 VIEWPOINT
Exploring the Interiors of the Imagination By Dr. Teodros Kiros Dec 6, 2003 In The Sovereignty of the Imagination, I had written, “Out of the all the endowments of the human being no faculty is as free as the imagination. Yet, this stellar faculty is the most underused one by us, humans. The imagination has been wrongly and unintelligently confined to the world of creative writers, as if that is the only domain to which it belongs. By neglecting the imagination, (instead of “By so doing”, as in the original paragraph) individuals, nations, groups and genders are increasingly emptying themselves of freeing the bored and abused self from the hold of the familiar, the given, the factual, and the so called natural, the essential as such. I had argued In Against essences and in defence of contingency Against essences and in defence of contingency (Ethiomedia) that nothing is forever, and everything is contingent. The faculty of the imagination is precisely the path to the contingent, to that which could always be, to that realm of possibility, as the deepest expression of freedom.”
I would like to elaborate on this paragraph, which is the key to the arguments that follow. The imagination is the water from which the writer drinks. Without it the writer cannot create anything. We, the ordinary spectators, are also equally endowed with this faculty of thinking which has its own rules. The imagination and reason are not mutually exclusive. We think of reason in its theoretical and practical forms as the faculty, which enables us to develop knowledge and originate principles of morality. Scientists for example use theoretical reason to engage in their varied practices; moral philosophers, political theorists and others employ the tools to practical reason to articulate and defend their visions of a just society. Similarly, creative writers resort to the interiors of their imagination to show us ways of life, possibilities of existence, and forms of living other than the familiar, the so called natural. Writers in particular seek to take us into the interiors of our existence and stretch our imagination to interrogate our identity as human beings. I have addressed this theme in “Portraits of Characters with Integrity in African Novels” Contemporary Philososophy, N0 1 &2 2002). An imaginative examination of the interiors of some complex modern characters is also a subject of my forthcoming novel, Cambridge Days, a shorter version of which, was recently published in Branna, Winter 2002 Vol I. Issue 2. These literary interventions are guided by the argument that the form of the novel is the most effective way of tapping in to the hidden passions of the ordinary individual who may be struggling with the desire for sexual fulfillment, racial trappings, and ethnic confinement. These strivings are subtle ways of exploring the interiors of one’s imagination, with the writer exploring them in words and the spectator living them secretly. Together, the writer and the spectator engage in the explorations of the contours of the imagination. It is in this expanded sense that in the first dense paragraph that I argued the modern self is bored with the familiar, the customary and the well-trodden paths of racial, ethnic and gendered styles of existence. Imagination, I now modestly propose can free us from the boredom of modern life, so rampantly existent in our very own contemporary Ethiopian politics. The Imagination itself houses reason also in the following way. The Self is a complex organic structure. Our senses of sight smell, hearing, taste and touch are the tactile source of the novelist’s world of the imagination. What we call mind, which is closely associated with the brain, processes information from the trees we see, the sounds we hear, and the commodities we touch. These natural objects of sense emit light and sound waves, which are received by the brain and projected into the objects of sense, so that we can see trees and hear sounds. Without this indispensable information provided by the senses, the thinking self’s brain has nothing to process. The novelist, the painter, and the moral philosopher, to name a few vocations, use practical reason in tandem with their imaginative gaze, and the imagination itself is closely associated with the senses. It is in this expansive sense that reason and the imagination enable the self to engage in what we call thinking. Thinking draws from the senses and information provided by the senses is articulated in the form of language organized by the brain. Thoughts originate in the senses and are processed by the brain. These are condensations of complex arguments, which I am developing, in my philosophical work in a journalistic style. Needless to say, in my sincere attempts to present topics on which philosophers continue to pour ink and time, I may be sacrificing substance for the sake of intelligibility and clarity, and I sincerely apologize to professional philosophers in particular and my sophisticated readers, for presenting their research in this form. It is the yearning for being understood that I have chosen the journalistic style of clear presentation. I hope I have at least adequately succeeded in presenting this weighty material clearly. In this vocation there is so much material that defies the possibility of ever being clear. That problem is inherent in the limitations of human language itself, but one must always try, and this I will continue to do, without the guarantee that I will ever succeed. I am pursuing some of these themes in my present research on the human heart, in which moral imagination plays a crucial role. The place of the human heart, one of the central organs of the human being, is the subject of my forthcoming book, The Rationality of the Human Heart: Zara Yacob, a Seventeenth Century Ethiopian Philosopher of Modernity (Red Sea Press, 2004). NB: ETHIOMEDIA.COM – ETHIOPIA’S PREMIER NEWS AND VIEWS WEBSITE © COPYRIGHT 20001-2003 ETHIOMEDIA.COM. EMAIL: [email protected] |
