Abstract
This chapter presents the concept of practical imagination as a specification of the general concept of imagination. This type of imagination participates in the representation and anticipation of possible scenarios in which we see ourselves performing a course of action and living its consequences; it is from this anticipation that we make our decisions and act. By virtue of this, practical imagination is mainly counterfactual, and its exercise is limited to the field of the possible and realizable.
The internal relationship between practical rationality and imagination allows us, in turn, to differentiate the latter into the four practical contexts in which practical rationality can be differentiated, so that we can speak of ethical, moral, political and legal imagination. These four forms of imagination are developed as enablers of ethical, moral, legal and political rationality. This will be illustrated through the contributions of classical thinkers such as Aristotle and the Stoics in the case of ethical imagination, Hume and Kant for moral imagination, whereas the anticipation of institutional and legal arrangements that articulate our political and legal imagination will be presented from a wide variety of contributions that range from Plato to Marx.
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Notes
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This type of imagination is a modal imagination insofar as it represents different possibilities conceived by an individual (Kripke 1985; Nichols 2004; Chalmers 2002; Sosa 2000). This opens the field to questions on the modal epistemology concerning how knowledge of what is possible is attainable, which in the case of practical imagination could lead, for example, to research on moral knowledge. However, this kind of problems do not fall within the scope of this work, so the discussions associated with the counterfactual imagination as modal imagination leading to issues of modal epistemology will not be considered.
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The significant contribution Modzelewski (2017) has made consists in the development of an education of emotions aiming at stimulating citizen’s dispositions in democratic societies.
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The role of advising and assisting that means-ends rationality has, is implied in Hume’s position in his “slave passage” and which has been further developed by contemporary non-cognitive ethics theories, which having a restricted version of rationality, only focusing on this role of practical reason.
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Regarding this, imagination differs from conceiving because to think or make judgements does not depend exclusively on us, and that is why we can incur in truth or error; in the case of the imagination, it cannot be true or false since it does not depend on anything external to the agent, and since it only depends on the agent, it can be exercised at will. From such exercise, it is possible to create fictions (427 b 16–21, 56) that can be located in the future or even be timeless.
In addition, according to Aristotle, imagination differs from understanding in the effect produced by the objects referred to. In the case of understanding, when we think something is terrible, we experience a strong impression, but when we imagine, that impression does not arise, but we experience it as someone contemplating a painting, because it is fictitious (427 b 23–24, 56).
According to Aristotle, the imagination is not a sense either, since the senses are always either a potentiality or an actuality (sight and seeing), while an image can be given without potentiality or actuality, as it happens in dreams. Additionally, perception is always present and available to the agent, which does not happen with the imagination (428 a 5–16, 57).
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I am especially grateful to María Julia Bertomeu, who suggested this way of understanding moral imagination in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. A similar way of understanding this exercise of moral imagination can be found in what John Rawls calls the ‘categorical imperative procedure’ (Rawls 2000: 168–70).
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Pereira, G. (2019). Practical Imagination. In: Imposed Rationality and Besieged Imagination. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26520-5_1
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