Imagination

Imagination, David Abram argues (following Merleau-Ponty), is not “a separate mental faculty” but “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.”  These anticipations are products of imagination, but are not arbitrary: “they regularly respond to suggestions offered by the sensible itself.”

A professional sleight-of-hand magician, Abram illustrates by talking about coin tricks: “I may suddenly hide the coin behind the hand, clipping it between two fingers, so that it is no longer visible to their gaze.  If, an instant later, I reach into the air on the other side of my body with my left hand, and bring into view another silver coin that had been clipped behind that hand, the audience common perceives something quite wondrous.  They will not perceive that one coin has been momentarily hidden while a wholly different coin, in another place, has been brought out of hiding, although this would surely be the most obvious and rational interpretation.  Rather, they will perceive that a single coin, having vanished from my right hand, has traveled invisibly through the air and reappeared in my left hand!”  Abram says that “the perceiving body does not calculate logical probabilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in order to see them more fully.”