Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the "Critique of Judgment" (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 145 Rudolf A. Makkreel. Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the "Critique ofJudgment." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199o. Pp. xi + 187. Cloth, $94-95. One should not be misled by the subtitle: the scope of this work extends far beyond the Critique ofJudgment. In fact, one might well describe this book as an attempt to uncover a hidden unity in Kant's mature (but not just critical) writings centered around the notions of imagination and reflective judgment. Makkreers stated intention is to show that a reconsideration of the role of the third Crit/que can shed significant light on the whole of the Kantian project and lead to a new understanding of the transcendental standpoint that is "no longer conceived as exclusively foundational for a science of nature but as orientational for the human subject in the world" (~). Makkreers strategy is not so much to deny foundational elements for science and morality that can be found in the first two Critiques, as to relativize their status by situating both theoretical experience and practical moral demands for Kant within a broader framework of human life in which reflective judgment plays a preeminent role. According to this reading, the third Crit/que is not just an afterthought to or even a bridge between the first two Critiques, but rather provides a systematic backdrop against which the two earlier critical works, as well as Kant's noncritical works on history, politics, and religion , can be properly understood. A noteworthy by-product of this thesis is the added importance that thereby accrues to the later writings on politics, religion, and history. The book is divided into three main parts. The first traces the development of Kant's concept of the imagination from the precritical writings through the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, with a special emphasis upon the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding and a rather negative appraisal of Heidegger's well-known discussion of these texts in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. It closes with a chapter that draws out and extends Kant's own description of experience as deciphering, reading, and interpreting nature , in order to indicate the limitations of the first Critique's emphasis upon experience as a reading of nature as opposed to a more comprehensive, holistic interpretation of nature as a system, which can be found in the Opus postumum and The Metaphysical Foundations of Nature, as well as in the Critique ofJudgment. The second part of the book develops this theme further, showing how the third Cr/t/que reverses the relationship in the Critique of Pure Reason, according to which the imagination is subordinated to the understanding in the latter's attempt to synthesize what is given by the senses in a linear temporal succession. Makkreel maintains that with the shift from determinant to reflective judgment in the Critique ofJudgment, the tasks of imagination are also redefined and expanded. Not just in the second part of that Cr/t/que, which relates to teleological judgment, but rather already in the critique of aesthetic judgment, does Kant redirect his gaze from the temporally successive, purely theoretical apperception of individual objects to the apprehension of the world as a sphere with significance for human life as a whole, in which the strictly theoretical is merely one, albeit an extremely important, element. This involves both a shift from viewing nature as a mechanistic aggregate made up of discrete units to a unified 146 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31 : ~ JANUARY 1993 harmonic whole, and a shift from viewing oneself as a detached knower to a dynamic living entity for whom knowledge of nature is only one aspect of its vital existence. The third part, finally, draws out more explicitly hermeneutic aspects in Kant's work, turning first to the notion of an "aesthetic normal idea" as another place where the linear, serial, almost mechanistic model of the first Cr/t/que is displaced in favor of a more dynamic interaction among the cognitive faculties oriented by a part/whole relationship in nature. Moreover, with aesthetic ideas the presentation of...