Limits to Imagination
Several
weeks ago, while discussing a philosophy text with some really good students, I
said, “MacIntyre’s point is that we can’t imagine a good life for human beings
without practices. And since practices
require virtues, we actually need virtues for the good life.” Or something to that effect. Claire, being a really good philosophy
student, challenged the claim. “Let’s
imagine someone stranded on a desert island,” she said. “Why couldn’t this person live a good human
life?” And so the classroom
discussion/debate continued.
(Side
comment: I get paid to do this! How cool is that? Yes, being a professor means reading and
marking lots of mediocre essays by half-hearted or sleep-deprived
students. But it also means doing
philosophy with smart, enthusiastic young people like Claire.)
At the end
of the hour—at the end of the semester, for that matter—I still agree with Alasdair
MacIntyre. Human beings are social
creatures, and I can’t imagine a good life for human beings that did not
include “practices” (a semi-technical term in MacIntyre’s theory of the virtues). But my point is not to resume a classroom
discussion, but to think about the limits of imagination.
What does
it mean to imagine or conceive of something?
In philosophy we sometimes speak of “broadly logical”
possibilities. The only limitation here
is logical consistency. The sun has
risen in the east for ten million mornings in a row; can we imagine that it
will not rise in the east tomorrow?
Yes. The sun “rises” because the
earth turns on its axis. If there were
no earth, there would be no sunrise. So
if the Vogons put in a hyperspace bypass (see Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), there
won’t be an earth and there won’t be a sunrise.
There is no logical
contradiction between the fact that the sun rose ten million mornings in a row
and the possibility that it will not rise tomorrow. In contrast, “a stone so heavy that an
omnipotent God could not lift it” is a logical contradiction, naming nothing. We may think we can imagine such a stone, but
we can’t, no more than we can imagine round squares.
But logical
limits are not the only limits to our imagination. We can conceive of beings somewhat like human
beings who could live happy, productive and fulfilling lives in total
solitude. They might be some sort of
angel or extraterrestrial. Of course,
these imagined beings would only be “somewhat” like human beings. They would not have language, since we are
imagining them to live wonderful lives without any interactions with
others. An intelligent being with no
language and no interaction with other intelligent beings… Hm.
Aristotle remarked that a solitary life might be fit for a god or a
beast, but not for a man. The limitation
here rises from human nature, not pure logic.
Some people
object to arguments that appeal to “human nature.” For good reason! In times past, people have argued that human
nature requires or allows superior people to enslave inferior ones, or that
women are designed naturally to be mothers and wives and not much else, or that
human beings are naturally warlike.
Objecting to such arguments, some have come to think that “human nature”
is a fiction. They believe that people
can be literally anything they want.
But that’s
not true. Each one of us has a certain
physical form, organs of particular kinds, and mental capacities peculiar to us
as individuals. And in spite of the
differences between us, we are far more like each other than we are like the ET
or the angel who could delight in lifelong solitude. We cannot be “simply anything” and still be
human beings. Who would want such an
undefined life? We are human beings, and
what we want is a good life for human beings.
There is
yet a further limitation on our imagination, a limitation especially important
for writers. George MacDonald,
nineteenth century writer of fantasy stories, pointed out that the fantasy
writer has enormous but not unlimited freedom.
In a fantasy, the author can make fairies small or tall, princesses
serious or light (MacDonald’s “The Light Princess” is so light she defies
gravity, which is a problem for her parents), dragons of all sorts, and
intelligent parrots (as in my story, The
Heart of the Sea). But what the
fantasy writer cannot do is change good into evil or vice versa. The moral world
extends to the land of fairie, MacDonald
said. There cannot be a world where
cruelty is the ultimate good or kindness the worst of evils. Of course, there may be imaginary worlds with
lots of cruel characters and those characters may pour scorn on kindness (think
Game of Thrones), but even in those
stories vice has not been turned into virtue.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called for a revaluation of all
values, but even he pleaded with his readers: “Let us be honest with ourselves!” It
turns out Nietzsche wanted to revalue some values, not all of them.
Despite the
truth in MacDonald’s teaching, imagination does have the power to shape our understanding of morality. It’s not so much the explicit teaching of
stories that matters, though that is important.
Stories help us see what is possible.
For example, if a person reads or sees story after story built on the
myth of redemptive violence, he may come to see the world that way. He may come to think, perhaps only
unconsciously, that evil can be defeated only by destroying the source of evil—that
is, by killing the enemy. Marduk kills
Tiamat, Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star, the good guys imprison the bad
guys (even better, execute them); this is how good defeats evil. An imagination shaped by the myth of
redemptive violence may be offended by a gospel of redemption through suffering. It is important to attend to stories shaped
by Jesus’ story.
