Philosophy | Inspiration
Inspiration - Imagination: friend or foe?
| 2025-10-27 |     |
What is imagination? The ambiguity of this word begins with its definition, which is both positive and negative. Indeed, imagination is both “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality” or the “creative ability”, but the term also refers to a “fanciful or empty assumption.”[1] Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin imago (“image”, in other words, a reproduction or imitation of the form of a person or thing). From this comes the meaning of “appearance” as opposed to reality. Moreover, this is the root from which the verb “to imitate” is derived (meaning “to seek to re-produce the image of”).
Indeed, imagination, “the mistress of error and falsity”, can deceive man, as Blaise Pascal explains when he exclaims: “Reason protests in vain, for she can make no true estimate. This proud potentate, who loves to rule and domineer over her enemy, reason, has established in man a second nature in order to show her wide-spread influence.” He gives an example below: “Set the greatest philosopher in the world on a plank really wider than he needs, but hanging over a precipice, and though reason convince him of his security, imagination will prevail. Many will scarce bear the thought without a cold sweat”[2], and prevent him from behaving according to his reason.
But imagination is no less a human attribute, as René Descartes asserted at the same time in his Meditations on First Philosophy: “But indeed it is also this same I that is imagining; for although it might be the case […] that none of these imagined things is true, yet the actual power of imagining certainly does exist, and is part of my thinking.”[3]
Thinkers have also reflected on its positive function. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees it as a point of liberation for human beings: “Studies of the imagination […] are confused by the deceptive light of etymology. We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them”, concluding that “It [the imagination] is the human psyche’s experience of openness and novelty.”[4]
American thinker and philanthropist L. Ron Hubbard also shows how essential imagination is to the functioning of the human mind: “Imagination is the recombination of things one has sensed, thought or intellectually computed into existence. This is the mind’s method of envisioning desirable goals or forecasting futures. Imagination is extremely valuable as a part of essential solutions in any mental problem and in everyday existence.”[5]
He also explains the important value of creative imagination: “In addition to standard imagination there is creative imagination. […] It can be aberrated only by prohibition of its general practice, which is to say, by aberrating the persistence in its application or encysting the whole mind. But creative imagination, that possession by which works of art are done, states built and Man enriched, can be envisioned as a special function, independent in operation and in no way dependent for its existence upon an aberrated condition in the individual, …”[6]
Let’s let our imaginations dream, compose and invent!
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[1] Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary.
[2] Blaise Pascal, The Thoughts, Of the Deceptive Powers of the Imagination, translated from the text of M. Auguste Molinier by C. Kegan Paul, fragment 51, pp. 51-52 (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46921/46921-h/46921-h.htm).
[3] René Descartes, Meditations on First philosophy, translated by Michael Moriarty, Oxford University Press, Second Meditation, p. 21 (https://personal.lse.ac.uk/ROBERT49/teaching/ph103/pdf/Descartes_1641Meditations.pdf).
[4] Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams, Introduction, translated by Edith R. Farrel and C. Frederick Farrel, The Dallas Institute Publications, pp. 1-2 (https://www.are.na/block/17756084).
[5] L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, p. 20.
[6] Ibid., p. 21.
