I. Imagination, Kant says, is the faculty of making present what is absent, the faculty of re-presentation: “Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present.”*2 Or: “Imagination (facultas imaginandi) is a faculty of perception in the absence of an object.”*3 To give the name “imagination” to this faculty of having present what is absent is natural enough. If I represent what is absent, I have an image in my mind—an image of something I have seen and now somehow reproduce. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant sometimes calls this faculty “reproductive”—I represent what I have seen—to distinguish it from the “productive” faculty—the artistic faculty that produces something it has never seen. But productive imagination (genius) is never entirely productive. It produces, for instance, the centaur out of the given: the horse and the man. This sounds as though we are dealing with memory. But for Kant, imagination is the condition for memory, and a much more comprehensive faculty. In his Anthropology Kant puts memory, “the faculty to make present the past,” together with a “faculty of divination,” which makes present the future. Both are faculties of “association,” that is, of connecting the “no longer” and the “not yet” with the present; and “although they themselves are not perceptions, they serve to connect the perceptions in time.”*4 Imagination does not need to be led by this temporal association; it can make present at will whatever it chooses.
What Kant calls the faculty of imagination, to have present in the mind what is absent from sense perception, has less to do with memory than with another faculty, one that has been known since the beginnings of philosophy. Parmenides called it nous, by which he meant true Being is not what is present, does not present itself to the senses. What is not present is the it-is; and the it-is, though absent from the senses is present to the mind. Or Anaxagoras’ opsis tōn adēlōn ta phainomena, “a glimpse of the nonvisible are the appearances.”*5 To put this differently, by looking at appearances, which are given to intuition in Kant, you become aware, catch a glimpse of something that does not appear. This something is Being as such. From it comes metaphysics, the discipline that treats of what lies beyond physical reality; and then, still in a mysterious way, what is given to the mind as the nonappearance in the appearances, becomes ontology, the science of Being.
II. The role of imagination for our cognitive faculties is perhaps the greatest discovery Kant made in the Critique of Pure Reason. For our purposes it is best to turn to the “Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding.”*6 To anticipate: the same faculty, imagination, which provides schemata for cognition, provides examples for judgment. You will recall that in Kant there are two stems of experience and knowledge: intuition (sensibility) and concepts (understanding). Intuition always gives us something particular; the concept makes this particular known to us. If I say: “this table,” it is as though intuition says “this” and the understanding adds “table.” “This” relates only to the specific item; “table” identifies it and makes the object communicable.
Two questions arise. First, how do the two faculties come together? To be sure, the concepts of understanding enable the mind to order the manifold of the sensations. But where does the synthesis, their working together, spring from? Second, is this concept, “table,” a concept at all? Is it not perhaps also a kind of image? So that some sort of imagination is present in the intellect as well? The answer is: “Synthesis of a manifold…is what first gives rise to knowledge….[It] gathers the elements for knowledge, and unites them into a certain content”; this synthesis “is the mere result of the faculty of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.”*7 And the way imagination produces the synthesis is by “providing an image for a concept.”*8 Such an image is called a “schema.”
The two extremes, namely sensibility and understanding, must be brought into connection with each other by means…of imagination, because otherwise the former, though indeed yielding appearances, would supply no objects of empirical knowledge, hence no experience.*9
Here Kant calls upon imagination to provide the connection between the two faculties, and in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason he calls the faculty of imagination “the faculty of synthesis in general [überhaupt].” At other places where he speaks directly of the “schematism” involved in our understanding, he calls it “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul”*10 (i.e., we have a kind of “intuition” of something that is never present), and by this he suggests that imagination is actually the common root of the other cognitive faculties, that is, it is the “common, but to us unknown, root” of sensibility and understanding,*11 of which he speaks in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason and which, in its last chapter, without naming the faculty, he mentions again.*12
III. Schema: The point of the matter is that without a “schema” one can never recognize anything. When one says: “this table,” the general “image” of table is present in one’s mind, and one recognizes that the “this” is a table, something that shares its qualities with many other such things though it is itself an individual, particular thing. If I recognize a house, this perceived house also includes how a house in general looks. This is what Plato called the eidos—the general form—of a house, which is never given to the natural senses but only to the eyes of the mind. Since, speaking literally, it is not given even to “the eyes of the mind,” it is something like an “image” or, better, a “schema.” Whenever one draws or builds a house, one draws or builds a particular house, not the house as such. Still, how could one not do it without having this schema or Platonic eidos before the eye of one’s mind? Kant says: “No image could ever be adequate to the concept of triangle in general. It would never attain that universality of the concept which renders it valid of all triangles, whether right-angled, obtuse-angled, or acute-angled;…the schema of the triangle can exist nowhere but in thought.”*13 Yet, though it exists in thought only, it is a kind of “image”; it is not a product of thought, nor is it given to sensibility; and least of all is it the product of an abstraction from sensibly given data. It is something beyond or between thought and sensibility; it belongs to thought insofar as it is outwardly invisible, and it belongs to sensibility insofar as it is something like an image. Kant therefore sometimes calls imagination “one of the original sources…of all experience,” and says that it cannot itself “be derived from any other faculty of the mind.”*14
One more example: “The concept ‘dog’ signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually presents—although as soon as the figure is delineated on paper it is again a particular animal!” This is the “art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover and to have open to our gaze.”*15 Kant says that the image—for instance, the George Washington Bridge—is the product “of the empirical faculty of reproductive imagination; the schema [bridge]…is a product…of pure a priori imagination…through which images themselves first become possible.”*16 In other words: if I did not have the faculty of “schematizing,” I could not have images.
IV. For us, the following points are decisive.
1. In perception of this particular table there is contained “table” as such. Hence, no perception is possible without imagination. Kant remarks that “psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”*17
2. The schema “table” is valid for all particular tables. Without it, we would be surrounded by a manifold of objects of which we could say only “this” and “this” and “this.” Not only would no knowledge be possible, but communication—“Bring me a table” (no matter which)—would be impossible.
3. Hence: Without the ability to say “table,” we could never communicate. We can describe the George Washington Bridge because we all know “bridge.” Suppose someone comes along who does not know “bridge,” and there is no bridge to which I could point and utter the word. I would then draw an image of the schema of a bridge, which of course is already a particular bridge, just to remind him of some schema known to him, such as “transition from one side of the river to the other.”
In other words: What makes particulars communicable is (a) that in perceiving a particular we have in the back of our minds (or in the “depths of our souls”) a “schema” whose “shape” is characteristic of many such particulars and (b) that this schematic shape is in the back of the minds of many different people. These schematic shapes are products of the imagination, although “no schema can ever be brought into any image whatsoever.”*18 All single agreements or disagreements presuppose that we are talking about the same thing—that we, who are many, agree, come together, on something that is one and the same for us all.
4. The Critique of Judgment deals with reflective judgments as distinguished from determinant ones. Determinant judgments subsume the particular under a general rule; reflective judgments, on the contrary, “derive” the rule from the particular. In the schema, one actually “perceives” some “universal” in the particular. One sees, so to speak, the schema “table” by recognizing the table as table. Kant hints at this distinction between determinant and reflective judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason by drawing a distinction between “subsuming under a concept” and “bringing to a concept.”*19
5. Finally, our sensibility seems to need imagination not only as an aid to knowledge but in order to recognize sameness in the manifold. As such, it is the condition of all knowledge: the “synthesis of imagination, prior to apperception, is the ground of the possibility of all knowledge, especially of experience.”*20 As such, imagination “determines the sensibility a priori,” i.e., it inheres in all sense perceptions. Without it, there would be neither the objectivity of the world—that it can be known—nor any possibility of communication—that we can talk about it.
V. The importance of the schema for our purposes is that sensibility and understanding meet in producing it through imagination. In the Critique of Pure Reason imagination is at the service of the intellect; in the Critique of Judgment the intellect is “at the service of imagination.”*21
In the Critique of Judgment we find an analogy to the “schema”: it is the example.*22 Kant accords to examples the same role in judgments that the intuitions called schemata have for experience and cognition. Examples play a role in both reflective and determinant judgments, that is, whenever we are concerned with particulars. In the Critique of Pure Reason—where we read that “judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught” and that “its lack no school can make good”*23—they are called “the go-cart [Gängelband] of judgment.”*24 In the Critique of Judgment, i.e., in the treatment of reflective judgments, where one does not subsume a particular under a concept, the example helps one in the same way in which the schema helped one to recognize the table as table. The examples lead and guide us, and the judgment thus acquires “exemplary validity.”*25
The example is the particular that contains in itself, or is supposed to contain, a concept or a general rule. How, for instance, are you able to judge, to evaluate, an act as courageous? When judging, you say spontaneously, without any derivations from general rules, “This man has courage.” If you were a Greek you would have in “the depths of your mind” the example of Achilles. Imagination is again necessary: you must have Achilles present despite his absence. If we say of somebody that he is good, we have in the back of our minds the example of Saint Francis or Jesus of Nazareth. The judgment has exemplary validity to the extent that the example is rightly chosen. Or, to take another instance: in the circumstances of French history I can speak of Napoleon Bonaparte as a particular man; but the moment I speak of Bonapartism I make an example of him. The validity of this example will be restricted to those who possess the experience of Napoleon, if not as his contemporaries then as heirs of a particular historical tradition. Most concepts in the historical and political sciences are of this restricted nature; they have their origin in a particular historical incident, and then proceed to make it “exemplary”—to see in the particular what is valid for more than one case.
1970
*1 “Imagination” is published in Ron Beiner’s edition of Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), along with the following comment: “The notes on Imagination are from a seminar…given during the same semester as the 1970 Kant Lectures….These seminar notes help to elaborate the Kant Lectures by showing that the notion of exemplary validity…and the doctrine of the Schematism…are linked by the role of the imagination, which is fundamental to both, providing schemata for cognition as well as examples for judgment” (viii). This is enlarged upon, but not altered, in the note immediately preceding “Imagination” (79).
What then is the rationale for republishing these “seminar notes” here? First, they are not “seminar notes.” In the first meeting of the seminar—whose dozen or so members were composed of a few advanced students from the lecture course and the rest from those who had followed Arendt’s thought for years but did not attend the lectures—Arendt announced that one participant each week would present a paper on a section of the long First Part of Kant’s Critique of Judgment; moreover, she added, she would attempt to show what she expected by contributing the first paper the following week. “Imagination” is that paper.
Published as a supplement to the Lectures, “Imagination” has been virtually ignored (I can think of one exception). Arendt’s fascination with Kant’s third Critique goes back years before this paper was written; in August and September, 1957, for example, in a flurry of correspondence with Karl Jaspers, she writes of Kant’s consideration of common sense, “so often scorned,” in which “the phenomenon of taste [is] taken seriously as the basic phenomenon of judgment.” She and Jaspers contemplate giving a seminar together “right away” on Kant’s understanding of the beautiful “as the quintessence of the worldliness of the world (die Weltlichkeit der Welt).”
Finally, and this is only a guess—a guess based in some experience—these few pages offer the best, if not the only, indication of what Arendt’s third volume of The Life of the Mind, Judging, which has roused so much speculation, might have been like. Arendt died as she was beginning to write it. A few weeks earlier she had asked for my copy of this paper, having misplaced her own, which she found the following day. I am not suggesting that the volume on Judging would have begun with this paper; it would be far more likely for Arendt to start with its classical references to Parmenides and Anaxagoras, and in far greater detail. Beginning with a new consideration of the past was her modus operandi throughout The Life of the Mind. Most important is the role of the faculty of imagination in Kant, which is highly condensed here. At the time, in 1970, she remarked that “there is something missing in the whole corpus of Kant scholarship, a sustained study of the imagination—reproductive as well as productive—throughout his critical philosophy.” —Ed.
*2 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B151 (italics added), trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963).
*3 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, § 28 (italics added), trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974).
*4 Ibid., § 34.
*5 Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokraiker, 5th ed. (Berlin), B21a.
*6 Critique of Pure Reason, B176ff.
*7 Ibid., B103 (italics added).
*8 Ibid., B180 (italics added).
*9 Ibid., A124.
*10 Ibid., B180.
*11 Ibid., B29.
*12 Ibid., B863.
*13 Ibid., B180.
*14 Ibid., A94.
*15 Ibid., B180–81.
*16 Ibid., B181.
*17 Ibid., A120 (note).
*18 Ibid., B181.
*19 Ibid., B104.
*20 Ibid., A118.
*21 Critique of Judgment, General Remark to § 22, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951).
*22 Ibid., § 59.
*23 Critique of Pure Reason, B172.
*24 Ibid., B173–74.
*25 Critique of Judgment, § 22.