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Nicholas Gordon
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1. Imagination is inseparable from experience,
since even what we experience as the immediate moment is only partially
observed.
2. All experience is a mix of sense data, reason,
and imagination, the proportions changing as we move from present to future
or past, or from our own point of view to those of others. But every moment
contains past, present, and future, and every thought and feeling is colored
continuously by imaginative glimpses into the inner lives of
others.
3. We even imagine ourselves, seeing ourselves
in the mirror of others, so that without imagination we would have no sense
of our own identity, just as, if we lived in a world without reflection,
we would have no sense of what we looked like.
4. We also cannot live with others except
imaginatively. All social relations require imagination, as we can love or
befriend or dislike only the person we imagine within the body we see, and
can know how to treat people with consideration only by imagining what we
would want in their situation.
5. Imagination infuses perception with feeling,
so that a landscape might fill us with wonder and awe, or, returned to after
many years, with nostalgia, or, under moonlight, with serenity, and so on.
All experience is charged by the imagination with feeling, so that life is
accompanied by a music to which we listen only intermittently with
care.
6. Some contrast imagination and reason, as though
the two were opposite rather than complementary. But both are present in
every moment of experience, as what we evaluate and categorize we imagine
rather than sense directly. In fact, sense data would be incomprehensible
if not shaped by reason and imagination working together as two aspects of
a single process.
7. Some contrast imagination and truth. But if
truth is taken to mean the thing-in-itself, outside of our experience of
it, then the same contrast can be made of sense data and truth, or reason
and truth, or experience and truth, for there is never any guarantee about
the accuracy of our perceptions, which is why the greatest accuracy, and
hence the greatest truth, is in experience tested rigorously over time. But
if truth is taken to signify a correspondence between what we experience
and what we say, then imagination is neither truthful nor untruthful. Only
we can be truthful or untruthful, as, for example, when we say that we heard
something that we only surmised.
8. When we manipulate experience to create a
greater clarity or beauty, we are not being untruthful unless we misrepresent
what we are doing. In fact, art serves truth by reshaping experience in ways
that reveal what we would not otherwise see. Just as a scientist uses reason,
an everyday tool of perception, to probe more deeply into the nature of
experience, so the artist uses imagination, also an everyday tool of perception,
to probe more deeply, albeit in a different manner.
9. Even though imagination, sense data, and reason
are indispensable, they are also not dependable. This is because reality
beyond experience, though unknowable, makes itself known, often in surprising
or painful ways. So although we have no choice but to trust our perceptions,
we must at the same time distrust them as well, always ready to be
wrong.
Next: The Principles
of Wisdom: Reason
Previous: The Principles of Wisdom:
Hope
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