The "Urbild" of "Einbildung": The Archetype in the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century German Aesthetics

This article outlines what is arguably the uniquely German trajectory of the imagination, focusing on the relation between the imagination and "Urbild" in eighteenth-century German aesthetics, particularly in Kant and Schelling. I contend that shared German roots of the "Einbildung" (imagination) and "Urbild" (archetype) in "Bild" led German aesthetic thinkers to conceive of the imagination much more in (Neo-)Platonic terms. This article therefore argues that there is a perceptible rift in how the imagination is conceived in eighteenth-century discourse which follows a linguistic fault line between the Latin-origin "imagination" and the German "Einbildung."