The imagination is a tricky facet of the human mind for the philosopher. Each philosopher seems to have his own definitions of what the senses and the human imagination actually are, and the role that each plays in the development and everyday existence of man. Plato errs on the side of shunning the arts and the imaginative in the Republic. Others like Aristotle and Hobbes are more welcoming, treating the imagination as a facet, or a close relative of the memory. Despite the varying opinions, one plaguing question remains, of what use is the imagination to the philosopher? The human imagination is one of the defining characteristics of being human, with it, man is able to delve further into the human mind, investigate, theorize, and most importantly, it allows philosophers to understand the way things are and the way that things could be.
The imagination has always been of interest to philosophers over the course of history. Aristotle is seemingly the first philosopher to introduce the concept of the imagination into philosophy in his work, De Anima. He writes, "imagination is that by which we say that some phantasm arises within us.” According to Aristotle, "Imaginative phantasms are to the intellective soul as sense-objects. But when it affirms or denies good or evil it pursues or avoids. Hence the soul never understands apart from phantasms.” Aristotle observes that phantasms are to the intellectual part of the soul as sense-objects to the senses. He argues that the pursuit of a thing that is not physically present to the senses must be preceded by an image or representation of the desired object, thus arguing for the necessity of the imagination amongst philosophers.
Aristotle, like Hobbes, believed that knowledge came directl...
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...ject matter of dreams, allowing your imagination to seemingly run rampant.
For the philosopher, the acknowledgment of the existence and the importance of the human imagination is a necessary trait. Without an active and informed imagination, one cannot make judgment calls or investigate the world with the skill and ease of the great philosophers. If one does not have an imagination, one cannot fathom Plato’s analogy of the cave, one cannot imagine the gray shadows flickering against the cold and jagged wall. Without an imagination, one cannot picture the ideal city, or Santa Clause, or divide the imagination into two parts. In the same way, the imagination is an intricate and useful part of human nature. The mind, a multi-faceted folder of sense, dreams, and imagination opens the door for philosophy to lead the way in pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Imagination allows for one to explore deeper into their faith than what would be possible in the physical world. Brueggemann describes imagination in faith as inevitable because it is bound to happen when trying to understand that of which is beyond physical means; also when one relates the stories of an ancient world to present day circumstances.
Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” explains his beliefs on education of one’s soul and the core of the way they shape themselves. The rhetorical devices that Plato represents inside of his story explains how much freedom is worth in this world. The deeper meaning inside of what Plato describes can further be found out once a reader realizes the type of rhetorical devices are being used. For example, Plato portrays prisoners being locked inside of a cave without a way out. These prisoners never got to see the outside world, yet he mentions they “see shadows” which explains they are only able to catch a glimpse of reality from the outside. Plato’s use of imagery gives us a mental picture on the tease we may feel to notice reality but not be able to experience it. In reality, we do not value freedom as much as we are supposed to. We seem to not see the world as he sees it. With the help of personification, Plato uses human like characteristics to describe non-living things to give
In his Allegory Plato shows us how a man ascends from the darkness of a cave to the light of the outside world. In this ascent Plato’s man passes through four distinct stages of cognition: from imagination, to belief, understanding, and finally knowledge.
Imagination is the action of creating new ideas, scenarios, or concepts that are not present. It is the ability to form a mental image of anything that is not perceived through senses. It’s the ability of the mind to build mental scenes, objects or events that do not exist or are not there or have never happened. “...the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental system that have evolved for real world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones.” (pg.577 parg 4, Bloom)
Imagination is very noticeable in the beginning of the story. We find out that Thebes has been affected by a plague. The citizens want answers. Oedipus tells them that he has sent his brother-in-law, Creon, to the oracle at Delphi to gain information about how to help Thebes. Creon later returns with a letter from the oracle himself. He says that the plague will end when the killer the of the former king of Thebes, Laius, is found and cast away. He also says that the murderer is inside the city. Oedipus then asks Creon if he has any knowledge of the murderer. Oedipus then vows to find the murderer and cast he away forever (not knowing that he is the killer). Oedipus asks for Tiresias, a blind prophet. Oedipus states “ I have sent for him twice, in fact, and have been wandering for sometime why is he not yet here.” (Knox). Oedipus then asks Tiresias what he knows about the murder. Everyone is imagining who has killed Laius. You can imagine the truth and think it is real when in fact it isn’t.
Creative experience and its expression cannot exist without some contextual framework by which it is understood and appreciated. The very survival of all that is creative depends upon such knowledge. Just as a bird released from its cage must eventually return to roost or perish in the wilderness so must our creative thoughts and imaginings eventually return to the reality of the corporeal world and the causal laws that govern it. This is the very nature of that which we call 'learning' and it is in such a way that creative thought gains relevance and weight, becoming part of our conscious reality. It is through this relationship between creativity and knowledge, between that which we imagine and that which we know, that we may gain a greater understanding of the heroic figure and its cultural significance.
We may think that we come up we ideas and theories because is something that happened in our mind and that nobody had to do something with it but all our surround environment influence us in how we take decision, in what we believe and much more. Philosophers had been influence throughout their life by other people in order to come up with their works. The philosophical work of some of the great philosophers of all time such as Plato, Marx, Freud and Carnegie were also influenced by the environment in which they were living. In the “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato was influenced by several events that happened in his life that lead to him writing this essay in a way to express his feeling on what society do to people that can show them reality.
The Allegory of the Cave has many applications to both Plato’s writing and life in general. It describes the education of a philosopher, as well as how others look on the philosopher after he has gained the knowledge of the Forms. It also describes what it is like to see the forms. After understanding the forms, what once were objects, real things, become merely shadows. One sees everything as it truly exists, as it’s form.
In the essay “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato addresses how humans generally do not pursue knowledge. Most humans are satisfied with what they already know and do not want to expand their knowledge. Plato uses simple examples to help the reader understand his logic on why humans do not expand their knowledge.
This state-of-mind journey ends as it begins in the Republic, with the moral and intellectual condition of the average person. Plato defined this condition as an initial illusion, where thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are mere shadowy notions of opinion, and not pure knowledge. In the cave analogy, prisoners restrained since childhood to look straight ahead at reflected shadows gain an uncritical, careless acceptance of the shapes of men and animals, made of stone and wood, thrown by the fire. A liberated prisoner experiencing the lack of sight during the transition either from light to darkness, or from darkness to light, recognizes that the same thing applies to the mind. The form of the good, once seen, is inferred to be the brightest of all realities, "the truth known only to God".
The classic stories “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll consist of dreamlike adventures in a crazy world of nonsense. However this nonsense can be deciphered into a complex new system of thinking. This way of thinking can be transferred and directly applied to the mind. How the mind works, its many varying functions, and lastly the unconscious mind can all be tied to Alice. The unconscious mind can be compared to Alice, as can a dreamlike state of mind.
Written more than 2000 years ago, The Republic is one of Plato’s most influential and widely read works in the whole of western philosophy . Consisting of a series of ten books and contained within Book VII is the Allegory of the Cave, one of his best known works to emerge. The point of the allegory aims to conceive knowledge as a sort of illumination; Plato portrays the process of education as an ascent from darkness into light. This theory of knowledge still applies to events in our lives today, just as Plato directed it to the people of his time.
Ideas are man's thoughts. They are fainter copies of impressions, and so they are images in the imagination that are remembered.
Just as it is human nature to feel desire, it is also human nature to long for an understanding of Earth’s unanswerable questions. Prior to scientific discoveries, humans developed their own means of understanding- religion. Although religion originally served as a means to explain natural phenomenona as well as spiritual ones, as science began to answer those kinds of questions, religion evolved to explain what science could not. Questions about the meaning of life and the mortality of man were answered in various formats. Unfortunately, as it is human nature to desire knowledge, it is also human nature to physically see manifestations of this knowledge. By creating immutable answers to mutable questions, mankind accidentally created a paradox. In order to achieve the answers that men desired, they must have faith in them. Since faith and doubt go hand in hand, it is impossible to have one without the other. For some, doubt wins over and they refuse to be associated with anything spiritual. Yet others are willing to take a leap of faith and believe in the unknown, their rational minds clinging to the idea that this knowledge will perhaps grant them immortality. After all, it is only human nature to desire survival. Nevertheless, doubt often worms itself into their minds, often in times of intense emotional time periods, often brought on by the grief over losing a loved one. Since art is often a reflection of the human mind, many works of art mirror the artist’s most intense emotional experiences. An example of such a work is Sir Alfred Tennyson’s series of poems, entitled In Memoriam A.H.H. These poems follow Tennyson throughout a three year mourning period after the sudden death of his close friend, Arthur Henry H...
In this essay, I aim to discuss the issue whether imagination is more important than knowledge. “For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there will ever be to know and understand” (Albert Einstein).