In some branches of psychology the world of images is a real place, yet most of us are familiar with the phrase, both dismissive and reassuring: ‘it’s only your imagination’. We hear it first as children, yet remain convinced that there really is a monster under the bed. As adults we even say it to ourselves as a resolve against some perceived slight or neurotic phobia. So I want to know why we are rarely, if ever, told: ‘it’s only science’ or ‘mathematics’ or ‘medicine’.What if many or most of our original assumptions about the world are no more quantifiably correct than imagination? What if the way in which we make sense of our universe is simply based on theories developed from random elements that have serendipitously been placed before us at any given moment? Science has been really wrong before, the relatively recent discovery that matter is not made of solid particles is a major one, it forms the basis of so many other theories and assumptions. The implications of its collapse as a popular theory don't seem to have filtered through to the general populous yet.
Imagination is the poor cousin of reason, yet without imagination there is no science; many many scientific discoveries and inventions have first been imagined, often long before any scientist found a way to verify their existence empirically. And verifying them did not make them any more real. Science is the more ponderous route, validated yet consequently weighed down by its rigorous methodology, and usually pulls up the rear 'after the fact'. Imagination in contrast roams freely, unconstrained by time, space or physics, which of course is both its strength and its weakness.
In her article Berger argues for a different perspective on imagination, one that places it in a different context to Romanticism and far from ‘mere fantasy’. Her ideas are based on the work of Henri Corbin and Mircea Eliade whose phenomenological approach to imagination resituates it within a methodology that is both an ‘artistic science and a scientific art’. (Berger, 143) Imagination is an 'active and creative scene of encounters with other worlds through which understanding is achieved’. (Berger, 142)
Whether I can ‘prove’ my imagined insights are correct or not seems less important than the expanded view I have gained from simply allowing my encounters with imaginal reality to 'colour' my view of the consensually realised world. Trying to prove a poem or a painting is missing the point - rather it is the effect of their being heard or seen or felt that is more relavent. Whichever, it is enough for me that my small acts of imagining have opened a vast portal into a specific realm of consciousness that I would never have discovered had it not been for my imagination.
Image: Julia Set http://www.virtualrecordings.com
Adriana Berger, “Cultural Hermeneutics: The Concept of Imagination in the Phenomenological Approaches of Henry Corbin and Mircea Eliade”, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Apr., 1986), 141-156.
