Can Imagination, Alone, Lead Us to Beauty?


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Can Imagination Alone Provide a Compelling Reason to Live?




Is imagination capable of providing a meaningful ritual and narrative for each and every human life?—or, on the other hand, does every serious, thinking individual eventually evaluate imagination as fantasy and superstition? The former is imagination as myth and ritual fundamental to a society; the latter is imagination as folly, often dangerous folly.

Do we not “mentally perceive” the objective events of our lives with a continuing set of evolving mental representations? The mental representations of objective phenomena, though often imprecise, are automatically classified by the mind as physical reality. This reality is found to obey physical laws, as if—in a metaphorical sense—actual physical phenomena were constrained to exist upon a “physical surface” where science and its measurements and its mathematics reign supreme, unhindered and unchallenged by metaphysics which has been consigned by science to other dimensions—dimensions  where subjective and spiritual concepts are allowed. Imagination, using this metaphor, may exist away from the “physical surface” of objective reality; that is, imagination is not constrained to the “physical surface” but free to exist and to play in other dimensions of mental activity. If freedom exists for us at all, does it not exist first and foremost in the human imagination?

Of course, our human subconscious already has filtered and conditioned the output of our senses before we are consciously aware of them. Do you believe that each of us has a double, as the ancients believed their shadow to be?—Another self, on the other side of the mirror of the mind with which we contemplate ourselves. Somehow, deep within us, complex sets of excited neurons and brain chemistry orders our initial perceptions before they are presented to the conscious self. These become mental representations that impact us at the threshold of our conscious mind with intuitive conceptions of space and time. Then, out of a driving and instinctual curiosity, our conscious intellect operates on these mental representations, continuously seeking causes and effects, subjects and objects.  Our conscious intellect then relates these mental representations to stored memory in a continuously updated fashion that we conventionally label “thinking.” Again we may ask: What has imagination, if anything, to do with this?—That is, if imagination is associated with the uniquely human faculty of being able to free our mental selves from the  metaphorical surface of objective reality, of what use is it in a real life that takes place only on that physical surface?

Is this not the fundamental problem of modern life?—To find meaning in a life now confined to objective reality?—To find meaning in a life haunted by guaranteed annihilation? Can Imagination Alone Provide a Compelling Reason to Live?

Nature and Imagination: Can They Ever Be the Same?


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Nature and Imagination: Which Causes Which?


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“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”   (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Is it fair to say that the subconscious and the conscious existed before language? Were they there in our prehistoric heads before we spoke using symbols or before we drew pictures on the walls of a cave? Regardless, both of these faculties would have been, as they are now, limited and determined by genetics, environment, and perhaps by the complex epigenetic relationships between them. All would be dictated by evolutionary necessity, would it not? Freedom of will, certainly before language, would be an illusion.

Today, science discredits most beliefs formerly considered miraculous, and neuroscience has demonstrated that our subconscious inner-self makes decisions before our conscious mind is aware of them, ironically relegating our consciousness to the status of an observer (of our deeper self which is determined by “nature plus nurture”).  However, despite these so-called advances of science, if there were only one “miracle” left for us to believe in, it would be the wonder of symbolic language—language that not only creates and defines the “self” within a culture, but that opens up the power of imagination, the power to conceive of what has never been and that never could be. With imagination—that is, with the “freedom of imagination,” a real power emerges from our psyche, a power that once again ignites the search and the hope for freedom—freedom of will, at least, if not freedom of action.

Therefore, if freedom of will is not another illusion waiting to be debunked by science, that freedom needs to be unleashed by the power of imagination through the “miracle” of symbolic language. Without imagination—as Wittgenstein states above—language is not liberating, but rather a hard constraint on what we can know and understand. “What a queer mechanism,” Wittgenstein says, that we can imagine someone “even if he is thousands of miles away or dead.” (“The Blue Book”).

The logical power and constraints of language, when combined with the unleashing of unlimited possibility through imagination, provide our species with the ultimate survival advantage—the freedom to imagine nature itself as infinite possibility. Imagination, properly informed and disciplined, is the escape hatch from the prison ruled by language and logic and mathematics; it is the creative spark that produces those rare “eureka” flashes of insight and that allows us to become artists in creating our own narratives of existence and of generating meaning and hope for our place within existence.

Therefore, can we not accept that nature and imagination cause each other, because they both exist fundamentally as concepts within our minds, mutually created within us by evolutionary forces beyond our comprehension? Just as Yahweh is unspoken because no word or words can describe an ineffable Being, just so we need a similar word (or metaphor) for nature that shows by its utterance its inadequacy.

Can Nature and Philosophy Coexist?




Is Nature an affront to humanity?



It seems that nature is wondrous to behold as an observer, but at times terrifying to experience as a participant. When least expected, our breath may be cut short, our perceived mooring in creation may be toppled, and our stability may be exposed as a fraud in a single brittle and fragile moment. Despite our awe of nature, it affronts us in three primary ways. Our cosmology puts us, forgets us, in an unremarkable corner of one of uncountable galaxies; our biology tells us that we exist at the end of an innumerable number of mutations through the ages, compensating for insufficient instinct and lack of physical adaptation with intelligence from a three-pound brain; and our psychology exposes our fragile ego with defense mechanisms that demonstrate that we are not masters of our own consciousness.

What Are the Preconditions for “Good News” in Our Life?

QUESTION: “Is Freedom of Will Necessary for Life to Have Meaning?”

NOTE: Freedom of will, as used here, is not freedom of action. Freedom of action implies the lack of external constraints on our thoughts and behaviors, while freedom of will implies our ability to think or to determine our attitude regardless of external constraints. Freedom of action may be determined by outside factors; freedom of will, if it exists, is an autonomous faculty within ourselves.

If there is no freedom of will and therefore no autonomous faculty within ourselves, then our deepest mental processes are fully and totally determined by genetics, the environment, and the epigenetic relationship between them. This list of primary influences on our decisions and behavior seems complete. What other human faculty or physical process is there that would result in autonomy and thus confer freedom of will? The imagined concept of a metaphysical soul seems necessary to provide this autonomy, and this is, indeed, a leap of faith!

And so, if the freedom of will is necessary for meaning in life, then metaphysics seems essential to define the soul, the spiritual faculty that confers true autonomy. Otherwise, if freedom of will is an illusion, the belief in meaning for one’s life (as well as the belief in personal freedom of any significance) is also an illusion, one that is pre-programmed, fated, and determined.

ANSWER: “Yes, otherwise one’s life only provides the illusion of meaning.” 


“The reality in…

“The reality in which we live is determined by unreality which we believe to be real because it is rational.”

Otto Rank (“Beyond Psychology”)

“In the physical sciences, advance often comes through paradigms that build upon and then replace one another. The measurable value of these paradigms lies in their predictive capacity for material processes and events. In the social sciences, however, and often also in philosophy and religion, separate paradigms often tend to debunk or negate one another rather than build upon them. So today, the once great Sigmund Freud is largely negated by contemporary psychologists, often without reading his work. Freud’s disciple Otto Rank, on the contrary, built upon what was solid in Freud and created a paradigm of human behavior that expanded Freud’s insight, negating only that within Freud’s activity which could be shown to be in error. In this, Rank’s insights relative to Freud’s work are analogous to Einstein’s insights relative to Newton’s work; that is, they build rather than negate. This, I believe, is the key to advancement in any field of endeavor.”  (dkreikneros)


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