Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Unimaginative Nonsense

Nonsense. The contention that a language of science has replaced a language of myth to the detriment of the world is nonsense.

Lachman blames the pre-Socratic Greeks for starting the rot in language. Measurement and the language of mathematics are particularly vile. They empty out the existential reality of everything and leave us with sterile husks of mere scientific concepts. According to him the results are disastrous: “Anomie, apathy, alienation, a sense of existential ‘So what?’ accompanied the success of our now seemingly unstoppable aim of quantifying all of existence and our experience of it.”

Lachman gropes continuously for examples to demonstrate how evil his idea of scientific terminology is. He says, for example, “The spirit of geometry works sequentially, reasoning its way step-by-step, following its rules, whereas the intuitive minds sees everything all at once. It arrives at its goal in one glance, not by a process of deduction.” Step by step reasoning - bad; intuitive understanding of wholes - good. Perhaps he could benefit by reading Ian Hacking’s exposition about how important both intuition and the process of deduction are in mathematics: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

That Lachman attempts to make science conform with his idea of social evil is apparent. What he would like us all to do about this evil is less clear. He wants more ‘imagination’ but is convinced that we no longer know what imagination is. He defines it as “our ability to grasp reality;” and claims have lost knowledge of this critical skill through the pernicious intrusion of unimaginative science into every aspect of our lives.

The obvious question that has to be posed to Lachman is ‘How could you possibly know this?’ If the connection between our language and our words is flawed, the error is inexpressible in the language we have. Many have claimed linguistic superiority as a matter of divine revelation as a solution to this epistemological problem - Hebrew for Jews, Latin for Christians, Arabic for Muslims. Lachman is very big on Owen Barfield’s so-called Anthroposophy, a sort of poetic systems theory of the world, which was influential with C.S. Lewis and the other members of the Oxford Inklings.

So Lachman likes poets, especially religious poets, the more mystical the better: Goethe, Hamann, Jung, Cassirer. So do I. And I have some sympathy with Lachman’s rather spiritual view that language, scientific or not, does not capture reality. But to claim that poetic or religious language somehow does and in some way demonstrates superior imaginative skill is not just bogus but stupid. Lachman is well read; but he is also a closet religious fundamentalist who believes that he and his pals have an inside track on which language has the right connections with those things that are not-language.

As I said: Nonsense. And not very imaginative nonsense given that its all been said before.

Postscript: See here for Lachman’s language suggestions: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0wqof...

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