There is no imaginary world

There is no imaginary world is a rule about the limits of imagination: imagined objects do not compose a genuine world because they lack both strict individuation and equilibrium with a determinate environment. What seems to be an imaginary world, especially in a dream or an artwork, is instead an appearance sustained by consciousness through images and their material or symbolic analogons. The distinction preserves a sharp difference between the real medium and the irreal object apprehended through it.

What makes a world

A world is not merely a collection of objects. It is a dependent whole in which each object has a determinate place and maintains relations with other objects. Its members must be strictly individuated, and they must be in balance with an environment. The principle follows from this double requirement: no irreal object fulfills both conditions, so imagined objects do not constitute a world in the strict sense.

This account distinguishes an imagined sequence from an organized environment. The imagined course of a centaur or a naval battle can have a before and an after, but its events have no temporal location in the perceiver’s duration. Its time is an irreal succession rather than the flowing, irreversible time of perception. Such sequences may be extended or contracted without changing their character; they do not, by themselves, supply the situated relations required for a world.

Ambiguity and the failure of individuation

Irreal objects are not clearly bounded individuals. They may contain too much and too little at once: they are elusive, can appear as themselves and as something else, and may support contradictory qualities. Reflection can disclose several things gathered into one apparent object. This ambiguity is not an incidental defect but a central feature of the imaged object, which has only a semblance of opacity rather than the settled identity of a clearly perceived thing.

The distinction also accounts for the particular unease of imagined threats. A perceived tiger can cause fear, but it is a different kind of fear from the fear experienced in darkness and solitude, where suspect, ambiguous images haunt the perceiver. In the latter case, the object’s uncertain identity is part of what makes it frightening: what is feared escapes the principle of individuation. The rule therefore connects the absence of a genuine imaginary world to the instability of the objects that seem to populate one.

Dreams and the appearance of a world

Dreams seem to challenge the principle because they can unfold as stories in a world of threats, promises, places, and events. The account distinguishes a dream from a pre-dream image by this worldlike quality. Merely seeing the Aga Khan’s face as an image is a hypnagogic vision; sensing a world of implications behind the face signals a dream. The dream’s setting, however, is not a fully imaged universe whose details are all presented to consciousness. It is the correlate of belief: the dreamer believes that the scene unfolds in a world, while that world remains an empty intention directed from the central image.

The dream’s apparent continuity does not overturn the rule. Images remain isolated, separated by their essential poverty and by quasi-observation; relations between them exist only insofar as consciousness conceives them at each moment. Each dream image instead carries an immanent worldly atmosphere. There may be as many apparent worlds as images, even when the sleeper dreams of moving through one continuous world. Dream-world language is convenient, but it should not be taken to mean that the images have formed a determinate whole in the strict sense.

The transition into dreaming enriches belief rather than supplying a stable world of independently established objects. A fish first taken as an image may acquire an imagined story: it was caught in a river and will appear on an archbishop’s table. The river, fish, and archbishop are all equally imaginary, but consciousness projects its knowledge, preoccupations, memories, and sense of being-in-the-world onto the image. In the dream, consciousness is absorbed in these syntheses and carried along by them; the apparent world is thus produced in the imaginary mode, not discovered as a real environment.

Art and the irreal object

The principle also clarifies the status of the work of art, which is characterized as an irreality. In a portrait, the real canvas, frame, and layers of paint are not the aesthetic object. That object appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude and apprehends the depicted figure through the painting. The material painting does not turn an imaginary object into a real one; it serves as an external analogon through which the irreal object can be apprehended.

The distinction applies even when the painting does not represent familiar things. A cubist work may manifest unfamiliar forms with density, matter, depth, and relations of perspective. These forms do not thereby become real objects located in the world or on the canvas: the painting functions as an analogon for an irreal ensemble. Likewise, an actor’s actual body, gestures, feelings, and tears can serve as analogons for Hamlet without the actor becoming Hamlet in reality. The performance makes the character imaginatively present; it does not realize the character as a real person.

Aesthetic experience thus offers no exception to the rule. The viewer’s enjoyment is real, but it is directed through the material canvas toward the irreal object, rather than toward the canvas considered solely as a real thing. The principle does not deny that images and artworks can feel coherent, absorbing, or worldlike. It specifies what sustains that appearance: not a genuine world of individuated objects in equilibrium, but consciousness’s imaginative apprehension of irreal objects through images and their analogons.