1. The Disenchanted World

Max Weber, speaking in 1922 characterised the world which it was the job of the scientist to describe as a world in the ‘process of disenchantment'. In such a world, ‘there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play … one can … in principle master all things by calculation… One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master [it]’.Footnote ¹ But for Weber it was not only magical and mysterious forces which have no place in such a scientific world, but also meaning and value. ‘If these natural sciences lead to anything in this way, they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as the ‘meaning’ of the universe die out at its very roots’.Footnote ² This thought was also captured by Merleau Ponty when he said ‘Scientific thinking treats everything as though it were an object-in-general, as though it meant nothing to us’.Footnote ³ It is often claimed that it is characteristic of modernist thinking to yield such a disenchanted view of nature, and hand in hand with it to assume that everything in the world is in principle intelligible to us. This paper explores the role of imagination in perception, to yield an, at least partially, re-enchanted world.

2. The Expressive Body: Physiognomy not physiology

To begin with let us consider the way in which we perceive other people. In everyday encounters when we encounter the bodies of other people, we are not perceiving them according to their physiological characteristics. That is the job of science. Rather we are recognising what Wittgenstein calls a physiognomy, a form expressive of character.Footnote ⁴ ‘Look into someone else's face and see the consciousness in it, and also a particular shade of consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference, interest, excitement, dullness etc. The light in the face of another’.Footnote ⁵ We perceive the joy or sadness in a face without being able to describe the position of its features as arrangements in objective space. We commonly could not describe how much the mouth had gone up and down, or the position of the cheek bones, although we are often able to mimic the expression perceived, on our own, sometimes physiologically variable features. ‘We see emotion … we do not see facial contortions and make inferences from them … to joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. Grief one would like to say, is personified in the face.’Footnote ⁶ If asked what unites all joyful faces it becomes clear that it is not some physiological arrangement. It is that they express joy, a pattern in their materiality which we learn to detect. Such a physiognomy is evident also when we see people engaged in intentional acts. Again what we perceive are not sets of bodily movements as they would be detected by a physiologist. Instead we see people shopping or making tea, taking a rest or engaged in conversation. Mostly our perception of these activities is immediate. We don't first see bodily movements and infer to what purposes they might promote. We perceive the activities and would, most commonly, be at a loss to characterise the movements by which they were done.

Such perceptions of others are intimately tied to our responses to them. Pain or grief prompt responses of comfort and solicitude. Intentional acts prompt corresponding engagements. In each case the shape we have detected in the bodies of others provides us with reasons for making certain kinds of response. If asked to justify our smiling in response to someone entering a room we might reply, ‘look at her, she's so full of life, doesn't that deserve a smile in return?’ Or, if asked ‘Why have you gone so quiet?’ we might say, ‘look at him, he is about to explode!’ Here what are being signalled are not simply relations of brute causation. It is not just that her joyfulness makes me joyful also. It is rather that our responses are justified, rendered appropriate, by what we directly perceive of the bodies of others. Consequently when we detect a physiognomy in the face of another, what we are detecting cannot be conveyed simply by a drawing. It can only be conveyed when someone recognises how that expression is woven into the pattern of inter-subjective life. ‘Pain has this position in our life; it has these connexions; …Only surrounded by certain normal manifestations of life is there such a thing as an expression of pain; only surrounded by an even more far reaching manifestation of life, such a thing as the expression of sorrow or affection. And so on.’Footnote ⁷

Recognition of character in the faces and bodies of others, is not, then, simply the detection of a particular kind of pattern, like a pattern on wallpaper. The form detected is internally linked to the appropriateness of certain kind of responses to it. Recognition of bodily expressions is therefore a form of what John McDowell terms reason constituting perception.Footnote ⁸ There are internal, broadly conceptual, relations between the shape perceived and our own body's response to it. Our responses are rendered intelligible or appropriate by the physiognomy perceived.

3. The Physiognomy of the World

When we turn away from the perception of persons and turn our attention to other parts of the world we perceive, it becomes clear that those also have a physiognomy, in both a parallel and interdependent way. Merleau Ponty claims; ‘this disclosure of an immanent and incipient significance in the living body extends, as we shall see, to the whole sensible world, and our gaze … will discover in all other ‘objects’ the miracle of expression.’Footnote ⁹ The O.E.D notes that the notion of physiognomy, used for the character of a face, can also be used for the contours, or character of a landscape. It may seem unsettling to accept Merleau Ponty's claim that objects as well as people, can be expressive. Some examples may give a flavour of what features of our relation to our surroundings he is drawing attention to here. Heidegger, for example, writes: ‘The high school building, for us who return to it, thirty years later, as for those who occupy it today, is not so much an object which it would be useful or possible to describe by its characteristics, as it is a certain odor, a certain affective texture which holds sway over a certain vicinity of space.’Footnote ¹⁰ This is what we might describe as the sense or feel which a place has for us. Such a sense or feel is not something captured by listing the objects present at a place and their spatio-temporal positions to each other. We are often aware of such a sense or feel, when we would be at a loss to characterise in any clinical way what the features of the place were, just as we can recognise the character of a face without being able to describe it in any other way.

Mitch Rose, in an article discussing people's relations to the landscapes which surround them, cites the following directions: ‘All right now, you know where Miss Banks stays at up there, don't you? … Now go on down Miss Banks place past that big ol’ bridge where that McKinney boy went over and hit, looks like you might go in after'm if you ain't careful buddy… keep on ‘til you see the Black Eagle post office. That's where the snake handlers stay at and Bud says he's skeered to deliver the mail down there, where he might put his hand in a mailbox and ther's a snake in there… now, keep on, keep on, pretty soon you come to that place where they shot up that boy…’.Footnote ¹¹

What is clear from these examples is that the way we experience the world is quite different from any description that would be offered by scientists. Certain aspects show up for us, while others are passed over; and what shows up is interwoven with the lives we lead as we are immersed within our surroundings. Our relation to such a world is not that of detached observers, but of participants. We might say, drawing a parallel with our perception of people, that the world has a character; and the character we find in it anchors our responses.

4. Imagination and Perception

The shape which the bodies of ourselves and others, and the world in general, has in these examples, is what this paper, will term its ‘imaginary shape’. But why use that term? What exactly has the imagination got to do with perception of this kind?

In speaking of the imagination as at work in perception, certain accounts of the imagination have to be rejected. Firstly, we need to reject the assumption that imagination is the realm of the fanciful or the illusory. Although we often use imagination as the term for what we might also call fanciful thinking, it is also possible to identify a sense of the imagination which is prior to that, a use in which imagination is in play in perception as well as in fanciful thinking and artistic creation. The second association which we need to rid the term imagination of, if we are to think of the perceived world as having an imaginary shape, is its association with inner or private mental images. Imagining is not just making up pictures in our heads. For Hume the imagination consists in the possession of mental images, faint copies of perceptions, conjured up in the absence of, and as an inadequate replacement for, the perceptual world. Here images are items in a private mental realm, copies of something presented to our senses. But the notion of an image, and that of the imagination as the domain of images, has a much wider currency. As Merleau Ponty points out: ‘The word image is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that the design was a tracing, a copy, a second thing and that the mental image was … belonging among our private bric a brac. But in fact it is nothing of the kind …, They are [that] … without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.’Footnote ¹²

The issue of ‘quasi presence and imminent visibility’ will be taken up below. But to start with we must take the point that the notion of an image is not simply that of a copy. In this paper, following Sartre, ‘the word image… [will be taken to] indicate a certain way in which the object appears to consciousness.’Footnote ¹³ To speak of images in this way, and of the imagination as that which concerns such images, is not to employ a usage quite removed from our everyday one. When we speak of people as imaginative, we do not usually mean that they live in a world of make believe, played out within their own interior life. We often mean that they are particularly perceptive, sensitive to the shapes which the world around them can take.

The starting point for an account of the imagination, as the domain of images of this kind, is Kant. For Kant the imagination works by unifying a manifold of intuitions, giving them a structure or form. ‘What is first given to us is appearances. When combined with consciousness it is called perception. Now since every appearance contains a manifold, and since different perceptions therefore occur in the mind separately and singly, combination of them such as they cannot have in sense, is demanded. There therefore must exist in us an active faculty for the synthesis of this manifold. To this faculty I give the name Imagination… Imagination has to bring the manifold of intuition into the form of an image.’Footnote ¹⁴

The Kantian account is important in drawing our attention to the ‘seeing as’ structure of perception, which Strawson, later, illuminatingly compared with Wittgenstein's discussion.Footnote ¹⁵ Sartre, despite drawing a strict distinction between imagination and perception, anchors his account of the imaginary in the way in which we can see doodles as animals, clouds as castles, and ‘the fat and painted cheeks, black hair and female body’ of the impersonator Franconey, as Maurice Chevalier.Footnote ¹⁶ In the Kantian account, amplified by Strawson, however, the imagination is at work, not only when a child treats a broom as a horse, but when she perceives a horse as a horse also. It is at work, not only when we see the impersonator as Maurice Chevalier but also when we see her as Franconey. In each case a multiplicity of sensations is organised into a shape or form which enables us to experience it as something. Strawson points to the workings of imagination in a range of cases from ‘seeing a cloud as a camel or a … formation of stalagmites as a dragon … to the first application of the word ‘astringent’ to a remark … to a … scientist seeing a pattern in phenomena which has never been seen before … to Blake seeing eternity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.’Footnote ¹⁷ This then, is the first aspect of the role of the imagination which merits especial note; the detection of a shape or form, an image or schema, in the multiplicity of intuitions which are available to us. The world is an imaginary world in so far as it has such a physiognomy.

Kant stressed that for the experienced world to have a shape or form there needs to be a synthesising or holding together of a multiplicity of intuitions. Such a synthesis employs an aspect of the imagination which many writers have drawn attention to; that of, in a certain sense, making the absent present. Strawson discusses what is involved in perceiving a dog. ‘To perceive something as a dog, when silent and stationary, is to see it as a possible mover and barker’.Footnote ¹⁸ We should not, however, interpret this as requiring us to conjure up an inner mental images of the dog, moving or barking. Most of the time, we do not do that. Rather, the possible moving and barking is part of the immediate and present perception of the dog. This is what Merleau Ponty was indicating with his claim that the whole problem of the imaginary concerned ‘quasi presence and imminent visibility’. It is not possible to capture what we encounter in perception in a way that utilises only the resources of an assumed instantaneous now and here. As has been emphasised, particularly by phenomenologists, the now is sedimented with the past and pregnant with a future; the here sedimented with and pregnant with the there. Passing a chair I assume its continuity behind me, and the possibility of looking at it from a different angle, avoiding it by a different route. The way the ‘non-present’ is woven into the ‘present’ determines the shape the world has for us. Merleau Ponty amplifies this aspect of our perceived world: ‘the visible … is what in the present announces and harbours an immense latent content, of the past, the future, and the elsewhere.’Footnote ¹⁹ Such a weaving together of the here and the elsewhere, as part of the character of immediate perception, is found even when simply encountering a patch of red: ‘This red is what it is only by connecting up … with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation … a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive.’Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, when we perceive, each of our senses suggests what is available to the others: ‘One sees the hardness and brittleness of the glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass. One sees the springiness of steel, the ductility of redhot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of shavings … The form of a fold in linen or cotton shows us the resilience or dryness of the fabric … In the jerk of the branch from which a bird has flown, we read its flexibility or elasticity … one sees the weight of a block of cast iron which sinks in the sand.Footnote ²¹

The character of our perceptual experience therefore takes us beyond what is immediately presented and this interweaving of the elsewhere into current experience is part of what is involved in claiming that the perceived world has an imaginary form.

5. An affective logic

To claim that our perception has an imaginary dimension, then, is to suggest that the perceived world has a physiognomy, in which the ‘elsewhere’ is woven in to the ‘present’. There is however an aspect of this imaginary form which both Kant and Strawson failed to discuss. Our perceived world has an ‘affective logic’. The character we find the world to have suggests and demands the desiring and sometimes fearful responses we make to it. It is a world we refer to, to make sense of our own modes of existence in relation to it.

To help make good that claim that the imaginary shape of the perceptual world carries affective and not simply cognitive content, we need to turn to a tradition of 20^th century writing on the imaginary not so far mentioned; namely psycho-analytic thought and feminist thought drawing on its framework. A key contribution made by psychoanalytic thought is the weaving together of the imagination and the domain of emotion or ‘affect’. Hume had recognised that ‘the imagination and affections have a close union together’,Footnote ²² but this had simply been a regularity he noticed. Within the psychoanalytic literature the imaginary dimension of experience becomes constitutively the domain of affect. For Freud phantasy provided us with a way of representing ourselves, our biological processes and our relations to the world and others, governed not by judgment, but by the demands of the passions.Footnote ²³ In the Freudian framework images embody our emotional relations to the world and others. The images, in the broad sense of that term which we have been employing, become vehicles which carry such affective content. By means of these images the emotional contours of the subject's world are revealed; unconscious meanings not so much buried in another place, but present as an ‘elsewhere’ in the images we invoke.

Lacan developed Freud's ideas by positing the Imaginary as a stage in the development of the ego, a dimension of consciousness which remains in play throughout life. What Lacan's discussion highlights is that a subject's sense of their body and sense of the world around them becomes formed by means of the emotional attachments which they form to images, such as the image of themselves reflected back by a mirror, or later the images they see on the screen. Such an imaginary domain, governed by affect, remains as a dimension of adult negotiation of the world.Footnote ²⁴

For both Freud and Lacan imaginary or phantasmatic relations, now recognised as the domain of passion or emotion, were regarded as problematic. For Freud, such relations, being informed by emotions, rather than considerations of truth and falsity, meant that they were not subject to ‘the reality principle’, by means of which they needed to be curtailed. However, he also recognised that such modes of relating to the world pervasively co- existed with knowledge derived from such a principle, providing an affective substratum to it. For Lacan, the imaginary is necessarily a source of error and illusion. The imaginary frames our relations to the world in ways that are ultimately futile. For him, access to what he terms ‘the Real’ is not a possibility. The route out of imaginary relations to the world, founded on illusion and misrecognition, comes with subjection to the Symbolic order, an objective and publicly given structure of language and signs, which releases desire from the grip of the Imaginary and into the inter-subjective, rational and social world.

However, other writers, employing the psychoanalytic concept of the imaginary as the domain of affective thinking, reject the clear division between the imaginary and the real or the imaginary and the symbolic; themselves manifestations of an age-old division between emotion and reason. They thereby reject any necessary association between the domain of the imaginary and the realm of illusion and misrecognition. As Castoriadis expresses it: language is not only a code ‘a quasi univocal instrument of making/doing, reckoning and elementary reasoning. The code aspect of language (the cat is on the mat) is opposed to, but also inextricably entangled with its poetic aspects, carrying the imaginary significations.’Footnote ²⁵ The shapes or forms which order our perceptions do not only categorise, but carry emotional significance for us . And this is true of linguistic categories as well as other images and symbols. Feminist philosophers have also paid attention to the intertwining of both the codifying and poetic aspects of thought, as they interrogate the significance of our gendered categories. For Irigaray, for example, interrogation of the category ‘woman’ in psychoanalytic thought and the wider cultural setting, draws attention to an image or schema which both ‘codifies’ and carries an imaginary signification, which she claims is that of a ‘lack’ or ‘deficiency’; but which we might accept can be variable in different settings.Footnote ²⁶ What these psychoanalytic writings suggest is that the images or forms in terms of which our perceptual experience is structured have an affective as well as codifying logic. The world we encounter is one in which we find not only cognitive but also affective, emotional, sense; the affective sense carried by the images which constitute its form.

What exactly does it mean to claim that the world makes ‘affective sense’ to us? Earlier in the paper it was suggested that when we perceived other bodies as expressive, we experienced them as requiring or suggesting responses of our own; grief demanding comfort. Such perception was characterised, borrowing a term from John McDowell, as reason constituting. When we perceive other parts of the world as having an affective shape we also perceive them as reason constituting in a parallel way. The world is experienced as a world of possibilities for us, both for intentional projects and expressive responses; those which would be appropriate or make sense, given how the world appears. McDowell discusses the example of fear. Our fearful responses make evident the threatening aspect which the world presents to us.Footnote ²⁷ The responses of our bodies and the shape of the world are interwoven by relations of mutual intelligibility, mutual appropriateness. The inter-wovenness here parallels that which we have with other bodies, the way a smile invokes a smile and distress comfort. The imaginary shape the world takes for us is therefore constitutively tied up with ways of responding to and acting in relation to our environment.

For Merleau Ponty sensitivity to the affective shape of the world is a form of bodily awareness: ‘Quality, light, colour, depth … are there only because they awake an echo in our body, and because the body welcomes them.’Footnote ²⁸ He also refers us to an example of Heidegger's: ‘This velvet, this silk, are under my figures a certain manner of resisting them, and of yielding to them, … lend themselves to its movement of muscled flesh, or tempt it in its inertia.’Footnote ²⁹ Within such phenomenological accounts, the imaginary shape of the world is something encountered, prompting or requiring our responses. The world itself is enticing or, in the words of Sartre, ‘ensnaring’.Footnote ³⁰ From our point of view, as experiencing subjects, we have no access to a supposedly neutral world onto which we are then supposed to cast a veil of significance to give us reasons to respond. The imaginary, and thereby affectively laden world, is instead our most direct and immediate mode of perception. In the way in which we can see a face as joyful, without being aware of its spatial coordinates, we also experience the freshness of the morning without having access to some alternative characterisation of it, which lacks affective resonance. The meaning and value which our modernist accounts of the world claimed to have removed, remains in the enchantment of everyday experience.

6. The imaginary texture of the real

While arguing that the emotional significance of the world is something which is immediately disclosed to us, we can nonetheless recognise that our perceptual sensitivity to it is something which we are initiated into by the personal and social milieu into which we are placed. This initiation is a process of orientation to a world which is salient to us, a world taking on a form for response. The individual and social anchorage of such salience can, however, have the result that the imaginary shape of our worlds can vary between individuals and across social contexts. Can this be accommodated in an account in which the imaginary is a texture of the real, something disclosed to us in the perceptual encounter? One aspect of being a realist requires that the world we perceive exceeds any possible perceptions we may have of it, and any images or forms in terms of which we may experience it. However many ways we have of perceiving the world, they can never exhaust what we are presented with. Despite the modernist picture, the world can never be fully available to us. Another aspect of realism requires that our perceptions can be wrong or misleading, accurate or inaccurate. This may seem more difficult to reconcile both with the plurality of imaginary forms, and a central feature of imagination yet to be highlighted, namely that of creativity.

Here we might turn back again to Kant. In Kant's account of the imagination, in the Critique of Pure Reason, he stresses its synthesising powers. But the way the synthesis is produced, and the consequent form which the world takes, for us, is constrained by the categories, universal rules to which all perceptual content must conform. However, in Kant's account of beauty in the Critique of Judgment, we have an account of the imagination in which creativity comes into play. Rather than bringing a manifold under universal forms, aesthetic comprehension allows a creative apprehension of the form of beauty, recognising a unity within a multiplicity. He argues here that we employ our creativity in seeking the form of beauty, but that its validity depends on it being recognisable by others. The form which we apprehend must be a possible form for the world to take, and for that it must be available to the apprehension of others. The position Kant adopts here for the detection of beauty is one which we can appropriate for the detection of imaginary form in general. It is something we creatively, collectively and individually apprehend. But it must be a possible form for the world to take, its legitimacy as a possible form, requires its recognition by others. The dimension of creativity suggested by the claim that our world is an imaginary world allows for the possibility of it being imagined in different ways, being open to alternative visions; ‘interminable reinterpretations to which it is legitimately susceptible’.Footnote ³¹ We can think of the imaginary structure of the world as the way in which the world is lit up for us, and one of the tasks for writers, visual artists and musicians, is to offer us new affective structures, lighting the world up in different ways.

This explains how, despite the creative aspect of the imagination informing its role in perception, concepts of accuracy and inaccuracy can still get a hold. To recognise the creative role of the imagination in perception is not to turn the shape the world takes for us into a mere fiction. The images and schemas in terms of which our perceived world takes shape, must be ones which the world can bear or carry. There may be many ways in which the world can be perceived, but if it is to have an existence in excess of our perceptions, there are some schemas into which it will not fit, some saliences it cannot carry. However, to challenge the imaginary shape which the world appears to take for us, faces a number of difficulties. One difficulty is the epistemological immediacy of imaginary salience. Our most immediate experience of the world is as having imaginary shape, so there is no more primitive characterisation we can retreat to, while evaluating the appropriateness of just such a schema. However, difficult as it makes re-evaluation, epistemological primacy does not guarantee incorrigibility nor un-revisability. The matter gets more complex once we have recognised that the forms in terms of which we perceive the world, and consequently in terms of which we live, have not only a codifying but also an affective logic. Moreover, the affective salience, which our world bears, may not always be available to reflective scrutiny. It can condition the shapes of our responses, without becoming a focus of our awareness. Spinoza, whose account of the imagination recognised its dual codifying and affective role, notes that this gives imaginary form a particular resilience. ‘No affect’ he claims ‘can be restrained by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only insofar as it is considered as an affect’.Footnote ³² What he means by this is that we cannot change people's way of looking at the world simply by offering them contrary facts. We need to offer them alternative pictures which make emotional and not just cognitive sense.

Despite seeing the difficulty that effecting changes in the imaginary shape that other people, and the rest of our world, can take for us, Spinoza did think it was possible. In the words of one commentator ‘he sees these organised patterns of affect and image as changeable through challenging the appropriateness of the images at their core … whereby we can learn to replace misleading and debilitating illusions’.Footnote ³³ Gatens and Lloyd provide an example of this, in discussing the way in which non-indigenous Australians, thinking of their history, imagined Australia as a terra nullius, prior to British colonisation, an image conditioning their relation to their land, and crucially their relation to indigenous people. In 1992 Paul Keating, then prime minister, tried to dislodge this way of thinking: ‘It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life, we committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers.’Footnote ³⁴ Here Keating is not simply amassing facts .He is trying to bring about a change in the way the past is imagined, and consequently thought and felt about. What we can say, therefore, given the role of the imaginary in our engagement with the world, is that any assessment of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of imaginary formations has to involve the confrontation of different ways of inhabiting our world and living both effectively and affectively within it.

7. Re-enchantment

To present the world of perception as an imaginary world is to be engaged in a task that John McDowell terms ‘partial re-enchantment’.Footnote ³⁵ And, of course, once we have recognised the workings of imagination in perception, then the scientific world, which was offered as an implied contrast, can be seen, not as lacking an imaginary, but as simply carrying imaginaries of its own. As Bruno Latour has argued ‘modern attempts to disenchant nature … [ simply] recreate a new kind of enchantment’.Footnote ³⁶ Science continually reshapes the image we have of the world we inhabit. And as many writers have pointed out ‘learning a scientific theory … one acquires a repertoire … for seeing, imagining, and manipulating the world in new ways’.Footnote ³⁷

This paper has characterised imagination at work in the perceived world, manifest in the shapes and forms in terms of which we experience it, in which present and absent are woven together, to make affective sense of the ways in which we tuck or hide ourselves into our surroundings. On this picture the imaginary does not sit in contrast to the perceived world, it is rather in the line of the perceptual, ‘inscribed within it (in filigree).’Footnote ³⁸