Imagination

by Mary Warnock

Imagination is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to be related to its use in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who she considers to be the creators of a new kind of awareness with more than literary implications. The purpose of her historical account is to suggest that the role of imagination in our perception and thought is more pervasive than may at first sight appear, and that the thread she traces is an important link joining apparently different areas of our experience. She argues that imagination is an essential element in both our awareness of the world and our attaching of value to it.

Genres: Philosophy, Research

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock, DBE, FBA is a British philosopher of morality, education and mind, and writer on existentialism.

Reviews

[Adam Carnehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning with Hume and concluding with Sartre, Warnock traces the major contours of philosophical reflection on the imagination in the past 200 years in her 1976 book aptly titled "Imagination." Along the way, she lucidly presents Kant's ideas on the imagination, as well as those of Schelling, Coleridge, Wordsworth, the Phenomenologists (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), Ryle, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. In her learned exposition, she develops her thesis that the imagination is the means through which people imbue the world with meaning and love, and therefore it is the faculty which educators must nurture the most in their pupils. While she acknowledges that the most basic meaning of imagination is "that which creates mental images," (10) she notes that for these thinkers she's surveying, even that simple definition was understood in various ways.

For Hume, the receptivity of the person to outside phenomena did not involve imagination so much as custom. Imagination was a mental faculty whereby "faint impressions" of people and things came to mind. He acknowledged that poets and artistic geniuses have a greater ability at imagining, and so can bring together more images than other people and combine them in sharper ways. Kant argued that it can't be custom which allows us to perceive a tree as a tree, but it is the imagination combining all our experiences and memories of trees that allows us to see a tree as such. Like Hume, Kant also believed poetic genius was due to a more than normal ability of imagining, of combining many different elements in order to illustrate truth or beauty or goodness. In this Kant shows a tinge of Platonism, insisting that there are some kind of lessons beneath the products of imagination that are offered to those who also can perceive and combine images well. For both Hume and Kant, the imagination serves the purpose of bridging the understanding and the reason: how we see the world to what the world means.

When she comes to Schelling and Fichte, Warnock points out that these Kantians diverged considerably from the Prussian philosopher in elevating Imagination to some kind of power imbued by the Spirit. Warnock is not exactly enthusiastic about Coleridge, but she spends a considerable amount of time examining his theories on the imagination. Coleridge believed the imagination was the way to see the universal in the particular. Wordsworth essentially developed this in his own way with less opacity and more poetry than Coleridge!

The Phenomenologists demolished these Enlightenment and Romantic views. They simply said that when we picture a friend in our "mind's eye," we do not picture a picture of that friend, but we picture him - his appearance, voice, style, "feel." It's also nonsense, according to these French thinkers, to claim that when we perceive a tree, we first go through the mental hoops of analyzing our perception against a web of other perceptions, internalizing the various elements we perceive, and then combining memories and other data in order to arrive at the conclusion that, "Yes. This one is a tree." Perception is not like this, so the Phenomenologists say.

Wittgenstein comes along and adds much more to the discussion on perception and imagination. He essentially argues that all thinking has a perception element and all perception has a thought element (192). One cannot extricate one from the other, and as humans we don't even necessarily have the capacity to do that. Sartre essentially has the thesis that imagination is proof or guarantee of humanity's ultimate freedom; the fact that we all of us have this limitless combinatory power means that we are under no determinism (or the power of necessary associations, a la Hartley), but have the freedom to think, dream, act.

Warnock ends her book, interestingly enough, with a reflection on C. S. Lewis's autobiography, "Surprised by Joy" in which he explains the impact that a Beatrix Potter story had on his imagination. Its description of Autumn created in him a longing for Autumn, a desire to possess it, and as a child he never could. This longing Lewis calls "joy," and for Warnock, it's a perfect illustration of the power of imagination to imbue the world with meaning and love. The question is: Is this meaning and love already there for us to find, or do we produce it ourselves out of otherwise meaningless materials?

[Roberto Velasquez García · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me ayudó a entender parte de los procesos creativos, cómo se plantean las diversas visiones de filósofos como Kant y Wittgenstein

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The obscene contribution of the parasitic class to the people that risk fines and police violence if they refuse to give up their earned money to support the chosen ones.

[Neil White · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely some interesting perspectives from Descartes, Hume, Wordsworth, Sartre, Wittgenstein and others on the philosophical evolution of thinking about imagination and what it is. I'll definitely have to take some time processing this, but Mary Warnock does a good job of presenting these thinkers in a coherent way. I have to assume that her reading is accurate since I am not a professional philosopher who is well versed in the writings of these philosophers, but I really appreciated her compilation and commentary on their thoughts.

[Matthew A LaPine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great historical work, intriguing conclusion. It's one of the better books on this topic, and more important because it is early in the revival of interest in "imagination." The difficulty is that it is philosophically dense, so might be inaccessible to many readers.