Thinking through the Imagination

 Aesthetics in human cognition (Pt. 1)

Human imagination

Human imagination is an essential element of the human psyche, it empowers us to interpret artworks, create music, envision the future and enables science to continue progressing in order to improve our lives. Above all it is a unique aspect of our humanity: as a thinking process it facilitates the interaction of sense, emotion, and creativity, fostering fertile ground where new ideas and forms of human endeavour can grow and flourish. It has the power to transcend beyond our embodied existence.

In modern Western culture imagination has often been marginalised in favour of pure reason and embodied sensual experience. Too often the imagination has been relegated to mere fantasy and emotionalism. This notion can be traced back to Socrates's suggestion that imaginative poetry does not enliven but rather corrupts young minds. Modernism has separated affective and emotional components of cognition from the logical, analytic, and rational processes of thought. This emphasis on separation can be largely attributed to Descartes' 'Meditations' in a type of mind-body dualism which underpins much of Western modernist thought. This is what became known as Cartesian mentalism that represented thought as an abstract mental impression of the natural world as experienced by, but separated from our embodied sensibilities. Thus, in Western Enlightenment thinking, there is a disjunction of sensibility and understanding; a dualism of body and mind.

Thinking through 

It must be emphasised that the outgrowth of imagination in Western thought has remained an enigma but is essentially a part of a process of 'thinking through' conscious experience. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, in his 'Critique of pure Reason', initiated a radical departure from this separation of sense and understanding, or reason and imagination. Although Kant highlighted the 'imaginative imperative' he failed to realise imagination's full creative potential. Moreover, he failed to understand its central role in creativity. The natural world has order and continuity and, as such, gives certainty, which enables us to make inferences, such as predictive inferences, about what is and what can be. Thus, human embodied experience is fertile ground for the growth of abstract conceptualisations to grow. 

Carrying across

Abstract conceptualisations are characterised by spacial, temporal, and visceral relations. For example, analogies and metaphors play a vital role in human construction of imaginative concepts and abstract meaning. For example, metaphor and analogy are mental devices that 'carry across' ideas to other situations that are different but have some similarity to embodied experiences. This transference allows the human mind to generate associations from embodied experience to generate novel symbols, signs and relationships. In most instances they will give clarity and give depth of meaning by way of comparison. For example, when you say that, "I am feeling down today." the statement imposes a temporal and spacial dynamic to this abstract expression of language . Thus, the human mind structures the imagination by using forms of space and time to make sense of the seemingly random stimuli. Our interaction with the world is not just a matter of  'knowing', 'thinking,' and 'understanding' but is an outgrowth of embodiment: of thinking through sensual interaction with objects. Our minds use forms of space and time to gather and organise what would otherwise be random stimuli in the environment. 

Organisation

Kant, maintained that imagination was a schematising process. Schema are products of imagination, they mediate between the world of objects and concepts. Concepts are essentially the imagined rules by which schema are constructed. Schema act like flexible structures that link images or ideas in the form of stories or scenes. Imagination is what comes before understanding and sense, the subject of which is both productive and reproductive. However, our empirical observations are not necessarily pure because we use judgement and schema to render thoughts in terms of images and concepts. Thus, schema act as a bridge between sense and understanding. A schema can be both a process and a product. 

Abduction is one of several types of imaginative reasoning processes that Kaag identified. It is a type of inference that moves toward a logical conclusion when presented with two arguments that both seem to be true. It relies on one's ability to listen and respond to the natural ordering of the world. It simply amounts to a type of guesswork, not necessarily based on random associations but it is more to do intuitively with what is normally expected in similar situations. Abductive thinking lends itself to the ability of the mind to bring order to perception (as anchored in embodied cognition). In other words, because there is order in nature (embodied experience) there is also order in cognition. Thus, the more one is attuned to the patterns of nature the more one is consistently more able to make inferences in the form of a viable hypothesis. Hypotheses are predictive inferences that are constructed in reference to the possible relationships that emerge from multiple embodied experiences. Thus, what the imagination necessitates is a sense of order and continuity in the natural world.

Relationship

Kaag maintained that the dualism of mind-body of the Enlightenment is a false separation. In contrast there is a type of triadic synechism, or a underlying principle of mind and being: Kaag outlines three logical/epistemological processes:' sensing', 'responding', and 'adapting' that operates in an organised and purposeful manner. Imaginative and complex systems can arise from simple natural systems in an organised and seemingly purposeful manner. These processes also correspond to Woolley's (me) three levels of cognition: perception (sensing), comprehension (responding), and metacognition (adapting) in a likewise purposeful manner. Whereas Kaag focusses on imagination and creativity Woolley's categories relate to the ability to form mental imagery to achieve comprehension of the written or spoken word. Essentially Woolley's triadic relationship functions in a similar way. 

Kaag illustrates another triadic relationship:

"The prologue of the Gospel of John reflects Pierce's philosophy of mind and leads naturally to a development of agape. John opens with a description of the co-emergence of logic, in the form of the Word (logos), and being. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made ... The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." Here, it seems appropriate to describe the Word as the logos, the order and relation of things. If human logic has the ability to apprehend the ordering of reality, its ability rests on the logos that girds both the imaginative mind of the human being and the purposiveness of being in its most general form... Thus all matter is really mind."  

Conclusion

The imagination has long been the dark horse of western intellectualism, the substance of which has been relegated to Romanticism and pure fantasy. Kaag's book is a bridge that spans the spectrum of language from metaphor, creativity and reason. It addresses the short-comings of Enlightenment thinking with its separation of mind and body. At the end of the day innovation and scientific progress rely on imaginative thinking. It is in the of metaphor and image schema that moves us towards aesthetic and imaginational structures which give rise to creativity. 

This current discussion should give some traction to this blog series dealing with metaphoric and 

symbolic meaning.

The book:

J. Kaag (2014). Thinking through the imagination: Aesthetics in human cognition. New York: Fordham University Press.

My books are listed and hyperlinked on the side panel on the right of this blog. 

Propaganda

 

My motivation in reading this book was that I am interested in social memory and how perceived meanings/propaganda can influence people to make changes to deeply entrenched beliefs. I have noticed in the last two years how public opinion can quickly change over a very short period of time, particularly when people's fears are exploited, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Take for example, the recent shootings in America. If the perpetrator of a mass shooting is black, Hispanic or Arab the mainstream media tends to ignore it, but if the perpetrator is white the popular media will exploit and dramatise the event. As the Western Civilisation mythos is under attack and history is being rewritten one can assume that there is some political advantage in fanning the flames of racial hatred and fear through the channels of popular MSM. 

Another example of public opinion manipulation is the recent shooting of a teenage boy at night in an alley. MSM made a point in showing the youth with raised hands in a gesture of surrender before he was fatally shot by a white officer. What they did not show was the broader context in which the incident took place. The footage from the police body cam showed the police chasing the youth down a dark alley way, the young fugitive stopped with his body side on and shielding  the gun from the view of the camera. As the boy turned he dropped his gun on the ground out of view of the camera lens. As he raised his hand it was not clear whether or not he was going to shoot. The officer who allegedly shot him would have had to make a split second decision to pull the trigger in self defence. Only a thorough investigation will reveal the truth. What is apparent is that the media selected an edited (purposely?) still from the footage to support their view of the story. Remember the George Floyd incident that set the world on fire in 2020? A brief video clip was sent across the internet - no context - and delivered the needed content to activate BLM marches and worldwide protests and the call to Defund the Police. Eventually the whole video revealed a very different story to the one MSM pushed. But few people would even be aware of it as it does not suit the contrived political narrative.

And again the shooting of Ashli Babbitt on 6th January at the so called siege of the Capitol in Washington DC. Ashli was an ex-military intelligence officer who was unarmed at the time of the shooting. She was supposedly a conservative Trump supporter and was allegedly shot in the neck at a very close range by one of the guards in the capitol building. The whole scene was recorded by John Sullivan, a far left activist who was accompanied by a CNN reporter. Even though it was recorded on camera the incident has not been investigated (as yet), the name of the guard has not been released and the media has shown no interest in this case. Why? Especially in light of the fact that so much has been made of this incident and it appears that she is actually the only person who was killed in the action.

These above mentioned cases may or may not be referred to as examples of deliberate propaganda. However, the word 'propaganda' has not always been used as a pejorative. Certainly at the time of Edward Bernays' (the author) writing in 1928 propaganda was a neutral term that referred to pubic persuasion, for good or for ill. According to Mark Crispin Miller, the writer of the introduction to this edition, it was first coined in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV, used the term to emphasise the Catholic efforts to spread the Gospel in response to the spread of Protestant missionary efforts throughout the world. It wasn't until the First World War that it was used in a derogatory term. It is well known what the German propaganda machine was capable of but Allied propaganda also used it to demonise the 'Hun'.

Bernays adds, "Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group. This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. ... It was not many years ago that newspaper editors resented what they called 'the use of the news columns for propaganda purposes'. Some editors would even kill a good story if they imagined its publication might benefit anyone."

Click on picture to go to original

Advertisers have used Bernays' ideas to convince people that they should buy their products. For example, the tobacco industry have spent a fortune on advertising (see the poster on the left) even though it was obvious that the product was causing cancer. This poster shows a cowboy lighting up a cigarette in an effort to show that smoking is essentially a masculine thing. Even though the tobacco industry had used Bernays' ideas he was exceptionally ethical and so the toxic side effects of smoking became impossible for him to tolerate. Bernays eventually gave up working for tobacco companies and lobbied staunchly (but unsuccessfully) to get the Public Relations Society of America to work against the spread of the habit.

On 15th April 2021, James O'Keefe released a secretly taped conversation with a technical director from CNN in which he admitted that their news items were deliberately biased towards Black Lives Matter. Project Veritas had also previously released 2 other segments of the undercover conversation with Charles Chester where he admitted that CNN had played up Covid death statistics and promoted anti-Trump propaganda. To make matters worse James O'Keefe announced on 14th that he intended to sue CNN for defamation for accusing him of using disinformation (propaganda).

Click on picture to go to article

Bernays finishes with the following statement, "Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realise that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos." Something to think about!

The Book: Bernays, E. (1928). Propaganda. N.Y.: Ig Publishing.

Beauty

 A not so very short introduction: A reflection

If you are asked to imagine the word 'beautiful' chances are that you will visualise a breathtaking landscape, seascape, building or some precious object with some emotional attachment associated with it. I might suggest that most people have a different image suspended in their imagination. Most of us have an intuitive notion of what appeals to sensibility and we actually do make judgements about beauty based on comparisons using words like: 'charming', 'elegant', and 'attractive'. Order, harmony, meaning, and fittedness are examples of typical criteria that people often use to make aesthetic judgements. Most likely would think of something regarded as being good or noble. 

Avant-guarde

However, the philosopher, Nietzsche pointed out that beauty and goodness sometimes diverge. For example, Duchamp, a French Dada  artist, exhibited a urinal as a work of art at a major exhibition in France earlier last century and the artefact became a valued icon of the avant-guarde. Dada was an anti-art movement that would have disapproved  of what became a much sort after and highly prized museum treasure. So then what is beauty? If a common and normally repulsive object can become esteemed then what can we say about an individual's judgement of what classifies as a thing of beauty? In her forward to this edition, Sperryville commented, "Hence the current 'crisis in the humanities': is there any point in studying our artistic and cultural inheritance, when the judgment of its beauty has no rational grounds?"

In a recent blog, Zombies in Western Culture, I wrote about the attraction of the Zombie myth exemplified by its ghoulish ugliness and human degradation. You would have to ask the question, "What makes us attracted to what is normally regarded as inherently ugly?" To answer this question Scruton delves into what we actually mean when we ascribe something as being beautiful. Philosophers first grappled with this question before the birth of Christ. The Greek philosophers imputed beauty to a thing's innate nature, to its 'telos', because they believed that all objets have an inherent purpose. They believed then that truth, beauty, and goodness were attributes of the deity and in some sense these divine virtues have been revealed to the human soul. Later, St Thomas Aquinas adapted the ancient virtues as transcendental attributes, but considered truth and beauty as being inseparable. 

Enlightenment

In contrast, some Enlightened thinkers tended to see beauty as an appreciation of an object for its own sake. In other words, desiring the thing for its inherent attractiveness rather than for its utility. Likewise, the Enlightenment philosopher, Kant postulated,  to ... "be interested in beauty is to set all interests aside, so as to attend to the thing itself." Kant also made a distinction between aesthetic interest in a thing from the position of desire or from a position of 'disinterested interest'; from the point of view of a judge using 'pure reason'. During this Enlightenment period (which extends to the present) there has always been this tension between desire and reason.

Steven Pinker, an Enlightenment thinker and a cognitive scientist postulated in his book, 'How the Mind Works', the notion that the human sense of beauty has evolved purely by a natural biological means. Scruton reflected on Pinker's idea with the following comment, "According to this theory the sense of beauty has emerged through a process of sexual selection - a suggestion originally made by Charles Darwin in his book, 'The Descent of Man'. Pinker uses the Darwinian illustration of female birds being attracted by the colourful male bird's plumage in order to mate and reproduce." As an 'Enlightened' rationalist, Pinker understands the mind merely as a soft electro-chemical machine and, as such, cannot possibly explain how the displays of birds and sexual attraction evolved randomly into the intricacies of human aesthetics.

Triadic structure of Cognition

The ancient philosopher, Plato, on the other hand, thought that platonic love bore no relation to eros (sexual desire). He did, however, separate mind from embodied experience by valuing contemplation more highly over physical desire. In fact, Plato was disgusted by physical lust just as many moderns are disgusted by obscenity, which is euphemistically described as an 'eclipse of the soul by the body'. Maybe the answer is somewhere else. "The love of beauty is really a signal to free ourselves from that sensory attachment, and to begin the ascent of the soul towards the world of ideas." From this statement  I tend to think that Scruton is not discussing beauty in terms of a Platonic or Cartesian separation of mind and body.  Scruton asserts that the human condition involves a triadic structure of cognition. Whether by desire or reason we take pleasure in listening, viewing or taking part in art happenings, scenes, or artefacts we can take pleasure: 'from,' pleasure 'in', and pleasure 'that.' When we take pleasure 'from' something we derive enjoyment directly from our senses. When we have pleasure 'in' something we have enjoyment in the actual thinking activity inspired by the appreciation of that object, performance, or activity. When we have pleasure 'that', we enjoy reflecting about our own appreciation in a responsive mental act. In essence, the 'that' is a transcendent reality, it is a stepping out of ourselves and thinking about our own thinking. In other words, it is a stepping out of embodied experiential thought.

Transcendence

Many people attest to art and beauty as being a very transcendent spiritual experience. In other words, a transcendent process that seeks a meditational and relationship orientation to spirituality and to that which is beyond the mind and sensorial experience. Thus, aesthetic meditation can be a spiritual state that seeks connection with the sacred. Sacred things are not normally of this world; they are set apart from ordinary reality through meditation and affect. Human beauty, nature, art, or symbolic ritual can evoke transcendence and ontological meaning. Thus, art has been an important transformative element of traditional Christian worship that encompasses a union of body, soul, and spirit. Moreover, this triadic appreciation encapsulates sacred art has the propensity to move one in the direction of transcendence, or contemplation on a relationship responsive to God's spirit.

Click on picture to go to Video

Johnathan Pageau is a Canadian Christian artist who specialises in traditional Eastern Orthodox iconic sacred carvings and painting. In the YouTube video 'A call to Christian Artists' (link in the picture on the left) he gives a very articulate outline of the current state of art and spirituality in contemporary Western culture. He makes a plea to Christians, in particular, to use art to portray narrative. We are all involved in story, myths, legends, movies and literacy, it is when our own story is responsive to art that we can respond to what is meaningful and transcendent. 

The book:

Scruton, R. (2009). Beauty: A very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Links: 

Roger Scruton: The True, the Good and the Beautiful: YouTube

A Call to Christian Artists: Jonathan Pageau: YouTube

Why is there so much Beauty in the World?: YouTube: Rupert Sheldrake