Henry Corbin et le mundus imaginalis: Ontologie figurale, vision et réalité de l'apparaître (French Edition) [Henry Corbin and the Mundus Imaginalis: Figural Ontology, Vision, and the Reality of Appearing]

Abstract

Can a reality be present without being material, meaningful without being conceptual, and real without allowing itself to be reduced to imagination? It is around this question that Henry Corbin et le mundus imaginalis opens. Starting from one of Henry Corbin's most fruitful intuitions, Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad explores the imaginal world as a register of reality irreducible both to the sensible and to the intelligible. The imaginal is not the imaginary. It designates neither fantasy nor a subjective production of the mind. It names an intermediate mode of being in which form can be real without being material, in which vision becomes participation, and in which presence precedes representation. The work develops this intuition through several fundamental questions: how are we to think of a space without extension and a time that is not reducible to succession? What does it mean to see when vision is no longer mere perception? Can a figure possess a reality of its own without becoming a symbol or an allegory? Can one know without turning what appears into an object? And what becomes of metaphysics when the real resists all definitive systematisation? In dialogue with Henry Corbin, Suhrawardi (Sohravardi), Ibn Arabi and the tradition of Islamic philosophy, but also with the questions of phenomenology and contemporary philosophy, this book offers a demanding reflection on presence, manifestation, knowledge and the limits of modern ontology. As modern reality comes to be reduced to what can be measured, represented or verified, something risks disappearing: the possibility that a form of reality might manifest itself otherwise. The mundus imaginalis makes it possible to reopen this question without renouncing philosophical rigour. More than an introduction to Corbin's thought, this work develops an ontology of the imaginal: a philosophy of vision, of appearing and of presence that ultimately leads towards the possibility of a non-systematic metaphysics—a way of thinking capable of remaining rigorous without claiming to exhaust the real. For readers of philosophy, metaphysics, phenomenology, Islamic philosophy and Henry Corbin, as well as for all those who question the relationships between reality, imagination, vision and knowledge.