claims#vortex-as-ratio-essendi-of-being

The imaginary is the *ratio essendi* (in "ironic" version) of Being for late MP — every being has the mode of being characteristic of imagination

ID: vortex-as-ratio-essendi-of-being Title: The imaginary is the ratio essendi (in "ironic" version) of Being for late MP — every being has the mode of being characteristic of imagination Status: candidate Confidence: speculative Claim type: thesis-central / interpretive Created: 2026-05-05 Updated: 2026-05-05 Sources: mendoza-canales-2026-institution-ontology-politics, merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible Wiki homes: imaginary-mp, vortex-tourbillon

Claim

Per Élodie Dufourcq's reading, the imaginary is not only ratio cognoscendi (heuristic dimension through which Being is approached) but ratio essendi (in an "ironic" version) of Being in late MP — the mode of being characteristic of imagination (ubiquity, hovering, inexhaustibility, presence-absence) is the mode of being of every being. Husserl already showed positivist ontology fails because horizon, distance, and illusion are something; once "appearances are the canon of what we can understand by 'being'," structural features (polymorphous Being, being of latency, oneiric being) are transposed wholesale from phenomenology of images into ontology. The "ontogenetic vortex that distributes times and spaces" is the figure of Being; the imaginary body is the true Stiftung of Being (November 1960 working note); my body is a "superficial crystallization" of an anterior imaginary.

Evidence

  • mendoza-canales-2026-institution-ontology-politics — Dufourcq, Ch 8 §1–§4 (pp. 187–197, lines 1000–1010). The imaginary-as-ratio-essendi thesis. Anchor: extraction-note Pass 2a Argument 1–5.
  • mendoza-canales-2026-institution-ontology-politics — Dufourcq Ch 8 §1 (p. 189). MP citations: "Appearances are the canon of what we can understand by 'being'" (La Nature 371); "Polymorphous Being," "being of latency," "presentation of a certain absence," "oneiric being," "mythical time" — compiled formulations from Notes 1959–1961, V&I, Nature, Parcours deux.
  • merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — V&I 262 (November 1960 working note): "Understand the dream starting from the body: as being in the world (l'être au monde) without a body, without 'observation,' or rather with an imaginary body without weight. ... the imaginary sphere of the Body ... [is] the true Stiftung of Being of which the observation and the articulated body are special variants." The strongest single attestation.
  • merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — V&I 19, 211, 244, 139 — the vortex / Stiftung / dream / imaginary cluster.

Counterpressure / Limits

  • Dufourcq concedes she is doing "extrapolation." The chapter's central thesis is that MP "never made this ontology of the imaginary the explicit core of his last philosophy" — the reading is consistently flagged as Dufourcq's interpretive synthesis, not MP's own commitment.
  • The flesh-as-load-bearing alternative reading is the dominant tradition. Most readers (Carbone, Fóti, Johnson, Saint Aubert) take flesh as the load-bearing late-ontology figure and the imaginary as regional. Dufourcq's inversion (imaginary as primary, body as superficial crystallization) is contestable.
  • The "ironic foundational status" of the imaginary is hard to distinguish from face-saving. Dufourcq's qualifier that the imaginary "is the 'most ultimate' foundation one can find, and yet at the same time the subversion of the very concept of ultimate foundation" is interpretively rich but methodologically slippery. A reader could argue the irony does the work the thesis cannot do on its own.
  • Single-chapter dependency within Mendoza-Canales 2026. Dufourcq's Ch 8 is the sole anchor.

Payoff

If supportable, the claim re-positions imaginary-mp from regional concept to structural-ontological commitment, and connects to vortex-tourbillon (per Dufourcq's vortex-as-complexification-of-circle reading). It also opens a comparative register with Bachelard (the Bachelardian du contre / world-as-provocation / philosophy du non) that the wiki has not yet developed. Coordinate with claims#mp-painter-as-primary-witness-for-indirect-ontology (live): if the imaginary is the ratio essendi of Being, painting's primary-witness role is even more emphatically positioned, since painting is the discipline that operates explicitly within the imaginary register.

Status History

  • 2026-05-05 — created as candidate (Phase 8 ninth run) after the mendoza-canales-2026-institution-ontology-politics ingest. Status candidate and confidence speculative rather than live/medium because: (a) Dufourcq concedes the reading is extrapolation; (b) the flesh-as-load-bearing alternative is the dominant tradition; (c) the "ironic foundational status" qualifier is interpretively slippery; (d) single-chapter dependency. Promotion to live requires either (a) corroborating secondary readings of MP-as-imaginary-ontologist (Dufourcq's earlier La dimension imaginaire du réel 2011 and The Imaginary of Animals 2021 not yet in raw/), or (b) sustained reading of MP's Notes 1959–1961 and the November 1960 working note against the imaginary-as-ratio-essendi reading.

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