The role of imagination in creativity-REV-web

It is perhaps an uncontroversial truth that the imagination is important for creative thought. The terms ‘creative’ and ‘imaginative’ are often used interchangeably, at least in popular contexts. And volumes have been written on the imaginations of creative artists, not to mention poems, films, paintings, and other depictions of the same phenomenon. Kant recognized a connection between imagination and creativity. So the mental powers whose combination (in a certain relation) constitutes genius are imagination and understanding. One qualification is needed, however. When the imagination is used for cognition, then it is under the constraint of the understanding and is subject to the restriction of adequacy to the understanding’s concept. But when the aim is aesthetic, then the imagination is free, so that, over and above that harmony with the concept, it may supply, in an unstudied way, a wealth of undeveloped material for the understanding which the latter disregarded in its concept (Kant [1790]1987: 185).