The Teleology of Imagination
Knowledge constitutes justified, true belief and as such the path to knowledge necessarily begins with a belief (which is then determined by reason and evidence to be justified according to an assumption of truth). This ability to form beliefs is owed to our imaginative faculty, and every attempt to construct knowledge, to “build a coherent theory about reality is an act of imagination.” As truth is the passive a priori condition of knowledge — that is ‘if there is no such thing as truth, then there can be no knowledge’[1] — belief is its active counterpart, from which we start to form our conception of reality. Fundamentally, truth and belief are notions of meaning, and come to us not by the way of science and rationality, but only through the imaginative faculty, through the heart as Pascal put it.[2]
That we can grasp this assumption of truth, that we can construct beliefs, owes to the fact that we are beings that can register meaning — seemingly made for and made up of meaning. Similar to Wheeler’s Participatory Universe[3] which has the universe remaining in an indefinitive state until the observer arrived to solidify the superposition of the cosmos, “perhaps significance in the cosmos can only be perceived by … imagination. Perhaps the universe has been waiting for our form of imaginative seeing.”
We are beings given to meaning, which nourishes and sustains us. But there is a strange paradox to meaning, in that it exposes us to both the meaning of love and the meaninglessness of suffering. In one way, love ‘lights up the world’, yet suffering threatens to drown any trace of meaningfulness. But here is where the paradox lies: that that which strikes us down also picks us up again. The risk and terror of meaning can nonetheless be “transformed into hope by the awakening of love”. Similar to the notion expressed by Levinas[4], “we learn to love and be loved in a peculiar way in the middle of suffering.” We learn to love through suffering and its attending ‘tendering of the soul’. In suffering, we learn to reach out from ourselves towards the Other and towards a love that “can overcome anything in the world, including the grief of the sufferer”.
Suffering leads us to salvation, and it is in suffering that we come to see the ‘beauty that will save the world.’[5] Life is a sculpture half done, and it has fallen on us to pick up where the universe has left off. We respond to meaninglessness, not in giving in to despair, but standing tall and declaring that it matters to us. The universe is not just cold and meaningless, because we are here to give it meaning. We are the universe in microcosm, we are the conscious flowering of nature herself, and because it matters to us, it has to matter to the universe. In this way, we transmute horror into hope, pain into promise, and suffering into salvation. God is struggling “alongside us towards a harmonious whole,” towards a cosmos that “is moving toward an end, with a strange teleology aimed at bringing about beauty.” “We are creators inside creation” finding our way home. And this transformation of the world is the end goal of our imaginative journey.
All unreferenced quotations taken from Raymond C. Barfield’s The Poetic Apriori: Philosophical Imagination in a Meaningful Universe. 2020.
[1] “Epistemology.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[2] “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know. … We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles.” — Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts. [Translated by W. F. Trotter. Vol. 48, Part 1. The Harvard Classics. 1909–14]
[3] We find ourselves living in a participatory universe emerging from the “interplay of consciousness and physical reality, the subjective and objective realms”. — Horgan, John. [Paraphrasing John Wheeler]. “Why Information Can’t be the Basis of Reality”. Scientific American. 7 Mar. 2011
[4] The path to becoming fully human lies in our ability to “suffer for the Other” — Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics as First Philosophy. In, Kearney, Richard, and Mara Rainwater’s The Continental Philosophy Reader. 1996.
[5] Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot. 1869.
