Imagination, a Road to Delusion or Reality?

Imagination, or the image-making faculty of man, can err in the direction of fantasy, the multiplication willy-nilly of unreal images. It finds its true path when it is open to a reality beyond image: the necessary, the eternal.

In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, the lunatic, the lover and the poet are described as "of imagination all compact," meaning they are dominated by their overactive imaginations, nowhere near the real world. But Boris Pasternak had a different view of imagination. He viewed art as being "possessed" by . . . reality. "For me art is a possession, and the artist is a man stricken, possessed by reality." (quoted in The Language of Mystery, Edward Robinson, at p. 15.)

How are we to understand these seemingly contradictory statements? Does imagination lead one into flights of fancy or into reality?

Robinson explains that fantasy and delusion are linked by an ego that creates the world (if only temporarily) in its own mind. You've heard the put-down phrase, "He is a legend in his own mind." A fantasizing person uses his image-making power to gratify his ego. "My fantasy is the product of all the desires, fears and frustrations by which, consciously or unconsciously, I am motivated. I am constantly driven by them. In real life I cannot let them have their head, but . . . in privacy . . . I can let them loose. I may even think of this as therapeutic; I may feel it does me a world of good to let my feelings take over for the time being. Here at least I need set no bounds to my self-indulgence; here at least I am completely free. Nothing of course could be further from the truth. . . . This is the danger we run when we abandon ourselves to fantasy: we remain ego-bound." Ibid, p. 19.

But there is another way to use imagination. It is, as Robert Sokolowski explains, to find necessities. By examining different imagined possibilities, one can arrive at what by necessity cannot be, and what must be. The "thought experiments" of scientists have produced a wealth of insight into the way things have to be. Einstein imagined what it must be like to ride on a ray of light, realizing that space and time had to "bend" in relation to this absolute. Sokolowski (and phenomenology) call these thought experiments "imaginative variations" through which truth can emerge. "If some writers can use their imaginations to generate insight into what has to be, they help us see the eternal things." Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 181.

This takes us the distance to Pasternak, who saw imagination as a vehicle to being possessed of reality. Thankfully, not every imagined thing is possible. There are truths and necessities that can ground us. Not only scientific, they also relate to our daily life and to the life of the divine world beyond all imagining. And we can discover these through our imagination.