Kantian Imagination, Part Ii

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 clear that this mutual or reciprocal grounding of the objective unity of apperception on the one hand, and transcendental imagination on the other, to which I have just been drawing attention, is responsible for the peculiar epistemological position accorded to the imagination by Kant.

Imagination is said to be a component of the mind's spontaneity, since all synthesis belongs to the imagination. And yet as a mode of intuition, imagination is intrinsically bound up with a sensible receptivity, which it can only synthesise on the basis of the conceptual, categorical forms to which its schematising activity is subservient. But again, such categorically structuring conceptual features could be said to depend on this same imaginative schematic activity, as a mode of hypotyposis, or presentation of concepts, on the basis of which concepts are introduced to sensible representations. On the one hand, transcendental imagination structures sensible apprehension, and does so in accordance with conceptual categories, which give experience its objectivity. On the other hand, the schematism according to which sensible apprehension is structured is an imaginatively apprehending activity, solely on the basis of which are categories able to be brought to bear on sensible representations at all. That which enables categorically structured time is the same transcendental imagination whose structuring activity in relation to the form of inner sense is enabled by the pure understanding. The transcendental imagination is both guide and guided.