Abstract
I argue that imagination has an inherently paradoxical structure: it enables one to flee one’s socio-cultural reality and to constitute one’s socio-cultural world. I maintain that most philosophical accounts of the imagination leave this paradox unexplored. I further contend that Paul Ricoeur is the only thinker to have addressed this paradox explicitly. According to Ricoeur, to resolve this paradox, one needs to recognize language as the origin of productive imagination. This paper explores Ricoeur’s solution by offering a detailed study of reproductive and productive imagination in the framework of poetic imagination. My analysis subjects Ricoeur’s distinction between reproductive and productive imagination to a critique that relies upon the principles of classical phenomenology. According to my central thesis, the imaginative powers of language are themselves rooted in perception. This thesis broadens the scope and significance of Ricoeur’s solution by enabling one to resolve the paradox of imagination not only at the level of language-based imagination, but also at the level of dreams and daydreaming as well as at the level of non-language based art. No less significantly, this thesis enables one to open a fresh dialogue between phenomenology and hermeneutics.
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Notes
After viewing the film before its official screening, Bill Bright offered to reimburse Universal Studios for all its investments into The Last Temptation in exchange for all existing prints, which he vowed to destroy.
Here Levy was led to the conclusion that Ricoeur’s critique of Sartre’s philosophy of the imagination, which focuses only on reproductive imagination, remains partial and unconvincing. In contrast to Ricoeur’s reading of Sartre, Levy proceeds to demonstrate that Sartre develops a notion of productive imagination. Furthermore, she also suggests that Sartre develops a notion of narrative identity well before Ricoeur and that much like Ricoeur, Sartre also conceives of selfhood as inseparable from imagination.
According to Castoriadis, the distinction between these two forms of imagination can already be found in Aristotle’s De Anima (see Castoriadis 1997: 319f.).
Why does Ricoeur consider this paradox as necessary and irremovable? His most concise answer to this question is to be found in “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling”: “On the one hand, imagination entails the epoché, the suspension, of the direct reference of thought to the objects of our ordinary discourse. On the other hand, imagination provides models for reading reality in a new way. This split structure is the structure of imagination as fiction” (1957, 1978).
Ricoeur interprets Aristotle’s portrayal of tragedy as the earliest account of productive imagination. In the words of George Taylor, “for Aristotle, the tragedy is not a copy or reduplication of human life but on the contrary has a ‘power of disclosure concerning reality.’ Aristotle’s conception of imagination is thus directed against Plato’s notion of imagination as a shadow” (2006: 96).
There are two different notions of productive imagination is Kant’s works. In the First Critique, productive imagination is meant to synthesize concepts and intuitions. By contrast, in the Third Critique productive imagination strives for the beyond, even though it fails to be adequate to it. George Taylor remarks that in the Lectures on Imagination Ricoeur addresses both notions of productive imagination in Kant. As Taylor goes on to say, “[a]greeing with Gadamer that cognition and aesthetics should not remain separated, Ricoeur considers the task after Kant is to build a unified concept of imagination that brings the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions together” (2013b: 6).
Ricoeur presents such a fourfold typology in his Lectures on Imagination, which at the moment are being prepared for publication.
As George Taylor remarks in “Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination,” “Ricoeur’s main thesis in the Lectures on Imagination is that the productive imagination can most prototypically be found in fiction” (2013a: 6). Or as Ricoeur himself puts it in these lectures, “[b]ecause fictions don’t reproduce a previous reality, they may produce a new reality. They are not bound by an original that precedes them” (quoted from Taylor 2013a, op. cit.).
One could of course argue that such a clarification remains imprecise: it invites one to think of such imaginary creatures as unicorns, sirens, or the above-mentioned centaurs and chimaeras, as though they were fictive objects. However, purely imaginary beings are built out of the very same materials that we encounter in the perceptual world. In this expanded sense, they exemplify reproductive rather than productive imagination, which conceives of images as replicas of the given reality.
Or as George Taylor puts it: “productive imagination discloses new forms of reality; it augments reality…. [P]roductive imagination is the manifestation of new reality rather than simply adequation to existing reality” (2013b: 5).
At this point, one might object that Ricoeur need not subscribe to such a narrow conception of language as the one I have attributed to him in my analysis. Since not only Husserl’s but also Heidegger’s influence on Ricoeur’s thought is undeniable, should one not broaden the conception of language in a Heideggerian fashion by conceiving of language as the “house of Being,” i.e., as that which allows for meaningful being-in-the-world? Yet as soon as language is conceived in such a broad way, Ricoeur’s conception of productive imagination loses its specificity and legitimacy. It loses its specificity because it becomes no longer clear how one is to distinguish between productive and reproductive imagination, for clearly, both forms of imaginations unfold within the horizon of Dasein’s meaningful being-in-the-world. It also loses its legitimacy, since as soon as language is conceived in the broad hermeneutical way, it no longer becomes clear why productive imagination is to be grounded in a theory of metaphor.
As Ricoeur puts it in the context of his analysis of Paul Henle’s theory of metaphor, “if metaphor adds nothing to the description of the world, at least it adds to the way in which we perceive; and this is the poetic function of metaphor” (1977: 190).
In his “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” Ricoeur calls such a possibility “bad psychology” (1978: 155), interpreting it in a Humean rather than in a phenomenological way.
To avoid misunderstanding, I should note that Ricoeur himself emphasizes that productive imagination manifests itself outside the language-based sphere. For instance, in his Lectures on Imagination, he refers to impressionism as a movement that embodies productive imagination. Impressionism created “a new alphabet of colors capable of capturing the transient and fleeting with the magic of hidden correspondences. And once more reality was remade” (Ricoeur, “Lectures on Imagination,” 17:15 [Quoted from Taylor 2006: 96–97]). Yet how exactly is one to reconcile this non-linguistic power of productive imagination with Ricoeur’s explicit emphasis that productive imagination is grounded in the metaphorical use of language? To the best of my knowledge, Ricoeur does not respond to this question.
For Ricoeur’s own account of the affective dimensions of imagination, see especially Ricoeur (1978: 155–158). Here Ricoeur distances himself from those theories, which ascribe a merely substitutive role to affection. According to these theories, imagination in general, and metaphor in particular, lack informative value, yet they cover up this lack with “informationless” imagery. In contrast to such a view, Ricoeur argues that affection is irreducibly cognitive. To put the matter in the terms I have employed in this paper, affection is constitutive.
As Thomas Busch observes in the essay I have referred to above, “Ricoeur’s interest in imagination came at a time when his thought was moving from a phenomenological to a hermeneutic methodology in which problems of language supplanted problems of consciousness” (1997: 514). Thus Ricoeur does not thematize imagination in the framework of a phenomenological analysis of pre-predicative experience, but rather turns to imagination in the framework of different types of language use. Such a methodological reorientation justifies the claim that when it comes to his philosophy of the imagination, Ricoeur grafts phenomenology onto hermeneutics and not hermeneutics onto phenomenology.
As Ricoeur puts it in his Lectures on Imagination, “[w]e can no longer oppose … imagining to seeing, if seeing is itself a away of imagining, interpreting, or thinking” (Ricoeur, Lectures on Imagination, 9:1 [Quoted from Taylor 2006: 94]).
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Geniusas, S. Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination. Hum Stud 38, 223–241 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9339-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-014-9339-8