Imagination precedes and produces reality rather than reflecting it

Evidence

With Castoriadis, each of these misrecognitions is not only refuted but reversed entirely. First, imagination precedes and anticipates “reality,” which in turn stems from the human capacity to imagine—reality is nothing but imagination’s ongoing outcome. To understand this radical view, we must trace it back to the idea of phantasia, the notion of imagination appearing first in Plato and which bears equally on “sensation,” “cognition,” and “action.” Aristotle (1984) substantiated this view: imagination is phantasia aisthetike, and the force generating emotions—sensuous phantasia—as well as reason—deliberative phantasia (Rhetoric 1370a, 1378b), with which we actively construct the world around us. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 152

With Castoriadis, each of these misrecognitions is not only refuted but reversed entirely. First, imagination precedes and anticipates “reality,” which in turn stems from the human capacity to imagine—reality is nothing but imagination’s ongoing outcome. To understand this radical view, we must trace it back to the idea of phantasia, the notion of imagination appearing first in Plato and which bears equally on “sensation,” “cognition,” and “action.” Aristotle (1984) substantiated this view: imagination is phantasia aisthetike, and the force generating emotions—sensuous phantasia—as well as reason—deliberative phantasia (Rhetoric 1370a, 1378b), with which we actively construct the world around us. Therefore, imagination constitutes “a crucial ingredient of our mental life, but it is also something that, insofar as it enables us to deliberate, is a specifically human faculty associated with reason” (Bottici 2014, 19). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophical treatments of the imagination succeeded in severing conceptual links to this idea of phantasia and placed it instead within the sphere of aesthetics, where it has remained to this day. … Relatedly, as to the question of why imagination should not be confounded with passive perception and imitation, Castoriadis is steadfast: “Representation is not tracing out the spectacle of the world, it is that in and through which at a given moment a world arises” (1975, 331). Hence, Castoriadis considers images to be generated by a fundamentally creative (rather than imitative or repetitive) act of representation. With creative representation, we have no simple “unmediated access to ‘reality,’ and further, no interest in ‘reality’” (Castoriadis 1997a, 151). The act of “putting” our world “into images” is a twofold process of distorting what “is” (seeing what is absolutely not there in what “is”) and of creating forms so alien to “reality” that they cannot even be called distortions but are nonetheless entirely unique “unmotivated creations” (Castoriadis 1975, 247). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 152

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definitional move: Castoriadis reverses the dominant view—reality is imagination’s ongoing outcome, via phantasia. This is the philosophical grounding the reader needs for homo speculans as a speculating, world-constituting subject.
• XREF: Imagination-as-reality-producing connects to the thesis that financial speculation doesn’t bet on a real future but constitutes it, and to reading populist voting as world-construction rather than miscalculation. — connects to: Mental imagery itself requires a nihilating withdrawal of consciousness; Possibilities often reveal themselves only through the very act of realizing them — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 246; Sensation involves a magical inherence of lived and living rather than spatial belonging — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 844 (+8 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the seventeenth-eighteenth century shift that relegated phantasia to aesthetics—when exactly, and what was lost?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 152