Zsuzsanna Mariann Lengyel

The purpose of our contribution in this paper is to provide an overview of development of Heidegger’s account of imagination with a special focus to the affinity between phenomenology and psychology. (I.) Firstly, we reconstruct how – by his reading Husserl and Aristotle – the early Heidegger got to know the function of imagination as it can open the realm of the things themselves. (II.) Secondly, we investigate that in his Kant-book, Heidegger gave up his plan to further think the viewpoints envisioned by Husserl and the Neo-Kantians, and he entirely transformed his previous concept of imagination by the chapter on Schematism. Ourcore thesis is that Heidegger’s account of imagination is concerned with the emergence of schemes of our thinking, that is to say, Heidegger went beyond the psychological Kant-interpretation, and at the same time he turned to discover the field of phenomenological unconscious.

In this paper, I would like to investigate how Gadamer explores the hermeneutic potential of Kant’s aesthetic theory in the third Critique with regard to the notion of imagination. For the first time, by making some references, Gadamer discussed the question of imagination in his Truth and Method of 1960, and we can read as a further substantial contribution his essay entitled Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit (Intuition and Intuitiveness) published in 1980. Although Gadamer’s approach was influenced by some Heideggerian impulses, he offered another alternative that is completely different from Heidegger’s one. I shall argue that even if the question of imagination is not so much stressed by Gadamer, it proves important to the development and ontological basis of the Gadamerian hermeneutics in Wahrheit und Methode. My hypothesis is that through the themes of intuition and education (Bildung), the imagination is concerned with the human understanding and our interpreting work, thus, its significance transcends the scope of aesthetics.