A very short history of imagination

Introduction The point of trying to sketch even a very short history of imagination is due to the way such a complex concept accumulates its meaning. What we mean by the term today is a compound of residues of various meanings people have had of it in the past. Many of our most complex concepts are accumulations of meanings whose constituents often do not always entirely cohere. We have a sense of vagueness about such concepts. In the case of imagination, I think this sense of vagueness is due in part to its complexity but also in part to its containing a number of elements that do not sit comfortably together. I think we can clarify its present complex meaning by unfolding some of the ideas that have folded into it over the centuries. The old style of intellectual history -in which modern Western thought is taken as an unequivocal pinnacle reached by a progressive, evolutionary path from the confusions of myth, through the glories of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and so on, to ourselves in the present -has hit a number of snags of late. This is a particularly unhelpful paradigm or story-line if our focus is imagination. In as far as imagination is assumed generally to be a good thing, it is far from clear that it is more fully exercised, more evidently life-enhancing, more socially beneficial now than at the beginnings of human history. We have difficulty denying that in the mythologies of the world there is evidence of imaginative life of a vivid power rarely encountered in the Western intellectual tradition today. So let us begin with imagination in mythic cultures, and then try to trace something of its career in the mental life of the West. In the conclusion to this chapter, I will synthesize as well as I can the persistent features evident in the varied uses of the concept, trying to provide that "more articulate grasp" on imagination.