Knowledge, Proximity, Imagination

November 6th, 2007 Fred McVittie

‘Imagination is our capacity to organise mental representations (especially percepts, images, and image schemata) into meaningful coherent unities.’ (Johnson. 1987: p.140)

In ‘The Body in the Mind’ Johnson reminds us of the Platonic categorisation of modes of cognition, in which the validity of knowledge is seen to vary according to how one approaches its collection. Most valued is knowledge acquired by intellection (noesis), in which the unchanging ‘essence’ of the knowledge is grasped. At the bottom of the scale of knowing is imagination (eikasia) in which only ‘images, shadows, reflections’ (p.142) are apprehended, not the essential knowledge itself.

This structure of distinction, it can be noted, also arranges knowledge across the spectra of proximity and the senses, locating the essence of knowing close to the body where it can be ‘grasped’, and the less secure knowing offered by the Platonic imagination placed at some remove where only its surface appearance, or even only traces of that appearance such as a shadow, can be apprehended. Interestingly, there is no suggestion within this scheme of the later association of closeness/’feltness’ with subjectivity, or of distance/visibility with objectivity. In our current understanding,as revealed through the metaphors we use, we give a great deal of credence to objective knowledge described in visual terms and located figuratively at a distance in interpersonal space. We correspondingly give less credence to subjective knowledge described in tactile terms and located up close and personal (even though we may intuitively ‘feel’ this subjective knowledge as more ‘real’ than the objective knowledge of intersubjectively validated visual knowing). This modern value distinction between the subjective and the objective does not appear in Plato’s categorisation.

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