Can a sophisticated individual rise above ideology?

Had he even been subjected to the critical habit of thought? There is an important difference between the self as it is experienced and lived and the self as it is investigated objectively.

Which is another way of saying imagination is not a necessary for being an intellectual. Not something I would have guessed you'd espouse, but that's fine. Does the same go for social attachment?

Good point.

To clarify I must go into a long dissertation regarding what is and is not the correct and substantive meaning of imagination. I shall try to prepare such a statement.

I wouldn't bother old chap. It will inevitably be just another piece of sophistry in the service of proving that your imagination is superior in every respect to that of the average common person, one of whom, as is well known, is born every minute.

Good. It would mean sidtracking my present program.

Are you sure about that Chuck?

Imagination is a function of the concepts available to it.

This is some of my rough information that I plan to use to speak about imagination.

Imagination is Central to the Cognitive Process/

“Human thought is irreducibly imaginative.”--Steven Winter page 5 winter

Human thought is not principally representational, propositional, or computational; empirical research from SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) informs us that our thought processes are imagistic and cross-modal.

Two most important conclusions derived from cognitive research are that imagination is central to the cognitive process and that this imagination is embodied. We are learning that human imagination operates orderly and systematically based upon our bodily interaction with the world. Imagination structures cognition in light of our bodily structure; thereby giving it the necessary dynamic quality and grounding



Cognition is dynamic and adaptive; it is not principally representational, propositional, or computational, “it involves processes that are imaginative, associative, and analogical”. Human brain processes are imagistic and cross-modal.”

Winter page xi
“By far the most important conclusions to emerge from the recent work on cognition [SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science)] are two: first, the imagination is central to the cognitive process; and second, that imagination is embodied. The workings of the mind simply cannot be understood without appreciating the pivotal role of embodied imagination in all aspects of cognition, language, and thought. The implications are momentous. On one hand, we are discovering the human thought is irreducibly imaginative. On the other, we are learning that"contrary to the conventional wisdom"human imagination operates in an orderly and systematic fashion. This insight alters the contours of entire debates in disciplines such as law, philosophy, and literary theory.”


Johnson page 1
“Recent empirical research in the cognitive sciences has revealed that both our concepts and our reasoning about them are grounded in the nature of our bodily experience and are structured by various kinds of imaginative processes. Consequently, since moral reasoning makes use of these same general cognitive capacities, it, too, is grounded in embodied structure of meaning and is imaginative through and through. This means that the quality of our moral understanding and deliberation depends critically on the cultivation of our moral imagination.”

Imaginative Rationality

All of our laws of natural science are human constructs that depended upon imaginative rationality in their construction.

Human understanding is about a process of developing imaginative models of reality and then testing those imaginative structures against what is perceived as reality. We comprehend our model of reality, i.e. our hypothesis, as being true when that model fits our comprehension of the situation closely enough for our purposes.

In our vanity we have tried to hide the true nature of imagination because imagination has been closely associated with the body, how ghastly the vulgar body when compared to the nature of gods. Can one be a god when one is required to drag along the body, especially when that body includes an anus?

Imagine how imagination works.

Imagination has a two part job: Imagination is part of the creation of image schemas and of the creation of elaborate models of reality. Imagination fits into the beginning of thought and into the resulting meaning of thought.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) and Antonio Damasio inform me that before there is a concept of an object or an experience there exists already preconceptual structures that makes such things possible.

An object is an entity: such as a person, rock, tree, tooth ache, song, melody, etc. An image is a “mental pattern in any of the sensory modalities, e.g. a sound image, a tactile image, the image of a state of well-being. Such images convey aspects of the physical characteristics of the object and they may also convey the reaction of like or dislike one may have for an object, the plans one may formulate for it, or the web of relationships of this object among other objects.” Pge 9 damasio

How are such resulting images from the inputs from our five sensory portals formed into what might loosely be called the MITB (“movie-in-the-brain”)? Damasio says “I believe these qualities will be eventually explained neurobiological although at the moment the neurobiological account is incomplete and there is an explanatory gap.”

Consciousness is a matter of connecting this MITB with the self. Damasio cannot explain at this time the biological formation of the object but sets himself the task of theorizing about the second problem of consciousness; that is the parallel problem of comprehending the sense of self in the act of knowing.

Consciousness is the coming together of an object and the self.

Quotes from “The Feeling of what Happens” Antonio Damasio

No need. I'm simply trying to make sense of contradictory statements in your first post. If you believe that imagination is necessary for an "intellectual," then you're rejecting the Parekh quotation you cited. Fine. Does the same go for social engagement? Parekh says intellectuals are socially engaged, you say they are not.

The problem is between passionate social engagement and disinterested social engagement. The more passioanate the engagement the greater the pull of ideology especially in a nation such as America. The American public is very susceptable to manipulation because few Americans have any education in Critical Thinking. So if one side is not spinning while the other side is spinning like crazy then the spinning can produce the winner. In a society like America spinning, i.e ideology, becomes a necessity.

Not only is that an oxymoron, but your own posts contradict it. Do you think contemporary American society can be characterized a certain way, and you think that way needs to change? If so, then your social engagement is not disinterested. Nor should it be, if you actually want to make a difference.

A difference to what? Flaubert wasn't trying to make a difference. Nor Joyce. Nor Proust. It is the artistic contradiction. Trying to describe the social scene disinterestedly whilst being inevitably a part of it no matter how far you withdraw from it. Three exiles: one to his study (with R&R breaks), one to another country and one to his bed in a room lined with cork.

And they made a difference. It is trying to make a difference which inhibits actually making any of any interest.

To clarify, what difference did Joyce and Proust make? What changed?



While we're on the subject of French naturalism, Flaubert's buddy Zola provides a resounding counterexample. As do Bergson and Saint-Saëns, to take contemporaries from outside literature.



In any event, all of these are non sequiturs unless Coberst is claiming to be a disinterested artist rather than an agent of social change.

Oh Babe-- you need to go back to school.

Chuck's chances of being an agent of social change are zero.

C'mon, Spendi, fill me in. What is different about the world thanks to Joyce and Proust?



For all his hemming and hawing about it, I don't think he wants to be one. Not really. It would mean leaving the armchair.

spendi doesn't use a armchair; he uses a bar stool.

C'mon Shapie-- are you kidding? Every decent wordsmith is familiar with both and influenced by them. Like in osmosis. Joycean and Proustian are words one hears in conversation and employed casually in literary articles.

For a detailed answer you need prepare yourself for ca few years intensive study. The moral relativity you see around you didn't grow on trees.

I'm far from disputing later writers' familiarity with Joyce and Proust. I would dispute the extent of their influence: without questioning that many authors were influenced by Joyce and Proust (I'd say Joyce more than Proust), I would dispute that enough authors were influenced by them that one can state that they "changed the world." The fact that Joyce and Proust had distinctive enough styles that we now have the terms "Joycean" and "Proustian" does not show that Joyce and Proust changed the world. It merely shows that they had distinctive styles.

In any event, that is neither here nor there as far as this thread goes because the kind of change you are talking about is felt only within the world of artists, whereas the kind of change Cobby and I were discussing was social change. You expressed the belief that the only artists to engender social change were the ones who never deigned to try (a quintessentially modernist belief and an unsurprising one given that your examples were Joyce and Proust) but history furnishes countless counterexamples. That's why I asked you about what kind of "change" you had in mind with Joyce and Proust: as I suspected, you weren't talking about social change.

The simple answer is no. "Sophisticated individual" is an oxymoron so that anything that follows doesn't make any sense.

Not simply "later writers". Journalists, script writers, teachers.

We all have distinctive styles. But only a few give their name to them. The changes brought about are felt everywhere but are not striking. It's a tone. An ambience. A movement in emphasis.



Was I so extreme. I hadn't meant to be. I meant a tendency.

Might I recommend S.J.Goldberg's The Classical Temper.

If there is a tendency, it is only a few decades old because it is only in the modernist era that artists (and their critics) have been squeamish about the relationship between art and social issues. That squeamishness would have been alien to just about any artist before the twentieth century. For better or worse we've inherited that view, but the fact that it is of recent vintage makes me reluctant to describe it even as a "tendency."