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Thursday 27 February 2014

That double-faced companion

Above all things he feared imagination, that double-faced companion, friend on one side and foe on the other – friend in so far as one distrusts it, and enemy if one goes trustfully to sleep to the sound of its sweet murmur.
Ivan Goncharov – Oblamov

Spinoza distrusted imagination, seeing it as the primary form of defective and deceptive thinking. However, both his view and Goncharov’s may have been influenced by the absurdly superstitious worlds in which they found themselves.

These days we value our imagination, often equating it to creativity. Yet I think Spinoza and Goncharov had a point and we should distrust its sweet murmur. It seems to me that vast swathes of political reasoning are little more than the sweet murmur of imagination swirling around some more or less nebulous utopian core.

Impossibilities dressed up as possibilities, like a dream where we swoop and soar through fluffy clouds supported by nothing better than the power of the unconscious mind to pooh pooh physics.

One day there will be an app for people who hanker after a more active imagination. An app which knows our habits and limitations will trawl the web to find some imaginative yet personalised possibilities complete with bespoke ads and special offers...

...and that’s enough imagination for one day.

2 comments:

Mac said...

I assume your last paragraph is a little tongue-in-cheek dig at Google and the fight to disable all their stuff on an Android tablet?
“Don’t go down that street; try this one. There’s a great place for lunch. It’s got 20 thumbs-up already! We see you don’t have your Google+ circle set up yet. A tad disappointing but try to get it done today, okay? So many folk waiting to message you with their comings and goings. How exciting is that? While you’re there, we have a couple of great YouTube clips for you to view. Oh, and a great new book you need to download ASAP. Have a great day and remember, we’ll be watching!”
Anybody who can disable all that Google stuff should find arresting climate change a doddle. Delete it? You’re kidding, right?

A K Haart said...

Mac - yes it is tongue in cheek. As you say, we are well down that road. I sometimes wonder how long it will be possible to blog here without a Google+ account.