And, this happened a few days ago. It usually doesn't take me long to read a book, but with this I set a personal record. I think it took me almost a month. I said to stop reading only science or anything related to it, to read more... philosophy. But I had also read philosophy, only like this time, things were different.
The book I'm talking about is "Despre ingeri" by Andrei Plesu. Give many quotes from other books, and erudite. But, maybe because it is from a field so different from the one in which I am active, maybe because the approaches are so shockingly unscientific, maybe because I am limited in vibrating to some feelings, this year, but I found it terribly boring.
Actually, the general idea would be, beyond the rather diffuse message, that a theory of angels would try to explain some higher human functions, such as imagination. Human psychic functions would be according to the vision of some metaphysical philosophers, supernatural in nature, not to say divine. They would have nothing to do with our body, to which the sensations would be related. Angels would be entities whose sensations would be foreign, because he would not have a human-type body. But they would still have a more consistent nature than divinity.
Angels would fill the space between humans and divinity. If the angels had specified their imagination, in fact they would inspire us when we have ideas, pure reason would be the prerogative of divinity. The pinnacle of what nature can give in terms of spirituality would be pure reason, hard to understand for us, body possessors. Here he even gives some interesting quotes about the vision of some philosophers on imagination. Descartes totally discredits it, considering it a kind of fantasy, the opposite of common sense, Diderot, a faculty with a certain combinatory capacity, without creative power, and Baudelaire, "queen of colleges". What he doesn't say is that Einstein considered it more important than intelligence.
I am more and more inclined to agree with the author of the "relativity theory", who should also be considered a great philosopher. In "The Civilization of Hunger" there is more about the biological origin of imagination, but also about the ability to reason, which can be popularly called intelligence (actually reason).
Animals solve problems. Reason is not at all rare in the animal world. Learning as well. After I wrote the book, an article appeared about the shocking intelligence of some relatives of the garden snail (as they are also called in the "Civilization of Hunger""), the octopuses. They are lower animals. Why are they so smart?? What exactly makes them so?? The answer could be quite simple. What then is the reason in these conditions?
How do you know?, typical human thinking is symbolic. Such a thing has not been discovered in animals. Human thinking does not only operate with objects from nature, but with those that she creates permanently. In practice, she always creates objects to which she applies the rules of reason. Imagination is really the faculty to build castles in the sky, that is, to build virtual worlds that help to understand the real one. From here, it follows that imagination would be a faculty superior to reason.
What is even more important is that imagination, as well as reason, depend on the body, of sensations... More, affective functions also depend on the body. And they are essential for adaptation, they guide reason, imagination etc. So the higher psychic functions in the absence of the body would be impossible. Actually, evolution in the sense of raising these functions would be linked to an even more sensitive body.
