Imagining is denying reality

Badr Fdail

Professor Rossitsa Varadinova Borkowski

PHI 2302 03

24th Feb 2020

Is imagining to deny reality ?

Imagination is often a negation of reality, although I think it can be an ally of reason if used wisely.  Imagination is necessary for intelligence, and genius does not exist without it.  But an unbridled imagination can lead to madness. But again without any imagination, man would sink into pathological idiocy. Imagination is the faculty that allows us to envision the future, which makes it possible to improve human comfort through inventions.

1. To imagine is sometimes to deny the real.

 Imaginary images are never entirely accurate. They distort reality, are blurred.  This is what Descartes shows in the Metaphysical Meditations, in "Meditation 6" with the case of the chiliogone.  Descartes tells us that one can design a chiliogone (a geometric figure with a thousand sides), one can think it, have in mind the concept of such a figure, but on the other hand, one cannot imagine with exactitude a chiliogone. We are going to produce an imaginary image of a figure with lots of sides, but probably not with the thousand sides required.  Also Descartes says that there is a fertility of the understanding and a radical poverty of the imagination, it is not able to reproduce the reality with exactitude, it negates it in part.

 According to Descartes, in intellect, the mind only uses itself;  instead of imagining, the mind contemplates some bodily form (because who says imagination, says image).  Imagination is therefore a mix of body and mind.

 Imagination as Descartes points out is not pure like perception (which practically only involves the body), or idea (which practically only involves the mind).  And since the imagination is not pure, in the sense of "unmixed", it is blurred in the images it provides us, it is not exactly faithful to reality.

2- Madness usually comes from an excess of imagination.

 Imagination tends to satisfy the pleasure principle at the expense of the reality principle. Madness is this carelessness towards the pleasure principle.

 As Freud noted, imagination gives free rein to pleasure.  So for example, a lover imagines his beloved saying pleasant words to him, when this love is not reciprocal. In real life, you have to give up a certain number of these instincts (pleasure principle).

 Madness always results in an unbridled imagination. For example, in paranoia, the paranoid imagines that everyone is angry with him or laughing at him.  In mythomania, an individual tells lies constantly, in general, to satisfy his ego.  And these cases are present everywhere in our modern society, and I can testify that after 3 years going to university whose community represents a sample of a society.

 As we can see, the imagination sometimes denies reality, it is a faculty that can be amazing and dangerous.  With imagination, man is impressionable, he can believe that appearance necessarily corresponds to being.

 Imagination gives a wrong perception of reality.  We have seen that Plato ignores the imagination: for him, "phantasia" indicates only a state of error in which one lets oneself be deceived by the appearance of things. For him, reality is synonymous with "truth";  only what is real is true. To deny reality, in this case, is to deny the truth, and therefore to live in illusion and lies. To imagine, always according to Plato, is to "image", it is to produce images, by making believe that the images of reality correspond to reality itself. The most famous example is the sight of a piece of wood placed in the water, which appears to be broken.  Plato was careful towards our natural disposition to believe what we see.

 The prisoners of the cave, in the famous eponymous allegory of Plato (The Republic, Book VII), perceive, from their obscure prison, only images of reality, and take these images for real. They live in illusion, but they ignore it. However, these prisoners do not, strictly speaking, imagine the shadows reaching them from the outside world; they do perceive them.  Reality is simply distorted. In this case, it is an illusion of the senses, since they indeed perceive images, "shadows", which they assimilate to reality itself. The allegory of the cave symbolizes the difficult access to reality, and therefore to the truth.

Joined by the idea of ​​another philosopher, the imagination magnifies the facts or undermines them unjustly, according to Blaise Pascal in "Les Pensées": "The imagination magnifies small objects to fill our souls by a fantastic estimate, and by a reckless insolence, it diminishes the great to its extent as when speaking of God ».

 But I find that the most serious, as pointed out previously, is that imagination tends to make us live in 'appearance'.  We imagine the effect we have on others, we build an imaginary being while neglecting the real.  Sometimes, for example, we see people showing off with a luxurious car, playing loud music, as if the main thing is there. All that is only to appear, the will to display is the mark of a spiritual poverty or an outrageous narcissism, which always ends in a certain futility, I have nothing against those who put of the music loudly because it happens to me too, but not for the same reason.  Imagination, as we can see, is therefore problematic, it sometimes takes us away from reality.

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