ABSTRACT
The articles in this first part of the book investigate the connections between the faculty of imagination (Ger.Einbildungskraft), imagination, fantasy and creativity. The first essay undertakes the attempt to clarify the meaning of the German word “Einbildungskraft” within the field of related terms. Its starting point is the anthropological nature of the faculty of imagination (Einbildungskraft), which first makes people what they are. This anthropological view is to be found in Kant’s definition of the faculty of imagination (Einbildungskraft) as the capacity to “re-present” (vorstellen) an object in the intuition (Anschauung) without its being present. According to this view, which still remains relevant today, the faculty of imagination is tied to what has been perceived by the senses. For concepts to denote reality they have to be accompanied by intuition (Anschauung). While this is not a problem in the case of empirical concepts, concepts of the understanding and concepts of reason need schemata or symbols to be rendered sensory. In Kant’s view, concepts such as the state, love and death are not based on intuitions gained from experience. However, the faculty of imagination can nonetheless mediate between concept and perception by reminding us of comparable objects of perception. In addition to Kant’s considerations, since Rousseau, Goethe and the early German Romantics and since Schelling and Kierkegaard, there has been intense controversy about the significance of the imagination for artistic productivity (Mattenklott). The productive character is also expressed in the concepts of imagination, fantasy, invention and intuition, which are closely related to it. In aesthetics, the faculty of imagination refers not only to the capacity to represent (imag-in-e) the world inside oneself and to the power to bring what is temporally and spatially absent into the present, but also the possibility of restructuring existing systems and producing the new. The faculty of imagination and fantasy enable the subject to develop his or her creativity. To what extent the faculty of imagination is dependent for the production of its works on preconditions that exist in nature or culture remains controversial. At the turn of the 19th century there was extensive agreement that the imagination enables the artistic subject to behave like the natura naturans. In this view, the artist creates, like nature, but this does not mean that his works are nature. Rather the similarity exists in the artist’s possessing the same creative power. 1
