Imagination and judgment in Kant's practical philosophy

Abstract

My aim in this article is to understand the role of imagination and practical judgment in Kant's moral philosophy. After a comparison of Kant with Rousseau, I explore Kant's moral philosophy itself — unlike Hannah Arendt, who finds in the enlarged mentality of the third Critique the ground for the activity of imagination in a shared world. Instead, I place the concept of moral legislation in its background, the reflection on particulars relevant to deliberation, and discuss the mutual relation of reflection and determination. Not only reflection and determination work together; imagination and judgment imply one another essentially, as interpretation of what is relevant, and as a principle of orientation in the choice of the maxim against the backdrop of a uniform and ordered world. The concepts of analogy and symbolic exhibition turn out to be crucial for how reason represents to itself the reality of ideas in the world.

The People Shall Be Judge

“…That this code actually makes sense of the world, i.e., that it gives rise to meaningful combinations of letters, is only due to the fact that our imagination brings intuitions into "systematic" orders (of which there are two kinds: aesthetic and biological) when it is guided by an employment of judgment that makes reflective use of principles of purposiveness provided by reason. 17 For Kant, it is conceivable that a priori laws of nature could give rise to an empirical chaos, were it not for the fact that we approach the world, as a condition for getting to know it rationally, through our common sense and as living beings among other living beings. Analogously, the condition for the moral knowledge of man is the ordering of the human species through a particular, teleological and republican system of positive law (composed of civil, international and cosmopolitan right), which serves as the empiricaltranscendental bridge to the moral ideal of a "kingdom of ends.…”

Introduction

“…. the imagination's normativity and its relation to pure concepts and intellectual schemata' 24 are addressed only in the section on 'Schematism and the Power of Judgment' and are left basically unexplored in the Critique of Practical Reason. Furthermore even a cursory review of 18th-century authors such as Rousseau and Smith -who devoted very insightful investigations to the imagination -leaves us wondering what the reason might be for the virtual absence of any direct thematization of the role of the imagination in action and in the practical realm within Kant's work.…”