Conceptual blending, imagination, and other people

This nice, short talk about the power of imagination includes a number of concrete examples for what I have termed sedimentation of unreality into reality. Conceptual blending is the operative term; this means that some perception of physical reality blends with an abstract idea to generate something imaginary, which is then treated as real. (In addition to what I have called sedimentation, this notion is also related to Colin McGinn's discussion of imaginative seeing in the third chapter of Mindsight.[1])

In the second part of the talk, he gives a number of examples for how our imagination shapes (and often generates) our idea of other people. (This is what I have also identified in my book as one of he main functions of imagination.) Again, some good illustrations of how such ideas sediment into reality subsequently.

[1] Colin McGinn, Mindsight. Image, Dream, Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2004, 48–55.

Introductory book about the ideas behind this blog

During the fall months of the past year, it's been a little quieter than usual on this blog. The reason was that last summer I found that I needed something more of a coherent presentation of the ideas behind it — a kind of backgrounder and introductory text. So I sat down to write that. The result has taken the shape of a small book, which is now available in a draft version. (There is still some formatting work I want to do to optimize readability, and possibly smallish corrections in wording and grammar.)

You can download the pdf version here.

The table of contents looks like this:

Preface

Activities

  Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · Philosophy

Goals

  Beauty · Excellence of character · Eudaimonia

Theory

  Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · Present

References

Hinting at the difference

In Jasper Fforde's series of 'Thursday Next' novels that begins with The Eyre Affair, the borders between reality and fiction are permeable: they can be crossed from either side. What's more, there are multiple ways to do the trick. One way is open to young children with strong powers of imagination. The main character recalls:

my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-belief had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey — and returned.[1]

Let's put romanticism about childhood experience aside (Fforde exploits this cleverly in this passage, but it's not this rhetorical aspect I'm interested in here). What is the function of such explanations about the "barrier between reality and make-belief"? (Which are explanations, really, about the theory or metaphysics underlying the world of the book.) What do they help to achieve in the process of our consuming (or appreciating) fiction?

It is sometimes said that their function is to motivate what is going on in this instance of fiction (i.e. in this book or movie), that they are included in order to make the goings-on (the events, the reaction of the characters) plausible. Their function then, on this view, is to help us believe what we observe; they move us from incredulity to acceptance; they enable suspension of disbelief.

Now this is certainly not entirely wrong: such formulations probably do all these things. But suggestive though it may be, this way of putting it also obscures an important distinction. We don't perceive worlds of fiction. We imagine them. (No doubt we perceive, visually and auditorily, what goes on on a movie screen. But that's not the same as perceiving the imaginary world. In order for the latter to become accessible, there must be a process of imagination, just as there must be such a process when we read a novel. The imagination may be greatly supported by the movie images and sounds, both of which aren't there when we read prose. But what constitutes the fictional world, in both cases, is a process of imagination.) In contrast to perception, then, what we do isn't in the first instance belief-forming, but something more like stipulation.[2]

What phrases such as this one do is not to make the fictional world believable, I'm going to contend. Rather, these are hints to the imagination, design hints. They guide the imagination in fundamental aspects of the fictional world it constructs. They control the frame of what we imagine.

For instance, in the quote above from the Fforde novel: what we are told here is not that, contrary to our everyday belief, the borders between reality and fiction might be more porous than we thought, after all. (How would that be a plausible claim, even if it were made with the intention to appear as one? Countless experiences and the whole body of common knowledge weigh in favor of the contrary.) Instead, it is an indicator, given by the author, of the kind of fictional world we're in. It gently nudges our imagination in a certain direction. We're to imagine a fictional world (that is the world of the novel The Eyre Affair) in which, much in contrast to the real world, the borders between this world itself and any nested fiction (nested unreality, such as that of the book Jane Eyre as referred to in the novel The Eyre Affair) are permeable. It's more subtle than the traditional "Imagine, dear reader, a world in which the borders between reality and fiction can be bent, so that one might travel between the those two..." — but the function is exactly the same. It isn't intended to make such a thought more plausible or believable; it's intended to point out ways for us to imagine such a world.

Such pointers, such hints at differences between the fictional world we're dealing with and the real world, have something in common with the bits of fictional export I mentioned in the previous post. The author provides us with them so that we are better able to imagine the fictional world in question. The materials for fictional export hold also in the real world, and they are included by the author in his fictional world because they are required for the narrative. (Think explanations of forensic methods in crime fiction.) The differential hints I'm discussing here are of course explanations of differences between reality and fiction (this particular fiction). But they serve the same function: helping us to better understand what sort of world we are to imagine in order to make sense of the narrative.

[1] Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair. London: Hodder and Stoughton 2001, 63.

[2] Both perception and imagination are incredibly complicated processes, which haven't been researched in all detail by cognitive science and other disciplines yet. A good starting point for reading up about the differences in phenomenology is Colin McGinn's Mindsight. Image, Dream, Meaning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2004, especially chapter 1.

History, time travel, and informedness of unreality

'Join us for an amazing journey through time!' — Exhibitions at history museums sometimes advertise that they will 'take you back in time', typically to some earlier period the exhibition is about. And in fact, if the period in question is interesting and colorful enough in itself, and the exhibition supports it by a suitable manner of presentation, focusing not so much on written descriptions and explanations, but rather on rich tableaux, original costumes and items from the time, and appropriate lighting and background sound, you may easily find yourself suddenly 'in' that past world, looking at a lavish banquet, say, feeling almost as if in fact you were there.

Now this is 'time travel' only in a metaphorical sense: you're not actually going back in time — you're just imagining yourself at another time. Or perhaps you don't even imagine yourself as being there, you simply imagine what it must have been like, how it must have looked (and sounded, and smelled) at that time. This is different from time travel as it is presented in novels and films: there, a character is transferred from his own time into a different time and then is actually there. Put differently, a time traveler in a movie would perceive a different world, the world of the past, while a museum visitor imagines it. Both may have some visual impression (and again, also impressions on the other senses, too) of that world. But where the time traveler perceives an independent reality, not subject to his will, the museum visitor shapes such a world in his imagination, and is therefore free to include whatever he fancies (he might for instance imagine his romantic partner sitting at that banquet table in an exquisite old-fashioned dress). By virtue of this difference, the museum visit isn't time travel in a proper sense, only in a metaphorical sense, based on some similarities in the experiences one would have.

In order to make this distinction as clear as possible, I have so far not mentioned a complication, which we now have to look at. The complication is this: even though we imagine (not perceive) the world of the past into which the museum invites us, we couldn't just dream it up ourselves. After all, the very purpose of the exhibition is to make us familiar with details about the past which we didn't know about so far. We learn something from it, something we didn't know before, and what we learn is obviously not coming from our imagination, but comes from the outside, channeled through its presentation at the exhibition. Where does it come from?

The exhibition will be informed, often by historical or scientific fact which we know about. Thus, if the exhibition is about dinosaurs, much of the information will come from science (what did a dinosaur look like, what were its dimensions, its color and shape, its typical movements, how would a typical environment have looked, which plants were there, and so on). It's science which reconstructs these things and can tell us how we would have to imagine them in order to keep within established facts. If the exhibition is rather about historical or cultural matters (such as the history of an island or the life and work of a composer, say), then that information comes from history. (History has methods that are somewhat different from those of science.)

So, from a historical exhibition, we can learn something about the real world, even though we look at the world of an instance of unreality. I call this the informedness[1] of unreality by bits and pieces from the real world. This does not run counter to the general character of the unreal as imagined, as being a product of the imagination; it just shows that the workings of the imagination always take up some materials from reality and include, shape and develop them in the process of generating an instance of unreality. You can learn from an exhibition about the past just as you can learn from a movie or a novel, or a dream: for instance, if you are a reader of crime fiction, you might learn a bit from it about police procedure, or forensic science. Of course, it's only in there because the author has researched it and built it into the world of her story, and it goes without saying that there is no guarantee that it's not fictional — the author might just have invented some bit of science which was necessary for the narrative, but which isn't actual science. Even dreams include memories, thoughts and emotions from waking life as building blocks, however much they may rearrange and distort them; from these you may pick up things about yourself and your recent experience you haven't noticed (yet) while awake.

(Such informedness is in some respects a counterpart to sedimentation; just like the latter, the former results from the interplay of reality and unreality, resulting in a mix of both along the path. Instances of the unreal sediment into reality when they influence our views and actions; bits and pieces of the real make up the materials from which the worlds of unreality are created.)

[1] It's also sometimes called fictional export. See for instance Christy Mag Uidhir and Allen Hazlett, "Unrealistic Fictions", in: American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2011), 33–46. This seems to be a very helpful notion, but I have to read up more about it.

The illusionist effect

Yesterday I went to a magic show, and I found there were some interesting aspects of unreality to observe from that art form. An illusionist would perform numbers such as walking through a mirror or letting a person levitate on stage. What makes these performances so thrilling?

Let's begin by noting that many of the tasks are seemingly impossible and yet they are done right before our eyes. People don't hover some feet above ground (or a table) elsewhere, they don't do so naturally, and even if you try, you won't manage to do it in the real world. What we see is an illusion. Now I'm not interested in exactly how the illusion is produced, but I take it that some combination of clever distraction and technical devices is at work here. But that's not how we perceive it. We perceive a person levitating.

1) That seemingly impossible things happen cannot be in itself the characteristic thing about illusions that we're looking for — we can find that elsewhere as well, namely in fiction.

The world of the illusionist show is not obviously a fictional world, in the way in which novels or movies create fictional worlds that are apart in time and space. Even though the magicians might sport fancy costumes and exotic names, they're not (at least not always) telling a story about someone else, somewhere else, who does magical things. They often pretend to do it in our world, in the real world. (They don't claim to really perform magic, they're open about the fact that they just pretend to do it for their show; but where they pretend to do it is the actual world.)

Compare this with similar situations in movies. If the fictional world of a movie includes the possibility of people levitating (think Harry Potter), we will probably witness some scenes in which they do. Again, the people who produced that movie have used some technical tricks to create that effect. But in the case of a movie, the thrill of such a scene is weaker (of course it depends on how the levitation is introduced and dramatized). We're used to all sorts of strange things that might go on in sufficiently phantastic film worlds. In an illusionist show, it's not quite the same. After all, everything that goes on does go on before our eyes. There are real people on that stage, and real, physical scenes and props. Moreover, time flows exactly as we know it: when people suddenly change their appearance (their costume, say) in a movie, we take it that they have been photographed at some time, then changed, and at a later time photographed in their different outlook. We don't know much about the timing of production, only about the time of the resulting film. On the other hand, when a shapeshifting magician changes into a completely different look in a mere second or two on stage, there is no such intervening time. Whatever it is exactly that happens, it really happens in those one or two seconds.

2) So it seems it's not just that we are presented with a display of something that's impossible or highly improbable — it isn't just pretended that it happens, but also that it happens under circumstances that pretend to certify that it's real (as compared to trickery). An illusionist will go some lengths about reassuring the audience that they're watching the real thing. For example, I saw a number where a woman was shot out of a cannon into a water bowl, and the magician took care to have someone from the audience write her name on the assistant's arm, so that it was very clear that the woman who was presented in the water bowl was the same one, with those unique marks on her arm, as the one who had crawled into the cannon. We might call this 'non-fiction markers', in contrast to those fiction markers (such as the introductory formula 'Once upon a time...') which signal we're entering a fictional world. A non-fiction marker is intended to signal the exact opposite: it admonishes us to situate what we're about to see in the actual world; instead of being asked to suspend disbelief, we're asked to fire up disbelief and actually equip it with all our attention and perceptive capacities. We're encouraged to believe nothing unless we've satisfied us with our own eyes that it's all real. (Even though we know it's not.)

3) If someone asks you to imagine something, you have some leeway to not do it. For example, suppose you're asked to imagine there was no blogging, that the internet hadn't even been invited. You can now wonder what the world would look like if that was the case, but then again, you don't have to. You can simply refuse to imagine such a thing. Likewise, when you're watching a movie or reading a novel, especially if it's a bad one, you may refuse to get immersed in it. You can tell yourself that this is all 'just made up', you can focus your attention on the attempted (though not quite achieved) effect which it is supposed to make but actually doesn't.

With magic, that's more difficult, because illusionist magic projects the imaginary things that go on into the actual world. Magical illusions thus stimulate imagination more thoroughly; they almost force it out. Unless you really see through an illusion (which is something a clever magician will work hard to prevent), you'll have severe difficulties to refuse imagining that things such as levitation are going on here. At the very least, you'll constantly be asking yourself how it is done. But in addition, you'll constantly be encouraged to quickly consider what you're seeing as an option. You will, that is, for a moment ask yourself whether there is really a woman hovering around on stage, or whether you're deceived; but even if you are quick to reject the first option, it has presented itself to your perception for a moment, and so it has at least as a possibility briefly existed in your mind. The space of options that exist in the world widens, even if only for a moment, to include it. And if I'm right, that contributes considerably to the illusionist effect: it widens the space of options, stimulates imagination; and it does so in a manner that's very difficult to escape while you're sitting in the audience.

Fantasy, imagination, and unreality

In a passage I find illuminating,[1] Roger Scruton distinguishes imagination from fantasy (or aesthetic interest from mere effect):

True art appeals to the imagination whereas effects elicit fantasy. Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out. [...] A fantasy desire seeks neither a literary description, nor a delicate painting of its object, but a simulacrum — an image from which all veils of hesitation have been torn away. It eschews style and convention, since these impede the building of the surrogate, and subject it to judgment. (104–105)

The defining characteristic, then, is that imagination (the operation from an aesthetic interest) creates a distance, where fantasy destroys every distance (104). And it's not just an arbitrary sort of distance, but one that comes from inserting elements that have to do with the specific capacities I described in my post about our appreciation of the craft (in products of the imagination). Since fantasy destroys the distance that is essential in imagination, no beauty and real emotion can survive in it.

Scruton illustrates that point with respect to different subject matters: one is sexual fantasy, facilitated by pornographic images: "pornography lies outside the realm of art, [...] is incapable of beauty in itself and desecrates the beauty of people displayed in it. The pornographic image is like a magic wand that turns subjects into objects, people into things — and thereby disenchants them, destroying the source of their beauty." (163)

Another one is theatre. There, "the action is not real but represented, and however realistic, avoids (as a rule) those scenes which are the food of fantasy. In Greek tragedy the murders take place off stage [...]. The purpose is not to deprive death of its emotional power, but to contain it within the domain of the imagination" (106).

Imagination, as I would put it in the terms used on this blog, engages us in the creation of unreality, whereas fantasy does no such thing for us. It leaves us in the world of reality, and quite probably in a worse way than most alternatives. Since Scruton doesn't use 'unreality' in the technical sense I do, he assigns 'unrealities' both to imagination and fantasy, but that's a difference in terminology only; Scruton's 'unrealities' of fantasy are within our world, not within any world of the imagination: "while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute our world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in a condition of sympathetic detachment." (105) It's that distance which is amiss in fantasy, which is why it wouldn't qualify as unreality (produced by the activity of imagination) in my sense. Fantasy is precisely an example for what it looks like when you take imagination out of the picture: not unreality, but a de-humanized reality.

[1] In his Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009. Quoted with page numbers in the text.

Magically illustrated forms of unreality

Here's a very beautiful illustration of some of the forms of unreality by techno magician Marco Tempest. (He uses the term 'deception' as general cover term, where I've used 'unreality' on this blog.) Enjoy.

Disconnect, unreality, and unhappiness

In "Leaning from the steep slope", one of the beautifully composed novel fragments in Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, the protagonist acts continuously under misinterpretations of the events around him, as we can easily recognize while the story unfolds. He is spending some time in a sea town, recovering from an illness, and the people he meets, a pedantic meteorologist and a young woman with some artistic preoccupation, both pursue shady underground activities. The meteorologist seems to have a political agenda; he submerges for a few days, asking the protagonist to look after his weather instruments meanwhile, then there are some dark-looking men searching for him, and finally he meets the protagonist again in a conspirative setting. The young woman who makes drawings of sea animals is seen to visit an inmate of the local prison, and she asks the protagonist under a weak pretext to get tools (an anchor and a rope) that look suspiciously useful for an escape attempt. But none of this even enters the mind of the protagonist. (Only at the end of the fragment, when he is confronted by an actually escaped prisoner, there is 'a sudden crack' in his universe, but it's not clear which of his illusions has been shattered; or, for that matter, whether that phrase really shows that he's finally recognized what's going on. For all we know, he might shortly come up with another misinterpretation of what he sees.)

While the atmosphere of his surroundings is somewhat grey and clammy, his view of things is exceedingly pathetic. The very beginning reads "I'm coming to believe that the world wants to tell me something, through messages, signs, warnings." [1] Yet the meaning of most observations he makes would be plain with just a little common sense, and still they escape him. A little further down the text: "On some days everything I look at seems laden with meaning: full of messages which I'd have difficulty to define, to put into words, to communicate to others, but which for that very reason seem significant to me." And so an inability to perceive accurately and realistically corresponds with a refusal to come to terms with his own views, an indulgence in lofty self-talk, with the grander scheme of things serving as an excuse not to look at the details of his own life. (At some point, he states: "I'm only reporting my first impressions; for only those count.") Perhaps that sort of attitude is required for such a continuous self-deception.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that his naiveté is used and abused by both his acquaintances. Ingenious though his interpretations of the strange goings-on may be, they are far off a much more simpler reality. He is the tool both of a political underground group and a (very probably) romantically motivated escape attempt from prison. Whatever justification these may have in the broader constellation of the world of the novel, the protagonist himself isn't really acting in that world, not from his own motives, at least. He isn't, in a word, in the driving seat, he's himself just moved around by others.

(A side-note for those familiar with Calvino's book and receptive to the delights of the postmodern novel: this tale of a person driven by other people's interests is in the novel's surrounding plot read to the main protagonist, the 'reader'; and the sentence immediately following the fragment is the ironical: "Listening to someone else reading is entirely different from reading yourself. When you're reading yourself, you can take your time or quickly skim the sentences — it's you who controls the pace." It's as if Calvino wanted to drive the point home from the outside, from the guiding metaphor of the framework plot.)

It's almost a platitude to state that living under illusions isn't good; it is something like a basic premise of a good life that it must be connected to reality. Losing that connection, whether we realize it or not, is a form of unhappiness. We may not necessarily feel unhappy — it isn't unhappiness in a psychological sense; it's not a question only of a state of mind; when we talk about unhappiness here, it's about a condition of our life as such.

Among the reasons for this is that it makes us vulnerable to attempts by others to manipulate us. And being used that way is in turn bad because it means that our actions aren't for the sake of our own goals, including the top-level goal of leading a good life, but for the sake of others' goals. So in the terms I've used throughout this blog, there is a severe weakness of reflection involved here: an inability on the part of the protagonist to make sure the way his life unfolds remains in sync with reality, and in connection with his own goals. At the same time, there's failure of imagination, too. Throughout the story, the hero fails to see other's points of view. However mystical and poetical his interpretations of the world around him may sound, they're unimaginative to the extreme: failing to get a grasp on any concrete idea what might go on, producing no 'candidate realities' whatsoever, and crassly inadequate for seeing things from any of the other characters' point of view. It's others' imagination that controls him, and his own reflection that fails him.

This is a slightly revised version of an earlier posting over at my online journal.

[1] All quotes are my translations from what is already a translation into German; so I might be a little removed from the actual (or, if you will: the 'real') text.

Can unreality be more real than reality?

Some people claim that the worlds of fiction (in novels, or movies) are more real than the world around us, the everyday world. It's a paradoxical idea, but it seems a common one. Oscar Wilde, who had a taste for paradox, didn't let this opportunity pass and had his bad boy hero Lord Henry Wotton say of theatre performances: "I love acting. It's so more real than life."[1]

A little less playfully, Robert Nozick has remarked that

Some literary characters are more real than others. Think of Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, Lear, Antigone, Don Quixote, Raskolnikov. Even though none of them exist, they seem more real even than some people we know who do exist. It is not that these literary characters are real because they are 'true to life', people we could meet believably. The reality of these characters consists in their vividness, their sharpness of detail, the integrated way in which they function toward or are tortured over a goal. [...] These characters are 'realer than life', more sharply etched, with few extraneous details that do not fit. [...] They are intensely concentrated portions of reality.[2][3]

(When I recently wrote my article about Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, I noticed the same impression of the main character, Aschenbach; I remarked there that

Mann’s whole carefully crafted framework of symbols and allusions, parallels and consequences, seems to have the singular purpose of producing a strongly coherent, compulsively unwinding plot which at closer examination leaves not the minutest detail to chance — everything’s in the scheme, so to speak. (And that’s what primarily constitutes the high literary quality and artistic value of the novella, after all.)

Philosophy often looks to literature (and, we might add, also to other highly sophisticated art forms such as drama or film), in order to find material to analyze or examples to use in demonstrations.

In seeking a reflective understanding of ethical life, for instance, [philosophy] quite often takes examples from literature. Why not take examples from life? It is a perfectly good question, and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.[4]

In other words, there is a reason why philosophers rely on literature for their examples instead of making up their own ones. Literature, as it were, is in the business of making good examples, whereas making up your own examples would risk making them too simple, or unrealistic — 'cartoonlike', as Bas van Frassen calls it:

An example could be a real happening or a story. But a cartoonlike sketch of a story is neither. Both in real life and in real literature, the observer finds himself in a context so rich that — despite the clear limitations on what he can observe — he has a basis for conclusions about thought and emotions. Cartoonlike sketches, however, do not generally give him such a base [...].[5]

So, carefully crafted literature (or, more generally: carefully crafted fiction) can bring us insights that are at least as good as those we can gain from life, that is, from our own experience. Combine this with the fact that we often have no way to experience certain situations ourselves (how could you know what it is to be a renowned writer such as Aschenbach unless you've had a similar career yourself?); thus in some way, fiction provides us with a repository of insights about the world which are just as authentic, but richer than what we could experience ourselves.

To connect back to the main theme of this blog: this function of fiction is a special case of the more general practice that I've called imagination — the process of generating unreality. Among other things, the function of imagination in our lives is to provide rich materials to fill us with a sense of purpose, and a sense of possibilities. (Which always must be counterbalanced by a closeness to reality, which results from the process I call 'reflection'.) Life just by itself couldn't give us all that. And that's why we have fiction (and unreality, more generally speaking).

[1] Oscar Wilde, The picture of Dorian Gray. In: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Collins 2003, 67.
[2] Robert Nozick, The examined life. Philosophical meditations. New York: Simon & Schuster 1989, 129–130.
[3] Note that Nozick, when he uses terms like 'real' and 'reality', employs them in a slightly different sense than the one I've used throughout this blog when I refer to forms of unreality. The literary characters Nozick talks about belong to instances of unreality (in my sense of the word), which Nozick expresses by saying that they "don't exist". Yet they have a profound effect on our world, in part by the process I've called sedimentation, and more generally by the fundamental role of our use of imagination in our lives. These aspects are what Nozick is about when he speaks of their (in his sense) being more real.
[4] Bernard Williams, Shame and necessity. Berkely: UC California Press 1993, 13.
[5] Bas C. van Fraassen, "The peculiar effects of love and desire", in: Perspectives on self-deception, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Berkeley: UC California Press, 1988, 123–156 128.

Naturalizing myths (contd.)

(This continues my earlier posting about Plato's handling of the myth of Boreas and Oreithya in the Phaedrus.)

In the Republic, where the topic is the proper forming of character, Socrates reflects on the influence which bad myths might have, and proposes to reject them.

(This is not necessarily the call for censorship some people have read into it. Note that the Republic isn't a proposal for direct implementation of political measures; many textbooks misleadingly suggest that, by glossing its content as "Plato sketching his vision of an ideal state". But that's a grave oversimplification. The Republic is about the formation of the human psyche; it aims to explain the main excellences of character and their base in the complexities of human psychology; and it does so by demonstrating the internal processes within the psyche using a model: the model of a city-state, which makes the details more tangible in an externalized form and so helps us to discuss and explore them. This model, the sketch of an ideal state, makes up only part of the work; and though it probably lets us see some of Plato's ideas and fantasies about the political and social realm, this doesn't make it into a work of political science yet.)[1]

One criticism he makes is that portraying the gods as vicious, unjustly violent, or deceptive is wrong: both because it doesn't adequately reflect the nature of the divine (gods who'd behave that way could not count as divine, or something higher than humans; on the contrary, they'd be even worse than humans, at least when the latter are at their best), and also because, adequate or not, it plants the wrong examples in the minds of the audience.[2]

This criticism obviously fits the myth of Boreas we've seen Phaedrus and Socrates talk about on their way along the river in the Phaedrus. There is no way the actions of the personalized wind-god might be described as properly divine. One thing to be said, then, by the standards of the Republic, is that this story would be inappropriate for use in education. Still, Socrates in the Phaedrus avoids ethical reflection.

(Martha Nussbaum sees in this more tolerant stance a change of attitude which reflects a deeper change in Plato's thinking. She sees in the Phaedrus a shift towards higher tolerance and appreciation of emotional elements in ethics.[3] Even if this is true, however, it would explain the acceptance of the mythical story as such, i.e. as a story which displays personalized gods and the like; it still doesn't account for the fact that the sort of behavior shown here is unacceptable. The form of the myth would be OK, but not its content.)

[1] More on the reception history of the Republic can be found in Julia Annas', Ancient Philosophy. A very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, 24–36, and the references given there. A more detailed discussion of the inadequacy of a reading reduced to the political can be found in her Platonic Ethics: Old and New, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999, 72–95.
[2] Rep. 377d–378e
[3] In her The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, rev. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, 225.

Der Glanz der Unwirklichkeit

I gave this speech at the Spring 2011 Toastmasters Area F1 (District 59) contest. (I wasn't competing, it was a target speech for the evaluation contest in German.) I've used several themes from this blog in the speech.



The speech is in German; switch on the captions for the (German) transcript.

Naturalizing myths

On the last day she was seen alive, Oreithya, the daughter of the ancient Athenian king Erechtheus, was playing with her friends by the river Illissos; not suspecting any danger here, she was taken by surprise and carried away in a violent gust of wind from the north. Stories and legends have grown ever since about what might have happened to her.

Ages on, two philosophers stroll along those same banks of the Illissos, minding that it's more refreshing to walk along country roads than city streets,[1] but nonetheless, of course, intending to put their leisure to good use— and what better use could there be than a deep and pleasant conversation on the art of love, the craft of rhetorics, and the philosophic life?

On their way, they pass a spot that looks just as it might have been the very site where Boreas, the north wind, once did snatch the innocently playing girl; it seems so fitting, as Phaedrus observes: "The stream is lovely, pure and clear: just right for girls to be playing nearby."[2] Of the two philosophers, he's the one who really has an eye for that sort of thing; he's got imagination enough to see how nicely the scenery would invite people to dream up a mythical story, unfolding here in ancient times: of the wild and passionate wind god, Boreas, who'd fallen in love with the king's daughter and, having been rejected by her before, decides to take her by force, seizes the opportunity, grabs and carries her away to a cliff where he covers her in a cloud and rapes her.[3]

Giovanni Battista Cipriani, The Rape of Oreithya

But even though Phaedrus might welcome stories such as this one as occasions for testing his talent of spotting locations that look like just the right setting for them, he also is aware that it is only a myth, something an educated person wouldn't believe in. Socrates, his companion, seems to have a more nuanced stance on this, however:

Actually, it would not be out of place for me to reject it, as our intellectuals do. I could then tell a clever story: I could claim that a gust of the North Wind blew her over the rocks where she was playing [...]; and once she was killed that way people said she had been carried off by Boreas [...]

Now, Phaedrus, such stories are amusing enough, but they are a job for a man I cannot envy at all. [...] Anyone who does not believe in them, who wants to explain them away and make them plausible by means of some sort of rough ingenuity, will need a great deal of time.

But I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that.[4]

I think is important to note that Socrates says two things here: first, he recognizes the possibility to give a naturalized account of the events.[5] It is possible to explain it without recourse to gods or supernatural powers; what happened can be accounted for by giving a perfectly ordinary explanation. But, secondly, he also says that there are more important things to do, that it is not of the highest importance to do so; at least that is so for him, but by quoting the Delphic prescription, "know thyself", it seems clear that he thinks it would be a good idea for others as well to strive for self-knowledge rather than think up sophisticated naturalized versions of complicated ancient myths.[6] Thus, although Socrates might not really believe that gods and the like are necessary for explaining what's going on, he still seems to acknowledge that stories such as this can tell us something about ourselves—something we might also formulate differently (in a naturalized way, perhaps), but which would then also take more time and effort to formulate, time and effort that could be spent more wisely otherwise.

Not only does Socrates express tolerance for mythological accounts here, but later on he uses myths himself to make some of his ideas intelligible. And what applies to Socrates, the character in the Phaedrus, holds also more generally for Plato; he's built mythical stories into many of his dialogues. (Think, for instance, of the myth of the ancestry and birth of Eros in the Symposium, 203b–c.) Myths, as a form of unreality, are a vehicle of the imagination just as novels or movies are in our time, and as such they can convey insights, enhance our self-knowledge, make the world more intelligible for us, and propel us forward in our actions and projects.

(Next, I'll look into the corresponding need to restrict myth, by what I call reflection, in Plato.)

[1] Phdr. 227a–b. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from the Phaedrus.

[2] 229b; The general theme of fittingness of the sites they encounter, the 'impressario' role of Phaedrus in choosing them, and the dramatic and philosophical significance of all this for what follows (after all, the Phaedrus is the only dialogue where Plato makes substantial use of a landscape setting, and one outside the city for that) is carefully analyzed by G.R.F. Ferrari, in his Listening to the Cicadas. A study of Plato's Phaedrus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, ch. 1. Thus, that Socrates responds with a correction of fact at this point shows that "appropriateness is not a sufficient condition for truth" (ibd. 10). And then he launches into what is also the topic of this post, namely that "in a certain sense of truth, truth is not what matters". (Or, in the terminology of this blog: there is a role for unreality, just as for reality, in all our thinking and acting.)

[3] See the Wikipedia entry about Oreithya for more details on the myth, and references.

[4] 229c–230a

[5] Note that the term 'naturalized' is a modern word that I simply use for convenience; of course, the ancient Greek concept of nature was very different from the one that we have in mind when we talk of 'naturalizing' ideas.

An alternative might have been the term 'rationalizing' (which is what Ferrari uses in his analysis of the passage in Listening to the Cicadas). Insofar as rationalizing would mean to find reasons or reasonable explanations (ratio roughly means reason, after all), this doesn't seem to be a helpful term to me, though. Both the myth and the naturalized explanation aim at coming to terms (and thus to emotionally cope) with what is a disturbing event: the vanishing and probable violent death of a young girl. Both the mythical story and the naturalized story provide an account of what happened, and in both cases the account is given in a coherent, intelligible way. Their difference lies in that the former includes forces (such as gods and the extraordinary powers ascribed to them) which the latter wouldn't allow, restricting itself to natural forces. These stories differ only in the ingredients of the world view from which they come, but not in the rationalizing function (which both fulfill).

[6] By quoting the Delphic oracle, Socrates indirectly brings the authority of Apollo into play; which looks a little tendentious if you're on the side of the naturalizers. If you strive for naturalized explanations of the events in old myths, surely you wouldn't stop at oracles and this god either. Of course, the natural reply here would be that Apollo stands for rational discourse, truth and insight, and finally self-knowledge; there's nothing really mythical about that, and Socrates claim about priorities is made precisely as a rational argument (there are more important things than old stories, and time is limited).

Möglichkeitssinn

I have written on occasion that we need, in order to lead successful lives, both imagination (which lets us create unreality) and reflection (which cuts down unreality and keeps us close to reality); they're in a continuous interplay: if one of them would be dominated by the other, the result would be an unhealthful distortion.

Here's an imaginative formulation of the same line of thought from Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Musil entitles one of his chapters: "Wenn es Wirklichkeitssinn gibt, dann muß es auch Möglichkeitssinn geben", and continues:

Wer ihn besitzt, sagt beispielsweise nicht: Hier ist dies oder das geschehen, wird geschehen, muß geschehen; sondern er erfindet: Hier könnte, sollte oder müßte geschehn; und wenn man ihm von irgend etwas erklärt, daß es so sei, wie es sei, dann denkt er: Nun, es könnte wahrscheinlich auch anders sein.[1]

People with that sense for possibilities, the Möglichkeitssinn, aren't necessarily unable to cope with reality; some may be, but there we're talking about a weak variety: a "schwache Spielart [...], welche die Wirklichkeit nicht begreifen kann oder ihr wehleidig ausweicht, wo also das Fehlen des Wirklichkeitssinns wirklich einen Mangel bedeutet."[2] This is one of the extremes (imagination without counterbalancing reflection) I have referred to above when I said there's a danger of an unhealthful distortion.

In contrast, there are those who can see deeper:

"Ein mögliches Erlebnis oder eine mögliche Wahrheit sind nicht gleich einem wirklichen Erlebnis und wirklicher Wahrheit weniger dem Werte des Wirklichseins, sondern sie haben [...] etwas sehr Göttliches in sich, ein Feuer, einen Flug, einen Bauwillen und bewußten Utopismus, der die Wirklichkeit nicht scheut, wohl aber als Aufgabe und Erfindung behandelt. [...] Da seine Ideen [...] nichts als noch nicht geborene Wirklichkeiten bedeuten, hat natürlich auch er Wirklichkeitssinn; aber es ist ein Sinn für die mögliche Wirklichkeit und kommt viel langsamer ans Ziel als der den meisten Menschen eignende Sinn für ihre wirklichen Möglichkeiten.[3]

Even here Musil points (albeit gently) to that danger from too much imagination without counterbalancing reflection: "Ein unpraktischer Mann — und so erscheint er nicht nur, sondern ist er auch — bleibt unzuverlässig und unberechenbar im Verkehr mit Menschen."[4]

(From here on, Musil performs a subtle transition from this reflective passage into a description of his main character, partly by building oblique references to later events into the text. It's an intriguing technique, but I'm not going to follow this development here.)

[1] Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften; p. 16 in my paperback edition, Hamburg: Rowohlt 1987.
Note that Musil's notion of Möglichkeitssinn is a very broad notion (just as my notion of imagination).
[2] Ibd.
[3] Ibd., 16–17
[4] Ibd., 17

Eros, lack, and unreality

Wherever there is love, Socrates demonstrates,[1] there is a lack of something; for that there is love means that there is desire (which is what gives love its drive, its dynamic); and desire can only be for something that is lacking.

In other words, you can only want something that you don't have; if you already had it, there would be no point in desiring it. At the same time, you have to be aware that you are lacking it: if you didn't, you couldn't have a desire either. A good example is love of wisdom: you can only be a lover of wisdom if you are not wise yourself, for if you had wisdom already, there wouldn't be a need to strive for it any more; but at the same time, you cannot be a lover of wisdom as long as you are totally ignorant: because then you wouldn't know anything of such a thing as wisdom, and hence you couldn't desire it.[2] For love to be in play, there must be something you lack and therefore desire, something that you want, but know you do not have.

Something that is very important to understand about a line of thought such as this is that it's nothing that we can detect by simply observing what's going on: it's not merely a fitting interpretation of the facts of human behavior. It follows from our idea of love, the concept that we have in mind when we talk and think about it. (Behind that concept, there is much more than just the single linguistic item, of course: a sea of cultural background lies behind it, centuries of love poetry and reflective philosophy, stories and dramas, millions of lived and experienced love relationships have formed our idea of love, and also transformed it over time.) The dramatic means by which Plato makes this clear is by having Socrates insist on clarifying whether it's just 'likely', or whether it is necessary that there is a lack in someone who desires something, a lack of the very thing that is desired.[3] (It's necessary not necessarily because there is a mystical, metaphysical force behind it; it's necessary because, as I said, it follows from how we think about love. If there were a situation in which it looked like someone was loving something or someone, and there was in fact no lack of what was desired, then it simply wouldn't be a case of love, as we use the term.)

Love implies, then, that there is an instance of unreality in play. In order to form the desire that is the basis of love, we need to form an idea of something that is not the case (but which we desire to be the case). It's not love if there isn't a lack, and we must come up with an idea of that lack; it's unreality, because we're thinking of something that isn't so (yet), and we must produce it (it wouldn't be unreality if we didn't produce it). We must be both lacking something and be aware of the lack.

(This is the formulation I would give it in the terms I've been using in this blog; for reasons that will emerge soon, Plato would certainly be suspicious, to say the least, of that way of putting it.)

[1] Symp 200a–e. We should keep in mind that, throughout this discussion, the focus is on eros, which is only one of the various forms of love. Both in ancient Greek and modern thinking there's much complexity to the concept of love; we might distinguish different forms to the extent that it could even appear that there really is a multitude of different concepts behind the single word. But I'm not going into that variety here.
[2] Symp 204a
[3] Symp 200a–b. Moreover, Socrates doesn't just get Agathon (his partner in the discussion) to confirm this stronger claim (of a strictly conceptual necessity), but he also discusses an obvious objection. Sometimes it might seem that a person has a for something that he already has; but this, Socrates argues, cannot really be a desire for getting that thing; instead, what the desire really points to is a future continuation of these attributes: you desire to keep that thing which you already have (200b–d).

On having a strong sense of reality

It may sound paradoxical, but the deepest sense of reality usually comes from a keen insight into unreality: the varieties of its forms and the underlying structures which give rise to these varieties. Have you ever met someone who you felt had a fascinating grasp of what's going on in the world, an acute sense of reality? Chances are that this person has spent some substantial amount of time and energy in the study of unreality in one or more of its forms. He or she may be a writer or movie director, a dream researcher, a historian, or a business strategist — there are many ways to become involved with unreality. They all have in common that they strengthen your sense of reality in due course.

In part, this has to do with the interplay between reflection and imagination. Reflection, the activity of cutting down instances of unreality when navigating our lives, benefits from a familiarity with all the ways of unreality: the closer you know these, the more successful you'll be in spotting and eliminating them. At the same time, imagination itself is, unsurprisingly, empowered by good knowledge about unreality, and skills in bringing it about. So, for instance, studying narrative structures and writing techniques will help your storytelling (imagination), but also keep you aware of people trying to use them in conversation to appeal to your emotions and sell you something you might not want to buy (reflection); after you've studied scenario creation for a while, you can use the skills thus gained for finding opportunities and threats (imagination), but at the same time they'll help you to recognize and disarm fear fantasies (reflection). And so on.

The dance between reflection and imagination becomes faster and more intense, more high-energy, the more detail and depth there's in your insights into unreality, and that is what increases your command of reality, something that can be felt and seen quite clearly in your interactions.

(In other words, you wouldn't expect a deep sense of reality from people who have a weak imagination, and are 'down to earth'. They might sometimes cut off too high-flying, sentimental dreaming, but tend to live in a boring and impoverished world which is by far not reflecting the whole scope of what there could be for them. On the other hand, people who are too careless and let their imagination roam free without reflection that keeps it at bay are prone to disappointment and miscalculation which lessens their grip on reality and also tends to favor shallow if emotionally intense experience over anything with a deeper and sustained impact.)

Reflection and Imagination

In an earlier post, I introduced reflection as a high-level concept for an activity that helps us to remain close to reality when we navigate our lives.[1]

The counterpart to reflection is imagination. This is where we produce unreality, in all its forms. We do it when we come up with ideas what to do this evening, when we are creative decorating our surroundings, when we're problem-solving, day-dreaming, story-telling, lying ... you may be professionally making up stories (because you work as a scriptwriter) or seeking for high-opportunity scenarios (because you're an entrepreneur); you may be a little fearful and imagine all sorts of weird things that may happen when you walk a dark path at night, with shadows floating along and creaking sounds that can be heard; you may be re-inventing yourself every so often or creatively play around with world history (or the history of your town or company) to inspire people to get to the next level with doing something really worthwhile. In all these cases, imagination is the activity that widens the space in which we think and feel (and ultimately, act) by supplementing reality with counterpart worlds out of unreality.

I call them counterparts, not enemies; imagination complements, not subverts reflection as an activity. We constantly do both, and have to, in order to live our lives successfully. But they must be in balance.

Again (as with reflection), 'imagination' is a term that has had many, and for the most part much more strict and narrow uses in philosophy. And just as before, the way in which I shall employ it is broader. I use it mostly in the sense in which we say of someone that "he has no imagination". We'd say that of someone who normally acts in a certain way, has certain habits and preferences which all indicate that this person is rather not creative, imaginative, spontaneous, and so on. Someone, on the other hand, who does have imagination would brim with ideas, make up stories, try out new ways of decorating their surroundings, and so on. In other words, such a person would regularly produce unreality (deliberately and usually with the result of improving their own lives and that of others).

Reflection and imagination are in constant interplay, a complicated dance of forward and backward. We need both for success in our lives, though we must keep clear of the extremes in both direction: an excess of imagination can be as damaging as shutting it off completely. Imagination, the producing of unreality, gives us a drive and provides us with energy; reflection, the constant re-alignment with reality, gives us a sense of direction; because imagination is something that goes on in your own mind, it's also reflection that keeps you interactive socially. (Or, to put the point differently, the reality we're talking about includes social reality just as well as physical reality, historical fact etc. — reflection keeps you close to reality under all those aspects. Thus, it cuts down all sorts of fantasies about the behavior and opinions of other people, fantasies that otherwise might well lead you astray.)

Now, all this is only a very vague sketch, obviously there are many details yet to be filled in. There is, however, a connection with ethics in this point which I wanted to mention already at this early stage. Ethics, the study of character and leading a good life, is a particularly important stakeholder in the philosophy of unreality, and one of the main points of contact is the interplay between imagination and reflection with all its consequences.

[1] I've discussed reflection in this sense already in other blog postings: one on the reflective stance, and in another one that looked deeper into how reflection neutralizes unreality by facilitating a critical aesthetic stance.