The Imaginative Basis of Hope

Abstract

This article rearticulates Immanuel Kant’s theory of judgement, asserting that all forms of thought begin from an imaginative basis–including its highly functionalized and reified forms. A creative, productive, unruly, and radical power, the work of the imagination at the nucleus of the subject restates one’s freedom and autonomy, achieving this through the act of hoping, analytically defined as the imagining of possibility. Hope relies upon various capacities of the imagination–including its ability to delimit and expand the scope of judgement, reckoning with the possible. This rudimentary hope is non-rational and non-representational, its value deriving from the feeling of the imagination in a state of free play: a shock indicative of its spontaneous activity, emerging from the subject. This has analogues in sublime reflection, genius, and poetic venturing–characterized by drawing upon Kant, Jean-Luc Nancy, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Heidegger. Understanding the basis of hope as such accounts for why people may hope despite good reasons for doing otherwise, challenging accounts of the human subject (and human nature) that are definitively aligned with moral and rational character–arguing that the imagination is primordial, prior to prudential reasoning.