Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason

Notes

n o t e s prolog ue 1. I think here especially of Paul Guyer, who treats imagination only¤tfully and makes no mention whatsoever of imagination in his general introduction to Kant’s thought in a book designed as an overview of the Kantian philosophy. See Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge, 1992), 1–25. 2. That is to say, Kant is concerned with establishing the possibility of general metaphysics or rational ontology, and of special metaphysics. The latter consists of three divisions: rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology. Their establishment depends upon the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori. 3. The apparently technical word has a less forbidding sound in Greek: Y)siw means “a placing” and s4n means “together.” 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951). 5. Ibid., p. 206. 6. In addition to calling it the faculty of synthesis, Kant also ascribes clear centrality to imagination at other times: “the unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of imagination is the pure understanding” (A119, emphasis in original). Thus, he declares that the understanding depends upon imagination for its very possibility in the A Deduction. In the B Deduction, he calls imagination “the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present” (B151, emphasis in original). In a striking note, he says “imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself ” (A120n). Interestingly, both in the Schematism and in the Ideal, Kant calls the products of imagination monograms. In the former, in connection with the categories, they direct the pure synthesis despite their dark origin. In the latter , where reason can provide no such guidance, they form “rather a blurred sketch drawn from diverse experiences than a determinate image—a representation such as painters and physiognomists profess to carry in their heads, and which they treat as being an incommunicable shadowy image of their creations or even of their critical judgments” (A550, B598). At least the former will ¤nd greater indulgence in the Critique of Judgment. 7. Sallis notes that the metaphorics of tunneling employed by Kant (A319, B375–76) contains a profound inner tension, namely that the very act of tunneling to bedrock by critique deprives the ground that it would secure of its ¤rmness precisely by such tunneling. See Chapter One entitled “Tunnelings ”: “It is a matter of a ¤ssure within the Critique of Pure Reason as a whole, a ¤ssure, a spacing, that makes of it a radically heterogeneous text” (John Sallis, Spacings—of Reason and Imagination in Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel [Chicago, 1987], 7–8). 8. I borrow this term from Sallis’s chapter on Fichte in Spacings, 23–66, taking it from that context and employing it here in order to describe a key feature of imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason from which Fichte drew so thoroughly. 9. Kant called this table “The Clue (Leitfaden) to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” Therefore, the pure concepts of the understanding are not, strictly speaking, derived from the Table of Judgments . As will soon become apparent, the Pure Concepts of the Understanding are epistemologically prior, and the Table of Categories—or any table of merely formal (general, in Kant’s word) logic—are parasitical upon and abstracted from the Pure Concepts (Categories). The Table of Judgments can be found on A70, B95. The Table of Categories can be found on A80, B106. However, in an equally daring interpretation of the Analytic, Beatrice Longuenesse argues, to the contrary, that the Logical Table of Judgments correctly conceived provides what she calls “the guiding thread” that unites the Transcendental Analytic (Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic, trans. Charles T. Wolfe [Princeton , 2002]). While this interpretation seems, on its surface, diametrically opposed to mine, I ¤nd a deep inner kinship. Quite remarkably, she also claims that “on several points, my analysis is closer to [Heidegger’s] than any other I am acquainted with. . . . Where I disagree with Heidegger is his explanation of the ‘same function . . . ,’” which Heidegger famously ascribes to imagination as the common root and as having always already accomplished its synthesis. Longuenesse, by contrast, insists that imagination produces the unity of synthesis “only if it is under the unity of apperception, which is “the Vermögen zu Urteile whose speci¤cations make up the table of judgment” (203–204, emphasis in original). I am quite willing to grant Longuenesse’s...