and perhaps say to yourself, sotto voce, “Yes, indeed, that’s exactly the way it is,” and you go on reading, thinking all the while how marvelously accurate and to the point Flaubert’s descriptions are and how “realistic” a writer he is.

The point, then, is simply this: Meaning is not something that has to be “pictured” in order to be; it is not something that has to be mentally copied in order to be “grasped.”³² What, then, is it? The Flaubert example has the additional merit of indicating what in fact meaning is. What happens when you read the sentence is exactly what Flaubert supposedly wanted to happen: The net effect of describing camels in terms of ostriches (the foreign in terms of the even more foreign) is to create in the reader a feeling of exoticness, of encountering an exotic, foreign land—which is exactly what has to happen if the sentence, and the novel, is to be successful, un texte réussi. In other words, meaning is not some kind of state of affairs to be pictured; it is not any kind of thing at all but rather an event, a happening. The meaning of the text is what the text does to the reader, what happens to the reader when he or she reads it. Imagined meanings are simply ways in which, by means of language, we relate to, take up an existential attitude toward something or other (toward, in this case, what Ricoeur calls “the world of the work”). New meanings are simply new ways of relating to things by means of new or unusual usages of words (or their semiotic equivalent in other expressive media).

Such is the hermeneutical view of meaning, which is the necessary and inescapable consequence of the abandonment of epistemological-centered philosophy. The literary hermeneut Stanley Fish describes it appropriately when he says: “In this formulation, the reader’s response is not to the meaning; it is the meaning.”³³ The hermeneutical assumption, as Fish says, is “that the text is not a spatial object but the occasion for a temporal experience.”³⁴

By linking imagination up with language, I am, as you can see, insisting on its centrality in the “life of the mind,” since, from a postmodern, hermeneutical view, language is absolutely central. Now, the center of language itself is metaphor. As one writer has remarked: “Metaphor is as ultimate as speech itself, and speech as ultimate as thought.”³⁵ The nature of imaginative thinking can therefore be further illuminated by analyzing it in terms of metaphor. Indeed, the best definition of the linguistic imagination is perhaps that it is the “faculty” for producing metaphors.

In my Understanding book I argued that “the ‘meaning’ of metaphorical discourse is nothing other than the practical transformation it brings about in the listening and speaking subject, the orientation it communicates to understanding.”³⁶ Metaphor, as I also said, performs an “existential function in that it provokes a change in the way we view things, it brings about a transformation in our thinking. Its meaning lies entirely in its ‘perlocutionary force,’ in the effect the words have on us.”³⁷ One thing this does not mean is that metaphors have no meaning in any proper sense of the term—that they are, strictly speaking meaningless, as Don Stewart, in his critical piece on the Madisonian theory of metaphor that he published in Dialogue, nevertheless claims I mean to say.³⁸ Metaphors, under my definition, would be meaningless only if one believed in the “proper” (as Derrida would say), only if one sought to make sense of them while laboring under the epistemological paradigm.

The meaning of a metaphor is what it does. And what is that it does? Let us take as an example what I suppose is the favorite metaphor of philosophers (trite and hackneyed though it naturally be): “Man is a wolf.” When we say this we most definitely do not visualize man as having the physical appearance of a wolf, with pointed ears, long teeth, and a furry coat. It is not even correct to say that we “view” man as a wolf, unless the word “view” is used in a thoroughly metaphorical sense. To picture man as a wolf would have absolutely no meaning whatsoever (or would not have the meaning that the metaphor does have). When we say that man is a wolf we mean that he is vicious and inhuman, i.e., that he “preys” on his fellow creatures and is a “wolf” to man. The meaning “wolf” is here something definitely bad. But I can easily imagine cultures in which wolves do not conjure up something bad, in which they even conjure up something good, or don’t conjure up anything in particular at all. If to a member of such a culture we were to say, “Man is a wolf,” our hearer would either visualize man in the form of a wolf, in which case his or her response would likely be, “So what? I can just as well picture him as a pumpkin. Why should I visualize him one way or the other?” or else the metaphorical (linguistic) meaning that he or she understood would not at all be the one we intended (he or she would perhaps take this as a complimentary way of referring to man since in the hearer’s culture wolves are considered to be caring, family-oriented creatures).

Thus the metaphor means what it does only because we think of wolves in certain ways, and when we say of man that he is a wolf we are transferring to man some of the semantic values that we normally and—in the case of wolves—quite arbitrarily associate with wolves. This is, of course, the interaction theory of metaphor defended by I. A. Richards, Philip Wheelwright, Max Black, Nelson Goodman, Paul Ricoeur, and others. Taking metaphor as our model, we could therefore say that the essential business of the linguistic or semiological imagination (imagination as it functions in all creative endeavors) is to bring together disparate semantic or semiological fields, the net effect of this bisociative act (as Arthur Koestler would call it) being to alter the way we think of, categorize, interpret things. As Max Black has expressed the matter: “A memorable metaphor has the power to bring two separate domains into cognitive and emotional relation by using language directly appropriate to the one as a lense for seeing the other; the implications, suggestions, and supporting values entwined with the literal use of the metaphorical expression enable us to see a new subject matter in a new way.” And as he goes on to note: “Metaphorical thought is a distinctive mode of achieving insight, not to be construed as an ornamental substitute for plain thought.”³⁹

It is by means of the metaphorizing imagination that facts are categorized the way they are, that ideas and theories are woven together to make new theories, and that theory and experience are linked together in such a way as to produce what we call “knowledge”. Imagination is absolutely central, since it is the primary means whereby we form an understanding of what goes under the heading of “reality.” Imagination is what is responsible for the texture of our actual experience, thus also for the text-like character of our lives. “Man,” as Wallace Stevens says, “is the imagination or rather the imagination is man.”⁴⁰

One of the most important consequences of postmodernism, from a philosophical point of view, is the way it has undermined various traditional metaphysical oppositions, such as appearance-reality, belief-knowledge (science), mind-body, material-spiritual, subjective-objective, inside-outside, fact-fiction. Only when oppositions such as these are deconstructed can the imagination, like language, assume its rightful importance. Only then can it be understood how the imagination is the very heart of understanding, which is not merely a matter, as the traditional metaphor has it, of “facing the facts.” The theory of knowledge put forward by “objective, data-respecting modernism,” the postmodern economist, Donald McCloskey, says in his recent book, The Rhetoric of Economics,

The crux of modernism, McCloskey says, is its solipsistic, monological theory of truth. Indeed, in the traditional, Platonic-Cartesian view, knowledge is an essentially private affair, a matter of the individual’s communing through his gaze with “objective” reality. If only the lone individual can manage to place himself in the right relation with reality, the truth will be his.⁴² On this view the imagination is necessarily solipsistic and idiosyncratic, a matter of calling up purely within oneself various quasi- or pseudorealities which have no “objective” counterparts out there in the “real world.” It is quite understandable how in this view the imagination should be relegated to the limits of the “cognitional.” Everything changes, however, when we attempt to conceive of the imagination not in a representational but in a linguistic, hermeneutical context and when, moreover, we abandon the traditional metaphysical oppositions.

For those of us who, in the turbulent wake of Nietzsche’s devastating deconstruction not only of modernism but also of the entire metaphysical tradition, no longer believe in, have indeed lost the naive confidence we formerly placed in the myths of the metaphysicians and, in particular, the greatest herdconsoling myth of all, the myth that, as Bertrand Russell put it in his charmingly naive way, “the essential business of language is to assert or deny facts,”⁴³ or, as the metaphysicians of presence would say with more sophistication, to reveal, “express” “reality,” a world that lies, unchanging and impeccably pure beyond it—for us the imagination becomes, once we make the postmodern turn, the prime means for understanding reality, i.e., for forming interpretations of it, or, to be more precise still, for interpreting our lived experience in such a way as to construct semantic objects to which the epithet “real” can conveniently be attached. Being a linguistic affair, understanding is perforce a cultural, public, intersubjective sort of thing. Solipsism is not an issue here, precisely because there are no “unconditioned facts” to which the isolated “cognizer” could have privileged, representational access. Purely private meanings exist only for a theory which maintains that the essential business of words is to refer to ideas existing in the “mind,” i.e., for epistemological representationalism. Is this to say that there are no facts at all, that everything is mere imaginative fiction? Of course not. Just because, as Nietzsche said, all being is interpreted being doesn’t mean that there aren’t any “facts.” “Facts” there always are for any speaking community, but they do not descend on it like some kind of empiricistic manna. “Facts” are precisely what a cultural, conversational community agree they are. The “facts,” as Stanley Fish says, are what “the conventions of serious discourse stipulate them to be.”⁴⁴ In any event, as he aptly says, “like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town.”⁴⁵ The linguistic imagination is indeed the very life of the mind, thus also of reality (assuming, of course, that we have gotten rid of the metaphysical opposition appearancereality).

In conclusion, I might remark that if you are like me and believe that the essence of “man,” that essenceless being, is freedom, la liberté,⁴⁶ then you will believe also in the philosophic centrality of the imagination. For it is through the imagination, the realm of pure possibility, that we freely make ourselves to be who or what we are, that we creatively and imaginatively become who we are, while in the process preserving the freedom and possibility to be yet otherwise than what we have become and merely are. But I shall stop here, yielding the last word, cédant la parole (as certain deconstructionist minoritarians might like to say), to the poet, that master craftsman of pure possibilities. As Wallace Stevens (who else?) has said: “The imagination is the liberty of the mind and hence the liberty of reality.”⁴⁷

Notes

This essay was composed in response to an invitation from the Ontario Philosophical Society and was presented at the annual meeting of the Society, held at Glendon College in Toronto, October 18-19, 1986.

1. Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. ix, x.

2. The remarks made in this paragraph are reproduced from my book, Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 257.

3. “Imagination,” in Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1942).

4. See Plato, The Republic, 596e.

5. David Нume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. Α. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 10.

6. Casey, Imagining, p. 133.

7. In addition to the mainline, orthodox approach to the imagination, there is a secondary, heterodox line, coming prominently to the fore in the Renaissance and in Romanticism (but which, like the mainline view itself, has its origins in Plato—see Timaeus, 70-72, and Phaedrus, 250) which views the imagination not as a mere mediator between sensation and intellection but as a separate and distinct faculty providing us with its own distinctive access to “reality.” Characteristic of this secondary tradition is its emphasis on inspiration, divine madness, direct intuitive accesss to the inner resorts of Nature itself, the World Soul; the imagination is here a mystical faculty enabling the Knower to bypass what Coleridge called the “cold inanimate world which is accessible to the mere senses and rational intelect.” The heterodox tradition still views the imagination in a representationalist way, nevertheless, as a means of making contact not with the “external world” but with the inside of Nature itself.

8. Stephen Regoczei and Edwin P. O. Plantinga, “Ontology and Inventory: A Foundation for a Knowledge Acquisition Methodology,” unpublished paper, p. 4.

9. Ibid., p. 8.

10. Casey, Imagining, p. 5.

11. Ibid., p. 19.

12. Casey takes over the Husserlian view of the relation between meaning and expression, according to which meaning precedes and can exist independently of expression (see ibid., pp. 24-25).

13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. xxii.

14. See Isocrates Panegyricus, 48; and Nicocles, 5-7.

15. See, in this regard, my paper, “The Hermeneutics of [Inter]Subjectivity, Or: The Mind/Body Problem Deconstructed,” in Man and World 21: 3-33 (1988) (reprinted in this volume as essay 10).

16. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xix.

17. See Casey, Imagining, p. 41ff.

18. Ibid., p. 43.

19. Ibid., p. 42, n. 6.

20. Ibid., p. 180, n. 6.

21. Ibid., p. 50.

22. See ibid, p. 172.

23. Ibid., p. 192.

24. Ibid. p. 160.

25. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 13.

26. Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, Gesammelte Werke, IX (Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), p. 118.

27. William James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” penultimate paragraph. James did not fully follow through with his deconstruction of epistemology, for he does say: “Copying is one genuine mode of knowing.” Pioneers, like Moses, do not always make it to the Promised Land.

28. See Wilfred Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963).

29. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Discourses,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). Merleau-Ponty had already written: “In the natural attitude, I do not have perceptions” (Phenomenology of Perception p. 281).

30. Alluding to Merleau-Ponty’s thesis regarding the primacy of perception, Casey writes: “Perception is certainly a condition of imagination because imaginers are neeessarily also perceivers. Indeed, as human, we must be perceivers, whatever else we are capable of. Human imaginers all have bodies; and the body is, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘the subject qua perceiver.’ To be human is to be incarnate, and to be incarnate is to perceive, to be in various forms of sense contact with the immediate environment by means of our own body. If imagining is also one of our capacities, then it, like every other capacity, is dependent on the prior existence and exercise of perceptual powers. These powers accordingly represent a condition of possibility for imagination” (Imagining, pp. 192-93).

One is tempted to say of Casey’s treatment of the imagination, which takes the sensuous imagination as paradigmatic, as a kind of proton analogon, what Paul Ricoeur said of Merleau-Ponty, that “the project of a phenomenology of perception, in which the moment of saying is postponed and the reciprocity of saying and seeing destroyed, is, in the last analysis, a hopeless venture” (Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Ch. A. Kelbley [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 309.

31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), par. 329.

32. Although Wolfgang Iser maintains in a very traditional fashion that the imagination in reading is a matter of image building, what he actually says about these “images” leads one to doubt that there are any such things at all. Speaking of the case where one sees the film version of a novel one has read, he remarks on how the reaction is often that of disappointment, and he asks himself why this is so. It is, he says, because “the characters somehow fail to live up to the image we had created of them while reading.” Listen carefully to what he goes on to say: “The difference between the two types of picture is that the film is optical and presents a given object, whereas the imagination remains unfettered. Objects, unlike imaginings, are highly determinate and it is this determinacy which makes us feel disappointed. If for instance I see the film of Tom Jones, and try to summon up my past images of the character, they will seem strangely diffuse, but this impression will not necessarily make me prefer the optical picture. If I ask whether my imaginary Tom Jones was big or small, blue-eyed or dark-haired, the optical poverty of my image will become all too evident, but it is precisely this openness that will make me resent the determinacy of the film version. Our mental images do not serve to make the character physically visible; their optical poverty is an indication of the fact that they illuminate the character, not as an object but as a bearer of meaning [emphasis added]. Even if we are given a detailed description of a character’s appearance, we tend not to regard it as pure description, but try and conceive what is actually to be communicated throught it” (The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978], p. 138.

If our “mental images do not serve to make the character physically visible,” one wonders what point there is to speaking of “mental images” in the first place. In Iser’s own example we have to do not with an object which is pictured but a meaning which is communicated (by means precisely of the pseudo-description). It is interesting that in this discussion of image building, Iser, like us, alludes to Wittgenstein. The Wittgenstein he quotes is not, however, the later Wittgenstein, who did much to clear out the cluttered attic of the empiricist mind, but the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus defending a referentialist-representationalist theory of meaning (see ibid., p. 141).

To Iser’s credit, however, it must be said that—even though he continues to use the unfortunate term “mental image”—he nevertheless does, later in his study, criticize Ingarden for suggesting that the way we fill in spots of indeterminacy in a text is by visualizing the missing element (as when we deliberately picture a character described as an “old man” as having gray hair). Iser writes: “He [Ingarden] seems to assume that in concretizing we really visualize the omitted color of the old man’s hair—in another example, it is the unspecified eyes of Consul Buddenbrock—so that the picture of the old man actually achieves the degree of determinacy normally applicable only to optical perception. The implication is that a concretization must produce the object in such a way that it gives at least the illusion of perception. This illusion, however, is just one paradigmatic instance of image-building and is no way identifiable with the whole process of ideation. The mental image of the old man can be just as concrete without our giving him grey hair” (ibid., pp. 176-77).

33. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 3.

34. Ibid., p. 345. Iser writes: “We do not grasp it [the text] like an empirical object; nor do we comprehend it like a predicative fact; it owes its presence in our minds to our own reactions, and it is these that make us animate the meaning of the text as a reality” (The Act of Reading, p. 129).

35. J. M. Murry, cited by Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 69.

36. Understanding, p. 212.

37. Ibid., p. 308.

38. Donald Stewart, “Madison on Metaphor,” Dialogue, vol. XXIV, no. 4, 1985, pp. 707-12 (included in this volume as essay 9).

39. Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 236-37. As Ricoeur has noted, we cannot properly understand the “transfer of sense” involved in metaphorical predication if, as in traditional rhetoric, we restrict our analysis to the level of the word and, like Aristotle, define metaphor as the transfer of the everyday name of one thing to another in virtue of their resemblance. See his remarks in “On Interpretation,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore, (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 182-83. As I argued in Understanding, it is altogether misleading to say that the “transfer” of the word from one thing to another is done “in virtue of their resemblance.” “Resemblances” are precisely what first get created by means of metaphor, of semantic innovation. Ricoeur also makes much the same point when he writes: “The imagination can justly be termed productive because, by an extension of polysemy, it makes terms, previously heterogeneous, resemble one another, and thus homogeneous. The imagination, consequently, is this competence, this capacity for producing new logical kinds by means of predicative assimilation and for producing them in spite of . . . and thanks to . . . the initial difference between the terms which resist assimilation” (“On Interpretation,” p. 184). Ricoeur interestingly remarks on how from this point of view the act of understanding “consists in grasping the semantic dynamism by virtue of which, in a metaphorical statement, a new semantic relevance emerges from the ruins of the semantic non-relevance as this appears in a literal reading of the sentence. To understand is thus to perform or to repeat the discursive operation by which the semantic innovation is conveyed” (ibid.).

40. Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” Opus Posthumous (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 177.

41. Donald N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 99.

42. In classical metaphysics this was a moral matter; in modern metaphysics it is a matter of method.

43. Bertrand Russell, introduction to L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. ix.

44. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? p. 237; on pp. 239-40 Fish writes: “Of course the conventions of “serious” discourse include a claim to be in touch with the real (that is what being the standard story means), and therefore it comes equipped with evidentiary procedures (routines for checking things out) to which members of its class must be ready to submit. But these procedures (which fictional discourse lacks, making it different, not less “true”) inhere in the genre and therefore they cannot be brought forward to prove its fidelity to some supraconventional reality. The point may be obscured by the fact (I do not shrink from the word) that the fiction of this genre s status as something natural (not made) is one to which we ‘normally’ subscribe; but this only means that of the realities constituted by a variety of discourse conventions it is the most popular. That is why we give it the names we do—‘real workaday world,’ ‘normal circumstances,’ ‘ordinary usage,’ etc. . . . But these names are attempts to fix (or reify) something, not proof that it is fixed, and indeed the notion of normal or ordinary circumstances is continually being challenged by anyone (Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss) who says to us, ‘Now the real facts of the matter are. . . .’ Even in the real-workaday (as opposed to the philosopher’s) world, where the operative assumption is that the facts are stable and once-and-for-all specifiable, we very often subscribe to different versions of what those facts are.”

Nietzsche was saying much the same thing, albeit in his customarily blunter manner, when he wrote: “to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans, and ed. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Viking Press, 1968], p. 47).

45. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? p. 355.

46. “There is,” Gadamer says, “no higher principle of reason than that of freedom” (Reason in the Age of Science, trans. F. G. Lawrence [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981], p. 9.

47. Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” p. 179. After I had completed this paper, my attention was drawn to the following text by Paul Ricoeur, of which I had been unaware: “Allow me to conclude [the preceding discussion of metaphor] in a way which would be consistent with a theory of interpretation which places the emphasis on ‘opening up a world’. Our conclusion should also ‘open up’ some new perspectives, but on what? Perhaps on the old problem of the imagination which I have carefully put aside. Are we not ready to recognise in the power of imagination, no longer the faculty of deriving ‘images’ from our sensory experience, but the capacity for letting new worlds shape our understanding of ourselves? This power would not be conveyed by images, but by the emergent meanings in our language. Imagination would thus be treated as a dimension of language. In this way, a new link would appear between imagination and metaphor. We shall, for the time being refrain from entering this half-open door” (“Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics,” in Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. J. B. Thompson [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981], p. 181). Without realizing it, what I therefore in fact did in this paper was to pass through a door which Ricoeur had already unlocked for me. Which is an apt metaphor for much of our relationship in general.