A post by Nathanael Stein

This post is about a puzzle, a suspicion, and a cry for help. I need to make two points before I can raise the puzzle.

First, imagining a utopia is one of the most ambitious things you can do with the imagination, but it’s also a natural and maybe inevitable feature of our lives. (By ‘utopia’ I just mean a reasonably complete alternative form of social arrangement that is meant to be better than the present one in one or more aspects.) We spend a good amount of time imagining, or being caused to imagine, not just our own individual futures, but also a whole future way of life. These are hard to separate. Indeed, a lot of political discourse and manipulation depends on our tendency to have a vague but powerful imaginative picture of what the world might look like in 5, 10, 20 years. And such imaginings have had, to put it mildly, important real world consequences. Finally, if being able to imagine things’ being otherwise is a requirement of human freedom, to paraphrase Sartre, then imagining utopia is a non-negligible part of that activity. For a variety of reasons, then, utopian imagination deserves attention as a persistent feature of human life and world history.

Second, some utopian imaginings are better than others. In recent years philosophers have spent a fair amount of time examining the epistemic qualities of imagination for small scale matters, including under the heading of instructive vs. transcendent imagining. But there seem to be similar distinctions at the large scale as well: some utopian imaginings are more plausible than others, and some are more accurate than others about whether the alternative arrangements would indeed be better.

So this is the basis for my puzzle: utopian imagining is, I suggest, simply an extension of an exercise that we do all the time, and that Plato introduced into philosophy: imagining human social life under better or even ideal conditions. And this isn’t an exercise we need abandon on the grounds that there’s no difference between doing it well and doing it badly—even if it were possible to do so, which I doubt.

A post by Nathanael Stein

I’m grateful to be invited to contribute to the Junkyard, first because philosophy of imagination is a new area of research for me, and it’s especially due to resources like this that I’ve been able to find my way around, and second because I ended up thinking about imagination in very much the way implied by the “junkyard” quote. I’d like to use the opportunity to pick out a couple of threads from what I’ve done so far that I think might be both controversial and worth developing, and I’d be interested to hear any reactions.

I came to the topic by way of thinking about irrationality in two different ways which converged. One was in relation to the “classic” Davidsonian puzzle of accounting for irrationality without having it collapse into covert rationality, insanity, or plain stupidity. The other was in relation to a passage from Middlemarch that simply stuck with me over the years as nailing something important about the way we sometimes go wrong, but which I didn’t see being discussed in the philosophical literature. The passage involves a dried-up academic whose sense of having passed up all sorts of happiness in his youth for the sake of esoteric research (no comment!) has led him to expect a happier future as something owed to him—as though he’s stored it up on credit and can now look forward to drawing on it in middle age.