Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason

Conclusion(s)

Conclusion(s) To Kant’s Text The “ever new and increasing admiration and awe” (V, 161) provoked by the starry heavens and the moral law require philosophy for direction. Without them, the former becomes the subject for astrology , the latter for fanaticism and superstition. Both require philosophy in order for that primordial wonder to be properly channeled . More precisely, “science (critically sought and methodically directed) is the narrow gate that leads to the doctrine of wisdom” (V, 163, emphasis in original), and philosophy is the guardian of that science. But as Kant has already written in the Methodenlehre of the Critique of Pure Reason, “Indeed it is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists” (A727, B755). As I have endeavored to show throughout, Kantian philosophy consists of the limiting of theoretical knowledge to the sensible realm by means of the schemata, and the limiting of moral insight to the imaginative positing of an intelligible realm governed by the moral law. The former surely limits the study of the stars and the elements to astronomy, chemistry, and physics respectively. The latter just as surely limits moral maxims to those that can be universalized. Both, however, issue from the power of imagination to synthesize concepts (and, in the case of theoretical reason, pure intuition as well) into principles and, from this same power, to produce ruling images by means of which human experience has sense and signi¤cance. The “doctrine of wisdom,” then, includes a concealed paean to imagination. To This Interpretation: The exegetical task of determining the role of imagination in the Critique of Practical Reason seemed daunting if not impossible at its outset, given Kant’s apparent exclusion of imagination from moral reasoning. In reading the text closely, however, imagination showed itself to have both a prominent and a central role. As Kant noted at A78, B104 of the Critique of Pure Reason where it is declared to be the source of synthesis in general, imagination is both blind and indispensable , and we are scarcely ever conscious of it. As I have tried to show throughout, imagination is most fully present precisely where it is most completely concealed. Imagination is the source of synthesis. The moral law is a synthetic a priori judgment. Therefore imagination must be at work in effecting this synthesis. Maxims fashioned in accord with the moral law are likewise synthetic and so involve imagination. Applying these maxims in concreto, since this involves crossing from one realm (the intelligible ) to another that is different in kind (the sensible), also involves synthesis and thus also involves imagination. Imagination also produces images. The moral law is itself a pure image, not itself a law but the pure form of a law in general. When one thinks it, one has this pure image in view. The highest good, the object of a will that would act from the moral law in which happiness is granted in proportion to moral worth, is also a pure image. It is that pure vicarious image toward which the human being directs herself or himself, so that the natural inclination toward happiness ¤nds its appropriate outlet. The moral self-examination one can make of one’s past maxims, which might be called the Delphic counterpart in Kant, results in a human life interpreted as a unique phenomenon. Every element of this self-examination has imagination’s trace upon it: the moral law itself, the holding of the maxims (moral or not) that one has em125 Conclusion(s) ployed throughout one’s phenomenal life, the application of these maxims to the actions recalled, the life recollected as unique phenomenon , and the future life one projects as the completion of the unique phenomenon under the instruction of this self-examination. Further, the interpretation of one’s own life as unique self-determined phenomenon exceeds the architectonic structure Kant has provided for its discernment, as discussed in the discussion of the Critical Elucidation of the Analytic above. Neither a pure product of the intellect like the moral law nor like an empirical occurrence according to the natural law of causality, a human life subjected to (and then guided by) such self-examination must be seen as a work of art—again, a product of imagination. The Methodenlehre seems to be devoted entirely to the manipulation of images by reason in service to the cultivation of the moral life. However, the selection of images for the...