The literary critic Christopher Ricks once remarked, in an off-hand manner in an off-stage discussion, that we are prone these days too much to asking too solely and too persistently “is this true?” without asking also and equally “what is true in this?”.  The challenge of asking the latter—“what is true in this?”—arises in part from being repelled at what is, from one point of view, obviously not true, whether thanks to ignorance or deception. But as much as we recoil at accepting falsehoods, it would be easy to set them to one side, and to persevere in asking “but what is true in this” were it not for a more nefariously tangled state of affairs: the truth we seek is often nestled both alongside falsehoods and also within what seem to be unacknowledged contradictions. After all, untruth and truths, whether bald fact or complex proposition, are relations. Though a falsehood may be a mere denial of a patently visible state of affairs, it can also be heard as a statement that, though true at one time, is untrue at this time; a statement that, true in some possible world of valid claims, does not fit the valid claims of the world we accept. We seek coherence as well as correspondence in assessing the truth of what others say: asking that their claims fit one another, but also that they fit what we take to be in the world, entities to which they answer. The two are not easily distinguished, since “what is the case,” as a matter of empiricist or positivist intuition is already presented as a claim within a web of beliefs (in Quine’s phrase).

We are baffled when a person who seems mostly reasonable holds two beliefs about the world that contradict; accepting one and rejecting the other, we would say that they have lost hold of the chain of inference, that they would come up short if pressed to make explicit their reasons for their beliefs; and we rest superior. But this, of course, is never the whole story. Something else is at work, a sort of belief or claim or sense of things that operates like dark matter in the web, that allows for one person to move from A to R when we have decided R cannot possibly be reconciled with R. This dark matter is often intimate with the necessary functioning of the imagination: conjectures, probabilities, uncertainties rendered more or less likely, nightmares that persuade, and grip, by our capacity for envisioning them, the “natural” order of things (kinship structures, sanctioned social ideals), and the judgment of what, though imaginary, might also, perforce, be real, accessible only by way of imagination. “Life,” says poet-critic William Empson, “involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.” It is our imaginations that make standing thus tolerable.

 Even those in possession of common facts may diverge sufficiently in how they imagine the world so as to stymie consensus; and in other cases, those who disagree over common facts may be united by how and what they imagine to be a likely future or common ideal.  The fragmentation of legacy media, and its diffusion into social media outlets, has been accompanied by the conflation of speculation and reporting; no reporting can or should be isolated from the imagination, but it is perhaps salutary for journalism to work to thwart imaginative stirrings rather than to stoke them. Lately we have seen the opposite: looking forward, we are invited to see what is not yet there. The counterargument would be that the significance of the present can only be appreciated in reference to a probable trajectory into the future. Either way, the problem is the same: we feel as if we need others not only to have a better grasp of, and respect for facts, but also to better imagine all those uncertainties and probabilities that fill those facts in. This cannot mean only a better training in probability and statistics; too much of life is inaccessible, for practical or theoretical reasons, to these realms, and assigning a probability to a particular outcome still requires we leap to imagine what it entails and how it compares to other possible outcomes. The work of imagination cannot be evaded.

The trouble is not that we are failing to teach people to imagine the world well. This diagnosis implies that there is some measure of imagination to which we can appeal, as if we could decide what counts as “good imagining,” without a sleight-of-hand by which your “good imagination” is, lo and behold, my own confirmed. We move into a happier position if we alter perspective slightly: the trouble is that we are not very good at asking people what it means for others to imagine the world well. That failure is compounded when we proceed in discussions by asking “Is this true?” rather than “what is true in this?”, because there is no asking of a conjecture or imaginary entity “is this true?” because “it” as a whole can only be “true” in such an attenuated sense so as to evacuate the force of the question; a binary “true/false” distinction comes to grief on imagination’s shoals. Habermas helps frame the point in terms of political philosophy: we are insufficiently practiced at exchanging reasons and establishing consensus about an entire dimension of the lifeworld—one that sustains aesthetic, ethical, and instrumental validity claims and norms. I am not adept at asking of another, “what is true in your way of imagining the world?”, especially when your way of imagining the world is very different from mine.

I am not talking about empathy or sympathy—I am talking about something that is cooler, detached, and likely confrontational. I am talking about how we can evaluate the imagination of another, rejecting as well as affirming what we find in it.  The direction in which I am travelling should be clear: that the study of imaginative art, whether literature or any other form, trains us in a valuable skill—but also that such a skill depends upon a certain sort of critical reading, which asks that students assess “what is true in this imaginative world” with an appreciation that “what is true in” a work of art requires both a sense of truth and a truth-telling lexicon more capacious than what might be found in other disciplines, or at least different from what might be found in other disciplines.

Central to this argument is a refusal to divorce art from the aesthetic experience—from the immediate encounter of person and object (whatever the nature of this object) in which the person experiences the object’s design as fulfilling the (artist’s) imagination, and also is made to feel that the (artist’s) imagination is fulfilling the potential of the medium and justifying the design of the work of art. Not only this, but in a work of art, we can say that the medium and design of the work justifies the imagination in turn: both in the sense that in its design the work “sets right” (one sense of justify) the feeling for whatever is being imagined, and also because of how the substance and design of the work, in fulfilling the imagination into physical form, justify that it in the eyes of others. Both directions of fulfillment and justification are simultaneously, running like a circuit, imagination realized in an object, the significance of an object realized in the imagination. Encountering a work of art is encountering this circuit, this current running between, and inseparable from, imagination and object. Nor does this confine the aesthetic to works of art: in the “pure” aesthetic of a sublime mountain scene, the sublimity of nature seems to fulfill and justify not the imagination of one author, but of the existence of a universalized (or universalizable) human imagination; what I suggest is compatible not only with critical practice, but with Kant’s aesthetics.[1]

This matters because we cannot evaluate a work of art aesthetically without, at some point, asking for the truth in the imagination that sustains and is sustained by it. To take a poem as the representative example, we cannot speak of a poem as an aesthetic object without relating how in it the imagination seems to justify the words on the page, and how the words on the page justify and fulfill the promise of the imagination. This relationship is not one of “truth” but of “beauty”; in so far as it contains any “truth,” it would be a truth that cannot be separated out from an understanding of what it means for the imagination and words to fulfill and justify one another.  What is “true” in a poem can only be retrieved from it if we ask how that poem implicitly makes the case that its way of imagining the world is fulfilled by its selection and arrangement of language; and that its selection and arrangement of language is justified by what it imagines. This leads to a variation of the hermeneutic circle, understanding the place of each word in relation to the whole of the work, where the whole is both an imaginary unity and an imaginative vision of the world. We are led, in what I am saying, to ask “how is this work right” in its design and in its imagination, with “rightness” transcending truth, beauty, and goodness; philosopher Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art suggests rightness  is the proper term for understanding art, though he goes too far in suggesting it squeeze out the others, rather than allow for them to fluidly coexist within its boundaries.

If we ask how a work is right, we are not asking whether it is right in the way an argument is right; we are asking, in the Ricks formulation, what in it is right.  In the case of a poem, we are asking how one way of imagining the world is fulfilled and justified by language, we are asking how the language makes that way of imagining vivid and present, and also how the language carries within it sufficient traces of common experience to impose upon the imagination of the particular work a limit as to what can be asked of it; the language justifies the imagination by way of the depth of experience that words contain, freight from their history and circulation among individuals. The imagination of a work of art needs to weigh and respect the inertia of the medium, if only because any medium rendered into symbols (whether it is paint, language, or sound produced by instruments) is what it is by virtue of its history and worldly use.

If we are asking how a poem is right, we are asking how it its beauty (or aesthetic “goodness”) is an indicator of some measure of truth we accept, by standards of ethical goodness we in some way accept. (We might ask whether the sequence can be re-ordered; I think we can with some adjustments: mathematicians can speak of an elegant proof as a sign of intellectual virtue, uniting truth and beauty in one fell swoop, and even implying that the virtues of the intellect are continuous with ethical action elsewhere Iife).  Conversely, if someone were to hold up the classic counterexample, a film by Leni Riefenstahl, and to ask whether it is right, the argument would turn on distinguishing “how is it right?” (or “what is right in this?”) as opposed to “is it right overall?”, with the latter being preposterous, and the former allowing some degree of valid disagreement over the relation of cinematography to a notion of male beauty (though it would need to acknowledge the racism of the ideal).

Evaluative criticism has gone out of fashion as an academic subject; it’s too easy for students to think it means simply liking, without providing reasons. But this too speaks to one of the illnesses of political discourses: the reduction of any belief that is not a fact to a mere “opinion.” It might be true that we can call all non-agreed-upon facts “opinions,” but then we need to have some way of distinguishing between them. Not all opinions are examples of the imagination, since some are judgments over morality or manners; but if we ask students to ask “what is right?” or “what is true?” in this way of imagining the world, we are asking them to form an opinion that cannot be rendered as a string of facts, and that must allow that the ways in which others imagine the world could or will be cannot be neatly separated from opinions about how it should be.

Teaching students how, and pushing ourselves, to ask “how is this poem right?”—and what is the breadth and depth of its rightness—will not save us from the political fragmentation we are suffering. But the willingness to do so might represent some movement in the direction of accepting that reasons are not facts and that reasoning does not need to be confined to positivist grounds. It would be an acknowledgement that it is possible to ask and answer, when confronted with an imagination different from our own, “what in this is true?”.

Why literature or art more broadly as the proper training ground for such evaluation of the imagination? One answer is pragmatic: a work of art makes the imagination of an individual or society concrete and self-contained; its autonomy consists not in its ahistoricism, but in containing its own reasons, its self-justification and self-fulfillment, even as it carries the history of the world by way of the history of its medium. But also, more broadly, we approach a work of art in the trust that it has been successful in some way, that it is does do something right, that it does contain something true; it teaches us, by rewarding us, to trust, to hope, and to be charitable in our attempt at finding rightness in imaginations very different from our own. It also, if we accept that it does fulfill and justify itself, offers an example of the imagination at work in the best of ways—not ways that depend only on shared facts, but that depend on something else, something that cannot be known before the work of reading begins.