The activity of consciousness, we have seen, converts impression into idea, that is, crude sensation into imagination. Regarded as names for a certain kind or level of experience, the words consciousness and imagination are synonymous: they stand for the same thing, namely, the level of experience at which this conversion occurs. But within a single experience of this kind there is a distinction between that which effects the conversion and that which has undergone it. Consciousness is the first of these, imagination is the second. Imagination is thus the new form which feeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness. This makes good the suggestion t. . . that imagination is a distinct level of experience intermediate between sensation and intellect, the point at which the life of thought makes contact with the life of purely psychical experience. As we should now restate that suggestion: it is not sensa as such that provide the data for intellect, it is sensa transformed into ideas of imagination by the work of consciousness.
TMT [Terror Management Theory] proposes that fear of death is a primordial feature of the human mind. As early humans evolved their extraordinary intelligence, they started to use symbols in their minds to represent abstract ideas, like the ideas of the self and the future. Then . . . they combined these two symbols in particular to imagine the self in the future. This recursive self-awareness— consciousness of one’s consciousness through time— was a source of both awe and dread: awe, because it helped give these early humans a sense of agency and, with it, feelings of power and possibility; and dread, because it made them aware that their selves were subject to the inexorable degradation of time. “The most fateful consequence of mental time travel,” the psychologist Michael Corballis writes, “may be the understanding that we will all die.”
An empty discourse is one that behaves as if it wishes to be filled with a single inductive or deductive answer-a definitive argument meant to persuade all hearers and end inquiry through complete satisfaction-but in fact generates the continuation of attempts, or tacitly admits to unanswerability.
First, Socrates is a gadfly: he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will “sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives” unless somebody comes along to arouse them. And what does he arouse them to? To thinking and examination, an activity without which life, in his view, was not only not worth much but was not fully alive.
But what, exactly did he mean? What are “institutions”? Experts have suggested dozens of definitions, but I have always found the one offered by Douglass North, a Nobel prize–winning economic historian, most useful. Institutions, he says, are “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”
Counter-education interiorizes and individualizes, as Ficino said, the uniformities of education. Individualizing education, i.e., lodging learning within someone’s soul, requires eros, not because individualizing favors one student over another, the so-called “teacher’s pet,” but because eros kindles each person’s particular style of desire.
