Maybe man is the ‘imagining animal’

Maybe man is the ‘imagining animal’

Posted on February 24th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

I had never heard of Gaston Bachelard until a few weeks ago, when I read an article by David Cooper called “Art, Nature, Significance.” What Cooper says about Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, as well as the quotes from it, sounded so interesting that I immediately ordered a copy of the book from Amazon and am now slowly reading it. (I am reading it slowly not because it is difficult, but because it is too beautiful and thought-provoking to read any other way.)

Before the book arrived, however, I had come upon something Bachelard had said in another book, The Poetics of Reverie: “Man is an imagining being.”

Classical philosophy defines man as the “rational animal.” This has always seemed to me a self-serving definition — serving the self of the philosophers. They define the human species in terms of reasoning, which is what they think they do best. In other words, the defining human activity just happens to be the one that philosophers are especially suited for. OK, maybe they only mean the kind of commonsense thinking all of us do every day. But if you watch animals, you see that they deliberate and choose, just as we do. They think enough to get by, which is all most of us do. So, by itself, thinking hardly seems enough to fully distinguish us from our furred and feathered relatives.

But imagining might. And by imagining I do not mean merely the formation of images in our minds, but rather that process by which we take such images and the ideas we abstract from them and the feelings they generate in us and arrange them coherently and harmoniously into something new, in much the same way as the combination of two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen becomes a compound that is altogether different from either of its constituents by themselves. For all that we are hearing in this year of Darwin about a supposed connection between art and evolution, it seems worth noting that no other species has found it necessary for its survival to decorate a nest or lair with frescoes or adorn itself with jewelry or sit around and listen while one of their number sings a tale of bestial heroism or romance.

As neurologist Russell Brain pointed out many years ago, there is no necessary connection between the stimuli our senses receive from the outside world and the images we form of that world (for instance, the frequency of the sound vibrations transmitted by a tuning fork takes place at a rate faster than any nerve fiber in the body can carry). Now, animals receive sensory stimuli just as we do and presumably use them for arriving at some representation of the world around them. But there is no evidence they use this representation for anything other than getting around.

For us however, the world and the images by which we represent it to ourselves are practically indistinguishable. We do not merely take note of those images; we record them and descant upon them, as the world’s libraries and art museums amply attest.

Perception is not a purely passive undertaking. Our minds are not blank screens upon which the world projects its images. Those images are created by us. Given what Russell Brain observed, it would be more correct to say that we encounter the world, engage with it, and then translate it into images that we in turn project upon it. Oddly, we have come to regard those projections as “objectively real,” despite their subjective origins.

I would suggest that they may be no more “real” — and no less — than any other images to be found in the reservoir from which they have been drawn. Any writer of fiction will tell you how uncannily real the creatures of imagination can be. Suppose, then, that the world “out there” — in terms of its imagery — is a creation of the human imagination. Then it might follow that the way to understand the nature of reality is not to concentrate on the details of the world “out there,” but on the origin of that world within.

This is not to suggest that we ignore the outside world, but only that we remind ourselves more often than we do that the world’s imagery is fundamentally symbolical and that there may be more symbols waiting to be projected from the place those we already know of came from. Maybe, in ancient times, people actually did see centaurs and fauns and nymphs because their perception of the world was still fundamentally an imaginative engagement with it. Perhaps the Sanskrit sentence tat tvam asi (“thou art that”) really has to do with the imaginative origin of our perceptions. And perhaps there is something to the Australian aborigines’ Dreamtime.

What I think is worth considering is that science and philosophy and religion, and not just art, music, and literature, are imaginative constructs and as such have a vital dynamism that necessarily runs counter to any sort of static dogmatism. As Gaston Bachelard observed, “The imagination is ceaselessly imagining and enriching itself with new images.”

We should get to know them.