Dialectic of Imagination and Reason

itself from direct perception and to consider consequences within possible worlds, is often cited as a bond between and reason. Art is 400 Tonia Caterina Riviello not merely a flight of fancy, but is a conscious creation that must withstand criticism and is expected to' cast light' on its subject-matter, and on the real originals from which the subject-matter is ultimately drawn (Scruton, 349). The Enlightenment gave rise to a religion that identified God with the supreme order of nature and the precept that only a natural law and morals derived from it could bring happiness to mankind. They believed that the existing laws and institutions guaranteed happiness for only a few citizens, the noble class and the clergy, leaving the rest in relative oppression, misery and ignorance. People from the Enlightenment began to question the conception of the past as an unavoidable mixture of violence, oppression, and injustice. The culture of this period had as its practical aim the dissemination of truth to the widest audience possible, not just the privileged few. John Locke wrote the essay On the Human Intellect and another on 'The Civic Government in which he affirmed the right of the people in limiting the power of public officials. Descartes was, of course, the philosopher who put foremost and imposed on subsequent philosophers the requirement of rigorous method. When Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) wrote his work The First New Science, he deviated from the philosophy of Descartes, which associated the existence of man with the internal state of his mind. Vico was the first to find Descartes' statement Cogito ergo sum a limitation on man rather than a startling disC?very. Vico is a precursor of Bernard Lonergan in the sense that he pursues the -study man as more than a rational being, in possession of a vital poetic imagination. Meynell suggests that Lonergan's philosophy, as expressed in Insight, formulates mental life not just as a series of sensations and logical conclusions. The inquiring intelligence actively interacts with reality, achieves and propounds judgements on the basis of... (6). Vico's philosophy is not simply a reaction to cartesian principles, just as Lonergan's philosophy does not attempt to rectify the views of the twentieth-century positivist school. Vico offers a three-stage view of historical development, and postulates that these stages relate directly to stages in the development of the individual. Lonergan identifies three essential stages in mental activity: ''The real world is not that which is apprehended by mere observations, process of Dialectic of Imagination and Reason: From Vito to Lonergan 401 experience, understanding, and judgement (Meynell, 7). The British empiricist David Hume put forward the notion that human Perception consists of no more than sense-impressions. These impressions are combined and compounded by the mind into higher-level thoughts, but all thought can and should be analyzed in terms of impressions. He argued that no reason could be given for our instinctive feeling that there exists an external world or even a real internal mind. What we call our self consists, in his opinion, of merely the accumulation of memories and sense-data. Without refuting Hume's theory, modern philosophers have emphasized the content of human thought, in a search for meaning that cannot be conveyed as a mere sequence of sensations. Innate properties, such as a capacity for language acquisition, have been studied and have led to the general proposition that human beings fit their perceptions into pre-existing mental models of how language or the world works. The observation that the mind automatically categorizes Perceptions into categories, often mistakenly, suggests that the mind is constantly active at levels that need not be conscious. John Passmore says in The Great Philosophers: As Hume's thinking develops in his Treatise the imagination, which is first defined as nothing more than the capacity to have relatively faint images of complexes we have not actually perceived--relatively faint, that is, when contrasted with memory6comes to assume an ever more central and creative role. Even our most ordinary observations of the world around us turn out, on Hume's view, to involve an exercise of the imagination. We do not just passively perceive the world around us. If we did, we should be confined to a mere sequence of sensations. We perceive things as distinct from sensations only because our is constantly active. Indeed, the centrality of the in Hume, which leads him in the direction of the now current doctrine that there is not an absolute distinction between what we call 'bare facts' and 'theories', is one of the 402 Tonia Caterina Riviello most fascinating, and disquieting, features of Hume' s philosophy. (167) Hugo A. Meynell furthermore writes in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Bernard Lonergan that: ''Twentieth-century empiricists have been much indebted to Hume. For Bertrand Russell, whose theory of knowledge was largely a development of and continuation of Hume, minds and bodies were alike' logical constructions' out of sensations; in other words, to talk of minds and bodies is in the final analysis simply to talk of sensations. The central thesis of logical positivism [isl that any statement ... which is in principle impossible to validate in terms of' sense-data' of' sense-contents' is simply nonsensical. .. (5). Empiricists believed that what is outside of our sensory experience cannot lead us to reliable understanding. 1 This method of building up understanding from very simple components such as sense-data is analogous to the axiomatic method in mathematics. This method accepts certain axioms or statements without proof and then pursues the logical consequences of these axioms. Proof of theorems in geometry are familiar examples of the axiomatic method. We assume certain statements to be true, such as, 'Two lines intersect in exactly one point. We deduce many new statements or theorems from the given axioms. The axiomatic method has been a tremendous success for modem mathematics, but some disturbing and unforeseen consequences have arisen. One of the most famous inverse insights in modem logic was made by Kurt Godel in 1931. Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman describe the insight in their 1 In D. W. Hamlyn stresses the inescapable need for in ordering our thoughts: in particular, followed in recent times by P. F. Strawson, have maintained that all perception involves the imagination, in some sense of that term, in that some bridge is required between abstract thoughts and their perceptual instances. This comes out in Kant's treatment of what he calls the 'schematism', where he rightly argues that someone might have an abstract understanding of the concept of dog without being able to recognize or identify any dogs. It is also clear that someone might be able to classify all dogs together without any understanding of what a dog is. The bridge that needs to be provided to link these two abilities Kant attributes to the imagination (362). Dialectic of Imagination and Reason: From Vito to Lonergan 403

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  F W Garforth, Frank Garforth et al.•British Journal of Educational…•1995

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