If you asked any Joe on the street to define “imagination”, what might he say? Thomas Howard humorously captured the popular view of imagination this way: “Imagination is often treated as the country cousin, frolicking about in a flowered chicken-feedbag jumper, gathering dandelions and ragwort and supposing them to be orchids and birds-of-paradise flowers. When you want a recess from wearisome reality, you summon the foxfire of imagination” (The Night Is Far Spent, p. 46). This view articulates the common misconception that humanity can basically be broken into two groups: the irresponsible and impractical imaginative dreamers called “artsy folks,” and the rest of us who have our feet planted firmly on the ground. It takes only a hop, skip, and a jump to reach the conclusion that the imaginative and the rational don’t play well together. Now this dichotomy might be oversimplified, but from a young age we breathe it in to some degree or another. My aim in this article is to rethink this dichotomy and reconstruct a new way of seeing that embraces the absolute necessity of both imagination and reason working in tandem.
The essential need for and purpose of reason:
Reason and imagination are God’s gifts and both are marks of God’s image in us, crowning humanity with glory (Hebrews 2:7). Both have an essential function in the life of the mind, and both impact not only what we do, but who we become. So, let’s address each in their turn, beginning with reason.
Reason is the judgment faculty of the mind. By reason we judge whether something is true or false, right or wrong. It has the capacity to censor ideas. Peter Kreeft says that reason has a little old man at its door who censors what is welcome and dismisses what is unwelcome. This metaphor is one way of showing that reason is the organ of Truth, as Samuel Johnson has said and others have echoed. Rational argument traffics in definitions, logic, and univocal (unambiguous) language. Reason functions well when it is precise and careful, as evidenced across all the disciplines, from theology to genetics.
It’s worth noting the difference between reason and reason’s assumptions, so let’s take two scientists as examples. The first scientist is a Naturalist. The assumption upon which he bases all his careful reason might be simplified down to a metaphor: “The universe is a self-contained machine.” His reason functions upon this premise and his conclusions play out accordingly. The “little old man” at the door of his reason welcomes any data that supports his premise and rejects any that does not fit with it. The second scientist in our example is a Supernaturalist and the assumption upon which he bases all his careful reason might also be simplified down to a metaphor: “The universe is the spoken word of God.” His reason functions upon this premise and his conclusions play out accordingly. We would call this reigning metaphor, this underlying premise, a worldview,”The implicit and mostly unconscious presuppositions through which we view reality” (Martin Cothran). Sound important?
The faculty of reason functions the same both for the Christian and non-Christian. Both have either weak or strong inductive and deductive reasoning, but the measurement of weak or strong is based on transcendental principles not especially belonging to the Christian. Like measures of beauty, strong logic is available to both the Christian and non-Christian alike. Can one defend something like “Christian reason”? I think it would be difficult, if not impossible, to do so. Reason can function more biblically or unbiblically not so much in its careful definitions, logic, or univocal language but in its assumptions, its premises.
Stark examples of this implicit and mostly unconscious presupposition abound in life and in Scripture. Two immediately come to mind: Gideon cowering in the corner of his threshing floor had one view of the world (his weltanshauung) and of himself that had no room for the way God actually saw him: “And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him, and said to him, ‘the Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor!'” And then there is Moses who saw himself as an exiled stutterer incapable of the task to which God had called him. Exodus 3 and 4 are a litany of excuses refuted one by one by God himself, but even after Moses performs multiple miracles through the power of God, he offers one last gem: “O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor since you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). His worldview, his implicit and mostly unconscious presuppositions gave little room to accept the way God saw him. If a worldview is an implicit and mostly unconscious presupposition, then it functions at a precognitive, intuitive level as it did with Gideon and Moses. So the senses provide information that passes through this weltanshauung (world perception) before it ever reaches the old man waiting at the door of reason. He bases his censorship, his judgement, upon the way that sensory information or ideas has been mediated by that worldview. For both Moses and Gideon, and many others, the old man at the door rejected God’s vision because it did not align with his own.
God is fond of doing this sort of thing. In Isaiah 41, he addresses Jacob in this way: “Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel. I will help you” (v. 14) How will he help? “Behold, I will make you into a new threshing sledge with sharp teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and beat them small, and make the hills like chaff” (v. 15). Worms don’t do that sort of thing, but God’s vision is rarely our own.
It’s right about now that you’re asking what all this has to do with imagination and it’s right about now that I attempt an answer. Any kind of perception is the ability to become aware of something and so requires vision. The same is true of worldview perception. Every worldview requires a vision that constructs a meaningful metaphor (worldview) through which we view all of reality? I have become convinced that the imagination performs this crucial role in our lives.
The essential need for and purpose of imagination:
Although the word “imagination” has a messy philosophical history, philosophers have agreed on one thing from the beginning: the imagination serves as a crucial bridge between the senses and reason. Aristotle wrote, “every time one thinks one must at the same time contemplate some image” (De Anima, 432a). Imagination, therefore, plays a constant role in perception and contributes necessary material for rational thought.
The imagination mediates between the data pulled from our senses and what is finally judged by our reason. The imagination translates what is perceived by the senses into some image or string of images that reason can understand. It traffics in images of various kinds, particularly metaphor and narrative. It is a combiner, gluing various images together to create a new image entirely. We see this in the common notion of imagination as a faculty of unwieldy fancy as when it concocts a Chimera, a myth, by combining a lion, a serpent, and a goat. Or we see this gluing ability when it combines an eagle with a horse called Pegasus. This fancy is, indeed, one function of the imagination, but not the sole function, and for this reason Coleridge called it Secondary Imagination.
Another way that the imagination glues images together is when it takes moments from memory (what happened yesterday) and combines them with what is happening right now so that it can anticipate what will happen later. The imagination images the sensory world and strings those images together to form a kind of movie, a visual narrative. It is the imagination’s task to take sensory information and translate it into a usable narrative for the reason, imaging the sensory information so that it fits into what is already known in the narrative conceived thus far. It takes the chaos of our lives and arranges all of it into something recognizable, meaningful.
Thomas Howard put it this way: “Imagination, far from being an unfortunate inclination in us mortals that leads us down the garden path toward illusion and a region that is nothing but wish fulfillment, may, rather, be the faculty in us corresponding in a unique way to reality. We cannot pit it over or against intellect and will and affection. All of these properties rightly crown our humanness, and each, after its own mode, enables us to respond to reality” (The Night Is Far Spent, p. 46). That last line is critical for rethinking false dichotomies set up between reason and imagination. Both reason and imagination enable us to respond to reality, but let us recognize that reason functions by the light of the imagination.
C.S. Lewis agreed, “It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
In the final line of this quote, Lewis says that the imagination is not the cause of truth, but its condition. As light is the condition for the perception of any object, so imagination is the condition for the perception of any truth. We even say, “Let me shed a little light on the subject” as a metaphor for understanding. Reason is the organ of truth, judging what is true so that the old man at the door can reject that which is false. Imagination, on the other hand, is the organ of meaning, the light without which everything would be nonsense or meaninglessness. In other words, reason cannot trump the imagination, but the imagination usually dictates what we reason. .
Now, if only it were all that easy to make such delineations. Unfortunately, imagination resists categorizing. For this reason it becomes difficult if not impossible to talk of “the imagination” as though it were a single and simple function of the mind: a noun. In some respects, our talk of “the imagination” is deceptive. Reason is more like a noun, something that holds still long enough for me to point at it and say, “Look kids, that is a thing.” Imagination, however, is more like a verb, even a state of being verb that just is. I never really turn on the light in a room, the light just is. I switch a circuit, a noun, but I don’t turn on the light. Light is and does. Imagination is and does; hence the complications of talking about “the imagination” as if it is a static function of the mind waiting to be turned on. We’ll be more effective in reclaiming the imagination when we recognize the potency of its power as a perpetually revved and orienting function.
