I’ve read the majority of Kearney’s Poetics now and find it interesting. I looked him up on the nets and read a few interviews, listened to bits of podcasts, saw a bit of video and what I heard (amongst other things) was his predisposition to avoid the simulacrum-trap of post-modernism. This, I suspect, comes courtesy of his early (positive) religious training in Irish Catholicism; he seems a man deeply interested in ethics and empathy. I get that, although, obviously, I don’t come at those ideas from a religious standpoint.

How his obsession with grounding human meaning in something that we can authentically share (i.e. meaning isn’t a solipsistic illusion) is reflected in his reading of phenomenology and his understanding of imagination is as complex as it is interesting.

He says of phenomenology and imagination:

Three decisive claims made by phenomenology – as it emerges in Husserl and evolves through his existential and hermeneutic disciples – are: (1) imagining is a productive act of consciousness, not a mental reproduction in the mind; (2) imagining does not involve a courier service between body and mind but an original synthesis which precedes the age-old opposition between the sensible and the intelligible; and (3) imagining is not a luxury of idle fancy but an instrument of semantic innovation.

That’s rather a nice summary; and if each point was followed, it would lead to some interesting conclusions about what it is like to be a human being.

Another dimension of his thought about imagination is that it has an orientation to the “other”. This orientation enacts ethics. Throughout the book he examines “Kristeva’s melancholic imagination, Vattimo’s fragile imagination (and) Lyotard’s narrative imagination” each of which presents “an irreducibly ethical scruple.”  I can feel the religiousness in him here, as I do when I read Alasdair MacIntyre, and can’t help but think about Wallace Stevens’ and his underlying assumptions and this apparently required sense of a moral universe.  I do find it interesting that it appears that these ethical thinkers (all Catholics) have been reducing the scope of the claims they make with regard to the seating of this morality, as they must to avoid the old pitfalls of a necessary, but unworkable, god.

There are numerous similarities between these three. Whereas Kearney’s required Phenomenologically-based shift of perspective is explained as imagination ceasing to “take itself for granted and (coming) reflectively to acknowledge its own pre-reflective engagement with everyday lived projects and preoccupations,” Stevens has this as his “supreme fiction” and his requirement that imagination and reality co-adhere for an effective poem/narrative/life.  For MacIntyre these same ideas are present, at least in part, in his notions of dependence and “goods of excellence.” These men are all humanists in the sense that they have seated the human capacity for ethical behaviour at the center of their lives and read it as the center of ours as well. And yet they also seem monks-in-disguise, not humanists but theists: their work seems a kind of secular application of the contemporary Christian man’s tendency to priesthood when those men aren’t in agreement with the dogma and social practices of the institutional church.

Anyway, I’ve gone off topic. It’s just that I find it interesting the similarities in religiosity, ideas about ethics and their apparent shared assumptions about what empowers and/or constitutes imagination.

One last quote from Kearney, to resonate with Stevens’ struggle between imagination and reality:

The ethical potential of narrative imagination may be summarized under three main heading: (1) the testimonial capacity to bear witness to a forgotten past; (2) the empathic capacity to identify with those different to us (victims and exemplars alike); and (3) the critical-utopian capacity to challenge official stories with unofficial or dissenting ones which open up alternative ways of being.

Compare Stevens’ imaginative force: it is the thing that will ultimately return us “not as a god, but as a god might be, / naked among them, like a savage source.” The alternative way of being to which Kearney alludes is this utopian semi-divinity, an ethical, reasonable yet passionate, human being who shares the world of possibility with the “other.” Here is the basic vision of these post-modern Catholics — an utopian ethic founded on the power of human narrative/poetic imagination. It explains their similarities, and their assumptions, but I still haven’t answered my own question. Without the battle – this “challenge” – as the motivational centerpiece, how will the imagined narrative go?