- I imagine seeing horses in front of me. (Sensory)
- I imagine that there are horses in front of me. (Propositional)
- I act as if there are horses in front of me. (Make-believe)
Setting aside 3 for the moment, it will be helpful to spell out the dif-
ference between 1 and 2– a difference commonly noted by philoso-
phers.^47 In the case of 1, the imagination is a matter of visualising, or
seeing‘in the mind’s eye’. When I imagine the horses, I am imagining a
visual perception of the horses.^48 In the case of 2, the imagination
involves supposing that some statement is true (without necessarily
believing that it is true). The point is that imagination of the second kind
(propositional) is possible without imagination of thefirst kind. I can
imagine, say, that somebody other than Shakespeare was in fact the
author ofHenry V,without using any kind of sensory imagination. Of
course, Icouldalso use sensory imagination in relation to this thought–
I could imagine (or visualise) Shakespeare tiptoeing into someone’s room,
stealing a manuscript and so on. But I don’t have to. Looking back to the
words of the Chorus, we see that both sensory imagination and proposi-
tional imagination are suggested. The audience is invited to imagine
seeingthe horses, their hooves pressing into the ground. But it is also to
imagine that certain facts are the case, for example that years have passed
in the space of a couple of hours. When the audience imagines that years
have passed between scenes, this is obviously not a matter of visualising
the years passing, but of supposing or accepting the claim that years have
passed.^49 If interpreted in this way, the Chorus’request seems general for
theatre: the audience has to imagine seeing certain things, and it has to
imagine that certain things are the case.
Make-believe
The third category, above, was a kind of make-believe response–acting
as if something is the case. Following 3, I would behave as if there were a
horse there, using appropriate gestures and so on. When Aristotle speaks
of the pleasure that children take inmimesis, it is not clear which of the
many meanings of the term he has in mind; after all, children like drawing,
copying and play-acting.^50 But, regardless of what Aristotle meant, we
can be reasonably sure that even young children show an impressive
capacity to engage in make-believe, with relatively elaborate rules.^51
What distinguishes make-believe or play-acting from the kinds of sensory
and propositional imagining is its focus onaction.Make-believe, at least in
an everyday sense, suggests an emphasis on responses to certain imagined
states of affairs. If two children play a game in which they make believe
that a tree-stump is a bear, then the important point seems to be that
Mimesis 39