Western philosophy wrongly equated imagination with mere unreal fiction and fantasy

Evidence

To understand the uniqueness of Castoriadis’s theorizing of the imagination, we should first discern two cardinal “misrecognitions” that throw a wrench in the works of dominant philosophical approaches to the imagination. 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

• DEFINE: Defines the first ‘misrecognition’ — treating imagination as ‘the unreal’ — which Castoriadis’s corrective concept must overturn; groundwork for distinguishing radical imagination from mere speculation/fantasy.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on how we still equate imaginative possibility with naive utopianism, and what that delegitimizing move does to political and financial futures.