Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason

Introduction: Weapons of War: Preliminary Reactions on the Practical in the Critique of Pure Reason

i n t r o d u c t i o n Weapons of War Preliminary Re®ections on the Practical in the Critique of Pure Reason The goal of the book is nothing less than to establish the ¤delity of the interpretation, ¤rst propounded by Fichte and Schelling, more recently and controversially by Heidegger, and advanced by Sallis within his own more radical interpretive framework,1 that any judicious reading of Kant’s critical philosophy must conclude that imagination is primary. Theirs is the work upon which I proudly build, extending the thread of this seminal way of interpretation to the Critique of Practical Reason. However, I speak to many audiences besides those already in®uenced by this interpretive strain. I hope to provide encouragement to students of Kant who ¤nd the prevailing Anglo-American Kant literature puzzling, since it not only fails to treat imagination adequately , but also sometimes fails to treat it at all.2 I also hope to challenge readers of Kant in that prevailing tradition to take the measure of this interpretation.3 Although my orientation is mainly continental , I believe that the rigor of my textual exegesis will amply reward their time and attention, despite the many hackles it is likely to raise. Finally, many continental philosophers who hold the Critique of Pure Reason (also the Critique of Judgment) in the highest esteem withhold such esteem from the second critique. I aim to persuade them to grant that same esteem to the Critique of Practical Reason, as I also enter into dialogue with my continental colleagues.4 In the Prologue, I showed how imagination occupies the animating center of the Critique of Pure Reason. Can the same centrality be exhibited for the Critique of Practical Reason? In my view, the answer both is, and must be, a resounding “yes!” Kant consistently insists upon the unity of his entire philosophy and especially upon the consistency between the ¤rst two critiques. Further, for a Kantian who is convinced of the unity of the Kantian philosophy,5 it is incumbent upon me to provide an account of this unity. The goal of this book is to provide precisely such an account. No special interpretive measures , unless close attention to the key passages in the text can be called “special,” are required. I have consciously chosen to avoid recourse to the Critique of Judgment . While it may be tempting to exploit the apparently more liberal employment of imagination in this third critique in order to illuminate those more obscure regions of the Critique of Practical Reason from which imagination seems most expressly excluded, this would defeat the principal goal of this work, which is to exhibit imagination even and especially where it seems to be entirely absent and to do so in terms internal to the work.6 However, the task of exposing imagination ’s work beneath the surface of Kant’s moral philosophy is much more dif¤cult given Kant’s almost total silence concerning it. This silence is especially noteworthy in the Critique of Practical Reason , for this work (together with the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals7 ) constitutes the pure part upon which the whole of the practical philosophy rests. Heidegger, whose Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics argued for imagination’s being the “unknown” root of understanding and sensibility in the ¤rst edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, also argued (albeit brie®y) for imagination’s central role in the Critique of Practical Reason. There, he claims that “the origin of practical reason can be understood from transcendental imagination,” and presents duty and action as imagination’s original unifying of the “self-subjecting immediate giving of the law (pure spontaneity) and the free pregivingto -oneself ” of the law (pure receptivity) and “the free self-imposition 19 Introduction of the moral law” (spontaneity),8 a uni¤cation that—I say—has always already taken place. Heidegger says that Kant “recoiled” from the radicality of the view that imagination is the “unknown root” and presented a tamer version in the B edition, in which understanding is given ascendancy .9 This Heideggerian provocation has been of inestimable value to me. However, I take issue with this view elsewhere, arguing that in §24 of the B edition imagination sustains equal force when measured against its more obvious ascendancy in the A edition.10 However , Heidegger’s general observation leads to a crucial element in my...