their affective powers and inferential connections within one another within
the game of make-believe:^73 to pretend or imagine that Elizabeth Bennett is
at Pemberly commits one to imagining that she is not at that moment in
London (though imagining that Bugs Bunny is a rabbit does not commit one
to imagining that he is unable to talk or sing). In addition, what we pretend
to be so is compatible with its actually being so: I can in fantasy pretend or
imagine myself to be an accomplished cellist, hence a human being, while in
fact being a human being. As Joseph Margolis elegantly puts it,“the imagina-
tive”–what we present to ourselves via imagination–“is hardly limited to
the imaginary.”^74 In this respect, imagining is, as Richard Moran puts it, like
“‘trying on’[a] point of view”that may be directed at either fictional or actual
objects.^75
At the same time, some forms of imagining, especially those connected
with visual or aural experience, are less subject to intention and will. Dreams
come unbidden in presenting visual or aural images, and one may be unable
to banish an earworm. When one gives oneself over to such experiences, then
one runs, as Pillow puts it,“the risk of producing nonsense along with the
potential for real revelation.”^76 In a dream or in a fantasy, a rabbit can be the
barber of Seville, trees can clutch and grab, and elephants can fly. As a result,
fictions that traffic in such contents have often been dismissed as seductive
lies and mere fantasies, fit at best only to entertain, not to disclose truths.
For some imagining, however, that is subject to some degree of volitional
control,“the target domain”for imagining, visually or verbally, is, in Pillow’s
formulation,“the reader’s [or viewer’s] own world.”^77 Instead of freely and
emptily fantasizing, one takes up a point of view on something initially
actual, as in creating a literary character as a mélange of actual people or
as in exploring the look of an actual landscape by rendering and elaborating
it in paint or on film. Taking up of a point of view on things actual and
developing and embodying it in a representation is a way of“investing [the
(^73) Gregory Currie,Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science(Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1995), pp. 149–50.
(^74) Joseph Margolis,The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism(New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 135.
(^75) Richard Moran,“The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,”Philosophical Review103,
1 ( January 1994), pp. 75–106 at p. 93.
(^76) Pillow,“Imagination,”p. 364.
(^77) Ibid., p. 361.
Originality and imagination 139