Making sense of imagination and knowledge

This is an article in response to Otti Vogt 's post "WHAT IS REAL? THE CURIOUS POPULARITY OF DAVID BOHM AND "SCIENTIFIC" MYSTICISM"

To answer this question I want to introduce a sensemaking framework of the Spanish Philosopher Patxi Lanceros that I encounter previously to Dave Snowden 's Cynefin. While they may point to similar conclusions, they do not overlap, and I treasure Lancero's one because it makes explicit Imagination.

But first let me rescue a quote of the Xenephon's Memorabilia (this disciple's defense of Socrates), that probably sums everything up:

"People who think that these kinds of things are wholly within the realm of human understanding and that none of them exceeds reason are, he claimed, irrational. Equally irrational, however, are those who turn to divination for things the gods have granted human beings to study and make their own decisions about (such as asking “Is it better to get somebody experienced or inexperienced to drive my carriage?” or “Is it better to get somebody experienced or inexperienced to pilot my ship?”), or for things one can ascertain by simple calculation, measurement, or weighing. He considered it impious for people to ask the gods about such things. He maintained that it was necessary to learn through study what the gods grant us to learn in this way; but in the case of things not apparent to human beings, we must try to learn them from the gods through divination, since the gods provide signs to whomever they favor"

So, here we are, more than two thousand years later, discussing the same issues. Why happens?

TL;DR version:

• There are three kinds of knowledge that play in three different scenes: the Truth-Functional Scene (normative), the Hypothetical-theoretical Scene (speculative), and the Imaginary Scene (symbolic).
• The relationship between them "is complicated" because each scene is autonomous and relative: presents an argument that requires the argument of the other two since “each scene claims capacity for producing true and effective discourse about anything/the whole thing” (Lanceros, 1997: 42) (which provokes an inclination to reductionism of what knowledge and reality is).

The Imaginary and the limits of knowledge

Departing from an epistemological perspective, Lanceros defines three kinds of knowledge (see Figure 1) that are relatively autonomous in the sense that they have their own norms, and also a limited scene of application that set the friendly or polemical relationship between them (Lanceros, 1997). The first scene is what he calls the Truth-Functional Scene, where knowledge is ready for being used, and includes all technical and practical knowledge expressed in norms, formulas and decrees. But when that kind of knowledge proves to be incapable or insecure (the limit of action), clashes with the second scene: the Hypothetical-theoretical Scene. In this scene, knowledge is organized in hypothesis, experiences and tests. It incorporates risk and error, which are non-tolerable in the previous scene; departs from the limit of action and looks for expanding it. Again, there is some point where this knowledge cannot extend its hypothesis, experiencing challenge, impossibility, enigma or mystery (the limit of understanding). Science, as we have inherited from modernity, operates in this scene of knowledge, in between the limit of action and the limit of understanding. Beyond the limit of understanding, there is still a new scene: the Imaginary Scene. The knowledge that embraces is symbolic, and escapes from norm and hypothesis. Opposed to the tyrannical precision of the concept and the sign, the symbolic language is ambiguous and accepts dilemmas and contradictions that pervade the human universe of meaning.

Figure 1: types of knowledge, and their limits (from Lanceros, 1997)

The Imaginary scene does not diminish because of the expansion of the two other scenes; when they cannot offer a better/different future, the Imaginary Scene “can”. It is able to confront any degree of complexity and paradox; to literally make sense of anything; to capture individual and collective fears and hopes. It is a kind of knowledge that is not linked to a method (Gadamer, 2004), and only can be captured and transmitted through a poem, a narrative, a painting, a ritual…

The Imaginary Scene is connected to the other two scenes: “problematize action and theoretical knowledge, at the same time that it allows to be impregnated by the ruling norm and the ongoing research” (Lanceros, 1997: 40). This is why any general theory of knowledge has to pay attention to the dynamism of the limits and the interconnection between the three scenes: as we have learnt after Armstrong’s walk in the moon, Cyranos’ vision of moon travelling should not be disdained in terms of operational criteria, either functional or theoretical. Even more: fundamental knowledge (in its double sense of basic and essential) should not be situated in the Truth-functional and Hypothetical-theoretical scenes, but in the Imaginary Scene, which is the one that “requires not only senses but also feelings, not just reason but also passion” (Lanceros, 1997: 40).

Each scene, Lanceros explains, is autonomous and relative: presents an argument that requires the argument of the other two, because “each scene claims capacity for producing true and effective discourse about anything/the whole thing” (Lanceros, 1997: 42), which provokes an inclination to reductionism of what knowledge and reality is. That argument in respect of anything/the whole thing becomes an “a priori that legitimizes activities, interests and expectations of each scene, and turns into the basis of their strategies” (Lanceros, 1997: 42). The axiom of the Truth-Functional Scene is that anything/the whole thing can be dominated, which establishes its relationship with the real in terms of objects, and its relationship with knowledge in terms of instruments. The Hypothetical-theoretical Scene maintains the axiom that anything/the whole thing can be known. Its relationship with reality is set in terms of subject (consciousness)-object that pursues a development of methodologies of representation of reality, and qualitative an incremental observation of it. Finally, the Imaginary Scene departs from the axiom that anything/the whole thing is (ab initio) fractured. Its relationship with reality and knowledge is set in terms of looking for ways of implication and reconstruction of this ontologically broken totality, in which symbol is the place for mediation and meaning bridging. It is very important to realize that the primary aspect of the Imaginary Scene does not involve to control or explain, but to link or implicate through meaning construction what it is experienced as fractured: animal/man, man/gods, nature/culture, life/death, etc. Among them, the certainty of death is the ever-present “tragic wound” that connects the three scenes.

Axioms and relationships with reality of each type of knowledge is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Axioms and relationship with reality of different types of knowledge (own elaboration, from Lanceros, 1997)

As Lanceros puts it, “those unstable and plural figures called truth, certainty, plausibility… are sketched over the complex landscape of the three scenes in continuous interaction” (Lanceros, 40). His elegant model captures Foucault’s strategy for unveiling those cultural rules and codes - epistemes - that defined what constituted a legitimate form of knowledge in a given epoch: making “the history not of thought in general but of all that ‘contains though’ in a culture, of all in which there is thought. For there is thought in philosophy, but also in a novel, in jurisprudence, in law, in an administrative system, in a prison” (Foucault, 1996: 9).

Epistemes tell us about the three limits of knowledge: what can be dominated? What can be known? What can be implicated? Speaking in general terms, there would be little debate around the idea that the ruling episteme in contemporary academic world subordinates the Imaginary Scene to the Truth-Functional and the Hypothetical-theoretical Scene, experienced as the “crisis of the Humanities” and the distinction between “soft sciences” and “hard sciences”. That subordination has to be supported, of course, by a concrete polarization of Imaginary: by imagining that when doing research scientist get rid of the Imaginary Scene. In this widespread narrative, the knowledge of the Imaginary Scene operates under the same axiom of the Hypothetical-theoretical Scene (“everything can be known”), and the Imaginary Scene is progressively diminished at the same time that the Hypothetical-Theoretical Scene expands its field. Ernst Cassirer coined the term homo symbolicus to reflect that man

“has enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of facts, or according to his immediate needs or desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams” (Cassirer, 1972: 43, emphasis mine)

Because reality is not presented to consciousness but always represented in some degree, the three scenes of knowledge are always interacting. Bachelard was the first to study the influence of imagination in scientific mind, proposing an analysis of objective knowledge in order to identify the epistemological obstacles rooted in unconscious symbolic preferences of the researcher.

I think this scheme in which each type of knowledge experiences limits is quite illuminating as to why this interaction between types of knowledge. Why leadership talks about quantum mechanics; why Bhor and Einstein argued about whether God plays dice or not. Why we talk about "superstrings," as if there were such things as actual "superstrings".

Those interested in better understanding the relationship between imagination and science will enjoy reading the work of Gaston Bachelard and Gerald Holton. And those who find Socrates' idea of consulting oracles ridiculous should consider that (symbolic) language and life are not independent, as shown by biosemiotics in general, and delightfully by the semiophysics of René Thom.

References

Cassirer, E. (1972). An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Heaven: Yale University Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and Method. New York: Continuum.

Lanceros, P. (1997). La herida trágica: el pensamiento simbólico tras H?lderlin, Nietzsche, Goya y Rilke. Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial.

Foucault, M. (1996). Foucault live: (interviews, 1961-1984). New York: Semiotext(e).

Also:

Bachelard, G. (1968). The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind. New York: Orion Press.

Bachelard, G. (1984). The New Scientific Spirit. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bachelard, G. (1999). Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Barbieri, M. (2008). Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis. Berlin: Springer.

Canguilhem, G. (1992). La Connaissance De La Vie. Paris: Vrin.

Castoriadis, C. (1998). The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Corbin, H. (2000). Mundus Imaginalis, Or, The Imaginary and the Imaginal. In B. Sells (Ed.), Working with Images (pp. 70–89). Woodstock: Spring Publications.

Durand, G. (1999b). The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary. Brisbane: Boombana Publications.

Foucault, M. (2002). The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Routledge.

Holton, G. (1998). The Scientific Imagination: With a New Introduction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kincheloe, J. L., & Tobin, K. (2009). The much exaggerated death of positivism. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 4(3), 513–528.

Lanceros, P. (2000). Verdades Frágiles, Mentiras útiles: éticas, Estéticas y Políticas de la Postmodernidad. Bilbao: Hiria Liburuak.

Lanceros, P. (2005). Política mente: de la revolución a la globalización. Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial.

Ricoeur, P. (2003). The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Thom, R., Lejeune, C. and Duport, J.P. (1978) Morphogenèse et imaginaire. Lettres modernes.

Thom, R. (1980). Les racines biologiques du symbolique. In M. Maffesoli (Ed.), La Galaxie de l’imaginaire: dérive autour de l’?uvre de Gilbert Durand (pp. 249–256). Paris: Berg.

Thom, R. (1990) Semio Physics: A Sketch. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Advanced Book Program.

Wheeler, W. (2006). The whole creature: complexity, biosemiotics and the evolution of culture. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Wigner, E. P. (1960). The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 13(1), 1–14.