Introduction
Descartes and the Imagination
I consider that this power of imagining which is in me, inasmuch as it differs from the force of understanding, is not required for the essence of myself, that is, of my mind. For although it were absent from me, without doubt I would none the less remain the same thing that I now am; from which there seems to follow that this [power] depends on something different from me. And I easily understand that, if some body exists to which the mind is so joined that it [=the mind] might apply itself to (as it were) inspecting that [body] at will, then it could happen that through this [body] itself I might imagine corporeal things; so that this mode of thinking might differ from pure understanding only in this, that the mind, while it is understanding; turns[1] in some way toward its very self and regards one of the ideas that are within itself; while it is imagining; however, it turns itself toward a body, and looks into [or intuits] something in this [body] in conformance with an idea understood by itself or perceived by sense.
—MEDITATION 6, AT VII 73
A. THE QUESTION
Readers of the Meditations on First Philosophy know that the imagination fails to bring us to the truth, whether about ourselves as thinking things or about the world as extended matter. Imagination by its nature has as object what is not really "there," and in dreams and hallucinations it takes appearances for reality. Yet even as the meditator sees it fall short of truth, imagination nevertheless serves as a vehicle able to traverse part of the way to what is firm and unshakable.
In the First Meditation's search for truth, that is, for an appearance that accurately corresponds to the underlying reality, imagination compounds the uncertainties the meditator discovers in sensation. Although sensation can sometimes be proved unreliable, the imagination, in the hallucinations of madmen and the dreams of everyman, produces appearances that are virtually guaranteed not to have any corresponding reality. Imagination's power of feigning reality turns out to be methodologically fruitful, however,
[1] 'Turn,' here and a few lines farther down, renders convertat, which, along with the noun form conversio, is the standard term in Scholastic Latin for the turning toward phantasms that was necessary for thought. See chapter t for the significance of this.
as the meditator pursues the thought that she might be dreaming and then considers the consequences. Although imagining produces possibilities rather than certainties, it leads the meditator to a brilliant fictional device: the demon who devotes all his force and cunning to deceiving the meditator, always and everywhere. The device brings the meditator to the threshold of the first certainty, the "cogito, sum." It is not true that imagination perceives this truth, but it does prepare the way.
In the Sixth Meditation, imagination once again plays a preparatory role. After the Fifth Meditation persuades the meditator of the truth of mathematics, God's existence, and the reliability of memory (when it recalls what has already been known clearly and distinctly), the meditator returns to the question of the First Meditation, whether there is an extended, material world corresponding to ordinary sense experience. Imagination comes close to establishing the existence of bodies, but only as a possibility, not as reality. The proof of the existence of the corporeal realm requires instead a renewed examination of the testimony of the senses, understood now in the light of the first truths of metaphysics.
Thus both in the descent into doubt and in the reascent to a knowledge of the extended world the imagination plays an intermediate role between the senses and the intellect. Although cognitively weak, it is fruitful in generating possibilities, and when rigorously put to methodological purpose it points the meditator in the right direction.
From the Meditations the imagination appears to have the character of a middling power. It marks out an experience that resembles sensation but also exhibits a freedom from the senses, yet this is not sufficient to establish that experience as secure enough to satisfy intellect. There is a making to imagination, but it is not enough to make a reality; it can lead one closer to the truth, but it is incapable of knowing the truth. It is simultaneously frustrating in its incapacities and tantalizing in the prospects and analogies it suggests. For example, when Descartes begins to wonder whether his experience is dreamlike, he reflects that dreams might be like paintings. Perhaps the true realities are the elements out of which both dreams and pictures are composed—human figures, for example, are composed of arms, legs, and heads, or (concentrating more specifically on how paintings are made) perhaps of colors. "And for a not dissimilar reason, although these general things, eyes, head, hands, and the like, could be imaginary, it is nevertheless necessary at least that certain other things even simpler and more universal are to be acknowledged true; out of such true colors (as it were) are fashioned all those images of things, either true or false, that are in our cogitation" (AT VII 20).
Nevertheless, the impression of imagination that a reader takes away from the Meditations is more likely to be dominated by the memory of its failures than of its promise. The reflection on the reality of the elements
or "true colors" subverts our confidence in the truth value of all composites, and even the hope momentarily put in the possible existence of true elements fails, at least for the time being. Descartes's adversion to color may well adumbrate a source of this failure, for, as we know from Cartesian physics, colors are not in things but only in the mind.
The imagination of the Meditations is simultaneously promising and perplexing. In the context of the search for truth it is bound to come up short, of course, since by the end of the Second Meditation the meditator knows that imagination does not and cannot know. As the examination of the piece of wax shows, the knowledge of things belongs not to sensation or imagination but to the inspection of the mind (inspectio mentis ; AT VII 30-32). Imagination can produce appearances, but this power is never definitive. Although everyone can picture, that is, produce in imagination, a triangle, a thousand-sided figure is beyond the human being's imaginative powers; for the understanding, however, the chiliagon is no less clearly and distinctly conceived than the triangle (AT VII 72).
Most devastating of all to any pretensions for human imagination is the claim made in the epigraph to this introduction: imagination must lie outside my essence as a thinking being, since without it I would still be the same thing I am now (AT VII 73). Although imagining is included as one of the items falling under the generic name 'thinking' (AT VII 28), it is a weak instance of thinking, inessential to that most fundamental of human activities. It seems implausible to take imagination as in any sense typical or paradigmatic of what thought and understanding are. Moreover, we can even begin to wonder whether imagination's methodological use in the Meditations can have more than incidental significance, especially when we note the claim in the letter of 13 November 1639 to Marin Mersenne that imagination harms rather than helps in the search for the most basic truths of all, those of metaphysics (AT II 622).
Imagination by its nature is, for cognitive purposes, unreliable and even deceptive. Yet if we are familiar with all of Descartes's writings, we know that imagination does occasionally have positive cognitive roles. Consider two remarks drawn from a notebook that Descartes kept in the years 1619 to 1621, that is, some twenty years before the Meditations.
As imagination uses figures to conceive bodies, so intellect uses certain sensible bodies to figure spiritual things, like wind, [and] light: whence, philosophizing, we can by cognition raise the mind higher in the sublime.
It can seem amazing, why pregnant meanings [are] in the writings of poets more than of philosophers. The reason is that poets write through enthusiasm and the force of imagination: there are particles [or seeds] of science in us, as in flintstone, that are educed by philosophers through reason, [but] that through imagination are shaken loose by poets and shine out more. ("Cogitationes privatae," AT X 217)
The cognition of natural things by human beings [occurs] solely through the similitude of those things that fall under sense: and indeed we judge that person to have more truly philosophized who will have more successfully assimilated the thing sought to what is cognized by sense. ("Cogitationes ptivatae," AT X 218-219)
These notes present a rather different, one might say quite unCartesian, picture of imagination and its role in knowing. As we shall see in chapter 2, this is not an aberration but typical of the high esteem in which Descartes held cognitive imagination early in his philosophical career. The Regulae ad directionem ingenii (AT X 359-469; presumably abandoned ca. 1629 and not published in any form until thirty-four years after Descartes's death) is the best-known work presenting a positive understanding of imagination; imagination is discussed throughout, and the second part expressly develops a cognitive method of employing imagination to solve problems. Moreover, even in works of his philosophical maturity, Descartes frequently used images for cognitive purposes. In the optics essay appended to the Discourse, for example, tennis rackets, grapes in wine vats, and rigid sticks are used as models for conceiving the mechanics of light; in the preface to the French edition of Principles of Philosophy, the tree of philosophy represents the relationships of the various disciplines to one another.[2]
Are such "facts" about imagination in Descartes isolated, even aberrant, or do they reveal something deeply ingrained in his thought? What is the ultimate status of imagination in Descartes?
The answer depends not a little on who the questioner thinks Descartes is. For philosophers, he is probably above all the author of the Meditations, around which all the other works revolve. For an intellectual or cultural historian, he might be instead the author of the Discourse on Method ; for a historian of science, the author of the essays on optics, meteorology, and geometry to which the Discourse was just a preface. According to the Descartes intended, the answer will be different, or at least differently inflected. About imagination in Descartes, however, the Meditations' account of the inessentiality and cognitive irrelevance of imagination appears to be the decisive fact that any scholar's claims or "discoveries" can never minimize or deny.
Nevertheless, Descartes scholarship and philosophical reflection about his work have not yet settled the question of the role and scope of imagination in his thought. The topic, seemingly of marginal interest, has produced few studies and no consensus. In the first part of this century there
[2] For the tree of philosophy, see AT IXB 14-15. For evidence of the pervasiveness of suggestive images in the later writings, see Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, "From Metaphysics to Physics," in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, ed. Stephen Voss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 242-258.
was some attention to the place of imagination in Descartes's mathematical writings,[3] More recent studies have looked to some of his early writings, unpublished during his lifetime, to underscore the centrality of imagination in finite human existence.[4] Another philosopher, surveying the entire corpus of Descartes's writings, recently suggested that shifts in the treatment of imagination might serve as indicators of deeper transformations in his philosophy.[5] A book-length study of imagination in Descartes, written in the early 1940s by a student of Jean-Paul Sartre, carefully surveys what Descartes had to say about imagination in its psychological and physico-physiological ramifications. It is limited, however, by an insufficient attention to the sources and the development of Descartes's theory, or rather theories, of imagination.[6]
Imagination can indeed serve as an index of Descartes's deeper concerns and of the transformations of his thought—not because there are remote and obscure connections between them, but rather because imagination was at the heart of his earliest philosophizing, and because his prolonged effort to establish the practical relevance and cognitive importance of imagination led him into a network of problems that defeated his initial hopes. The later philosophy, the canonical Descartes (as we might call it), is a direct outgrowth of a shift that was intended to circumvent and displace the problematics of imagination. Nevertheless, the later philosophy bears the mark of its origins, and it is not for any accidental reason that imagination makes its appearance at crucial turns in the investigations of what human beings are and how it is that they know.
[3] Pierre Boutroux, L'Imagination et les mathématiques selon Descartes, Faculté des lettres de I'Université de Paris, no. 10 (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1900); Léon Brunschvicg, "Mathématique et métaphysique chez Descartes," in Ecrits philosophiques, vol. 1: L'Hurnanisme de l'Occident: Descartes, Spinoza, Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 11-54; and Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 107-211 and notes. A recent, profound reevocation of this theme is found in David Rapport Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1980), esp. 67-91. In his study of the Regulae, Leslie J. Beck notes the persistence of the methodological importance of imagination in the Discourse ; see Beck, The Method of Descartes: A Study of the "Regulae" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).
[4] Lüder Gäbe, Descartes' Selbstkritik: Untersungen zur Philosophie des jungen Descartes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972), and Josef Simon, Wahrheit als Freiheit: Zur Entwicklung der Wahrheits-frage in der neueren Philosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978), esp. 121-149.
[5] Véronique Fóti, "The Cartesian Imagination," Philosopky and Phenomenological Research 46 (1986): 631-642.
[6] Jean H. Roy, L'Imagination selon Descartes (Paris: Gallimard, 1944). In chapter 7, I will mention in addition several outstanding articles on imagination in the Meditations.
Also of note is an unpublished dissertation that uses Rules 7, 12, and 14-16 of the Regulae, the passage explaining imagination's role in musical perception from the Compendium musicae, and the Meditations' assertion that the thinking human being is an image of God to argue that imagination is the truly active, synthetic agent among the powers of mind (a thesis to which I give only qualified assent); see Stephen Henry Ford, "Imagination and Thought in Descartes,' Ph.D. dissertation, York University (Canada), 1977. I believe that Ford gives too unitary a reading of imagination in Descartes and overlooks essential differences between the writings before and after 1630; in particular, he does not recognize the historical context and development of Descartes's psychophysiology of imagination, the central role of proportional mathematics (or mathetics) in its functioning, and the biplanarity of imaginative thinking. Nevertheless, had it been published, Ford's study would have helped establish the urgent need for reconceiving Descartes's philosophical psychology.
This study can be viewed as arguing for three major claims: (1) In Descartes's earliest works, from 1618 until around 1630, the cognitive use of imagination was always of central concern and often the fundamental one. (2) Le Monde (begun ca. 1630) marked the beginning of a sharper restriction of imagination's cognitive capabilities to mathematics and physics, but imagination nevertheless remained at the center of his thought, both as an explicit theme and as providing an analogical key to understanding the workings even of pure intellect. And (3) when the mature Descartes used words like cogito (je pense ), esprit, idea (idée ), inspectio mentis, meditatio, and the like, he was marking positions in a psychological constellation informed by and entwined with a premodern conception of the human soul and its operations, a formation and entwinement that has been eclipsed by the passage of time and by a shift in the central problematics of Western philosophy. Once we have become aware of this, however, even the Meditations' apparent rejection of imagination begins to tell another story than the one to which we are accustomed, and we begin to recognize Descartes's preoccupation with imagination as a key episode in his efforts to come to grips with thought as an activity of mind.
The historical tendency of these three claims might be put in a kind of slogan that, though oversimplified, has the virtues of being compact and suggestive: the philosophy of Descartes, from beginning to end, is an extended reflection on the implications of a dictum first pronounced in Greek antiquity by Aristotle, "There is no thought without phantasms"—no thought without the presence of something in imagination in view of which the power of understanding exercises its activity.
The third claim, in particular, that Descartes's psychology is entwined more with premodern than modern psychology, is as much about philosophy and the history of philosophy as it is about Descartes, and it concerns not merely his subsequent influence on philosophy but us as well. Consider first that 'epistemology' is a coinage of the seventeenth century, not by accident but because the attention to the powers, activities, and facts of consciousness transformed the philosophical way of questioning, a transformation that received a decisive impulse from Descartes's works. Yet, as we shall see, this transformation is only a partial translation of Descartes's own problematic, which was more physical, physiological, psychological,
anthropological, and metaphysical than it was epistemological. If he is the father of modern philosophy, his offspring bear an imperfect resemblance to him. Thus by attending to some of the differences between the pre- and post-Cartesian problematics, we can gain a clearer sense of the distinctive character of modern thought. Moreover, there is an important sense in which the apparent ahistoricism of Descartes's own thinking is tempered by his awareness that the starting point of a thinking that rids one of prejudices is situated and must traverse the ground of a heritage in order to recover a clear and distinct sense of the activity of knowing.[7] If there is some fundamental truth to the notion that there is no thinking without phantasms—and I shall argue that Descartes believed that this was for most purposes true, even in his mature philosophical works—and if the phantasm in the fullest sense turns out to be something that is not just an image of corporeal things but also words and intellectual memories that are biographically and historically constituted, then by following out the prod lematics of imagination in Descartes in an even more radical way than he did we can recover a relevant understanding of human existence as historical and imaginative. The phantasm thus would turn out to be not just a notion of archival interest but a rich and evolving principle at the root of both thinking and doing.
B. LOOKING AHEAD
The reader with a specialized interest in Descartes may already find sufficient reason to proceed. But, as the preceding considerations have already suggested, there are larger reasons for pressing ahead with the question of imagination.
The first has to do with Descartes. The Sixth Meditation's dismissal of the possibility that imagination is essential to us as thinking things and its recognition of the cognitive weakness of imagination do not establish the irrelevance of imagination and images to the later Descartes. Throughout his career Descartes attributed a key role to imagination in mathematical and physical thinking. In the last work he published, the Passions of the Soul, he allowed it a notable function in the mastery of the passions. In the Meditations he put imagination to work in the very act of transcending it, and he took ordinary imagination as an analogical model for conceiving
[7] The examination of beliefs that one ought to undertake once in one's lifetime follows on one's acquisition of those beliefs not simply as a thinking thing but also as a human being who has been brought up in the ways and traditions of a society with some decided conceptions about the nature and existence of knowledge (quite apart from the mores that give rise to the morality one adheres to). One must therefore think through the conflict of interpretations one has grown up with by means of the models of acquired and secured truth that have been previously recognized and cultivated.
the activity and objects of intellection. One need think only of the use he made of the "malign genius" at the end of the First Meditation to recognize that radical doubt itself is an imaginative, or at least an imagination-like, function. As for imagination's role as analogical model for the workings of the thinking thing, one might read the "Responses" to the third set of objections to the Meditations, where Descartes tells Thomas Hobbes that he chose the term 'idea' because it is used "by philosophers for signifying the forms of perceptions of the divine mind, although we recognize no phantasia in God' (AT VII 181). Ideas are like the forms of God's imaginings, if God had imaginings—which of course he doesn't! Even if over the years Descartes reconceived or downgraded the importance, especially the cognitive importance, of imagination, the response to Hobbes suggests that for an adequate understanding of so Cartesian a notion as 'idea' we must consider it in the context of imagination's functions.
A further motivation for pushing forward in this study is provided by remarking that imagination is just one of what medieval and early modern thinkers called internal senses and that, as we shall see, some of its functions in Descartes are closely related or even identical to those that had traditionally been assigned to the cogitativa, the internal sense in which cogitation proper begins. In the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, the term imaginatio in fact appears on one occasion as a direct synonym of cogitatio, which at the very least reinforces the suspicion that Descartes's pre-1630 understanding of psychology provides a context out of which the later philosophy might be more accurately understood. It would, after all is said and done, be hard to argue that Descartes's understanding of cogitatio is a matter of only minute historical interest—not when the truth that resists the corrosiveness of hyperbolic doubt and marks the beginning of modern philosophy is formulated "cogito, ergo sum."
But we can press beyond Descartes scholarship and history of philosophy conceived narrowly to the question of his influence and role in Western intellectual culture. The constellation of the internal senses, from common sense to cogitation, was part not just of philosophy but also of the medical and scientific understanding of the sensitive and cognitive abilities of human beings, in particular of the relationship between body and mind or soul. The doctrine of internal senses constituted an intellectual commonplace well into the seventeenth century, but in the wake of Car-tesianism it underwent rapid disintegration and was displaced by radically simplified schemas. Unlike the Cartesians, that is, his followers, Descartes began his philosophic and scientific career solidly rooted in this earlier tradition. He developed a new conception of the mind/body relationship precisely by thinking through the paradoxes of the old tradition and discovering that it could not be brought into conformity with the medicine and science of his day. If there was a Cartesian turn in Western thought,
Descartes himself was the first to accomplish it, and perhaps he was the only person ever to accomplish it in a thoroughgoing, philosophical way. Seeing how this happened may help us recognize questions about Descartes and modernity that have never been adequately explored. Not least of the advantages we could gain might be a more concrete and less demonized version of the classic Descartes, whom it is popular to stigmatize as originator of a host of modern evils.
The final reason I shall cite for pressing forward has to do with imagination itself and its place in the economy of human being and human life. Today no aspect of mind has comparable power to elicit by the mere mention of its name a wide and curious audience, both intellectual and popular. 'Imagination' is a shibboleth of modern hopefulness. It names a power that many people think can save them, if not the world; they believe that "the results of an ever greater triumph of the imagination can only be good."[8]
Eva Brann, in a work that attempts to bring into focus the vast philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic literature on imagination, remarks that Western tradition assigns imagination "a pivotal function."
It is placed centrally between the faculties and intermediately between soul and world. Thus it both holds the soul together within and connects it to the objects without. Yet the treatment given this great power even by habitually definitive authors like Aristotle and Kant is tacitly unfinished, cursory, and problematic. The imagination appears to pose a problem too deep for proper acknowledgment. It is, so to speak, the missing mystery of philosophy.[9]
One might add: it is a missing mystery of Western culture as well.
It is risky to put great hopes in any one thing. There is the danger of asking from imagination, by nature a middling power, more than it can possibly deliver. It cannot, for example, supplant the extremes that it mediates. In order to understand, we must have recourse to abstraction and concepts, but there must also be real objects of understanding situated in a world that is experienced by sense before it is imagined. We cannot think in images alone, nor can we live in them. Yet it sometimes seems to even the most tough-minded thinkers that imagination has a force able to deepen understanding and enliven ordinary experience.
Few have had such high hopes for imagination as Descartes, and few who have entertained such hopes have ended by so narrowing its application. Yet imagination always retained for him a paradigmatic aspect: he
[8] René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 85. Girard ascribes this sentiment, which he does not share, to "romantics and neoromantics' alike.
[9] Eva T. H. Brann, The World of Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 3; emphasis in original.
recognized that it is in imagination that most human beings, including himself, first encounter (although not in purest form) the active power of mind and the activity of thought.
Perhaps it is not too fanciful, here at the outset, to wonder whether it is precisely owing to the closeness of imagination to our thinking, acting being that we set such great store by it and at the same time are unable to give more than a fragmentary or oblique account of it. Much of what Descartes has to say about imagination is fragmentary and oblique. Is this because his understanding is inadequate? Or is it because there is something about imagination that encourages, even demands, indirection and partiality? Are human beings capable of a complete, discursive understanding of imagination? Although this book cannot aspire to answer each of these, it will, I hope, give insight into the phenomenon of imagination—the silent center of this investigation—and the questions surrounding it. At the very least, by trying to think imagination along with Descartes, by tracing out the career of the imagining Descartes, we can gain not just perspective on the evolution of a single thinker but also insight into the workings of this deeply rooted power, the source of much promise and many perplexities.