Existentialist Metaphysics

I won’t attempt to explain, let alone justify, the existentialist philosophy laid out in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; I will simply presuppose it. My concern is with the metaphysics that goes along with it (which Sartre completely ignores).[1] We have the in-itself and the for-itself. The in-itself is what it is; the for-itself is what it is not. The essence of the in-itself is inert matter; the essence of the for-itself is consciousness. The essence of inert matter is being; the essence of consciousness is nothingness. The essence of being is unfreedom; the essence of nothingness is freedom. So, the essence of the in-itself is unfreedom and the essence of the for-itself is freedom. The for-itself can be in bad faith, but the in-itself cannot. It is the essence of the in-itself (matter) to lack freedom; it is the essence of the for-itself (consciousness) to be free. Matter cannot be free; consciousness cannot be anything but free. This is because matter has no intentionality and consciousness is all about intentionality. The in-itself and the for-itself are categorically distinct—this is an irreducible dualism at the heart of reality (nothingness is real, all too real). Metaphysically, the in-itself and the for-itself are the opposite poles of the real. Being cannot be nothingness and nothingness cannot be being. Call this Sartrean dualism, analogous to Cartesian dualism.[2]

Now apply this system to panpsychism. Panpsychism says that matter is (partly) mental: the intrinsic nature of any material thing is mentality, i.e., consciousness. In addition to what we see of matter externally, matter also has an unseen inside—how it feels internally. Thus, matter is imbued with both being and nothingness, unfreedom and freedom, inertia and will. An electron, say, is both an in-itself and a for-itself, these being opposite types of reality: it both is what it is and what it is not. This makes it contradictory, which is impossible. Therefore, panpsychism posits a contradictory ontology. Existentialism doesn’t do this, since mind and matter are deemed separate things: one is free and the other is unfree. It is as if one is in jail and other isn’t. But you can’t be both. So, adopting Sartre’s ontology, panpsychism is a contradictory doctrine; it both affirms and denies that matter is free (a for-itself and an in-itself). That is, it says that matter is nothingness and that it is not nothingness (but is being).

How does Sartre’s system relate to the mind and body? The mind is consciousness, so it is nothingness (a for-itself); the body is inert matter, so it is being (an in-itself). Mind and body are therefore an irreducible duality. Human reality (as Sartre would say) is a double reality: we are all two things roped together–animals included. We are made of a free thing and an unfree thing, a thing of being and thing of nothingness. There is nothing contradictory about this, since body and mind are distinct existences (to borrow Hume’s indispensable phrase). There is no reason to think that Sartre would deny this; indeed, it is baked into his existentialist philosophy. Sartre is a metaphysical dualist with regard to mind and body. Fine, no problem about logical consistency. But not everybody is down with that; some folks want to retain a type of monism about human (animal) reality. How do they do this? They introduce a third category of thing, which they label the person or the self or the ego or the subject. This is commonly regarded as distinct from the mind and body, being instead an amalgam of the two—or better, something that has the other two aspects. That is, they talk this way, perhaps claiming that the concept of a person is primitive and not reducible to its physical and mental “aspects”. This sounds all well and good, given that we know what it means to talk of aspects of the same thing (e.g., the color and shape of a material body). Evidently, this third thing is neither an in-itself nor a for-itself—it isn’t pure matter and it isn’t pure mind, but a confluence of both (whatever that means—is it like two rivers joining together?). For want of a better label, let’s call it the “at-itself”, since the mind and body are both at a person—they are where a person is at. (It’s better than saying “up-itself” or “with-itself”.) The question then is whether the at-itself is real—can we quantify over at-itselves? I should bally well say not, as Bertie Wooster might phrase it; eff that, as others might put it. Because such a thing would involve a contradiction: for the at-itself is both free and not free, an in-itself and a for-itself, being and nothingness combined. What the flipping eff! The problem with the at-itself is that it isn’t real; it’s a myth dreamt up to avoid admitting dualism. This is why you can never quite put your finger on it (as Hume complained). The only realities here are the body and the mind, the in-itself and the for-itself; there is no third thing over and above these, acting as their bearer, their supervisor, their plus one. Look inside yourself: you are a body and a mind, and that’s it. There is no third thing lurking in the shadows and slouching around the premises—a homunculus or succubus. The person is a mythical creature, metaphysically. It is a handy way to talk, serving forensic purposes, but it is not a fundamental constituent of reality. Worse, it is bally contradictory—and we know what we say to that. In point of fact, Sartre never soils himself by introducing such an entity (he is a good empiricist); there are no persons in his ontology—no psychophysical hybrids. You are either an in-itself or a for-itself, no mixing or merging allowed. Here Sartre follows Descartes, who also eschewed the at-itself—the thinking-and-extended thing. We may talk this way for convenience, but in serious ontology we do better without it; once you have mind and body, you have covered the ground. Accordingly, Sartrean dualism and Cartesian dualism have no room for double aspect theories, these being deemed contradictory. This is not to say that they are all fine and dandy, only that they avoid a certain tempting move that ultimately leads nowhere. There are no metaphysical double agents, just a trick of language.[3]

[1] See my “Incompatible Minds”.

[2] We can label these views “French dualism”—firm distinctions not hazy continua (“Tibetan dualism”).

[3] Am I saying there are no people? Yes, I am saying that—no people in a metaphysically interesting sense. Of course, there are minds and bodies, but no third entity that has both a mind and body. There is no “I” but these. There are two things there not three. Similarly, there are no cats and dogs distinct from cat and dog minds and bodies. We can’t say, “Here is a cat mind, and there is a cat body, and over there there is a cat”. Nor can we say a cat is the mereological sum of its mind and body, as if they are cat parts. Ontologically, an animal is two things combined, not a third thing over and above the things combined—something like a zoological point or particle or spectral shadow. We can talk that way, but it is not serious metaphysics (like “sakes”). We should not be trinitarians about animal ontology (“the body, the mind, and the holy beast”). There is therefore really no such subject as the theory of personal identity, though there is certainly such a subject as body identity or mind identity. The person is nothing like a peg.

Circles of Being

Let’s take analytical philosophy to a place it has never been before—into the heart of darkness. We have been up sunlit rivers into low-lying bush (necessary and sufficient conditions etc.), but now we must venture into the depths of the jungle to seek out new life and new forms, the basic structures of existence. Have you ever noticed the prevalence of the sphere and circle in nature? Stars and planets, orbits, atoms, raindrops, plant and animal parts, the wheel, balls, geometrical figures—there’s a whole lot of circularity going on. Here I mean to include not just the strict circle and sphere but also ellipses and polygonal approximations to the circle (e.g., a thousand-sided figure). Not everything is round—there are a lot of jagged irregular shapes in the world—but the round thing is ubiquitous (from testicles to the sun and moon). One can imagine a grizzled pre-Socratic announcing, “All is round”. If an object isn’t round, it is composed of round things (atoms), or on the way to being round (you just need to keep adding sides to a square to reach something looking round). The circle looks like the preferred geometric form of nature. There is nothing necessary or a priori about this; the universe could have been irregular and sharp-angled through and through. But in fact, there are spheres everywhere, or circular cross-sections. The Mona Lisa has a round face, and other parts of her body are round too. Humans have round heads (and roundish brains). Ontology is extremely round. Could it be that conceptual analysis reveals the pervasiveness of the circular? Is our conceptual scheme built on the notion of roundness? Kant thought space was everywhere in the phenomenal world; could roundness be a necessary attribute of both our reality and our conception of it? Is roundness the basic category or rule of being?

What is a circle? It is a closed figure whose edges are equidistant from a center. We all remember the geometry of the circle from our school days: circumference, diameter, radius, chords, tangents, quadrants. It is etched in our consciousness (and unconsciousness). The sun and moon are striking exhibits in the museum of the round. They have been striking the human (and animal) mind for millions of years. We later discovered that the earth is round too—just one more sphere in a world of spheres. There can be spheres within spheres; concentric circles. The circle has been regarded as the perfect figure, the epitome of harmony, symmetry, and wholeness. It has a godlike status (like the sun for our impressionable ancestors). We can imagine an artistic movement, analogous to cubism, that privileges the circle (“sphericism”)—pictures populated with spheres, circles, and ellipses—and not much else. If asked what shape God is, we might if pressed say spherical—certainly not cubical or shaped like Great Britain. There is something holy about the circle, mystical. Observable space is spherical. The sky is dome-like. The form of circularity would occupy a high place in Plato’s hierarchy of forms. What I want to know is whether the circle is central to philosophy; it is central to the natural world, but is it central to the philosophical world? This is where the dark jungle begins, because here the circle is not staring us in the face. We have to dig deep for it, cut through the dense vegetation. Do the central concepts of philosophy harbor circles at their heart? And I don’t mean concepts of the spatial natural world but of the world of morality, mind, knowledge, truth, and beauty: is the concept of the circle implicated in these areas?

On the face of it, no: how can goodness be spherical? We might begin with a Platonic thought: goodness is a thing, an object, the primary Form. What kind of thing? We might picture it as like the sun: a radiant orb illuminating and benefiting all before it. Plato’s idea of the Good is based on the Greek gods, evidently, and they are in turn derived from ancient sun worship—that massive disc of blinding light and soothing warmth we observe every day in the sky. The sun is a circle and it provides the model for the Platonic concept of the Good; if the Good has a shape, it is going to be a circle not the shape of a walnut or a scorpion. It is an iridescent ball of some sort. Perhaps this is exactly how Plato pictured it in his imagination and our remote ancestors believed it to be (“Good is Sun”). But we have got beyond such primitive thinking and don’t fall for ancient myths, so has our moral thinking left the circle behind? Not quite: for we still invoke the circle in our moral thinking in our conception of the “moral circle”. We think of the sphere of moral obligation in geometrical terms (as witness that word “sphere”). This idea goes back two thousand years and it has cropped up repeatedly in the history of moral thinking. First, there is the family circle[1] surrounding the individual; then the extended family; then the local community; then the country; then humanity; then animals. A set of concentric circles within which a kind of moral equality obtains, with a radius and a circumference; it tells you who is in and who is out. It is critical to morality because it defines who is, and who isn’t, of moral concern. This is prior to any consideration of what is right or wrong, or what right and wrong consist in. It is like the physical notion of territory. The longer the radius the less the moral concern. Equality is part of it because the distance of each point from the center is always identical for any given circle. There is moral equality within the moral circle. The circle may expand, recognizing new circles of moral concern; morality admits of such expansion. Morality thus has a geometry. It is one example of geometrical thinking, more general than ordinary spatial geometry. There is a moral “space” and it has a circular form.[2]

That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now mind: is it made of circles? Again, not physical circles but circle-like structures. The head is a sphere with a midpoint and a radius and a surface. We have the (roughly) spherical brain with its (roughly) spherical cerebral areas. The neurons have spherical components: the nucleus and the encircling fibers. We have phrenology (or we did). But what about consciousness and the soul? Here things go blurry, but the circle is not left completely behind. What shape is the soul? If you had to choose, I conjecture you would say it is round (that’s what disembodied minds look like on Star Trek anyway). The sphere is the shape of the spirit in traditional iconography. When the soul ascends to heaven it takes on the appearance of a globular cloud not an anvil or coffee cup. The circle is the closest shape to the mind. We also have the idea of a center and a periphery—the self and its faculties laid out as if on a platter. The senses are like points on a circumference at some distance from a central point. We can’t help trying to fit the mind into our geometrical conceptions, with the circle as the dominant form. The circle seems like the most natural form for the mind to be. It might even be that we think of circles by analogy with minds; we psychologize them. The idea of a border, of inclusion, of distance—the ego with its surrounding mental structures. The abstract architecture is common to both.

What about knowledge? Here again we have clues in ordinary thought: the widening circle of knowledge. Knowledge grows outwards forming an expanding circle, outside of which ignorance prevails. It is like a bright disc in a dark night. Kant’s phenomenal world is like a sphere of knowledge surrounded by a noumenal world about which we know nothing. Human knowledge in toto is spherical; it forms a sphere. To come to know something is to move outwards from a center, thus enlarging the sphere. It grows to form a sphere, like a growing plant (think apples and oranges). Science comprises a circle of knowledge.

Truth is a more challenging case, and here we must resort to ingenuity not ordinary thought. But I think the rewards are palpable if not easily digested. Truth is correspondence to reality (facts, the world). What is this correspondence and what things do the corresponding? Evidently, there is some similarity of structure. Let’s go full Tractatus on this: the correspondence is isomorphism and the correspondents are geometric entities (complexes of things standing in certain relations to each other). We can lay one beside the other and see the geometric relation—the similarity of form. Is it like parallel lines? But parallel lines don’t touch—they make no contact. We want truth to involve some sort of contact or overlap, joining up with reality, embracing it. What does this better than a circle? The picture, then, is that truth is like two halves of a circle mirroring each other with no firm break between them. They merge and mirror. If the top half is the proposition and the bottom half is the fact, then truth is the top half mirroring the bottom half. They each replicate the other and truth is the result. The two halves are isomorphic and joined together they form a truth. If there is no corresponding fact, there is no whole circle just a semi-circle, an incomplete figure. Thus, truth has the form of a circle; it is made of a pair of isomorphic halves. That, at any rate, is how we naturally conceive it, if not consciously and explicitly. The world is the totality of these truth-making circles. For a proposition to be true it must be one half of a truth circle. The link between them is continuous not disjoined; they are organically compounded. Proposition and fact flow into each other forming a unity. There is a symmetry and harmony between them. The geometry of truth is a circular geometry.

Finally, beauty: here not much heavy lifting is required. Beauty and the circle belong together. The portrait is the summit of this coincidence: the face is a circle, more or less. The head is a sphere. The circle is the prototype of the face; once you have drawn a circle a face is easily sketched in. The nude is a collection of fleshy spheres, among other things. The eyes are orbs. The mouth is a round orifice. Still lives abound with round objects. Eliminating the circle from art would rob it of its charm (that may be the point). The dome is an architectural feature. The sun and moon are beautiful objects. Novels are about social circles. Circular thinking is never far away in aesthetic matters. Geometry itself is beautiful, or was so to Euclid, Pythagoras, and Plato. Apples and peaches are beautiful (bananas and carrots not so much). Philosophy of art should have a journal dedicated to the philosophy of the sphere. Jagged, misshapen, irregular things are lacking in beauty. Babies are nice to look at. We like the feel of a ball in our hand.

It is important to see that geometry as a department of mathematics is not the only kind of geometry. We also have folk geometry and what I will call general geometry. General geometry is the field of abstract geometrical relations like inclusion and exclusion, closed and open, inside and outside, distance and proximity. Everything has a geometry in this sense, as everything has a logic. It lies at the heart of all concepts—a kind of map. Arithmetic has a geometry: parts and wholes, size, the successor relation, series. Logic has a geometry; just look at how a logical argument is laid out in a logic text. The circle is at the center of geometry and it generalizes into non-mathematical areas. It is tempting to suggest that all this derives from the sun (with a little help from the moon), but that too may be more an instance of roundness than its original source. Somehow the human mind constructed the idea of the circle and allied concepts; it seems archetypal, part of the collective unconscious. It is surely innate. It shapes our whole way of looking at things (literally). We have Being and Time and Being and Nothingness; how about Being and Roundness?[3]

[1] The OED gives as its second definition of “circle” the following: “a group of people or things forming a circle”—such as the Vienna circle. This may well be a fundamental aspect of our concept of a circle. Being invited to join “our circle” may be considered an honor and gift. This is all part of conceptual analysis, broadly understood.

[2] The halo is also circular, as is Jesus’s crown of thorns. Wedding rings are circular and indicate fidelity, a virtue. They are usually costly and much-valued. Necklaces and bracelets are similarly viewed.

[3] All being divides into the round and the not-round, the smooth and jagged. The former is deemed superior to the latter (recall Kant’s “crooked timber” of mankind). It may also be deemed more real. There are intermediate forms like polygons, which arguably lean in the direction of the circle—degenerate circles, it may be said. Presumably, there could be a universe in which everything is a variant on the circle, a perfect universe; but ours is a fallen universe in which the perfect lives cheek by jowl with the imperfect. The circle gives us the idea of the perfect, which guides our judgements of imperfection. (Or is this fanciful metaphysics?) Our conceptual scheme is a convoluted thing and does not easily reveal its secrets. The circle of our conceptual scheme is infused with the concept of the circle.

Are Men Women?

I mean this question literally: are men really women? Are they deep down, biologically, women in disguise—and a thin disguise at that? When you meet a man are you actually meeting a woman? I will give a quick proof that they are: men have nipples; anyone with nipples is a woman; therefore, men are women. If you see the point immediately, you need not bother to read on; if you are slow on the uptake, keep reading (and prepare to be surprised). We are told in the Bible that Eve was made from a rib of Adam, so she is a kind of honorary man; well, men have a similar relation to women, so they are really women. The natural kind Woman includes the natural kind Man; or better, there are no men (in the exclusive sense) only women. There aren’t two sexes but one, and it’s female. I am talking here about all species that are conventionally divided into male and female specimens: there are only female animals and subclasses of them. It is a pre-scientific myth that male (non-female) animals exist (like the myth of the unicorn or centaur). This is just not a sound way to carve up the biological universe. If you think I am going to present recondite genetic evidence to this effect, then think again—I am going to establish the point by means of imaginary thought experiments. It follows from basic principles of biological classification.

What is a woman? A woman is a human being that gets pregnant and gives birth; a man doesn’t get pregnant and give birth, though he contributes to procreation in his own secondary way. But is that really true? The woman carries the baby in her womb and it exits her body at birth; these things are not true of the man. But the man is also pregnant in his own way and also gives birth: he carries the burden of the baby, ensuring that it reaches maturity safely, by feeding it (via the mother) and protecting the vessel in which it resides, sometimes with his life; and he also gives birth to it in the sense that he enables this event to happen by providing the necessary aid and comfort. If he does neither of these things, he is not pregnant and not involved in giving birth; but if he does, he is. Indeed, this is the way people have recently come to talk of pregnancy and birth: the couple is said to be pregnant, including the man; the couple is the biological unit of pregnancy. Having the fetus spatially inside you is not the only way of being pregnant. If you are skeptical, consider the following thought experiment: on another planet the so-called male is attached to the female by something like an umbilical cord through which nutrients pass to the fetus. He has no say in this; it just happens by biological necessity. He feeds the fetus just like the mother; indeed, we can suppose that only he feeds the fetus—the mother is not even connected to it by an umbilical cord. The man is thus pregnant with the baby, though it doesn’t live inside his body. But then, by the definition of a woman, he is a woman. We can also suppose that in addition to nipples he has functioning breasts and takes part in feeding the baby post-partum. He has a penis, naturally, but this doesn’t prevent him playing the biological roles in question. If this isn’t enough to prove the point, imagine that after three months the fetus is transferred into a chamber inside the man where it lives for the next three months; surely then he is pregnant! He might even give birth to the baby in due course. He is a woman as well as a man (what with the penis and all). If an animal with a penis could impregnate itself and carry the baby to term, thereupon giving birth, it would be a female according to the standard definition; and what other kind of definition could there be? But this kind of imaginary case is no different conceptually from the ordinary human case, except that the man is not physically conjoined with the baby. We might even say that he is the pregnant one, not the female, if he carries the full responsibility for ensuring the healthy birth of the baby—while the female merely acts as a holding cell for the fetus (it might not even cause her much inconvenience). What if the male of the species has a body very like that of a human female, with breasts and no penis to speak of, passing his sperm to the female body in some other way, which looks just like a human male body, wherein the fetus resides for the next few months and then slips painlessly out? Wouldn’t we say the “man” is really a woman, since he does the lion’s share of the procreative work and looks like a woman? Where the fetus happens to spend its time is beside the point. The man has gotten (in effect) pregnant by inserting sperm into a female helper, so he is really a woman: he is also a woman. An ordinary human father-to-be is a woman in that he plays the biological role played by a woman, viz. donating resources to the baby he has fathered. His life is now one of expecting: he is about to have a baby: he is pregnant. We might say he has an external uterus, or that the mother’s uterus has now extended to include him. He is part of the environment in which the fetus develops—the sustaining biological environment. The mother’s reproductive phenotype is extended in his direction. The couple copulate, get pregnant, and give birth; it’s not solely the job of the mother. But then, the father is also the mother and hence a woman. If an organism had both a penis and a vagina (a not impossible arrangement), it would be both male and female by our usual rough criteria; well, the human male is also a human female, because of his role in reproduction. He is a baby vehicle. And given that every male has the potential to get pregnant in this sense, they are all women too. If surgery could install a womb inside a man, then we would not hesitate to say that he is now a woman (as well as a man); but functionally this has already happened, since the man performs the same function as the womb in respect of keeping the fetus safe and fed. Deep down, a man is a woman.

This is like saying humans are apes: we fall under the same natural zoological kind. The contrastive use of “human” and “ape” should not fool us; it is entirely pragmatic. Similarly, we use “man” and “woman” contrastively in ordinary discourse, but that doesn’t show that the natural kind Woman does not include men—men are simply a subspecies of women. This is something we have discovered by logical reasoning plus elementary biology. It’s a bit like discovering that all white people are brown because every so-called white person is apt to turn a shade of brown in the sun (a browner shade of pale). The labels can be useful, but they don’t map exactly onto biological reality. Let’s add another thought experiment: suppose there were once only female humans and that the so-called males evolved from them (the converse of the Adam and Eve story) by various tweaks and accidents. Then it would be natural to say that the males are just variants on the females and are really a special case of them; they are not some independent natural kind. The male nipples provide evidence for this, but it is clear from many anatomical facts. The primary specimens are the females because they came first and do the main work of reproduction; the females were the prototype, the males merely parvenus. They are females with penises, that’s all. If their psychology and anatomy are very like those of the original females, then we may as well classify them together. The nipples are just the tip of the iceberg taxonomically. Biologically speaking, men and women are of the same basic natural kind: anatomically, psychologically, reproductively. The differences are minor and can be removed in thought experiments—there could in principle be child-bearing penis-wielding hunks of manliness and non-child-bearing vagina-hosting (but sperm-releasing) slices of femininity. The former would qualify as women according to the usual definition, while the latter would count as men. As it is, we humans have the opposite suite of traits; but men still share the trait of fetus-supporting and child-rearing, thus qualifying them as women. In imaginary worlds we could move the two sexes closer together so as to equalize the roles. Male nipples remind us that biologically we are of the same natural kind as women. Under the skin we are all female. Really, we are both of the same sex, since we both participate in the reproductive process in roughly equivalent ways: women get pregnant, but so do men. It is the same with the birds and bees: from a biological perspective the sexes are fundamentally the same—both are offspring-producing machines spending their hard-earned resources. Things are not as objectively binary as our linguistic practices would suggest. Nature doesn’t think in this binary way (the genes don’t care who is male and who is female so long as they get into the next generation).

Imagine if the male and female physically merged during the reproductive process so that only one body moved about the place. Then the male would be indistinguishable from the female and would be rightly described as female for the duration. Imagine too that the male does not survive the merging and perishes once the job is done, leaving the female behind. Wouldn’t we then say that the male had become a female in the process of reproducing? We don’t physically merge with each other when reproducing, but we do get tightly bonded; the man becomes more like a woman when acting as father. Men are women waiting to happen, and nothing wrong with that (it’s not a “sex change”). Men have a feminine side, literally. If men grew breasts during the pregnancy of their partners and used them to feed the baby, wouldn’t this be sufficiently womanly as to demand the label “woman”? But men functionally do much the same thing when they go out hunting for food to feed the baby. So, lads, let’s all agree, we are really women at heart (as well as men); we are just very macho women, or feminine men. Nature is procreative so we all do what women do, create and care for babies. Nature made two types of women: big slobby hairy ones with penises and petite neat smooth ones with vaginas.[1]

[1] Actually, the phenotypic differences are not that marked, with large individual variation; still, the basic point remains. It’s a woman’s world (to paraphrase James Brown).

On Imagination, Belief, and Action

I was reminded recently of the importance of my book Mindsight (2004), because it brings the imagination into the center of the philosophy of mind.[1] In that book I make the point that belief presupposes imagination (chapter 10): for you can’t believe something without entertaining it first—imagining the state of affairs that makes it true. Imagination is thus prior to cognition: the cognitive step of belief formation builds on the antecedent formation of an imagined state of affairs. Imagination thus precedes and conditions reason. It isn’t somehow independent of reason and possibly at odds with it, as the rationalist tradition supposes; it is foundational to reason. The theory of belief (and hence reasoning) must include a theory of imagination. In the beginning was the image (in a broad sense). Representing a possibility precedes accepting an actuality.

The point I want to add to this is that imagination is also vital to agency: you can’t act (in the full sense) unless you envisage possibilities, because that’s what choice is—selecting from among imagined possibilities.[2]Action, like belief, is imagination-dependent. The will presupposes imagination, as does the ability to believe (and hence reason). Conation and cognition are thus up to their neck in imagination. The old opposition between rational action and rational belief, on the one hand, and imagination, on the other, is mistaken. Imagination is foundational in both areas. Thus, romanticism is true, after all. The human mind is fundamentally an imagining mind; it uses the same faculty as art and literature. We choose and believe because we imagine.

In addition, imagination is indispensable to freedom, since freedom is choice among possibilities; no imagination, no freedom.[3] True, a creature can be free of constraints hampering its free expression of desire; but unless it can imagine, it cannot choose from among alternatives. Many animals presumably lack an imagination capable of generating alternative possibilities, so they are not free in the way we are (though they can still be free to do what they want). Thus, freedom presupposes imagination. We can conclude that three of our most precious attributes—willed action, rational belief, and freedom—are predicated on the existence of imagination. We would do well to explore imagination further.[4]

[1] I happened upon a talk by Dr. Richard Ogle at the Bath Royal in 2005 (I had not seen it before), which celebrates the publication of Mindsight as reintroducing the imagination into the study of mind. It used to be regarded with suspicion (Plato, Christianity, etc.).

[2] See my “Agency and Imagination”.

[3] See my “Imagination and Free Will”.

[4] The higher flights of imagination, in art and science and philosophy, are based on a faculty universal in our species—presumably one that is biologically grounded. Language itself is made possible by the imagination, because meaning is a matter of grasping possibilities (see chapter 12 of Mindsight).