Avshalom Schwartz is an assistant professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. His current book project, The Discovery of Imagination, offers a new account of the earliest origins of imagination in classical antiquity and the role of imagination in classical political thought and democratic practices.
A post by Avshalom Schwartz
The safest general characterization of the history of imagination is that it begins with Plato. Indeed, this is a rare point of agreement between scholars—from intellectual historians to analytical philosophers—about what is otherwise a contested and heavily debated concept. According to this standard account, Plato was the first to offer a philosophical investigation of imagination. This position was taken, for example, by Murray Wright Bundy in what is, to this day, the most comprehensive study of imagination in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Bundy’s claim that “the history of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ as terms of reflective thought begins with Plato” is echoed in countless other historical and philosophical treatments of this concept (Bundy 1927, 11; cf. Kearney 1988, 87; Jørgensen 2017; Watson 1988, 1; Clifford and Buxton 2023, 4). Aristotle, as this common story goes, was the first to treat this concept systematically—“the first to give a careful delineation of the power of imagination as part of a complex theory of human and animal psychology,” as one commentator has put it (Sepper 2013; See also Schweitzer 1925, 77)—with others going as far as attributing to him the “discovery” of imagination (Castoriadis 1997).
Very few studies of the imagination have examined the pre-Platonic imagination or evaluated the background of his treatment of imagination and the resources on which he drew in developing his philosophical account of this mental faculty. Some have searched among Plato’s philosophical predecessors, focusing on pre-Socratic thinkers such as Thales, the Atomists, Heraclitus, and Parmenides (Ambrosi 1898, 5–9; Bundy 1927, 11–18; Sepper 2013, 107–14). Others took more mythical or aesthetic routes, treating the story of Prometheus and early practice of poetry—including ideas about inspiration and creativity—as pre-theoretical reflections on the human imaginative power (Kearney 1988, 79–80; Jørgensen 2017, 21; Sheppard 2015). But what about the more straightforward, linguistic origins of imagination?
Among classical scholars, it is well known and recognized that the ancient Greek term for imagination, phantasia, is derived from the noun phantasma (“appearance, image, ghost”), itself a secondary derivation from the verb phantazomai (“to make visible, to represent”). This group of phant- root words, in turn, is derived from the general verb phainō (“become visible, come into the light, show oneself, appear”), which can be traced back to phae, phaos, phōs, words that generally refer to “light” (Chantraine et al. 1999, 1168, 1170–71; Beekes 2009, 1545–46; Bundy 1927, 12). Eikasia, the second—and somewhat less central—ancient Greek term for imagination, has a parallel history. It is derived from eikō (“to be/seem like”), which is the root of later verbs such as eoika (“to resemble, to seem”) and eikazō (“represent by an image”) and the noun eikon (“image, representation”) (Chantraine et al. 1999, 354–55; Beekes 2009, 380–81; cf. Bundy 1927, 11–12). Although familiar to many scholars of imagination, the implications of this etymology for our understanding of the concept, its historical roots, and its developments have yet to be explored. This has left us with only a partial understanding of the origins of imagination, the reason behind its appearance in the middle dialogues of Plato, and the shape that it took in his writings and in the work of his successors.
Taking such a philological route to the study of the origins of imagination yields surprising insights. In sharp contrast to the contemporary emphasis on imagination’s role in producing mental images and representations, the words that form the linguistic backdrop for the later development of imagination often describe how things in the world appear to the human observer and the profound epistemological uncertainty surrounding some of these appearances. A modern reader might be even more surprised by the context in which these words are found. In both epic and tragic poetry—the two earliest literary sources to make use of this vocabulary of the “proto-imagination”—these words are used to describe encounters between humans and gods, the various forms the gods take when appearing to humans, and the radical epistemic uncertainty involved in these moments.
Let me briefly consider a few examples. In Book I of Homer’s Iliad, Athena appears to Achilles and intervenes moments before he draws his sword and strikes Agamemnon. “She stood behind him, and seized the son of Peleus by his fair hair, appearing (phainomenē) to him alone. No one of the others saw her” (1.195-200). The word used to describe Athena’s appearance, phainomenē, is a participle form of the verb phainō (“to appear”), which, as noted above, is the linguistic predecessor of phantasia. The Homeric poem also frequently employs variations of the verb eikō (“be like, resemble”), which is the basis of the second Greek term for imagination, eikasia. This is the case, for example, when Zeus sends a Dream to Agamemnon, which appears in the likeness (eoikōs) of Nestor (2.20-23). Greek tragedy echoes the Homeric use of this vocabulary and further expands on it. In Euripides’s Bacchae, for example, Dionysus appears (phanenta, e.g., 39-54), disguised, to the people of Thebes, and in one memorable scene creates a “phantom” (phasma) of himself out of thin air, which the young prince Pentheus desperately tries to stab with his sword. The same word is used by Euripides again in Iphigenia in Aulis to describe the marvelous scene in which, moments before being sacrificed, Iphigenia is replaced with a large deer on the altar, “due to some phantom (phasma) from the gods” (1584-6).
These are only a few examples (there are plenty more where they came from!). But they can nonetheless provide us with some insights about the original questions, problems, and phenomena that gave rise to the discovery of imagination in classical antiquity. First, as noted above, it suggests that the original conception of the imagination arose from concern not with mental images or representations, but rather with how the world appears to the human observer. Second, it points to the profound epistemic uncertainty involved in some of these appearances. In short, the fact that the gods often appear in disguise—and take the likeness of other humans—puts humans in an awkward position of epistemic uncertainty, where they are constantly struggling to determine whether the person standing next to them, talking to them, or fighting alongside them is a human or an Olympian in disguise. It thus points to an ever-present potential gap between the world as it is and the world as it appears to the human observer, thus suggesting that this “proto-vocabulary” of imagination might be linked to one of the most difficult problems that later generations of philosophers have come to associate with the imagination.
Finally, taking such a philological route to the earliest history of imagination provides us with a promising new approach to studying the discovery of this mental faculty in Plato’s work. As classical philosophers know well, Plato was not writing in a vacuum. Even when he introduces novel concepts and radical ideas, he borrows from the philosophical, poetic, and political vocabulary that was available to him and his contemporaries, often making highly sophisticated and subtle interventions. Perhaps the best-known example of this is his use of the word theoria (“theory”) to describe the practice of philosophy. Borrowed from an ancient institution of religious pilgrimage, in which a theoros was sent to other city-states to behold religious festivals and cult practices, this term was appropriated by Plato to describe the philosopher’s intellectual pilgrimage to behold eternal truths about the kosmos, before descending back into the cave armed with his newly acquired knowledge (Nightingale 2004). Tracing the earliest linguistic sources for the words Plato has chosen to describe the newly discovered mental faculty of “imagination” has the potential for yielding equally surprising insights. Uncovering the terms, concepts, debates, and concerns he was responding to when introducing this concept can thus provide us with a new perspective not only on Plato’s “theory” of imagination—a notoriously difficult aspect of his metaphysics and epistemology and a source for endless scholarly debate—but also on the history of imagination and our contemporary treatment of this concept in philosophy.
References
Ambrosi, Luigi. 1898. La psicologia della immaginazione nella storia della filosofia. Società editrice Dante Alighieri.
Beekes, Robert. 2009. Etymological Dictionary of Greek (2 Vols.). Brill.
Bundy, Murray Wright. 1927. “The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought.” University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 7: 2–3.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. “The Discovery of the Imagination.” In World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, edited and translated by D. A. Curtis. Stanford University Press.
Chantraine, Pierre, Alain Blanc, Charles de Lamberterie, and Jean-Louis Perpillou. 1999. Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque: Histoire des mots. 1st edition. Klincksieck.
Clifford, Emily, and Xavier Buxton. 2023. “Introduction.” In The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens. Routledge.
Jørgensen, Dorthe. 2017. “The Philosophy of Imagination.” In Handbook of Imagination and Culture, edited by Tania Zittoun and Vlad Glaveanu. Oxford University Press.
Kearney, Richard. 1988. The Wake of the Imagination. Routledge.
Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge University Press.
Schweitzer, Bernhard. 1925. “Der Bildende Künstler Und Der Begriff Des Künstlerischen in Der Antike: ΜΙΜΗΣΙΣ Und ΦΑΝΤΑΣΙΑ.” Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher.
Sepper, Dennis L. 2013. Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images. Springer.
Sheppard, Anne. 2015. “Imagination.” In A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, 1st ed., edited by Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray. Wiley.
Watson, Gerard. 1988. Phantasia in Classical Thought. Galway University Press.