I’ve been reading Serious Art by the philosopher John Passmore. This book has inspired in me some thoughts about what might be called the imagination. I’m especially interested in the relationship of imagination to an allegedly different part of the human mind called reason. It’s possible I’m interested because and not despite my efforts to write fiction, mostly novels, as well as philosophy and theology. I use the imagination when I write on topics philosophical and theological, though — maybe — in a different way than when I write fiction.
I’ve noticed that my ideas on those topics philosophical and theological often appear in the thoughts of a character or in the way in which events are presented in a novel and then appear in a more explicit form years later. Apparently, my mind seeks alternatives more freely when I’m off the grid which ties us all to communal thoughts of various sorts, desirable and not. It’s not the case that I could go back to one of my novels written in the 1990s and pull out a coherent and complete version of my current ideas about being and about the relationships between God and His Creation. Yet, as a novelist, I’ve definitely been meandering along the road toward such an understanding and doing so in the persona of fictional characters, allowing me for some intellectual or psychological reason to travel more freely and more confidently, even to explore a few side-trails. Knowing how my lines of thought developed, I can go back to an early novel and see the early development as if I had been traveling consciously toward a clearly seen goal. That is no more than an illusion though modern brain-science discoveries hints I might have been traveling somewhat steadily but unconsciously toward my current systems and narratives of thought. That sort of a possibility, of a human being acting or thinking in a rational way without being conscious of what’s really happening inside of him, appears in several of my novels. In fact, I generally question the belief that we’re always, or even often, conscious of our processes of reason.
I won’t pretend to have a coherent and mature understanding of my imaginative movements, let alone a description which can allow me to communicate what’s going on. It does seem that those movements are leaps and skips and spins and joyous runs which the serious creative thinkers can occasionally execute even as they mostly move along calmly. I doubt if Aristotle or Kant or Hume or Heidegger often moved in such playful ways, but maybe Plato couldn’t keep himself from doing so nor could Augustine of Hippo and Nietzsche. I can also imagine Melville and Flannery O’Connor willingly moving along as if circus acrobats performing as they moved down the road toward an impending performance. The characters and in their stories, and mine, are often strange in appearance of, often the events take on some sort of eerie aura of sorts, but there is never any real evidence of supernatural events, only testimony to a world of depths not yet explored by the human mind.
Though Melville and Flannery O’Connor never — to my knowledge — wrote of metaphysics directly outside of comments in letters, these sorts of novelistic hi-jinks seem to have helped them and definitely help me to get a better understanding of the miracles which are in in the things and events of ordinary life, not because of indwelling genies or visits by angels but because of those depths of being which I explore more directly in my nonfiction writings. That is, a human mind, whether a conveniently insane character in a novel or a befuddled observer in that same novel or in some real-world events, sees — quite correctly — strange and only indirectly accessible realms of being in the those ordinary things and events. Mystics have seen this even if I think most have misinterpreted the workings of Creation. The most hardheaded of saints and novelists of mainstream sensibility, the greatest of philosophers and scientists, have seen this and haven’t known what to do with it. The best and most unbiased of observers, such as William James and some of his philosophical disciples — including the neuroscientists Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman, have written of subjective `events’, qualia or purely personal experiences not sharable. I admit there are reasons for speaking this way but, at least as a matter of emphasis, I prefer to speak of human minds being molded as encapsulations of God’s acts as Creator. Something else is happening when we experience what is personal, something real but not personal in the sense of not being sharable. In fact, I’ve taken the position that the Body of Christ is real and under formation and will result in entities and an entity comparable to the Triune God, three Persons and yet only one God. We will retain our individuality but will be truly one Body of Christ. Even what is most personal in us is, and will be, fully shared with our communities in the world of the resurrected — if, of course, we are raised into that world.
There’s a sense in which a metaphysician, possibly a physicist in his philosophical moods, can create at least an outline of an entire universe, even a sketch of a world of moral order such as I’ve proposed to include the universe allowing for the full spectrum of created being along with the narratives set in the realm of thing-like being, but only a few scientists, such as Einstein, work regularly in realms where it’s proper to unleash the imagination and to think in terms of realms of being not directly accessible to human senses, including the amplified senses made possibly by telescopes and x-ray machines. When it’s proper to his task, a scientist has to use the higher imagination in the way I’m discussing, leaping and skipping between realms of being, from concrete being to more abstract regions and back again, maybe returning with some good insights which help him to understand why, as well as how, the immune system which distinguishes between `me’ and `other’ was apparently the evolutionary source of the nervous system, including the brain. The bare facts of the relationships between immune system and nervous system will never, by themselves, be more than organized facts. The greater theories are the result of imaginative leaps.
I claim that metaphysicians and some physicists whose work borders on metaphysics (Newton and Boltzmann and Einstein come to mind) work at some primary level of creativity, that is, they try to reconstruct the more abstract levels of the Creator’s work, try to understand the materials and tools He created and how He went about using them. If we understand God’s act of creating from nothingness as an ontological event rather than some magical event which took place in space and time though neither had existed at the start of that event, we can see metaphysicians and some physicists trying to travel the entire road back to that ontological event and to understand the event itself to some extent by understanding the road back to it.
Most thinkers and most artists and most in more active pursuits should be traveling the roads already cleared by those few called to such a fascinating and frustrating task. There have been few called to that task, only a small percentage of even serious philosophers and theoretical physicists and mathematicians. At this time, after a century or more of explosive developments in physics and mathematics, it seems to me that the baton has, in a manner of speaking, been passed to the brain-scientists who have sometimes found themselves forced to describe an entity which seems to have evolved to encapsulate reality for reasons of successful survivability and attainment of some pleasure in life, but that evolution seems to have given the human brain the capability to travel that road. This is to say that the difficult task of understanding how the brains of Plato and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas and Newton and Einstein worked so that they could travel that road is the task of understanding how that road could be traveled. Though Darwin was hardly a competent metaphysical thinker, as he freely admitted, he deserves an honorable mention for truly creative thought just because of some leap into a more honest perception of the evolutionary and developmental aspects of nature. That led to much good including the modern effort to understand brain and mind and thought.
Individual human minds are pulling the human communal mind along as they explore some regions along the abstract end of the spectrum of being. Some of those regions can’t yet be reached by disciplined reason — playful imagination would seem to be needed. But it doesn’t appear that many serious artists are really equipped to explore such regions — it takes a man with a solid but not too solid attachment to reality as he has received it from the culture and traditions into which he was born. What I wish to emphasize here is that a solid attachment to reality has, over time, come to include a deeper understanding of abstract created being. The sort of imagination I’m speaking of is moving is being directed by opportunities offered by Creation, and those opportunities are leading us further away from being as directly and naively perceived, further into the regions of abstract being. I’m not speaking of the imagination of the businessman trying to move goods faster when demand increases nor am I talking about the more concrete imaginations of most poets and novelists, even the most serious, for — as Passmore tells us: nearly all artists, including the most serious, are tied to concrete realms. In fact, most who are called abstractionists, or similar terms of compliment or insult, are really just looking at a particular aspect of what can be, more or less, directly and naively perceived.
In this essay even more digressive than is my habit, I have to raise the question: is there truly any cleanly-defined line of demarcation between imagination and reason? I think not, but we need a way of speaking of a steady walk as opposed to leaps and bounds, some of which might land us in that brier patch or even to a very short hover over a deep gulch as happened in many a cartoon I saw during my boyhood. In real-life, such happenings result in painful ends to rapid descents. But the imagination also allows us to leap over barriers of a sort to enter fertile pastures not yet accessible by a steadier sort of gait.
Again, as my title claims: Reason and imagination travel hand-in-hand. Also again: each carries us over a different part of the journey, each does a differing amount of work depending on the road being traveled. One way of re-expressing my overall criticism of my fellow-Christian thinkers is that they rely upon a pietistic sort of imagination to travel over realms of created being which have been explored by reason on at least a tentative basis. Moreover, the imaginative acts of nearly all Christian thinkers are from a repertoire of set pieces, dance-steps, parade-ground maneuvers — call them what you will, but they are no more than canned and reflexive responses to even the most interesting and potentially fruitful of possibilities presented by Creation.
I’m exploring and not presenting firm conclusions, though I’ve tried to state my initial thoughts in a strong way. As I discussed, I think there are some artists, perhaps Melville and probably me in my novelist-mode, who are metaphysicians of a sort, moving through regions of abstract being more freely than what might be called `normal’ artists. The interested reader can download two of my early novels, The Open Independence of the Seas and its tongue-in-cheekier version, Safe Harbours and Open Seas, to see what I’m merely hinting at regarding some basic metaphysical issues. Another of my novels, A Man for Every Purpose, tells a tale of a man shaping his mind by way of questionable responses to a poorly understood world.