Idil Çakmur is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and ethics, focusing on the place for conceptual work in our moral lives.
A post by Idil Çakmur
There is a simplicity to a life without the imagination. An unimaginative person might be frightfully dull, but at least they have a firm footing in reality, while the imaginative person is off in la la land, chasing windmills. The imagination, we are ordinarily inclined to think, might make things more interesting, but it does not bring us closer to the truth. It instead traps us in a dreamland of our own making.
This is where Iris Murdoch begins to disagree: “we use our imagination not to escape the world”, she writes, “but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real” (EM 374). When we consider the role of the imagination within her broader moral philosophy, it is clear that becoming more imaginative is a moral imperative.
Murdoch’s philosophy is an attempt to rescue moral philosophy from its overemphasis on action, toward the importance of vision. We act in the world we see. If we see clearly, if we are in touch with reality, then when the time comes, we will know the right thing to do—“true vision occasions right conduct” (EM 353).
The pursuit of true vision is what unites art and morality:
Art and morals are … one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (EM 215)
As we’ll see, the imagination sets the standard for correct engagement in both.
“Much of our life”, Murdoch writes, “is taken up by truth-seeking imagining, questioning” (EM 26). The operation of the imagination is constant and pervasive, as are its effects: “the world which we confront is not just a world of ‘facts’, but a world upon which our imagination has, at any given moment, already worked” (EM 199). We constantly “add color” to what we perceive. We make connections, tell stories. We endorse particular interpretations without even realizing it.
Murdoch’s account of the imagination is Kantian in its foundations. As she puts it: “imagination provides essential fusion, also gratuitous creation. At one end of the scale is the unconscious activity necessary to experience a world, at the other the free inventive power of exceptional minds. This may be seen as a scale of degrees of freedom” (MGM 309). The scale runs, in other words, from the transcendental imagination of the first Critique, the hidden cognitive machinery that makes experience possible for us at all, to the creative imagination of the third, uniquely realized by the Kantian genius. But what concerns Murdoch is the middle ground which she takes Kant to have omitted: the role of the imagination in morals.
When we settle down to be ‘thoroughly rational’ about a situation, we have already, reflectively or unreflectively, imagined it in a certain way. Our deepest imaginings which structure the world in which ‘moral judgments’ occur are already evaluations. Perception itself is a mode of evaluation. Any account of morality must at least set up a problem here. Kant both celebrates the imagination and fears it. He fears the degeneration of moral judgment into aesthetic judgment, and if the matter is put in this way we can also sympathise with him (EM 314-5).
The imagination is always active, even when we are not conscious of it, and it always introduces evaluations into the world. This means that even when we take ourselves to step back and judge “objectively”, we are still not removing the effects of our previous imaginings. We don’t have a neutral mode of perception. We are on the verge of solipsism, which Murdoch acknowledges when she writes that “each of us lives and chooses within a partly private, partly fabricated world” (EM 199). But the way forward is not to deny the pervasiveness of the imagination out of fear. It is to embrace it as a defining challenge for our moral lives: we have to make our way back to reality.
If we can’t escape the imagination, then we have to know how to separate good imagining from bad. What we have to fear isn’t the imagination generally, but the way it devolves into what she labels “fantasy”:
The human mind is naturally and largely given to fantasy. Vanity (a prime human motive) is composed of fantasy. Neurotic or vengeful fantasies, erotic fantasies, delusions of grandeur, dreams of power, can imprison the mind, impeding new understanding, new interests and affections, possibilities of fruitful and virtuous action. If we consider the narrow dreariness of this fantasy life to which we are so addicted the term ‘unimaginative’ seems appropriate. (MGM 322)
It is this distinction that we have to maintain, “between ‘fantasy’ as mechanical, egoistic, untruthful, and ‘imagination’ as truthful and free” (MGM 321). The clearest delineator between the two is how heavily the process of imagining is influenced by selfish concerns.
Fantasy, in this sense, is a catchall for the ways the imagination goes awry under the influence of our “fat relentless ego” (EM 342). Even if we are always influencing how we represent the world, if we uphold truth over self-interest, we are more likely to get things right. But that is also why we have to be cautious of our psyche and the “almost irresistible human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy” (EM 352):
The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine; in order to operate it needs sources of energy, and it is predisposed to certain patterns of activity. … One of its main pastimes is day-dreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. (EM 364)
Fantasy stands in the way of our apprehending reality. It does so in mostly self-serving ways, for self-serving reasons—that is why Murdoch labels its production “consolation”.
There are two forms of consolation that we especially have to worry about. One is in service of affirming our self-importance and covering up our flaws. It distorts reality toward something more favorable for our self-conception, like delusions of grandeur. The dangers of this kind of consolation, as well as how we can resist it, are obvious, compared to the latter.
The second form of consolation makes us simplify the world, to pretend that reality is easily comprehendible. It is an effort to remove the unease we feel at not understanding the world or the people that surround us. It makes us reduce complexity into myths and stereotypes, allowing us to think we have a command over reality, that we have “individuals and situations ‘taped’” (EM 87). The danger is that it means we are no longer in touch with the individual in front of us, as they really are, but with the homogenized images we have created. The way to resist this consolation is to turn our attention toward particulars, in their irreducible complexity.
This need to attend to particulars without lapsing into fantasy is the goal that unites art and morals. “Real people are destructive of myth,” Murdoch thinks, “contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination” (EM 294). When we examine people closely, we begin to see how much we had missed in generalizing too soon — “people in real life are very, very odd, as soon as one gets to know them at all well” (EM 255). Art is important partly because it can serve as a training ground for this kind of attention:
It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. This exercise of detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated is a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a colour or a sound. … Beauty is that which attracts this particular sort of unselfish attention. (EM 353)
The exercise of detachment is not only a task for the audience, but for the artist. The good writer allows someone other than himself to exist—his stories are not rehearsals of his wishes and anxieties; his characters are not mirror-images. In this way, “the artist is indeed the analogon of the good man, and in a special sense he is the good man: the lover who, nothing himself, lets other things be through him. And that also, I am sure, is what is meant by ‘negative capability’” (EM 284). The imagination is differentiated from fantasy through this negative capability: we don’t add, but remove. We remove our own inclinations, desires, and temptations. We learn to be open to the truth, rather than hinder our search by getting our egos wrapped up in it.
At heart, imagination turns out to be a way of truly attending to the other. It is a success term. We are imaginative insofar as we are being brought out of ourselves, closer to the world. We might not know what that looks like, but we know what it is to be enveloped in a fantasy realm—to be consumed by hopes of success or revenge, to be unable to shake ourselves; to struggle to see others as they are, rather than through our anxieties or desires.
Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination. (EM 216)
References
Murdoch, Iris. 1993. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM). Penguin Philosophy Series. Penguin.
Murdoch, Iris. 1999. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (EM). Penguin Books.