1) Kant and the power of imagination: “The power of imaginative freedom”

Postscript (1)
Kant and the power of imagination: “The power of imaginative freedom”
Jane Kellner

The very ability of our productive imagination to go into a “free play” striving beyond bounds of experience is what accounts for the genius. The reproductive imagination plays a crucial role in giving coherence and order to the world but in the 3rd critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, Kant turns on the inventive, self-active role of imagination that sets the very faculty of our intellectual ideas – reason into motion. Imagination here is seen to be:

“free to provide beyond that concord with the concept, unsought extensive undeveloped material for the understanding, of which the latter took no regard in its concept, but it applies not so much objectively, for cognition as subjectively for the [very] animation of the cognitive powers… [CAPJ pp. 194]”

“…a productive cognitive faculty is, namely, very powerful in creating as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives…. In this we feel our freedom from the law of association, in accordance with which material can be certainly lent to us by nature, but the latter can be transformed by us into something entirely different, namely, into that which steps beyond nature [CAPJ pp. 192]”

The productive imagination is hence not only a key cognitive function in making way for human freedom and autonomy but also, in explaining why and how we can possibly postulate the highest good, the immortality of the soul and the existence of a supreme being. It is where we derive ideas (from its free-play) of the highest good summum bonum and as Keller argues for, is key in bringing about the highest good.

For Kant, we cannot know of the moral world (in itself) but we still have to believe it possible to bring a moral world about. In the Critique of Practical Reason, this is seen as a categorical imperative, a duty or in other words, a command of reason. Postulates of God, a supreme being is a speculative move to aid us in bringing about summum bonum. It is this rational belief that I think complements his moral law in creating a moral state in empirical nature. Kant is thus trying to make space for a rational faith in human progress when reason transgresses nature into the intelligible. Faith can be seen as Denkungsart – a way of thinking or an attitude. Faith is “reason’s moral way of thinking in assenting to what is not accessible to theoretical cognition. It is the mind’s steadfast principle to assume as true what we must necessarily presuppose as a condition for the possibility of achieving the highest moral final purpose, and to assume this because of our obligation to this final purpose and despite the fact that we have no insight into whether achieving it is possible… [Kant CTJ pp. 471-472]”

But Kellner goes one step further. She inteprets Kant’s faith not simply as an attitude, but also that of a rational motivation i.e. of having good reason to imagine ourselves achieving what reason demands, of feeling that possibly, we can accomplish such a moral world characterized by the highest good even though the natural world is always filled with evils (K pp. 50). Hence, for Kellner, Kant’s Practical Reason that commands us to strive for the highest good (K pp. 51) is insufficient and for her, the role of the Productive Imagination is cardinal for only if we are able to represent such a moral world in our imagination, in its free-play, can there be a chance for us to represent (vorgestellt) a representation (vorstellung) of the Ideal world in our individual exhibution (Darstellung) (CPJ: pp. 232) and only then, can we believe in the possibility of such an ideal moral world with ourselves as creators (K, pp. 52) and thus also as creators responsible to bringing about a moral society.

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Side note to self: Moral law taken as duty; attitude; faith; rational motivation