3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Consciousness embodied: language and the imagination in the communal world of William Blake(2014-08-26) Pierce, RobynThis dissertation examines the philosophical and spiritual beliefs that underpin William Blake’s account of the imagination, his objections to empiricism and his understanding of poetic language. It begins by considering these beliefs in relation to the idealist principles of George Berkeley as a means of illustrating Blake’s own objections to the empiricism of John Locke. The philosophies of Locke and Berkeley were popular in Blake’s society and their philosophical positions were well known to him. Blake and Berkeley are aligned against Locke’s belief in an objective world composed of matter, and his theory of abstract ideas. Both reject Locke’s principles by affirming the primacy of the perceiving subject. However, Blake disagrees with Berkeley’s theologically traditional understanding of God. He views perception as an act of artistic creation and believes that spiritual divinity is contained within and is intrinsic to man’s human form. This account of human perception as the creative act of an immanent divinity is further elucidated through a comparison with the twentieth-century existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty examines human experience as the functioning of an embodied consciousness in a shared life-world. While Merleau-Ponty does not make any reference to a spiritual deity, his understanding of experience offers a link between Berkeley’s criticisms of Locke and Blake’s own objections to empiricism. Through a comparative examination of Blake and Merleau-Ponty, the imagination is revealed to be the creative or formative consciousness that proceeds from the integrated mind-body complex of the “Divine Body” or “human form divine”. This embodied existence locates the perceiving self in a dynamic physical landscape that is shared with other embodied consciousnesses. It is this communal or intersubjective interaction between self and other that constitutes the experienced world. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the chiasm and his notion of flesh, discussed in The Visible and the Invisible, are applied to Blake in order to elucidate his belief in poetic vision and the constitutive power of language. The form and function of language are compared with that of the body, because both bring the individual experience of a perceiving subject into being in the world and facilitate the reciprocal exchange between the self and other. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Blake characterises the body and language as the living media of the imagination, which facilitate a creative exchange between a perceiving self and a shared life-world.Item 'It's just your imagination': Fantasy proneness and social anxiety(2008-05-30T13:19:42Z) Garda, Zureida TanyaSelf-imagery plays a significant role in the development and maintenance of social anxiety (Hirsch, Clark and Mathews, 2006a). As a feared social event is anticipated, negative self- images become activated and this increases the experience of anxiety (Hirsch & Holmes, 2007). These continue to be present during the social event and become reinforced by negative interpretations of self-performance as well as by the responses of others (Hirsch, Clark, Mathews & Williams, 2003). Mental imagery is a key characteristic of fantasy proneness where the ability to generate vivid imagery forms part of imaginational ability (Sanchez-Bernados & Avia, 2004). This study investigated the relationship between fantasy proneness and social anxiety. As anticipation of a feared event plays a pivotal role in social anxiety; the establishment of a positive relationship between fantasy proneness (imaginational ability) and social anxiety may shed light on the role that imagination and fantasy play in how a socially anxious person imagines a feared event, which then contributes to the experience of social anxiety. The implications of a relationship between these constructs may indicate the role which imaginational ability (fantasy proneness) could play in underlying and maintaining social anxiety. Two self-report measures (the Creative Experiences Questionnaire and the self-report version of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale) were administered to a sample of 50 non-clinical participants; 38 females and 12 males, within the age range of 19 to 52 years old. Both scales have been found to have adequate psychometric properties internationally (Fresco, Coles, Heimberg, Liebowitz, Hami, Stein and Goetz, 2001; Merckelbach, Horselenberg & Muris, 2001). Whilst no psychometric information on the use of these scales in the South African context could be found, the results of this study will contribute to the use of these scales in South Africa. The results of these scales were statistically correlated revealing that, within the research design and methodology parameters of this study, a weak, but significant, positive, relationship was found between the constructs of fantasy proneness and social anxiety. The implication of this finding is that imagination, as a cognitive process, plays a role in social anxiety. Clinically this suggests that whilst imaginative processes play a role in underlying social anxiety, they can also be utilised adaptively in cognitively countering social anxiety in a treatment context.