The Zolt-Gilburne Faculty Seminar

–Joan Richardson

• “God and the imagination are one.” Wallace Stevens, Adagia
• “Imagination” as we have come to think of it, has/needs to be reconceived, as for Ralph Waldo Emerson who had at the heart of his project, to “reconceive reason.” This desire, on his part, had all to do with what we have come to recognize as the “Darwinian event.”
• “…so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend to a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature.
  […]”“This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent.” (Emerson, “The Poet,” 456, 459)
• Oliver Wendell Holmes was the first to realize that Emerson had anticipated what we have come to understand, after Charles Darwin’s monumental contribution, as “evolution,” in his moment known simply as “developmental theory.” (Dov Ospovat; Gillian Beer et al).
• William James, perhaps Emerson’s and Darwin’s most significant heir, was at pains to indicate in the grounding “Stream of Thought” chapter of his The Principles of Psychology (1890)—a text that was ten years in the making—that it is accidental that we come to think of words like “imagination,” “truth,” or almost any other word ending in “-ion” as having substantive purchase because, simply, of features of the language we happened to have inherited/acquired in which nouns and verbs occupy prominence as substantives and essential categories. He goes on to note that this feature of these languages occludes the actuality of accident and process that in fact is the more accurate decriptor of human experience. [Quote passage from James.]
• Given this access, an anticipation of what contemporary researchers like Gerald Edelman and Jean-Pierre Changeux have been articulating about thinking/mind processes being themselves subject to the same natural/evolutionary pressures as a life form like any other life forms—a naturalized extension of a Kantian insight—it is rather urgent that this information be integrated into both conceptual frameworks and methodologies of research and teaching.
• There is not yet a theorized basis for such a program, though there are individuals and texts mapping paths into this (new) territory.
• Along the way of one of these paths, I would offer, that it is crucial to separate the idea of “imagination” from “image”—something that on the surface seems, of course, to some, a given. Yet, only by the suggestion/connotation of the word itself, it is quite difficult for us to entertain the reality that, in fact, “imagination” is not at all limited to an “image-ing” function but, rather, encompasses/point to/draws on all residual remnants of lived experience as they are called up by “present” prompts—elicitors.
• Consider for example this passage from linguist Roman Jakobson’s second lecture on Sound and Meaning given in New York City in 1942 as part of the inaugural event  of L’Ecole Libre des hautes etudes (Free School for Advanced Studies) founded by French and Belgian scientists in exile:

We speak to ourselves without emitting and without hearing any sounds. Instead of pronouncing or hearing we imagine ourselves to be pronouncing or hearing. The words of our interior speech are not composed of emitted sounds but of their acoustic and motor images. And if a Russian, in his interior speech, pronounces in imagination… (SM 37; my emphases).

• [Explore Stevens’s “Imagination as Value”]
• Think of imago, final stage in the metamorphosis from larva to pupa to imago: adult, sexually mature, winged stage.
• Along the way to “reconceiving reason,” following William James, following Emerson, we find in Jamesian pragmatism a project dependent on “the use of…imagination”:

[…] Pent in, as the pragmatist more than any one else sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations? If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandments one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the uses of imagination in science. [John Tyndall] It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. (“Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking in William James: Writings 1902-1910 [New York: Library of America, 1987], pp. 588-89)

• Overlapping domains (as opposed to Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria”): adapting information from one area and using it in another: fine example, Emile Galle’s using what he learned from Darwin and Haeckel and from Japanese botanist Hokkai Takashina as well as Japanese art displayed in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century to shape his exquisite glass objects. See Nature review, “Evolution’s influence on art nouveau” (Vol. 460 [2 July 2009] 37). Connect as well with overlapping in William James, as observed by Jean Wahl in Vers le Concret.Similarly, Darwin’s taking from Paradise Lost a “moving picture” of evolution’s process—then still called “development theory” (Dov Ospovat volume; Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots and Open Fields). And my sense/use of manner of DNA/RNA activity, imperfect replication, providing a current vehicle for understanding the nature and behavior of imagination (A Natural History of Pragmatism).
• Another thought: given recent finding that dreaming is continuous—Gregory Bateson’s “primary process”—it seems to me that whatever it is we call “imagination” is what William James describes as the “hook” that we drop from “consciousness” into the “darker, blinder strata…where we find real fact in the making” (passage in Principles). These “hooks” Whitehead calls “lures for feeling.” In the “darker, blinder strata” is the undifferentiated matter/experience/information that we share with all being/matter/process.
• Prehension: Charles Lyell’s adding to scientific “fact,” to the empirical, the imagination’s grasping of invisible and completely untestable experience, the passage of aeons of time that it had to have taken for the stria of the planet to be laid down (Burgess Shale).
• From Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants comes the aptest description of imagination’s working. It is Goethe’s description of what he called “exact sensory imagination”:

The second part of the genetic method requires what Goethe calls “exact sensory imagination.” We initially see the different leaves as discrete steps in a process, but since “nature leaves no gaps,” we need to consolidate these steps in order to apprehend nature’s continuous inner workings. Reviewing the sequence of leaves, we then attentively internalize these visual forms as memory images. With these forms firmly in mind, we move in imagination through the sequence, transforming the first into the second, the second into the third, and so on, following the process forward and backward, forward backward, as nature has also done. We thus implicate each explicit form—each momentary pause in the process—with those before and after, like the flow of notes in a musical performance [and has bearing for James’s “specious present”]. By focusing on the relationship between the leaf forms, exact sensory imagination involves setting one’s mind in corresponding motion, so that the selfsame living idea that has expressed itself in the metamorphosis of the plant comes to life and visibility in the mind as well. What was successinve in one’s empirical experience then becomes simultaneous in the intuitively perceived idea—Proteus in potentia. Insteaad of an onlooking subject knowing an alien object, this is knowledge through participation, or even identification, of observer and observed—knowing things from the inside. As Goethe said, “our spirit stands in harmony with those simpler powers that lie deep within nature; and it is able to represent them to itself just as purely as the objects of the visible world are formed in a clear eye.”* (Italics mine; bold italics, the editors: MIT edition, 2009, pp. 109-11)

Additional Reading

Beer, Gilian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London and Boston: Ark/Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).

_________, Open Fields: Studies in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1996).

Bunn, James H., Wave Forms: A Natural Syntax for Rhythmic Languages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Clark, Andy, “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” in Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, ed. Peter Carruthers and Jill Boucher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 162-83.

Crick, Francis, and Christof Koch, “A Framework for Consciousness,” Nature Neuroscience, 6:2 (February 2003), 119-26.

Edelman, Gerald M., Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

James, William, The Principles of Psychology (rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1890]).

Le Doux, Joseph, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Ospovat, Dov, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Sciences, 1838-1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Richardson, Joan, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Sacks, Oliver, “In the River of Consciousness,” New York Review of Books (January 15, 2004), 41-44.

“Seeing Science,” special issue, Representations 40 (Fall 1992).

Stafford, Barbara Maria, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

Stevens, Wallace, “Imagination as Value,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1997), pp. 724-39.

Tyndall, John, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” in Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews, 2 vols. (rpt. London: Gregg International Publishers Ltd., 1970 [Longman’s, Green, 1892]).

Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, ed.

David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1985).

___________________, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967).

Zeki, Semir, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).