Abstract
What sets us apart from other animals? According to psychologist and paleoanthropologist Michael Tomasello at Duke University, it is not discursive reason per se that distinguishes us from our great ape cousins; instead, social reason turns out to be our species’ superpower. Through multi-level mutual perspective taking, the ability to develop theories about what others are thinking, the complexities of language, and mutual accountability structures, we have conquered the entire world and developed astounding variety in our cultural and technological achievements.
Imagination plays an outsized role in constituting our astounding abilities in the area of social cognition. Picturing in the mind things that do not yet exist, that could exist, or might exist drives most of our ability to communicate, to collaborate, and to construct. Two recent books add to the growing conversation about the shape and role of imagination in human life and culture. One traces the role of ideas in shaping human life from the paleolithic record through the twenty-first century; the other examines the central role of imagination in theology.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It sets out to explain the whole human story through the lens of imagination. Fernández-Armesto, professor of history at Notre Dame University, holds that memory of the past and anticipation of possible futures play key roles in the constitution of imagination. This impressive human ability, in turn, gives rise to particular ideas which can be communicated through symbol and language. The book attempts to show how ideas, theories, and concepts shape human history and contemporary cultural realities. It concludes with a brief consideration of the impact that intelligent machines and cyborgs may have on thought and, therefore, on the future of human life. In a phrase, “ideas are the driving force of history” (399).
Fernández-Armesto covers a breath-taking amount of human history and culture in this work. He demonstrates time and again how a new idea—born of memory, anticipation, and language—opened up new ways of being human together. It seems that this effort aims to function as a counterpoint to historical studies premised on material culture or sociocultural facts as the driving force in the way things have unfolded for our species. The author makes a case for a deductive theory of change and development when he writes about the central argument of the book, “people reimagined the world and worked to realize the idea” (198). Only once in this broad sweep through all things human does he seem to leave room for the possibility of things to work in reverse.
The chief concern I have with this approach to imagination lies in the pendulum swing that it attempts to bring about. While it is doubtless true that new ideas can and do shape social and material realities, things often go the other way. I rather doubt that all of human history can be told in terms of ideas or imagination alone. This strikes me as rather too cognitive, too deductive, and too human-centric. It may be the case that so much emphasis has been placed on the shaping influence of material cultural, social class, and other markers of social distinction that ideas have been given short shrift. Nonetheless, a pendulum swing back to a decidedly idea-ist orientation only sets up a binary conflict of theories. It would make more sense to talk about the reciprocal interplay between material culture, demographic realities, and ideas produced by the imagination than trying to make a case only for one of these factors as supreme. In other words, Fernández-Armesto only gets things partly right in my more Deweyan-inspired holistic and reciprocally determinative view of how human history works.
A lesser, yet still significant, quibble with Fernández-Armesto’s argument pertains to his reducing imagination to ideas. Imagination also connects strongly to emotions, as the entire Romantic movement and contemporary neuroscience has shown to be the case. Human history and particular episodes have often been driven by desire for non-rational goods such as beauty, riches, or domination. The overly cognitive, top-down, rather linear approach here has more than a whiff of Aristotle about it. The book makes many connections and affords several important insights, but, in the end, it seems like listening to music with only one earbud in proper working order.
Garrett Green, professor emeritus at Connecticut College, offers a more engaging and provocative, if less tightly integrated, take on imagination by analyzing the role it has played in Christian theology. In this collection of essays stitched together into clusters of exploration, Green attempts to reframe longstanding debates in theology about science and faith, liberal and conservative, and orthodoxy and modernity. Along the way, he enters into constructive dialogue and critique of thinkers such as Feuerbach, Kant, Barth, and Moltmann in relation to the role of imagination in theology.
According to Green, theology is “the grammar of the Christian imagination” (199). Theology has to work at making sense of the images, metaphors, narratives, and convictions about the way things are as construed by the biblical witnesses. It is not that theology functions in the world of fantasy and myth over and against empirical reality; instead, reality—whether of the world, ourselves, or God—can only be accessed in a manner mediated by the Kantian processes of combining human sensibility and conceptuality into credible portrayals. The tired, old distinction between reality and imagination should give way to a more sophisticated recognition that even in the realm of science that which is taken to be real is a paradigmatic and, therefore, imaginative synthesis of data and logical relationships. For Green, imagination provides construal of wholes built of many parts and encompassing thought, emotion, and body as well as interaction with the physical and social environment. In contrast to Fernández-Armesto, Green never reduces imagination simply to ideas or cognition.
Another important feature of imagination for Green has to do with the origin of imagination. To be sure, humans perpetually and actively seek to make meaning of things; yet, imagination as a human production does not tell the whole story. Theologically speaking, the Holy Spirit plays a key role in the workings of imagination and in two ways. First, the Holy Spirit inspired biblical witnesses in the midst of particular linguistic, cultural, and historical circumstances toward apophatic awareness of a God beyond mere human construction or analogy. Second, the same Holy Spirit illumines the reader of Scripture and enables the production of insights about God that are, in many ways, ironic and counter to human “religion.” In short, Green brings divine agency and revelatory normativity into the equation. Not all renderings of God, the world, our neighbors, and ourselves are of equal value; some are clearly more adequate and truthful than others.
Somewhat incongruously in light of his basic affirmation of the Kantian epistemological approach to understanding imagination and how it functions, Green claims that imagination is only a temporary matter. In the eschaton, imagination will no longer be necessary because we will see the reality of the Triune God, the creation, others, and ourselves in a direct and unmediated way. It seems odd and a bit contradictory to talk about all human knowing as imaginative in character with paradigms as ways of making sense out of everything at our disposal and then to argue that human cognition will, at some point in the future, cease to function in this manner. I am not at all convinced that the Beautific Vision will obviate the claim that our apprehension of the glorious reality of God is and will always be partial, limited, and figurational. How could any creature know God as God knows God? Even in a future in which the heavy and distorting burden of sin is removed would not make it possible for us to see as God sees. With apologies to Gregory of Nyssa, even in a realized eschatological situation we will still need to be “transformed from one degree of glory to another”—and that goes for our understanding of the mystery of God as well.
In the end, both of these books helped stretch my imagination. I have a greater appreciation for the ways in which the uniquely human features of our subjectivity and intersubjectivity have played out in manifold ways down through millenia into the present moment and straining toward the future. I also have a better appreciation for the imaginative character of all our knowing, including and especially our knowledge of God and ourselves. Because both of these perspectives on imagination function deductively or “from the top down,” I am left needing to hear from those who work inductively from thickly textured social and material contexts such as cultural anthropologists and “4E Cognition” researchers (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended knowing) to grasp more fully how our imaginations work “from the bottom up.” I imagine that the truth lies in the busy intersection of deductive and inductive approaches to attempts to make sense out of God, ourselves, our world, and where it is all headed. As John Lennon once said, “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”