ABSTRACT

To shift our notions of reason and imagination in this direction would be to relate them more closely to the constitution and appropriation of meaning, to patterns of world-interpretation, and to the space that is thus opened up for interpretive conflicts. In as much as reason and imagination are involved in the ongoing self-interpretation of modernity, they become sources and figures of human autonomy. The contrast between the productive and the reproductive imagination obviously refers to a polarization within modern thought; in fact, Ricoeur mentions Sartre and Hume as representative examples. Heidegger uses the half-developed Kantian notion of the imagination to radicalize the notion of human finiteness, whereas the line of thought that led through Fichte to Schelling aimed at transcending finitude. From the first point of view - that of radicalization - the theory of rationality is seen as continuing and enhancing the trends that were already evident in the modern development of the idea of reason.