Imagination and Truth
Chapter 5 reflects on Coleridge’s famous fancy–imagination distinction, which inspired the author’s own distinction between fantasy and imagination. The continuing relevance of Coleridge’s distinction lies in recognizing imagination as essentially truth-directed. Importantly, we can venture into the unreal with two quite different intentions—to become lost there, or to find ourselves. We can see the unreal world as a place of escape, fulfilling dreams in cost-free ways that set up channels of reward which so often lead to addiction and psychological enslavement (as in pornography). Or, we can see the world of the unreal as an imaginative construct for deeper epistemological purposes, to know through sympathy the varieties of human life, as life that could be ours. The term ‘imagination’ is reserved for this second approach. This imaginary is the unreal called to judgement by the real, in contrast with the pretence of reality in clichéd, sentimental, or kitsch fantasy.