THE DISCOVERY OF THE IMAGINATION* Cornelius Castoriadis Foreword The following pages are excerpted from a work in progress, L’Elément imaginaire [The Imaginary Element], whose first volume, “historical” in nature, includes a section devoted to Aristotle’s discovery of the imagination in his treatise De Anima (Peri Psyches [On the Soul]). A few more than schematic remarks on the direction and themes of this work might facilitate the task of the reader. Despite the risk of one-sidedness, it is illuminating to think the history of the mainstream of philosophy as the elaboration of Reason, homologous to the positing of being as being-determined, or determinacy (peras, Bestimmtheit). The risk involved, which may be reduced when one is aware of it, is indeed in itself quite low. For what does not pertain to Reason and determined Being has always been assigned, in this central channel, to the infrathinkable or to the suprathinkable, to indetermination as mere privation, a deficit of determination, that is to say, of being, or to an absolutely transcendent and inaccessible origin of all determination. This position has, at all times, entailed the covering back over of alterity and of its source, of the positive rupture of already given determinations, of creation not simply as undetermined but as determining, or as the positing of new determinations. In other words, it has at all times entailed the occultation of the radical imaginary and, correlatively, that of time as time of creation and not of repetition. This occultation is total and patent as concerns the social-historical dimension of the radical imaginary, that is, the social imaginary or instituting society. In this case, the motivations, if one may express oneself thus, are clear. It appertains intrinsically and constitutively to the known institution of society, as heteronomous institution, to exclude the idea that it might be self-institution, the work of socicty as instituting. At most (in modern times), the self-institution of society will be seen as the implement- ation [mise en oeuvre] or application to human affairs of Reason in its finally understood form. Philosophy could not avoid, however, an encounter with the other dimension of the radical imaginary, its psychical dimension, the radical imagination of the subject. Here, the occultation cannot be radical. It has been the occultation of the radical character of the imagination, the Constellations Volume 1, No 2, 1994. © Basil Blackwell Ltd 1994. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge. MA 02142, USA.184 Constellations Volume 1, No 2, 1994 reduction of the latter to a secondary role, sometimes a perturbing and negative one, sometimes auxiliary and instrumental: the question has always been posed in terms of the role the imagination plays in our relation to a True/False, Beauty/Ugliness, Good/Bad posited as already given and determined elsewhere. What mattered, indeed, was to assure the theory — the view, or the constitution — of what is, of what must be done, of what is valid, in its necessity, in its very determinacy. The imagination is, however, in its essence rebellious against determinacy. To this extent, it most of the time will be simply scotomized, or relegated to “psychology,” or “inter- preted” and “explained” in terms of its products, using flagrantly superficial ideas such as “compensation” for some unsatisfied need or desire. (The imagination is obviously not effect of, but condition for desire, as Aristotle already knew: “There is no desiring without imagination,” De Anima 433b29.) And even where the creative role of the imagination will be recognized, when Kant sees in the work of art “produced” by genius the undetermined and indeterminable positing of new determinations, there will still be an “instrumentality” of a higher order, a subordination of the imagination to something else that allows one to gauge its works. In the Critique of Judgment, the ontological status of the work of art is a reflection or a derivative of its value status, which consists in the presentation within intuition of the Ideas for which Reason cannot, in principle, furnish a discursive representation. Nevertheless, this cover-up will be interrupted twice in the history of philosophy. Each time the rupture will be difficult to achieve, antinomical in character, and creative of insoluble aporias. What is thereby discovered, the imagination, does not allow itself to be held and contained, nor put into place or in its place in a clear, univocal, and assignable relation to sensibility and thought. And each time the rupture will be followed immediately by a strange and total forgetting. It is Aristotle who first discovers the imagination — and he discovers it twice, that is, he discovers two imaginations. He discovers first (De Anima, Book III, Chapter 3) the imagination in the sense that later became banal, which I will henceforth call the second imagination, and he lays down the doctrine of the imagination that has since his time become the conventional one and that still reigns today in fact and in substance. He then discovers another imagination, one with a much more radical function, that enjoys almost nothing but a homonymic relation to the previous one, and which I will henceforth call the first imagination. This discovery takes place in the middle of Book III of De Anima; it is neither made explicit nor thematized as such; it interrupts the logical order of the treatise and, of infinitely greater importance, it virtually bursts apart Aristotelian ontology — which amounts to saying, ontology tout court. And it will be ignored in interpretations and commentaries, as well as in the history of philosophy, © Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994Discovery of the Imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis 185 which will use the discovery of the second imagination to cover-up the discovery of the first imagination. One will have to wait until Kant (and, following him, Fichte) for the question of the imagination again to be posed, renewed, and opened in a much more explicit and much broader fashion — though just as antinomical, untenable, and uncontainable. And, again in this case, a new cover-up will tapidly supervene. In his youthful writings, Hegel pursued and, at times, radicalized the movement initiated by Kant and Fichte: the imagination, he writes in Faith and Knowledge, is not a “middle term” but “that which is first and original.” These writings, however, will remain unpublished and unknown. Things went in an entirely other direction in his published work. No trace of the theme or the term ‘imagination’ will be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit. And later on, Hegel will switch the emphasis from imagination to memory, to which he will transfer the “objectifiable” works of the imagination (reproaching the Ancients for having lowered memory to the rank of the imagination: Encyclopaedia, section 462 Zusatz); and what he will again call, in the Propaedeutic and the Encyclopaedia, “active imagination” and “creative imagination” will in fact be only a selective recombination of empirical data guided by the Idea — an astounding banality, after the Kantian Critiques. Thus, with regard to this question, Hegel restores and reestablishes the vulgar tradition, still dominant today, which merely reproduces the first exposition of the imagination in Aristotle’s treatise: relegating the imagination to the realm of “psychology,” fixing its place between sensation and intellection (which completely obliterates the admirable ninth chapter of Book III of De Anima, and its refutation in advance of the Encyclopaedia’s apothecary storage system), making it merely reproductive in character and recombina- tory in its activity, and thereby granting its works a deficient, illusory, deceptive, or suspect status. No doubt it is to Heidegger, with his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), that we owe both the restoration of the question of the imagination as a philosophical question and the possibility of an approach to Kant that breaks with the somnolence and aridity of the neo-Kantians. No doubt, too, that Heidegger reintroduces in his turn and completely on his own ~ an impressive spectacle — the successive movements of discovery and covering back over that have marked the history of the question of the imagination. I will speak elsewhere of Heidegger’s rediscovery of the Kantian discovery of the imagination, and the — in my view — partial and biased character of this rediscovery. Let me simply note here, with respect to the “recoiling” Heidegger imputes to Kant when faced with the “bottomless abyss” opened by the discovery of the transcendental imagina- tion, that it is Heidegger himself who in effect “recoils” after writing his book on Kant. A new forgetting, covering-over, and effacement of the © Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994186 Constellations Volume 1, No 2, 1994 question of the imagination intervenes, for no further traces of the question will be found in any of his subsequent writings; there is a suppression of what this question unsettles for every ontology (and for every “thinking of Being”). Nearer to us, the trace of the difficulties and aporias to which the question of the imagination and the imaginary gives birth persists in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible. How else can we comprehend the hesitation which sometimes, in this work, makes of the imaginary a synonym for irreal fiction, for the nonexistent without further ado, and sometimes goes almost so far as to dissolve the distinction between the imaginary and the real? Here we see Merleau-Ponty striving very far toward his goal of effacing the “ancient cleavages”; yet, at the same time, something draws him back: undoubtedly, this is the persistence of the schema of perception in the broadest sense, from which he will never completely succeed in freeing himself, perception having become now experience or ontological reception. Fragments of this text have been published in Greek under the title “Never Does the Soul Think Without Phantasm,” in the Athenian review Tomes (January 1977). The translations of passages from Aristotle are my own.' Often they diverge considerably (and sometimes on “elementary” points of meaning) from existing translations. I have worried little about elegance. Whenever there has been no risk of misunderstanding, I have retained the modern derivatives of Greek terms (for example, noema). Thus, too, I have translated phantasma by phantasm. To translate this word, as one does, by image, representation, etc., is both unfaithful and highly interpretive; it is a source for arbitrariness, the translator rendering phantasma sometimes by image, sometimes by representation, sometimes by something else in its stead or according to what s/he has decided is a “meaning” indicated by the context, and without the reader even being able to suspect that there might be a problem. We need not fear confusion with the Freudian word “phantasy.” Phantasm here is the work of the phantasia, of the imagination. As for knowing what phantasia is, this is the question the present article addresses. On my translation of sumbebékos by comitant (instead of the usual, “accident”) and of ti én einai by what it was to be, | have explained myself elsewhere (cf. The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT and Oxford: Polity, 1987], n. 22, p. 395 and p. 328; Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Martin H. Ryle and Kate Soper [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT and Brighton: Harvester, 1984], pp. 322-24). January 1978 © Basil Blackwell Lad, 1994Discovery of the Imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis 187 “Never Does the Soul Think Without Phantasm” From the outset, the question of the imagination has been marked by the embarrassments, aporias, and impossibilities that will always accompany it. A first sign, already: it is not where Aristotle explicitly proposes to talk about it and does talk about it ex professo (De Anima, Book ITI, Chapter 3), but elsewhere, fragmentarily and incidentally, that he speaks the essence of what he has to say about it (De Anima, Book IIT, Chapters 7 and 8). Here are the weightiest passages: (III. 7) And for the thinking soul the phantasms are like sensations. . . . This is why the soul never thinks without phantasm. . . . the noetic [of the soul] thinks the forms (eid@) in the phantasms, in them that what is to be sought or avoided is determined for it, it moves even in the absence of sensation when it has to do with phantasms. yi Other times it is through the phantasms or noemata in the soul that, as though it were seeing, it calculates and deliberates about things to come in relation to present things . . . ... And thought (nous), such as it is in actuality, is totally the things. But whether it is possible for it to think some having-been-separated (kechoris- menon) object itself having-not-been-separated from magnitude, we will have to examine later. (II, 8) And now summing up what we have said about the soul, let us say again that the soul is in a certain fashion (pés) all the beings, for the beings are cither sensible or intelligible, and knowledge (epistéme) is, in a certain fashion, the knowables (épistéta) and sensation the sensibles; how that is, we must seek to find out. Knowledge and sensation are divided according to the objects, [relating] inasmuch as they are in potentiality to the objects in potentiality, and inasmuch as they are in actuality to the objects in actuality. But the sensitive and the knowing [elements] of the soul are potentially that very thing, the knowable and the sensible. And they necessarily are either those very things [sc., the knowable and the sensible] or else their forms (eidé). But they are not those very things, for it is not the rock that is in the soul, but the form, so that the soul is like the hand, for the hand too is a tool of tools, and thought form of forms and sensation form of sensibles. And since there is nothing, it seems, having-been-separated and apart from sensible magnitudes, the intelligibles (noeta) are in the sensible forms, both those that are said by abstraction and those that are dispositions and affections (exeis kai pathé) of sensibles. And this is the reason why if one sensed nothing one could learn and understand nothing; and why, when one thinks (theorei), it is necessary that at the same time (ama) one comtemplate (theorein) some phantasm, for phantasms are like sensations, but without matter. The imagination, however, is other than affirmation and negation, for it is a complexion of noemata that is the true or the error. But what then will differentiate the first © Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994188 Constellations Volume 1, No 2, 1994 noemata from [make them not be] phantasms? Or [should it be said that] they are not phantasms, but neither are they without phantasms (431a14~432a14). Here we witness the invasion of the intractable, of the aporon — the essence of philosophy. All the aporias of the imagination are indicated here, either implicitly or explicitly. What the imagination is, and the saying of what it is, is not “coherent” in the sense of any sort of logic or dialectic. Not only is it not “clear,” the phantasia — correlate of phainesthai, to make oneself seen in the light, connected with phaos (429a3-4) — does not let itself so easily be seen, let alone said (apophainesthai). It takes flight in all directions, does not contract into eidos, cannot be-held-together [étre-tenue- ensemble] (concipere, erfassen, be-greifen). Still less can it be put into place and in its place beside aisthésis (sensibility), beside noésis (thought). This situation will not essentially change for the sole author who, twenty-one centuries later, will be able to see more and say more about the imagination than did Aristotle. What Kant will discover of essence beyond what Aristotle does about the imagination will only make things still more untenable [intenables] and radically un-containable [in-contenables]. Vacillation of the Sensible and the Intelligible For Aristotle, as well as for the philosophical tradition he already inherits, two terms seem to be and are assured: the aisthéion and the noéton, the sensible and the intelligible. Central to De Anima, they alone have some ontological weight; they give access to two great types of beings [éants] and provide, as far as possible, determination for their mode of being [ére]. “For the beings are either sensible or intelligible,” and, “in a certain fashion,” epistéme (knowledge both true and certain of its object) is the epistéta, just as aisthésis, “in a certain fashion,” is the aisthéta. “How that is,” Aristotle adds, “we must seek to find out.” We must seek to find out —a surprising statement, for we are almost at the end of the third and last book of the treatise, and, above all, because this is all that he has been doing; that is to say, seeking the relationship between nous and the noeta, aisthésis and the aisthéta is all that he has been doing, in one way or another, since the beginning of the second book. Does this statement serve as a preface for new and extended developments that would be proportionate to the decisive importance of the question; does it announce in advance the solution? No. The “solution” is dismissed in two short phrases: the soul is potentially (dunamei) the sensible and the intelligible — not themselves (auta), but their forms (eidé). But above all, the question is immediately deported toward something else: a new and unexpected invasion of the question of the phantasia (though already apparently exhaustively treated in Book III, Chapter 3), marked by the assertion that all thought (theorein) © Basil Blackwell Led. 1994Discovery of the Imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis 189 must also be contemplation (theorein) of a phantasm. This leads to the statement that, truly speaking, one cannot know whether and how the first noemata — the irreducible, originary, elementary noemata — are not pure and simple phantasms. What is certain, in any case, is that they could not be without phantasms. What then is, and what then can be, the bipartition noéton-aisthéton, noésis-aisthesis? How can we think that it is exhaustive, that it exhausts whatever could be said to be? The phantasm is not “nothing,” since not only do “we have it,” but it is necessarily implicated in thinking, as it is impossible to think without phantasm. (If you want to employ modern terminology, it is not “empiricial given” but “transcendental condition.”) It is not nothing — but one does not know what it is. It is obviously not sensible: it is “like the sensible,” but without matter, and that makes all the difference in the world for Aristotelian ontology, and for all ontology.” It is also impossible to reduce the phantasm in question here to the definition of the imagination given in IIT, 3, “movement engendered by a sensation in actuality.” This is the definition of the second imagination, the only kind treated in III, 3. And it is on this imagination that his interpreters and the whole of the post-Aristotelian philosophical and psychological tradition has been fixed, even though it cannot be jibed with the imagination as discussed in III, 7 and 8, this latter kind of imagination being at the origin of the phantasms that either are the “first noemata” or else are that without which the first noemata could not be. Neither, however, is the phantasm intelligible in the strict sense, as the following sentence shows: “The imagination, however, is other than affirmation or negation, for it is a complexion of noemata that is the true or the error.” No sooner than it is reaffirmed, the thoroughgoing division of what is into sensible and intelligible is thoroughly shaken. A Third surges forth that escapes division and challenges its foundation. This Third, moreover, does not appear as something that would have been left out, that would point to an insufficiency in this division for exhausting the given, that would invite its completion or overcoming. It is from and within the division that it acts, and it seems to render this division impossible since this Third sometimes finds itself in the One and sometimes in the Other, without being the One or the Other. It is in being like a sensible that the phantasm is what is thought, at least what is “necessarily also and in the same stroke” (ananké hama) thought when there is thought. This means that the nous cannot be truly, actually, energeia, that is to say, in the act of thinking, except by means of this problematical being/non-being, the phantasm. Conversely, it is inasmuch as [en tant que] and to the extent that the phantasm distinguishes itself from what makes the sensible be like the sensible — the effective indissociation of eidos and hulé, of form and matter — in being, therefore, in a certain fashion, itself also a having-been-separated, like the © Basil Blackwell Lid. 1994190 Constellations Volume 1, No 2, 1994 intelligible, that it can “be like” (function as) the sensible at the very time when and even where the latter is not. The Order of De Anima and the Rupture of Book ILL Undoubtedly, the treatise De Anima, along with several of the Short Treatises On Natural History (Parva Naturalia) — “Short Treatises On Psychical History” would in fact be the correct title - that are directly connected with it and that constitute almost appendices to it, is one of Aristotle’s last writings. Whatever the great philologists say about it (see Werner Jaeger, Aristotle, Fundamentals of the History of His Development [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962], 331-34, and D. Ross, Aristotle [London: Methuen, 1923/1964], 17-19; Jaeger will go so far as to write that Book III of the treatise is “peculiarly Platonic and not very scientific”), the unity of its composition is evident. The movement of the treatise is clear and orderly — much more so than that of other writings of Aristotle as they have come down to us — up to the middle of Book III. Book 1 is devoted, as is often the case in Aristotle, to the definition of the problem and of its difficulties and aporias, as well as to the exposition and criticism of previous theories. The formulas used here prepare or usher in the ideas that will be laid out and defended further on, notably in Book TI. Book II gives the Aristotelian definition of the soul — “the soul is essence as eidos of a natural body which potentially has life. And the essence is entelechy” (412a19-21) — and then discusses the potentialities (dunameis) of the soul: nutritive (or vegetative), desiderative, sensitive, locomotive, dianoetic. This discussion is in full agreement with what will be said in the insuperable ninth chapter of Book IT, where Aristotle challenges and refutes any separation of the soul into “parts” or “faculties” (Aristotle’s dunameis is translated, most of the time, as “faculties”; it is clear, nonetheless, that for Aristotle it is a matter of powers or potentialities that become actualized differently but never actually exist except as one). We must note that there appears here — as, moreover, in Book I—an uncertainty as to the status and the place of the imagination, as it is not counted among these dunameis (414a31-32) and yet often finds itself mentioned as situated on the same level as them (413a22, 414b16, 415a10-11; cf. in Book I, 402b22—403a2, 403a7-10). Book IT continues with the detailed examination of the nutritive (vegetative) potentiality, then the sensitive potentiality, as such and of the five senses. There is no interruption of the movement of the investigation between the end of Book I], which resumes the examination of certain general problems of sensation, and the first two chapters of Book III, which, after having dismissed the possibility of a sixth sense, undertake to discuss in a more profound way the “common sense,” or the sensation of © Basil Blackwell Lid. 1994Discovery of the Imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis 191 common sensibles (movement, rest, number, shape, magnitude), already defined in IT, 6. The question of the imagination is introduced, discussed ex professo, and, in appearance, “resolved” in the third chapter of Book III. This discussion, which is shorter (427a17-429a9) than the one previously devoted to the sensation of commons (424b22-427a16), culminates in a good and proper Aristotelian definition of the imagination: “imagination would be the movement that comes about from sensation in actuality” (429a1-2). The chapter ends with the remark that, as images endure and resemble sensations, animals often act in accordance with them, sometimes, as in the case of beasts, because they are lacking thought, sometimes, as in the case of men, because their thought is obscured by illness or sleep. “For what is then of the imagination, what it is and for what [pour quoi] it is, let what has been said suffice” (429a4-9). The question is settled, and Aristotle proceeds to attack the supreme and sublime problem: knowledge and thought. Chapters 4 and 6 and the bulk of Chapter 7 of Book III are devoted to nous, its mode of being, its attributes or determinations, its manner of operation, its intellection of divisibles and indivisibles, its access to truth (429a10-431a14, then 431b12-19). Nothing is said in these passages about phantasia, nothing leaves one to suspect that phantasia might have to do, in any manner whatsoever, with thought. The treatise would nevertheless be incomplete if it ended on these considerations. What remains to be discussed is this essential potentiality of a great portion of living beings, including man, the potential for local movement (or, action). It is therefore to this that Chapters 9 to 11 (432a15- 434a21) are devoted, and it is there, too, that a digression designed to refute the idea that the soul has “parts” is contained (432a22-432b7). The treatise ends with two chapters (12 and 13) that are rather like an appendix. Bearing on the relative importance of the senses for life, the necessarily composite character of the living body, and the basic priority of touch, they could just as well have found their place somewhere in Book II, except to the — quite small — extent that they presuppose somewhat a discussion of local movement. There is an orderliness to the movement of the investigation, which is not disproved by the fact that the examination of the potential for local movement comes after that of nous, contrary to the hierarchy implied by Aristotle’s ontology and reaffirmed in the passage already mentioned (414a31-32). Indeed, local movement presupposes at least sensation and imagination (among beasts) and also intellection (in man); these belong to the potentialities by which the soul has knowledge. It is therefore logical, and necessary for the clarity of the exposition, that the examination of cognitive potentialities — sensation, imagination, intellection — be brought © Basi! Blackwell Ltd. 1994192 Constellations Volume I, No 2, 1994 to an end first, before the examination of the potential for local movement is undertaken. Now, this ordering of the Third Book of the Treatise is brutally shattered on two occasions: first, by the sudden reappearance of the question of phantasia right in the middle of the examination of the dianoetic potentiality (III, 7, 431a14-b12, and TIT, 8, 431b20-432a14, these are the passages cited at the beginning of my text); then, by an insistent return of phantasia throughout the examination of the potential for movement (III, 9-11, 432b14~434a21). The rupture is not situated on the level of literary composition. The invasion of phantasia in III, 7 and 8, could very well have been a digression, an excursus — it is not the first time Aristotle, like every author who thinks — that is, who is carried along by his thought — has done that; he does so as much as Plato and infinitely more than modern authors — and there is nothing surprising about the use of the term and the idea during his discussion of local movement in III, 9 to 11. The rupture is situated at a much more profound level. The phantasia in question here has, so to speak, nothing to do with the one defined ex professo in the apparent sedes in TM, 3. Its relationship to the latter is homonymic; its ions and its functions not only exceed those of the other but appear incompatible with them; both its “place” and its “essence” become uncertain; and, finally, what is said about it appears irreconcilable not only with what the treatise has attempted to determine as the soul’s potentialities but also with what the whole of Aristotle’s work has striven to sift out as determination of being. The Conventional Doctrine of the Second Imagination The treatment of the imagination in IL, 3 can be called, anachronistically, conventional; in discovering the second imagination, Aristotle sets down at the same time what will become the conventions by which the imagination will, in the aftermath of this discovery, be thought, that is to say, will not be thought. This treatment may also seem banal and naive to the contemporary reader, to the extent that s/he remains ignorant of the origin of the “self- evident facts” with which his/her mind is filled, what was required for them to be discovered, and above all the superabundant richness in which their discovery took place and whose tradition has been one of impoverishment, distortion, and misrecognition. In the present case, two remarks will perhaps allow us better to gauge what was required for even the second imagination to be able to be discovered and thematized. It may be douted that there was ever a tongue completely ignorant of the category of the “fictive” in the trivial sense — a tongue in which it would be impossible to say to someone, not “you are © Basil Blackwell Lid. 1994Discovery of the Imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis 193 mistaken” or “you are lying,” but “you are making it up [tu inventes].” At the same time, however, the “fictive” in a trivial or minor sense has no status in ontology or in the preontology implicit in one’s native tongue, it delimits no region of beings, it is only an inconsistent, enfeebled variant of what is not. And that seems to be connected with the nonrecognition of the imaginary as such, with the reality status almost always accorded, in the archaic representation of things, to dreams or to delirium, up to and including the terms employed to describe them (“Tonight J was at such and such a place” or “J saw such and such”). Moreover, it must be recalled that, right before Aristotle, Plato himself, who was constantly preoccupied by phantasia, nonetheless did not succeed in thinking it as such; for him, it is a “mixture of sensation and opinion” taken within the more general class of eikon, of icon-images, essentially an imitation to which is adjoined a false belief bearing on the reality-type of its products (see Jean-Pierre Vernant’s excellent discussion, “Image et apparence dans la théorie platonicienne de la mimesis,” Journal de Psychologie, 2 [April-June 1975], 133-60). Plato’s conception will be explicitly criticized and rejected by Aristotle. In beginning the exposition of his doctrine (of the “conventional” doctrine), Aristotle immediately places the imagination among the potentialities by which “the soul judges (separates, krinei) and knows any being whatsoever” (427a20-21; 428a1-4). He declares from the outset that “the imagination is other than sensation and thought (dianoia,” (427b14-15). The distinction between sensation and thought is taken as evident: the sensation of proper sensibles is always true and appertains to all animals, while thought can just as well be false and appertains only to beings endowed with logos (427b6- 14). Now, the imagination differs from sensation, since sensation is always potentiality or actuality (sight or vision), while there are apparitions (phainétai ti) independent of this potentiality or actuality — as in dreams, or visions one can have “with eyes closed.” Sensation is always present, but not the imagination. Lastly, sensations are always true, whereas most of the products of the imagination are false (428a5-16). But neither is imagination thought and conviction (noésis kai hupolepsis). It cannot appertain to the type of thought that is always true, nous and epistémeé, since false imaginations exist. Nor can it be the type of thinking that is liable to truth and error, namely opinion (doxa), for it depends on us (eph’ hémin), we can produce it at will, like those who fabricate effigies (eidolopoiountes),° while it is not in our power to have or not have opinions since “it is always necessary to be in the true or the false.” And opinion, which is always necessarily accompanied by belief (pistis), immediately provokes passion or emotion, which is not the case with the imagination (to believe that something is terrible provokes terror, simply to imagine it does not do so). Finally, it cannot be, as Plato thought, a complexion of sensation and © Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994194 Constellations Volume 1, No 2, 1994 opinion (doxa), since sensation and doxa bearing on the same object can be such that one is false and the other true (the Sun appears to be a foot across, but we believe it to be larger than the inhabited Earth). Tt is at the conclusion of this discussion - when he states that the imagination is a kind of movement that is impossible without sensation and possible only for sentient beings and for objects of which there is sensation and that the act of sensation can engender a movement that will necessarily be similar to the sensation — that Aristotle arrives at the definition of the imagination mentioned above, viz., “movement that comes about from the sensation in actuality.” As such, it can be the cause of many actions and passions for the being that has it, and it will be liable to both truth and error. This last possibility is a direct consequence of imagination’s dependence, clearly presupposed here, upon sensation. There is the sensation of proper sensibles (white, sweet) which is “always true” (and on this occasion, for the only time in the treatise, Aristotle adds: “or else involves only minimal error,” 428b19). There is the sensation of the object with which proper sensibles go, of which proper sensibles are the comitants: this white object is perceived as the son of Cleon. That it is a question of a white object is certain, but perhaps it is not the son of Cleon. Lastly, there is sensation of commons (for example, movement, magnitude), apropos of which the possibilities for error are the most considerable (cf. the issue of apparent magnitude). Now, says Aristotle, the possibility of truth/error for the imagination will differ according to the kind of sensation that is at its origin. If it is a question of the first kind of sensation (that of proper sensibles), the imagination will be true if the sensation is present. If it is a matter of the two others, and whether sensation is present or absent, the imagination will be (or: could be [eien]) false, and all the more so the further removed the sensible object is (428b17-30). Thus, at the end of this discussion, the imagination appears to be placed under the complete dependence of sensation, homogeneous with the latter and caused by it (these two determinations being, as is known, meta- physically related in Aristotle’s work). It appears as its superfluous doublet; and, as presented here, it seems to possess only one, quite strange, function: to multiply considerably the possibilities of error inherent in the sensation of the comitant object and in those of commons. The Difficulties With the Conventional Doctrine Of course, we cannot forget the text’s complexity (which the preceding summary necessarily tramples upon), its waverings and its contradictions. These are clearly apparent in two truly crucial questions. In the first place — and this is completely independent of the discussion and the criticism of any conception of the soul having “parts” or “faculties” — here already the © Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994