Kantian Imagination: A New Approach

In the Critique of Pure Reason, according to Kant's first edition version of the Transcendental Deduction , it is held that objective experience is made possible by means of a threefold synthesis of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. Kant assigns these moments of one overarching synthetic activity to sense, imagination and conceptuality respectively. But all synthesis is the work of imagination. The three 'moments' of imaginative synthesis are in fact different aspects of the one, imaginative activity , the focus varying to show imaginative activity as it bears in one respect on sensibility, and in another, on the understanding. I will show that imagination, in one unifying activity, manifests itself in relation both to sensory and conceptual elements in possible cognition.

Imagination makes present what is absent: it is 'the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition' . The synthesis of apprehension is the unification of the manifold in inner sense. The manifold of representations is a mere unconnected multitude, or synopsis, without imaginative synthetic activity . Inner sense, in which all representations, inner and outer come to pass, is time. To combine the synopsis of inner sense into a temporal synthesis is the work of imagination, as the faculty of making present what is absent: past moments are successively retained and future ones anticipated in imaginative temporal combination . The activity of imagination makes possible an intuition or apprehension of temporal continuity, thus enabling a formal intuition of time (as opposed to which all reference to time as a form of intuition is a mere abstraction ).

Kant's analysis of the threefold synthesis, in distinguishing different relations of the one imaginative activity in regard to sense on the one hand, and understanding on the other, shows the role of imagination in enabling sensible apprehension. From the above discussion, it has become clear that in its pure passivity, sensory receptivity is not sufficient for perception. While in general in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant regards sensibility as the mode of the mind's receptivity, he realises that this needs qualification, and his account of the role of imagination in the synthesis of apprehension illustrates that there is an active element in the mind that is not itself conceptual: the imagination. Given a division of the mind into sensibility and understanding, one would think that Kant held to a straightforward distinction between active and passive aspects of cognition. However, Kant was heir to a long philosophical tradition of thinking about the imagination as a mediating power . This idea of a medium between matter and mind derives from very ancient roots in the philosophy of imagination. The Neo-Platonists Porphyry, Iamblichus and Synesius discuss variations of an idea of imaginative mediation between hypostatic Mind, or Nous, and the World-Soul emanating from it. Imagination or Phantasia is said to be the aetherial or astral body - a tenuous reality halfway between matter and mind - that mediates between the intelligible and sensible realms of being. This conception of imagination, or phantasia as a medium between the mind and the senses ultimately derives from Aristotelean psychology . In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, (1798b) , Kant codified his earlier thinking on the imagination as found in his Critiques of Pure Reason and of the Power of Judgement. Kant distinguishes sensibility into imaginative-active and sensory-passive components. Sense is defined as the 'faculty of intuition in the presence of an object', and therefore a purely passive receptivity, while imagination is conceived as 'the faculty of intuition without the presence of an object (echoing the descri ption of imagination given in the Critique of Pure Reason, at B151, as discussed above). Against the activity of the conceptual faculty, therefore, there is juxtaposed not only the passivity of sense, but also a power of sensible intuition that was not, however, dependent on the presence of an object for the production of images. As empirical imagination, this latter intuitive power is able to recall and anticipate past and future representations in their absence, but only on the basis of the former actual presence of objects of experience. In conjunction with the understanding, empirical imagination makes memory and 'prevision' or foresight possible. But to make such empirical reproduction of past experience possible, the synopsis of the sensory manifold must be gathered together in an apprehension of sequence, as a formal intuition in inner sense, as discussed above. For this role, imagination can obviously not be dependent on any former experience, since the production of a content-rich, temporal intuition is a transcendental condition of any possible experience. Kant thus distinguishes a productive imaginative capacity from that of empirical imagination. By virtue of its creative, transcendental role, the productive imagination is the same power that works unconsciously to guide aesthetic production in works of genius. I will discuss this aesthetic aspect of the productive imagination below. The point to be grasped here is that Kant distinguishes between empirical image-production and an interpretive, synthetic activity assigned to the productive imagination. Productive, or transcendental imagination gives a temporal interpretation to the synopsis of the manifold in inner sense, allowing an awareness of formal intuition of the manifold as contained in the form of intuition (this form of inner sense being, in itself, merely an abstraction for the purposes of analysis as stated earlier). It is the productive imagination that occupies Kant's thought, in its epistemological and aesthetic bearings, respectively, in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgement.

In the apprehensive synthesis that has been under discussion, imagination creates the formal intuition of time through a synthesis of pure reproduction : the second analytical moment that Kant focuses on in his treatment of the 'threefold synthesis'. It will emerge that the synthesis of apprehension intrinsically involves the synthesis of reproduction, reinforcing the view that the threefold synthesis is in fact the analysis of different aspects of the one work of productive or transcendental imagination. Kant identifies the productive imagination as responsible for all synthetic activity: 'synthesis in general is...the mere effect of the imagination, of a blind though indifspensible function of the soul without which we would have no cognition at all, but of which we are seldom even conscious' .

Imagination is specifically assigned the role of pure reproduction of the sensory manifold in Kant's account of the threefold synthesis. From this we can gather that sensible apprehension, as imaginatively enabled, must involve the production of temporal consciousness by the arranging and retaining of the individual appearances of the manifold in necessary sequential relations through imaginative synthetic activity. The reproductive synthesis enables a formal intuition of the temporal manifold, or in other words, it enables awareness of inner sense. Therefore this imaginative activity is pure, not empirical: this activity is the work of the transcendental imagination, and the ground of any possible empirical imaginative connection through mere association, with which it must not be confused. As enabling, or constituting a formal intuition of objective temporal sequence, Kant also refers to the activity of the pure, transcendental imagination as productive. But this does not contradict passages in which he shows that a priori imaginative synthesis proceeds reproductively. The production by transcendental imagination of a formal intuition of time proceeds through imaginative reproduction: reproductive anticipation and retention in the present of future and past moments is the nature of the transcendental imaginative production of a formal intuition of time, since imagination is a faculty of making present what is absent.

The third moment of imaginative synthesis concerns the involvement of pure conceptual components in the transcendental possibility of objective experience . The sequence of representations referred to, in the last paragraph, as an imaginatively construed arrangement, or temporal interpretation, must be a necessary ordering, in order to be an objective consciousness of time, as opposed to a subjective impression, which can be either slow or rapid, depending on emotional and other, accidental, considerations. Only a rule bound sequence can have this required objectivity, free from all arbitrary subjective considerations. The understanding, as a faculty of concepts, is a faculty of rules. A necessary sequence is brought to bear on imaginative temporal synthesis through the combination of successive moments in accordance with a single plan. The single plan gives unity to the temporal synthesis, and its temporal shape is expressed in transcendental concepts. The unity that comes to expression in judgement is grounded in transcendental subjectivity, (as already discussed in some detail in the first chapter). Transcendental subjectivity, as the self-awareness that must in principle be able to accompany all objective experience , is the unity of consciousness, manifest in acts of objective judgement, which is a correlate of and requirement for experiential objectivity; an objectivity conceived as the conceptually structured unity of the formal intuition of a temporal manifold, as transcendental concepts are brought to bear in judgement through imaginative synthesis.

In his Anthropology (mentioned earlier), Kant refers to three types of imaginative activity. Imagination is subdivided under the heads of 'plastic imagination', which has to do with the connection of representations into figures or patterns of imagery in space; 'associative imagination' concerned with the connecting of representations in time; and a connection of representations in terms of thematic affinity, as belonging together. Paton suggests that the crucial imaginative activity at work in the threefold synthesis is the combination in accordance with affinity, which is analysed as involving both spatial and temporal aspects of connection. Combination through affinity governs imaginative interpretative activity, since a thematic continuity serves as the hermeneutical framework according to which spatial patterns or imaginative arrangements are associated with one another through time. It is only as a thematic continuity, or by their referential affinity, that successive patterns of representation can be referred to a single object. Kant himself says: 'the ground of the possibility of the association of ideas, so far as it lies in the object, is called the affinity of the manifold' . From the above it becomes clear that, whatever may be the case with regard to empirical imagination, that the activity of productive or transcendental imagination is not concerned with the making of images, but rather with the forming of an interpretation of fluctuating sensa, or appearances; an interpretation that connects together the shifting moments of a changing manifold according to a thematic unity, whose transcendental rule is given through categories of the pure understanding. It has been shown in chapter one that transcendental imagination mediates the conceptual categories that form the armature of the transcendental unity of apperception through the activity of schematism. What has been discussed above as an activity of imaginative synthesis according to thematic affinity, as guided by conceptual rules of temporal order, is just this imaginative creation of interpretive schemata of categorical modes of temporal combination, without which pure concepts of the understanding could not be brought to bear on appearances to give them the categorical structure of objectively sequential experience. Thus while it is true to say that imagination is guided by conceptual rules in the construal of ordered affinity among the manifold of sense, it is no less true to say that imagination guides a faculty of pure understanding, and that without the imaginative activity on which pure concepts depend for their applicability to sense data, categorically structured experience could not occur. Paradoxically, it is as true to say that imagination leads conceptuality as that it follows its rules.

From what we have seen above, it becomes clear that no experience would be possible without the imaginative coordination of sense data and concepts. Productive imagination mediates between the active and passive parts of experience. Productive imagination, through its transcendental, or pure, reproductive activity, both enables, and is enabled by, a categorically structured, focal unity of objective consciousness, and moreover, this transcendental unity of consciousness itself displays a similarly ambiguous structure. It is to the imagination's relation to this latter ambiguity, or rather polarity of structure, that I shall now turn.

As seen in chapter one, transcendental subjectivity, or the unity of transcendental apperception, is the condition of transcendental objectivity as its own polar correlate, an objectivity manifesting through judgements or acts of unification for transcendental subjectivity according to pure conceptual categories. All consciousness is 'intentional' or referential, which is to say no more than that all consciousness is 'consciousness of' something: all subjectivity exists as such only in relation to an object. Kant can only identify this necessary, conceptually structured objective correlate and focus for transcendental apperception as 'X' , as a consciousness of... something: transcendental objectivity cannot have any more informative definition than is contained in describing it as that of which transcendental subjectivity is conscious, as that focus of attention without which there could be no transcendental unity or singleness of consciousness. The objective structure of experience is a categorically structured objectivity for a subject, which is logically prior to all consideration of any empirical objects which this polar, transcendental subject-object structure makes possible. The two poles of transcendental subjectivity and objectivity, as structural correlates, are mutually defining: they only make sense in relation to one another. They are polar concepts, and thus mutually constitutive, and I suggest that the transcendental or productive imagination is the ground of both.

Paton writes of the representations as imaginatively apprehended, (i.e., with regard to the synthesis of apprehension considered in itself, analytically, or without reference to the role of understanding in possible experience), that such representations 'would be described more accurately, if they were said to be neither subjective nor objective, since for mere apprehension they are certainly not modifications of a subject which is distinguished from objects' . In a footnote Paton suggests that 'as apprehended, ideas [representations] are modifications of the mind or events in mental history. We do not, however, know them to be such except by inner sense and reflexion' . Kant describes the synthesis of apprehension, which as we have seen, involves a synthesis of pure imaginative reproduction, as the synthesis of the apprehension of the representations, as modifications of the mind in intuition' , and thus as the imaginatively enabled formal intuition by which all objective knowledge is mediated. This leads Paton to point out that the imaginative synthesis of the temporal manifold is neither subjective nor objective, since 'it is through thought, and not through mere apprehension, that [representations] are recognised to be ideas of an object; and it is only when they are recognised to be ideas of an object that they are recognised to be themselves modifications of the mind. Knowledge of an object and knowledge of a subject are for Kant correlative terms, as the one always implies the other' . The apprehension of various sense data through their imaginative combination is a necessary part of experience, to be distinguished from the necessary conceptual components that structure fully objective experience. Thus there is a necessary aspect of any objective experience which is imaginatively constituted. Through imaginative apprehension, the bringing to bear of transcendental concepts is made possible. But such imaginative apprehension is, as such, neither objective nor subjective. Imaginative apprehension is in itself neither subjective nor objective, and cannot be either subjective or objective, since the productive imagination grounds the very possibility of transcendental subjectivity and objectivity as polar relations.

Transcendental imaginative apprehension enables the application of transcendental concepts, and thus enables the subject-object structure of transcendental consciousness. To echo Coleridge's analysis of polarity, the activity of transcendental imagination is one power, manifesting as two, mutually constitutive, polar contraries. There is never any manifestation of productive imagination save through these two poles of transcendental objectivity and subjectivity, since there is never any actual experience of imaginative apprehension as in itself, neither subjective nor objective: this is an abstraction, born of epistemological analysis. At the same time, however, what analysis directs attention towards here is, really and actually, the sine qua non of possible objective experience in a focused, temporal unity of apperception.

There is thus a complex, polar relationship involving the transcendental imagination as a source of the two poles of objective knowledge on the one hand, and, on the other, as itself subordinate to the pure understanding whose concepts it schematises, whose rules it follows in synthesising the manifold. I suggest that there is a mutuality, or epistemological inter-dependency of grounding and groundedness at work here. While there is no transcendental apperception without imaginative synthesis, there is no synthesis without necessary conceptual structure. However, it should be remembered that what is thought of discursively, and thus sequentially, in an epistemological analysis of experiential conditions, is in fact a unified, organic whole in actuality, (and it is just this organic shape of reciprocal causality manifested by the activity of the transcendental imagination that post-Kantian thinkers were to pick up on, as we shall see).

Looking back at what we have learned on the whole about Kant's conception of imagination, and especially in the light of the last three paragraphs, it becomes cl