Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Let me begin my review by sharing some thoughts that I held about imagination before first reading this book.Imagination is one of those terms, such as freedom or love, that we can’t conclusively define, but which we can’t do without. Imagination, however, seems to have fallen out of favor in comparison to the more widely used contemporary term, “creativity.” Creativity, however, strikes me a much shallower concept. To my mind, creativity denotes more of a surface ingenuity, a clever retelling or reworking of existing schemes, structures, or stories. A typical example of this sense of creativity comes from contemporary public art, which often runs from the whimsical or merely clever (in the American sense) to the disjointed, if not merely dull or ugly. Imagination, on the other hand, exists at deeper—one might even say archetypal—level. By going deeper, below the surface, it goes beyond the common human trait of reworking the surface of things by recognizing the deep structures of reality and how they may be contemplated and explored. It is from within the depths of the human mind that imagination springs. Thus, my sense of the distinction between creativity and imagination and where I find much of our contemporary infatuation with creativity misses the mark. In times of trouble, in which we certainly live, we need to move beyond creativity and into the deep wellsprings of imagination.It was with the frame of mind described above that I eagerly dove into Gary Lachman’s Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. As I’ve come to expect from Lachman’s books, he’s gone before me to explore and give voice to thoughts that I often held as no more than intuitions. And when someone says something that you’re inclined to think in any event (and you can overcome the envy in realizes the other’s superior talent and effort), you quickly are taken in by a book or argument, as I was with this book. Lachman entitles his opening chapter “A Different Way of Knowing,” and he had me there. Lachman explores the profound shift in ways of knowing that came to fruition in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th-century with its emphasis on empirical observations and mathematical-logical thinking that emphasized the role of quantity. This, Lachman writes, was not a slow shift, but a sharp break with tradition, although essential thinkers of the era, such as Pascal, realized that this new method was an addition to older ways of thinking, not a full replacement. Lachman quotes Jacques Barzun (referencing Pascal): “the spirit of geometry ‘works with exact definitions and abstractions in science or mathematics’, while the spirit of finesse ‘works with ideas and perceptions not capable of exact definition’”. Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Floris Books. Kindle Edition. But not all of Pascal’s contemporaries, nor Barzun’s in our own time, appreciate and realize this distinction. Lachman goes on to explain some of the ramifications of failing to appreciate this distinction:“The drawback here is that because the lack of definition is rooted in its subjects themselves, and not due to insufficient information or ‘facts’ about them – when will we have all the facts about love or freedom? – those who follow the spirit of finesse find it difficult, if not impossible, to explain how they know what they know. There are no steps 1, 2, and 3; it just hits them and it is obvious, self-evident. We hear a sonata by Beethoven and we know it is beautiful and meaningful; we do not arrive at this knowledge through a series of logical steps. We do not say to ourselves, ‘Well, it has x number of notes in this passage, which means that …’ and so on. But if asked how we know it is beautiful and meaningful, and even worse, if we can prove it, we draw a blank. The spirit of geometry can take us by the hand and lead us from definition, theorem, and axiom to the goal. But the process is mechanical, practically tautological, as each definition is merely another way of stating the same thing (4 is only another way of saying 2 + 2). And it works best with practical, utilitarian things, not with those that have a purchase on our emotional being.” Id.Lachman goes on to discuss others who’ve arrived at very similar insights, from the 20th-century German thinker Ernest Junger to Michael Polanyi, Alfred North Whitehead, and the contemporary literary scholar-turned-neuroscientist, Iain McGilchrist. These thinkers—and many others—have described and appreciated the distinctions between these different modes of thought, while much of the broader culture clings to a simplistic emphasis on the abstractness (and resulting barrenness) of the "scientific method.” To be clear, Lachman isn’t rejecting the scientific method or the value of science, only “scientism,” which recognizes the abstractions and conclusions of natural science as the only means of knowledge and arriving at “truth.” From this foundation in the history of Western thought, Lachman proceeds to establish the value of the ways of knowing that have been mostly (although not entirely) lost. He describes his project:“This book is about this ‘lost’ knowledge of the imagination. Yet, while this may give us a handy phrase under which we can put examples of the other kind of knowing I have been speaking about, it is not immediately clear what we mean by ‘imagination’. Imagination is one of those things which we all know intimately but which we would find difficult to pin down exactly. It is one of those things that, as Whitehead said, are ‘incapable of analysis in terms of factors more far-reaching than themselves’. . .. Memory, self-consciousness, thought, perception: all inform and are informed by imagination and are difficult, if not impossible, to pry apart from it or each other. This should not be surprising. Imagination does not follow the clear axioms and definitions of the spirit of geometry, but the wayward, vague, surprising insights of the spirit of finesse.” Id.Lachman, having set the terms of his project, moves on to explore a variety of thinkers who have developed and explored insights into this different way of knowing. For instance, he explores the towering figure of the German Enlightenment and Romanticism, Goethe, and the (underappreciated) 20th-century British thinker, Owen Barfield. And, I must add, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, about whom Barfield wrote a book-length study. I must pause here because of what I wrote about at the opening of this review about my distinction between “creativity” and “imagination.” As is inevitably the case, someone arrived at 'my' keen insight long before I did—in this case, no mean figure: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lachman writes, “[T]he distinction that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge made between fantasy and imagination, with fantasy doing collage work, and imagination creating something that is truly ‘new’. For Coleridge a unicorn or a flying pig is a product of fantasy, of putting together different bits and pieces of our snapshots. True imagination is something else.” Id. Like I said.Lachman goes more deeply into Coleridge’s perspective by tying his insight with that of Goethe’s work on plants and Goethe’s imaginative insight about what the first plants must have looked like:The non-existing plants that Goethe could hypothetically create would not be monsters in the original sense of the word – aberrations of nature – but in perfect keeping with Nature’s designs. This is because Goethe had matched the ‘unknown law’ in the outer world, Nature, with the ‘unknown law’ in his inner one, his imagination. As I mentioned, these ‘unknown laws’ are what Coleridge called ‘facts of mind’, necessities of the imagination, that must be met in order for it to be something more than a ‘madman’s cornerstone’. Failing this, imagination sinks to being merely what Coleridge called ‘fancy’, which is nothing more than ‘a mode of Memory’, a way of re-arranging elements obtained through the senses (‘flying pigs’), which is all the ‘blank slate’ school of psychology will allow us. Or worse, it becomes a distortion of reality, Paracelsus’s ‘madman’s cornerstone’ or the kinds of images being produced by much of modern art that Barfield found indicative of a spiritual bankruptcy and which, with something like Yeats’ warning in mind, he feared could eventually produce a ‘fantastically hideous world’. Id.Do we live in a “fantastically hideous world”? As, no doubt, the world has always been, it’s a mixed lot. But much of what passes for imagination today we can more accurately describe as (at its best) mere creativity or fancy, and at its worst, a nightmarish parody of reality, where fake and real become interchangeable and indistinct. Lachman discusses (and greatly appreciates) the work of the 20th-century British poet and essayist Kathleen Raine, and in exploring her work in “the Tradition.” He writesDecades before its popularity, Raine predicted the rise of ‘reality TV’, pointing out that what is on the screen is often no different from the lives of those watching it. ‘Viewers and viewed’, she observed, ‘could change places and nothing would be altered’. If a work of imagination had once been a ‘magic glass in which we discover that nature to which actuality is barely an approximation’, it had become in our time a kind of brightly lit bathroom mirror, in which all the blemishes and wrinkles of ‘real life’ were magnified a hundredfold. Id.I can only add that in the U.S., in the era of the reality-TV president, we need more from our imaginations that ever.I haven’t addressed many other themes and thinkers explored in this wonderful work. “Imagination” is one of those significant terms that one could explore almost endlessly (and I hope to explore the topic further). There are many works and thinkers to reference in such a project. But it’s hard to—imagine?—a better book with which to begin such a quest. In fact, there is so much that Lachman covers in this (relatively) short work that I’ve not mentioned that I feel guilty leaving so much out, but the best way to alleviate my shortcoming (my guilt is my own stuff) is the read this outstanding work.

In writing this book, the author had to deal with two burdens. First, he had to assume that a substantial number of his readers would not know anything about his prior work, and would be newcomers to the issues he addresses; as a result, he had to begin once more at the beginning. Second, a book for general readers had to be brief rather than nuanced, and simplified, or even over-simplified, rather than extensive.He deals with these difficulties rather well. In six readable chapters he distinguishes and delineates two major modes of knowledge (the imaginal and the analytic/Cartesian); describes the triumph of the analytic mode since the 17th Century; develops arguments for the inadequacy of a solely analytic approach to grasping the world; delineates the counter-current that has persisted through the increasing dominance of the analytic; proposes the development of a more balanced mode of knowing in which both modes are active; and, finally, warns about the problems arising from an irresponsible use of imaginative knowing, and emphasizes the need for responsible use of the imagination.The need to simplify and abbreviate leads to some significant omissions: it doesn't really let him trace the development of the analytic mode through the history of the natural sciences of the Middle Ages. It also leads to some odd and hasty judgments – for example, dismissing Marshall Mcluhan as an "intellectual demagogue", rather than as himself a reflective participant in the stream of imaginal knowing (who received inspiration from the Virgin Mary). And finally, it means that he must omit almost completely any consideration of the Buddhist analyses of the constructive role of perception in giving rise to the manifest world (though he does refer offhandedly to Alexandra David-Neel's experience with generating a tulpa). Addressing this would require quite a bit of work: although the problem-situation addressed in Buddhist analyses, especially the Madhyamika, is very much like that of the Parmenidean-Platonic-Neoplatonic tradition, it tends, so to speak, to reverse all the values, starting with a denial of the Parmenidean Real.These are relatively small points: to write, after all, is to omit. There is one very large point that he does not address, despite its immediate relevance to his call for responsible imagination. I will try to provide a brief sketch of the issue.In some ways the author locates the initial sidelining of imaginal knowledge with that naughty old sourpuss, the Church, which rushed around with its omnipresent Church Police putting the kibosh on the poetic imagination (as well as on the sciences).This anachronistic oversimplification has some validity, in that the Church in medieval western Europe was the guarantor of a vision of order, that is, of meaning, precisely the kind of imaginal hierarchical vision the author otherwise admires. Challenges to this vision of order were not just good clean fun: they were potentially highly disruptive political acts – they easily became assertions of alternative centers of meaning and political power. As was common almost everywhere (compare, for example, the Yellow Turban rebellion in China, or the fate of Suhrawardi, for that matter) this meant that these alternatives were suppressed – when they could not be coopted or otherwise re-integrated. (Societies can afford disorder only to the extent that they are rich enough to have resources to waste.)In Europe, this order broke down, under the repeated assertions of alternative visions of order, which "went kinetic", over and over again, at great cost in in suffering and in lives. Voltaire's remark that there is no sect in geometry represents a turn away from the visionary or imaginal not simply because the analytic is more useful, but because (at the time) it seemed likely to be less murderous. The hope was that an analytic, managerial, secular society could find a place for the visionary and imaginal, tamed precisely because they were "just" art or entertainment, and not something to take seriously. The history of the 20th century did not fulfill this hope: it turned out that visions of order may be secular, managerial, atheistic and bureaucratic, and no less lethal than their sectarian precursors. Karl Popper fought a vigorous battle with the whole idea of visionary order, from Plato through Marx, but even his austere laïcité has been hijacked to sectarian ends.There is nothing internal to the imaginal mode of knowing that guarantees its sanity, much less its non-lethality. Sylvia Nasser's biography of John Nash quotes him as saying that he took his delusions seriously because they seemed to come from the same place as his mathematical insights. Our author recognizes this problem, and in his final chapter calls for "tradition" to protect imagination from the monsters that may arise from the sleep of reason. But what this can possibly mean (whose tradition? who are the Guardians? what could this look like in practice?) is left quite undefined. In an important sense, the book stops where it finally was ready to begin.Nevertheless, the book provides a very clear and readable survey of the issue of the two modes of knowing, with a very useful introduction to major figures in the imaginal current, and their writings. It ends with an excellent reading list, which will take the interested reader quite far into the subject. For anyone who is not already very familiar with the primary sources, this book will provide very helpful orientation and access to them. It would also be very useful ancillary reading for undergraduate survey courses.

This book has changed the way I think about myself and the world. It's not a effortless read as in, to get value out of it you have to read carefully and sometimes back up a little, stop and think, Google for context on the side. Eager to read more from this author

I have been reading Gary Lachman's informed and stimulating books for several years now and he is a particularly prolific and fascinating writer. Of all his works, I think this one is possibly the best I have, thus far, read. It is certainly one of the most thought provoking books I have ever read, enjoying every minute of the absorbing experience. The subject of the imagination and consciousness has been the main focus of my thoughts and study for some while, having come to question, as I age, the fickle emptiness of our money and possessions driven culture in this digital age, which has so much to offer human evolution. I am already looking forward to the next one, published in just a couple of months.

When I start any of Lachman's books I get a nervous exciting sensation. I know from experience that I will not be the same person at the end of a paragraph let alone a chapter or the book. My anxiety levels increase. I begin to become more conscious of the moment - and then - as I begin to read I'm in a new place and a sense of ease begins to wash over me as my imagination is fired and I am awake.And Lost Knowledge of the Imagination is as impressive as it is insightful.

Like reading Wilson,you feel the author is with you while you read. Summarizes Lachman's thoughts to date. Along with his constant favourites like Stiener, Yeats and Jung this work introduced a few new names to those following Lachman's works. Kathleen Raine, Barfield,Thompson, Goethe among others exploring the theme of consciousness evolution and imagination.

Very much enjoyed this book. Other positive reviews probably said it better than I could but if you are interested in this type of subject then I doubt you will be disappointed. You will want to reflect and meditate more after reading it.