Imagination is defined in philosophy as the ability to reproduce and combine impressions and ideas. Hume saw imagination as an acquired faculty based on experience, while Kant saw it as an a priori faculty that connects the emotions and intellect. Modern philosophy recognizes imagination as a driving force for creativity and innovation.
What is imagination and how does philosophy define its role? Hume is considered to be the first philosopher to recognize imagination as a mental, acquired faculty, as opposed to the traditional view of imagination as a physical, innate faculty. Hume divides perception, a human mental activity, into impressions and ideas. Impressions are the direct material of our experience of an object, like our senses, while ideas are the images that arise in our minds as a result of our impressions. Here, Hume considers the ability to reproduce images from impressions as ‘imagination’. Imagination is our most fundamental ability to understand and think about objects based on ideas.
Along with imagination, Hume presents ‘memory’ as the ability to reproduce impressions in the form of ideas. The difference between memory and imagination, like the difference between impressions and ideas, is one of degree of vividness: memory reproduces impressions more vividly than imagination does, so that ideas reproduced by memory are much more vivid and intense than ideas reproduced by imagination. Also, whereas memory plays impressions in the same order in which they were received, imagination plays them freely and in any order. An idea played back by memory is an idea of a particular impression received at a particular time and place, but an idea played back by imagination is an idea in which the time sequence of the impressions, and even the spatial arrangement of the impressions, is different from that in which they were originally received. In other words, unlike memory, imagination can combine or separate ideas. The imagination cannot create impressions, but it can autonomously reorganize the ideas created from impressions.
However, Hume sees certain constraints on the imagination’s autonomy. He explains that the imagination combines ideas according to the principles of association, which are not innate but acquired from experience, such as similarity, adjacency, and causality. When the imagination combines ideas, it does so not arbitrarily, but between similar ideas, between ideas that are adjacent in space and time, or between ideas that are causally related. For Hume, arbitrarily combined ideas are nothing more than meaningless fantasies.
Furthermore, Hume argues that the homeostatic nature of the imagination allows it to transcend the disconnection between impressions of an object and achieve sameness. The continuous existence of an object means that it remains the same, and this sameness is secured by the imagination. The idea that the sky we see when we wake up in the morning has not been destroyed and re-created overnight can be understood as homeostasis. This homeostasis of the imagination is what allows us to continuously understand and perceive the world.
Unlike Hume, Kant explored the imagination on an a priori level. According to Kant, we have four cognitive faculties: emotion, imagination, intellect, and reason. Sensibility is the ability to receive what is sensually presented to us by an object through the five senses. Intellect is the ability to form concepts and make judgments about a given situation based on those concepts. ‘Imagination’ is the ability to connect emotion and intellect, which are disparate capacities, and convey the content of emotion to intellect and the content of intellect to emotion. Combining occurs when imagination transfers emotional content to intellect, while schematizing occurs when imagination transfers intellectual content to emotion. ‘Reason’ is the ability to reason, and it converges and systematizes the myriad of knowledge accumulated by emotion, imagination, and intellect in various fields into the idea of soul, universe, or God. In this way, Kant divided human cognition into emotion, imagination, intellect, and reason, and analyzed the principles of how each function works and connects, emphasizing the role of imagination as a mediator between emotion and intellect. Without imagination, Kant believed that cognition would not be possible.
Kant divides imagination into ‘regenerative imagination’ and ‘productive imagination’ in terms of combining and schematizing. Regenerative imagination is the ability to combine the various sensations felt through the five senses by replaying them, which consists of first sifting through the disordered and diverse sensations and then replaying and combining them. This is also called “synthesis,” which combines experiences from different times into a single, unified whole. For example, when I look at an apple, and I skim through the various sensations of my five senses and combine them into a single image of the apple, I am synthesizing through the use of reproductive imagination.
Productive imagination is the ability to actively create schemas. A schema is an a priori form that precedes an experience and is not affected by the senses, but allows us to recognize that experience. They allow us to understand abstract concepts by connecting them to concrete sensations. Furthermore, the productive imagination can create schemata, which not only allow us to understand concepts accurately, but also to apply them freely. In this way, Kant goes beyond Hume’s limitations by exploring the imagination on an a priori level, where Hume studied it on an empirical level.
Meanwhile, the philosophical discussion of imagination continues in modern philosophy. Rather than viewing the imagination simply as a tool for mediating cognition, modern philosophers recognize that it is deeply connected to human creativity. It is seen as a driving force for generating new ideas and innovations in a variety of fields, including art, literature, and science. This is because imagination is recognized as more than just the ability to play, but also the ability to create new things and think outside the box. As such, imagination remains an important subject of philosophical inquiry and will continue to be reinterpreted and explored in a variety of ways.
