The Ethical Imagination in Bachelard’s Reading of Nietzsche

Abstract

What is an ethical imagination ? Is there a place of imagination in the ethical action? The answer is not so evident. A Kantian attitude is characteristic. In distinguishing the cognitive or theoretical function from the practical usage of law, Kant denies the exercise of transcendental imagination in the law of freedom. The raison d’être of the imagination in the realm of pure theoretical reason is the mediation between the sensible intuition and the understanding. The problem of how the law of freedom is applied to actions in the world of senses, Kant sees only in the understanding in stead of the imagination which engages the schema of sensibility. In considering solely the form, Kant calls into use the law of nature as “ the type of the moral law (Typus des Sittengesetzes)”, which, as an example in actual experience, renders possible the application of the law of practical reason to the experience . The rigid usage of the type guarantees the “rationalism of judgments” against the empiricism and the mysticism of practical reason in reserving the supersensuous character of the intelligible nature. Apart from this apparent negation of imagination in the practical reason, we have another negative presentation in the aesthetical realm.