Hirngespinste und andere Ungeheuerlichkeiten. Versuch über die ambivalente Bedeutung des philosophischen Begriffs ,Phantasma" im Rahmen des gesellschaftlichen Imaginären ausgehend von der Renaissance-Philosophie Pietro Pomponazzis

The long title tries to bring some of the crucial topics of this diploma work together: The linguistic as well as philosophical meaning of the "Phantasma", an initially Greek notion which comes to have some influence on philosophical debate since Aristotle's book De Anima - a debate that will last until the late Renaissance and, as I have tried to demonstrate, emerges again or is supposed to do so in actual philosophy. Therefore I positioned my discussion of the Phantasma in a philosophical as well as political debate of the early 16th century in the context of the neo-Aristotelian school of Padova and Bologna, employing the philosophical terms of a contemporary French philosopher, Cornelius Castoriadis. On the background of the socio-historical imaginary (l'imaginaire social-historique), the significance of the Phantasma and of phantasia would appear, until the 16th century, as the missing link between human perception and thought in the epistemological discussion of human cognition, but from then onward would be constructed as the feared opposite of the human ratio which will have to be persecuted and sent to prison or to lunatic asylums. Of course it is not the Phantasma itself which is set on fire, but, for example, an Italian philosopher named Pomponazzi only escaped very closely to such a cruel condemnation as the Roman Catholic Church of his time got notorious for (the Holy Inquisition). Beginning with the latter, the "Pomponazzi-affair", the analysis of the Phantasma then jumps over to a Deleuze influenced discussion of paradoxes which deal with cognitive and logical problems, and, after this "Intermezzo", gets back to the socio-historical background of 16th century philosophy. Enlarging the linguistic notion of the Phantasma to a person who is called a "phantast", for instance in a pre-critical work by Immanuel Kant, the epistemological discussion of the notion is itself widened by a socio-historical critique, following in some points Castoriadis as well as Foucault. The critique is founded in the presumption that, with Immanuel Kant as the outstanding philosopher of the Enlightenment, the Phantasma loses its significance as an epistemological technical term of philosophy and becomes the pathological stigma of an unreasonable human being: Not all human beings are, whilst thinking, doing this on the base of Phantasmata, but only "phantasts" whose ratio is already darkened by the Phantasmata. My purpose was to urge for a new understanding of the meaning of Phantasma and its correlates like imagination (phantasia), memory, thought, perception and intentional forms of action and their interplay - new, but still in the sense of Aristotle's phrase: The human soul never thinks without Phantasmata (De Anima, III, 7).