{"id":13097,"date":"2023-05-16T16:56:05","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T20:56:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=13097"},"modified":"2023-05-16T17:10:43","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T21:10:43","slug":"tim-ingold-imagining-for-real-essays-on-creation-attention-and-correspondence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2023\/05\/16\/tim-ingold-imagining-for-real-essays-on-creation-attention-and-correspondence","title":{"rendered":"Tim Ingold, Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence."},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Ingold, <\/span>Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence.<\/span><\/i> New York: Routledge, 2022; 417 pp. ISBN: <\/span>978-0367775117<\/span><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Bruce Baugh, Professor Emeritus, Thompson Rivers University<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The proper study of mankind is man.<\/span><\/i>\u2014Alexander Pope, <\/span>Essay on Man<\/span><\/i>, 1733-34<\/span><\/p>\n

Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.<\/span><\/i>\u2014Michel Foucault, <\/span>The Order of Things<\/span><\/i>, 1966<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The study of human beings and their place in the world goes by the name of \u201canthropology.\u201d It was once a province of philosophy; Hume\u2019s <\/span>Treatise of Human Nature <\/span><\/i>(1739) and Kant\u2019s <\/span>Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View <\/span><\/i>(1798) constitute the most notable examples. But as Europeans increasingly colonized the planet, a new discipline arose, in which the colonizers studied the ways of life, customs, and belief systems of the colonized. This new discipline, focused on ethnography, developed methods and principles that would distinguish it from philosophy and establish its scientific bona fides. Lucien L\u00e9vy-Bruhl hypothesized that so-called \u201cprimitive people\u201d had a \u201cpre-logical mentality\u201d distinctively different from the discursive rationality of Europe (<\/span>The Primitive Mentality<\/span><\/i>,1922); Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss, on the contrary, argued that Indigenous peoples organize experience using the same rationality as Western science (<\/span>The Savage Mind<\/span><\/i>, 1966). But whether the colonized objects of study were regarded as the Same or as Other, anthropology looked to supposedly less developed cultures to seek the origins of the malaise of modern civilization Freud diagnosed in <\/span>Civilization and Its Discontents <\/span><\/i>(1923), and to perhaps offer a cure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tim Ingold, an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, begins his most recent book wondering whether he has strayed from anthropology to philosophy: \u201cAm I a philosopher now?\u201d (7). In his concluding chapter, he claims that anthropology poses philosophical questions concerning the nature of knowledge, social existence, justice, our place in nature, and the significance of our own mortality, but whereas philosophers prefer to wall themselves up in the ivory tower of their canonical texts, anthropologists philosophize through both observation and conversation with the human and non-human beings with whom or with which they share their lives (347). It is clear that Ingold\u2019s studies are meant to respond to problems of a modern post-industrial world dominated by a technocratic rationality that has removed humans from nature and isolated them from one another.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The basis of Ingold\u2019s approach is a metaphysics of a reality that is in a constant process of becoming. Supposedly stable objects, with determinate outlines separating them from other things, result from a temporary equilibrium among different and often opposing forces and processes (262, 271, 327-8). In truth, each thing\u2019s individuality arises from a differential ground of interconnected processes in the world as a whole, \u201cthe primordially undifferentiated flux of the potential\u201d (55, 356), much as a wave temporarily differentiates itself from the ocean in which it remains immanent and whose forces are carried within it like a memory of the whole from which it originates (54-56, 58, 326-7, 352-9). In a world of \u201cever-emergent difference,\u201d \u201cthings do not so much exist as occur\u201d (37);<\/span> \u00a0there are no boundaries of inclusion and exclusions demarcated by a set of stable characteristics shared by all members of a group but not by outsiders (359-60), no self-enclosed \u201ccontinents\u201d (173) to contradict the original unity of becoming that makes all beings inhabitants of one \u201cundivided and indivisible world\u201d (127, 362).<\/span><\/p>\n

Humans and other organisms, accordingly, are not self-contained units but \u201ca confluence of vital forces that spill out beyond the skin\u201d (344) into the environment, \u201ca tissue of affects\u201d defined by textures and resonances (110), radically open to the turbulence of nature\u2019s becoming (55-57). Every organism continually and mutually responds to other living and non-living beings through affects, senses, and lines of movement (of bodies, of weather, of scents, of light and dark, etc.) (6, 37, 122, 333, 352). Taking a page from Bergson\u2019s <\/span>Creative Evolution <\/span><\/i>(1922), Ingold holds that organisms (like all things) are \u201crelatively stable forms\u201d that emerge from the ongoing flow of life and duration, like eddies that curl back from the forward flow of a river and \u201clag behind\u201d while nevertheless being sustained by that forward flow (4, 24, 41-42, 55-56, 327-8). From Whitehead, he adopts the distinction between the diversity of constituted things, \u201cemergent facts\u201d or <\/span>natura naturata<\/span><\/i>, and the creative forces immanent in those things, \u201cthe life of <\/span>natura naturans<\/span><\/i>, of nature\u2019s becoming\u201d (24-25, 53-55). In short, for Ingold, reality is not only \u201ca whirling world\u201d of \u201cspiralling movements that run into one another\u201d (236-7) arising from \u201ca single matrix of variation\u201d (270), but \u201ca living whole that is always emerging out of the manifold biophysical, human, and spiritual elements and relations that make it up\u201d (362).<\/span><\/p>\n

Given Ingold\u2019s references to Bergson and Whitehead, it\u2019s not surprising that he also refers to Deleuze and Guattari, although not always accurately (see his erroneous interpretation of the \u201cblack hole\/white wall system,\u201d 95-96, 207). However, he doesn\u2019t make use of Bergson and Deleuze\u2019s distinction between the virtual and the actual. Nor does he refer to Spinoza, despite the explicit mentions of the <\/span>natura naturans\/natura naturata <\/span><\/i>distinction. Perhaps most surprising of all, there is not a single reference to the philosopher of becoming who (together with Bergson) most inspired Deleuze: Nietzsche. Nor, despite Ingold\u2019s invoking the Romantic idea of the world as \u201ca living whole\u201d is there any reference to Schelling or his followers, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alexander von Humboldt, the latter of whom wrote in <\/span>Cosmos <\/span><\/i>(1845) that the world is \u201ca living whole, not a dead aggregate,\u201d an idea to which Ingold returns to on several occasions (22-24, 52-56, 258-68, 360-61).<\/span><\/p>\n

The absence of any reference to Schelling or Coleridge is all the more surprising given that Ingold\u2019s goal is to mend the rift between imagination and reality (xii) and move beyond their opposition (4). For Ingold, imagination is neither an image-making nor representational faculty, but a movement that brings forth the new by entering into the impulse of creative growth\u2014what Bergson calls the <\/span>\u00e9lan vital<\/span><\/i>\u2014constitutive of the world itself (5-6, 24-25, 32), participating \u201cfrom within\u201d in the very flux of becoming (12). Just as temporal duration is a ceaseless upspringing from which the \u201cabsolutely new\u201d arises (Bergson), imagination is more than just the recombination of already existing and fully formed parts (24-26), but participates \u201cin the world\u2019s endless creation of itself\u201d (27), supported by an intuition that \u201cgoes upstream\u201d from constituted actual beings to enter into a milieu of \u201cimmanence and becoming\u201d prior to the division between \u201cthe real and the imagined\u201d (38). Like life itself, imagination \u201cruns ahead of itself,\u201d ventures forth into the unknown (38, 342), while taking up the past<\/span> (memory) that grounds our forward movement (49, 58, 279, 356, 359), straining forward beyond the limits of conceptualization and representation to loop back to a grounding that \u201crecedes beyond the limit of memory\u201d into a primeval past, thereby joining past and future, undergone passivity and creative activity (254, 342, 352). In that sense, imagination could be said to be the very ground of our being.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, says Ingold\u2014sounding a note of disenchantment with modernity that runs through his work\u2014a centuries-long process, beginning with Francis Bacon, has convinced us that imagination is \u201can escape from reality rather than its impulse,\u201d impairing our sense of wonder (61-62). It need not be so, says Ingold\u2014and here the ethnographer has his say. For Indigenous cultures, such as the Ojibwa, the division between imagination and reality does not exist; rather than being the province of \u201chard facts,\u201d truth for the Ojibwa is a pathway handed down by the ancestors, a movement one can join with in dreams, which can open us up to a truth behind appearances (67-72). Imagination allows us to <\/span>attend <\/span><\/i>to the world, not observing and classifying it, but through feeling and affect, and even empathy, a mode of inhabiting the world that is more open-ended, sensorily alive and sustainable than that offered by modern science and capitalism (66-80, 127). We can return to this older way of inhabiting the world, which we also glimpse in children (314), by giving the imaginative mode of life \u201contological primacy\u201d (324).<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, it would seem that for Ingold, as for Wordsworth, \u201cheaven lies about us in our infancy.\u201d But beyond this longing to return to less corrupted past, what truly makes Ingold a Romantic is the similarity of his theory of imagination to that of Schelling and Coleridge. For them as well, the imagination gives us the possibility of transcending the confines of conceptual thought and venturing into unknown future possibilities. More significantly, Schelling and Coleridge also make the imagination into the mediating faculty between passivity (sensations, affects, memory) and future-oriented activity, between the voluntary and the involuntary, the power, in Schelling\u2019s words, able \u201cto combine together even what is contradictory.\u201d It is the imagination, says Schelling, that enables us to recapture the original unity between Mind and Nature, activity and passivity\u2014in other words, as in Ingold, the originary world of becoming and growth prior to the division between the imaginary and the real, subjective and objective.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not coincidentally, when Ingold describes the relationship between perception, which grounds us in the world, and imagination, which allows us to venture forth, he uses the same metaphor as Coleridge: walking (38, 322). In walking, says Ingold, we lift one foot and risk falling forward into the void, only to regain equilibrium as that foot touches the ground and adjusts to its irregularities, just as imagination launches us into the void and perception \u201crestores our grip\u201d (322). Compare Coleridge: In walking, \u201cwe first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary [of lifting the foot], and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it, in order to light on the spot we had previously proposed to ourselves,\u201d just as the mind yields to sensory perceptions \u201cin order to gather strength for a further propulsion;\u201d this alternation of activity and passivity requires a coordinating faculty that is both active and passive, and that faculty is the imagination. The simile serves a somewhat different function in Ingold and Coleridge, but the similarity is remarkable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, what Ingold\u2019s theory of imagination lacks is the Romantics\u2019 conception, taken from Kant, of the imagination as a power of synthesis: the power to unite passively received sensations and feelings with active thought in a way that makes possible perceptions of things, landscapes, and the world as a whole\u2014and which forms images. Ingold contends that \u201cperceiving <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> imagining,\u201d not because the transcendental imagination makes possible the unity of experience, but because the perceived world \u201cis continually brought forth\u2026 in the very act of imagination\u201d (35). It\u2019s an interesting idea, but one that blurs the distinction between perceiving and imagining rather than showing how the latter informs the former. It seems that Ingold\u2019s philosophizing, here as elsewhere, could have benefited by diving more deeply into the philosophical canon.<\/span><\/p>\n

The myriad studies offered in this book, which touch on everything from the nature of color and sound to what is involved in playing a cello or tracking animals, give the philosopher plenty to ponder. As for anthropology, perhaps when it ceases to seek solutions to Western problems in Indigenous cultures, and instead becomes the decolonized subjects\u2019 study of \u201cthe Western mentality,\u201d then perhaps the image of (Western) man will, as Foucault predicted, at last be effaced by the incoming tide of history.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/p>\n

Alexander von Humboldt, <\/span>Kosmos: Entwurt einer physischen Weltbeschreibung<\/span><\/i>, vol.1-3 (Stuttgart and T\u00fcbingen: Cotta\u2019scher Verlag, 1845-50), vol. 1, 39; cited in Andrea Wulf, <\/span>Magnificent Rebels. The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self <\/span><\/i>(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 335.<\/span><\/p>\n

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, <\/span>System of Transcendental Idealism<\/span><\/i>, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 228.<\/span><\/p>\n

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, <\/span>Biographia Literaria<\/span><\/i>, ed. George Watson (London: Everyman; J. M. Dent and Sons, 1991), 72.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Ingold, Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. New York: Routledge, 2022; 417 pp. ISBN: 978-0367775117 Reviewed by Bruce Baugh, Professor Emeritus, Thompson Rivers University The proper study of mankind is man.\u2014Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, 1733-34 Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.\u2014Michel Foucault, The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[301,302],"class_list":["post-13097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-philosophical-anthropology","tag-realism","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-27 18:17:08","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13097"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13103,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13097\/revisions\/13103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}