Eva T. H. Brann: My Inchoate Thoughts on Imagination

I've begun reading The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance by Eva T. H. Brann. I'm very excited to read it and I'll be reading this over the coming weeks. I want to tie some of the insights in the book to a possible Ph.D. thesis I want to do on C.S. Lewis' Argument from Desire for God's existence. I believe that imagination is the cornerstone of the argument. Unfortunately, Brann is focusing on Imagination being primarily an image-making faculty or the power or faculty of presenting to the 'mind's eye' the forms of things without their matter, the abstraction of which involves the idea of pulling from Memory an object and presenting the object while the object is physically absent. I can imagine a red ball without there being any red balls around me. I say 'unfortunately' because this is an understanding of Imagination that Lewis veers away from in his essay The Language of Religion (it's an essay found here). There, Lewis distinguishes the image-making faculty from whatever it is that is responsible for why the image arises in the mind's eye in the first place. It is the difference between an indention in the sand on the beach and the wave that caused the indention. If anyone is familiar with Lewis' Great War with Owen Barfield, you know that such thoughts were already being wrestled with. There seems to be a debt to Coleridge from both authors, though Lewis seems to blend Coleridge with Hegel a lot more than Barfield did. In fact, Barfield's corpus seems to be footnotes to, and commentary on, Coleridge. Brann, however, thinks Coleridge is mistaken in the way he understood Imagination. I'm not sure why, apart from etymological or philological considerations. 


I do agree with Brann (while she paraphrases the ancients) that Imagination is the interface between sensation and rationality, and I wonder how this insight inspires, or overlaps with, Lewis' distinction between Reason being the organ of Truth, while Imagination is the organ of Meaning. I will have to investigate this. What would the analog be to sensation? Might it be the organ of The Senses? Both of the previous two outputs use 'organ' as a sensory metaphor (it might have to since faculties or powers as scholastic categories don't have spatial - and therefore material - extension). But organs have functions. So, the idea is that Reason and Imagination have functions. The senses have functions. The sense of sight is for seeing, etc. I am enjoying her discussion of Plato and the Imagination right now. There is some discussion regarding the relationship between sensation and memory, and how they inscribe propositions on the book of the soul. The memory uses visual translations of words; sensation uses propositional translations of images. Together they assist the soul in knowing via recollection, etc. I'm having trouble perfectly remembering, so I'll end here. I'll be contributing more to this topic in the future. 

I'll end by saying one last thing. I was sad to see that Lewis was mentioned twice in a book with over 700 pages. Considering all that Lewis had to say about the Imagination, I find this lamentable. But oh well. I do think there is more interaction with Coleridge, and it might be through that discussion that I can indirectly access Lewis via his interaction with Barfield.