Emotion and Imagination E-Book

Adam Morton

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 291

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Recent years have seen an enormous amount of philosophical research into the emotions and the imagination, but as yet little work has been done to connect the two. In his engaging and highly original new book, Adam Morton shows that all emotions require some form of imagination and goes on to fully explore the link between these two important concepts both within philosophy and in everyday life.

We may take it for granted that complex emotions, such as hope and resentment, require a rich thinking and an engagement with the imagination, but Morton shows how more basic and responsive emotions such as fear and anger also require us to take account of possibilities and opportunities beyond the immediate situation. Interweaving a powerful tapestry of subtle argument with vivid detail, the book highlights that many emotions, more than we tend to suppose, require us to imagine a situation from a particular point of view and that this in itself can be the source of further emotional feeling. Morton goes on to demonstrate the important role that emotions play in our moral lives, throwing light on emotions such as self-respect, disapproval, and remorse, and the price we pay for having them. He explores the intricate nature of moral emotions and the challenges we face when integrating our thinking on morality and the emotions.

This compelling and thought-provoking new book challenges many assumptions about the nature of emotion and imagination and will appeal to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the role that these concepts play in our lives. The book also has far reaching implications that will spark debate amongst scholars and students for some time to come.

Leseprobe

Emotion and Imagination

Emotion andImagination

Adam Morton

polity

Copyright © Adam Morton 2013

The right of Adam Morton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6447-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Epigraph taken from p. 120 of Bernard Williams’ essay ‘Janacek’s Modernism’, in his On Opera, Yale University Press, 2006. Used with kind permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Preface

Part I The range of emotions

Refined emotions

Imagining in emotion

Seeing as

Emotions and thinking

Keeping mood and emotion distinct

Pressure

Categories of emotion

Part II Imagining vile emotions

Imagining what we shouldn’t feel

Imagining minds: emotions and perspectives

Imagining a point of view

Misimagination

Imagining invented characters: fiction and philosophy

Invisible everyday failures

Imagining awful actions

Sympathy versus empathy

The tradeoff

Part III Memotions

The threat of irrelevance

Retracting emotions

Emotions with multiple points of view

The variety of moral emotions

Emotional learning

Smugness

Part IV Families of emotions

The ideas and the questions

Shame, regret, embarrassment, remorse

Shame-like versus regret-like

Ghosts

Looking backward and looking inward

Gaps in the pattern: shame versus guilt

Two kinds of pride

The smug family

Dark humour, radical possibilities

Shaping our emotions

End: a virtue of imagination

Notes

References

Index

Preface

I have been thinking and reading about the emotions for a long time, publishing a loosely connected series of papers on the topic. This book began as a collection of these papers, which are listed in the bibliography. Then, encouraged by Emma Hutchinson of Polity to make a real book of it, I tried, and found new opinions developing and connections between old ones emerging. Still, the occasional whole paragraph from those papers has been incorporated. The result is an attempt to impose some structure on the variety of human emotions, as part I should make clear. Psychological research meets philosophical articulacy here, and while this book is clearly more philosophy than psychology, I have tried to be guided by the empirical facts I am aware of. See the references to experimental work in the notes. A readable and wide-ranging guide to what psychologists have discovered about the emotions is Fox (2008). There is an overlap with moral philosophy, too. I discuss many morally significant emotions in this book, and the reader might suspect that I think they are so vital to moral life as to be moral life. But as I hope the book also makes clear, there are better and worse emotions to feel, and many to choose between. I’m not sure that there’s a circularity here, but it doesn’t bother me if there is. On the nature of morality in general I am very sympathetic to the line in Copp (2007), though with doubts about how tight the unity to all the rules, beliefs, and emotions we take as moral might be. There is room for someone to put together a ‘contractarian emotivism’, developing the idea that what is right is what fits the moral emotions that we would agree to encourage one another to have.

I have learned from many friends and colleagues. Most of all from Peter Goldie, whose death in 2011 was a great loss to philosophy and a great blow to his friends. I have also gained a lot from discussions with Susanna Braund, Ronald de Sousa, Martin Gibert, Amy Schmitter, and Christine Tappolet, and had invaluable help from Chloë FitzGerald, Elliot Goodine, Jenny Greenwood, Nicole Pernat, Madeleine Ransom, Amelie Rorty, Juan Santos, Kathleen Stock, and two referees for Polity who may or may not be the same as any of these people.

… a reminder even to a philosopher of what should be done: … to address, express, and restructure real emotions in ways that neither evade them with formalism nor degrade them into kitsch.

Bernard Williams, On Opera

Part I

The range of emotions

Refined emotions

We refine our emotions. From the rough sludge that comes naturally to us we distil the whole varied range of feelings that we can have, including some that are rare and delicate and some that are crude essential fuel. A central factor here is the relation between emotion and imagination. The central aim of this book is to explain the close link between the two, and how this allows us to have the wide range of emotions that we do, enabling us to direct ourselves towards emotions that fit our situations.

All emotion involves imagination. This is true of the basic emotions we share with mice, as well as the sophisticated and finely differentiated emotions that test the limits of our capacities to express ourselves in words and to relate to one another in complicated social projects. Or so I claim, and defend at some length. The claim may seem strange, since we think of emotion as common to animals of many kinds, while we may think of imagination as depending on human intellect and social sense. No – a fearful mouse imagines the dangers facing her, and people can imagine in ways that need little refined human capacity. The point can be put in a more cautious and less direct way. ‘Emotion’ and ‘imagination’ are both very loose words. Both can cover things that have little in common: the hope that your grandchild will behave herself on her birthday, and the foul mood with which you wake up on yours; the thought of how gold prices may react to a change in the property market, and the anticipation of how this spoonful of soup will taste in a moment. So in discussing them we will find ourselves tidying up their boundaries and making some arbitrary distinctions. The more cautious claim is then that we can draw the boundaries of emotion and imagination so that they fit together in a nice coherent jigsaw, one that is true both to the facts as we know them and to our experience as emoters and imaginers.

In defining the boundaries and arguing that the fit is a good one, I will appeal to imagination as well as to fact. That makes this an imaginative book on imagination: I ask readers to follow stories and consider the emotions they would feel in possible scenarios, and how they would describe them. (Of course, evidence, analysis, and argument are essential too. The notes at the end of the book have references to relevant empirical work, and to other authors and sources I am drawing on.) In imagining emotions, you will come to appreciate more how imagination and emotion fit. This method is inevitable, given my aim and given how little we know about many of the relevant areas. I am sure that people’s fundamental attitudes are affected more by their emotions and experiences than by argument, so telling stories and evoking reactions gives me a chance of influencing my readers more deeply. But it does have dangers, some of which are brought into focus by following the method itself. In particular, the section ‘Imagining invented characters: fiction and philosophy’, in part II, discusses the danger that in philosophy and everyday life, as in fiction, we may imagine emotions that simply do not exist.

One result of distillation is the emotions that are central to our moral lives. Not that all of these are very refined: simple moral outrage is not that far removed from anger and disgust. The emotions of morality play a large role in the later parts of this book. To give a taste of those later parts now, here is a curious question about the persistence of sludge. Imagine a good person, who has emotions helping her generally to do the right thing. She is upset by the sufferings of homeless people, appalled by the self-indulgence of some young professionals, disapproving of cruelty to animals, and proud of her ability to balance her obligations to her family against the demands of generosity to others. What you might expect. Now ask whether there are less admirable emotions that could easily accompany, support, and fit with emotions like those I have listed.

It might seem that we would need to know a lot about this person’s psychology, and perhaps a lot about the psychology of human moral behaviour in general, to say anything helpful. But consider the following list of soiled moral emotions: smugness, self-satisfaction, sanctimoniousness, and those associated with hypocrisy, priggery, prudery, selective moral blindness. There’s quite a long list: they are epithets thrown by the rest of the world at those whose self-conception centres on morality. None of these describe emotions that our person has to have. But they are labels that can be hard for her to avoid, as they connect so closely to the valuable emotions I have listed. In later sections I describe systematic ways in which morally focused people can become prey to these emotions. You might take this as undermining moral pretensions. I prefer to think of it as a stab at how to take seriously issues of what we ought to do and feel while avoiding some of the traps that accompany being someone who thinks about their responsibilities.

Consider our person’s morally more relaxed cousin (‘backsliding’, ‘irresponsible’, she will say). Suppose that, tired of being compared to his disadvantage with his cousin, he describes her as smug. How can she defend herself? It is true that she thinks that she has done the right thing on many occasions when others have not. It is true that she thinks that he lacks some qualities that people ought to have and that she by chance or control does exhibit. And are these thoughts not smugness? For all that she may protest that she knows she is not perfect, and that she values him as another flawed human being, she cannot deny that she thinks that there is something wrong with him that is a lot less wrong with herself. So the charge is hard to evade.

Hard to evade, but not impossible. The relaxed cousin is pointing to thoughts that our good person almost certainly thinks. But thoughts are not emotions, so he has not yet shown that she feels smug or self-satisfied. He has a point, though. The emotions of a conscientious person will generate a pressure, as I say below, to these thoughts, and the thoughts create a pressure to smugness. More is needed for smugness, and I discuss this extra content later, in parts III and IV. But there does seem to be a facilitating relation between the emotions. Feeling disapproval of others and feeling morally satisfied towards oneself dispose one to smugness. Virtue has its dangers. There is more to say about this.

Imagining in emotion

When we fear something, we often imagine awful possibilities involving it. And at a more fundamental level we prepare for such possibilities and are alert for more. We look over our shoulders. When we are angry at someone, we have vivid quarrels with them in our minds. When we feel guilty, we create an imaginary accuser who points an imaginary finger. The imagining can take many forms, from vivid mental images to simple verbal thoughts to preparedness for perception and action. If you think imagination needs images, you may think that there is often no imagining at all. But on my approach to imagination, images and words are just one way in which we can grasp possibilities that might be important. This allows a close connection between emotion and imagination.

When we imagine, we represent something to ourselves: a fact, a thing, or a possibility. Sometimes we make a mental picture of it and examine the picture, turning it around and trying different approaches to it. Sometimes all we are aware of is thoughts about what we are imagining; sometimes we are not aware of anything, as when you are confused during your first walk in the southern hemisphere: you had not been aware that you expected the sun to travel clockwise, and that your sense of the way morning turns to afternoon depended on it. Imagination is a process rather than a result, something people do rather than something they get or experience. It is a process of searching for representations suitable for a specific purpose. Pictures and verbal descriptions are all-purpose representations and can be used in many kinds of thinking. The representations I am concerned with are purpose-specific. For example, you are holding a baby on your right hip while walking towards a step; you move your left hand over to steady the right wrist around the baby while changing your stride so that you come up to the step with the baby well supported. No words or pictures cross your mind, but you prepare for a very particular possibility, stumbling so the baby slips. I will say that you imagined this possibility and were apprehensive about it. You searched for ways of coping with the feared situation and found one, ending up in a state in which you were ready to notice the danger and ready to counteract it. This is why I am happy to assume that non-humans imagine, taking imagination to be a purposeful relation to a possibility, rather than images or words. A mouse imagines the cat that might be around the corner.

When we imagine, we are trying to achieve something with the representation, trying to get it to do some job. So if you are trapped in a building and thinking, imaginatively, how to get out, you mentally walk down one way and then another, hoping to find an exit. You are not representing the hallways and staircases in just any way, but making yourself attend to those features which are relevant to escape. The same is true if it all happens in words. You are going to a meeting where you expect someone will make an attack on your motives in supporting a project and you are considering how to reply. You think of various things the person might say and you turn them over in your mind, looking for flaws and openings for replies. You are not just thinking about what she might say but thinking of it in a certain light. If you find yourself representing her opinion as the interesting or informative one, you suspend that line and try another, which allows you to represent it as vulnerable or flawed. Almost all imagining has a purpose.

We can imagine actions as well as scenes and events. Of course we can picture what we intend to do and what might result, and we can describe these in words. But we can also form representations of the actions we are going to perform, as actions. That is, we can keep copies in our minds of the instructions we will send to our bodies if and when we perform an action. The standard example of this is planning to grasp an object of a particular shape. Before doing this you prepare by readying your control of your fingers to take the positions they will need. The fingers may not move and the muscles may not even tense, but the neural preparations for tensing and moving are ready. There can be some conscious awareness of this pre-movement, but typically much of it is unconscious. We not only represent the instructions we may send to our bodies, but we plan whole sequences of actions, together with anticipations of the sensations that will guide them and the feedback from muscles and limb-position sensors that may occur. We do this routinely. The easiest way to convince yourself in an intuitive unscientific way that this is so is to think of planning a complex action that will have to be performed quickly. You are beginning a ski run and you will have to turn at a particular pole, or you are planning to cycle along a narrow winding path, or you are preparing to dart your hand into a fireplace and retrieve a piece of paper that has fallen near the flames.

In cases like this, one has a sense of doing the action before doing it. Sometimes one rehearses the action mentally to get it more nearly right before launching the actual deed, and sometimes one just anticipates and then acts. In both cases it feels as if a model of the action has occurred mentally before the bodily action. Now this is one’s sense of what it is like to act, which can be very different from what in fact happens. But there is also experimental evidence that we do form ‘motor images’, which are part of a complex integration of motor control, proprioception (our information about what our limbs are doing), and sensation.

Representations of actions are important for my purposes because they are at the heart of many emotions. You see a movie in which a child is being beaten and you have an impulse to reach out and shield him. Aggressive dogs behind a solid fence rush barking towards the fence as you walk by, and though you keep to your path you can feel your impulse to get away. A person with an abusive boss develops back problems, which are diagnosed as a reaction to her unconscious rage, and the suppressed impulses to violent action that it motivated. Of course you can represent an action for many reasons, not just in connection with an emotion. Emotions make us focus on the representation rather than the action because often, as in the cases just described, the action is not performed. In fact, the presence of a variety of representations of action, together with other representations, is essential to emotions.

Images do not make an experience into imagination. Nor do auditory experiences, nor do as-if actions. As I am using the term it is not imagination unless representations are being made and searched through in order to meet some criterion: the organism is doing something that makes it more likely that it will make some possibilities real and take note of other possibilities. Suppose that a very vivid image of your childhood home flashes into your mind, seen from behind the back porch at about two in the afternoon. You are not imagining it but remembering it or having a flashback of it. You wonder how you could have got up the steps and through the door pulling a toboggan, and you mentally approach the porch from various angles and see the outer and inner doors swing open in various angles and sequences. Then you are imagining, once you are doing something with the representations.

It is also worth pointing out that it is not a simple matter what is being imagined. Suppose that there was a picture above your bed as a child that you always thought was your grandmother. Sometimes you put yourself to bed and had no story or goodnight kiss, and then you would imagine that woman coming out of the picture, giving you a hug and whispering a short reminiscence from her life. You do not imagine her being grandmotherly, and in fact you have no information about your grandmothers, but just as being as she is in the picture, and being nice to you. You think that you were imagining your grandmother putting you to bed, but in fact the picture was of her sister, so you were imagining your great-aunt. Cases like this show that the content of imagination is often not transparent to the person who is imagining. This is also so when the imagining is unconscious. Suppose, to add to this series of imagination-describing imaginative exercises, that you are warned to be careful in dealing with the meter reader, who is short-tempered and potentially violent. The electric company truck stops outside your house and there is a knock at the door. You open the door, keeping it on the latch, and then have to look three times to see the meter reader, who is a small young woman. With a shock you realize that you have been mentally preparing for an encounter with a large middle-aged man. Between the warning and the meeting you have been imagining without knowing it.

Imagination, as I have been describing it, is in some ways rather like emotion. It pushes in a certain direction; it is going to a particular end. So the frightened mouse that anticipates carnivores leaping from unexpected places is imagining them, probably as inaccurately as we imagine many of the fates that await us, by setting in place a structure of responses to possible threats. When a plant moves, the mouse is prepared to freeze, smell, listen; her motor control is preparing to dash for shelter. This is like you in the meter reader case, when you half-open the door, prepared to see a heavy boot inserted to jam it open, and find your shoulder ready to jam the door shut, all without any images or words passing through your consciousness. The mouse and you are producing representations of possible situations, in order to be prepared for trouble.

Imagining is unlike emotion too, in a way that suggests how the two fit together. We can imagine very specific things, such as the story that a bore may tell us for the hundredth time or the path that leads from the washroom to the back door. These are different acts of imagination, though someone could perform them simultaneously. You would, if you were dreading that Uncle George might corner you and tell you the story yet again and you were thinking of ways you could escape before he had the chance. Emotions directed at a topic will drive imagination of associated facts, possibilities, and actions. They have many of their powers by driving, pressuring, us to imagine, and imagination is important in part because it expresses and responds to our emotions.

Here is what I take to be essential to emotions. An emotion is a state which generates a range of representations on a given theme, usually with respect to particular objects. These include representations of actions towards the objects, representations of situations that might develop, and representations of results that might be produced. It is crucial that the representations concern both facts and actions. Emotions are like little belief–desire packages, with linked effects on how one interprets the environment and how one acts towards it. This is why a single emotion can serve as a short-cut version of a complex system of motives. The range of representations is held together by the theme. For example, a person feels horror at seeing a kitten killed by a dog. She represents ways she might have intervened, though she did not, and represents the kitten safe. She represents the actions of impulsively not observing the scene. She represents the scene itself, emphasizing its more disturbing moments. She replays her experience leading up to the event, comparing it to possible variations that might show it to be an illusion or a dream. Another person feels contempt for a colleague. He represents the colleague’s actions in comparison with better alternatives; he represents crudely humiliating actions that he does not take, and more subtle dismissals, some of which he may actually act on. He thinks of how he would have done duties that he takes the other to have bungled, and he emphasizes unsatisfactory aspects of the colleague’s performance.

Think of simple fear and anger, where representations of running away or attacking are combined with representations of the harm that the feared object might do or damage that might be done to the object of the anger. Some of these representations, for example those of means of escape and what one would have to do to take them, are very primitive and are similar to those of other creatures with which we share our basic emotions. We all have certain basic motivational packages that we use when the environment provides an appropriate theme.

In all of these we have a large range of representations, in which representations of actions and representations of situations are tied together by the theme of the emotion. Many of the representations are exploratory, such as various ways of escaping a threat, or hypothetical, such as kinds of harm that could come from a worrying situation. Many of them are anticipations of possible developments in the situation as it is, and thus represent dispositions to interpret the situation: the innocuous person who reveals a nasty agenda, the half-seen corridor that leads outside. There is no single representation that must accompany any emotion: a person who fears a stranger may imagine the stranger attacking her, or imagine herself running away with the person in pursuit. Many of the situations represented have little relation to the beliefs and desires that govern the person’s deliberate actions: the terrifying driving test examiner is not really going to throw you out of the car or tell you that you are the worst examinee he has ever shared a car with. But they are part of what makes it the emotion it is, and they are also a large part of the reason that emotions are essential things to have. So one represents a situation as fearful by representing the bad consequences that could come from it, and in doing this one makes the threatening aspects of it stand out more definitely. This often remarked-on function of emotions, to filter information and options by making some more salient than others, amounts to the way emotions link representations of real situations to representations of various possibilities arising from them.

Seeing as

You can see almost anything as almost anything else, with a little imaginative effort. Here are some lines and shapes. What do they look like?

You can probably see a few faces, since we see faces everywhere. But it can also be a countryside seen from above, with roads winding around it, or earthworms rising out of the soil. If I tell you the right story before showing it to you, you will immediately see it as a countryside or as worms. It can also be seen as a swimmer, with the tentacles of a giant squid reaching to seize her legs and drag her underwater.

The phenomenon is not confined to pictures and seeing. The first four notes of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ are the same as the first four notes of ‘The Wedding March’. Try twisting the rhythm of either to make yourself hear it as the other. They have quite different characters as tunes (and one has associations of looking back in time and the other of looking forward). Tasting coffee when you expect orange juice will make it disgusting. And so on. Figures which are ambiguous in their perspective, like the familiar reversing cube, are particularly interesting, for in switching from one to the other way of understanding them, one is switching one’s own position, as imaginary observer, from one place to another. So, we might say, in one of them one is imagining oneself to be looking in a different direction than in imagining the other. (In one of them one looks up at a base and in the other one looks down at a floor.) This is a point to return to.

One thing that happens when we perceive something as something is that many representations are produced, linked to the possibilities we are summoning. When you see that loop as a tentacle pulling the swimmer under, you also entertain a representation of her disappearing under the surface, and of the pull on her leg. You may well empathetically represent a struggle to free the leg or to keep your head above water. These are rather like emotions. Real emotions are present when actions of the imagining person are represented, for example the fearful desperation of someone trying not to drown. In other cases there are states that we do not have familiar words to classify. They can be complicated states involving many representations, rather like the torrent of associations produced by some works of art. Paintings, songs, and stories are not usually objects of literal perception-as, except in the trivial sense in which you see paint on a canvas as a winged horse. But they share the feature that in reacting to them we experience a host of shifting and competing secondary representations, helping to explain why we refer to our reactions as emotional, though frequently with a bad conscience since we know that these are not really surprise, relief, elation, but patterns of reaction that have something in common with them.

There is another connection between perception-as and emotion that is worth mentioning: the way that it affects the appearances of things. Sometimes this is trivial and obvious, as when seeing the moon’s surface as a face makes the ‘eyes’ and ‘mouth’ locations more prominent while non-facial features recede. Sometimes it is more subtle, as when seeing an alley as a place you might be mugged makes the shadows seem bigger and darker. To anticipate an idea that will appear soon, a pressure is put on the appearances. It is as if the shadows were squeezed by the possibility that muggers are lurking in them so that their darkness oozes out to cover more of the scene. This can happen with accurately perceived scenes. You are shown the alley and told that it is a perfectly safe place but that some people are spooked by it, taking it as a place where muggers will wait for them on the way to their cars. You trust the assurances and you do not see the alley as dangerous. But you do see it as a somewhere that looks dangerous to others, and this ‘seeing as seeing as scary’ – seeing how it could be seen as scary – is enough to darken and stretch the shadows. The subconscious soundtrack for your perception moves down an octave and acquires some unresolved chords.

The imagining that is linked to emotions comes in crowds of linked representations playing out a story. But when we think of imagining we often think of a solitary representation, representing a single fact or containing a single image. In fact I suspect this is pretty rare. (It is usually supposing rather than imagining.) An image you summon to mind isn’t like an enigmatic picture found on the street: when you imagine something, you give it a meaning, you take it to be a particular kind of thing, and you relate yourself to it in a particular way. Still, the imagination that is associated with emotions gives particularly rich mixtures of representations, and in particular includes motor images and plans of action. Moreover, in emotional imagination there is always a purpose, a story; the representations are never just imagined for their own sake.

I suspect that it is pretty rare that representations ever are completely purposeless. We can say ‘suppose that there is silicon-based life on a distant planet’, and consider the possibility without any pro or con or purpose. Or we can picture a planet that follows a figure-eight path around two stars which are themselves in a cyclic pattern relative to one another, just to see if we are capable of it. Or we can hold one hand behind our back and without moving it prepare to grasp various shapes or trace out various patterns, just to have the experience of doing this. (It is interesting that this sort of example is unusual among those that people use when discussing imagination.) These are very special human exploits, basic to curiosity-driven science and wonder-driven art, and connected with the fact that the emotions of curiosity and wonder lead to activities drained of some emotionally fertile aspects of imagination. But I take them to be exceptions, rare extreme cases that require a delicate background. And I conjecture that it is only because we have the richer crowds of representations that we can have these more delicately tuned ones. Supposing is a very special, limiting, case of imagining. To imagine with freely multiplying representations, which link perceptual sensitivities and motor preparations, is to have an emotion. A dramatic and potentially misleading way of putting this is that imagination can be seen as a special case of emotion, or rather of some larger class which has emotion at its core. Perhaps emotion made thought possible.

Emotions and thinking

We describe some people as particularly imaginative. This always takes one particular form or another: one person is rich in stories, another in unusual practical options. This, rather than calculating ability, is often what we admire in people who are clever in various ways. And in fact the ability to solve mathematical or logical problems is often based on imagination, when a person comes up with their own route to a solution which can’t be got in an easy mechanical way. Notice how original a lot of emotion-driven thinking is. Someone is jealous of their spouse’s affection for a lover and takes creative revenge, filling the lover’s convertible with fish. Another is suspicious of a salesman’s motives, and besides watching her purse and her social identification number, she checks to make sure that the salesman has not implanted any recording devices on her. Neither is a routine or predictable action, but is the kind of thing that people do all the time when their emotions inspire them. And this is in accord with the biological function of emotions, to make us search for actions, and actions that will address problems of particular kinds.