I. Imagination and Our Experience of the Universe

Leibniz asked a good question. Why does something exist rather than nothing?¹

Granting that things exist, Leibniz thinks we should be able to give a reason why they exist—his concept of the principle of sufficient reason, which he develops in Monadology and in Theodicy.

Irrespective of the way one interprets the terms of the question, over-familiarity can lead a thinker to miss the substantial imaginative act required to fully grasp Leibniz’s question.

First, try to imagine nothing.

No objects. No minds. No time.

No forces, no vacuum, no space, no laws.

Nothing.

It requires focus and patience. Once you have succeeded in imagining nothing, try to imagine one thing—a single atom, say—popping into existence from nothing. Then, think about the difference between nothing and the single thing that now exists.

Every argument has a starting point, often involving a choice between two possibilities that take the logical form of P or ~P. Either the universe had a beginning or it did not. Either it has an end or it does not. Either it is created or it is not created. Even if the motivation for choosing a starting point is unclear, an argument can still be illuminating in a “What if this were true?” kind of way. As we compare the argument’s consequences to our lived experience, we can ask whether experience makes the starting points seem more compelling, or less.

Victor Hugo described the universe as an appearance corrected by a transparency. Correction is the story we tell about the universe. It affects the way we see things in the universe, and it may even affect whether or not we are aware of a thing in the first place. Theories of philosophical imagination are about the meaning of the word correction. The nature of philosophical imagination is disclosed through iterative imaginative acts that form a story about what shows up in our experience. Each imaginative act is a variation on the question, “What if this were true?” Certain ways of conceiving imagination that are plausible in one kind of universe are implausible (or even nonsense) in another kind.

For example, assume the universe is uncreated but had a beginning: once there was nothing, and then, as a brute just so fact, there was something.

Deciding which assumptions should guide revisions to our stories is sometimes viewed as the task of modern science. This is a category mistake: embracing an assumption that limits the possible stories we can tell about the universe is a philosophical act rather than a scientific act. But the mistake is understandable. When we use scientific methods to study appearances in the sky, for example, we discover that the stars and the forces affecting the stars are mathematically describable physical phenomena. Scientific models based on our observations allow us to predict the behavior of these phenomena reliably without introducing personal forces in the form of God or other divine creative entities. If science can cleanse mythological personal forces from our astronomy, perhaps the same correction will hold for the rest of the universe.

What if we apply our corrective transparency to other personal forces in the universe? Does this kind of correction eliminate all people from the universe? At first, the answer to this question seems to be No, simply because there are apparently persons in the universe who have force—ourselves, for example. But there are also reasons for answering Yes. Prior to the appearance of people, non-personal reality constituted all that exists.

Such an account requires enormous imaginative activity. A theory is a kind of story about something. Every attempt to build a coherent theory about reality is an act of imagination. Because there is actually stuff in the universe behaving in certain ways, we can test our scientific theories about the universe and assess their predictive value. If a theory we have imagined provides a satisfying explanation for the ways past and present events appear to us, and if it accurately predicts how future events will show up, we are justified in thinking our theory is pretty good. If some part of our theory can be eliminated without changing the robustness of our account of everything past, present, and future, then that part of the theory is doing no work. In the spirit of Ockham’s razor, perhaps it should be lopped off.

I say perhaps it should be lopped off, because the choice to lop it off is a philosophical, or even aesthetic, choice: we like theories in which all the parts do some kind of work, and we often prefer simplicity to complexity, all other things being equal. But the universe might actually be full of useless parts that do no work at all. If so, lopping off parts will make our theory neater, but it will not get us closer to the truth of the universe.

If something shows up that cannot be accounted for by our theory, then our theory is incomplete.

In my discussion of philosophical imagination, I will begin with a different assumption. I will assume the universe is created, and I will consider how the assumption that the universe is created affects theories of philosophical imagination. The assumption illuminates some ideas that would make no sense without it. It marks the difference between a universe that has no inherent meaning or purpose (however meaningful it might seem to creatures like us) and a universe that might have inherent meaning and purpose as a whole (because it was created).

We will never reach a bedrock of Cartesian certainty about our assumptions, because we never reach a bedrock of Cartesian certainty about anything.

The same is true for philosophical investigation. Suppose, for example, that the imagination functions to bring the cosmos into the soul, allowing the significance of things to take hold. For this theory to be true, of course, things that appear—stars, persons, the universe as a whole—must actually have significance. The presence or absence of such significance cannot be tested through scientific experimentation. A soul is required to register significance. Such a theory of the imagination, however strange, leads to surprising possibilities. Perhaps significance in the cosmos can only be perceived by a prayer-formed imagination. Perhaps the universe has been waiting for our form of imaginative seeing, just as God waited for Adam to name the animals (Genesis 2:19): “Out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” Naming is an imaginative act of the soul that has real power in the world. It changes our ability to see the significance and meaning of things. Naming both reveals and contributes to reality.

Even if we assume the universe is created, ideas of this sort are speculative. They can be tested against human experience to confirm or disconfirm our sense of their veracity. But just as we rely on a sommelier to assess the quality of wine, to test a theory of the imagination in which the soul, the cosmos, and human purpose converge with our pursuit of knowledge about God, we may need guidance from a theological poet or a saint, rather than a scientist. Because God is unfathomable by finite creatures such as ourselves, the work of imaginative reach is never finished, and neither is all that follows from imaginative acts—artistic, literary, and liturgical expressions of imaginative discoveries, along with scientific, philosophical, and theological theories.

Imaginative acts leave artifacts in their wake. Theories, poems, paintings, music, relationships—these artifacts are traces that hint at the nature of the imagination and its relationship to the world. The artifacts are made (poesis), but they can reveal reality. They are in the same category as Adam’s naming of the animals. Insofar as things exist before they are named, existence is prior to the imaginative act. But insofar as naming allows a thing to be seen or to be seen in a certain way, the imaginative act of naming is prior to our experience of a thing as it shows up in the world. Naming has priority in theories of the imagination that allow the soul to receive appearances and to register significance coinciding with a thing’s proper name. The place of the made in the discovery of the true is what I mean by the term at the heart of this theory of philosophical imagination—the poetic apriori. The coherence of the idea of the poetic apriori, in turn, depends upon the organizing idea around which the entire theory is developed—the analogia entis, the analogy of being.

The idea of the soul is a placeholder for whatever it is that allows us to perceive, to investigate, and to discover the significance of things through the imagination in a created universe. The soul’s response to everything imagination imports or creates illuminates the power and purpose of the imagination. The forms, patterns, and contours of what the imagination makes are determined by the reality the imagination encounters, along with the character, limits, power, and function of the imagination itself. The soul registers the truth of what the imagination makes. Without the artifacts of the imagination, the soul would be isolated from reality. But without the soul, truth cannot emerge from imaginative acts, just as truth does not emerge in the words produced by a computer algorithm unless there is a reader to register the presence or absence of meaning. The idea of the poetic apriori gestures toward the conditions required for the imagination to have the power to make artifacts that enable the soul to see reality. The soul craves truth that aligns with reality. It loves wisdom, and it desires to know both itself and the world around it.

Some theories of the imagination make more sense in an uncreated universe than in a created universe. In such theories, the imagination is a byproduct of accidental, purposeless events, because ultimately everything is a byproduct of accidental, purposeless events. These theories are not my concern. My entire discussion of the philosophical imagination depends upon the assumption that the universe is created, because the theory depends upon a kind of significance that things can have only in a universe that is meaningful as a whole.

We show up in the world. As we develop self-awareness, most of us have a sense of ourselves as a whole, rather than merely a collection of parts. Many of us also have a sense of being a single person over time. We feel at least the temporary unity of our being, even if its foundation is not apparent to us. In between this mysterious ground and everything we encounter in the cosmos, we have an inner world where experiences meet in sense, memory, and imagination. Everything that populates this vast inner world is open to our exploration through thought, feeling, and perhaps other forms of intimate awareness. This is the theater of our soul.

In this arena, between the visible and the invisible, we explore, shape, and revise our experience of the world. All the facts of the world show up here. The meaning of the world also shows up here. As we discover the texture of the world, we become aware of something beyond the experience of discrete data points. Imagination allows us to reach outward, inward, and upward for what is not yet known—sometimes wonderful, sometimes frightening, sometimes uncanny. It is a power both to project and to receive. When it projects, the result is sometimes mere fiction. But even fiction can transform our ability to see, for better or worse.

As we come up against the fullness of reality in the theater of our souls, we correct our partial vision with the transparencies we make and lay on the world. Our transparencies are likewise revised by our perception of significance in the world, which changes the way we see things. There is no end to revision in the sense of completeness, but there is an end to revision and imaginative reach in the sense of a purpose, a direction, a telos. Imaginative revision often takes the form of play. This is not a denigration of imaginative work but rather an exaltation of play as a means of discovery. Imaginative play is a response to the peculiar beckoning that we experience as significance or beauty, the meaning of the whole.

The philosophical imagination is a faculty for discovering significance through a certain kind of making. Rationality is, in part, our ability to question and to test these discoveries. Rationality—like the ideas of imagination and soul—is a placeholder for something with real force in a person’s inward life and in a person’s interaction with reality. Our accounts of reality, constructed through our imaginative acts of naming and making, can only approximate truth as far as we know. The boundaries of real things often seem hazy to us. But the work of philosophical imagination is still useful. And besides, we cannot avoid it. We are compelled to name the things in our world, to name their forms as they appear to us. This is one of our most important sources of knowledge.

If naming is an imaginative act that gives us genuine insight into reality and if rationality is, at least in part, how we test imagination’s artifacts, what is the relationship of the soul to imagination and rationality? Answering this question requires a larger philosophical context to avoid reducing the imagination to something that is not imagination. If the imagination brings candidates for significance to the soul, the idea of the soul itself is surely one of those candidates. There are many concepts of the soul consistent with the theory of imagination I am developing. I will briefly consider an Aristotelian account of the soul because it is accessible and requires fewer religious commitments than some other accounts.⁵ This discussion is meant primarily to demonstrate one compelling approach to discussing the soul, but other accounts would serve my central arguments about philosophical imagination just as well.

The imagination suggests things to us. Think of it as an instrument that is sensitive to reverberations unfelt by other aspects of the mind. It listens for the echoes of our own calls, bounced back to us by the surfaces of real things, as we grope our way along in the shadow lands, moving farther in and farther up. Imagination uses hope, play, metaphor, and analogy to explore. Through these imaginative acts, we discover the vast treasure trove that is the soul. The contour of the soul appears through its unification of the value, significance, and there-ness of our active presence in the world. It turns the universe into a university. Along the way, one early discovery is that we do not have a soul. We are a soul.

Aristotle described humans as rational animals who use concepts as tools to reason about things we cannot observe. Material bodies and brains are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for our ability to use concepts. Immaterial intellect is also needed. Without intellect, we cannot use concepts.

To understand the non-material nature of our intellect, we must understand the difference between form and shape. A form is the essential nature of the thing. It is the answer to the question, What is it? A shape is a complete, quantifiable description of the thing. The sciences study shapes because shape is the totality of a thing’s quantifiable properties, and science studies quantifiable properties.

lang=EN style='font-size:11.5pt'>The soul is the form of the body, not its shape. When neuroscientists dissect the brain but find no soul and then conclude that either the soul is nothing other than the material of the brain, or that souls do not exist, they have confused form and shape. The Aristotelian point is that souls exist, but they are not the same as material substances, nor do they exist in the gaps between material substances.

Aristotle distinguished three kinds of souls based on their essential abilities: there are souls that make bodies alive, souls that make animals both alive and sentient (which means they can feel, though there is no threshold between souls with faint feelings and souls that respond intensely to The Goldberg Variations), and souls capable of life, consciousness, and self-knowledge. These latter souls, of which we are examples, can use language to abstract forms from shapes. This allows us to reason about things unseen and unexperienced (such as God, whom we have never seen, and death, which we have never experienced).

Shapes can be pictured, but forms can only be conceived. Forms divide matter ontologically. These formal divisions are inaccessible to science qua science, though not to a scientist qua human. The difference between a shape and a form is a difference of kind, not degree. Forms can never be reduced to shapes. Ontological differences in kind coexist with biological continuity. There are naturally occurring ontological distinctions between elements, compounds, plants, animals, and humans (or human-like creatures). The lower kinds touch the higher, so there is some fuzziness in classification. It might be hard to say at what point organic compounds can first register feeling, but this epistemological fuzziness is compatible with ontological sharpness. At whatever stage the feeling shows up, once it does, there is a new kind of thing. A thing that is capable of feeling is a different kind of thing than a thing that is not capable of feeling, even though the phylogenetic continuum is not interrupted.

Of the four types of causes Aristotle identified—material, formal, efficient, and final—philosophy is primarily interested in formal and final causality. It offers a clarifying question that fits well with an understanding of the imagination and the soul that asks, “Can we understand the significance of the universe in which we live?” The search for magical elements in the gaps between efficient causes will never lead to a grasp of the beauty of music, the meaning of words, or the information stored on a computer, because these things have to do with the form of a thing, not its shape. To see beauty, meaning, or information we must look beyond mechanism. The difference between seeing an efficient cause and seeing a final cause is the difference between perceiving and conceiving, the difference between empirical induction and conceptual induction.

Empirical induction is the form of reasoning that moves from observed events to connections between these events. Chemical A is mixed with chemical B and reaction X occurs. We conclude that the chemical mixing of A and B caused the reaction X. This is the work of science. It is also the target for David Hume’s famous skepticism. Hume argued that experience can tell us nothing beyond the constant conjunction of events. Event one: chemical A is mixed with chemical B. Event two: reaction X occurs. This says nothing about a causal relation between the two events. To conclude that event X is caused by mixing chemical A and chemical B, we must assume the first principle of empirical inductive reasoning, which is that everything has a cause—nothing comes from nothing. But this assumption depends upon rational insight, which is not itself a result of empirical induction.

Empirical induction concerns causal events. Conceptual induction concerns the purposes and forms of things. Rational insight allows conceptual induction, allows us to see forms as forms, and even allows us to understand things that have no extension. Without rational insight into form, we would be no better than video recorders, with no insight into the thingness of recorded things. We would not understand the functions, interactions, and purposes of things. Recording and seeing are very different.

Questions of purpose or form cannot be answered without reference to final causes. This is important for any kind of thinking, including the kind of thinking we call science. Aristotle had a robust notion of biology. He thought that biologists should strive to include both efficient and final causes in their description of the world. In his discussion of the soul, Machuga uses the example of a turtle to illustrate this point. We can say, “The turtle came ashore to lay her eggs,” and we can say, “The turtle came ashore and laid her eggs.” The first statement illuminates nature in a way the second statement does not, because the second statement cannot be distinguished from, “The turtle came ashore and kicked the sand,” or “The turtle came ashore and reflected a photon into the eyes of an owl.”

Similar points can be made in the realm of molecular biology, regarding the presence of information in the genetic code. Machuga illustrates the significance of information with a simple example. Suppose we are invited to a party on the beach. We are instructed to park and then to walk in the direction of the arrow the organizers will place on the beach, using driftwood to make the arrow. We park, walk to the beach, and there on the sand is an arrow made of driftwood, pointing to our right. We walk to the right, join the party, and have a wonderful time. Now, suppose that our friends arrange the arrow, but the waves come up and swallow the sticks. Then a second large wave accidentally deposits two sticks arranged in an arrow pointing to the right. We park, walk to the beach, and there on the sand is an arrow made of driftwood, pointing to our right. We walk to the right, join the party, and have a wonderful time.

The two scenarios illustrate the relationship between efficient causes (operative in both scenarios) and final causes (operative only in the first scenario). The relationship between efficient and final causes is important for understanding the implications of molecular biology. Is DNA a real embedded genetic code? Is it information? Aristotelians hold that physical objects can only function as if they are a code when they are situated in a world where other things with the same or similar physical shapes really are a code.

size=3 color=black face=Cambria>This raises an important question. Can something that began as nothing more than, say, a physical flaw in a crystal, containing no more information than any other crack in a rock, become information over time? Aristotle would say no for the following reason: If DNA is a code, it is functioning as a kind of language that preserves and transmits information. The words in any language are physical things, but they are not just physical things—they have a form. The forms of words are concepts we intentionally impose on physical patterns. Concepts are immaterial, and they exist only in the immaterial minds of people. Concepts are not in words the way an invading virus is in a body. The concept either precedes or is simultaneous with the construction of the word pattern, or else it is never present. But information is present at the end of the process, so it must be present at the start as well.

The relationship of the mind to the material and the immaterial aspects of the world is complex, in part, because not all mental objects are immaterial. Feelings, for example, are arguably material mental objects. But words embody concepts, and concepts are meanings that exist as universals and not as particular material things. This way of thinking about what a word is depends on the difference between natural signs and intentional relations. Natural signs exist because there is a cause and effect relation in nature: smoke is a sign of fire, fever is a sign of infection. But for a sign to be a symbol, intention is required. A “No Soliciting” placard is intended to deliver the message that soliciting is prohibited. “Oncology” means the field of medicine dedicated to treating patients with cancer. These formal relations cannot be understood in material terms. Rational arguments do not physically compel, and there is no shape that is the meaning of a word.

The meaning of a word is identical to the concept it conveys. While material things exist as particulars, concepts exist as universals. All concepts are mental objects that exist and are real, but they do not exist the way that material things exist, because they are immaterial things that exist only in people’s minds. According to Aristotle, we do not understand a concept; rather, a concept is that by which we understand. Concepts are tools we use to understand the world in which we live. Our intellect abstracts a thing’s form from its shape, turning observation into information. The intellect is the faculty capable of grasping concepts, forms, or essences.

Words exist at the intersection of material and immaterial realms. They are physical things, but they are not merely physical. The relation between a word and its meaning is not a physical relation. A person who grasps the meaning of a word is active, whereas the word itself is passive. Something that acts must be before it can act. The intellect that grasps immaterial meaning is a necessary condition for understanding. Even if the physical body is the instrument by which the understanding becomes actual, when I understand something, my intellect is using my physical body—not vice versa. Even if the intellect cannot exist apart from the body, it must still be immaterial if it is rational: rational agency and free choice imply each other, and an intellect must transcend the laws of material nature or else its actions would be bound by physical laws of cause and effect. As far as we know, the brain is a necessary condition of rational thought in humans, and discoveries about the brain are consistent with the rest of science. But the laws of science cannot produce a sufficient account of human thought, because human thought deals with immaterial concepts that do not follow the laws of cause and effect needed for the scientific explanation of a thing. The rationality of science depends upon the immaterial nature of the mind, which transcends the very laws of nature that are the subject of scientific investigation and theorizing.

Words allow our concepts and ideas to be communicated to others, and the concepts embodied in words make it possible to order rationality. Words are material things that carry meanings, and they can bring about events in the world such as marrying someone or starting a revolution. The intellect does things with words. All brain states are either subject to efficient causes in the brain, ordered by the laws of nature and fully open to scientific investigation, or else they are ordered by the intentional acts of the intellect. Acts of the intellect that carry intention transcend the threshold of scientific investigation, because they are neither determined nor predictable. They are free. The intending intellect is capable of observing final causation in nature, but because it is free and immaterial, a material scientific instrument can detect neither final causality nor an intellect capable of grasping final causality.

This Aristotelian perspective need not be accepted in its entirety to think about philosophical imagination and the power of the poetic apriori in a meaningful universe. But the remainder of my discussion will lean on several ideas that emerge from an Aristotelian account—immaterial concepts, the relationship of meaning to words, and the ability of our intellects to abstract form from the shapes of things and to grasp immaterial meaning. The realm of meaning, freedom, and rationality is distinct from the world of determined material causation susceptible to investigation by the sciences. This distinction is crucial for understanding the role of the poetic apriori in philosophical imagination, as well as the central idea illuminating the nature of the imagination in a world that is meaningful as a whole—the analogia entis.

¹ I am grateful to Donald Verene for directing me to the first place where Leibniz makes this statement in his essay, “Principes de la nature et de la grâce, fondés en raison,” written in 1714, the same year as his Monadologie. The essay is available in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Robert Latta, Kessinger Publishing, Montana (2010), 405-24.

² Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2015).

³ Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale University Press, New Haven and London (2014), 1-4.

⁴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Charles Kay Ogden, Routledge Press, New York (1981), 187.

⁵ I will borrow from the clear, if controversial, Aristotelian arguments Ric Machuga makes in his book, In Defense of the Soul: What it Means to Be Human [Brazos Press, Michigan (2002)]. His book is a thoughtful and well-written example of an effort to engage contemporary philosophy and culture from within an Aristotelian frame.