Last updated on December 9, 2020
Beginning this week, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on the question of imagination: what it is, why it is important, and how greater knowledge of it has significant practical implications.
As a scholar of politics and thought, I have focused for almost a decade on the imagination and its relevance for all aspects of life. Like most people, I thought I knew what the imagination was. I had used the word a million times. But once I got to graduate school at the Catholic University of America, I learned to think about imagination in a much more sophisticated and systematic sense. I was particularly inspired by the account of the imagination provided by Claes Ryn in his book, Will, Imagination and Reason, but also by many thinkers that Ryn drew on, namely: Irving Babbitt, Benedetto Croce, Russell Kirk, S.T. Coleridge, R.G. Collingwood, Paul Elmer More, Edmund Burke, and many others. And while Ryn’s writings have focused primarily on the importance of imagination for politics and thought, I began to realize its significance far beyond political philosophy (as does Ryn). I started to see opportunities to expand the study of imagination to pedagogy, theology, Christian ethics, economics, and to ministry.
I’m not (to my knowledge) treading new ground in these studies. In some ways, I find that I’m slowly walking down paths that have become overgrown from neglect and disuse. But I’m struck by how many really important thinkers often came around to seeing the imagination as something even more central than, say, reason and logic. Examples of people in intellectual history who have noted the imagination’s importance include Aristotle (phantasia), Augustine (who seems to have invented the word), Machiavelli, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Kant, Hegel, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Dewey, Arendt, Voegelin, Eva Brann, and C.S. Lewis.
I also believe that the human imagination’s centrality is a major reason Jesus chose to teach in parables – more on that another time.
What I want to try and do is present my understanding of imagination in a way that is, hopefully, accessible to a much broader audience. Too much writing on the imagination has become esoteric and, quite frankly, annoying. It’s often conflated with words like “worldview” and “ideology,” or might as well be conflated with them. My goal is to help disentangle these misunderstandings and to wrestle with the mystery of the imagination while acknowledging from the very beginning that I have a lot to learn.
To begin, I offer the following, which is adapted from a recent lecture I gave to the Undergraduate Honors Program at Waynesburg University.
Emperor Napoleon allegedly once said, “Imagination governs the world.” What did he mean by that? Do we believe it? If he was right, is it a good thing? My contention is that Napoleon was right. But it may or may or may not be a bad thing. It just depends on the quality of imagination we are talking about.
Correctly understood, imagination, and its relationship to reason and the will, is central to understanding power, human behavior, and knowledge. Imagination is not, as Thomas Hobbes once said, a “decaying sense” or merely another word for “memory.” It is an active and creative form of human consciousness shaping all we do, including how we experience and respond to the world around us. Imagination, more precisely stated, is humans’ pre-rational intuition of what is good, true, and beautiful. We act in and reason with a “world” that we imagine prior to acting and reasoning. As a result, the quality of our imagination and its hold on reality (broadly construed) has profound consequences for our lives and the lives of those around us.
This all sounds quite technical, though, so lets step back, unpack this understanding, and place it in a broader cultural context, and ask how it helps us explain politics first. Later, we can move on to other areas.
Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with someone regarding a topic like politics, religion, or relationships and it seemed like they were not on the same planet as you? It’s almost as if they are talking to you from a different reality; from a parallel universe where their assumptions about what is real, possible, right, and wrong all make sense. But that “universe” from which they speak seems remarkably different from your own. Perhaps they speak of something as true which you find conspiratorial and ridiculous or you find something beautiful that they think is hideous. There seems to be a kind of chasm which reason is helpless to bridge. You may argue, but it only seems to make the chasm bigger.
This is especially true in the politics of the last decade. The sharp fragmentation of American culture and media results in the proliferation of echo chambers, complete with their own sets of “facts,” stories, and assumptions diametrically opposed to everything in the echo chamber of the person down the street. And it’s hard to talk between echo chambers since, by definition, you only hear your own voice reinforcing your presuppositions over and over again. You only hear what you want to hear.
For the last few centuries, and especially since the Enlightenment, many people thought we could reach across, or even eliminate these differences through education and greater access to more information. Using positivism and the scientific method, perhaps, we could cut through the noise and establish agreed upon criteria for what is definitively true, breaking down echo-chamber walls.
But this solid ground of agreement has proven elusive. Cultures differ widely across time and space and what once seemed to be established as the truth was exposed as more tentative and relative. Increased pluralism (that is, diversity in the broadest sense and more mixing of different perspectives) and more information has made us less and less confident that definitive answers exist or that a common human ground can be identified.
Perhaps, in the Enlightenment’s quest to leave behind the mysteries and so-called superstitions of the past, and then in our subsequent failure to definitively “solve” those mysteries, we have unwittingly come to a kind of nihilism. That is, we’ve come to a point where any claim to truth or meaning looks and feels arbitrary, groundless, and artificial.
Rather than return to older traditions or double-down on rationalism, we give up. There is nothing objectively true, good, or beautiful, it seems. It’s all subjective and culturally imposed. To suggest that something or someone is “better” or “worse,” or that anything could be more beautiful or uglier, makes many modern individuals uncomfortable. So we just abandon claims of objectivity altogether.
And yet, the uncertainty also seems off-putting. We long for solid-ground, fixed answers, and something to stand for and believe in. It’s a striking contradiction. We act as if we have found solid ground, but as soon as I ask my students, for example, whether they think something is objectively true or excellent, they balk. “Who am I to judge?” “What’s right for me may not be right for them or for another time.” I’ll give you an example.
In a recent class discussion I asked if we could agree that, objectively, Mother Theresa was a better person than me. Can we claim that, if we compare my life and my character to hers, I am quite pathetic? While the students likely don’t think I’m Mother Theresa, they almost uniformly said no, we can’t say that. The standard by which I’m labeling Mother Theresa as a morally and spiritually superior person to myself is subjective to our time, to our shared Christian faith (between Theresa and I), and to our roots in Western culture. In a different time, place, and culture, I may be far superior to Mother Theresa. So, in my students’ estimation, such claims are spurious. To be sure, they don’t argue that Mother Theresa is somehow bad – they’d rather give me that label (perhaps justifiably so!).
Needless to say, I find this disturbing. This environment of what is, essentially, nihilism, breeds crises of identity at the individual and community level. We sense, instinctually it seems, that there must be answers to the questions: “Who am I and what on earth am I here for?” Yet we simultaneously avoid or reject the possibility of answers at all.
As a result, we try to find our identity individually and as a community in seemingly more concrete things like race, politics, socio-economic class, gender, and sexuality. These elements of our lives seem like they could hold together all the disparate parts of our experience even in the midst of a world void of genuine meaning and objective truth. But simply acknowledging one’s racial or sexual identity is not enough. We often need a story or some kind of historical account that makes sense of all this. We need a narrative that puts these pieces together and which compels us to respond in specific ways. Sure, we may deny that any of it can be proven or asserted as objectively true, but at least we’ve found some “fixed land” on which to affix our identity. Otherwise, we’d just be existing in a kind of existential vacuum with no rhyme or reason to anything. As Nietzsche seems to have recognized, such a disposition is intolerable. Instead, we tend to fill that vacuum with stories, however vague, that make sense of our otherwise mysterious existence.
What stories, then, do we pick? Where do they come from? Who “writes” them?
Next time, we’ll start with these questions and begin to see how that choice shapes, and is shaped by, the imagination.
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