“Everything That Can Be Imagined Is Real”: Imagination and Reality in Vygotsky / “Todo lo que puede ser imaginado es real”: imaginación y realidad en Vygotski

Three Forms of Reality of the Imagination

The two texts on imagination taken from Educational Psychology represent the Vygotskian approach to imagination and fantasy before the development of his instrumental theory. In the excerpt “Fantasy and Imagination” (text 1.1), the theme of reality is at the heart. Indeed, Vygotsky defends three theses:

In the chapter on aesthetic education (text 1.2), the question of reality is discussed in relation to art, with imagination as a background. Vygotsky bases himself almost verbatim on passages from Psychology of Art, whose main theses are presented in summarized form. This chapter allows the reader to grasp aspects that will be discussed in more detail in chapters 6 to 8 of the booklet on Imagination and Creativity in Childhood (on literary writing, theater and drawing; text 2). From the point of view of the relationship between imagination and reality, the following points can be noted:

We see at once that Vygotsky is not at all interested in the “reality of the real,” so to speak. The “real,” and its “reality,” always appears, from its very inception, through the “real” or “lived experience” (opyt or pereživanij). It is thus not an ontological question.

Vygotsky’s Imagination and Creativity in Childhood (text 2) was edited and published in 1930 but most probably written earlier, perhaps even before the pivotal work History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions ⁹ (Vygotsky, 1928–1930/1987 ¹⁰ ). Two chapters (3 and 4) are taken word for word from the book Pedology in School Age, published in 1928. ¹¹ These chapters rely heavily on Ribot’s essay Creative Imagination (1900; already translated into Russian in 1901). It is, therefore, likely that it was the reading of this text that allowed Vygotsky to take a further step in his conception of imagination, and more precisely to formulate his idea of the cycle of imagination which is central throughout the whole booklet.

In Chapter 1, Vygotsky refers to Ribot from the beginning, asserting that the totality of culture is a product of imagination: “In this sense, absolutely everything around us that was created by the hand of the man, the entire world of human culture (. . .), all this is the product of human imagination and of creation based on this imagination.” (text 2, p. 9–10). And he refers to Ribot in a long quotation that ends with this sentence, essential for the whole book: “All the objects that we currently use in everyday life, even the simplest, the most common, are, so to speak, crystallized imagination.” ¹²

In Chapter 2, in which the question of imagination and reality is at the heart, Vygotsky deepens his first analyses and distinguishes four forms of relationship between imagination and reality. The first three reformulate, more systematically, the relations already presented in his chapter in Educational Psychology (text 1.1):

In other words, in the first form of relationship, imagination is based on experience; in the second, experience is based on imagination.

The fourth relation is added and stems directly from Ribot:

The central contribution of this chapter from the point of view of the relationship between imagination and reality is the idea of a cycle through the concept of crystallized imagination. The first definitions, as we have seen, already contained the idea of imagination as coming from lived reality, the cognitive function of it and the close relationship with emotion, thus in fact from the first three forms described in text 1.2. The formulations change—for example, the theory of sublimation disappears completely—but there is nothing substantially new since his first formulations. What is new, however, is the insistence on the idea of “crystallization” of the imagination, clearly borrowed from Ribot (1900), and, beyond Ribot’s theory, that of a cycle, namely the feedback effect of the crystallized products of the imagination—be they technical products or artistic works, the latter rather linked to emotions—on the other relations between imagination and reality.

We can reformulate this through the dialectical figure of reversal. The beginning of the cycle is externalization: elements of the experience of reality, be they real or lived experiences, the latter being deeply rooted in the emotions, are externalized in various forms; they are “crystallized.” This can range from the theatrical scene imagined by children or the writings of teenagers to works of art, technical tools, and scientific concepts. These products of imagination, which are realized by creative activity, act back to the interior, are internalized, and in turn deeply transform the experience, broadening it, giving it a new meaning, and opening up new possibilities of imagination. The cycle of imagination is a perfect illustration of the functioning of the dialectic that Sève (2025) identified in Vygotsky’s thinking: “the reversal of the internal into the external, and its reciprocal, the internalization of the external.” (p. 63). And it is not, therefore, a simple cycle that it produces but a spiral. With this dialectical conception of the imagination, Vygotsky by and large transcends Ribot’s conception.

Vygotsky develops the idea of cycle in more detail in relation to the artistic imagination. Starting from his observation, in agreement with Ribot, that “feeling as well as thought drives human creativity” (text 2, p. 21), he asks the rhetorical question: “Indeed, why do we need works of art? Do they not influence our internal world, our thoughts, and feelings just as much as technical equipment influences the external world, the world of nature?” (pp. 21–22). He develops again the idea of the cycle which acts on the “people’s social consciousness” (p. 23), real effect as it were, where we see the resurgence, without reference, of the idea of art as “social technique of the feeling” (1925/1971, p. 244) discussed in his Psychology of Art.

This conception of the relationship between imagination and reality as a cycle constitutes one of the main threads of the second part of the book, from Chapter 5 onward (in text 2), oriented towards creative activity.

The starting point of the book Imagination and Creativity in childhood, crystallized imagination on one hand, the basis of the relationship between imagination and reality in the form of a cycle on the other hand, are, taken together, the basis of the thesis that imagination is reality. Ribot’s idea (1900) seems to have allowed Vygotsky to return to the problem of imagination, all the more so as another central theme, that of development of imagination, is also deeply inspired by the Essay on the Creative Imagination (see Moro & Zampieron, 2022). However, it should also be noted that there is hardly any junction between the conception of imagination and Vygotsky’s instrumental theory. Yet, in Vygotsky’s (1928/2020) Pedology of the School Age, the first chapter on child development and the analyses of memory and of the relationship between thought and language already clearly refer to the use of instruments—signs—as conditions of development. Why is this so?

A Moment of Transition in the Work of Vygotsky

When one tries to understand why this almost finished, well-evolved manuscript composed of 15 chapters was not published by the author, several reasons can be put forward which seem to indicate that Vygotsky needed to seriously develop new theoretical tools to progress in his work:

Vygotsky thus finds himself at a crucial moment in his own development. He needs a more profound, non-teleological theory of development, a systemic conception of the development of functions, an elaborated theory of concept and its formation, to which one can add the difficulty of including the emotions or affects in an overall theory, but also imagination.

In order to find theoretical means, toward the end of 1930, he read Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, published in 1929. What could this bring him? He asks himself at this moment what a concept is. To answer this question, he notes:

A philosophical discussion is inevitable when we investigate such a psychological problem as the problem of concepts. (. . .) And therefore it is necessary to trace the beginnings and the ends, the sources, and the continuations of the processes we investigated sub specie philosophiae. ¹³ And these beginnings and ends rest upon philosophy. Hence, the inevitable philosophical excursions.

As he wrote in his notes in 1930 (text 6.2 1, p. 134), and he adds “psychopathology.” But what are these Philosophical Notebooks? A brief digression is necessary to give elements of an answer to this question.

Digression: Lenin’s Bern Notebooks: A Change in the Conception of Dialectics

It is August 1914. The socialist leaders of the Second International have voted for war credits to allow Germany and France to pursue their respective imperial ambitions. At first, Lenin simply disbelieves it: such an act is impossible; he then denounces “the horrors of the treachery shown by the leaders of present-day socialism, the horrors of the collapse of the present-day International.” (Lenin, 1914/1974, p. 20). And what does he do from August to December 1914, following this political catastrophe, at first incredible and then horrible to him? Either out of a “simple will to return to the sources of the Marxist thought or lucid intuition that the methodological Achilles’ heel of the Marxism of the IInd International was the incomprehension of the dialectic” (Löwy, 1970, p. 259), Lenin undertakes a study of Hegel’s Science of Logic in the peaceful library of the University of Bern in Switzerland. From September 1914 to the beginning of 1915, Lenin copies out hundreds of pages of excerpts from Hegel’s book and other philosophical texts like Metaphysics by Aristotle, accompanying them with comments and reflections. These notes are then published in 1929 in the volume entitled Philosophical Notebooks. These Bern Notebooks ¹⁴ (Yibing, 2012) allow us to see Lenin at work, day by day, and to follow step by step how he systematically deepened his conception of dialectics and in particular the relationship between knowledge, practice, and reality. ¹⁵

The concept of concept itself at last allows Lenin to revise fundamentally his ancient conception of reflection, which he discusses at length in his notes on the chapter “Subjective logic and the theory of the concept” of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Here, we present only some points that are particularly important, in our view, to understand Vygotsky’s interest in Lenin’s notebook (we base our presentation on Yibing, 2012, and Kouvélakis, 2020).

For Lenin, it is central to overcome the classical vision of the dialectic as a method external to its object:

The formation of (abstract) concepts and the operations made with them already includes idea, conviction, consciousness of the law-governed character of the objective connection of the world. (. . .) Consequently, Hegel is much more profound than Kant, and others, in tracing the reflection of the movement of the objective world in the movement of notions. (. . .) the first and simplest formation of concepts (judgments, syllogisms, etc.) already denotes man’s ever deeper cognition of the objective connection of the world. Here is where one should look for the true meaning, significance, and role of Hegel’s Logic. (1895–1915/1976, p. 178)

These concepts are not isolated, on the contrary. Answering the question “What constitutes dialectics?” Lenin writes: “mutual dependence of concepts, mutual dependence of all concepts without exception; transitions of concepts from one into another, transitions of all concepts without exception. The relativity of opposition between concepts (. . .) the identity of oppositions between concepts.” (p. 197) Concepts are the result of work, of human activity which constitutes the mediation towards the truth, knowledge of reality, and this includes the work of subjectivity. Lenin writes, still commenting on Hegel:

Remarkable: Hegel comes to the “Idea” as the coincidence of the concept and the object, as truth, through the practical, purposive activity of man. A very close approach to the view that man by his practice proves the objective correctness of his ideas, concepts, knowledge, science. (p. 191)

In other words: “The dialectics of things produce the dialectics of ideas” through human activity and labor. This leads to the epigraph at the beginning of the present paper: “Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.” (p. 212)

Thesis 1: Imagination as Condition for Reflecting About Reality Dynamically

The possibility of freedom has its origin at a very early age, as Vygotsky shows in his very long and penetrating analysis of Piaget’s (1926) book The Language and Thought of the Child. ²¹ Quoting Piaget’s conception of autistic thought which, according to this author “tends, not to establish truths, but to satisfy desires,” he retorts that “only empty abstractions devoid of any real content, only logical functions, metaphysical hypostases can be differentiated in this manner. The actual, vital process of the child’s thinking cannot” (1934/1987, p. 78). Then he quotes at length the extract where Lenin comments on Hegel concerning the primitive idealism that we already found in his notebooks (text 6.2). Referring to the end of this quotation from Lenin, “For even in the simplest generalization, in the most elementary general idea (‘table’ in general) there is a certain bit of fantasy,” (p. 133) Vygotsky interprets and widens the point in his critique of Piaget:

One cannot more clearly or profoundly express the idea that—in the process of their development—imagination and thinking are opposites, whose unity is inherent in the very first generalization, in the very first concept that people form. This remark on the unity of opposites and their bifurcation, on the zigzagging development of thinking and fantasy, implies that any generalization is, on the one hand, a take-off from life but, on the other, a more profound and accurate reflection of life, [and that in every general concept there is a certain amount of imagination]. (1934/1997, p. 78; modified translation; the last part of the quotation in brackets is not translated in the English text)

Like Lenin, Vygotsky takes up the idea of reflection, but in a new sense in which the dialectic between thought and imagination intervenes, an incessant movement of going back and forth between the real and its reflection to which thought and imagination contribute in a contrary way: “unity of opposites.” ²² Imagination is mediated by thought, which connects it “to life itself,” to reality, just as conversely thought is mediated by imagination, present in the most elementary and simple concept. This same idea is formulated in another way, more “audaciously,” in text 4:

Moreover, by observing the forms of imagination that are linked with creativity, that is, the forms of imagination that are directed toward reality, we find that the boundary between realistic thinking and imagination is erased. Imagination is a necessary, integral aspect of realistic thinking. (p. 349)

Thesis 2: Imagination Creates the New Concrete—Another Way of Thinking About the Cycle

Vygotsky borrows this idea of imagination creating a new concrete from Marx. It is another way of describing the functioning of the imagination in adolescence, in connection with conceptual thinking. It has to do with the new way of grasping the real:

It is characteristic for imagination that it does not stop at this point, that for it, the abstract is only an intermediate link, only a stage on the path of development, only a pass in the process of its movement to the concrete. From our point of view, imagination is a transforming, creative activity directed from the concrete toward a new concrete. The movement itself from a given concrete toward a conceived concrete, the feasibility of creative construction is possible only with the help of abstraction. Thus, the abstract enters as a requisite constituent into the activity of imagination, but is not the center of this activity. The movement from the concrete through the abstract to the construction of a new concrete image is the path that imagination describes during the transitional age. (text 3, p. 163)

This abstraction—we have seen it at work in the new perception of reality—is only the starting point of the imagination articulated to conceptual thinking. It allows going beyond, towards a new product of the imagination. This is a reference to Marx’s Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1857–1858/1976), which Vygotsky read intensively ²³ :

The concrete is concrete because it is the summing up of many determinations, thus the unity of the manifold. (. . .) The method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as a concrete in the mind [als geistig Konkretes; this could be translated to “as a mentally concrete”]” (pp. 31–32).

Is not the “mentally concrete” here the real, reflected in thought, in the new sense that Lenin gave it?

Thesis 3: The Contradictory Unity of Imagination and Thought Is the Condition of Freedom

All in all, Vygotsky asserts that imagination cannot be considered as a mental function among others but as a system whose heart lies in the complex articulation between thought and imagination that we have just described through the importance of the concept.

The analysis of the varied forms of imagination and thinking demonstrates that it is only by approaching these forms of activity as systems that we can begin to describe the very important changes that occur in them that we can begin to describe the dependencies and connections that are manifested in them. (text 4, like all the quotations that follow; p. 348)

This would not lead to confusing the two: they are different, contradictory even, and it is precisely this contradiction that is the motor, as we have said, of the possibility of reflection of reality and of creative activity. Imagination and thinking function as a whole, as a unity. Vygotsky expresses it in words borrowed from Lenin: “No accurate knowledge of reality is possible without a part of imagination, without a certain take-off [sic!] from the diverse, immediate, concrete impressions by which we initially represent reality through elementary acts of our consciousness.” (p. 349; modified translation). Both are linked to language; both are directed by oriented processes: “Concerning the imagination, its characteristic does not lie in a closer link with the emotional aspects, nor in a lesser degree of consciousness, nor in a greater relationship to the concrete.” ²⁴ But they are different, opposites even. In what does the specificity of the imagination consist? What is its contribution to the reflection and construction of reality?

The essential feature of imagination is that consciousness departs from reality. Imagination is a comparatively autonomous activity of consciousness in which there is a departure from any immediate cognition of reality. (. . .) A more profound penetration of reality demands that consciousness attains a freer relationship to the elements of that reality, that consciousness departs from the external and apparent aspect of reality that is given directly in perception. (p. 349)

Here we find a clear echo of Lenin’s “zigzag.” And Vygotsky arrives logically at the question we have already encountered above: that of the human freedom contained in every concept that always presupposes imagination; that which he approached through the loss of freedom in the patients observed by Cassirer. He thus arrives at the following conclusion concerning the relationship imagination allows to be established with reality: “The potential for free action that we find associated with the emergence of human consciousness is closely connected with imagination, with the unique attitude of consciousness vis a vis reality that becomes possible thanks to imagination.” (p. 349; translation modified)

The central role of the concept that appears in the contradictory unity of imagination and thought is further expanded later in the notes concerning emotion and his reflection on Spinoza. It opens up still other perspectives: “The concept of affect ²⁵ is an active condition and it is freedom. Freedom: the affect in the concept. (. . .) The grandiose picture of personality development: the path to freedom. To revive Spinozism in Marxist psychology.” (Vygotsky, 1931–1933/2018, p. 209).

Coda

In the very last note of his life, Vygotsky returns once again to the zigzag and to the relation to reality, again with reference to Lenin (see text 6.3²⁶). After a very detailed anamnesis of two of his patients, K and Z, he describes the behavior of the first one as activity without meaningful action, since concepts are absent, and the behavior of the second as fantasy without activity, unreal thinking, and thus revealing take-off into spheres beyond reality. And he interprets these two opposite clinical images by referring one last time to “Lenin’s philosophical analysis” and his image of the zigzag: “In K., the piece of fantasy is damaged (the first sharp bend of the zigzag); in Z., it is hypertrophied (there is no second bend—[the analogy in Lenin] idealism, religion).” (p. 497) The philosophical detour through Lenin reading Hegel is found in the last note of his life: another indication of the importance of this reading.