Excerpt
…prejudices: namely, that philosophy, poetry, art–and even science,
both at its beginnings and in its contemporary form–as products
of the Imaginative, that is, as more or less rationally articulated
fictions grounded in the observation and investigation of nature,
disregard truth as veridicality. We shall not comment here on this
assertion, but we reserve the right to affirm its fundamental inaccuracy.
Over time, with the firm establishment of a poorly understood
scientific mentality, the concept of the imaginary has acquired an
air of obsolescence. And perhaps, in a certain sense, this is justified
if we attribute to the imaginary a hallucinatory, delirious,
or fantastical meaning. Art, for example–and likewise philosophy
and science–is not the result of the imaginary understood as the
faculty of reverie and hallucination, but rather of what we shall
call the capacity of the Imaginative. Unlike the note of irrationality
contained in the notion of the imaginary, the Imaginative acquires
the value of rational possibility, the specific capacity of the intellect
capable of creating possible worlds.
For this reason, we maintain that only the Imaginative is the human
faculty capable of creating not only the work of art but also the
world itself, by virtue of an implicit rationality. Yet this capacity of
the Imaginary is more than that. It is the faculty unique to the human
being–and to the human being alone–to create possible worlds
whose rational meaning is both explicit and implicit. It is responsible
both for endowing reality with value and for understanding it, while
at the same time bringing it forth–its poiesis, its creation.
It is likewise this capacity, proper only to the human being, that
is responsible for humanity’s understanding of the world and its oppositional
stance toward it, as well as for absolutely everything that
human beings have ever created, from the work of art to scientific
discovery and technological development.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763890
