The German word einbildungskraft is, I believe, usually translated into English as “imagination” (and vice versa). According to Mary Warnock [in her book Imagination (1976 pp. 92-3)], when Samuel Taylor Coleridge read the work of Kant and other German philosophers (notably Schelling) in the original German, he took the word einbildungskraft to be a compound of ein (=one), bildung (=forming, shaping), and kraft (=power), and thus understood Kant to be talking about the power of forming things (mental things, ideas, I guess) into a unity. However, according to Warnock, this was a misunderstanding, and the ein in einbildungskraft simply means “in.” Then, reading bild as “picture” (I am not sure how she accounts for the ung part - can bildung mean something like “making a picture” or “depicting”?) we get einbildungskraft = “the power of forming inner pictures,” i.e. imagination in its most basic, dictionary sense.
I do not know German. Are there any German speakers or German language experts around here who can confirm for me whether Coleridge’s interpretation or Warnock’s (or neither) is correct?
Please note: I am not asking whether Germans today might understand einbildungskraft to carry a hint of “power of forming into a unity” (although it would be interesting to know). Coleridge’s writings about the imagination, fragmentary and dubiously coherent though they are, have had a huge impact on how English speaking intellectuals understand “imagination,” and it would not be too surprising if they have also had some impact in Germany. My main concern, however, is the actual etymology of the word, as Germans of that era (i.e., late 18th and early 19th century - including philosophers such as Kant and Schelling) would have understood it.
Well, for a start, the noun “Einbildung” comes from the verb “einbilden”, which means “imagine”. The “ung” part is just a way of forming a noun from a verb, and I suspect that’s it’s cognate with the English “ing”. The verb “einbilden”, like a lot of German verbs, contains a prefix “ein” and a verb “bilden”, meaning “to form”. Prefixes are hard to given meaning to, but I think that “ein” is reasonably close in meaning to “in” – so “forming inner pictures” is probably the way the verb “einbilden” came about.
Native German speaker here. I’m not sure if I can help, though. I don’t have a suitable etymological dictionary, and I don’t know much about classical German philosophy.
Google gave me a German “Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe” (philosophical glossary) from 1904, by one Rudolf Eisler.
Eisler quotes Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edition) as saying “Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, einen Gegenstand auch ohne dessen Gegenwart in der Anschauung vorzustellen.”
There are so many more or less synonymous words to choose from that it’s really hard to translate this without introducing some bias. But Kant basically says that Einbildungskraft is the capability to conceive of a thing in its absence. There is no hint of “forming a unity” or anything in that vein.
This is also the modern meaning of Einbildungskraft. As far as I can see, Warnock is right.
Regarding today’s meaning, Coleridge is wrong and Warnock is right - Einbildungskraft today mean ‘power of imagination’ (I’d prefer that translation to ‘imagination’ because that English word as I understand it can mean either the act of imagination or the faculty of imagination). The more unusual German terms today are Vorstellung and Vorstellungskraft, though, because Einbildung carries a connotation of delusion.
The Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Brothers Grimm (published in instalments 1838-1961, but the E volume seems to have been published before 1863 when Jacob Grimm died while editing the ‘Frucht’ entry) should yield more contemporary meanings but I cannot access the server at the moment.
No, I think it would be very odd to use “imagination” to mean the act in modern English. It means the faculty/power.
Well, ok, but imagination carries a connotation of delusion in many contexts in English too. (Although we also have the word fantasy, which carries a much stronger connotation of delusion or frivolity.) Imagination also has a strong positive connotation of creativity in many contexts, but I suspect that is true of einbildungskraft too. At any rate, I am fairly sure it is the word Kant uses in the context of aesthetics as well as in the context of psychology and epistemology. I am interested in what you say about Vorstellung and Vorstellungskraft, though. Am I right to think that they quite narrowly refer to mental imagery and the ability to experience mental imagery? If so, we do not really have a colloquial equivalent to Vorstellungskraft in English; we have to make do with the rather broad and ambiguous imagination.
Anyway, thanks to you (and Fish Cheer and Giles too) for confirming that Warnock essentially got this right. I am not surprised. Coleridge was a brilliant poet on his day, but as a philosopher he was a fuck-up.