Concepts to define the creative fantasy The European lmaginaries

Abstract

This study aims to delimit three concepts used to define the creative fantasy: imagination, imaginary and imaginal. While the former belongs to the common language and forms part of a long philosophical tradition, the latter two have been coined by the twentieth century philosophers, constituted in what may be called the school of "studies of the imaginary". To briefly explain it, imagination designates fantasy as a combinatorial faculty of preexisting images in the psyche. Classical philosophers have generally treated it as the "source of all errors" and the "madwoman of the house ". The imaginary is fantasy in its creative and exploratory aspect (Kant's "transcendental imagination"), as Romantic thinkers, psychoanalysts and contemporary philosophers (Bachelard, Durand, etc.) have successively defined. The imaginal or "mundus imaginalis "is a concept forged by Henry Corbin, from Arab Neoplatonism, to designate ontological fantasies, endowed with a metaphysical reality. I propose to reuse this third concept to define the imagosphere or the Iconsphere constituted by the contemporary digital and digital world.