Alfredo Ferrarin

The notion of productive imagination is not only of crucial importance for Kant’s idea of pure reason, and for the unity of our theoretical experience, it is also stunningly seminal for post-Kantian philosophy: think, for instance, of Fichte, Schelling, the German Romantics, and of Hegel’s Glauben und Wissen. For the historian of philosophy, in particular, it is a very intriguing notion. Yet, however fundamental the notion of productive imagination is, it is not easy to determine its precise role in the Critique of Pure Reason; the question of its historical genealogy is even more obscure.

Whether or not we think that Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy regarding the end of the Gutenberg galaxy and the advent of the civilization of the image has come true in the era of sophisticated computer-enhanced imagery, it seems indisputable that images play a central role in our existence. We are constantly bombarded and inescapably surrounded by images. Publicly accessible and reproducible images are a singularly effective way to find and exemplify a visual representative for what they picture, or to convey a message. Their main virtue is simplification: they not only select significant aspects in the representation of something concrete and individual, while at the same time isolating it from its particularity, but also they idealize and make what they represent general enough that virtually anyone can recognize and relate to it. Only thus can we explain their often spellbinding effect and their popular appeal.

WHEN NIETZSCHE CALLED MAN THE YET UNFINISHED ANIMAL, he echoed a phrase that had remote origins. In classical German philosophy, the idea of man as a Mängelwesen, a lacking and underdetermined being, was shared by Herder, Kant, and even Hegel and Marx, among others. It was brought to clear expression by Schiller when he wrote: “With the animal and plant, Nature did not only specify their dispositions but she also carried these out herself. With man, however, she merely provided the disposition and left its execution up to him.” What distinguishes man from animals, according to these thinkers, is the unfinished character of the gifts he is endowed with by nature; at the same time, this underdetermined quality is responsible for human openness and adaptability. To play on the myth of the birth of eros in the Symposium, one could say that for man poverty is resourcefulness.