Imagine That!

How does one become oneself?  One can think of it as a process of "assimilation" and "differentiation."  Assimilation is imitation, a conformance of oneself with one's environmental influences.  "In the very early years of life it occurs in a massive way in regard to fundamental issues:  eating, laughing and crying, smiling, becoming angry, undergoing loss and recovery, movement, babbling and initial speech, and the like."  Robert Sokolowski, "Making Distinctions," at 78 from Pictures, Quotations and Distinctions, Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology.  Of course, "distinctions have to be made in this associative matrix, and they are the early adjustments we make as we come to know, 'I am not you' and 'We are not that' and 'Mine is not thine.'" Ibid.

"As we grow older, all the identities the self achieves through the stages of life are simply the other side of differentiations it accomplishes within assimilations it has been undergoing." Ibid.  Sokolowski quotes T. S. Eliot: "there is a close analogy between the sort of experience which develops a man and the sort of experience which develops a writer."  Eliot "describes the identification that can occur between a writer and an author from the past.  In this experience, a young writer 'may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person.'" (quoting Eliot's "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry). Ibid at p. 300.

Sokolowski notes that imagination plays a central role in helping us to bring about the self-differentiations through which we make ourselves who we are.  Sokolowski says, "the imagination is not a power of examining internal images; it is a possibility of displacement, of Versetzung, which helps actualize the self.  In imagination we become distinguished into an imagined self and an imagining self . . . we appreciate ourself (as imagined) at some distance to ourselves (as imagining), and 'the self' is that which is the same in both dimensions, the imagining and the imagined."

"The same structural displacement occurs in memory, except that repetition instead of projection dominates.  We continually mix memory and desire, of course, as recollection blends with imagination, but the same displacement remains through both.  This displacement of the self is itself a distinction and an achievement. . . ."

"Because of its projective character, imagination is especially significant for differentiating the self from patterns it has imitatively assimilated.  While we are in one condition and while we carry on one behavior, we can imagine ourselves in another.   This occurs in simple daydreams, but it also occurs when we are trying to determine 'a way out,' a way of being and acting that resolves something painful and confusion.  Such confusions occur only in the concrete, and only the imagination of a concrete possibility can resolve them: and such an imagination is precisely what we have called the urgence of a distinction."

"If for example we are in the vicious double bind in which fondness is enjoined but made impossible, and if we are accused -- or accuse ourselves -- of cruelty or of indifference, the only resolution is to have the power to imagine a behavior, always in the concrete, which we could call something like kindness or concern, something distinguished from cruelty and from indifference, without yet being fondness, and to perform this behavior.  We might be able to formulate the distinction in words, 'Kindness is not fondness,' or 'Concern is not fondness,' but the formulation is not very important; what is important is the imaginative urgence that breaks the bind and releases the difference;  without the concrete imagination the verbal distinction is hollow."

"Because the concrete circumstances and the concrete possibilities of action are so complex, we might be able to imagine and execute an action which fits under no standard category: not fondness, but something between kindness and concern with perhaps a touch of a reprimand -- but certainly not cruelty and not indifference.  We need to be insightful, prudent, and virtuous to be able to imagine what we can and ought to do in the complexities of actual situations that call for action, and if we succeed it will be obvious to anyone who appreciates what is going on that what we did was the right thing to do, whether or not the right term can be found to name what we did."

So, it is through using our imagination that we can "try out" a new habitude, a new way of behaving, a new way of living.  Then we can move into that habitude and be changed, be someone "distinguished," someone "of distinction."