Lost Knowledge of the Imagination Quotes

“driven by a deep-lying need to master the world by understanding it, science works steadily toward its goal – a perfectly clear conceptual model of reality, adapted to explain all phenomena by the simplest formula that can be found …’ But Cornford saw that there’s a catch. ‘When we contemplate the finished result, we see that in banishing “the vague”, it has swept away everything in which another type of mind finds all the value and significance of the world’.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“Everything that liberates our mind without at the same time imparting self-control is pernicious’.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“To his audience at John Flaxman’s home Taylor spoke of Orpheus, Hermes, Zoroaster and the ‘perennial philosophy’, the ‘primal wisdom’ of the ancients which Plato had imbibed from the sages who preceded him. Taylor was a one-man Platonic Academy, doing for the esoteric intelligentsia of late eighteenth century London what Marsilio Ficino did for the artists and poets of Renaissance Florence, with his Latin translations of the lost books of Plato and the Hermetica.55 Taylor believed that this primal wisdom was ‘coeval with the universe itself; and however its continuity may be broken by opposing systems, it will make its appearance at different periods of time, as long as the sun himself shall continue to illumine the world’.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“The knowledge Raine spoke of and sought in her ‘real poets’ formed what she called ‘the learning of the imagination’, a teaching that was not about the imagination but was the imagination itself. Its curriculum was made up of the symbols, metaphors and images that informed her favourite poetry – with Owen Barfield she shared a love of the Romantics – and which constituted much of the ‘hollowed out’ iconography that the modern soul misunderstood and often did its best to undermine. ‘Tradition,’ she wrote in her major work on Blake, ‘is the record of imaginative experience’. ‘Traditional metaphysics’ – that of Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus – ‘is neither vague, personal or arbitrary’, as the learned dons at Cambridge had tried to convince her it was. ‘It is the recorded history of imaginative thought and has … an accompanying language of symbol and myth’.42 This is Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, ‘a very precise order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of perception’: the true imagination”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“The knowledge Raine spoke of and sought in her ‘real poets’ formed what she called ‘the learning of the imagination’, a teaching that was not about the imagination but was the imagination itself. Its curriculum was made up of the symbols, metaphors and images that informed her favourite poetry – with Owen Barfield she shared a love of the Romantics – and which constituted much of the ‘hollowed out’ iconography that the modern soul misunderstood and often did its best to undermine. ‘Tradition,’ she wrote in her major work on Blake, ‘is the record of imaginative experience’. ‘Traditional metaphysics’ – that of Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus – ‘is neither vague, personal or arbitrary’, as the learned dons at Cambridge had tried to convince her it was. ‘It is the recorded history of imaginative thought and has … an accompanying language of symbol and myth’.42 This is Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, ‘a very precise order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of perception’: the true imagination.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“Yeats affirmed his belief in a Platonic order of things in his poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which presents the ancient Oriental city (the direction of light in Suhrawardi’s gnostic Platonism) as a symbol of the mundus imaginalis, an archetypal capital of the ‘human kingdom of the imagination’, a hub of the interworld where the incarnate and discarnate, conscious and unconscious self, meet.45 Rejecting the world in which whatever is ‘begotten, born, and dies’ loses itself in ‘sensual neglect’, the poet turns instead to ‘monuments of unageing intellect’. He abjures his ‘dying animal’, his body, the ‘portable tomb’ of the Hermetists, and reaches for the ‘artifice of eternity’: timeless beauty.46”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“It is through the work of the ‘active’ or ‘true imagination’ that, as Corbin writes, ‘psychic energies that have been neglected or paralysed by our habits’ can be revived’.49 These energies can then be used to perform the work of ta’wil, the spiritual hermeneutics that can resuscitate the world of phenomena, which has fallen into the deadening embrace of mechanistic science and utilitarian exploitation. Functioning as a ‘faculty and organ of knowledge, just as real – if not more real than – the senses’, ‘true imagination’ releases ‘things’ from their bondage by returning them to their archetypal source in the Imaginal.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“Literalism, precisely the lack of imagination, wants to contend that the monotone opaque way in which it presents the world, showing only its surface, is the truth. But as Barfield points out, such literalism is the end product of an historical process, the shift from a poetic way of seeing the world to a prosaic one. Its success depends on it purposefully ignoring a dimension of reality, its depth and inwardness.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“The one big thing that Barfield knew was what he called ‘the evolution of consciousness’, which he saw as ‘the concept of man’s self-consciousness as a process in time’.12 And he had come to know this through a study of language. Like imagination and consciousness, language seems to be one of those things that Whitehead said were ‘incapable of analysis in terms of factors more far-reaching than themselves’. We may think we know how language ‘works’. We must know, we believe, because we use it all the time. But when we try to spell this out explicitly, we quickly find ourselves confronting a mystery. Barfield expressed something of this difficulty when he said that ‘asking about the origin of language is like asking about the origin of origin’.13 In order to talk about imagination we must use imagination and in order to talk about language we must use language. We can’t get behind them or stand apart from them, as detached observers, as we can with something in the physical world, but must understand them from ‘inside’.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“If we think about this we can see that it can lead to somewhat disturbing conclusions. One is that my ‘I’, my sense of self, a very important part of my inside, must not really exist. Nor must those of the scientists and philosophers writing books declaring that my inside or theirs doesn’t really exist. What is really writing those books are the physical processes that create the illusion that there are individual ‘I’s’ doing it. But for there to be an illusion, there must be someone being ‘fooled’ by it. The usual suspect here would be me. But if ‘I’ am the illusion, one wants to ask who it is that I am fooling? Another possibility is that, if there is no inside, then everything, all of reality, must only be an outside. But here are some logical problems here too. To have an ‘outside’ one must have an ‘inside’, just as in order to have a back one must have a front. Yet if there is no ‘inside’, and so no ‘outside’ what are we left with?”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“The philosopher Edmund Husserl called seeing the world in this way ‘the natural standpoint’. We really can’t help it. We seem to be made this way. The world as I see it existed before I came on the scene and it will be here after I depart, and my entrance and exit will do little to change it. In fact, according to the natural standpoint, the world was here before anyone turned up and it will remain after the last flicker of consciousness, human or otherwise, dies out. When the first humans became self-conscious and gazed out on the world, we assume they saw it in the same way that we do, as something ‘outside’ them. There were no buildings, no cities, no shopping malls, no highways or airports. Our man-made world did not exist. But the natural world did, and the humans who were waking up to that world experienced it in much the same way as we do today. We know a great deal more about the world than our ancestors did, in the sense of our new way of knowing, and this knowledge is what sets us apart from them. It’s what constitutes our ‘progress’. But the world our prehistoric ancestors experienced and the one we do today are the same. We just understand it better than they did.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“While it can be used for fantasy, illusion, make-believe, and escapism, the real work of imagination is to make contact with the strange world in which we live and to serve as both guide and inspiration for our development within it. It is the way we evolve. Imagination presents us with possible, potential realities that it is our job to actualise.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

“I take it from Colin Wilson, who in his own work explored the evolutionary potential of imagination. Imagination, he said, is ‘the ability to grasp realities that are not immediately present’. Not an escape from reality, or a substitute for it, but a deeper engagement with it. We could also say that imagination is simply our ability to grasp reality, or even, in some strange way, to create it, or at least to collaborate in its creation.”
― Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination