The Constitutional Role of Imagination in History in Paul Ricoeurˊs Hermeneutics

Imagination plays a main role in history by its narrative formulation. But this presence gives rise to a conflict through which, one the one hand, this narrative aspect has been discussed in aesthetics and as such affects the audience’s reading and lead him to a better understanding of historical events; On the other hand, many theorists hold that this imaginative aspect is an ornamental, and hence additional, insertion and try to eliminate it from historical content.  But what is important here is that neither of them maintains a cognitive role for imagination. Paul Ricoeur emphasizes the function of imagination, however, and seeks to demonstrate that how the constitution of imagination works here. He argues that history can reconstitute only by imagination and what imagination adds to history not only does not reduce history to literature but also improves it as a discourse and gives it more functional aspects. By exploring in Ricoeurˊs different texts, this paper aims to find a meaningful relation between history and imagination to show that how imagination modifies the reference of a historical narrative to the past reality through its creative activity. In this way, imagination provides a road through which our image of history is reconstructed.