Imagination

Imagination is perhaps the quintessential human quality. It appears to be a uniquely human capability and when exercised enables us change our view of ourselves, others and the world around us.

The Philosopher Owen Barfield called it ‘an ultimate mental activity’ and ‘the power of creating within forms which themselves become a part of nature’

Too often we think of imagination as the ability to fantasize or as a another word for escapism. For it can be used to put ourselves outside our troubles. It seems Western culture has marginalized a broader view of imagination. Indeed, for a time, Walt Disney seemed to have a monopoly on the imagination. He commercialized it and imagination was relegated to fantasy and the childish. Something for children and nostalgia.

Properly used it allows us to place ourselves in another time (future or past), another place, or allows us to see ourselves experiencing what someone else experiences. This last part is the basis of empathy.

When we enable imagination to examine a conundrum or problem it then posits solutions that we may then act on. We can imagine a sequence of actions that allow us to see a ‘path’ to personal betterment. We combine experience with imagination to prune less useful ideas or solutions. Another way it becomes a bridge between the inner and outer worlds. Imagination properly used becomes a way to understand each other.

Imagination is often a measure of intelligence. When we see someone bereft of ideas, solutions, or empathy we might say they lack imagination. It allows us to ’see‘ what cannot be seen.

Fundamentally imagination is a way of bridging the inner and outer world. Taking what we know and feel in our limited inner universe; displaying it to a wider world. Alternatively we can take in aspects of the outer world into our own inner world and integrate it so that we arrive at a different viewpoint or state. These become transcendental and can lead to important insights. (Even the word insight contains this deeper meaning of imagination.)

Prior to scientific materialism, imagination had a more esteemed role in seeking the truth. Today we tend to relegate it to the creation of fictions, but there was a time when it was considered a legitimate source of truth. One has only to look at the field of philosophy that relies almost entirely on imagination.

Imagination, since the rise of the enlightenment and scientific ideas, has been sidelined in favor of the predictive power of the empirical. To be sure, we have made huge strides in any number of fields based on scientific principles. It has, however left many of us feeling spiritually bereft; this idea of man and the world as a machine.

Personally I have been fortunate to have worked in roles that required me to bridge the scientific and the imaginative. That has been a significant factor in why I found high pressure work, in the end, satisfying. This leads me to conclude that if we deny our imagination, fail to utilize and exercise it, we will find ourselves lost or lacking in some deeper emotional or spiritual way.

Most of us have been so steeped in Western culture that it may, ironically, be challenging to imagine the way people thought before our time. How they relied on imagination to be the bridge between the mysterious outer world and an equally mysterious inner world.

For instance, the poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) lived at this juncture; at the rise of Newton’s mechanization of the world and the fall of the old order. He railed against Newton and his attempts to measure and order what he saw as the gods’ realm. Blake spoke openly of seeing visions and hearing voices. Those around him did not shun him for this. By the time of the Victorian era, people like him were being locked up in asylums.

The Philosopher Owen Barfield posited that the origins of early languages were actually participatory, that early language before the written word would have been full of literal form. He argues that communication was based on his principle of ‘living unity’ that provided a basis of common experience for communication.

This early language was what unified the inner and outer worlds through the mechanism of common experience. (We speak today still of this, when we speak of ‘the lived experience’ of a person.) For Barfield imagination can re-engage this lost unity at a higher, self-aware level. Imagination has the power to oppose and transmute the split between subject and object that science introduced.

This leads to the idea that imagination transforms outward forms as inner meaning and restores the depth of meaning to language.

Another influential Philosopher Rudolf Steiner saw imagination as the first stage of a disciplined path of cognition to overcome the modern subject-object divide.

This is why art and poetry can still speak to us today. These are forms, often difficult to articulate, that reflect on this bridging of the outer experience to the inner world. It is the mystery of why something of great beauty be it music or a painting might move us to tears of joy, raptures, the sublime. How that divide of subject-object so inculcated in us, keeps us from seeing the real. And perhaps why it is so difficult to articulate exactly the meaning that has induced such profound feelings.

I would also propose that many of the challenges we face today are because of a lack of imagination. That we lack the ability in our public lives to bridge this inner reality with an outer reality. We are not taught about it, indeed we are often told it is childish and should be put away as adults. Perhaps we should re-evaluate our relationship with imagination.