Revisiting the necessity of imagination for acts of invention.

While Gilbert Simondon is perhaps best known for his theory of individuation, he also wrote insightfully on the philosophy of technology. In his work On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) Simondon proposed an understanding of technology as a part of culture, rather than adherence to strict categorizations of “natural” and “artificial.” He articulated the term “concretization” whereby abstract concepts evolve into integrated technological systems. As it turns out, he was quite correct in his assumption that technology and culture would continue an interwoven trajectory beyond his lifetime.

The book Imagination and Invention, contains the complete series of lectures that Simondon gave at Sorbonne’s Institute of Psychology in 1965–66. The texts from these lectures were first published in French in 2008 and in English in 2023. Within the lectures, he engaged with the relationship and processes inherent to imagination and invention, the uniting of  “imagination and invention as successive moments in the development of a single organism” (xiii). 

Given that it has only recently been published in English, I am providing herein an overview of the key points that I believe to be relevant in current dialogue around invention and innovation, including: 

• Imagination as a necessary starting point of invention, within cultural contexts

• Strength of builders and founders who can conceptualize a third reality

• Infinitude of imagination and invention

Imaginative Acts and Cultural Context

During the 1950’s and 60’s, philosophical debates on topics of psychology were plentiful. Perception, imagination, and memory were central to much of the discourse. Sartre, a contemporary of Simondon, popularized the theory that psychology of the imagination was incompatible with perception. For Woodworth, images were not a phenomenon of perception, but rather of memory (109). Without losing too much nuance, it is sufficient to summarize that Simondon took an opposing position, effectively uniting perception and memory as fundamental faculties for compelling imagination; “one cannot separate perception and imagination; one must think of them together without confusing them” (xvii).

Closely correlating imagination with perception and memory creates an immediate opportunity for critique - if imagination draws upon what you have seen or what is being seen, is invention then reduced to “imitation phenomena” (38)? Simondon clarifies this explicitly, writing that “reproductive imagination and invention are not separate realities or opposed terms; they are successive phases of a single process of genesis” (3). The method of invention, stemming from imagination, is inherently replicative, but only to a point. From concrete, perceived images, a reorganization, reconstruction, and interpretation - which takes into account, past, present and future, to varying degrees - occurs, exacting an abstraction; a new image begins to take shape. “The image is an intermediary between the concrete and the abstract” (10). 

He continues, noting that “abstract thought is mainly a braking mechanism” (10) allowing for the new and imagined invention to form in such a way that is coherent to the culture in which it originates from. Simondon outlines action, perception, and symbolic memories as the “three fundamental modalities of the content of images that constitute the basis of cultures” (28). Images which stem from perceptions, which form memories and inform imaginative acts, exist and derive certain meaning and relevance within the context of a cultural system. Images permeate culture “in the form of perceptual anticipations of potentialities” (66) and the result is, necessarily, imaginative acts that instigate invention. Of course, this capacity for realized potentiality varies and is dependent upon culture. 

Within cultural contexts, the thread of imagination is continuous, but imaginative acts can be disruptive. According to Simondon, disruptability is a natural part of culture. It is not the imaginative capacity that is disrupted, but rather the result of imagination, which compels invention, which thus can prove to be disruptive or paradigm shifting. Paradigm shifts are a cyclical, cultural response to invention - “knowledge is progressive and continuous, whereas cultures after each cycle break apart, change structure, and re-emerge according to new principles” (28). 

Collective Creativity

I think quite relevant to founder ecosystems and even the venture landscape in general is Simondon’s suspicion that “there is a possible linkage between creativity within the group and the inventive attitude in the individual.” Simondon cites the Socratic dialectic as an example of imagination and recursive thought as producing invention. A key characteristic of Socratic dialogue being that it engaged a group in discourse and hypotheticals.

Groups that have a culture of supported creativity tend to produce innovative ideas - think of a longstanding community like Y Combinator; an expansive group, with a specific culture and intention. At Exceptional Capital, we talk often about maintaining intellectual curiosity within our team, with our founders, and with our extended community. To have that ethos of openness to imaginative and creative capacities will hopefully produce better outcomes for driving invention long-term. 

Building for a Third Reality

Simondon’s characterization of Epicurean wisdom is slightly humorous, as he writes it gives the “present its full plenitude by not allowing it to be devoured by the forces of the imagination, which constantly anticipate and wrench humans from the present in order to launch them on a quest for all that is not given in actuality” (47). This commentary is not unwarranted. Epicureanism’s overarching methodology of pain avoidance (ἀταραξία and ἀπονία) is a lower-risk approach for living, unpreoccupied with the future and without significant burden of the past.

Ok, now take a sprawling leap with me into the relevancy of this for…venture. 

I know that classic models of product market fit (PMF) and founder market fit (FMF) are not so rigid and this is not a direct critique or discounting of those models. My comments here are intended to apply Simondon to a method for considering (or even combining) PMF and FMF. While Epicureanism is an extreme example of hyperfixation on the present and avoidance of past and future, the rationale for mentioning is to note that an approach reconciling all three can have a benefit when evaluating temporality of imagination.

For Simondon, invention is inclusive of “turning toward the past memory…turning toward the future. Anticipating, waiting, inventing. And then a third turning toward the present” (xxiv). All of these actions, and all corresponding data points should be looked upon cohesively as opposed to selectively. 

Product-Founder Matrix

The diagram below depicting a Product-Founder Matrix has been deeply informed by the people I am lucky enough to learn from and work alongside! 

• Andrew has always reinforced founder fit - what about this person makes them uniquely qualified to solve (and scale) this?

• Marell talks frequently about founder obsession and paranoia - how competitive can a founder and vision be? How busy is the space, how is this team truly exceptional for this mission?

• Graham is quick to ask questions of founders that gets to the crux of how essential and urgent a product is - he is quick to discern possibilities of how replaceable/replicable the proposed solution could be.

This is purely an idea of how there is a necessary cohesion among the qualitative evaluation. I do not believe it is sufficiently nuanced to pick one singular category of where a product or a founder may fit into. Venture is anything but binary - we need to hold various data points in suspension in order to evaluate holistically the opportunity for invention. 

These categories for evaluation need not perfectly overlap, however there is a benefit in comprehending existing interconnectivity. My hope is that this visual captures simplistically what Simondon alludes to in writing that invention is “the result of an interaction between a present field of finality and an accumulated field of experience” (162).

[The * in the above visual denote terms from Sequoia’s The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework, which I believe many people are very familiar with; this is an advancement and further iteration on the general PMF concept, uniting it cohesively with FMF].

This is especially important as new technologies, new possibilities, and greater capacity and access to compute are being unleashed at rapid speeds. To hyperfixate on one PMF/FMF route may be a limitation. Perhaps a better method is to rank, or have a viable answer for all three routes - how does your solution likely solve a historical pain point, an emergent problem, and address a future reality? It is less about if the first iteration of the product addresses all three areas and more about if the founder can effectively imagine a roadmap that considers the full context of the past and present, as well as an intuited potentiality of the future. 

Simondon asserts that in imagination there is a creation of “anticipatory images…floating between extreme distance and immediate proximity. We are dealing with a “third reality” to invoke the expression Edgar Morin used to characterize certain cultural phenomena and the transmission of information” (49). The extremely distant future and the immediate proximity of the present (hair on fire problem for example) need to be effectively rationalized or reconciled to shape a third reality - as it pertains to venture, a reality where a founder successfully builds an integral, impactful, legacy company. Simondon asserts that “invention is so strongly stretched towards the future that it brings to existence outside of the subject a new mode of reality” (16).

Inventing with a hyperfocus on the present has certain pitfalls according to Simondon as “the qualities of the marvelous are the antitheses of those of lived reality” - it cannot extract only from reality (51). The third reality is vitally important to hold in tandem with past and present experience. This quote from Simondon summarizes the motion of unreality to third reality quite well:

“The imagination as anticipation is thus no longer a function severed from reality and deployed in unreality and in fiction; it triggers an effective activity of realization…the modality of the imaginary is that of potentiality; it only becomes the modality of unreality if the individual is deprived of access to the conditions of realization” (55). 

Early-stage venture is perhaps well designed to alleviate the risk of the liability he mentions, whereby a founder is “deprived” of an environment and conditions to imagine and invent. For this reason, and I quote Marell here, firms supporting the earliest stages of innovation are responsible for providing “capital, confidence, and credibility” to founders in order to help create these “conditions of realization.”

The Infinite

One thing I particularly appreciate about Simondon is his fervent belief in the boundlessness of imagination and invention. Invention corresponds to a problem, but it also necessarily goes beyond the problem and “tends towards the universal” (158).

While there are correlative relationships among imagination and perception, invention begets invention, as it “transcends its own end; the initial intention of solving a problem is only a trigger” as invention instigates “more than it anticipated” (xxxii). No invention is “limited to solving a single problem” (172). Invention has and continues to be an unending sequence of “discovering processes” (177).

Progress is “the consequence of acts of invention; it goes beyond improvements targeted by the inventor and his inventions because, according to the expression of Teilhard de Chardin, ‘the rooms are greater than the house’ that was planned to be built” (174). My personal theory on imagination aligns closely with that of Giambattista Vico (who I originally became familiar with by reading Donald Verene’s work). The basic premise being that imagination is a core function of cognition. Cognition and imagination cannot be separated. In order to grasp abstracts, to invent, to create, to replicate, to modify - an imaginative capacity of cognitive function is requisite. 

Technical invention serves “as a paradigm for processes of creation that take place in other domains” (183) writes Simondon, which I believe we have witnessed time and again through history and certainly over the past few decades. The invention of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad created an immense marketplace for mobile applications. Projected to reach a value of $967 billion by 2033, the global mobile application market did not exist 25 years ago. 

Enduring imagination fosters legacy invention

In understanding or anticipating paradigm shifts of culture and technicity, we can imagine and project beyond the immediacy of the present. One of the most amazing aspects of human cognition is the infinite potentiality of imagination and invention. Existing objects and concepts can originate evolving and alternative forms and functions. Invention can also effectively unify disparate components to reveal new functionalities. “What is truly the invention of an epoch…is a mode of compatibility between previously isolated forms” (159).

Interestingly, Simondon may have foreshadowed some of what we are anticipating of an agentic future, claiming that technology would reshape labor as workers gain more “immediate access to the tools of production and becomes the boss of the whole project” - he even hinted at “virtuality [as] the index of imaginary anticipation characterizing the activity of DIY” (55). He may not have been envisioning explicitly the reality of things like Zoom or code-generation or agents, but reading his work you get the sense that he intuited a reinvented future not so far from our reality today.

He includes a historical example that I truly love, as he mentions:

“The Romans of antiquity have invented the construction of roads as stable objects, concretizing the techniques of communication, fast travel, commerce, and transportation, while formalizing the entire reach of the image of power whose seat was Rome. This network of objects has survived the empire because it transcended, through invention, the particular finality of each of its actions” (178). 

The architectural development and city-building in ancient Rome was organized with a specific intention and near-term outcome in mind. Many inventions dating back centuries are still in use or being re-used throughout the former Roman empire. A particular example of reinvention being spolia, which denotes a reuse of materials or artifacts. The objects invented have outlived or exceeded usage beyond their original strategic development and imagination - a profound and highly tactile example of the cyclical and enduring nature of imagination.

This power of invention is important to keep in mind and something I value greatly from Simondon’s work. Imagination and invention are inextricable and infinite. As investors in current cycles of innovation, we can continue to empower the most imaginative builders; founders who can envision a reality where their invention is enduring and who possess a deep intuition that the longevity and impact of their creative work will continue to inspire invention in infinite ways. 

Work Cited:

Simondon, Gilbert, et al. Imagination and Invention. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.