Stephen Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. He is author of ten books, including The Evolution of Imagination (Chicago) and On Monsters (Oxford). Together with actor Paul Giamatti, Asma is the executive producer and co-host of the podcast Chinwag.
A post by Stephen Asma
Imagination is finally getting some love from philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.
My own work has been a tiny contribution to the resurgence of imagination studies, especially in the interface between neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and evolution (Asma, 2017). This essay, however, is not about respectable imagination studies. No, this is about the weird stuff –the eccentric history and philosophy of imagination.
None of what follows will get you tenure, or an invitation to speak somewhere prestigious. It will not gain you influential friends, and it might even prevent you from getting a date. But it needs to be aired, contemplated, and even celebrated. As cognitively fluid systems (like imagination, or language) expand into ecological niches, they themselves “play” and “experiment” and sometimes become adaptations, or exaptations, or spandrels, or deleterious dead ends. Theories are like this too. To my mind, not all the weird theories of imagination presented below are dead ends, and some may yet prove valuable –even if we’re not sure how.
First, imagination has its own metaphysical tradition. It’s a secret shadow tradition but it’s still influential, strange, and dangerous. Genius painter Hans Holbein watched as Protestant iconoclasts destroyed his painting of the Last Supper in 1529, Basel Switzerland, and after a few more years of Europe’s violent campaign against imagery he packed his paints and moved to England where he became the King’s Painter to Henry the VIII. Destroying imagery is a favorite hobby of the overly virtuous, and Holbein was simply dodging a righteous impulse that dates back to the book of Deuteronomy, in which God’s 2nd Commandment states, “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, even any manner of likeness, of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth, beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
Renaissance Protestants attacked images with the same fervor and for the same reasons that Rabbinical Jews and Muslims attacked them. Images were thought to constrain and distort the transcendent divine reality by trying to capture something that is intrinsically unrepresentable. The imagination, it was thought, was not up to the task of mirroring divinity, but paradoxically it had all the sensual power to misdirect vulnerable humans toward idolatry. Strictly speaking that can’t be the full explanation however, since images of non-divine stuff (i.e., earthly reality) are also clearly forbidden in Deuteronomy. Never mind. The prohibition against idolatry is familiar and does not suggest a metaphysical causal power to imagination beyond the psychology of gullibility. For the full-blooded and fully weird metaphysics we need to touch on the Hermetic magical tradition that rode alongside the official history.
In his book City of God, St. Augustine (354-430 CE) gives us a glimpse into a terrifying form of image making. Augustine explains the Greco-Egyptian magic tradition of legendary alchemist Hermes Trismegistus, in which necromancers can use images and sculptures to influence the future and create damaging spells. These alchemists can make good things happen too (“high magic” or benevolent magic) but Augustine is more worried about the demonic angle. At the point of a person’s death the odious alchemist catches the departing soul as it leaves the body to go to God, and instead reroutes the unfortunate soul into a new body – but the new “body” is just a drawing or carving of a person. The Hermetic alchemist traps the soul inside the image, and this transforms the graven image into a powerful hexing device for future spells. This explains, according to Augustine, how magic-practicing pagans can convert normal souls into demons, and then use the demon-infused images to cause disease and misfortune for their enemies (see Bk VIII, Augustine, 1993).
Iconoclasm and the rejection of imagination in this tradition is not simply an attempt to avoid cognitive confusion and temptation about idols. Rather in the magic tradition, images could causally change physical events, like illness and fortune. In the Hermetic tradition the imagination was often personified as a hermaphrodite – a being in which male and female are fused together in one form (from the mythological legend of Hermes and Aphrodite blending). The imagination blends two aspects of the mind or forces of reality: the synthetic insightful force of intuition that conjoins things, and the analytic discursive force (e.g., logic) that breaks things apart. Moreover, imagination was seen as a dualizer or intermediate between universal Ideas and material flux. Changes in the physical world could cause changes in the imagination, but also vice versa.
Imagination causation was not exclusively magic-based since there was already a mundane pre-Cartesian commitment to mind over matter (especially imagination over matter). The imagination faculty was considered closer to the soul (than mere senses) and therefore capable of envisioning the Forms/Ideas of intellect but also capable of mediating sensual inputs and embodied desires (Ch. LXIV, Agrippa 2006).
Paracelsus (1493-1541) makes the metaphysical power clear when he says that imagination is the demiurge within each of us – a world-making force he calls our “inner star” or “constellation” (see De Rerum Natura, Paracelsus, 1894). The inner star of imagination functions like a magnet. It pulls things from the outer world into the human mind and then manipulates them or reshapes them in the mind’s eye. But this process is not merely the recombination of subjective representations or mental images, it’s not merely a cognitive event. Rather such reshaping goes back to the physical world and changes it.
Nowhere is imagination metaphysics clearer than in maternal impression theory (Asma 2014): “The imagination of a pregnant woman is so strong that it can influence the seed and change the fruit in her womb in many directions. Her inner star acts powerfully and vigorously upon the fruit, so that its nature is thereby deeply and solidly shaped and forged.” (Paracelsus, 1995. pg. 32) Maternal impression theory, popular from the time of Hippocrates to the 20th century, still flourishes in parts of the world. One is reminded of Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” who claimed that his own unfortunate condition was the result of his pregnant mother being frightened by a dangerous elephant in 1859. In his autobiographical pamphlet, Merrick says, “I first saw the light on the 5th of August, 1860, I was born in Lee Street, Wharf Street, Leicester. The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of animals were passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the elephant's feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy.”
This theory characterizes the imagination as a force that receives sense impressions, but also fabulizes them, and then reshapes matter along the lines of those impressions. The devil, Paracelsus informs us, uses the pregnant woman’s imaginative faculty to distort her baby’s anatomy, giving the child extra digits like fingers and toes and thereby marks the child as potentially evil. “All men, therefore, should be avoided who have more or less than the usual numbers of any member, or have any member duplicated. For that is a presage of the Devil, and a certain sign of hidden wickedness and craft.” (Paracelsus, 1894. p. 123)
Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) tells us that dreams too are involuntary imaginings that can transform the flesh of men and women. King Cyprus, he tells us, dreamed very intensely about fighting bulls, and awoke with horns growing on his head. “The vegetative power, being stirred up by a vehement imagination, elevating cornific humors into his head and producing horns.” (2006, p. 198) The imagination has pious powers too, Agrippa informs us, because those who intensely imagine Christ’s wounds can become spontaneously marked by the stigmata. The mechanics of all such processes begin with a “vehement cogitation” (a form) that becomes replicated in the blood, which in turn travels to the physiological parts nourished by blood, where the form is impressed upon the soft material. Distortions of the body are obvious cases, Agrippa points out, but many kinds of volitional or motivated action also reveal imagination causation. He reminds us that some people, like actors, can cry on command by using imagination, and “so great a power is there of the soul upon the body, that whichever way the soul imagines and dreams that it goes, thither doth it lead the body.” (ibid. p. 199)
You’re probably thinking, this doesn’t sound very scientific. It didn’t seem terribly scientific to Pietro Pomponazzi either. Pomponazzi (1462-1595) nonetheless argued that sometimes the imagination really does cure illnesses, change body anatomy, and cause other weird magical phenomena. He seemed to be presaging some of our more recent theories about placebo effect (see Benedetti, 2021). He took the data seriously but argued that the processes are not universal or even regular enough to be considered scientifically valid. As singular weird events of the imagination he said they were more like medicine (art) than science (natural philosophy) (see Copenhaver, 2015). Imagination causation, Pomponazzi argued, could not be entirely ignored or dismissed. Sometimes the world just behaves erratically and some phenomena stand outside the scientific paradigm. Contemporary fans of this kind of “Fortean” argument would do well to acquaint themselves with Jeffrey Kripal’s oeuvre.
We need not confine ourselves to the West. Promotion of the imagination above mere fantasy is a huge part of Mahayana Buddhism, especially Vajrayana (practiced in Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan). A similar tension about images – like that between Lutheranism and Catholicism – exists between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists. Theravada is practiced in Southeast Asia and tends to focus on the philosophical dharma of the historical Buddha, whereas Mahayana (and especially Vajrayana) is more magical, more imaginative, visual, mythopoetic. The analogy with Western iconoclasm does not map on perfectly, but Theravada is aesthetically and metaphysically minimalist, focused on how all humans can achieve freedom from craving by practicing the Four Noble Truths. The Buddha is an inspirational man, not a deity. Magical Vajrayana by contrast is aesthetically and metaphysically maximalist. Just look at a thangka painting for a while.
Instead of clearing the mind of every content through meditation (sati, and samadhi), the Vajrayana Buddhist will employ imagination to engage in spiritually significant creative visualization. Ultimately, one needs to grasp the abstract intuition of the emptiness of all things (sunyata) but along the way imagination is vital. We’re invited in various sutras and stories, for example, to imagine wish-granting jewels, diamond weapons of wisdom, future Buddhas, trees with dazzling gemstone leaves, Yab-Yum lovers locked in Tantric sexual embrace, and so on. The branches of the gemstone tree that we build with our imagination can be populated with our favorite teachers and inspirational friends, and we can imagine meaningful conversations with them (Thurman, 2005). All this is for spiritual progress not fantasy entertainment.
While it’s not a mainstream feature of Vajrayana Buddhism, there is a theory that a master meditator can focus her imagination so powerfully on the Buddha, or a mandala, that she can call it into being in some way. This manifested thought-form or “imagination projection” is often called a tulpa. The weak version or the non-controversial version is that imagining a change in the world can slowly bring about a change in the world. In that sense every tech innovation and artistic creation is a “tulpa” and they take on a life of their own metaphorically as they spread through culture. The strong or controversial version is that a tulpa actually materializes somehow from the realm of mind and lives in the physical world temporarily. These imagination-based metaphysical entities are like ghosts can do good or ill as their creators intend. First formulated by the Theosophical thinkers of the 1920s -- from a corruption of the Tibetan ideas – everything from Mothman to Slenderman has been blamed on these tulpas in recent years (see Mikles and Laycock, 2015).
In a wonderful convergence, Eastern and Western thinking about imagination postulated a third force between the purely mental/intellectual and the purely physical or material; namely, the “astral-body.” While usually attributed to the Western occultists like Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891) some Neoplatonists argued for the existence of an astral-body and this continued in the Hermetic traditions as a substratum (a spirit substance of subtle matter) for the activity or functioning of imagination. On this view, the rational mind lives in the soul proper, the sensual and mechanical functions live in the material body, and the imagination lives in between in the astral body or mind-made body. Additionally, we see something like it in Vajrayana and even Theravada Buddhism (see the Ayoguḷa Sutta).
Tulpa incarnations, imagination beings, and astral-bodies are not the stuff of contemporary cognitive science or philosophy of mind, but they do capture something about the texture of our imagination-drenched everyday life -- where people live in a melodramatic world of invisible agents and occult assumptions. If you spend your days in the academic world of skepticism and scientific literacy you won’t believe what I’m saying here – that average people today have weird views which accord more with Hermetica than with Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I’m in favor of all this weirdness and I’d like the imagination to fly its freak-flag high. I have a Pragmatism notion of truth that’s capacious enough to include religion and even some of the occult traditions inside the realm of knowledge. In fact, I’ll go further and align with perennial weirdo William Blake and other Romantic thinkers like Von Humboldt by saying only the imagination can truly capture and constitute reality. It does this by helping us see through the present moment of sense perception to the vast stretches of unseen time, the unobserved causal pathways, the meaningful drama and valence of events, the sense of freedom or agency, and the poetry of nature.
Of course, there’s better and worse imaginings, and saying yes to the imagination is not carte blanche for conspiracy theories and schizotypal paranoia. Remember that Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was famously publishing revealed religion treatises, reporting his own dream-state visitations to heavenly celestial kingdoms where he communicated with angels. He also argued for a new science of “correspondences” between the heavenly realm and our earthly realm; blood circulates in us like planets circling in the sky, like thoughts circulating in the mind, like God’s plans spiraling through the creation, and so on.
At first Kant was enamored with Swedenborg’s visionary ability, calling it a “remarkable gift” in 1763. But a few years later Kant was dismissing Swedenborg as a “spook hunter” (Dreams of a Spirit Seer, 1766). Kant was beginning to draw the curtain across the noumenal realm and create the prohibition against speculative metaphysics that came to full fruition in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). But less known and more important for my view is the simultaneous rejection of Swedenborgian imaginative metaphysics by William Blake (1757-1827) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). They too rejected the stiff-necked dogma of Swedenborg and other naive theists, but from a totally different direction than Kant and with a totally different result.
Blake, like Kant, was originally very excited by Swedenborg’s “visits” to heaven and his commerce with angels, but by 1799 he was writing scathing satire of Swedenborg (see The Marriage of Heaven and Earth). As Blake’s views matured he began to see beliefs in other realms of heaven and hell – where angels lived in houses and had gardens (an actual claim by Swedenborg) – as just juvenile and unpoetic. But his was not a critique of spiritualism and esotericism from the viewpoint of secular humanism, scientism, or even a Kantian epistemic stricture. Blake argued instead that we needed a better esotericism. And that could only happen if we had better access to the occult, esoteric realm. Such access, he argued, would need to come through art and creativity – through the imagination. Stop reading theologians like Swedenborg, Blake demands, and look instead to Shakespeare, Dante, the Renaissance alchemist Paracelsus, and other geniuses of the imagination. The imagination is not mere fancy, but the key to reality, according to Blake and Emerson. There is more truth in Shakespeare, Blake argues, than in theology and science combined. As he puts it in All Religions are One (1788), “man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception, he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.”
American poetic philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) made this same complaint, characterizing Swedenborg’s picture of the world as a giant reflecting crystal – beautiful, but cold and lacking vitality. The rigid devotion to metaphysical theories of heaven and hell made Swedenborg’s ideas “dull” and “disagreeably wise” according to Emerson. Swedenborg and other dogmatists lacked poetry, and Emerson finally dismissed him by saying “his books have no melody.” (Emerson 1850).
My point is that choosing to embrace imagination metaphysics and the eccentric reality it produces does not force us to accept every frightening or childish subjective fiction. We still need a good “melody” as Emerson would say. Amidst our current political polarization – in which reality itself seems up for grabs -- many in the academy and technocratic elite want to clamp down against “eccentric reality” and insist on an orthodox picture of the world. I’d like to cautiously suggest we resist this urge. Yes, let’s consider the ethics of the imagination-laden realties on offer, but if they “do no harm” then let us tolerate and even welcome the weird.
References
Agrippa, C. 2006. Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy: Natural Magic. Dover Publications, Inc. New York.
Asma, S. 2014. “Look Not Upon Them” in Morbid Anatomy Anthology. Edited by Joanna Ebenstein and Colin Dickey. Morbid Anatomy Press. New York.
Asma, S. 2017. The Evolution of Imagination. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.
Asma, S. 2021. “Adaptive Imagination: Toward a Mythopoetic Cognitive Science” in Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. Vol. 5. No. 2
Augustine. 1993. City of God. Modern Library Edition. Random House. New York.
Buddha. 2003. Ayoguḷa Sutta in The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Wisdom Publications.
Benedetti, F. 2021. Placebo Effects: Understanding the mechanisms in health and disease. 3rd Edition. Oxford University Press.
Blake. W. 1788/2000. “All Religions are One” in William Blake: the Complete Illuminated Books. Thames and Hudson.
Copenhaver, B. 2015. Magic in Western Culture. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge UK.
Emerson, R. 1850. Swedenborg, Or the Mystic. Online text: https://emersoncentral.com/texts/representative-men/swedenborg-the-mystic
Paracelsus, 1894. The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus the Great Vol. 1. James Elliot and Co.
Paracelsus, 1995. Paracelsus: Selected Writings. Edited by Jolande Jacobi. Bollingen Series Princeton University Press.
Merrick, J. 1884. Autobiography pamphlet. Online text: https://publicdomainreview.org/pd-texts/the-autobiography-of-joseph-carey-merrick-1884/
Mikles and Laycock, 2015 “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the “Tibetan” Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea. Nova Religio: the Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions Vol. 19. No 1. 2015. Pp 87-97. University of California Press.
Thurman, R. 2005. The Jewel Tree of Tibet. Atria Books. New York.