Aphantasia (oil and clay)
by Rachel L. Clarke
I.
According to some, imagination is the foundation of material reality. That is to say, nothing actually exists before it has first been seen in the mind's eye. Such people have no evidence for this and so either quote poets or Plato for support, or fall back on good old common sense [1].
Isn't it obvious, they ask, that dreams, desires, and imaginative ideas encapsulate the true and essential nature of things and precede substantial forms. Think about it, they say, man like God creates by first imagining things and then willing them into physical existence.
Well, I have thought about it and this mixture of idealism and folk psychology seems to me nonsense. I agree with D. H. Lawrence here; no mind - not even Jordan Peterson's - could have imagined a lobster "dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!" [2]
Ultimately, I would suggest, we can only imagine things that already exist and that it is not the imagination that determines reality, but reality that shapes the imagination. To quote Lawrence once more:
"Even the mind of God can only imagine
those things that have become themselves:
bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation
even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe." [3]
II.
In an essay on eliminative materialism, Paul Churchland argues that "our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes
a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will
eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience" [4].
One of the problems with folk psychology is that when evaluated with regard to its coherence and continuity in relation to more recent work in evolutionary biology and neuroscience, it soon becomes increasingly suspect and would, argues Churchland, evoke open skepticism were it not one of our oldest and most cherished theories.
The fact is, that even the faculty of creative imagination, for example, is something that remains almost wholly mysterious within the framework provided by folk psychology. The latter believes its truths to not only be self-evident, but universally and eternally true and so is little prone to self-criticism or to change; perfect theories have no need to evolve in the light of new evidence or knowledge.
Ultimately, folk psychology has become a form of faith or dogma, proud of its own conceptual inertia. At best, says Churchland, it provides a "partial and unpenetrating gloss on
a deeper and more complex reality" [5] - one that is wholly material (rather than imaginary) in nature and not cluttered up with a lot of second-hand representations and hoary old archetypes [6].
Notes
[1] There's a very good reason why those who belong to a post-Romantic literary and/or post-Kantian philosophical tradition often return to a conceptual framework for mental phenomena based upon a remarkably conservative theory of common sense (or as they sometimes call it intuitive wisdom). For as Paul Churchland points out, it very conveniently provides "a simple and unifying organization to
most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind, including the
explanation and prediction of behavior, the semantics of mental
predicates, action theory, the other-minds problem, the intentionality of mental states, the nature of introspection, and the
mind-body problem".
Unfortunately, explanatory and predictive success does not necessarily make a theory true and those who subscribe to folk psychology might at least consider the possibility that its principles are radically false and its ontology is an illusion.
See Churchland's essay 'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes', in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 2, (Feb 1981), pp. 67-90. Lines quoted are on p. 68. I will return to this essay in part two of this post.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 603.
Lawrence's opposition to the imagination as the ability to make pictures of the world and oneself in the mind without any external sensory input, is revealed in his review of The Social Basis of Consciousness (1927) by Trigant Burrow. Lawrence argues, for example, that mental images are a substitute for life. As soon as man falls into self-consciousness, he makes pictures of himself - that is to say, he imagines himself ideally - and then he tries to live according to the picture. The imagination is thus a form of imprisonment; we become trapped within a world of representation. If only, he says, we could understand and admit to ourselves that we and the world are not the same as the images we make, then we might be able to live and think and create in an entirely fresh (non-ideal) manner. Ultimately, says Lawrence, the imagination is not real: "It is a horrible compulsion set over us [...] The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird as it sings sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself." Those who call themselves psychoanalysts, if they really cared about their patients, would liberate them from their own imaginations and get them back into touch with the world as it exists outside them (i.e. mind-independently): they must shatter the great image-producing machine that reflects nothing but their own human conceit.
See 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in D. H. Lawrence, Introductiond and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp, 329-336. Lines quoted are on pp. 334 and 336.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Demiurge', The Poems, Vol. I., op. cit., p. 603.
[4] Paul Churchland, 'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes' ... op. cit., p. 67.
[5] Ibid., p. 74.
[6] Even some philosophers in the European tradition eventually grew tired of post-Kantian models of the imagination; Gilles Deleuze, for example, refused to think of it as something innate or natural, but, rather, something that has been constructed and authorised by the governing determinations of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Readers interested in knowing more about aphantasia - the inability to create mental images in one's mind - should visit the Aphantasia Network: click here.
Excellent response. Love it when debate raises the level of intellectual engagement.
ReplyDeleteAs a poet, playwright and creative writer, any totalitarian reference to 'eliminating' the imagination is likely to make me run a mile. However, if we can take 'eliminate' in its strict etymological sense (i.e. putting 'out of doors', or over a threshold/across a limen), I am delighted if such thinking re-establishes me as a man beyond its limits and outside the household (or secular church) of people like Mr Churchland. (I'd probably be more interested in what he's buried in his family graveyard while I'm wandering around outside.)
ReplyDeleteUnfortunate and objectionable though it is if all proponents of the ontological autonomy of the imagination are here being propelled, through an ultra-compressed series of ante-upping rhetorical steps, into the domain of God-fearing poet-creationists, it's also amusing that such a fantasised group are upbraided for appealing to modern poets, artists and ancient thinkers as warrants for their position (as if such individuals were somehow a priori less credible) when the writer himself appeals to a poet, novelist and cod-psychologist in the form of Lawrence to buttress his own polemic. I suppose this is just one more form of having your fantastic cake and eating it.
What we have instead is just a series of contestable counter-suggestions, in which 'folk psychology' (whatever the writer means by this and whyever it is supposed to be prima facie suspect) is suspiciously over-attacked. As for Churchland (whose very name it might be interesting to drill down into in a psychohistorical mode), he nails his neuroscientific assumptions to the mast so fundamentalistically, it's hardly likely to be fruitful to argue with someone whose primary fantasy is almost certainly that the mind and brain are synonymous.
As for Lawrence's loaded idea that 'mental images' are somehow lifeless and/or substitutive of life, I pity him his lack of a vivid and vital interior life - something, for all my deficits, I don't suffer from. He had things upside down, I would argue - it's far more often the case that, rather than people 'retreating' from life into their dreams, they escape their dreamworld by overdosing on 'reality' in ways that give rise to all kinds of contemporary compulsions from social media addiction to identity politics.) As Edward Edinger has memorably stated, the unconscious gives rise to 'objective psychic organisms'. If one has encountered these in oneself, one recognises immediately the vital value of what he is saying.
For Jung himself, the archetypes manifested as living psychic images carried phylogenetically in the very codes of our DNA, whose 'evolutionary' power in the post-Jungian context remains openly contested and contestable. The idea that the archetyes are 'hoary' relics is itself a hoary cliche; in fact, they are the roots of instinctual life. Interested readers might here care to refer to Anthony Stevens 'Evolutionary Psychiatry' (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2000) for an extended discussion and make up their own minds.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolutionary-Psychiatry-second-New-Beginning/dp/0415219795
I make a reply (of sorts) to this comment in the following post: https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2021/07/gotzen-dammerung-notes-on-wandering.html
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