F CENTRO RICERCHE Kant e Hegel tra Europa e America 1. 2, 2009 fenomenologia costruttivismo idealismo logica eticaFENOMENOLOGIA E SOCIETA Periodico di filosofia a cura del Centro di Ricerche socio-culturali ‘n, 2/2009 anno XXXII Indice Kant e Hegel fra Europa e America Riccardo Pozzo e Marco Sgarbi, Kant e Hegel tra Europa e America Alfredo Ferrarin, Kant and Imagination Marco Sgarbi, The Spontancity of Mind in Kant’s Transcendental Logic Angelica Nuzzo, Steps to a “Feminist” Reading of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Philosophy Tom Rockmore, Kant, Hegel and phenomenological constructivism Federico Ferraguto, Recezione e Vergegenwartigung delVidealismo Antonio Moretto, Matematica e teoria della misura nella “Dottrina dell’essere” del 1832 di Hegel Giorgio Erle, Logos ¢ natura: aspetti della critica di Hegel al dover essere Gaetano Rametta, La “proposizione speculativa” nella Prefazione alla Fenomenologia dello spirito di Hegel Italo Testa, Recognition, Skepticism and Self-Consciousness in the Young Hegel Paolo Giuspoli, Morfogenesi della Scienza della logica di Hegel: forma sistematica e Seinslehre Note ¢ discusstoni Elena Ficara, Nichts - Negation ~ Nibilismus. Die europiiische Moderne als Erkenntnis und Erfahrung des Nichts 92 105 7 133 153Alfredo Ferrarin Kant and Imagination Kant is the philosopher who has given us the most groundbreaking, rich, and innerly articulate interpretation of imagination in the history of phi- losophy. For him, imagination is crucial to understand not only the notion of synthesis (how we hold together the manifold properties we perceive in the object), temporality and the work of consciousness in general. It is involved in all of reason’s fundamental activities, and is therefore central to the unity of our experience, to Kant’s consideration of nature as a whole, to his philosophy of mathematics as well as to his theory regarding art and the enjoyment of beauty, the heuristic powers of our reflection, and his moral theory. The contexts in which Kant proposes his reflections are, unsurprisingly, diverse and at times unrelated. Unfortunately, though, this is sometimes a source of inconsistencies. His uses of the notions of imagination and im- age are driven by such varied motivations and goals that it is hard to give a comprehensive account of the several functions of imagination or of the typology of images he has implicitly in mind (ot, more rarely, he explicitly discusses) when he considers the imagination’s crucial role in our dealings with the world. ‘Let me mention a few of the more obvious tensions in Kant’s philosophy on the imagination. Kant is not very clear about its role and function in the first Critique. In the first edition (KGS, 3, A 95), imagination is a separate faculty mediating between understanding and sensibility; in the second edition Kant revises the key chapter of the work (the Transcendental Deduction) so substantially that imagination hardly seems to play an independent role at all and is subordinated to the activity of the understanding. Yet, the chapter ‘on schematism, whose function is to provide the account of productive imagination’s mediating role between understanding and sensibility, is left entirely unaltered in the second edition. Fenomenologia ¢ Societi, n. 2/2009, XXXIL, pp. 7-18 © Rosenberg & Sellier 7Imagination is always responsible for synthesis and for such traditional activities as the formation of a unitary image of appearances. Imagination is therefore a spontaneous activity. which for Kant is passive (not active) and prediscursive. Kant oscillates between considering imagination as in service of the understanding (the synthesis of imagination “is an effect of the understanding on sensibility,” KGS, 3, B 152) and as a pre-intellectual or sensible function (KGS, 3, A 124, and KGS, 7, § 37 and § 15). Now, taking it as an active function of sensibility represents a big problem in view of Kant’s anti-Leibnizian thesis and the opposition of passivity and activity. Were that not enough, the definition of imagination as the cognitive faculty by which we give ourselves an intui- tion without the presence of the object (KGS, 7, § 28, KGS, 3, B 151—a definition taken over literally from Wolff and Baumgarten) seems to be even more problematic in light of Kant’s rejection of an intuitive understand- ing, which produces the objects it thinks, and in light of the requirement that empirical intuition be necessarily given to our senses in order for us to know anything at all. On top of that, imagination’s schematism is treated as a function of the power of judgment, hence of a putatively discursive faculty, which is op- posed to the passivity of sense. Why is that, considering that judgment is linguistic while imagination ensues in a sensible and not an abstract product? In this connection it is striking to note that in the third Critique the power of judgment will take on some of the functions ascribed to imagination and some of those attributed to reason’s regulative ideas in the first Critique (respectively, exhibition in intuition and maxims of homogeneity, specifi- cation and uniformity in the investigation of nature). In addition to these problems, there is the difficulty that schematization is Kant’s word for the imagination’s activity insofar as it is in accordance with concepts (or insofar as it is the way in which thought—Denken, KGS, 3, A 140/B 179—gives itself a method to represent a concept). Yet, in the third Critique, Kant speaks of schematization without concepts. Kant argues there is a synthesis of the understanding which he treats as synonymous with self-consciousness. Why then is synthesis a function of imagination, if imagination is called blind and involuntary? Tn this case, unlike in others, the problem cannot be entirely put aside by advancing conjectures on Kant'’s shift between the A and the B editions, if for no other reason than because it is in A that imagination performs the second synthesis (reproduction) and the understanding the third (recognition) which together account for objective cognitions. The A deduction is very confused and misleading in many of its central points, beginning with thevery mysterious “synopsis of sense” (how can we have a synopsis, literally a comprehensive gaze, in sense, if this is nothing but receptivity?). If ap- prehension is the perception or conscious representation of a given appear- ance, of what am I not conscious when Kant says that we are only rarely aware of imagination? If imagination seems clearly involuntary in Kant’s understanding, to what degree can we say that it is operative non-themati- cally, tacitly or unbeknownst to us? Besides, how can there be three syntheses if, as Kant says, synthesis is the product of the imagination and imagination is then identified by Kant as the agent of the second moment alone? Even if we come up with a good explanation of this point, we are still puzzled to read a very striking passage at A 97 (and KGS, 3, A 15/B 29; KGS, 3, A 78/B 104; KGS, 3, A 89/B 105): How can the synthesis “make possible even the understanding” (den Verstand, i.e., the faculty and not the act), if the synthesis is subject to the understanding, which is therefore not only independent, but also an original and underived faculty? Kant sets up oppositions and draws neat distinctions which prove to be more than elusive. But it is one thing to present as distinct for expository and clarification purposes moments that dé facto belong together and take place as a unity, and quite another to present as rigorous or clear-cut dichotomies distinctions that one cannot hold fast to because the notions involved are constantly merged or cannot be separated sharply. Consider the hint to a transcendental imagination over and above the opposition between productive and reproductive imagination in these same pages. Transcendental imagination is defined as the synthesis represented as a priori necessary with respect to the original unity of apperception. Is this a third version of imagination? Andis it needed? Oris it perhaps more fundamental than the productive and reproductive modes? Generally speaking, given the different realms in which imagination is employed (aesthetic, empirical, transcendental), should we speak of one imagination with different func- tions, or of several imaginations? The distinction between productive and reproductive imagination itself is rather elusive. Kant does not settle the matter conclusively as he desires when he writes that the former determines the pure forms of intuition a priori, while the latter is the empirical and associative faculty studied by psychology—which is his standard dismissive formulation of the distine- tion—, for the reproductive synthesis in the A deduction is an a ptiori and pure moment (even if necessarily directed to the empirical manifold), indis- pensable for and internal to productive imagination’s synthesis. Were it not, the whole A deduction would not merely borrow elements from empirical cEpsychology in a transcendental context, as it has been often charged with doing; it would be, more damagingly, an inexplicable insertion of sheer psychology where it does not belong. Or, take the gap between schema and image in the schematism chapter. After all the pain Kant has taken to distinguish pure sensible (mathemati- cal), empirical, and pure concepts and their respective schemata and to exclude empirical concepts from the investigation of the Analytic, why does he treat on a par the most heterogeneous examples when he tries to illustrate schematism, and mention the schemata of a triangle, of a dog, of causality, in which the relation between schema and image changes shape considerably? The schematism shifts its essential and defining terms con- stantly. If in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant talks about the schema of a dog, in the Critique of Judgment he writes that there ate only examples but no schemata of empirical concepts (§ 59). That is not the only apparent contradiction between first and third Critiques: recall the schematization without concepts I have mentioned above. The most important use of imagination for cognitive purposes is the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding. But it admittedly has little to do with what we usually understand by imagination, for it is directed not to images but to time. Furthermore, productive imagination has nothing to do with creation or invention, for it is responsible for exhibi- tion according to rules. To what degree and in what ways does imagination operate in service of the understanding? If imagination rules a priori its intuitive exhibitions, is it itself normative or is it the more or less docile tool of the understanding, the sole source of normativity for experience? If imagination is in service of the understanding, does that rule out the possibility of a synthesis which stops, in the words of the A Deduction, at reproduction and does not reach the “recognition of the concept”? ie., is an imaginative synthesis without concepts possible at all? Does Kant advance beyond Hume in the notion of the a priori rule of association of images? ‘That this is a real problem is something Kant was well aware of; but it is quite dubious that conflating different issues in what is differently identified and variously reconstructed by interpreters as Hume’s problem (I have in mind the conflation of causality and necessity, the affinity of appearances and nature’s conformity to law, the necessity of concepts as rules to make sense of all synthesis and the rule as law of nature vs the rule as concept, and finally the rule as empirical vs transcendental concept), or taking our bearings by Kant’s distinction between judgments of perception and judg- ments of experience, are helpful solutions. 10When it comes to anthropological and psychological aspects, the surface does not appear any smoother. A fundamental ambiguity is expressed in one section of the Anthropology (§ 28): productive imagination is the a priori exhibition of pure intuitions, of space and time, while empirical imagina- tion reproduces in the mind a previous empirical intuition. In other words, here reproductive imagination seems to be equated with memory. However, concluding to this would be very misleading for two reasons. Just a few lines below, Kant writes that productive imagination can be inventive and create pure or empirical intuitions—whereas earlier he had written that an empirical intuition is merely reproduced. We may very well make allowances for Kant’s move in the turn of a few lines from what must be taken as a summary of his theory from the first Critique to a consideration concerned with denying imagination the absolute creatio ex nibilo that was a topic in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Still, it remains true that Kant seems unaware and untroubled by this inadvertent shift. Also, a few paragraphs below (§ 34) Kant does draw a distinction between memory and reproduction, and says that memory is not as involuntary as reproduction, thereby suggesting an answer to the problem mentioned earlier, ic., that reproduction may be what is involuntary and unconscious in imagination. These conflicts can be solved at different levels. But whatever the solution, if the effort must be at keeping transcendental and empirical distinct, Kant’s examples of the cin- nabar or of the dog in the discussion of the Transcendental Analytic strike the reader as more than simply misplaced. One can actually argue they are misleading and cry out for careful examination, for in one case the sudden changes in color in the cinnabar are taken as impossible in a regular and lawful world such as the one Kant is arguing we presuppose to make sense of change and variability (KGS, 3, A 101), and in another colors are taken as secondary qualities which are only changes in the subject and have nothing to contribute to objectivity (KGS, 3, B 45). Finally, when Kant writes he has discovered for the first time the active role of imagination in perception (KGS, 3, A 120 n,), what exactly does he mean? From Aristotle to Wittgenstein, it is a quite legitimate commonplace that we cannot imagine and experience the same thing at the same time. Precisely what does imagination do when we perceive, integrate aspects that are not presently given to sensibility to yield a unitary image of the appear- ance despite its appearing inevitably and every time as partial, or act on the successive apprehension of the manifold as a whole? And is Kant right to stress the novelty of his thesis on this co-operation in the history of philoso- phy? What is so original and unprecedented to Kant's imagination? uThese are some of the open questions and most puzzling aspects of a stunningly seminal and almost paradoxical notion, associating contrasting properties within itself. Imagination is active and spontaneous in the passive apprehension of appearances, at the same timeas it is ruled by the understand- ing, Tc does not simply mirror appearances, and yet it is not an absolutely creative or mythological power, as it will later be in Romanticism. To be sure, some of the aforementioned problems can be easily dissolved once we qualify the concepts used, clarify their employment and context, even charge Kant with inconsistencies, careless proof-reading or with a taste for systematic articulations and subtle terminological distinctions he cannot hold fast to, or ascribe contrasting formulations to different periods in Kant’s path of thinking. Yet, many admit of no apparent solution. I sug- gest that this is (by and large) not so much because Kant is not rigorous enough, but because of the intrinsic difficulty and ineliminable ambiguity of the subject-matter, which is not helped by the narrow vocabulary avail- able failing to do all the duties it is asked to perform: for imagination may mean very many different activities, and so does the word ‘image.’ Nothing seems more urgent to me than a thorough and comprehensive examination of the problem of imagination and images to make sense of the internal coherence and profound insight we can gain from Kant. But we must first recognize that Kant uses the notion of imagination in a number of different, sometimes ambiguous, occasionally contradictory ways. What is worse, few readers and scholars agree on what they mean by imagination and images; and unfortunately most of them either do not realize the plurivocity of meaning of which Kant makes use, or simply bring their unreflected understanding of these terms to bear upon their interpretation of Kant, ‘The neglect of the rich implications inherent in a sorely ambiguous and limited vocabulary one is bound to use indifferently is the source of misun: derstandings when we conflate, for example, real and mental images, say, a photo of my brother, my memory of when I last saw him or my imaging his look of surprise when I present him with a gift for his upcoming birth. day. All these images are identified differently and satisfy different criteria, such as spatio-temporal individuation, modality of existence or ontological status, our interpretation or reading of them (codes of decipherment that are presupposed, our varying awareness of detail), relation to the space outside them, context and material medium in which they appear and the constraints thereby put on them, separation between viewer and image, what it means for us to perceive them, our psychological and affective involvement, etc. 12The same is true of imagination and its functions. Integrating the dis- continuities of perception into a unitary picture, anticipating the possible development of a plot, or of a shape partly hidden from view, deciphering a sketchy image and interpreting it as the two-dimensional abbreviation or snapshot of an event; giving rise to a world alternative to the perceptual one, dreaming, phantasizing and having reveries, recognizing someone in a portrait, not to mention constructing a plot, envisaging or picturing one, drawing a figure, writing a poem—all seem to be very different, yet not unrelated functions of the same imagination. The several modes at work are not only disparate, often they are conflicting, too, as when we oppose an escape from reality to an effort at better understanding it. But granting this plurivocity of meaning is only a first necessary step, for upon closer analysis it appears that when Kant speaks, say, about schemata he has precious little of those understandings in mind. Likewise, as I was saying, productive imagination has virtually nothing to do with the func- tions commonly attributed to imagination. The A deduction is misleading in many respects, but especially the lack of clarity on the synthesis of ap- prehension, which can hardly involve a mental or a memory image, and the overlap of reproduction, retention and association in the second synthesis, are responsible for some of the confusion. The confusion is all the more regrettable as it pushes to the background the philosophical lesson and the historical novelties of Kant’s imagination. Kant intends to put an end to the traditional Abbildtheorie (the theory so widespread in the history of western philosophy according to which perception leaves a trace in us that is like a copy of the thing, and can be treated as the thing in its absence, or the form of the thing without its matter). The imagination, rather than the locus of images as inertial residues of past experiences, intermediate between understanding and sensibility, is a synthetic activity of mediation between two heterogeneous faculties, with a logic of its own. The paradigm of resemblance and the residual concept of image, accounting for the con- tiguity between imagination and memory in most of our tradition, from Aristotle to Hume, are forsaken in favor of a method of representation or construction, of which images must be understood as partial aspects, realizations or figurative exhibitions. In other words, a method rules all generation of images. As I was saying, imagination is the effect of the understanding on sensi- bility. In it, I modify myself, I make my sensibility assume different figures and shapes. Understanding imagination as self-affection on the one hand shows how fundamental imagination is—in fact, I would have no objects if sensibility were not affected by the empirical manifold, but I could not 1Srepresent to myself any object to begin with if apperception through im- agination did not affect inner sense, if I did not act on my receptivity. On the other hand, by bringing the intuitive to the conceptual and viceversa, imagination makes two heterogeneous levels meet. Itthus works as a Hermes, the messenger-god of Greek myths, or as Diotima’s Eros, son of Penia and Poros. Poverty, penia, lies in sensibility’s inanity (a schema is irreducible to an image and the gap cannot be bridged), while resourcefulness, poros, is the scheming—appropriately—to get to the sensible regardless, Unlike eros, though, the two movements are complementary, and that is probably the greatest novelty of Kant’s imagination: the ascent from the sensible to the intelligible is not other than the way down, While in tradition construction and perception, the ostensive and the apprehensive moments were alterna- tive, Kant unifies the two functions in the idea that all empirical affection is at the same time a self-affection (“the figurative synthesis through which we construct a triangle in imagination is precisely the same as that which we exercise in the apprehension of an appearance,” KGS, 3, A 224/B 271). The second obstacle working against a comprehensive interpretation of the imagination in Kant is the convenient but arbitrary restriction of focus in which imagination is by and large understood. The reader may have noticed that all examples of open questions I have mentioned rehearse familiar problems regarding imagination as related to experience and its understanding: the cognitive imagination, as it were. In the literature on Kant imagination is considered almost exclusively in an epistemological sense. The tacit and unexamined assumption ostensibly guiding some of the most notable interpretations—let opposed readings, such as Heidegger's and Cohen's or Strawson’s, suffice as examples—seems to be that the Aesthetic and Analytic exhaust the positive teaching of the first Critique, that the first Critique consists in some form ot other of epistemology or theory of experi- ence, and that it sums up, if not the entirety, then at least the fundamental gist of Kant’s critical philosophy. In the next pages I cannot presume to offer more than the lines of a program. In the tribunal of self-knowledge that the Critique is, reason is occupied with the limits of its powers, with itself as an original unity, and the source of its ends. For reason is an innerly articulated system compa- rable to an organism, with drives, interests, ends. The philosopher is the legislator of reason, and this legislation in which reason’s essential ends consist concerns two objects: nature and freedom. In both realms reason goes beyond the given and is an a priori synthesis: it gives itself a transcen- dental content—which is no more than the form of possible experience—, and exercises its causality through freedom. 14‘As to the theoretical synthesis, the principles (Grundsiitze) of the transcendental logic, those judgments that reason actually makes a priori regarding objects of possible experience, are the application of the result of the Deduction and the Schematism: pure concepts refer a priori to ap- pearances through time, in the complementary operations of subsumption and application. Imagination schematizes pure concepts, ie. refers them a priori to pure intuitions and thereby to possible experience. Darstellung and Versinnlichung are synonyms: imagination gives objective reality, ie., an exhibition in pure intuition to what otherwise remains an empty concept. Imagination gives the power of judgment a determinate sensible object, re- presenting instances for the application of rules and for the subsumption of appearances under them (KGS, 3, B 161 and B 360). This means, however, that imagination essentially finitizes reason in all its functions: imagination’s identity consists in nothing other than this realization, restriction or fulfill- ment of forms. But the Principles are not in themselves the end of the story. For, just as the understanding addresses itself to sensibility, so is the understanding the object of reason. In fact, if the understanding is the faculty of the unity of appearances through rules, reason is the faculty of the unity of the under- standing on the basis of principles (B 359). If the understanding aims at knowledge of appearances, reason aims at comprehension (B 367), at the absolute totality of the synthesis .of cognitions. Reason’s ideas orient the understanding in its search for a maximum unity and extension. Provided they are taken as heuristic principles only, ideas regulating the empirical use of the understanding are also synthetic a priori propositions which, says Kant, have objective validity (B 691). Ideas have no corresponding object and are conclusions (Sch/iisse) that can neither originate in nor be disproven by experience, and owe nothing to the sciences. It is all the more striking then that Kant should write that reason’s idea is the analogon of the schema of sensibility. It indicates a method for sub- ordination of the empirical cognitions (B 693) of the understanding to the maximum unity. Rather than an image, it shows forth the idea of totality; rather than on time, it operates on the unification of empirical knowledge, so that what we thereby gain is not the application of the understanding to appearances, but of reason to the understanding’s cognitions in view of a system. What is at stake here is an indirect schematism, the schematism of analo; e regard nature qua totality as if it constituted the expression of a design. Analogy here refers to a relation between concepts and ideas in view of a system. Later it will take on a progressively greater and more intuitive function, and what is here called reason’s schema will be a sym- .bol. True, Kant shifts terminology constantly, and throws in the same bag symbol, allegory, metaphor, metonimy, synecdoche and other tropes. Still, I think his reflections on symbol and analogy are extremely important to gauge the full spectrum of the imagination. The schematism chapter in the first Critique shows how pure concepts refer a priori to intuitions, and is thus proof of the objective reality of our concepts. The schematism shows that the understanding in its categories and concepts is not confined to the sphere of logic, but has a rightful claim to refer to experience; in fact, it refers to nothing but experience, but only indirectly, because directly it refers to the intuitive forms in which we ap- prehend appearances. The understanding employs its concepts in judgments on experience. This should not be taken as if experience preceded our judgments on it, because experience first atises as unitary and meaning- ful through this very application of the understanding. In this sense the schematism is reason’s a priori synthesis constituting an object in general through the imagination’s mediation, and is in Kant’s view a success story he returns to time and again, until On a discovery, What real progress has metaphysics, the correspondence with Beck and Tieftrunk. Still, imagination’s avowed failings are no less significant: for example, the failure to comprehend in the sublime; the failure to fill with contents the notion of happiness in the Groundwork; the failure to find an example of the ideal of taste (KU §17); the failure to find an example of the archetype of virtue (KGS, 3, A 569/B 597 and A 315/B 372), or a concrete realiza- tion of the moral law in the Typic of practical judgment. Here imagination mimics the totalizing attempts that only reason can achieve, but, in the exhibition of the supersensible it cannot adequately show forth, it is every time defeated and relentlessly sent back to the acknowledgement of the gap between sensible and supersensible. In these failings there is a very instructive lesson which is of great impor- tance. For a symbol, as the KU § 49 on aesthetic ideas has it, gives much to thought (viel zw denken veranlasst). If a schema generates a form which works as a content (and the mathematical schema, an object on which we build a whole science, is a shining example of that), a symbol is an intuitive form manifesting the impossibility to represent adequately its content—which the imagination nevertheless is driven to try to exhibit. A symbol is a limited and partial attempt at instituting analogies with what I already know, and thus to make intelligible what is intrinsically unknowable. In the analogy I do not know the object directly; and yet, I indirectly know something of the object, ie., its relation to other terms, and can now think it. We have here an actual knowledge (Erkenntnis nach der Analogie, Kant calls it in the 16Prolegomena, § 57, KGS, 4, pp. 357/97-8) in which I convey a precise mean- ing. What I know is a relation, a proportion. Symbols are a sensible form of highlighting the impotence of imagination—but also its indispensability for our thought. Symbols do not freeze our attention on them, as images tend to do, but rather. stimulate reflection to go beyond them. Reason is not motivated to a search for an image expressing concepts, but to think of the relation between sensible and supersensible, as well as to reflect on the inner articulation of its own heterogencous functions. ‘Among the many examples of the relevance of this theme in Kant’s writ- ings after 1781, let me mention one. Kant’s description of the imagination’s link with experience would seem to imply that it has no role to play in moral matters. The fact that our actions are noumenally free, yet take place on the phenomenal level, is irrelevant to our choice regarding the moral law, for which only the determining motive of choice is relevant. Nevertheless, the relation between the noumenal and the phenomenal in action becomes important when Kant must explain our natural need to render our highest concepts comprehensible and meaningful (in his writings on right, history and religion). From this point of view, in Kant’s practical philosophy it is not so much the imagination that has a crucial importance, but the relation of schematization at work in the attempt—an attempt that is necessarily only analogical but no less certainly indispensable—at identifying the possible point of contact between supersensible and sensible. What is essential for this is both the symbolic function of the imagination and the power of judgment as application of a universal to a particular. By this symbolic dimension of the imagination Kant opens up new paths to metaphysics that many would have thought were for him dead ends, or vast oceans in which to lose oneself. Ifin symbolic anthropomorphism reason finds unexpected ways to interrelate sensible and supersensible, ways that a critique of scientific and empirical knowledge has proven illegitimate for cognitive purposes, then symbolic exhibition is how reason represents to itself the reality of ideas in our world. Reason—not because it knows sensible objects but because it thinks in freedom from sensibility—has not only a legitimate, but indeed a necessary employment, because it thus realizes the deepest core of its autonomy. The I-think, which exists as the pure consciousness of a determining activity, consciousness of an origination and a spontaneity, has as a practical correlate the noumenal I, freely determining itself to action; but both are the ways in which an intelligible I operates. What was called self-affection in the originary synthetic unity of apperception is here the autonomy of the will: in both we have an a priori synthesis, reason’s self-determination _independently of giveness. Just as the T-think is an unknowable and pure principle, of which empirical consciousness is a result, so does noumenal freedom practically determine my person and whatever is empirical in my character. While the I-think exercises its self-affection on my passivity, so that reason spontaneously determines itself but knows only in conjunction with sensibility, in morality the intelligible I is the pure determination of something that remains external to it. But in both reason isa priori synthesis, the activity of going beyond the limits of the sensible and occupying itself with itself only, as a source of the essential ends of humanity. By making reason concrete, by giving its concepts and ideas a determinate exhibition, imagination is the necessarily finite mode of the freedom that reason is, and the indispensable mediation between it and the world in all a priori synthesis 18