![]() Because the reproductive faculty works only with materials previously provided to someone’s senses, it is subject to the kind of limits Hume discussed. When a story comes on the radio about a long-lost cat who has found its way home, you draw from the many cats you’ve seen before to picture the heartwarming scene this would be the reproductive imagination at work. For Kant, our productive imagination is what makes perception possible.īy contrast, the reproductive imagination is largely about recollection. This unifying tendency is implanted in every human mind irrespective of experience. So the identification of something with pointy ears and fur, which meows and rubs itself against your legs, is brought together via the productive imagination into the form of a cat. The productive faculty is what helps to synthesise and transform sensory content into a meaningful whole. Along these lines, towards the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant distinguished two forms of imagination: the productive imagination and reproductive imagination. One way to resolve such ambivalence would be to divide the imagination into different kinds. ‘Let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the Universe we never really advance a step beyond ourselves,’ he wrote. But imagination is also restricted by the extent of our previous perceptions and experiences, Hume said. One need only think of how Leonardo da Vinci’s fantastical flying machines paved the way for the Wright brothers, or how H G Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) inspired the first liquid-fuelled space rocket, to see the truth of this insight. What’s behind this apparent tension at the heart of the imagination? Hume put his finger on it when he talked about how our facility for fantasy helps us to move beyond and change our present reality. Indeed, ‘nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible,’ Hume said. Perception can show us only the actual, he said, but imagination can go beyond that, to the realm of the maybe, the what-if and if-only. However, Hume also claimed that humans are most free when they’re engaging in imagination. But imagined images and sensations, he continued, are ‘faint and languid, and cannot without difficulty be preserved by the mind steady and uniform for any considerable time’. ‘When we remember any past event, the idea of it flows in upon the mind in a forcible manner,’ he wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738-40). The Scottish philosopher David Hume was equally conflicted about the imagination – especially when compared with perception and memory. ![]() ![]() According to the philosopher Dennis Sepper at the University of Dallas, Descartes relied upon a kind of ‘ biplanar’ imagination, pioneered by Plato, in which one level of reality could embody and display relations that existed on a different level, and vice versa. Yet Descartes also relied heavily on imagination in scientific and mathematical essays such as The World (1633), in which he tried to conjure up the details of the basic building blocks for structures such as humans, animals and machines. Trying to imagine one’s way towards metaphysical truth, he wrote in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), is as foolish as falling asleep in the hope of obtaining a clearer picture of the world through dreams. ![]() René Descartes, for one, disparaged it as ‘more of a hindrance than a help’ in answering the most profound questions about the nature of existence. Philosophers have a love-hate relationship with the imagination. ![]()
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