Dr. Shoei Raz is a researcher and teaches philosophy and history of ideas at Ben Gurion University in the Negev; creator, translator, editor and blogger
In the article Imagination as Value, published in 1948, the American poet and philosopher Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) discussed the positive value of imagination, not only for the life of poetry but for life in general. Stevens, who was a student of the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) at Harvard University at the beginning of the twentieth century, could not ignore the bad name that came to mind, partly in the philosophical tradition, as someone who embodies the tendency to falsehood, demonism, evil and materialism . For example, Stevens brought from the words of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who claimed that the imagination is the voice of the wild and enthusiastic fantasy, the voice of creativity that overcomes the moderate, analytical and cautious power of reason.
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According to Stevens, even if we managed to overcome the concept that rational science clearly represents the world, while art, based on the imagination, is only good for evoking dramatic or melodramatic emotions, then the modern educated will still be forced to meet Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) ); He also tended to see the imagination as a force that, when its activity is out of balance, may accelerate the phenomena of neurosis, hysteria, thought distortions and more in the person.
What is the place of imagination in the mind
Stevens’ claim for the right to imagination is this: Man lives in Mind; His mind is constantly creating images. These images become part of his most fundamental judgments of the world. Man cannot experience the world as it is, and cannot turn off the mental and cognitive forces active in him.
The world is not only the result of analysis, the logical-causal difficulties, refutation and confirmation of impressions and facts, but a changing complex, operating in man at all times. For example, both awake and asleep, both consciously and unconsciously. Therefore, it is not possible to skip over the imagination or banish it from all the systems that generate consciousness, this is because the powers of imagination and image are prevalent in humans; Although Stevens believed that one should rarely expect an old Parisian and a Ugandan villager to share the same world of imaginations and images.
Recommended books
● Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Songs
Translation from English, notes and afterword: Tova Rosen
expenditure: channel
Year of Hebrew translation: 2021
Number of pages: 416
The cover of the book Alas Stevens, Metaphysics in the Dark: A Selection of Poems
● Wallace Stevens, Metaphysics in the Dark: A Selection of Poems
English translation: Amos Adelheit
expenditure: Carmel
Year of Hebrew translation: 2014
Number of pages: 58
The book cover of Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems
A vital force in the development of civilization
One way or another, imagination is a vital force in the development of civilization. It has a very large part in the visual creation of the subject (plastic art, cinema, theater). It occupies a central place in psychology – because in the end we all crave, we are all anxious, and we all dream. We all have a rather heterogeneous, and not entirely controlled, tendency towards abstract or material imaginations. Thus, it is doubtful whether it is possible to love or hate without the power of imagination. The imagination causes feelings to arise and discuss the other with feelings of love-closeness or hate-rejection. If we had not built this power, we would probably be a reservoir of judgments, analyses, breaking down complex impressions and equations, without any feelings towards them.
When you imagine continuous images in your mind’s eye, you experience some fullness of things and sometimes also feelings of beauty, warmth, at the same time, magic and mystery, which we doubt we could have achieved without the imagination.
Therefore, according to Stevens, every metaphysical perception is the result of imagination, since man has never gone to an abstract reality that is not embodied in matter, but only to what he lives within himself (in consciousness). No person moves with his own body in the expanses of the universe, moves according to the propagation of a light wave or travels in time, forward or backward, even though a person is able to conjure up these things in his mind.
Stevens even claimed that all poets should strive to establish “Supreme Fictions”, a set of abstract ideas – unique to each poet, through which they will succeed in conceptualizing life.
Contrary to Plato (347-427 BC), the father of the theory of ideas, who demanded in the dialogue “Politia” (book three), to expel the poets from the ideal city-state, since their unrestrained imaginations hinder the philosophers from applying reason and virtue, Stevens argued that even in For the intelligent man imagination may act as the primary creative force, enabling him to move forward by sketching out the next possibilities and next steps before him.
Einstein praises the creative imagination
The one who could support Stevens’ theory of the vital power of imagination is the physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). On several occasions he told how already at the age of 16 he imagined what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, and what the physical consequences of this act would be. Einstein later said to a friend: “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the talent to imagine was more important to me than the talent to absorb pure knowledge.”
In the words he gave in Berlin in 1918, at an event to mark the sixtieth birthday of the Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947), Einstein claimed that the search for the basic laws of nature does not lie in the way of logical deduction, but rather in intuition that rests on a sense of understanding and experience. That is, not from an analytical breakdown of known data, but rather from a synthesis between different fields of knowledge and data, which are initially perceived as distant, disconnected or contradictory.
Bring to the table and activate the imagination
Since this column is published on the eve of Passover, I would suggest (you don’t have to adopt my suggestion) to turn to the Seder table this year, not out of historical consciousness or in order to absorb knowledge only, but out of using the imagination as a creative and healing force, as suggested by Stevens in his words. It is possible that the Sages were referring to such a ritual when they wrote in the Haggadah: “In every generation a person must see himself as he came out of Egypt.”
Wallace Stevens, American poet and essayist, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879. He attended Harvard University and then New York Law School. From a young age he was interested in literature and philosophy and was in contact with the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, whom he met at Harvard, and even visited him after he moved to live in a monastery in Rome at the end of his life.
Most of his adult life he worked as a manager for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He published his poems for the first time when he was 35 years old and his first book of poems, “Harmonium”, when he was 44 years old, a hundred years ago (1923). In 1949 he won the American National Prize for a book of poetry, in 1951 the Frost Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in the year of his death, 1955.