Michael Sokolov
PHIL 312

		  Imagination of Descartes, Hobbes and Pascal

I see imagination as the source of human creativity.  I agree with Descartes'
finding (in his second meditation) that it is a characteristic human ability
and part of our general cognitive abilities.  I also agree with his rational
observation that the things we imagine may be either true or false, and thus
imagination may not serve as a substitute for reason for the purpose of finding
what is true.  I believe, however, that imagination can serve well as a source
of raw hypotheses for testing.  What I mean is that we can use our imagination
to generate ideas, knowing that they may be true or false, and then subject
them to rationational or empirical tests to find out if they are true.  That is
called brainstorming.

It is disappointing to see some philosophers such as Blaise Pascal take the
observation that the things we imagine are not necessarily true and conclude
that imagination is nothing but a vice and an evil.  We need to remember that
Descartes' Meditations focused on one specific goal: establishing what facts we
can know with absolute certainty.  Imagination is not directly suitable for
that task, and Descartes correctly stated so.  But Descartes never intended to
proclaim which human abilities are good and which are not good for anything at
all, and it was a bad stretch of logic for Pascal to relegate imagination to the
latter category.

I think that imagination is primarily useful for technological innovation and
for creating artistic works, in addition to the use I've already mentioned that
would do well to complement either the Cartesian or the Baconian method: namely,
to generate raw ideas for subsequent testing by the proper rigorous method,
which is how science and even philosophy itself progresses.  I further believe
that all of these activities (advancement of science, advancement of technology
to better the human condition, and artistic expression) fulfill our divine
mandate as humans to think, create and enrich the world, and imagination plays
a part in all of these activities.

Both Descartes and Hobbes seem to have believed that imagination works strictly
by recalling memories and sometimes recombining their components, although
Hobbes states this belief more directly.  I am not sure if I agree with this
belief: after all, if imagination is the force by which we invent new things
and progress forward, we have to be able to imagine things that we have never
seen or conceived of before.

But perhaps Descartes was correct about the visual part of imagination.  In his
sixth meditation he describes imagination as a mental-visual activity by which
he would create a mental image of something he could potentially see with his
eyes, and concludes that such imagination is inferior to pure abstract reasoning
(using the example of a chiliogon, a figure with one thousand sides, which can
be easily studied analytically but cannot be distinctly visualized).  Descartes
then proceeds to assign imagination to functions of the body (with the sense
organs), rather than those of the spacetime-transcending mind.  Upon reading
this theory, I thought of it as bizarre, but upon further reflection, it does
shed some useful light on the question of whether our imagination merely
regurgitates our memories in altered combinations or creates something entirely
new.

Consider imagination which served as the source for some of our society's
technological breakthroughs.  Consider the imagination of the man who first
conceived of a machine that would do work that up to then had been done only
manually.  The visual aspect of his invention was nothing truly new: in the
mental picture he had, work was getting done and man was resting.  Both of those
aspects had been very common and familiar, just as in Hobbes' example of a man
imagining a Centaur from the images of a man and a horse that everyone has seen.
But the true novelty and the true inspiration of entirely new ideas had to come
in the pure mental reasoning necessary to make the machine work.  That was
something truly new and creative.

So perhaps Descartes and Hobbes were right about imagination in the literal
Latin meaning of this word (image made in seeing), but the true spark of human
creativity, which as I've already said I believe to be our divine mandate in
the Universe, occurs in the spacetime-transcending mind which only Descartes
had the wisdom to see as completely separate from the body.