Session 2 MIT 24.262 Feeling and Imagination in Art, Science, and Technology, Spring 2004

wait just one second oh no it's all right since there are new people in the class I thought it might be useful for me quickly to go over some of the Preparatory material that I gave you at the begin gave the class at the beginning of last week what I did in addition to uh a good deal of preparation that you already familiar with present 208 or the beginnings of 28 topics on the nature of creativity that being the focus of the seminar so I'll go very quickly over the ones I talked about last time they'll all be coming back in for further analysis and clarification so it doesn't matter that um I'm sure changing you uh this time after I fin the totality of them we'll take a break and then uh Joe Blaine here we'll give this week's reading and we can have a free discussion along any lines that she [Music] determines the first topic was the the idea of the Artist as an isolated individual living in a Garrett and living a life different from ordinary people sometimes very bizarre individual uh and I use Beethoven as an example Beethoven suffered from deafness but he was also a very um difficult person but ALS and very aloof person in many ways the second example was a different kind of creative artist uh exemplified by motsart about whom some people thought that he did never made any changes it was as if um his manuscripts that were very clean uh were the result of his taking dictation from God that comes out in the play and movie amadas uh the third is the concept that is developed in an encycl opedia work encyclopedic work by a very famous novelist and essayist named uh Arthur Kesler the title of the book is the act of creation and the concept is the notion of bisociation bisociation being the juncture of two different matrices in an unexpected way that that's what looks to us like a creative act and Kesler arcs argues that as a matter of fact all the examples of creativity in different fields and in life as as a whole can be can be shown to be uh the result of dissociation uh the next idea is uh the unconscious in its role in human life uh containing the basis of all creat ity partly because the unconscious is highly unstructured uh and unpredictable U possibly as Kesler would say because it inherently involves um a bisociation and that looks to us uh absurd very very strange uh and yet is also the basis of creativity related related to that is the idea that um it's not just the unconscious but it's dreaming in the unconscious which is the clue and basis of of human creativity uh in relation to Dreaming I gave the example of the uh chemist whose name I think I misrepresented it's actually keray who uh fell asleep in in front of the the fire and dreamt about the uh about a serpent broken up into into its parts that finally came together and um ended up with the tail in the mouth of the Circ Serpent and when te awoke he had the answer to a problem he' had been working on which is the molecular structure of the Benzene of benzene uh I have here something that I didn't read then but I would like to read it to you now which presents this event um better than I had K himself describes this experience as follows I turned my chair to the fire and dozed again no there must be something earlier than that well the this quotation begins with that again the atoms were gambling before my eyes my mental eye could distinguish larger structures of manifold confirmation long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all all Twining and twisting in snake like motion but look what was that one of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail and the form Whirled mockingly before my eyes as if by a flash of lightning I awoke unquote and then the author says this Vision was the origin of his hunch that the Benzene molec molecule might be a ring a hunch to turned out to be correct prior to this experience kulle had assumed that all organic molecules are based on strings of carbon atoms he had produced a string theory some years earlier but for Benzene the Val valencies of the constituent atoms uh did not fit now that whole experience is thought to be exemplification of creativity as it sometimes happens uh in science incidentally note that though those were here last time my representation was sort of roughly correct but largely mistaken I was acting talking from memory and you have to be prepared for the fact that in my attempt to be spontaneous in the class uh I will make mistakes of that sort the um reason for that spontaneity uh I went into it great length last time which was that that it's my attempt to be creative in the process of running the class uh to illustrate that I indicated that I was not a born teacher a teacher being somebody who was schooled and seeing into what another person pupil a child in in primary school for instance requires at that person's stage of development uh whereas the kind of uh instructor that I am it's closer to being a per pering artist in which he is trying to create a uh something a work of art out of himself out of his own experience so that it uh as um Tyler was saying um he is a singer and it was his interest in creativity in the Performing Arts I am too but um because I think of myself as a cognitive artist certainly not a scientist and not a teacher of the sort that uh a teacher in school would be it isn't as if I have a body of wisdom or of anything else to impart all I can do is Express uh a certain view of the world which comes out of me but is based on a great deal of training in philosophy so it it has to be categorized as a philosophical view of the world it's not empirical it's not uh mathematical it's not based on uh abstract thinking of of the sort that goes into logic it's an expression of the world I've lived in from my point of view in relation to the complexity of that world and at a level of abstraction which is pertinent to dealing with the concepts that I manipulate to express my view of the world but it those concepts are not totally abstract as they would be in mathematics uh and therefore they're closer to that of a Performing Artist than they are to a te incidentally one thing I didn't mention last time but I was going to get to today is that um mathematics is Al is abstract but it also can be a work of art it's a work of art uh in as much as the abstract of the elements that go into it uh are capable of creating uh properties of what the mathematicians call Elegance or beautiful or even aesthetic and I may possibly have quoted from uh GH Hardy's book uh the a mathematicians apology and I don't know do any of you know that on the last page of it he distinguishes between pure mathematics and useful mathematics disension that I'm sure you're familiar with and he says of pure mathematics if it can be justified at all it must must be as a work of art so that pure mathematics turns out uh to be uh a function of Art in the way that my cognitive but not mathematical uh work also is as far as I can tell the um this this comes out very clearly in the book that I asked you to read starter today in which uh questions about creativity are approached from the point of view of certain affective dimensions and certain uh activities that belong to the humanities more than the sciences and have been neglected by the cognitive Revolution that has done such excellent work up to the present but I think can be Amplified by a new approach and it's this new approach via uh cognitive analysis of non-cognitive activities like the imagination uh being used to supplement the work in cognitive science and the reason I think get the reason I feel this might work is because it's through the combination between the affective and the cognitive uh that one might be able to explain the nature of creativity so that remains our dominant theme but bringing in the affective and trying to see how it harmonizes with the cognitive can be a very useful way of pursuing uh that investigation uh last time I went through the history of the idea the ideas I've had over a period of many years about the nature of imagination I'll spare you that but uh I do want to take this opportunity to um clarify procedure that I was following last time I've since then looked at the videotape of that was being made for open courseware and I was struck by how often I talk about myself about my ideas and my development and uh that isn't necessarily bad uh I know that people who um report about meeting James Joyce uh the great writer said it was always his world it was always his imagination that he would explain the nature of our conversation uh and uh one might think well he's egocentric he's only interested in himself that might be true it might be true of him might be true of me it might be true of anybody um but the point about an artist is an artist if he's trying to be creative has to live in accordance with his own mission with his own vision of the world with his own development what he has learned how to put into his start how he's learned from criticism how to modify uh his perceptions of that uh self-centeredness annoying as May sometimes be uh is somehow related especially I think to the creativity in art now that doesn't mean that someone like me should not be aware of the fact that you are fellow human beings with ideas in a world and a mission and a and a vision of your own on the contrary I want to make contact with that that's one reason why I'm not reading lecture notes or reading a manuscript at you U I'm looking at you and through your involvement through seeing what's going on in your mind as I talked um I hope to be able to arouse your uh desire to develop in relation to whatever it is that you can get get out of me but being a Performing Artist all I can do is to make my mind con set the level of the art that I'm dealing with rather than uh my paintings or my musical compositions um available to you in any way that you want and if you find well it's not that interesting well then don't worry about it but uh you're likely to get something out of it and what you should then do is pursue it from your own point of view and the structure of this course above all uh facilitates that because most of the course will be devoted to your uh presentation and development of your own original or not or creative ideas on the basis of your own expertise so there isn't an assignment that everybody has to fulfill we'll all start with some point of unity which um is the book feeling and Imagination that is assigned but your use of it it will be up to you and then you're getting Beyond it in your own um papers and writings will take you into totally different fields again with the concept of creation and the nature of creativity as as the basis of what we're all doing together and we'll do it together you see so that it's a communal activity uh and therefore is different from the kind of art of an isolated uh writer like James Joyce uh in the case of someone like James Joyce who has received more attention than almost any other writer in the of the 20th century he had to die first to get that Community it's a community of commentators critics uh in view of his last work finigan wake which goes beyond the English language interpreters uh and translations um this year 2004 is the centen of blooms day which is uh um which occurs in on June 14th I think it is uh uh 194 so this Centenary will be June 14th of 2004 and that involves worldwide celebrations about in view of uh the importance of the book ulyses uh in which Leopold Bloom is main character and everything happens on one day which is June 14th of 194 and so that's been his been named by the followers and devotees uh of uh Joyce and the Joyce society which includes thousands of people as a day of Celebration all around the world now that's the community that Joyce was able to attain even if he was self-centered uh as an isolated artist while he was alive now the advantage of teaching or uh and being in the right University is that you will have students with whom you can commune however self-oriented you are on the spots and each of you will be self-oriented and yet given a chance um to participate in this Society of people uh who are educated or or are getting educated all right that's inside about the nature of my at my approach to the work that I'll be putting in and that I hope you will the next topic was uh um about idealization which you'll be reading about for next week and by IDE idealization I mean the making of ideals rather than um idealization in the Freudian sense which means the overvaluation of some person that you fall in love with perhaps or the platonic idea of idealization which is that everything in the universe is striving for Perfection and therefore striving to fulfill ideals that's not my use of the word idealization as you'll discover in the chapter for me it's the fact that so much of human life is centered on the making and carrying out were failing at uh and suffering because of the degree of your failure uh of ideals that happen to matter to you and they vary with Society uh with group with individual uh they're highly variable and yet they're a constant in human nature that uh people have not investigated enough so that was something that I have gone back to time and again feeling that that was my opportunity um the last the chapter after that is about the nature of consummation because if idealization and Imagination are related to and integral to the nature of creativity the question one can always ask is why do people go to the trouble what do they get out of it and there are various philosophical theories about human behavior uh that are that is explained on hedonic terms that is in terms of pleasure for instance that's um the prime hedonic category um I try to get beyond the limitations of the concept of pleasure in the book um that came out the same year as feeling and Imagination I distinguish among pleasure uh pleasantness um um um satisfaction enjoyment and all and and similar Concepts that are more than just pleasure and but all of them I lump together in this book as consummation now the word consummation is uh used very often nowadays for erotic relations uh and in law the consummation of a marriage is designated as sexual intercourse so that a couple that have been married who want to get a divorce all they have to argue in court is well the marriage was never consummated which means that they never had Coates and therefore it was it wasn't a true marriage and could be annulled I don't think they even need a divorce it could be that's a basis of analment uh I think that's often used in the Catholic religion too as a basis of analment now it's interesting um and in fact I discussed this in that chapter that marriage should be thought to be consummated by a physical act of that sort uh you would think that the consummation of marriage would be uh friendship loving Oneness uh communal uh Harmony between the spouses that's would be the conservation of marriage it it that isn't the way in which the word is used because the whole concept of marriage as uh we know it nowadays originates out of reproductive patterns so that in order for the space species to reproduce you have to have a male and a female uh you know in the traditional Order of Things leaving aside test Tu babies uh who have intercourse that's the natural traditional um method of rep reproduction we give so much importance to that that out of that fact alone arises the whole controversy that you're familiar with because it's in all the the headlines nowadays about same-sex marriage because same-sex marriage by definition is not reproductive there can't be cotis between a man and a woman if the spouses are both males or both females all of this for me requires a much broader approached the whole question of consummation and that's what I try to do in that chapter and the relationship to creativity I think will become evident because I think of the work of let's say Socrates who I use as a prime example as being highly consummatory consummatory of what uh his activity as a philosopher uh consisted in talking to people uh in the Town Square the agura helping them to make their ideas clear uh examining human problems uh from the point of view of his own sense of values but also by eliciting what was deep in the people the young men uh in that Society the young men with whom he was conversing and he did it as an Athenian when he was brought to trial for having seduced the young of Athens and uh um maligned the gods he denied both charges he didn't said he he didn't malign the gods he was uh never questioned him he was trying to clarify what their interests their intentions were so that they denied being um religious and as far as seducing the youths of of that time he said what I did with them was trying to help them to find the truth about themselves and to be a good Athenian you can't live in illusion you have to live in some kind of harmony with the truth and consequently rather than my being punished or executed which finally happened I should be treated like a hero I should be rewarded well my view is he was rewarded he was rewarded because in the activity of teaching the way he did he was true to his Athenian ideals he was true to his philosophical concept and ideals so he was at the beginning of the creation of what we call philosophy he was a true philosopher and a a true Athenian and thereby he was consummating in a very important part of what he was and what is Tru to IR relevant to human nature human nature doesn't ordain only that people reproduce it also ordains that their minds be developed uh in any fruitful way that is available to them and that's what Socrates devoted his life to consequently it was a different kind of consummation and so the whole idea of consummation um needs opening and when you open it enough uh a good deal of the ambiguity between pleasure and enjoyment and satisfaction which I deal with in that other book um the book is called sex a philosophical primer uh a good deal of that has its place within the overall concept of consummation okay all right you'll be reading those chapters in sequence um now the next thing on my list is the way in which creativity is often interpreted as being intuitive you suddenly if you're a creative person you suddenly see with a flash uh what it is that you were looking for and this isn't plotting it isn't pedestrian it's uh creative you could even think of K's finding the um Benzene ring as a flash it happened to him when he was asleep in fact he talks about like a stroke of lightning uh this then people there's a long tradition in philosophy and in uh culture generally uh about the nature of intuition there are people nowadays who think themselves um intuitive and there are many who really are I've known several people of that sort uh there were they were cap they were people of very high intelligence but instead of they having to go through all the steps of inference that we ordinarily go through I mean here's uh uh a young man and um he U his face is a little odd and he walks a little strangely and you collect evidence and then you work at the evidence to generalize and you try to be faithful in each step of your inference and then maybe you come out to a conclusion oh well I guess the explanation of all that is that the man is so and so uh the intuitive person just with a glance he sees the the solution to that uh people who are called Geniuses are often people of very high intuitive power why because their minds are so thoroughly refined so develop act so quickly beyond the capacity of most of us that they can reach conclusions quickly that others take a great deal of time about now the question is do they do this by going through all those steps only sort of skimming them the way you might skim a book um in order to get an idea of what the author is talking about or ra whereas most people have to read it Page by Page or paragraph by paragraph or even word by word whereas they can go some people can really read the book skimming or very rapid reading so the Geniuses are like those very rapid readers but in effect they're going through the same process they're just doing it more quickly and based on more experience with the subject matter than most of us have whatever that subject matter might be okay um there is uh for this interpretation of intuition there is something that um um Thomas Edison has said to have said which is that genius consists um in fixing the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair that you have to sort of sit there and work at it or G genius doesn't occur spontaneously there's another um uh there are various things like this and maybe Edison said one or another of them uh that the genius consists of 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration or um i' well in any event um the idea being that genius is not a special faculty uh and if the genius said to be intuitive it's because he can do the job that others do much more quickly now intell intuition is often contrasted with intelligence so that uh many people can be very very intelligent which means they know how to learn they know how to reach valid conclusions uh they have insights but they would deny being especially intuitive or others might deny that they're especially intuitive is it because they have this they lack this rapidity of mental action or is it the alternative about intuition is it because intuition is a different kind of mind a different way of experiencing the world uh and that uh the intuitive person is living in a different dimension from most people even those who are very very intelligent and reach good conclusions now that distinction is present in the work of a French philosopher of the N of the 20th century um named bergson h n r i he was French bergon and there couple of his books on the reading list that I gave to you the partial research list um and I went into some analysis of his philosophy last time I'll Skip by that and we'll come back to it some other time uh since we need today to try to get as far as possible into the prep the other step steps on this list we've only got so far to number nine um but um does any B want to say anything about what I've said so far has this helped as a preparation it's more than just a preparation because I've gone beyond what I did last time all right the next is um creativity in relation to platonic perfectionism that is the search for Perfection that Perfection is built into the concept of creativity and that the two are somehow related and then I talked about a different kind of approach to Perfection which is that it isn't that desirable and it isn't that creative on the contrary on the view of some people uh particularly uh the filmmaker Jean renoa um what he says is of course you can be perfect in limited areas and technology is dangerous because technology gives you the feeling of perfection because you can make a gadget that nobody could equal by means of your technology technology limits itself to specific tasks that you can ideally make per perfect or almost perfect simply by carrying out the technology to its maximum but that's it in the case of Art in particular is boring so he gives the example of academic paintings of uh studio um work that uh are then work that's then used use to uh celebrate some occasion the meeting of two armies or something some kind of official art that has been commissioned and renois says if you look at the the fingers or the the feet of these people it's stunn to Perfection because you can master that with proper technique if you know enough about the techniques of painting but the painting itself is boring it's uninteresting that's not a that's not truly creative so the the for him and this is Illustrated in his art um his movies what you have to do is to learn how to be creative on the basis of the imperfection in life the imperfection in your medium and the imperfection in yourself as a Creator so it's a wholly different uh approach to the nature of creativity from Plato and Plato has been the dominant one in the western world uh there are movements in philosophy empirical philosophy of the 18th century as in David Hume uh uh pragmatism in American philosophy of the 19th and 20th Century existentialism of 20th century Continental thought 21st century I suppose it as it still lingers on so does pragmatism in a way um those all emphasize the fact that the world is is inherently not perfect and cannot be thought of in terms of Perfections that those Perfections are only reifications of what even is called idealizations of what the world really is like and if a philosopher or artist is concerned with the nature of reality uh he or she must got get Beyond this preoccupation with perfection and try to make sense out of the imperfect world that we live in now what I am I I am bringing to the class is my philosophy and have I've already started as you know and it's the philosophy of what what is called pluralism the philosophy of pluralism is that it's a big mistake to think that the world is perfectly one thing or another the world is a a conglomerate of diverse attitudes and activ ities and elements which in principle may never be able to put into a single large scale order so the traditional metaphysics that wants to know what the nature of reality is what's the one crucial category in which everything can be explained is maybe barking up the wrong tree because there isn't any one reality there isn't any one explanation and the most the philosopher can do is to be open to the diversity of experience of life of the world that we live in and then uh somehow put that together in a way that will be communicated to other people who were different from us and also have diverse experiences but will'll be able to respond uh and through it's that through communication that we create a change in the world so we're really creating the World by means of our communication uh this is what uh Reno means in his theory about films about his own films he says the job of the filmmaker is to make contact with the audience and then if that works you have a conversation together and you're both collaborating in a creative Venture now I like that very much uh the book of mine that's coming out in few weeks is called three philosophical filmmakers um Hitchcock Wells and Renoir Hitchcock you all know Orson Wells and jean renois and renois in a sense is my hero because he does everything in a way that I uh identify with as a fellow uh pluralistic um naturalistic thinker the next um on this is the role of time as opposed to s inspiration you know if it's true that uh genius or you could say creativity is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration how does that inspiration arise it may seem to be spontaneous all of a sudden you get a bright idea you know you suddenly think oh that's it that's what I was looking for question is is it really spontaneous is it really limited to the moment at which it shows itself or is it possible that the 1% is like the 99% in as much as it is based on a great deal that has happened to you in the course of time and what is the role uh of time in uh creativity let me give you a little again talking from my own experience um uh something that uh though were here before will remember but I think it's repeating for those who weren't as an undergraduate I was a student of the philosophy of John Dewey um years later uh I was teaching a class like this and I got the idea because I learned a lot from my classes ideas come to me and for which I'm grateful to you for tolerating or eliciting um and it seemed to be very interesting and I thought about it afterwards and I thought you know that that really is a new original creative idea that's occurred to me just by chance shortly afterwards I looked in was looking for something in a book by Dewey that I had read maybe 50 years earlier I know 40 50 years old earlier uh 35 I can't remember and there was exactly that idea now I I wrote my undergraduate thesis on dwey I read everything of dwi's he was a great man in my life so it wasn't by chance that the two occurred first in him and then in me what undoubtedly happened was that I had picked it up in my writing in those early years it got lodged in my being I forgot that it was there and then it under appropriate surfaces circumstances it resurfaced um but I think that's the way time works and that may be a crucial element in all creativity uh the the fermenting the maturing of certain ideas as a result of the life experience or the time the live time that you've been through as a person who remains open to the possibility of creativity now if you devote your life to uh doing bookkeeping and come home at night and watch television idly and not because you care about television but just because you're so tired you just sit there with a a bottle of beer um you're closing your mind to the development of of it you're closing yourself to the development of your mind and so this is sort of process that I'm talking about this fermentation uh is less likely to happen but in Creative individuals or in the nature of creativity this may be the rule and so what we need to do is to understand the phenomenology and the logic of that fermentation uh through time and in terms of the importance of the passage of time now that line of thought lead led me leads me in various directions um which come into the notes in different places so maybe I'll skip over them later but I might as well start with that now um that is is that uh the the whole distinction between past present and future has to be reworked uh to be creative you have to be thinking about the future you can't be creative by uh uh rediscovering the wheel and that was done in the past that's over with uh and the future is something new and different that we as human beings are able to create well some people would say oh no people can't create anything that's another issue which I discuss in feeling and Imagination but that's not what I'm talking about now what I'm saying is the very nature of creativity is to bring the future into into being in accordance with your ability to mold it uh in one way or another that matters to you but does that mean that you can neglect the past now in your generation more than any that has preceded it in the last I don't know 2,000 years perhaps of the development of West civilization the past has more and more receded into nothingness not receding into the past but it'sing into nothingness because you're not brought up to think in terms of the past um uh the if you compare uh subjects like the history of science with uh the creative work that people do in MIT at The Cutting Edge which is the phrase I've heard as long as I've been in MIT the The Cutting Edge uh meaning the way in which the present is slicing into the future you see that history of science may have scholarly value it may be very important but from your point of view and from this has been generally true of places like MIT but now MIT is getting to be the model of all universities um in terms of an interest in science technology and how to change the world and education by means of them it's the future that matters what you can do next not what happened in the past there are no U um new companies on NASDAQ being created being brought into existence in in terms of the F terms of the past it's always a company that has makes promises for the future with some very minimal uh basis but with hopes of developing as you know the uh the com the com um um Bubble is based on hopes about the future and that's built into the nature of American society and above all built into nature of of creativity in science and what is creative in our society is based more and more and more than in any other period in the past in any civilization any country upon hopes for the uh originality in science that would be created by Looking forward looking in terms to the Future and it's worked fairly well for the last 200 years so this country more than older countries like those in Europe uh is has always been very optimistic maybe falsely optimistic in some respect but optimism is part of the American character uh as long as I've been alive the thing I love most about America that makes me very proud and very grateful is this has always been the land of opportunity uh that's why everybody came here why America is made up primarily of U of immigrants from all kinds of countries and is very sensitive to that and despite all the Prejudice and all the shortcomings welcomes Innovation from different cultures and in fact in my lifetime education and and enrollment all of that has been transformed uh by this openness to different cultures uh different uh traditions different people uh and all of that means that there's optimism about the future because that's the way could change the present now my question is how much of the past can we neglect is it possible that the nature of creativity capitalizes on the past that to be truly creative you have to somehow digest amalgamate and uh fructify the past in terms of what is Meaningful to you in the present and through which in that juncture of present and past you can create the future now if that's true what one wants to do is to have a working model to have a conceptual framework of thought and for me that's what it is to be philosophical um I don't care about any problems of philosophy that is has been enshrined in the American philosophical ass assciation or required to get uh tenure at a great University to be philosophical is to be able to develop your mind in that kind of way uh in order to change the future creatively but the create cre creativeness in the change of the future is a function of your the nature of creativity as being predicated upon the unity among past present and future all right so we have to rethink the whole question of time and though this may sound grandiose to me uh to you I'm sorry uh and it does to me too because I know how little I've attained any of that uh it seems comperable to uh Einstein's work in amalgamating time and space and creating concepts of space time uh now that's a way of creatively transcending our ordinary ways of thinking that in physics were uh limited and inadequate well in order to explain creativity we may have to transform our ordinary uses of terms like the past the present and the future something I wanted to go get into in more detail um I can illustrate now and I even it doesn't matter if if um uh we don't go through my whole Panorama or or even if you want we could give your presentation next week which do you prefer Joe well let me go on a little while longer though this is Will might look at first like a digression it's one of the anecdotes I frequently tell for two reasons I've got you've got to remember this I'm not trying to entertain you uh one reason is it's through the anecdotes that my mind works since I'm a Performing Artist and a humanist a literary philosopher and so I have that free play of the imagination to the four of my doing a philosophy um and so it's to show you a way in which imagination can be used if if I succeed in making the anecdote relevant rather than just an old man talking about his life um but that's the intention uh the second is that um it's sometimes only through this kind of anecdotal Touch of reality that you can understand the profundity of the questions that we're talking about all right so it's not merely question of form the way I experience the world and experience the doing a philosophy it's also my belief that the world is like that too that the world itself um shows itself in experiences which can then enter into the anecdotes all right this comes out now in relation to this question of past future and present I was at the McDow colony in New Hampshire once um and they give out medals they were giving out a medal to Leonard Bernstein you all know who he was uh and it was a medal for him as a composer not as a conductor or teacher and all the different things that he did but as a composer and the first thing he said in accepting it was this is the first time I ever got a medal for my composition for my composers because um in music he was neglected and thought to be a a writer of of musicals and uh semi- poopular music he wasn't a uh a first class serious composer which and a lot of that's been modified but he hadn't he had received many medals and awards when the first time for composing now before he received it he was introduced by another composer um who um uh spoke in very Frank ways about um Bernstein um and um Ned rorm was his name uh a friend of Bernstein's but rival composer and a younger man and he said um um it's been a it's been a um a truism in in among musicians that Bernstein is not as great a composer as he is a conductor and that's because he um is not original he doesn't have original ideas and being a conductor he's immersed in the world of music and he borrows and uses all all these things that he hears and there was some truth of that uh berstein told me once um when I come back after a concert I can't sleep because my head is filled with all that music and I can't get it out of my mind and I I knew he lived music and so there was surely a bit of Truth in that but this was presented as um a kind of caution to Future composers not to live in the past but to live in the present or the future right uh of course if you do that then you're not going to be truly original now Bernstein got up and he just got off a plane this this took place in New Hampshire out side of Peterboro McDow Colony uh he a little um single Cedar that was flown that he he hired to fly him from Tanglewood um to peterb and he said I just I'm in the midst of a concert them preparing at um Tanglewood and the big the big composition is Stravinsky's the rights of spring you prob or is it the rights of spring or the right of spring I think it's the right of spring um and um everybody knows that you probably know have heard of heard of it and it's a great when it when it was first um uh performed in the 1920s it was revolutionary it was Sensational was nobody ever heard music like this before it was thought to be too new too daring uh too too UT uh for most audiences as the years have gone on the audiences have uh increased enormously and um ordinary uh concert goers take it for granted as a great work of art but the at the time it was written it was thought to be absolutely novel and even too radical too too new and Bernstein said uh working on the score um what I discovered is that on the very first page he borrows he copies he steals uh musical material from rael's caprito espanol which had had its World premiere two months earlier and this was an example of a great work of art that everyone thought was not based on the past but was opening the future and Bernstein then went on in a way that was just magnificent trying to argue that there is no such thing as total originality that in music music uh is the result of imbuing yourself in a a tradition in a continuity that goes far back uh using it to your own advantage in your own way but the idea of being totally new is not applicable and that was I thought a stunning uh rebuttal to Ned rm's comments about Bernstein's own music uh Bernstein's own music is not in the class of shinsky and he would never have said that but it's not as inferior as rorm was implying uh and um it reminded me of something that braah said which was that an inferior composer borrows a master Steals and I think that's true and it's true of all art uh you can steal as much as you can get away with you can borrow and reuse and never give it back the the genius will come out in the way in which you put it to your own view from your own point of view from your own perspective and if you're a pluralist as me you're prepared for the fact that there are an infinite number of points of view perspectives and so if an artist is true to himself uh that that Fidelity to his own genius will show up and appear to us to be original and creative when you get to the chapter in this book on the aesthetic you'll see I use that sort of thinking uh for my analysis of aesthetic truth as as opposed to Scientific truth I'm not convinced that I do it well enough and I'm aching to get into this book this the sequel on creativity in order to do it better but the whole idea of aesthetic truth I say is always a function of what's true to the being of the Creator and sudden we see oh yeah that's that's him that's his way of seeing things that if that's true then this the whole way of thinking about the past the present the future of time in relation to creativity has to be transformed and reworked um I think you know it might be a good procedure for me to stop there and continue next week and maybe the week after with what I call my Preparatory remarks but there I think you're getting the flavor and getting some of the ideas that you can use for your own part of the course and so we can each week divide it up the way we thought we would today with me giving Preparatory material and then one of you taking over in this case it will be Joe so why do we take a short break and then Joe will take over and um to remind you or to inform you uh she all of you are expected to do to to proceed in any way that is comfortable to you you can write out an essay and read it uh write out notes and work from them you can come in with notes and not work from them uh you can discuss on your own the way in principle I do which for me is a very creative experience but it's it's difficult and I've had Decades of preparation for this uh I don't mean on the same giving the same course but just having taught so many different courses I feel comfortable with the idea of doing doing speaking my mind and making that the burden of my teaching so you don't have to feel you have to do that proceed any way that is comfortable for you and you can go on for as long as you want don't feel that you have to hurry up but the the hope is that you will excite the class to conversation to um comments and there there'll be a good deal of discussion because you know these this is your your class I'm just a a prod so I'm eager to know what you're thinking and you can learn from each other so now let's take a f minute break okay she can have as much time as she wants she can proceed in any way that she wants and my hope is that uh anyone who wants to make a comment and start the discussion going we feel free to do so one question is do you want to be interrupted or not do you want people to wait until you've finished um I don't mind being interrupted as long as people don't expect me to answer questions no no I'm just getting familiar with but um I think um you should all project loudly so that anybody can hear everybody can hear not you know not don't direct it just to Joe but to the group as a whole okay okay should I begin please okay so I got to tackle the first part of the book which is the preface the introduction which pretty much goes over effective attachment and a chapter on imagination so I guess I made like notes bullets with some questions or just rewarding some of the information you presented in the book so I don't know if I'll just let me interrupt you I can hear you very well can the uh camera here okay okay so okay first thing um say the book seems to explore um effective attachment I'm not sure that I can summarize your views on effective attachment but um I see that one of the aspects it's one of the aspects of how we create our world through our emotions or feelings and you go on to include intuitions inclinations and kinesthetic Sensations and you hope that your view is a supplement to uh scientific inquiry such as cognitive science um second Point um I see that um the material refers back to some of your previous Works um and you hope to address your mass your past misconceptions or misperceptions um in the introduction and you state your purposes being um to portray how feelings rely upon imagination and through imagination upon idealization consummation and the aesthetic uh you attempt to draw a picture um that will present the the lineaments of sex love and compassion as well as other um I guess Stations of the spectrum to which they belong I'm not sure what what the spectrum is yeah uh the spectrum is the kinds of feelings that have mattered to people the kinds of of U relationships I I want to repeat the word affective but that's what I'm trying to explain uh affective Dimensions that people value or that that exist to be a human being is to have feeling as well as to have thought and uh one question is how is thought related to feeling that'll come in later uh but one another question is well what do we even mean by feeling uh it is it a matter of is love a matter of feeling some people say it's not uh I don't know whether it's in this book or another one that I quote from wienstein the um 20th century philosopher who has had a great effect on all analytical philosophy um in which he says that love is not a a feeling I mean you you might uh feel that uh your tooth hurts or you might uh feel that somebody has injured you but love is not just a feeling now the way I interpret him um in the in context is that love is also a question of how you live of what your behavior is so if you say to somebody I love you you're not just describing a feeling that you might have the way you would be if somebody um poked you with a a pen and you said that feels bad or ouch that hurts your I feel pain uh love isn't like that because love is a question of your relationship to that person of what you're um declaring what you're promising the way in which you can live it's more than just a feeling all right uh my question is well what is it even to be a feeling and that's the Spectrum with which within which uh I try to locate these different categories of being of human being um idealization imagination so on uh and uh they're all on that spectrum of phenomena that matter to people over and above the mental processes the ideas the concepts the thoughts the reasoning uh the uh scientific investigation that slump together under cognition my general idea is that cognition and affect are not totally separated they are interwoven but nobody has analyzed their relationship and that's part partly because the component of affect a feeling has not been fully and adequately analyzed and that's what I try to do in this book you know but I don't know about feeling like love not being a feeling because sometimes it has very physical um aspects on you right I suppose what Vicken Stein meant certainly what I agree with is love is not just a feeling it's also a pattern of behavior it's a question of uh what you do uh one advice to the love Lauren that I've received and needed I I'm sorry to say is that you can show your love not only in the large scale things you do like a husband providing for the family and and um um uh thinking about what the other person really cares about but also in little insignificant things that's how your feelings will show themselves I think so the point is it isn't just a question of love being a feeling but also things that manifest love even and maybe in some situations above all the trivial little things and that's what people respond to I mean let's just say I love Tyler like what just let's just say I love Tyler yeah like I if I touched his hand like I would actually feel something you know like supposedly when you experience love where if you miss the person you actually feel pangs in your stomach or butterflies and stuff like that so I mean but what if um Tyler is your significant other and he hears some news that you know will distress him and you touch him the way you did you might not feel anything you you know you or you Loosely talk speaking you said well I felt a desire to be of help or I felt I wanted to help him you know help him by knowing that I'm here with him but in terms of what you were saying butterflies and the other evidences of feeling you might not feel that the mere touching would be enough to show your love and one can't go through life having feelings all the time uh in fact um once you become habituary to another person the feelings may not be that regular or constant but if you're there with that person if you do things of a certain sort that will be love do you know the musical uh Fiddler on the Roof oh good and you remember the scene in which uh the farmer asks his wife no the wife asked the farmer um do you love me I forget their names now but rabba is that the wife's name she says do you love me no he says wait a minute he says to her do you love me right and she says well I make your breakfast for you I take care of your needs I'm with you here um these there all these things I do I take care of the children do I love you I don't know but that's what I do now I think the point one can infer from that is that the fact that he sounded as if there must be some stupendous feeling which is like turning on a light and when the light comes on that's love but her view is love is more a function of what you do and the way you live with a person the way you behave than any one particular feeling or uh the summation of all your feelings and and I think that there's a great deal one can say in favor of that that if love is a feeling it isn't only a feeling it also manifests itself in the actions pervading all of life cuz she says like for 25 years she did all those things so if that's not love then what is right now um I I can't remember in the musical whether that satisfies her husband uh and he concludes well I guess she does love me uh or he says well she's avoiding the question because I know she does these things the question is why she does them and somehow she does them because of this thing called a feeling then that proves love well what do maybe that's not right maybe it doesn't prove anything uh and having the feeling uh may not indicate love you know you wake up one morning and you have this Oceanic feeling as Freud calls it and it might be because of something you ate theight before or it may be real and authentic at that moment and may last a day or two and then you throw yourselves into the arms of the other person and reg regret it forever after uh so that the feeling itself wouldn't even if it's authentic and even if it is a sign of love it wouldn't be sufficient to indicate the presence of love and it could be uh counterproductive for love could also be lust where does lust come in lust lust mhm okay well you going this is your your is that something you want the class to discuss I I guess we can get into it later um again you refer to the work of academic psychologists by contending that um cognitive methods tend to ignore the nature of human attachments and the role um that effect plays on them um perhaps you offer your discoveries as a supplement or remedy to these oversights um uh for example psychologists reduce adult attitudes to some childhood event um childhood attachments carry over into interests that determine our effective being and each um and each other in later periods um you offer the point of view that by examining any present moment we can more reliably discern the operative dynamism in that person's experience as it currently exists it often defers greatly from anything that might be adduced by studying effective dispositions in the past uh you use the example of a singer's attachment to his or her art as vocal art um because the vocal art is dependent upon um bodily and mental proclivities that everyone has um as we all present ourselves to others through the meaningful utterances that issue from our lips to directly quote you okay I thought that was a good um example just because I was like okay why do you keep talking about a singer like how am I going to relate that to me if I'm not a singer and you kind of brought that full circle um to relating it to just speech singing like what comes out of our mouth and how we express ourselves and how that all becomes like I guess an art of some sort um yeah and um next I recall asking you last week um how imagination relates to our survival and evolutionary terms right and even though you weren't really able to verbalize like the significance of imagination to our survival I was able to able to relate to some of what I found in the book to to this um I wrote artists for example become attached to Sensations emotions feelings and thoughts of their trainers but also to themselves as vehicles of an interpersonal contact merely in being what they are and doing um what only they can do and this creative power is what you call a fountain head of security and ability to survive and for me that kind of explains like like Stephen Pinker would say you know what is the role of dancing to Human survival what is the point of it um where did she say this um how the mind works um yeah so he kinds of questions like certain things that we do in life like what purpose do they have like evolutionary like why did we you know develop the ability to play chess or write music what is the point of it all and and I guess in some way it's it relates to like certain skills that we developed in order to survive and maybe imagination is one of those things that help us to survive it helps us to I guess strategize um to respond some more to moral um possibilities or things of that nature that that's very good that opens up an enormous question and one comment I want to make is that what one wants to know is whether you're talking about imagination in general or a particular kind of imagination because what's true of one kind of imagination might not be true of another so one needs to have a finer analysis of that sort second uh you're talking now very correctly and right on about the relationship between something that used to be thought to belong to be native to the province of the humanities like in the Arts rather than sciences that science was supposed to be purely rational sort of cold obser based on empirical sensory observations put together in a system in which general generalizations are made from which you can derive other generalizations and on Bas of that have new observations that feelings and Imagination was not really a part of it the crucial thing was to be true to the evidence now once you start asking the kinds of questions you are we wanted the you you were asking we have to reexamine the relationship between feelings and uh cognition between the humanities and the Sciences uh between a magic ination and rational procedure and that's what really the Crux of everything that we're concerned about um it also gets to the heart of the what I consider to be the crisis in cognitive science I I shouldn't say the crisis in cognitive science because cognitive scientists are usually not aware of it and don't feel any need to to raise this kind of question but the crisis that I about it the shortcomings um and that I think Pinker to un uh recognizes the trouble being that nobody has done very much to do to handle this kind of problem and that is uh how is Imagination essential to cognition and the other way around how is cognition essential to imagination can they be analyzed separately do they have to be analyzed in terms of each other and which comes first also in terms of your reference to Pinker one wants to know you know when he asks those questions is he asking for some causal mechanism so that the explanation would be of a cognitive sort and terms of evolution and survival of the species and that uh will be the causal basis for imagination we have imagination so we can uh survive better and do science better and somehow deal with questions of that sort by means of imagination or which would which would not answer the question what one still wants to know what is it about imagination that distinguishes is it from cognition and do they cooperate uh not merely one causing the other but because each of them requires elements of the other do they interpenetrate are they a function of each other now the usual view has been the earlier one that uh the um the uh things the human values of various sorts humanistic sorts um are obvious and evident but they're the cause of certain biological facts that a scientist can discover and in the course and show how in the course of evolution uh the uh those facts generated the human values to further what was needed biologically and my argument is that this is too narrow conception of what is biological and uh it demeans or minimizes the role of the humanities by thinking that it's simply a causal agent for carrying out these other jobs and if that's true then the whole question of imagination cognition of the affect all of that has to be reworked I think as Pinker develops has developed I think he is recognizing that more and more the problem is how to carry it out the solution to this kind of problem cuz he just touches on it he doesn't really offer pardon he touches on that but he doesn't really seem to offer any well nobody has and what I do in this book which is my major attempt to doesn't really scratch the surface I don't feel that this alone will will um do much in that direction except to start screaming about the need for it for work of that sort to be done I guess I can continue um you incidentally uh you're talking very faintly and I hear it is it clear that it's going to be coming out already okay you suggest that effective attachments should be studied as meaningful forms of life that cannot be explained entirely by ref ref to what happened in childhood I guess this is in response to I guess the shortcomings of cognitive science um you contrast your stance against that of Freud criticizing um his work and um I guess his school of thought um because um see I guess as we finish this his ideaas about regression yeah I didn't really finish this thought here so but basically you criticize his school of thought um in cognition attachment yields information and awareness that helps people to cope with the vicissitudes of life um he argue that cognition is always correlative to some affective need and to relevant attachments of one type or the other and it offers an approach that is amendable to different fields of inquiry such as the Sciences um as opposed to Freud uh you agree with John bulby um his research offers um I guess well you think that um I guess what his research corrects the mistakes of Freud um he offers a distinction between two sources of effective attach no you offer distinctions between two sources of effective attachment which are appraisal and bestow where appraisal is the act of discovering uh what something is worth whereas bestow is the act of creating value by accepting people or I guess an object as it is um in response to BBY you feel that his research neglected the process of bestow and in the attachment um being part of a Quest from meaning in one's life um here I can present I guess some of what you said about appraisal and besto Appraisal may be instantaneous or prolonged conscious or unconscious directed toward a single attribute or toward a toward a total entity uh Bol is an act of imagination a way of responding affirmatively to a person or a thing or an ideal constitutes our capacity for Bol and makes it beneficiary valuable in that respect um and the modalities of apprais and Bol unified or um how we experience love at least this is what you allege um so this um Imagination playing a role in basto kind of leads to the element um of imagination um as a prominent as prominent in attaining um what makes life worth living um but you warn us that um Imagination like behind imagination lies negative um certain negative feelings that may be destructive to human welfare is that correct M okay um you say that imagination plays a crucial role in effective attachment which can Aid Us in understanding meaning happiness love and other elements of nature and spirit um and again you refer back to your previous Works cuz you use a lot of past tense I thought that I presented that and so um like you said in class last week that you know you're constantly kind of reworking your old ideas and right hoping to arrive at this you know perfect solution and I think you continue to do that in this book um well the um writings I think of most philosophers and many other thinkers um who are productive are very organic so that the later works are related to the earlier Works a little in the way in which Bernstein was talking about the history of Music the earlier musical compositions being related to the later ones um in the sense that the authors are working at problems that may look different but are really related to what they did previously and last time you remember I was emphasizing the importance of CR of accepting the phenomenon of criticism as a way in which you can grow that somebody just praises you you can't get much out of it someone rejects you out of hand you can't do anything out of with that but if somebody gives you good criticism however painful it may be because we don't like to be told that we're not perfect um you can do something with that and you develop uh the so there is a kind of dialectic from the earlier work to later if it is been digested and entered into your bloodstream by means of criticism reflection uh or your own rejection of many of the earlier ideas but within a sense of self-confidence such that you can keep on going then there will be uh this organic progression linking the earlier to the later works now this happens with lesser authors and it happens with great ones so it's no Criterion of value or genius but I think it if one keeps at it in that way uh yes you will move that in that in that fashion in the preface to uh a book I wrote 1990 four I think um 10 years ago I give the analogy of the mind being like a a tree that as you move up the the trunk you encounter branches if you go out on one branch you're not going to go any higher unless you come back but the the level that you reach will be a function of How High you've gone or if you've gone out on a branch how you've neglected other branches below and then there going to be other branches and that uh if you're creative and if you're capable if you have the strength the moral strength physical strength emotional strength intellectual strength you you keep on going and the Great Men um you know goash Bak Mozart whose life was cut short uh but the great creative producers just keep on going and there is this organic uh relationship as there would be in somebody at the top of the tree once it reached its peak uh John Dewey who lived into his 90s and was writing and creating volume after volume all his life and had tremendous influence somebody said to him um what is um life what is life as a whole in general and he said the creative life perhaps um he said um life is climbing One Mount set of series of mountain peaks after another and the inter interrogator said well what happens when there aren't any more Peaks to climb and dwey said you die well I think the truth in that you know not everyone does die some some get Alzheimer's disease and and return to their vegetative stage uh in the last 10 years of their life um I know I know professor at Harvard who at 80 he was retired of course um uh developed Alzheimer's disease and died in his 90s in our society uh such people are valued enough so they're kept alive even if they've lost their mind um but if you're uh as far as your active life your creative life well in his case it it ended when he was 80 he might have died he might just as well have died as far as his creative life was concerned he continued uh in a diminished form closer to being a vegetable uh if uh your creative life dies when you stop striving to attain these higher Peaks climbing the higher Mountain one mountain range after another the whole process of living however is organic in as much as it's not just any old Peaks it's not just any old uh climbing but rather it's integrated to what you've been doing all your life uh the U great film film director that I mentioned whom I admire so much Jean genena um says at the be excuse me at the beginning of one of his um essays about his own work he says I have the feeling that all my life I've been making one film uh actually made something like 50 35 uh but they're always the for me it's always the same film now you know the subject matter is different a lot of differences and he went through different phases sometimes uh he used the camera one way sometimes another way uh he learned from his previous experiences he the world changed around him and so he adapted to that you know strictly speaking what he was saying was not true they weren't they're not the same movie what he meant and what I uh appreciate is the idea that they all came out organically from him as the person he is at the period in history in the countries and in the civilizations through which he lived and they're all an expression of that and an attempt to make contact and to re reveal that to show it to the audience for whom he's doing that my anecdotes are made with that mind so don't I I hope that some of them won't embarrass you uh of course they're very carefully censored but um they're an attempt to express and show you my world in order for you to understand what it is to do philosophy in the way that I do now you may not want to do that and lots of people have succeeded without even trying but that that's my idea of what philosophy is and that's where uh this idea of the organic relationship uh comes in I was trying to figure out if I had a response but I guess I don't um in the imagination chapter you critique Plato's Plato's view that reason should be the source of all AFF of attachment um Plato contends that uh reason AIDS in appraisal and determines the worthiness of effective attachment um we should only love what reason approves quote unquote um you state that imagination AIDS in revealing possibilities of effective attachment to a person um or objective affection um in a way you imply or pass passively Define imagination as a mental act that bestows importance upon the manner in which abstract possibility exceeds the purely factual right um we must refer to the capability of imagination to explain love as an effective attachment um where imagination is considered a pre a prerequisite for love um you say that on page 35 I think um you critique play Plato for under playing the role of imagination in love and um because he conceived of imagination as something completely detached from the intellect um you point out it's it's rationality pure rationality that Plato used as his Idol for learning what the world is like and that's what I consider to be a fundamental mistake and especially um exciting because Plato was such an imaginative man himself and such the um great figure in western civilization and yet he didn't sort of use his use the imagination that he had as the basis of his method of explanation it went into it but he he never sort of said Ah that's that's the key to finding out what reality is like he used imagination to make his philosophy um he didn't deny that scientists could be imaginative but they had to use their imagination for the sake of attaining rational goals and therefore it was through re reason that we would find out what the na of reality was the fact that his own reality was a function of his great powers of imagination never occurred to him I think this is the the idea comes into uh Western Civilization many years later in the 19th century for instance where imagination then becomes very very important not for not but not for ploh um you also point out that imagination plays a role in person's mod of behavior um in terms of what they consider to be emotionally or morally possible mhm um bestow as one of the aspects of Love is a supplement comp compensation or even Liberation from appraisal um and the nature of a imagination is what allows humans to transcend appraisive inclinations I'm not sure I understand what well it'll be clearer if you could discuss the different types of imagination that I articulate I guess I didn't really did you they W clear to me they weren't um I talk about logical possibilities in empirical possibilities um moral or practical possibilities um you know remember that did did you pick that up Nick I remember the possibilities part but yeah I picked yeah I picked up on those POs but not so much I didn't feel like it was like a strong point like you were trying to distinguish clearly between different modes of imagination right you you didn't think that that was clearly established the distinction among them right well let's see if we can make sense of this um what what do you think I meant by a logical possibility did you use the example x a equals a yeah that it's logically impossible for a to be equal anything other than a and therefore um something that denies that is logically impossible right um but that doesn't tell us very much about the world in order to learn what is true about the world we have to discover what is empirically possible and what would that be it may be um useful for you to go back to the chapter but tell me can you answer the question T I don't know is it something on the lines of like a therefore B if something what is empirically but I'm you can't know this because you haven't read this chapter what I mean by empirically possible is in accordance with the laws of nature mhm right okay so if something violates laws of logic that's logically impossible but there could be something that is doesn't violate any laws of logic and yet is empirically impossible for instance um something that defies the laws of gravity right we all have that dream of flying and being unattached or somehow imagining that we could just take off um unfortunately people have died um because under the influence of some psychedelic drug or other they jumped out the window thinking that they'll be able to defy the laws of gravity I mean they they that's what is to be that high I guess that you don't realize that you can fall down um now that they they die because they are trying to violate the laws of gravity about uh that we are subjected to those the laws of nature correct but there's no logical impossibility in flying you know if somebody in a fantasy says uh so and so um under the influence of um LSD or whatever jumped out of the window thinking he would fly and he did we say well that's a fiction because it's not I understand what he means it's not logically impossible it's just empirically impossible now logically impossible is essential in order to for a statement to make any kind of sense so if somebody says a is a and a is not a you don't know how to you can't understand that um a is um I mean um but in a way it makes sense still butter is soft and butter is not soft now that's a is it could be verying degrees is one thing well no but then we use if the um predicate is used identically meaning by Soft exactly okay what it does in both cases MH and we realize that in the second case you're denying that butter is that that doesn't contradict the First statement that butter is soft all butter or whatever um it's in the meaning of the word butter that it should be soft uh it what it does is to throw us into confusion we don't know how they're using the person's using language anymore whether the word butter is uh is being used equivocally or whether soft is or not is or is there's something wrong in that language and therefore you can't communicate by means of that kind of logical inconsistency all right um but there's nothing like that in saying uh that morning John took a gulp of [Music] LSD jumping jumped out of the window uh with the idea that he would fly off to school uh and he did right now that says to us well this must be a fiction this is a story but I understand it because there's nothing in logically inconsistent in the language that's being used it's just empirically impossible so we now have different concepts of what is logically possible what is logically Impossible on the one hand and empirically possible or impossible all right um let's think that we consider um traveling at the speed of beyond the speed of Life Light of light as being a violation of a fundamental law of nature it would then be empirically impossible to travel faster than the speed of light right um I mean they do it in Star Wars don't they but that is because in that Society they somehow learned new laws of nature and so the one we consider fun fundamental about the speed of light has been discarded like you know that's one way of explaining it uh another way is this is just make beliefs so we don't have to take it literally but um that's what's going on all right but let's say then we understand what logical is logically possible what is empirically possible does that mean that we can we can't fly faster than the speed of light but that we can fly at the speed of light or close to the speed of light now somebody might say well I don't know about at the speed of light but we can get much closer to it than we can now with our primitive uh aircraft and therefore uh in the future there will be uh people who travel hundreds of times faster than we do thousands of times much closer to the speed of light and if someone says well why is it we can't the answer would be well we don't have the technical means it's just a matter of building the right kind of air shift so that's an example of another kind of possibility or impossibility in accordance or not in accordance with current technology current technical ability so we now have that analysis among different kind of possibilities and if imagination is our Capa human capacity to in envisage mere possibilities then we have different kinds of imagination or we sketch different kinds of imagination uh and this ability to envisage different kinds of possibilities is contrasted with our perception of what is actual our experience what is factual so that I know in the usual way that scientists of course develop that um this thing I'm looking at is the table that's an actuality that's this is the fact but the idea that possibly by um bringing in a saw and cutting it we could make it half the length that's already getting beyond the actuality that's creating ideas about a new actuality which it is based upon our conception of what is possible now as a matter of fact that example would be something that is certainly logically possible because there's no contradiction it's empirically possible because uh it something we know from our experience of the world of laws of nature that can be done it's technically possible if you have a big enough saw or power saw so it illustrates all three kinds of possibilities but you see how they are staggered like in those arcade games where a penny drops on one level and you have to dial the knob so the penny moves to the next level and from that to the next well that's the way in which uh these kinds of possibilities are in ently related as sheer as possibilities then there's another one that I bring in what is that is it moral possibility moral or practical now what do what do I mean by that um can you give me an example I mean I guess that one is Le more an experience where um I guess let's say my mother needs medication your mother my mother needs medication and I don't have the money to I can't afford it no no no that's not that's not a good example no um let's say that uh somebody's parent is in agony and whatever medication you give can't cure it the condition and someone says you know you should put her out of her misery she suffering terribly um there's nothing that anybody could do to help her whether it's the doctor or you or anybody I don't I want to take an example that you started with I'm not talking about your mother but somebody that one loves um and it's just horrible seeing this we often face this as animal lovers our pets get into that condition and the polite language is the question is what put the poor thing asleep when you don't mean putting it asleep you mean killing it and it's as horrible for the pet doing that for your pet as it would be for the person you love human being that you love um now imagine someone says um I I know I know that there's no way out I know it would be Humane to act that way but I just can't do it it's I it is for me an impossibility well it's not a logical impossibility it's not an empirical impossibility it's not a technical impossibility it's what I call moral or practical and the reason I put use both of the words is because nowadays moral the meaning of the word moral has changed from the way it was a 100 years ago and my own sensibility is at least 100 years old uh and so I like that language and regret that it's not used very much in this case uh by moral was meant not morace Customs it's something that indicates one's idea of how to live to live a good life and the French may still at least when I was a student there years ago they used the word moral morality not to mean what it sometimes usually meant in the English language but rather it's moral is the study of how to live how to have a happy life had to have a good life it's morals in that sense it's not the same as ethics doing what is right as opposed to what's wrong uh it's not hurting people or whatever you consider to be ethical it's rather a question of living a good life and there is a kind of overarching philosophy which as a matter of fact is very attractive to me which argues that ethics ultimately come down to what is naturally good that is what is moral in that sense of moral if you live a good life what you do will be ethical if you're expected to do to to uh frustrate yourself and frustrate other people um that might be considered ethical but then that's not a good ethics that you should accept you should accept one that indicates the goodness and provoke provides provokes and fosters happiness a good life right um George B Shaw says in the great English writer and wit he says um actually it occurs in his play Man and Superman um an Englishman thinks he's being ethical when he's merely being uncomfortable well you see that's the limitation in that use and morality would in the sense that I'm using it morals uh moral that makes it very clear there's no morality simply in making yourself uncomfortable but if you're going to be living up to the the laws sense of Duty a feeling of responsibility in their abstraction you will consider self- ethical and that's what Shaw was trying to undermine in the English character just doing the right thing because it's the right thing it's don't question don't ask the consequences don't uh worry about people suffering as a result or what the outcome will be you just do what you you're expected to do as a matter of ethical principle well that just means making yourself uncomfortable if however it's morals then you're going to avoid that and that's the sense in which I introduced the word to this category of imagination that it's moral or practical in the sense that you feel it so deeply that it has that effect upon you at uh at times in describing this in the chapter you may have noticed that I talk about moral or emotional that it's a question of your strong feelings right so that you might say the problem with putting my beloved pet to death which I can't do however much he is suffering it wouldn't be unethical to put him to death save him the suffering that's allowed with animals it wouldn't be unethical to let him to die naturally uh in suffering but I can't do it I can't take that step I can't force death upon him for his own good what do I know about his own good it's something I I just can't do right well that's the sense of that's the kind of impossibility that I'm talking about and then uh all of these different kinds of possibilities open up an analysis about the nature of imagination the trouble is that my imagination when I wrote that was so limited I couldn't see how much further one should go but I'm sure and I can't the claim to have gone much further still but I'm sure one could develop that kind of analysis in Greater detail I hope you will do it one of you okay you claim that imagination is invested in all aspects of human consciousness not just love um and yet experience is what presents to one's imagination possibilities um you say that art is closely Allied to imagination and as you contended before imagination also prefers negative attitudes where love is and is um is subject to negative as well as positive appra appraisals and bestows as they interact with each other in all further circumstances um you offer imagination as a cure although it can be seen as a cause of mental illness um you relate your ideas about the imaginary to those of w wienstein and Sal um wiin emphasized viin I think Vin V like it's a German name viin V Vin I know I can do it I can do it vien Stein um emphasize the difference between imagination and the having of either Sensations or uh simple imagery um imagining a simulating experience rather than being a duplication of some perceptual content in it self identifies imagination with the imaginary arguing that the imaginary and perceptual art can you stop a second before you go on to the imaginary um in the 18th century many philosophers even great ones like John U well John lock but um David hum is what I was thinking of um analyze the analyze imagination in terms of a property that's related to sensory experience so it's the having of images that imagination uh is a way of dealing with images that we have like visual images auditory images and so on and that something that I reject as vicenin also does um you don't have to have a perception of anything in order to have imagination so that um but any but it can it's something that many creatures can have so my dog can imagine that I want to go out if I put my Overcoat on doesn't mean there's an image that comes to him and there isn't an image to me when I say you know I can imagine um um um there being weapons of mass destruction still hidden in Iraq or I can't imagine that after all this time we'll ever disco discover any find any now that doesn't involve any Act of imagery and there is another word to account for the fact that we often do have images and use them in very productive ways and that's called Imaging imagining imagining um um so imagining is different from having imagination on top of that let me add there is a book on the list that I put on the list uh by a writer named Gran called the worlds of imagination isn't that it uh yeah the world of imagination right uh it's a very big book hundreds of pages and very encyclopedia opedic she goes through philosophical psychological all sorts of theories of imagination and then gives her own ideas and her idea is that imagination is a kind of imagining which I don't agree with at all uh so that um you you um I uh you at in the place in which I give her a footnote you could see my rejecting that and um as an antidote to me you might want to look at her book in general if you use the footnotes cleverly you can piece together uh a great deal of literature that is relevant to these problems some of which disagree with me and some of which you may want to uh agree with right all right now we can go on to the imaginary I don't know if I get into it too much but um you say that Sal identifies imagination with the imaginary arguing that the imaginary and perceptual are irreconcilable um he claims that imagination is of the unreal um treating impossibilities as if they were indeed possible um you say that love reveals how thoroughly the imaginary saturates our appetitive and consum comptitive reptitive English is not my first language forgive me oh really what is tell me what is cray and French really is not interesting and are they different yes Creo is different from French yes but it's related to French yes um I guess for example um we don't um conjugate verbs we always use the infinitive is creel a dialect or totally different language I mean it's considered a dialect but it's an official language of Haiti mhm that's fascinating so but and in I would say in French but in I Sayan so there where did you grow up I well I was born in ha came here when I was six so I pretty much you born where in Haiti and people speak Creole there yeah and French oh was Creo the language of Haiti not French both of them are the official languages in Haiti both are official languages I think I think of Creole as New Orleans and well they're different you know the period when Napoleon owned Louisiana there different cre there's Spanish cre there's you know Portuguese cre there's all kinds of it's great you have these different languages may may I make a suggestion it's getting close to 5:00 okay I'm almost done well I was hoping we could go a little further into the concept of of the imaginary which is something that people have had troubles with and it'll take us longer I think that we can so could you begin again on that and then we'll see how how it goes next time sure um there was something I was going to say about oh that's right uh before we stop I wanted to point out something which I think I neglected to mention last time and that that is there are all kinds of philosophers my kind or what I know through my own experience is a maker of distinctions so that this chapter illustrates that there's this very fuzzy difficult very amorphous concept of the imagination which we all talk about we use the word all the time and nobody knows what they mean and it's the job of the philosopher to do something about that now my way of approaching that is to take it and make distinctions among different types as a way of seeing the complexity and as a way of resisting the temptation to reduce any of these important uh Mega Concepts to a single one so my view is non- reductivism so it's Analytical in that sense uh it's the making of distinctions and I do it not only because I'm not reductivism one category of explanation but also because um I feel that once we've made various ambiguities and per and puzzlements evident they go away they take care of themselves the beginning of this tradition is in the philosophy of Socrates Socrates thought of himself as some who simply wants to make ideas clear and he began it was the beginning of logic of of that sort and he also um felt that he had no knowledge he was not a not a scientist uh he made no claims to any metaphysical or ultimate insights but that by helping people to clarify their thinking to make their ideas clear they would know what reality is because they're immersed in it we're all immersed in it reality is US each of us but we're all different so if you had played Socrates didn't pursue that as much as I do and want to the differences among people that comes from my American sources so we're all different and all equally valuable our experience is all equally important to us and definitive of us but if we're all different then then there isn't any one reality and the job of the philosophers is to help people to find their own reality and they're going to do that by avoiding all of the stock ideas and vague generalizations that we grow up with just to make our own ideas clear so the non the the pluralism the non- reductivism um the uh emphasis upon um making ideas clear they all go together and in terms of my usual method um it means Mak these distinctions making them very rationally and with great sharpness not operating on the kitchen table but uh with the Sharp Tools of surgeon in the hospital uh to make these distinctions and once you've made them you may find that the nature of the original question that's been troubling people and that philosophers have tried to deal with in some grandiose way no longer applies and that uh people sort of forget that puzzlement it's a kind of therapy a kind of conceptual therapy when it's done well um that's all I hope for I'm not going to tell anybody how to live I I don't tell people how to live but I try to help them to make their ideas clear and then they'll know how to live and can do it better than me very often um and that I think is illustrated by the structure of this chapter the nature of imagination well I have a a general idea about the experiencing possibilities but it's not very profound then you break it up into its parts to make the distinctions and then you go on to what looks like something that follows out of that like the branch following out of the lower regions of the trunk and so on and so on um somebody asked vikin Stein what he does for a living and he was a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and but a very special kind of person and what he said was I am a maker of analogies and when you study his philosophy it's true he was always making analogies that was the way he approached all of the traditional problems of philosophy well in that same vein I am a maker of distinctions and you just encountered one example of it may not be what you need you live your own life maybe some help and the last distinction about of the imaginary um takes us very close to questions about creativity and uh needs much more development that's why I would like to leave it for next time one final question who is going to give the presentation next time do that Nick great fine and as I said um somebody coming into the course will catch up very readily by looking at the vide tapes um and I don't know how how many more we're going to make but for the first two weeks anybody who wants to who has the motivation will be welcome so I'll see you next time SEC same place same same time did I do okay I mean I wasn't sure I just no you did fine you did fine don't worry about it you did fine think that jumped out of me you did fine okay