When I was thirty, I told some coworkers about my plan to enter grad school to become a psychotherapist. We were technical writers for a large insurance company.
“We used to have such dreams,” one of them sighed as the others nodded. “But you have to pay the bills and keep to what you know.” They had stayed there down the decades, uninspired and miserable, because they couldn’t imagine anything better. I could, so I moved forward with my plan.
Years later, before transitioning from psychotherapist to professor, I had the same conversation. I had it again when considering a second PhD, this time in philosophy and religion. “It’s cheaper to get your head examined,” one friend joked. I made good use of tuition reimbursement and graduated in 2023 at age 60.
We have a cultural bias against imagination, which we treat as an entertaining add-on, a form of escape from an intolerable present. That this is all there is, that we can’t do any better, is also an imagining. Like Mercurius, the spirit said to animate the sacred work of alchemy, imagination can be poisonous or healthful, destructive or uplifting, depending on how consciously we wield it.
For my second PhD thesis, Restorying Our Lore, I got curious about what Western philosophers had to say about the relevance of imagining to how we live.
Some philosophers—Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Santayana, for example—treat imagination as an inferior sort of perception, representation, or reason. Hume compares it to a faint idea, and Ricoeur and Derrida to a kind of logic or language. Sartre describes imagination as an emptiness, an absence of being.
Yet these philosophers imagine well beyond their own definitions of imagining. Plato conjures reflective dialogues, the famous cave of shadows, an ensouled cosmos, and the instructive myths of Er and Atlantis. Hume calls imagining a kind of magical faculty of the soul, and Sartre, who wrote plays to illuminate life, shows how imagining reaches beyond pre-given meanings. With it, we can push past what we assume limits us. (Asked by Simone de Beauvoir how such an introverted bookworm turned into a cosmopolitan, Sartre said his early readings kept showing him the world. He fantasized about it until he went out to see it. Crossing the first frontier taught him that he could cross them all.)
Aristotle on imagination sounds a bit like Plato at first, but “phantasia” makes thought and reason possible by building them out of imagery. He also links imagination to moral actions and considers it a kind of perception that illuminates possible future events. Current cognitive and neuroscientific research agrees: not only do activities such as daydreaming, creative thinking, learning, remembering, and prediction require the exercise of imagination, but they share many neural structures that typically support imaginative processes. .
Although medieval philosophers like Augustine, Richard of Saint Victor, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus look suspiciously at imagination as a potential seducer of virginally imagined reason, they also underline its necessity as a partner to thought. On the esoteric side of the philosophical house, alchemy and Renaissance natural magic practiced imagining as a form of deep knowing, echoing Islamic thinkers like Suhrawardy and Ibn Arabi. Marsilio Ficino, who translated Plato and the Corpus Hermeticum, even invented a therapy of imagination for treating his bouts of depression. Centuries later, studies on how imagining can aid acquiring new skills and managing mood finally caught up with him.
In many ways, Ficino taught the philosophers of Modernity to consciously take imagination seriously. Thomas Hobbes, Joseph Addison (who praised a “fairy way of writing”), Mark Akenside, Gottfried Leibniz (touched by Akenside’s idea of all things being interconnected), Leonhard Meister (who aligned imagination and philosophy), Nicolaus Tetens, Joseph Priestley, Dugald Stewart, John Locke (for whom ideas are imaginings), Lord Shaftesbury: all highlight imagination as a key player in philosophy, science, thought, and art. Without imagination, we could not think, analyze, predict, or create. We could not really live. Fuller living requires fuller imagining.
As Samuel Johnson points out, even our biological responses are saturated with imaginings. Today, we project them onto the mysteries of body and brain. Our theories of consciousness teem with fantasy creatures: homunculi, sparkling nets, and magic mirrors upgraded with new neuroscientific names.
Hobbes surprised me. I expected an authoritarian with a mechanist bias. Those are present, but so was his innovative linking of will with creativity. Reason itself is a kind of imagining. Language, memory, hope, and fear: all linked by our imaginings. Anticipating Schelling, Hobbes argues that a well-formed imagination is the essence of philosophy.
And, according to Giambattista Vico, of our religions as well, with imagination a source of gods, faiths, mythologies, and their associated poetry. The gods arise from poetic and imaginative archetypes—anticipating C.G. Jung’s psychoanalitic theory—that personify awe-inspiring qualities like wisdom (e.g., Athena, Saraswati, Amaterasu). The old stories tell us what not to be like, but beyond that, admirable qualities to develop. (In the Odyssey, one of Athena’s names is Mentor, which is where we get that word.)
One of these qualities is empathy, or what Schleiermacher calls sympathetic imagination. The Stoics, Hume, and later Romantic philosophers describe a sympathy of feeling for each other, the world, and its fellow creatures. Shaftsbury, Hutscheson, Arbuckle, Campbell, Cooper, Hume, Burke, Brown, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Wordsworth build this observation into their work on imagining. For Adam Smith, sympathy founds human morality, which relies on imagination; as Shaftsbury put it, all things sympathize. Dugald Stewart traces our coldness and selfishness to lack of attention and imagination.
Philosophers draw a distinction between inauthentic, unconscious, or agenda-driven imagination and the more conscious kind, which Paracelsus calls “true imagination.” In my psychotherapy days, for example, I worked with violent men who came out of jail or prison still imagining themselves as victims. Nations split or go to war over false imaginings amplified by propaganda. Samuel Johnson identifies them as fictions operating imperiously as realities—diseases of the imagination.
According to Kant, imagination constitutes consciousness itself, in part by combining perceptions into objects and our concepts about them. We need the free play of our imaginings to solve problems and avoid “stiff regularity.” For Kant and later German Idealists and European Romantics, imagining is a power of knowing that bridges parts and wholes and mind and nature, welcoming us back into the neglected world.
To the many powers and influences of imagination, philosophers like Johann Herder and Friedrich Schiller add storymaking: not only myths and tales, but orienting narratives (in my work, “guiding fictions”). Nature itself lives in us, imaginatively dreaming up new cosmologies, visions, and inspirations, buoyed forth on Schiller’s play drive. Creative play unifies self and world so deeply that it temporarily freezes time. For Fichte, even the sense of “I” depends on our imaginings that, for Schelling, convert the potentials of reason into actualities. It’s hard to get where you can’t imagine going.
Imagination’s exploratory potential shows up in Goethe’s investigations of patterns in nature, Hegel’s reconciliation of difference, unity, and identity in connections to other people, Kierkegaard’s call to leap into the possible despite all fear, and Nietzsche’s study of truths as working fictions. W.E.B. Du Bois, who founded the first sociology school in the United States, also wrote speculative fiction and raised the question of what life is for. His answer: giving rein to the creative impulse, in thought and imagination. Whitehead compared the free flight of imagination to aerial flights of discovery. Alain LeRoy Locke, the philosopher who promoted the Harlem Renaissance, suggests philosophizing playfully with serious notions like cosmopolitanism, sorting alternative visions through values that unite.
Although Eva Brann keeps the old link between imagination and representations, she also thinks our capacity to imagine can counter bombardments by mass media and propaganda. Ed Casey, who describes imagination as a potency, observes in it a certain freedom from what we perceive, projecting liberating possibilities beyond the given. Cornel West describes such possibilities as radical imaginings for social justice, visionary leadership, and a common destiny for everyone.
What these and other philosophers have revealed about imagination’s roles and uses in how we live, work, and share an ailing planet also addresses the question: What use is philosophy? We all have one. With varying degrees of consciousness, we all carry a set of frameworks, ideas, values, goals, and outlooks, some rigid and others flexible. Our guiding philosophies congeal into personal and collective worldviews built on internal stories about how things are, who matters most, where we belong, where to go next. Stories based on imaginings that can be opened up and deepened. When they are, actions, attitudes, and feelings change.
Philosophy contributes to a democratizing of guiding stories so vast in scope that we face the possibility of what Schlegel, Schelling, Novalis, Holderlin, and Campbell call a new mythology for our time—not another story cycle of distant gods and lands, but new tales for how to find unity in difference here on Earth.
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