التخيل التمثيلي والتخيل المبدع ؛ الحقيقة والخيال .. كتاب علم النَّفس جميل صَليبا

Representational imagination and creative imagination; Fact and fiction... imagination

1 - Introduction

Imagination has many meanings among philosophers. Some of them (Descartes) make it a pictorial force that retrieves the images in the imagination and represents it sensually. Some of them make it a creative force that creates images and creates or invents new meanings. Some of them make it an imaginary, false force that generates illusions and dreams. Descartes’ students even describe this force by saying that it is “madness in the house,” and “a cause of error and vice.” Most contemporary philosophers find imagination necessary for man, because it relieves his pain, makes life endearing to him, and reveals He talks about the secrets of the universe. The difference in meanings of imagination led one of the contemporary philosophers to say that this necessary word for language must be removed from the dictionary of psychology due to its many meanings (1) and that it can be replaced with clearer words, such as imagery, creativity, and illusion. However, this term is indispensable to us, because in each of the pictures (representational imagination), creativity and illusion there is some kind of imagination. Let us now examine each of these three sections: that is, the representational imagination, the creative imagination, and the imaginary imagination.

2 - Representative imagination and creative imagination: truth and imagination

The representational imagination is a memory without knowledge, or as it was said, it is merely the return of psychological images to the arena of feeling. We know that the image is the continuation of the feeling in the soul after the absence of the stimulus, or it is the memory of the feeling. We mentioned this in the study of mental images. If a person recalls an image of a mountain or a river, and does not know which mountain to see or which river to imagine, his imagination is representational (Imagination. reproductrice). Because imagination restores what the soul has preserved and remains in it after the absence of tangible things. It is therefore similar to memory, except as we said, it is memory without knowledge. This representational imagination, as you can see, is limited to retrieving images preserved in the soul. As for creative imagination, it changes these images into one another and extracts new models from them. Look at the photographer. He is drawing with his brush an imaginary picture that he sees deep within himself. He did not recall a simple picture that he had previously preserved in himself, but rather he superimposed some of what was in these simple pictures onto others, creating a new picture from them.

However, this difference between representative imagination and creative imagination is not absolute, because representative imagination does not restore psychological images as they are, but rather changes them, erasing some of their elements, and adding some new elements to them. We demonstrated this when researching feelings and the danger of memories. Memories are not identical images of the past, but rather they are often a composite of both the past and the present, because the soul creates them, and perception is not a simple incident that creates in the soul an imagination identical to the thing perceived, but rather it is the creation of a composite image of changing psychological elements. The image is not a fixed imagination, but it is. A changing reality. Le Roy even said: (Perception and memory are both inventions).

The opposite is true. Its elements are from reality. Imagination is therefore woven from reality. In creativity, they distinguished between image and matter. They said that imagination does not create new material, but rather is limited to gathering some images together, analyzing, compounding, reducing, and enlarging. So he creates a new image, but the material of his creativity is all taken from reality, so the image alone is new, and imagination is creative in the sense of elements interconnecting with each other, so it creates new compounds from them. All creativity is also in... It is that creative imagination does not create images from nothing, but rather derives that. It brings together the truth.

If it is said that the mind does not limit creativity to collecting images, but rather collects these images into abstract meanings, emotional states, and personal tendencies and whims, we say that whatever the type of composition, and whatever the condition of the elements, creativity always ends with images. One contemporary scholar said the following: “The inventor is an intuitive poet. It may be said that there are logical, dialectical minds. Forward except by analogy and proof - following the path of Vauban, who was not strong except. After that, he prepares for the matter, but the reality is otherwise, because these minds are also intuitive. It is not limited to collecting methods of research, rules of logic, rulings of reason, and forms of analogy, but rather adds to them what it finds in its way of colors, sounds, weights, sensory metaphors, and personalized situations. No matter how far the invention is from the sensory perception, the abstract example must be transformed into a tangible image that indicates it, revives it, and brings it from the depths of the subconscious to visible, tangible life.

Can the soul create images? Most psychologists say, with Locke, that the soul is incapable of creating simple images and ideas on its own. Every image, then, is a copy of something tangible, and can only be visualized by sensation. A blind person cannot imagine colors, and a deaf person cannot create melodies. Imagination is not creative in the sense that it is a bringing from nothingness into existence, but rather it is creative in the sense that it is the synthesis of images, but the mind, as we said, combines various elements in this synthesis. It combines sensory images with abstract thoughts, inclinations, and whims. Perhaps he is not incapable of creating some ideas, but as for images, he only deals with them through sensation, and if he represents them, he is able to mix them with one another, and through this mixing he obtains new images. Yes, the blind cannot imagine colours, but the discerning one can imagine intermediate colors composed of simple colours, so he imagines, for example, a violet color that is redder than natural violet.

It may be said that nature is richer than art. The inventions of photographers are nothing but an imitation of the different shapes and images in nature, and there are colors in the sunset that the greatest photographers cannot create. This is correct, because natural colors are more diverse than artistic colors. However, the sounds of nature are poorer than the sounds of art, and they are mostly in one pattern: such as the rustling of branches, the chirping of birds, the trickling of water, and the croaking of frogs. Art machines are not a gift of nature, but rather a human invention. Yes, man did not clearly imagine the tones of the field, the loudness of the strings, and the response of the flutes and their amazing singers, except after he mastered these instruments, but the oud, for example, was not perfected until after man moved with it from one voice to another, and imagined in each stage of its transition a voice. Best of luck. It has a deeper impact than familiar sounds. At every level of this integration, there is progress in imagination and creativity of new images that art has never known before.