Productive Imagination

Its History, Meaning and Significance

Saulius Geniusas, Dmitri Nikulin

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786604323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Kritische Theorie

Although the concept of productive imagination plays a fundamental role in Kant, German Idealism, Romanticism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, the meaning of this central concept remains largely undetermined. The significance of productive imagination is therefore all-too-often either inflated or underrated. The articles collected in this volume trace the development of productive imagination through the history of philosophy, identify the different meanings this concept has been ascribed in different philosophical frameworks, and raise the question anew concerning this concept’s philosophical significance. Special attention is given to the historical background that underlies the emergence of productive imagination in modernity, to Kant’s concept of productive imagination, to the further development of this concept in German Idealism, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur. A group of leading scholars present a systematic and comprehensive reference tool for anyone working in the firsl of social imaginaries.

Chapter 1

What Is Productive Imagination?

Dmitri Nikulin

The problem of imagination—of what it is and how it works—has occupied not only the imagination of the poets but also the thinking of philosophers for centuries, and yet it gets reimagined and rethought in each epoch in accord with the current imaginative self-understanding of the thinking subject.¹ Not only do we reproduce imagination but imagination equally seems to produce and creatively reinvent us. In an attempt to answer the question about the meaning of the productive imagination, I begin with Aristotle’s theory of imagination, which is then creatively developed by Proclus. I then move on to the discussion of Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant, all of whom appropriate and reinterpret the transmitted Aristotelian account and, responding both to Aristotle and to each other, come up with a set of insights that constitute our modern understanding of the productive imagination. I will argue, first, that the imagination embraces and lives off negativity more than any other cognitive faculty. This enables the imagination to try to achieve autonomy as something productive independently of sensation and thinking, an attitude that is exemplified in the modern understanding of the role of productive imagination in art. However, despite its best efforts, productive imagination cannot get rid of its dependence on, and mediation between, sensation and thinking. Such a mediating relation is revealed in the workings of memory. I thus argue, second, since imagination is the production and preservation of images, it is fundamentally indispensable for the proper functioning of memory. Yet this mnemonic role of the imagination gets blurred and forgotten in modern philosophy, because of the imagination’s attempt at negative self-assertion. Hence, one needs to genealogically recollect and systematically restore the connection of the productive imagination with memory.

FACULTY

Although it is Plato who is the first to use the term φαντασία (Rep. 382e), later translated as imaginatio, he does not come up with a consistent theory of imagination, and one needs to make a considerable effort to reconstruct it from his texts. It is Aristotle who turns φαντασία into an imagination that is indispensable for any discussion of the representation of the natural, social, cultural, and mental world (De an. 427a19 sqq.).² Most importantly, he takes imagination to be a capacity (δύναμις, which is translated by the Latin facultas or capacitas, but also stands for potentiality). A capacity, for Aristotle, is something that allows us to perform certain operations and thus bring about a change—to produce a state or a thing. A capacity is not acquired (as is habituation or disposition, ἕξις) but is there as part of our make-up, and is determined by the corresponding activity and its objects. The activity (ἐνέργεια or ἐντελέχεια) thus takes priority over capacity both ontologically and logically, although capacity often temporally precedes the corresponding activity (Met. 1049b4 sqq.). We already have many different capacities for acting in various ways, but we realize each capacity in action and come to understand it only when we actually act.

Imagination is understood by Aristotle as the mental capacity or ability by which we discern (κρίνομεν) and tell the right from the wrong (De an. 428a3–4). And that’s what imagination remains to this day: it acts as a capacity, as a mental power, even though its activity and objects can be understood very differently. It is the same for Wolff: the “power of the soul” (die Kraft der Seele).³ For Baumgarten (who still uses the original term, phantasia), imagination is a faculty, facultas imaginandi, which is a cognitive faculty of the soul, facultas cognoscitiva (Vermögen zu erkennen).⁴ And for Kant, imagination is equally a power of the soul, or Einbildungskraft (KrV B151).⁵

Yet the knowledge of a capacity is never immediate but comes only after and from its use, when it is activated and made to act. Only then do we become reflectively aware of our having a capacity to do something, which we then call a “faculty” (VG §192). Thus, a faculty is known on the one hand from its activity, when the possibility of doing something becomes actual. On the other hand, we come to know a faculty from the study of its objects. We all have the capacity to see, but we see only when we are seeing, and seeing the things that we see. Only then we can realize what seeing is: what it means to see and what it means to see a thing. Such an approach can go a long way: in physical things, one could claim that the capacity for a body to get warm comes from the corresponding faculty. It is precisely this understanding of physical activity, as resulting from a hypothetical “occult” capacity, that the modern science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vigorously objected to. Yet the knowledge of the “inner” activity of the mind still remained to a great extent based on the Aristotelian faculties model. For every significant phenomenon, then, there should have been a faculty, the position for which Nietzsche has famously ridiculed Kant. Thus, if we detect moral phenomena, there should be a moral capacity; for volitional acts, there should be the capacity of will. And yet, Aristotle remained happily unaware of both.

Thus, the activity of a faculty is determined by its objects, which are different and distinct for every faculty or capacity. Imagination, in particular, is defined by its images. Already Plato, without mentioning imagination by name, speaks about the soul as a “painter” capable of producing mental images—φαντάσματα (Phil. 40a). But it is Aristotle who defines imagination as the capacity to have an image (φάντασμα τι). However, he does not claim, as it often supposed, that imagination produces its images, but rather that the images or φαντάσματα occur or happen to us (ἡμῖν γίγνεσθαι) because of the capacity of imagination (De an. 428a1–2).

But what are these imaginary images? The φαντάσματα, as the concept’s derivation from the verb φαίνω suggests—“to bring to light,” “make known,” “reveal,” “give light,” “shine,” “appear”—has to do with the appearance of the imagined in such a way that it shows or reveals itself to a mental “gaze.” It is something that is “seen,” an “appearance” and “apparition” of a thing in the absence of that thing. Despite the imagination’s apparent ability to represent the heard, the tasted, the touched, and the smelled, its paradigmatic object in Aristotle is the representation as seeing or inner vision. The imagined is therefore as if “before the eyes” (πρὸ ὀμμάτων) so that we are as if “watching pictures” (ἐν γραφῇ [De an. 427b18, 24, 428a6–7]). Imaginary images are hence taken as pictorial or picture-like and they continue to be understood as such in modernity, which takes seeing or vision as the paradigm for both thinking and imagination.

For Wolff, as later for Kant, imagination is the power of the soul to bring forth the representations (Vorstellungen) of things that are currently not present, which are the images of imagination, the term for which, Einbildungen, is derived from Bild—“image” or “picture” (VG §235).⁶ The representations of the imaginary objects are thus visualizations or images of things or states that are (1) inner representations of those things or states in their absence and (2) are immediately recognizable from their imaginary visualization or “picturing.” Baumgarten expresses this attitude:

I am conscious of my past state [conscius sum status mei], and hence, of a past state of the world. The representation [repraesentatio] of a past state of the world, and hence of my past state, is an image (imagination, a sight, a vision) [phantasma (imaginatio, visum, visio)]. Therefore, I form images or imagine [formo, seu imaginor] through the power of the soul for representing [vis animae repraesentatiua] the universe according to the position of my body. (M §557)⁷

Imagination is thus a mental “vision” that “sees” and recognizes its objects the way they appear to our inner mental gaze from a particular imaginary point of view (“according to the position of my body”), without, however, yet knowing the properties of those imaginary visualized representations or “phantasms.”

INTERMEDIATENESS

From the observation of various mental operations and the different types of their objects, we come to recognize a whole plurality of different cognitive faculties (Kant, KrV B677), most notably, besides imagination, sense perception or sensibility (of which, for Kant, there are five empirical kinds but only two a priori forms—space and time) and reason. Of reason too there are different kinds, the discursive logical reasoning or διάνοια (which later becomes understanding or Verstand), moral reason or φρόνησις (which later becomes practical reason), and the nondiscursive reason or νοῦς (which later becomes reason proper or Vernunft). The opposition between sensation and reason is established by the opposition of external/internal (in Aristotle) or multiplicity/unity (in Plato and Kant), and by the role they play in the constitution of knowledge and experience. Already Aristotle famously claims that imagination is different from both sense perception and discursive thinking (φαντασία γὰρ ἕτερον καὶ αἰσθήσεως καὶ διανοίας [De an. 427b14–5]). But how are these faculties different? Again, they differ as faculties that have different activities and different objects so that the φαντάσματα of imagination are distinct both from the sensations and from the objects of thought. The important difference is that the imagination’s images can exist without sensation, for instance, in sleep, and that sensations are always present, while images are not (De an. 428a5–9).

Yet as a faculty, imagination is not just different from sensation and discursive reason or understanding—it is intermediate between the two. For Aristotle, imagination has its origin in sensation, which provides the model for its inner visualizations. But at the same time, thinking is itself impossible without imagination, because imagination provides a kind of pictorial diagram in which thinking can then discern certain properties (Mem. 449b31–450a2). Imagination is thus not only different from sensation and thinking but also connects them, both separating and uniting the two.

However, at this point, Wolff and Baumgarten (M §520–1) dissent from Aristotle in considering imagination, together with sensation, an “inferior” cognitive faculty, opposed to the “superior” faculty of understanding. As Wolff later argues, while we come to concepts (Begriffe) by recognizing similarities and differences in our perceptions and imaginations (VG §273), the understanding in its cognition differs from both sense perception and imagination, because the images or representations of the imagination can be clear but not yet distinct, as in the understanding (VG §277 sqq.). In his Anthropology (§15), Kant also considers sensibility to consist of two parts, sense and the power of imagination.⁸ However, in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant is concerned with the way categories of understanding apply to the objects of senses, he goes with Aristotle, famously claiming that imagination is a pure synthesis that binds plurality of sensation with the unity of thinking.⁹ While sensation is an a priori manifold of pure intuition (many), imagination is the synthesis of this manifold (one-many), and only the concept of understanding gives this synthesis unity (one), which results in cognition and knowledge (KrV B104). Because our intuitions are sensible for Kant, imagination belongs to sensibility; but because synthesis is an exercise of spontaneity, imagination as the a priori synthesis (figurative synthesis, synthesis speciosa) is also the expression of understanding. This is the imagination as the transcendental, which has affinity with sensation (intuition), on the one hand, and with understanding, on the other (KrV B151–2). As Kant puts it in the Critique of Judgement, “Now there belongs to a representation by which an object is given, in order for there to be cognition of it in general, imagination for the composition of the manifold of intuition and understanding for the unity of the concept that unifies the representations” (KU §9).¹⁰

Perhaps the best and most original illustration of the intermediate position of imagination can be found in Proclus’ commentary of the first book of Euclid. Following Aristotle, Proclus argues that imagination or φαντασία is an intermediate cognitive faculty between sense perception or αἴσθησις and discursive thinking or διάνοια. As in Aristotle, every faculty for Proclus is defined by its specific object. The objects of the highest cognitive faculty, the νοῦς, are the indivisible intelligible concepts or νοητά; the objects of the διάνοια are discursive representations of the concepts—definitions or λόγοι; and the objects of sense perception are the sense perceptions or αἰσθητά. The objects of imagination are φαντάσματα, which make the thinkable ment...