The Wager of Imagination

Paul Ricoeur’s investigations into the function of imagination highlight similarities between aesthetic experiences occasioned by individual works and utopian alternatives to current social and political practices and ways of life. On the one hand, Ricoeur emphasizes how poetry, literature, music and works of art renew reality in accordance with the worlds they project. On the other hand, he stresses how visionary utopias are critical to reforming or revolutionizing praxis. Like works of art, these visionary outlooks renew the real from within. This renewal and regeneration of orientations, modes of thinking and styles of living attest to the imagination’s productive power. This power, I will argue, is accordingly also the source of a wager based on the solutions that works and acts provide to questions, problems and crises to which they reply.

Looking to the work of art to account for the way imagination is operative in moral and political acts that we admire accentuates the kinship between aesthetic judgment and the prospective dimension of the rules exemplified by such acts. In his essay on Hannah Arendt’s concept of political judgment, Ricoeur sets the historical spectator’s retrospective view against the social agent’s forward-looking one. By relating judgment’s prospective dimension to the logic of hope, I will show how the capacity for responding to the demands of a situation by coming up with a fitting solution is the basis for wagering on the power of imagination. This wager figures prominently in an eschatology of freedom such as the one Ricoeur places in dialectical relation with an ontology of lingual understanding. For him, this eschatology “forms the ultimate philosophical horizon of a critique of ideology.”[1] Like the logic of hope, an eschatology of non-violence draws its force from as yet unfulfilled demands. Setting the power of imagination against emancipatory social projects’ claims to be absolutely radical consequently invigorates the political and ethical task of preserving the tension between the space of our experiences and the horizon of our expectations.