2.104
Good imagination, like good art, sees how it is for another. We don’t simply ‘imagine,’ if we think of ‘imagine,’ like ‘metaphor,’ as merely fictitious. We see how it is (how it could be) for another. Seeing in this way is a response to the other. Good imagination tarries with wisps of worlds that trail possibilities after them.
How do we know when imagining or art is ‘good’? It isn’t when it accurately represents something. Rather, it’s when it opens or joins with a world within which we can temporarily be.
“‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he [sic] dies,’ said Jojen. ‘The man who never reads lives only one.’”[1] — This quote from Game of Thrones captures something about reading or experiencing art. In the novel, Bran is learning that he’s able to enter other lifeforms (crows, trees, wolves) in other historical times, even though, when he does the latter, he can only observe but not speak. Likewise, the novel series puts us in different character perspectives, with chapters delineated by these shifts. In other words, Bran’s ability to change perspectives is precisely what we’re doing as we read the series or, more generally, when we experience art: we see how things are (how things could be) from various perspectives, through various transformations.
Near the beginning of his famous essay, Nagel asks about transposing himself into a bat.[2] He points to limitations: “Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth […]. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”[3] Without going into Nagel’s specific conclusions, what I wish to draw to our attention is his methodological concern: the limits of imagination.
Imagination sees things differently. Like any way of seeing, it can be wrong. And there are indeed methodological concerns. But notice that we cannot stop imagining. When Heidegger implicitly answers that we cannot transpose ourselves into non-human animals because there’s no ‘there’ for them (no Da), he’s employing an imaginary — a poor one in my view. That is, he imagines that there’s no access and he imagines a poorness in world (§2.11).
But when we allow ourselves to encounter the alterity of a particular non-human animal (which includes its commonalities with us), we cannot but be struck by it. Here’s another form of living, wrapped in its own mysteries. To either pretend to renounce any imagination or to imagine too effortlessly is to harm the phenomenon. Thus, while Nagel raises some good points warning against the latter, one shouldn’t subsequently be driven to the former.[4]
Any act of imagination involves a risk, but so too does any communication or relation. We cannot avoid relating or communicating, just as we cannot avoid imagining. How we pick up this fact shows something about who we are.
[1] See §1.104. Martin, A Dance with Dragons, p. 490, chapter 34.
[2] Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974): p. 435–50.
[3] ibid, p. 439.
[4] Nagel speculatively proposes that we move beyond imagination (p. 449): “This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination.” He thereby falls into the former mistake (i.e., pretending to renounce imagination), for an ‘objective phenomenology’ would still require imagination.