Thinking Through the Imagination: Aesthetics in Human Cognition

Nine Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative

B { 192 } Surveying the Field At the end of an afternoon of gardening, one looks back, if only for a moment, to survey the ground that one has covered and worked through. It seems fitting, therefore, to take account of the moves made in this book. I have argued that the imagination plays a central role in the development of human cognition and, more generally, in the humanness of human life. At the service of this argument, I have amplified, extended, and explained the opening passage of Art as Experience that tells us: “the imagination is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole. It is the large and general blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world. When old and familiar things are made new in experience there is imagination .” In my examination of the role of the imagination in the development of German idealism, American pragmatism, and the contemporary cognitive neurosciences, I have identified three movements of the imagination that anticipate or echo this quotation. Nine Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative 193 First, I addressed the critical works of Immanuel Kant, concentrating on the way in which the concept of the imagination is developed in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment. I provided a reading of Kant’s rendering of aesthetic judgment, common sense, and genius that rescues the productive imagination from its narrow artistic interpretation and restores it as a vital aspect and pervasive force in human cognition. In his account of aesthetic judgment, we see Kant thinking through a dynamic process in which the things of the world are seen and felt as a unified whole without appealing to the determinate rules of the understanding. It is important to note that this seeing and feeling is not constrained to the perception of an isolated individual but rather is communicable by way of a common sense. In the third Critique, Kant suggests that the seeing and feeling of aesthetic judgment is possible only if our minds are in contact with the world. This point is made explicit in his discussion of genius, in which he claims that genius is a “natural gift,” a gift by which nature gives the rule to art. This rule places some natural constraints on the creativity of genius but also enables its generative force. Here, Kant seems to reflect the pragmatic sensibility that the world is not “out there”—something alien to and apart from human inquiry. Instead judgment and inquiry have access to the world only because they are always embodied in its movement. He acknowledges the movement and novelty of thought as he develops the sections on genius, reframing the imagination to emphasize its productive rather than its merely reproductive role. He initiates this project in the Critique of Pure Reason but extends it in detail in his description of aesthetics. In so doing, he sets the groundwork for a belief that when the old is made anew in experience, there is imagination. Although Kant begins to think through the imagination, he leaves the project largely unfinished, failing to explain how creative imagination and reflective judgment might apply to cognition on the whole. The work of C. S. Peirce appropriates Kant’s understanding of aesthetic judgment (via Schiller) and develops this project with his initiation of the pragmatic movement in the late 1860s. Like aesthetic judgment, pragmatic inquiry does not operate by way of determinate and instructional rules. Rather, it proceeds by way of a certain sensitivity to a type of harmony that might be established between an agent of inquiry and 194 Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative wider environmental situations. That is also to say that pragmatic investigation proceeds imaginatively by pursuing and remaining sensitive to a feeling of a unified whole. For Peirce the unity that is reflected in human conception can be traced to the dynamics of the imagination. Peirce’s epistemological position rests on the insistence that human knowledge is always “in touch” with the natural world, indeed, that the mind is always continuous with the physical processes of human comportment. This continuity is reflected in the 1890 Monist articles but also poignantly expressed in earlier pieces such as “Thinking as Cerebration.” One of Peirce’s key insights is that human thinking is defined by continuity but also by its creative spontaneity. As...