A imaginação produtiva e reprodutiva em Immanuel Kant

Abstract

This study investigates the faculty of imagination (Einbildungskraft) in Immanuel Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, aiming to understand its nature, its different aptitudes, and its role in the constitution of human experience. It is based on the interpretation that, in this work, imagination belongs primarily to the domain of sensibility rather than thought, a position grounded especially in the interpretation proposed by Olavo Calabria. First, the Kantian distinction between sensibility, imagination, and understanding is examined, highlighting the intermediary role of imagination between feeling and thinking. Next, the productive and reproductive aptitudes of imagination are analyzed, showing that the former originally organizes sensible manifold, making experience possible, while the latter reactivates previously acquired representations. The study also examines the authorial faculties described by Kant, including plastic sensible imagination, associative imagination, and affinity, as well as the voluntary and involuntary impulses and the autonomous and heteronomous modes of imagination. In order to clarify these distinctions, the research draws on everyday examples, personal experiences, artistic manifestations, and philosophical analogies, seeking to bring Kantian reflection closer to ordinary experience without compromising conceptual rigor. The research is based on a bibliographical review, taking Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View as its primary source, complemented by secondary literature on the subject. It concludes that imagination plays an indispensable role in human life by organizing sensible experience, enabling recollection, guiding artistic creation, and continuously mediating the relationship between the subject and the world, thereby revealing itself as one of the richest and most complex faculties in Kant's philosophy.