The Imaginative Space of Science

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

               --C.S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare”

According to Lewis, we discover truth through reason and meaning through imagination.

[Note: after coming to the end of this blog post, I realized that I should probably define imagination, which unfortunately would require an entirely separate post. For now, I found a working definition of imagination from Wikipedia, which I’ve also slightly modified: “the ability to form new images and sensations in the mind that are not presently, physically perceived through senses such as sight, hearing, or other senses.”]

For example, we often employ metaphors in our writing to help readers understand the “truths” of certain ideas that aren’t necessarily picturable, such as emotions, human character, motivations, etc. The emotions or impressions aroused by metaphor are supposed to be similar to the object it analogizes, even if the literal meaning of the metaphor is completely unlike the object it represents. Suppose I write, “The man just two storefronts down was like a rattlesnake one has just realized lies in the tall grass three feet to the right.” In this case, the man isn’t like the rattlesnake in appearance, intelligence, or position; rather, the mention of the rattlesnake is meant to draw certain emotions from the reader which would reflect the character’s feelings about the man. (If you’re interested in reading more, I garnered most of these ideas from Robert Holyer’s article, “C.S. Lewis on the Epistemic Significance of the Imagination”).

We might say that imagination initiates an understanding of the significance or meaning of certain truths. The readings for this week seemed to also support this particular function of imagination. Wolpert writes, “science often explains the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar” (233). We could read this statement in many different ways (and he probably did mean that familiar, day-to-day objects are usually explained away by what appears strange), but one interpretation could be that science involves the “unfamiliar”—the fictional, the imaginative—to understand and communicate the familiar. Scientists quite often use metaphor to describe scientific concepts: the universe is foamlike; electrons orbit around atoms as if they were planets spinning around a sun; genes are part of a code; the Earth is a living organism (Robert Root-Bernstein).

We use imagination not only to understand scientific concepts but also to form questions and pursue different hypotheses. In this following passage, the “it” Carl Sagan refers to is actually science. However, I’ve decided to replace the subject with “imagination,” and I think it fits quite nicely:

[Imagination] invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. [Imagination] counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. [Imagination] urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom. (241)

Sagan’s (modified) first sentence could highlight the role of metaphor in imagination, as I’ve already discussed. The second sentence deals with hypothesizing, and what drives hypothesizing if not imagination? Some would argue that reason and critical thinking form the basis of hypotheses, but then, that brings us back to the quote by C.S. Lewis, and we are forced to distinguish between imagination and reason. (I think the distinction hinges on the difference between truth and meaning—again, a subject for a different article and one that involves more depth than I could possibly cover in this blog post.) Sagan’s third sentence reminds me of Subrahmanya Chandrasekhar’s statement that “There is ample evidence that in science, beauty is often the source of delight” (350). To roughly summarize something of what Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedrus, the soul longs for and aspires toward the beautiful (The Rhetorical Tradition 148-155). But what kindles that desire for the beautiful? I think the spark begins with imagination: “The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 225).