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In light of these disadvantages, we are motivated to search for alternative approaches. As mentioned above, the chief alternative would suggest that to understand the meaning of philosophical concepts, it is not enough to fix their origins, but it is also necessary to trace their historical development. Sensitivity to the history of the concept of productive imagination invites one to qualify it as a register of Kantian heresies marked by a consistent effort to stretch the limits of productive imagination. It is a history that implodes the fundamental distinctions that we come across in Kant’s account of this concept: transcendental vs. empirical; Einbildungskraft vs. Phantasie; sensibility vs. understanding. So also, it is a history that is marked by an attempt to extend the Kantian problematic in the frameworks that lie beyond its original reach.

Most post-Kantian thinkers do not subscribe to the conceptual dualisms that pervade Kant’s philosophy: sensibility vs. understanding, phenomenon vs. noumenon, nature vs. freedom, theoretical vs. practical reason. Yet clearly, insofar as one does not subscribe to these dualisms, one must either give up the concept of productive imagination entirely, or, should one choose to retain it, infuse it with a new meaning. Thus, on the one hand, in thinkers such as Hegel we do not come across the concept of productive imagination. Hegel transforms productive imagination into one of the many aspects of the spirit’s self-actualizations (see Nuzzo 2018). By contrast, a large variety of other post-Kantian thinkers—the other main representatives of German Idealism, the central spokespersons of Romanticism, as well as various figures representing phenomenology and hermeneutics—continue to employ the concept of productive imagination as they impart upon it a new life and meaning.

Reflecting on Kant’s concept of productive imagination, one could single out two of its chief characteristics. First, this concept is meant to reconcile the antagonism between sensibility, on the one hand, and either understanding (in the first Critique) or reason (in the third Critique), on the other hand. Second, it is also meant to constitute the phenomenal field, conceived as the overall horizon of human experience. While in Kant, the reconciliatory and the constitutive functions are bound to each other, their fusion is brought into question in post-Kantian philosophical frameworks. Most post-Kantian thinkers do not retain the concept’s first chief characteristic but consider it to be an artificial solution to an artificial problem created by the dualisms of Kant’s philosophy. Yet even as they take their distance from Kant, post-Kantian thinkers simultaneously continue to follow him in that they continue to conceive of productive imagination as a power that constitutes the phenomenal field and that makes human experience possible. In short, post-Kantian philosophy of productive imagination is characterized by the effort to capitalize on its constitutive function and purify it from the reconciliatory function.

This general propensity to retain the constitutive function, while abandoning the reconciliatory dimension, has given rise to highly diverse accounts of productive imagination in the history of post-Kantian philosophy. This should come as small surprise, if only because in post-Kantian philosophy, the constitutive function of productive imagination is understood in highly diverse ways. For some (especially Heidegger or Cornelius Castoriadis), the purification of the constitutive function from the reconciliatory function comes with the demand to bolster the sharp distinction between transcendental and empirical fields and, by implication, to thereby bolster the distinction between productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) and phantasy (Phantasie). Heidegger, for his part, rethinks the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical as the distinction between the ontological and the ontic. For Heidegger, the power of imagination does not serve as an intermediary mid-point between sense and apperception, but is the original ground that underlies human cognition and knowledge. Heidegger understands Kant’s power of imagination neither in the psychological sense, nor in terms of a “transcendental” power of imagination, conceived epistemologically. Rather, Heidegger conceives of productive imagination as distinctly ontological and he further interprets it as a primordial grounding that makes both experience, and objects of experience, possible (see Wang 2018). By contrast, Castoriadis reinterprets the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical as a distinction between the socio-historical and the psychological. Conceiving of the radical imaginary as a distinctly socio-historical force, he identifies it as an anonymous, trans-subjective and unmotivated power that creates ex nihilo figures and forms that make the world. Castoriadis stretches the limits of productive imagination to such a degree that it ends up being synonymous with the creative core of the human condition. Conceived as a radically instituting power, productive imagination procures figures and forms that make up the social world (see Adams 2011, 2014, 2019).

In the hands of the thinkers I have just mentioned, the purification of the constitutive function of productive imagination requires that one reinterpret (and, mutatis mutandis, reinforce) the Kantian distinction between the transcendental and the empirical. However, for a large group of other thinkers, the purification of the constitutive function carries the opposite demand, namely, that of imploding the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical. For Wilhelm Dilthey, productive imagination is poetic, historical, and scientific. Much like Max Scheler after him, whose contribution will be addressed in Chapter III, Dilthey conceives of productive imagination as productive phantasy. Besides playing a constitutive role in the aesthetic realm, Dilthey’s imagination also codetermines the processes of understanding and interpretation in ordinary life by enabling humans to form a sense of the whole. One could say that Dilthey’s central contribution to the philosophy of productive imagination is that of stretching its limits so as to render it capable of clarifying those fields that remain unexplored in Kant’s philosophy. While in Kant, productive imagination served the function of clarifying how we make sense of the natural world, in Dilthey, its central function is to expound how we inhabit the human, socio-historical world. As Eric Nelson has recently argued (see Nelson 2018), Dilthey reinterprets productive imagination as the formative-generative imagination, thereby demonstrating that imagination is productive in the sense that it shapes the implicit, historically-embodied, orientational contexts, which are presupposed and utilized by human efforts to reach knowledge and truth.

The implosion of the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical imagination, or more precisely, the recognition that empirical imagination is itself productive insofar as it performs a constitutive function, is to be found in the thought of many other post-Kantian thinkers—in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (insofar as one can speak of productive imagination in the framework of their respective philosophies), in Miki Kiyoshi, who more than anyone else has stressed the need to give up all dualisms in the framework of the philosophy of the imagination, and in Ricœur, who conceptualizes productive imagination as symbolic, oneiric, poetic and utopian (see Kearney 2018).

Our understanding of any concept, and especially the concept of productive imagination, cannot be reduced to the history of explicit analyses of its meaning and significance. We cannot overlook implicit reflections, which at first glance appear to be focused on different figures of the imagination, yet at a closer glance prove to be of great importance for our understanding of productive imagination. In some of her recent contributions, building primarily on the resources that we find in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, Kathleen Lennon has interpreted productive imagination as a power that constitutes what Merleau-Ponty had called the “imaginary texture of the real” (see Lennon 2015 and 2018). By this we are to understand that productive imagination weaves together the present and the absent into gestalt-like formations, which the subjects of experience subsequently encounter in the surrounding world. These formations are neither imposed on the world nor discovered in it, but rather emerge from a creative interplay between subjects and the world. By interlacing the visible and the invisible, productive imagination provides the world with depth, affective character, salience and significance.

In a similar vein, taking Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of the imagination as her source of inspiration, Annabelle Dufourcq has explored the thesis that images and phantasies are made possible by the very being of things, rather than by the arbitrary activity of the subjective faculty that we identify as the imagination (see Dufourcq 2010, 2011, 2018). What is at stake here concerns an ontological account of the imaginary that relies upon Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s writings. An inquiry into the ontological roots of productive imagination invites one to recognize the need to overcome the duality of the real and the imaginary as a necessary step towards the disclosure of being that would precede such a distinction. In this regard, Kristupas Sabolius has also developed a similar approach and has been led to similar conclusions in his research while focusing on a highly interesting yet largely overlooked thinker, Gilbert Simondon (Sabolius 2019).

To a large degree, productive imagination is an umbrella term that covers various forms and figures of imagination and the imaginary. In this regard, one cannot overlook Dieter Lohmar’s various contributions, in which he focused on prelinguistic imagination. In many of his writings, Lohmar argued for the significance of pre-linguistic thinking in human consciousness. Pre-linguistic thinking, which is by no means only a human characteristic, is to be conceived in terms of the sudden occurrence of phantasmatic pictures in consciousness, which enable the subject of experience to resolve impasses as well as choose possibilities. Conceived as an “old mode of thinking,” such reliance on the productivity of the imagination largely organizes decisions that underlie social relations (see, for instance, Lohmar 2008). So also, it is worthwhile mentioning Gediminas Karoblis’s analyses of kinaesthetic imagination (see Karoblis 2018), which clearly demonstrates that in contrast to some recent views in phenomenology, productive imagination cannot be limited to its narrative forms alone.