The Activity of Sensibility in Kant’s Anthropology. A Developmental History of the Concept of the Formative Faculty

Abstract

Kant usually characterizes sensibility as receptivity. Hence it can seem paradoxical to speak of the "activity of sensibility" in his philosophy. Yet that sensible representations are receptive in origin does not necessarily mean that their content is due to our receptivity alone. In fact, as early as his 1770 inaugural dissertation Kant assumes acts of coordinating the sensible as conditions of sensible knowledge. In the context of his anthropology he then attributes these acts to the so-called "formative faculty" which he conceives as part of sensibility. With the concept of the formative faculty Kant unifies Baumgarten's conception of the lower cognitive faculty. Moreover he outlines his own theory of the activity of sensibility by means of the formative faculty and its various facets. Furthermore, a closer look at the various transcriptions of Kant's lectures on anthropology shows that, in the late 1770s, the concept of the imagination supplants that of the formative faculty as the foundation of his conception of an active sensibility, and shows also how the distinction between productive and reproductive imagination is able to stand in for the various facets of the formative faculty. The paper concludes with a brief look at the prospects beyond the field of anthropology.