Western philosophy’s equating of imagination with fantasy delegitimizes it as irrational

Evidence

The first is the view that considers the imagination as equivalent to “fiction” and the “fantastical,” and thus with the “not real,” or that which is not. This view has its roots in Western philosophy’s “exorbitant ontological privilege granted to the res (extensa and cogitans, each always involving the other)” (Castoriadis 1975, 332). The bulk of Greek-Western philosophical thought hence divides imagination, reality, and reason into opposing camps. This false distinction has a twofold effect. First it delegates the imagination to the ambit of the “instinctive” and the “irrational.” Second, it confers a semantic separation of the real from the ideal (the latter can be traced in the Latin root of imago, meaning “ideal image”). Imagining is therefore considered an act that aspires to an (inherently) unreachable perfection, a naive striving for utopia—a fantasy. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 150

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Explains the first ‘misrecognition’ Castoriadis refutes—imagination-as-fiction—which the author will reverse to argue speculation is a form of imagination, not fantasy.

Related

• Western philosophy wrongly equated imagination with mere unreal fiction and fantasy (similarity 0.95)
• Western thought has treated imagination as fantasy or individual genius, not social (similarity 0.84)
• Imagination precedes and produces reality rather than reflecting it (similarity 0.83)
• Imagination actively creates worlds rather than merely imitating an external reality (similarity 0.83)
• Legitimacy of speculation was fought over competing forms of imagination (similarity 0.81)
• Market rationality is actually imagination dominating at every level (similarity 0.80)
• Imagination functions both as an open-ended process and a fixed outcome (similarity 0.80)
• Imagination is social and intersubjective, constituting collectivities (similarity 0.79)
• Speculative imagination generates collective futures under incalculable uncertainty (similarity 0.79)