想象力二分法(英文).doc
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1、The Dichotomy of Imagination想象力二分法In the West, the imagination as an image forming faculty has been variously dichotomized. Plotinus, for instance, distinguishes between a higher and a lower phantasy (i.e., imagination).1 For him the lower is dependent on sense while the higher is reflective of idea
2、s. By this distinction he is making his Neoplatonic assertion that the World of Ideas is truer and thus higher than the World of Senses. This distinction, however, also suggests that imagination is, for Plotinus, a mediatory power between the material and the form of art, because in his ideology to
3、create art through imagination is to invest matter with form, and that, in turn, is to unify sense with ideas.After Plotinus, the next significant dichotomy of imagination was made by Hobbes. In his Leviathan Hobbes divides imagination into the simple and the compounded types. The former refers to “
4、the imagining the whole object, as it was presented to the sense,” as when one imagines a man or a horse he has seen before. The latter refers to the imagining of a compounded object whose parts have been perceived before at several times, as when “from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse
5、 at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaure.” This latter type also includes the compounding of the image of ones own person with the image of the actions of another man, as when “a man imagines himself a Hercules, or an Alexander.”2Hoboes division of imagination into simple and compounded types
6、 does not transgress the bounds of experience, which is for him simply “much memory” or “memory of many things.” However, contrary to many peoples concept of Hobbes empirical tradition, this division of his does not describe imagination as a faculty entirely passive and devoid of invention. To be su
7、re, his “simple imagination” is not creative at all. Yet, his “compounded imagination” is, as he says, capable of “a fiction of the mind.”3 It explains, in fact, that imaginative creation is the work of dissection and recombination, or of relocational displacement of one sense impression with anothe
8、r, not that of producing something absolutely new-an idea to be directly uttered later by Edmund Burke in his The Sublime and Beautiful.In the 18th century, Joseph Addison talked of primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination in his Spectator articles. The basis for such a classification is t
9、he source of pleasures to be derived from imagination. The source of the primary is really-seen objects while that of the secondary is remembered absent or fictitious objects. This assortment serves to explain peoples difference of taste, besides calling our attention to the fact that imagination wo
10、rks not only in the writer but also in the reader-a fact the reader-oriented critics of our time have given special heed to.The Scottish philosopher Dougald Stewart is one of the first to use fancy and imagination to designate two related sorts of the same image-forming faculty. He ascribes imagery
11、wholly to “fancy,” saying that it is the power which “supplies the poet with metaphorical language,” while, freeing “imagination” from its close association with the image, he calls the imagination the power that “creates the complex scenes he the poet describes and the fictitious characters he deli
12、neates,” as illustrated in Miltons Eden, Harringtons Oceana, and Shakespeares Falstaff or Hamlet.4 This differentiation between fancy and imagination is in essence little different from Hobbes division of simple and compounded imagination. Yet, Stewart is here confined to the realm of literature, as
13、 he talks solely of metaphorical language and scenes and characters, instead of just the image of a man or a horse and the image of a Centaur or a Hercules in a scene. More importantly, he makes us realize that the image-forming faculty can deal with either linguistic or extralinguistic matters (arr
14、anging scenes and delineating characters are extralinguistic imagination).The most impressive Romantic who dichotomizes the image-forming faculty by using the names of fancy and imagination is of course S. T. Coleridge. But before Coleridges dichotomy appeared in Biographia Literaria (1817), his fri
15、end Wordsworth had made his own dichotomy in his Preface to Poems (1815). The two Romantics ideas of fancy and imagination are quite different and their respective points have been subject to various interpretations and ample arguments. To speak summarily, for Wordsworth “Fancy is given to quicken a
16、nd to beguile the temporal part of our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal.-Yet is it not the less true that fancy, as she is an active, is also, under her own laws and in her own spirit, a creative faculty.”5 In contrast, regarding imagination as the only creative power, Coleri
17、dge thinks of fancy as merely a passive, associative, rather than creative, faculty, for, as he says, it is “indeed not other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space” and it must needs “receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.”6Actually, neither Co
18、leridges nor Wordsworths distinction between fancy and imagination makes any great sense in terms of literary creation. What really counts is Coleridges further dichotomy of imagination into the primary and the secondary types:The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of
19、all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only
20、in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead
21、. (Biographia Literaria, chpt. 13)This famous passage is indeed charged with philosophical depth, hence giving rise to difficulties of interpretation. In my book Imagination and the Process of Literary Creation (1991), I have given some critics explications which may or may not be right. And I have
22、given my own explication, which I dare to deem very sensible. Basically I agree with most critics that Coleridges primary and secondary imagination ought to refer to the powers of human perception vs. artistic creation. Nevertheless, I think the primary imagination can be exercised in two modes: eit
23、her with or without the users conscious will. And it can result in either ordinary or extraordinary human perception, related respectively to what some psychologists call “R-thinking” (reality-adjusted thinking) and “A-thinking” (autism).7In reality, the above-quoted passage of Coleridges is a descr
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