2.1 Meanings of ‘imagination’
A natural starting point is to consider the ways in which ‘imagination’ and related terms such as ‘imagine’ and ‘image’ are used in everyday contexts.
Activity 1
Imagine someone asking you to define ‘imagination’. What would you say?
Can you think of any cases where we would talk of ‘imagining’ but not of ‘images’?
Consider the connotations of the term ‘imaginary’. What do they suggest as to how the imagination is sometimes regarded?
What is it for someone to be ‘imaginative’? How do the connotations of ‘imaginative’ compare with those of ‘imaginary’, and what does this suggest as to our talk of imagination?
How would you explain the difference between ‘imagination’ and ‘fantasy’ (or ‘fancy’), as those terms are used today?
Discussion
You may have suggested one or more of various possible definitions. Perhaps you characterised ‘imagination’ as ‘the power to form images’. Alternatively, or additionally, you might have mentioned the capacity to conceive of what is non-existent or to conjure up something new. The definition of ‘imagination’ in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th edn) runs as follows: ‘Imagining; mental faculty forming images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses; fancy; creative faculty of the mind.’ This covers most of what might be thought of in an initial specification, although there is no indication here of the relationship between the various meanings.
One such case occurred in posing the first question: ‘Imagine someone asking you to define “imagination”.’ In answering this question, you do not need to conjure up any image in your mind. Perhaps an image of a particular person did go through your mind, but it is not essential. It is certainly not essential in the way in which an image might seem required if you were asked to imagine a hairy monster with six legs. In imagining that I have perfect pitch, or that everyone speaks Gaelic, or that there are parallel universes, what I am doing is conceiving of a possibility. There is a difference, then, between ‘imagining’ and ‘imaging’: imagining may involve imaging, but there is a broad sense of ‘imagining’ in which conjuring up images is not a necessary condition for imagining to occur. This is well brought out in the definition of ‘imagination’ that Simon Blackburn provides in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994, 187): ‘Most directly, the faculty of reviving or especially creating images in the mind's eye. But more generally, the ability to create and rehearse possible situations, to combine knowledge in unusual ways, or to invent thought experiments.’ As we shall see, however, even this more general characterisation does not do justice to the full range of meanings of ‘imagination’ in the philosophical literature.
‘Imaginary’ is contrasted with ‘real’. More specifically, what is ‘imaginary’ may be said to be ‘fanciful’ or ‘illusory’. It is with these senses in mind that we might talk of ‘merely imagining’ something, or of something existing ‘only in the imagination’. ‘Did you really see the knife in the bedroom, or did you only imagine it?’ ‘Her happiness was just a figment of his imagination.’ What these uses suggest is a connection between imagination and fancy or delusion, a connection that we can certainly find in the literature (both philosophical and non-philosophical). When we talk of someone having an ‘active imagination’, for example, we may well be using the phrase in a derogatory sense. But while important, these uses are only one strand in our complex talk of imagination. Imagining can occur without what is imagined being ‘imaginary’. I can imagine something that really happened or that genuinely could happen, and if images are indeed involved, then these may well have been acquired from previous actual experience.
If imagining always involved imaging, then someone who is ‘imaginative’ would be someone who is good at conjuring up images. If what is imagined is always ‘imaginary’, then someone who is ‘imaginative’ would be someone who is frequently deluded. But what we normally have in mind in calling someone ‘imaginative’ is the more general sense of ‘imagination’ that Blackburn specified. Someone who is imaginative is someone who can think up new possibilities, offer fresh perspectives on what is familiar, make fruitful connections between apparently disparate ideas, elaborate original ways of seeing or doing things, project themselves into unusual situations, and so on. In short, someone who is imaginative is someone who is creative. As far as the connotations of ‘imaginative’ are concerned, they suggest a more positive view of ‘imagination’ than do the connotations of ‘imaginary’. But taken together, it might be argued, the two sets of connotations indicate the two poles between which our talk of imagination takes place.
Nowadays, ‘fantasy’ has more connotations of unreality or delusion than ‘imagination’ does, although, as suggested in answer to the third question, ‘imagination’ can also be used with these connotations. In the Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th edn), ‘fantasy’ is defined as follows: ‘Image-inventing faculty, esp. when extravagant or visionary; mental image, daydream; fantastic invention or composition, fantasia; whimsical speculation.’ The noun ‘fancy’ is defined in a similar way. Compare this with the definition of ‘imagination’ cited above. ‘Fancy’ is given as one of the meanings of ‘imagination’, but there is no talk in the latter case of anything ‘extravagant’, ‘whimsical’ or ‘fantastic’. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary treats ‘fantasy’ and ‘phantasy’ as mere variants, but it is sometimes suggested in literary contexts that ‘phantasy’ indicates a more elevated or visionary power; see Brann 1991, 21.)
Etymologically, ‘imagination’ derives from the Latin word imaginatio, while ‘fantasy’ and ‘fancy’ derive from the ancient Greek term phantasia. In the works of Plato and Aristotle, phantasia meant the power of apprehending or experiencing phantasmata (‘phantasms’). Arguably, what phantasma originally meant was an ‘appearance’ – an occurrence of something appearing to be such-and-such, as when the sun looks to us as being only a foot across. But even in Aristotle's work, it was also used to mean ‘mental image’, which is how it was subsequently understood. Phantasia came to be translated by imaginatio and phantasma by imago in Latin, preserving the etymological and conceptual connection here, although the original Greek terms were also used in their transliterated form (i.e. employing the Latin rather than Greek alphabet, as I have done here) alongside their Latin correlates. In the seventeenth century, as Latin lost its place as the official language of philosophy, the terms that replaced phantasia and imaginatio in English were ‘fantasy’ – or ‘fancy’ or ‘phantasy’ – and ‘imagination’. In this initial period of English usage, there seems to have been no established distinction between the two terms. In his Leviathan of 1651, for example, Hobbes claimed that what ‘the Latins call imagination … the Greeks call … fancy’ (I, ii). By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the distinction between fantasy and imagination had more or less settled down into its current sense. In his Dissertations Moral and Critical of 1783, James Beattie wrote: ‘According to the common use of words, Imagination and Fancy are not perfectly synonymous. They are, indeed, names for the same faculty; but the former seems to be applied to the more solemn, and the latter to the more trivial, exertions of it. A witty author is a man of lively Fancy; but a sublime poet is said to possess a vast imagination’ (quoted in Engell 1981, 172).
This brief consideration of some of the uses of ‘imagination’ and related terms illustrates the range of the meanings involved here, and hints at some of the philosophical issues that will concern us in what follows. Does it make sense to talk of a single faculty of imagination? Can ‘imagining’ be defined? What role do images play in imagination? How does imagining differ from perceiving? What contribution does the imagination make to our thought processes? To what extent does the imagination involve distortion or illusion? What is the relationship between imagination and creativity?