ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant’s theory of the imagination is one of the most enduring aspects of his philosophy, inspiring philosophers ranging from Hegel to Sellars, Heidegger to Strawson. The lasting legacy of Kant’s account is due, in part, to his broad conception of the imagination. In contrast to philosophers who construe the imagination as something that operates in fairly narrow confines, e.g., just in acts of make-believe or visualization, Kant conceives of the imagination as a more pervasive mental capacity that contributes to the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral aspects of our lives. Though compelling, the breadth of Kant’s account also poses a certain challenge to readers: in what sense are the wide range of activities that Kant ascribes to the imagination to be understood as exercises of a single capacity? Moreover, given that he explicitly distinguishes between different levels of imaginative activity, e.g., empirical and transcendental, and different types of imaginative activity, e.g., productive and reproductive, how are we to understand the underlying unity of the imagination as Kant characterizes it? In light of these questions, before we can proceed to an analysis of the contribution Kant
takes the imagination to make in cognition, aesthetics, and morality, respectively, we need to begin with a discussion of his basic conception of the imagination. To this end, it will be helpful to consider two passages in which Kant offers a more general definition of the imagination. In the first passage, which appears in the so-called “B edition” of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant claims, “Imagination [Einbildungskraft] is a faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition” (B151).1 As this definition suggests, Kant conceives of the imagination as a faculty of representation, more specifically, a faculty that is responsible for intuitive, i.e., sensible representations of objects that are not immediately present to us. This often happens when we imagine a physical object or property of an object that is no longer present to us, e.g., when I imagine a Frank Stella painting I saw two months ago or I see a house as having a back side even though I am only looking at its front side. However, as we shall see, on Kant’s view, the imagination is not confined to representing objects in only this narrow physical sense; rather he takes the imagination to also be able to produce sensible representations of objects that are not present in virtue of being intellectual objects, e.g., concepts and ideas. This happens, for example, in make-believe when a child sees a stick as a wand, in fiction when I picture what Natasha from War and Peace looks like, or in
mental imagery when I imagine the paragon of moral virtue. On a Kantian analysis, in each of these cases, the imagination plays a pivotal role because it brings something nonsensible, e.g., the absent Stella painting, the unseen back side of the house, the wand, Natasha, or moral virtue, to bear on our sensible representations. What this line of thought ultimately points to is Kant’s idea that the imagination is fundamentally a capacity for producing representations that bridge the gap between what is sensible, on the one hand, and what is nonsensible or intellectual, on the other, and this mediating activity is one Kant takes to be crucial for our cognitive, aesthetic, and moral experience. In the second passage, which is from the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798),
Kant states,
The power of imagination (facultas imaginandi), as a faculty of intuition without the presence of the object, is either productive, that is, a faculty of the original presentation [Darstellung] of the object (exhibitio originaria), which thus precedes experience; or reproductive, a faculty of the derivative presentation of the object (exhibitio derivativa), which brings back to mind an empirical intuition that it had previously.
