The Imaginary Flower

The imaginary flower is the thought-experiment object at the center of Scarry's analysis of imagination in Dreaming by the Book. Building on Sartre's The Imaginary, Scarry demonstrates that the imagined object is structurally thinner than the perceived object: the imagined rose has only the properties the imagining consciousness actively constructs — the redness one attributes to it, the shape one assigns, perhaps a vague sense of fragrance. It does not have a backside one has not yet seen. It does not have an interior structure of cells and capillaries. It does not have the weight a real rose possesses when held in the hand, the way the stem gives slightly under pressure, the texture of the petals that differs from what one expected based on visual appearance. The imagined flower is thin. The perceived flower is dense. This asymmetry, which Scarry takes more seriously than Sartre himself intended, generates the framework through which the AI