Conditions for imagination as connectivity

While Hume’s almost existential concepts of imagination seem to imply a frightening and chaotic existence, their saving grace is that they enable us to hold together a world view and to make ourselves feel secure as conscious beings in a complex universe.

Imagination does this by ‘filling in the gaps’, when empirical experience which might convince us of a truth or meaning is simply not available. For example, we cannot see that other people still exist when we are not with them, but our imagination enables us to think that they do.

‘When the exact resemblance of our perceptions makes us ascribe to them an identity, we may remove the seeming interruption by feigning a continued being which may fill those intervals and preserve a perfect and entire identity to our perceptions.’ (Hume, T1.4.2.40,SBN 207)

Imagination enables the congruence of our understanding, in turn, enabling us to feel secure as conscious beings trying to deal with the otherwise chaotic experience of life.

Of course, this also extends to our idea of our ‘self’ based on the relations of contiguity and resemblance that we experience among our perceptions.

Identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions and uniting them together, but is merely a quality we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination.’ (Hume, T1.4.6.16, SBN 259)

The idea that imagination helps us to cope with consciousness brings us back to archaeological and evolutionary psychology perspectives discussed earlier, in which it is suggested that dealing with the possibilities for thought which imaginative capacity brings may have led to the development of art and culture in an attempt to work out meanings via externalisation. In both sets of theory, imagination helps us to cope with an otherwise overwhelming context for a conscious being and is therefore necessary for survival in a somewhat ‘chicken and egg’ situation in which it is also the vital

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ingredient for consciousness in the first place. Imagination emerges, more and more, as the keystone of human stability and development and the means by which we hold ourselves and our society together.

As well as providing a view of imagination as our means of meaningful existence, Hume outlines its connective nature and the conditions for supporting this. (We will return to this idea in the context of visual art in Chapter 5). He describes a ‘uniting principle among ideas’ (Treatise on Human Nature, 1, 4). This principle has three psychological features: resemblance, contiguity in time or space and causal connection.

‘In memory, then, our ideas are bound to occur to us in temporal and spatial order…In imagination…the three principles of union supply the place of inseparable connexion by which they are bound to each other in memory.’

(Warnock, 1976, p.17)

This demonstrates a perspective in which imagination is recognised as a faculty enabling the malleability of thought and specifies the actions involved. Furthermore, this malleability enables the union and solidification of ideas. Like Aristotle, Hume’s impression of the imagination is concerned with movement and flow in its uniting of ideas and filling in of gaps, helping us to make leaps in order to form meanings. Hume tells us that the imagination

‘…when set into any train of thinking, is apt to continue even when its object fails it, and, like a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its course without any new impulse.’ (Hume, T1.4.2.22, SBN 198)

As well as providing us with a subjective view of existence in which imagination is our greatest tool, Hume gives us some useful ideas about the conditions in which imagination thrives. He alerts us to the positive impact of, at one end of the spectrum, the proximity of sensed experiences on imagination and at the other, of the positive impact of distance, ‘gaps’ and problematic thinking (see Warnock, 1978,’ p. 37-38 referring to the Treatise). It seems that imagination works best with extremes in Hume’s model and that there is something powerful in our need to complete a picture.

This need is felt emotionally.

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‘It is certain nothing more powerfully animates any affection, than to conceal some part of its object by throwing it into a kind of shade, which at the same time it sees enough to pre-possess us in favour of the object, still leaves some work for the imagination. Besides that obscurity is always attended with a kind of uncertainty; the effort which the fancy makes to complete the idea rouzes the sprits and gives additional force to the passion.’ (Hume, T2.3.4.9, SBN 422)

For Hume there is a strong association between emotion and imagination. Mental imagery, whether stored in memory and recalled or being directly experienced, is the source of this emotion. The ‘more powerful the imagination to form the image, the more powerful the feelings.’ (Warnock, 1976, p.37-38). Considering Hume’s words (above) in regard to the motivation stirred by concealed or missing knowledge, it follows that the more powerful a sensed experience, the more emotionally powerful the resulting imagination. Of course there are significant implications here for the value of arts experiences, particularly if we consider them in Aristotelian terms, as the

‘essence’ of ideas. This notion of the deliberate potency of art lends itself to Hume’s conception of powerful sensory experience and therefore, has the potential to spark more emotional, powerful imaginative responses.

So there is an iterative relationship: emotional experiences are likely to produce potent mental imagery and mental imagery is able to produce emotion when recalled or applied to a new experience. The emotional power may come from unpredictable sources, specifically relevant to an individual who is emotionally stirred by a new experience because it resonates with an existing one, stored in the mind as a mental image. The idea that imagination depends upon experience and that if this experience is emotional it has additional power brings to mind Dewey’s idea of ‘Art as Experience’.

We will explore this in Chapter 5 but for now, in terms of art, let us say that we might expect it to work strongly on the imagination, since it employs aesthetic and conceptual techniques in a deliberate attempt to produce emotion or thought. People often speak of art as having an emotional power and I have often heard arts-education practitioners cite this as a special aspect of its educational potential.

Going further, the aligning emotional aspects of imagination and therefore of imagination embodied in art, support the development of empathy, since we are able to imagine what others feel.

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‘Tis indeed evident that when we sympathize with the passions and sentiments of others these movements appear first in our mind as mere ideas, and are conceiv’d to belong to another person as we conceive any other matter of fact. Tis also evident that ideas of the affections of others are converted into the very impressions they represent, and that the passions arise in conformity with the images we form of them.’ (Hume, T2.1.11.8, SBN 319)

For Hume, imagination is terrifying in enabling us to realise that we live in a chaotic universe, in which it is all we have to help us cope and ‘find our place’. Yet it is also comforting in providing the antidote to this potentially frightening subjectivity by enabling us to make connections in our thoughts towards constructing meanings which make us feel stable. Imagination’s power is derived from it being bound up with our emotions. While it can be argued that emotions are simply a form of cognition, each of us knows, experientially, the difference between plain thought and feeling – emotions are perhaps a special form of thought, hence Hume’s distinction. It is the intertwined and to some extent, interdependent nature of imagination and emotion which drives us to make meanings and construct knowledge where this is absent. It is also what enables empathy for our fellow human beings. Imagination, as a connecting power, seems to permeate our cognition at every point and is not relegated to the bottom of a cognitive hierarchy. Suddenly, imagination is critically important.