Encountering Imagination in Hanslick, Vischer, and Kant: History of a Concept

The concept of imagination and the influence of Idealist philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer are two intersecting lacunae in scholarship on Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful. Although, from the onset, Hanslick named the imagination as the true agency of beauty (instead of feeling) and called it his “modest first premise,” there are few studies that allocate imagination’s role in Hanslick’s treatise the same importance as he clearly did. Even fewer studies address Hanslick’s cited source for the imagination, Vischer’s multi-volume Aesthetics (1846–1858), which included a book-length section entitled Theory of Imagination (1848). Furthermore, existing scholarship on Vischer, Hanslick, and the concept of imagination has misread Vischer’s relationship to Kant – tending to ignore it altogether – and, consequently, overlooks substantial textual links between Kant, Vischer, and Hanslick. In this article, I show that Hanslick’s invocation of the imagination closely follows Vischer’s theory of imagination, which must be reframed as an extension of Kant’s theory of imagination in an important departure from Vischer’s otherwise Hegelian aesthetics. First, I briefly recuperate the intellectual history of imagination in Western aesthetics, and I make a revisionist case for Vischer’s relationship to Kant. Second, I conduct close readings of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, Vischer’s extensive exegesis of it in his own Aesthetics, and, finally, the resulting role of imagination in On the Musically Beautiful. My readings establish the significance of imagination to Hanslick and offer a solution to ongoing debates in scholarship regarding the presence of Kant’s thought in On the Musically Beautiful.