Kant on Imagination and the Natural Sources of the Conceptual
Kant famously defends an approach to knowledge involving two ‘stems’ that necessarily interact to generate knowledge of the external world. This comprises, on the one hand, the receptivity of our sensibility, responsible for intuitive representations, and
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Kant on Imagination and the Natural Sources of the Conceptual Johannes Haag
It is well-known that in his theoretical philosophy Kant puts forward an approach to knowledge involving two ‘stems’ that necessarily interact to generate knowledge of a world existing independently of the subject of experience. This comprises, on the one hand, the receptivity of our sensibility, somehow responsible for intuitive representations and, on the other hand, the spontaneity of our understanding, conceived as a faculty of conceptual representations. It seems that the differentiation between these two ‘stems’ aligns quite neatly with the distinction between natural and normative influences on our knowledge respectively. One of the persisting questions of Kant scholarship, however, is how nature and normativity so conceived can interact in such a way as to produce empirical representations that are simultaneously shaped by our conceptual constraints. In other words, while conceptual resources seem to have a significant influence on those representations, at the same time we need to ask how this representational spontaneity can, as Wilfrid Sellars once put it,1 be ‘guided from without’ by a receptive sensibility in order to guarantee that the ensuing representations are truly empirical. Consequently, sensibility and understanding, the receptive and spontaneous faculties, must interact if they are to generate conceptual empirical representations, i.e., normativity constrained by nature. To make this possible, Kant introduces a further faculty in his system that, guided by the understanding, allows subjects of experience to ‘synthesize’ or unify the representational input of sensibility into conceptually shaped representations, namely, the faculty of imagination. My paper will be devoted to outlining the philosophical theory behind these ideas. Exegetically, it will focus on the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), while a broadly Sellarsian interpretation will serve as a systematic background. In this way we can at least begin to do justice to the complex function of the imagination as an intermediary between conceptual norms and nature in Kant’s philosophy.
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Cf. Sellars (1968, 16).
J. Haag (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Lenz and A. Waldow (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Nature and Norms in Thought, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6241-1_5, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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5.1
The Faculty of Presentation
What then is the role of the imagination in Kant’s system? In its most general form, it is a faculty of presentation (Darstellung).2 Kant in the third Critique introduces the concept of presentation as follows: If the concept of an object is given, then the business of the power of judgment in using it for cognition consists in presentation (exhibitio), i.e., in placing a corresponding intuition beside the concept. (CPJ 5:192)
That Kant, in the context from wh
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