Heroes Not Zombies

I listened to an interview with Iain McGilchrist recently where he said the difference between imagination and fantasy is that imagination engages us with reality where fantasy takes us away from it.

Iris Murdoch makes the same point about imagination in her “The Sovereignty of Good”…..

We use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it….

Imagination is our super power. We can’t know the inner life of another….whether that be a person, an animal or a plant.

When patients told me their stories I used my imagination to “see” them, to “hear” them and to “feel” what they were feeling. I think, and Iris Murdoch makes this point too, that we have to focus our imagination with a particular kind of attention – loving attention.

I know love has many forms and is different in different contexts and in every relationship but we need a loving attention if we want to get to know another. We need to regard them positively, to listen without judging and we need to care. All of that falls into place when we act with love, when we pay a loving attention.

Imagination, then, is essential to empathy because it connects, it builds bonds between us. I remember after 9/11, the author, Ian McEwan, described the terrorist act as a “failure of imagination”, and the 9/11 Commission picked up on that in its report. It seems to me that all such cruelties, such acts of heartless violence, are failures of imagination…..the perpetrators don’t know their victims, don’t pay loving attention to them.

Fantasy on the other takes us away from the world, from reality. Fantasies about immortality, fantasies about the human race leaving planet Earth to live on Mars, fantasies about consciousness downloaded into computers or robots…..they all take us away from reality.

Fantasy can be fun. It’s good to escape or dream from time to time. But it’s good to remember that fantasies remove us from real life because they involve a direction of attention away from reality.

There’s a lot more I could say about this but I’ll leave it at that and ask, what comes up for you when you reflect on the differences between imagination and fantasy?