A post by Nick Wiltsher.

I had a great plan for this blog-post. See, I was meant to speak at a disaster studies conference last week. Disaster studies, it turns out, is a firmly established field, combining hard-headed analysis of actual disasters and their mitigation with speculative fictionalizing about possible disasters and dystopias. They wanted a philosopher to come talk about imagination, disasters of the future, and the future of disasters; I was local, cheap, and available. I was going to gather and share with you all some observations of how imagination figures in the thinking of disaster studiers, and make some comparisons with how we here think of imagination. “Field notes from the interdisciplinary wilds”. Something like that. Writes itself, practically.

Unfortunately, the disaster studies conference was cancelled. You can write your own punchline. And so there I was, devoid of field notes, socially isolated, inspirationally bereft, and yet dedicated to the provision of imagination content. Take all that as an apology for the state of what follows.

Happily, it is well-known that philosophers are able to engage in fieldwork without leaving quarantine. Accordingly, in the spirit of my original plan, I looked among my books for any imagination-related titles beyond a disciplinary boundary. I ended up with The Dialogic Imagination, a seminal work of Russian literary theory by M.M. Bakhtin (1975); The Strength to Dream, which according to the cover is “a fascinating search for a definition of the creative imagination and its influence on literature” by the critic and author Colin Wilson (1963); and Faith Theology and Imagination, a philosophically engaged work of theology by John McIntyre (1987). With a bit of a push, I reckon I can make a relatively serious point with respect to this selection—a point that should be taken relatively seriously by anyone who has ever found themselves making tenuous claims about the interdisciplinary interest of their work for the benefit of grant gatekeepers. (I’ve done it. I probably will again. Perhaps the whole post is just me talking to myself. That’s what social isolation does to you)

Something that seems obvious from the titles of these books—even more so from their contents—is that the uses of imagination with which their authors are engaged are very different from the functions that preoccupy philosophers today. Bakhtin isn’t bothered about fiction; he’s interested in literature, or more precisely novels. McIntyre inquires about imagination as a “theological category” (ch. 3), which isn’t the kind of thing you hear much of in my local seminar rooms, at any rate. Wilson, alarmingly, has a whole chapter on “sex and the imagination”, in which he tells us that “[t]he most perfunctory study of The 120 Days of Sodom reveals that imagination is the source of all sexual perversion” (151). Add that to your list of explananda—or, rather, please don’t.

These authors don’t only differ from contemporary philosophers regarding the things they want to explain using imagination. They also differ with respect to the sorts of things they say about imagination by way of explanation. As a tendentious generalization, philosophers of imagination are mostly currently concerned with the contested place within cognitive architecture of a distinctive cognitive attitude proprietary to i-states and similar recreative representations. All this seems far removed from Bakhtin’s “creating literary consciousness” that allows “languages [to] interanimate each other” (62), or from Wilson’s idea that “implied value judgement[s] on life and human destiny . . . [are] almost synonymous with imagination” (188–9), or McIntyre’s contention that “the imagination is the whole mind working in certain ways” (158).

So here’s an observation: based on a tiny, unrepresentative sample, I can confidently say that the way in which imagination is thought of in a range of broadly humanistic disciplines is pretty different from the way imagination is thought of in philosophy—both in terms of what imagination does, and what imagination is. Following the observation, here’s a question: what might explain this difference? I now present a range of cursory attempts at an answer.

One answer might be that, in fact, there is no difference. On closer investigation, it will turn out that the preoccupations of Bakhtin, Wilson, and McIntyre are similar, perhaps even reducible, to those of philosophers. For example, accounts of imagination’s role in fiction, articulated in terms of i-belief, will be adequate also to account for the interanimating of languages in the creation of novels. This is, for sure, a possibility, but it strikes me as unlikely. It’s hard to see how these conceptions of imagination and its functions could possibly be neatly congruent.

A converse answer would be that there is all the difference in the world. The authors I’m citing—more generally, the disciplines within which they work—simply mean completely different things than we do when they employ terms like “imagination” (and, perhaps, terms like “mind” or “value judgement”). But this won’t do either. The imagination here appears in different modes, but it is recognisably the same sort of thing with which philosophers are concerned. This is evident when you consider that Wilson, for example, is mostly animated by Sartrean existentialism, or that McIntyre is engaged with Collingwood, Murdoch, Ryle, and Warnock, among others. These writers and their disciplines are part of the same intellectual tradition as Western analytic philosophy, and their projects make more than coincidental contact with ours: our terms share meanings, not just spellings. (Bakhtin is a trickier case, admittedly. I do think the differences between his work and that of analytic philosophy is not so profound as might initially appear, but here is not the place to pursue that thought)

Another answer would be to admit that all these authors share a substantial subject matter with philosophers of imagination, but suggest that the reason their thinking does not easily cohere with our own is that they, and all the people in their disciplines who engage with them, are mostly writing bunk. I hope that this answer doesn’t appeal to any readers of this post, since it betrays a dreadful snobbish attitude to other disciplines, and a sad lack of intellectual openness and curiosity.

A more subtly dismissive answer would be to suggest that the works cited are very much of their time, and that more up-to-date excursions into other disciplines would reveal that literary scholars and the like are now thinking very much in the terms that philosophers are. Perhaps so, but my brief foray into disaster studies suggests to me that this is not the case. (I also suspect that, when looking for a philosopher for a speaker, these disaster studies people had in mind something like a certain suspiciously sniffly Slovenian. Goodness knows what they would have made of me. Anyway.)

A fifth answer, and the one that seems right to me, is this. We in philosophy and our colleagues in other disciplines are involved in a joint enterprise, to the extent that we are all investigating a pervasive, powerful, and complicated mental phenomenon. As with all complicated phenomena, no single mode or tool of investigation is adequate to capture the whole of the truth. The best we can hope for is a multitude of models and techniques, each illuminating a different facet of the phenomenon. As it happens, we in philosophy now have adopted certain interests and approaches that are not readily commensurable with those of colleagues in, say, literary theory or theology; nonetheless, appropriately humble and open engagement can bring our projects into dialogue.

Supposing something like this is right, I’d like to know why it is so, and I wonder what should follow from it. The why-question is prompted by the evident fact that a lot of contemporary philosophy of imagination is well-suited to interdisciplinary engagement—but with disciplines such as psychology and cognitive science, rather than the humanities departments with which we are usually aligned at the faculty level. Presumably, it was not always thus. I know a bit of the story, at sociological and philosophical levels. I ought to know more.

Without knowing more, what anyway should follow? Simply, I suppose, that we (I) ought to be modest when making claims about the wide applicability of our work, or its appeal outside philosophy, or the comprehensive explanatory power of our models of imagination—for it turns out that imagination in the interdisciplinary wilds is an unfamiliar beast.

References

Bakhtin, M.M. (1975). The Dialogic Imagination (Voprosy Literatury I Estetiki). Ed. Holquist, Michael; trans. Emerson, Caryl, and Michael Holquist (1981). Austin: University of Texas Press.

McIntyre, John (1987). Faith Theology and Imagination. Edinburgh: Handsel Press.

Wilson, Colin (1963). The Strength to Dream. London: Victor Gollancz.