The Life of the Productive Imagination in Ricoeur’s Philosophy of the Imagination

Abstract This essay explores the historical, ontological and practical dimensions of the life of the productive imagination in Ricoeur’s philosophy of the imagination. First of all, I will attempt to clarify what the historicity belonging to the dialectic of innovation and sedimentation governing Ricoeur’s thesis of threefold mimesis adds to his important revision of the Kantian conception of the transcendental. I will propose characterizing the complex status of the productive schematism of metaphor and narrative as theorized by Ricoeur as a “transhistorical quasi-transcendantal.” Then I shall consider more closely the ontological and phenomenological dimensions of the process of threefold mimesis, asking what is the core experience that underlies this process. As I will attempt to show, it is the lived experience of a productive tension between invention and discovery that allows Ricoeur to think of the productive imagination as an incarnate imagination, one that deals with the world and with history. This experience, I want to suggest, implies a conception of the productive power of the imagination as an operative virtuality already manifest at the level of prefiguration that makes thinkable the paradoxical unfolding of an “ontology of fiction”.