Scheler on the Concept of Productive Imagination in His Phenomenology and Metaphysics

Abstract

Abstract The paper is a critical analysis of Max Scheler’s concept of productive phantasy as it functions in two ways that the author finds philosophically interesting. First, it examines critically Scheler’s attempt to overturn the basis for the claims of David Hume that there is no genuine productive phantasy, and that all phantasy is reproductive where it is at all legitimate. Scheler responds with a theory of perception through which he attempts to demonstrate that productive phantasy is an essential component of all perceptual acts. Second, it examines Scheler’s development of the theory of productive phantasy in his late efforts in metaphysics and aesthetics. Here he claims that productive phantasy functions in the Ground of Being in the process of world-creation, with humankind as its helpmate. The result is a genetic phenomenology exhibiting the ways in which the mind comes to constitute a coherent world. The author agrees with Scheler that productive phantasy is indeed essential for the constitution of the everyday world and for the works of art that illuminate that world, but contrary to Scheler, the author argues that Scheler’s claims about the function of the term are incoherent, and it therefore cannot serve as one of the foundations of his “possibly true” metaphysical system.