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c h ap t e r 1 4 The Creative Imagination: Unique Expression of Our Soul-Body Unity Introduction My aim in this essay is to engage in a philosophical exploration of the creative imagination in human beings, seeking to discern its basic structure and its significance for our understanding of what it means to be human. For it is unique in the universe, so far as we know it, to human beings: God and angels are certainly creative, but by pure intelligence, without images; animals have imagination, but principally reproductive, to conserve images of past experience, not creative, save to a very limited degree, always tied down to present particular experiences and concrete problems. Humans, on the other hand, enjoy a far wider scope of creative imagination , partly due to the power of human intelligence to abstract and break free of the concrete material present we find ourselves situated in—which animals cannot do—and partly from the freedom in which our imagination participates because it is associated with the free will of the human spirit. In addition to being unique to human beings—taking ‘‘human’’ in the widest sense of rational animal or embodied spirit (since there might well be other species of this kind of being in our cosmos)—the creative imagination is uniquely revealing of what it means to be human, in that it is a privileged expression of the intrinsic unity of body and soul—body and soul, matter and spirit, at the same time distinct from each other and constitutive of one single being, as a unity collaborating in a single act. It is this second aspect of the creative imagination, its privileged expression of the intrinsic unity of mind and body—and more broadly, of soul 191 192 Unique Expression of Our Soul-Body Unity and body—that especially interests me and seems to me the most philosophically illuminating. In general I mean by ‘‘creative imagination’’ that power or ability that human beings have not only to store up sense images of our past experiences, but also to actively create new images never before experienced by the imaginer—or perhaps by any other person. These new images are created by either combining old images, or creatively making up entirely new ones out of the basic raw material of our experience. One can find examples of our creative imagination at work in literature, the plastic arts, technology, problem solving in various fields, including the sciences (in which there are many famous examples of new theories discovered this way), and finally the activity that has especially caught my attention and in which I have considerable experience: storytelling, in particular the telling of what are now called ‘‘wisdom stories.’’ For many years in my teaching of courses on human nature, the human person, etc., in the Thomistic tradition, I never bothered much with the imagination, let alone the creative imagination, except to mention it briefly, following the tradition of most Thomists and other Scholastics, who ordinarily pay careful attention to the reproductive imagination and its role in preparing the abstraction of universal ideas, but have very little if anything to say about the creative imagination. This includes both Aristotle and Saint Thomas himself—Aquinas a little better than most on the topic, though still very terse. But in the last ten or fifteen years of my fiftyyear career, I have gradually awakened to the profound importance of this distinctive aspect of human nature, both for understanding our individual selves and for understanding and promoting the healthy functioning of any living culture. My awakening was due to the following: (1) initially fortuitous encounters with a network of image therapists who used creative visualization to improve health (both physical and psychic) and public performances of all kinds, including athletics, public speaking, and even medical practice; (2) my reflection on the now widely recognized role of creative imagination in scientific and technological discovery; (3) encounters with psychologists studying the indispensable role of imagination in moral development—you can’t learn how to act morally towards others unless you use your imagination to put yourself in the shoes of other persons and creatively imagine how you would feel if you were treated in such and such a way as you are planning to do to them; and (4) my general reflections on the work of psychologists studying the central importance of storytelling, specifically the telling of ‘‘wisdom stories,’’ for the healthy [18.221.53...

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