Imagination

The capacity to represent what is absent, altered or not the case at all.

Theme: Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term: φαντασία · phantasia
Term fixed: c. 330 BC

In plain terms

Imagination gets treated as the decorative faculty - what artists have extra. It is closer to a precondition of ordinary thought.

To plan anything you have to represent a situation that does not obtain. To understand a sentence about somewhere you have never been, you have to entertain it without believing it. To feel anything about a novel, or about the consequences of a decision, something has to stand in for what is absent.

And the interesting thing is what it is not. Imagining is not believing - you can imagine at will and cannot believe at will. It is not perceiving - nobody mistakes the two. It need not involve pictures at all, which is a fact about human variation that was only established recently and surprised almost everyone.

As a philosopher would put it

Aristotle's phantasia mediates between perception and thought, retaining images that make memory and deliberation possible. Hume treats imagination as the faculty that recombines impressions, constrained only by what has been experienced.

Kant makes it constitutive. The productive imagination synthesises the manifold of sense so that it can be brought under concepts - without it there would be no unified experience to have, which promotes imagination from a decorative faculty to a condition of any perception at all. In the third Critique it also underwrites aesthetic judgement, in free play with the understanding.

Contemporary work divides imagination from supposition and both from mental imagery, and the central puzzle is the paradox of fiction: how one can be moved by what one knows does not exist, without believing it does. Simulationist accounts make imagination the mechanism of mindreading and of counterfactual reasoning, which makes it central to both social cognition and to any planning at all.

Where you meet it

In 2015 Adam Zeman and colleagues at Exeter published a study of twenty-one people who reported having no voluntary visual imagery whatever. Asked to picture a familiar face or a sunrise, they experienced nothing - no faint image, no dim version. Most had assumed all their lives that talk of picturing things was a figure of speech.

Zeman named it aphantasia. It is not a disorder in any obvious sense: those with it perform normally on most memory and cognitive tasks, and the group includes scientists, novelists and at least one former head of a major animation studio. Later work put prevalence somewhere around one to four per cent, with a small group at the other extreme reporting imagery as vivid as sight.

What this establishes is that a capacity everyone assumed was uniform varies enormously, and that people had no way to discover the difference because there is nothing to compare. It also separates imagery from imagination: those with aphantasia plan, suppose, read fiction and reason counterfactually, all without pictures.

What is actually disputed

Whether imagination is one capacity.

Mental imagery, supposition, pretence, creativity and counterfactual reasoning are grouped under one word and may have little in common. Aphantasia is the sharpest evidence for the split, since it removes one and leaves the rest intact.

The paradox of fiction remains open. Being genuinely moved by what one knows to be untrue looks irrational if emotions require beliefs, and the available answers all cost something: that the emotions are not real, that we half-believe, or that emotions can be caused by imaginings directly, which weakens the cognitive theory of emotion. And there is an older worry, running from Plato through the Puritans to contemporary media debates, that a capacity for entertaining the false is dangerous - a worry that has never been well supported and never quite gone away.

Commonly confused with

mental imagery Imagery is pictures in the head. Aphantasia shows that people without any of it still imagine, suppose and plan perfectly well.
Creativity 1790 Creativity is producing something new and valuable. Imagination is the capacity to represent the absent, most of which produces nothing at all.
Belief c. 380 BC You can imagine at will and cannot believe at will, which is the cleanest evidence that they are different attitudes to the same content.

Defined against

Perception Imagining and perceiving are never confused from the inside, and saying what the difference consists in has proved unexpectedly hard

Philosophers

Aristotle Phantasia as the bridge between sensing and thinking
David Hume Imagination as the recombination of what has been experienced
Immanuel Kant Imagination as a condition of experience, not an embellishment on it
Jean-Paul Sartre Imagining as consciousness positing its object as absent
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The productive imagination as a mode of knowledge rather than of fancy

Works

Metaphysics Where phantasia is placed between sense and intellect
A Treatise of Human Nature The associative account
Critique of Pure Reason The productive imagination as constitutive
Being and Nothingness Imagination as positing absence
Republic The suspicion of images, in its original form

Schools

Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) The classical account
British Empiricism Imagination as recombination
German Idealism Imagination as a condition of experience
Existentialism Imagination as the positing of what is not

Related concepts

Perception c. 330 BC · Possibility c. 330 BC · Emotion c. 340 BC · Creativity 1790 · Appearance and reality c. 475 BC

Aristotle's phantasia is the capacity that leaves images after perception; Kant makes imagination a condition of experience itself rather than an optional embellishment on it.