Louis Aragon, quoted by my sister Nudawn. That there is no consensus position among philosophers and scientists concerning the problem of reason’s relation to the external world, whether it is coincidentally isomorphic, imperfectly virtualizing, merely descriptive, or something more, was partly responsible for the many answers I received to this question.
Nevertheless, this seems clear to me: given that our senses are not literally perceptive and not even synthetic so much as creative, and that our perpetually-improving theories of the world are irreducibly based on these senses and are themselves not “the world” as such so much as arbitrarily scaled and detailed and imagined models, I think this quote is quite right and beautifully-put.
A myth of our time: that reason is not a form of imagination but is the structural code of the universe. A caveat: that it is a form of imagination does not reduce its predictive power anymore than navigational charts which presumed the stars were a “fixed firmament of orbs” were unable to steer ships for being based on a dream.
Imagination is an incredible form of virtualization, of analysis, of enactment and reflection; it is the primary creative act before all others, and it is not dismissive to call “imaginative” an act of reasoning which acquaints us more closely with a universe written in a language not our own. But it has always been and will always be a problem among humans that we see fantasy and delusion in the imaginations of others and truth and beauty in our own.
