Luca Tateo - A Theory of Imagining, Knowing, and Understanding

Luca Tateo has undertaken a task that has remained undone for a century. Psychology over the last hundred yearsafter Hans Vaihinger (1911) powerfully pointed out how useful fictions are needed for the human mindhas remained mute on the role of imagination in the human psyche. The ever-active efforts toward anchoring psychology in the realism of the phenomenaas these arehave de-focused the researchers from the linked developmental questionphenomenaas they could be, orcould become. Of course that question can be answered in the present time only through imagination. Thus, imagination can be understood as the central arena for human psychological functioning.

Since ancient times, imagination has occupied a special position in any theory of human knowledge. Already at the first inspection, imagination highlights as the faculty of producing new images (orphantasmata), indispensable for making possible the specifically human mode of knowledge. In animals, knowledge capacities are essentially restricted to the data provided by the senses. Animal behavior is constrained to an organisms repertoire in front of salient features of its environment. Feeding, sleeping, hunting, fleeing, and mating are, in animals, determined by surrounding sensorial stimuli. In the human case, higher complexity processes interrupt the straightforward dependence on sensorial data. One of these higher level processes is imagination. It detaches people from their immediate surroundings, allowing them to act with regard to internally produced stimuli rather than externally given occurrences. Imagination operates by transforming and altering images provided by the senses, allowing new modes of perception and breaking the fundamental action-reaction of animal life. Imagination produces modified sensorial data, providing images for higher intellectual tasks such as reasoning and language production. In this sense, imagination occupies a middle position between the senses and intellect; it can be understood as either the highest sensory modalitythe Aristoteliansensus communisor the lowest intellectual process.

In the Hellenistic tradition, the peculiar intermediate position of imagination results in its oscillating consideration betweenpsycheandnous. On the one hand, imagination works when people dream, providing images that populate sleeping minds. Thus, imagination seems to work independent of conscious, goal-oriented rational thinking. From this point of view, imagination is seen as tightly united to vital forces and therefore one of the multiple functions ofpsyche. On the other hand, imagination represents the most basic intellectual operation upon sensory perception, initiating the properly human rational approach to nature. Imagination seems to be an indispensable part of every form of noetic examination of reality, from the abstract counterfactual thinking (What if this or that were the case?) to the vivid understanding of poetic images. Thus, imagination is matter and form; part of the sensible world, part of the spiritual world.

In modern times, imagination also plays an intermediate role in knowledge. Imagination is situated between affect and cognition as well as between unconsciousness and consciousness. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, imagination, in the form offantasy, was an important soul faculty whose existence allowed the contact with the totality of Nature. Its cultivation was necessary for whoever was interested in knowing Nature. Rational means are not enough; it is also necessary tofeelNature. We need, in Goethes terms, the exact sensory fantasy (see Cornejo, 2017a).Fantasyis hence incorporated into passive faculties, whose cultivation should compensate what rationality and understanding cannot reach. Far from being a mechanism to get away from the mundanity of the real world, Goethean anthropology and the school of thought he inspired understood fantasy as havingepistemic value(Cornejo, 2017b): it corresponds to the necessary process of bringing abstractions and discursive thinking to the soil of Earth. Opposing the rational model of human mind, which at that time gained increasing notoriety, fantasy and imagination is understood by Goethe as being central for