Cody Staton The Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Wolff and Baumgarten Introduction This paper elucidates Kant’s conception of the imagination in light of his criticism of the Wolffian tradition in the Critique of Pure Reason. Wolff’s account of the imagination is an important facet of Kant’s so-called “critical turn” for a number of reasons. For one, Kant wholesale adopts Wolff’s definition of the imagination, namely, that it is the capacity (Vermögen) to represent things that are otherwise absent or hitherto unseen.¹ In the course of this paper, I will try to shed light on what that means for Kant – that the imagination represents something that is itself absent. Kant’s view, of course, differs markedly from Wolff’s as is evident in his claim that both Wolff and Leibniz had “directed all investigations of the nature and origin of our cognitions to an entirely unjust point of view”². Kant’s problem with the Wolffians on the role of the imagination is, in my view, ultimately determined by the fact that he thinks that they misconstrued the nature of sensibility. Sensibility, Kant argues, is not merely a confused or even clear form of representing objects; the confusion, if any, belongs to the understanding. Rather, sensibility, though receptive, is obliged to communicate with the understanding through the active, form-giving capacity of the imagination that determines its representations. I do not claim that Wolff’s view of the imagination was so entirely different than Descartes’s or Leibniz’s views, or even Aristotle’s for that matter. Yet Kant’s whole critical project was undertaken as a kind of reform of the German rationalist tradition proceeding from Wolff, and thus, Kant’s theory of the imagination would have to account for the way that Wolff and his predecessors articulated its role. In the first two parts of this paper, I will outline Wolff’s account of the imagination. I will briefly touch on Baumgarten’s view before turning to Kant’s criticisms of the Wolffian account of sensibility. From there, I will point to Kant’s sol-  See Kant, Anth, AA 07: 167; V-Met-L2/Pölitz, AA 28: 585; VKK, AA 02: 265; V-Met-Herder, AA 28: 24; and KrV, B 151. I also refer to the English translation of Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996).  Kant: KrV, Bxxxvi. Cody Staton, KU Leuven, marshall.staton@hiw.kuleuven.be https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110467888-084 3284 Cody Staton ution to this problem through his account of the imagination. Ultimately what I am trying to get at is a way of articulating the imagination as the transcendental faculty that acts for the sake of both the understanding and sensibility. On the whole, there are two main currents that run through Kant’s critique of Wolff in this paper: the first is that, for Kant, sensibility itself is pure; the second is that Kant argues that the imagination is the faculty that determines sensibility for the sake of experience. What brings these two points together is the way in which Kant articulates the determination of time that is enacted by the imagination. 1 Wolff’s Account of the Imagination In keeping with Leibniz, and also Descartes, Wolff claims that the higher faculties of the understanding and reason are distinct from the lower faculties of sensibility and the imagination. Thus, Wolff writes that the faculty (Vermögen) of distinctly representing to ourselves what is possible isthe understanding […] [which] differs from the senses and imagination (Einbildungs-Kraft); for the latter can at most give clear, not distinct ideas; but when understanding is added, the same ideas become distinct.³ Despite a heavily Leibnizian bent to his argument, Wolff goes further in his investigation – adding that the representations of sensibility refer to things that are present in perception, but that the imagination (facultas imaginandi, Einbildungs-Kraft) represents the ability to “produce the perceptions of sensible things that are absent.”⁴ Wolff takes it that our ordinary experience of most empirical objects comes about this way. When we find ourselves in an unfamiliar place, for example, the mind will immediately seek to distinguish certain representations from others, but not all sensible representations will become clear, let alone distinct. At this point, Wolff would argue that we draw upon our experiences via the memory to imagine the nature of those unfamiliar representations in sensibility in order to get clear about them. Yet the nature of sensibility and the imagination are such that most representations will remain obscure.  Wolff: Deutsche Metaphysik, 5th edition (Halle: 1732), § 277. Hereafter cited as DM.  Wolff: Psychologia empirica (Frankfurt and Leipzig 1732), § 92. Hereafter cited as EP, see also § 251 and especially § 235 where Wolff writes: “And the force of the soul similar to the representations that it brings forward is called the force of imagination.” Also, cf. Wolff, Psychologia rationalis (Frankfurt 1734), § 753 and §832. Hereafter cited as RP. The Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Wolff and Baumgarten 3285 In the Empirical Psychology, Wolff describes what a total perception would like and how the imagination contributes to it: [i]f I behold fresh troops in a field, in one gaze I likewise behold the field beyond them, a forest viewed from a distance, the boundary of heaven and earth, and other objects. And indeed at the same moment, I also represent objects that are absent to me, as for instance the church in which I often see the military commander. Various thoughts also arise in my mind according to the diversity of objects that I represent to myself. All the perceptions likewise complete the total perception.⁵ Wolff does not mention the imagination explicitly in this quote, but the point is that a total perception is thought to be incomplete without the obscure representations of absent objects, which are accounted for by the imagination. Since the imagination always represents images to the mind that resemble past perceptions, he writes in the example that he could represent the absent military commander through an image. I take this to mean that, for Wolff, the mind has a basic urge to fill-in all the missing pieces, that we feel unsatisfied when the story is incomplete, and thus, the dim or absent perceptions that I have now can be made clear when the imagination juxtaposes those weak perceptions with previously distinct thoughts. For Wolff, the soul can only imagine the present and future states of the world by imagining previous thoughts. Yet it also seems that he makes some overtures to a kind of imagination that is not limited to representing past thoughts. He claims that “we learn in geometry that if we represent the curve of a bowed line like we have never seen, also by drawing it on paper afterwards, and thus, bring this [representation] to sensation,” that we create an entirely new image through the faculty of invention (facultas fingendi).⁶ In the Empirical Psychology, he gives one such example of what he calls hieroglyphic figures (figurae hieroglyphicae). If we think of the notion of justice, for example, Wolff asserts that we are actually combining a series of images – such as a sword, a balance, a blindfolded virgin – to form a new image.⁷ He, therefore, argues that within “the force of invention […] lies the force to erect or bring out something which would often be impossible, and therefore, it can be called an empty imagination (leere Einbildung).”⁸ However empty or devoid of reference to experience it may be, he characterizes the facultas fingendi as the “force to poeticize (Kraft zu erdichten)” because – unlike the other faculties – it borrows its content from expe-     Wolff: Wolff: Wolff: Wolff: EP, § 43, my emphasis in italics. DM, § 241. EP, § 156. DM, § 242. 3286 Cody Staton rience in order to create something completely novel that may indeed instruct our experience. Most of Wolff’s followers argued alone the same lines, albeit with even more systematic constraint than Wolff. This is especially the case with Baumgarten who sought to catalogue a much wider range of mental powers than Wolff had done. 2 The Lower Faculty in Baumgarten’s View of the Imagination Like Wolff, Baumgarten also holds to this idea that the mind cognizes through higher and lower orders, and that if the mind knows something through the lower order, then it will always be obscure, confused, or at best, indistinct.⁹ However, as Matthias Wunsch has pointed out, Baumgarten completely reconfigures the Leibnizian and Wolffian conception of this inferior cognitive faculty.¹⁰ Of the many layers that span from sensus, phantasia, and the facultas fingendi, Baumgarten also claims that the lower faculty includes the powers of iudicum, praesagitio, and facultas characteristica. Baumgarten puts it a bit differently, but he also agrees with Wolff that the lower order must be accounted for in order to articulate the way that the mind achieves a total perception. According to Baumgarten, the mind becomes conscious of a “past state of the world” through the images that represent those states.¹¹ He, therefore, adopts Wolff’s view that the the imagination (phantasia) represents things that are absent to perception when he writes that “even though my imaginations are perceptions of things that were once present, while I imagine, they are perceptions of absent things.”¹² To that end, he argues that whenever a “partial idea is perceived, its total idea recurs. This proposition is also called the association of ideas.”¹³ For Baumgarten as well, the imagination associates ideas in order for the mind to think the total idea. One striking difference here, however, is that Baumgarten holds to the much more limited view that the imagination is merely reproductive: it gives the soul the capacity to clarify only what has been previ-  Baumgarten: Metaphysica (Halle 1739) § 520. Hereafter cited as M.  Wunsch, Matthias: The Activity of Sensibility in Kant’s Anthropology. In: Kant Yearbook 3/1 (2011), 73 – 74. The entire list of Baumgarten’s account includes sensus, phantasia, perspicacia, memoria, facultas fingendi, praevisio, iudicum, praesagitio, facultas characteristica (cf. Baumgarten, Metaphyscia, §§ 534– 623).  Baumgarten: M, § 557.  Baumgarten: M, § 559.  Baumgarten: M, § 561. The Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Wolff and Baumgarten 3287 ously perceived by associating former ideas with present perceptions. Unlike Wolff, Baumgarten distinguishes the imagination (phantasia) as a reproductive faculty, at least in name, from anticipation (praevisio) and invention (facultas fingendi). From Kant’s perspective, by contrast, both thinkers failed to notice the active element of the imagination in experience itself. Thus, he writes in the A-deduction that “no psychologist has yet thought that the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself”¹⁴. For Kant, Wolff and his followers merely considered the imagination as a determination of the past, but they had yet to grasp the fact that time itself is a product of the imagination. 3 Kant’s Criticisms of the Wolffians There are, of course, many criticisms that Kant levels at the Wolffians, but I will single out just two: first, the Wolffian idea that sensibility is merely a confused form of representation, and second, that the imagination is either merely empirical or that it is fictive. The two points are mutually entailing of one another. Throughout the 1770’s, Kant labored to find an explanation for the way in which sensibility, as a receptive faculty, communicates with an otherwise polar opposite faculty of the understanding that is spontaneous. The solution that he offers in the first Critique is to assign to it an active, form-giving capacity that takes up sensible representations and combines them. Kant argues in a rather well-known passage the “spontaneity of our thought requires that this manifold first, in a certain way, be gone through, taken up, and combined (durchgegangen, auf genommen, und verbunden werde) to make a cognition out of it. I call this action synthesis”¹⁵. And on the following page, he explicitly argues that all syntheses are achieved by the imagination. There are some seemingly problematic passages from the B-deduction that muddy the waters regarding the synthesis performed by the imagination, as for instance, when he states that all synthesis belongs to the understanding.¹⁶ Aside from the various changes that transpire between the 1781 and 1787 versions of the transcendental deduction, Kant maintains the argument throughout that the transcendental imagination enacts the synthesis of intuitions – i. e., the pure forms of space and time. Yet despite Kant’s many criticisms of Wolff and Baumgarten relating to their views of sensi-  Kant: KrV, A 120 n.  Kant: KrV, A 77/B 102.  See Kant: KrV, B 130. 3288 Cody Staton bility and the imagination, Kant makes no effort to distinguish his definition of the imagination, at least formally, from them. Thus, in the B-deduction, Kant writes that the “imagination is the power of representing an object in intuition even without the presence of the object itself”¹⁷. Kant does hold on to some elements of Wolff’s. For example, Kant also claims that the reproductive imagination synthesizes empirical intuitions in such a way that the empirical synthesis is nothing other than an image of a particular manifold. In that respect, Kant agrees with Wolff that the imagination represents what is itself not present. Yet on the transcendental level, it cannot be the case that Kant is merely concerned with the way in which the imagination synthesizes empirical intuitions. Rather, in my view, Kant argues that the imagination represents the possibility of determining objects of experience as such by synthesizing the pure forms of intuition. The pure forms of intuitions are themselves not experienced, but what Kant argues is that they give shape to all outer intuition by representing an ideal space for the sake of experience. With respect to time, Kant also claims that the imagination affects inner sense.¹⁸ This point becomes much more evident in the Schematism chapter where he claims that the transcendental capacity of the imagination produces the conditions that allow the rules of the understanding to determine all objects of intuition.¹⁹ Unlike Wolff, Kant notes that “in fact it is not images of objects but schemata that ground our pure sensible concepts”²⁰. In my view, Kant criticizes Wolff for merely assuming the dogmatic view concerning the production of images, but without going any further to investigate its ground. Kant maintains that: the image is a product of the empirical faculty of productive imagination (Einbildungskraft), the schema of sensible concepts (such as figures in space) is a product and as it were a monogram of pure a priori imagination (Einbildungskraft) through which and in accordance with which the images first become possible, but which must be connected with the concept, to which they are in themselves never fully congruent, always only by means of the schema that they designate. The schema of a pure concept of the understanding, on the contrary, is something that can never be brought to an image at all, but is rather only the pure synthesis, in accord with a rule of unity according to concepts in general, which the category expresses, and is a transcendental product of the imagination, which concerns the determination of inner sense in general, in accordance with conditions of its form (time) in regard to all representations, insofar as these are to be connected together a priori in one concept in accord with the unity of apperception.²¹      Kant: KrV, B 151. See Kant: KrV, B 153 – 155. See Kant: KrV, A 141/B 180. Kant: KrV, A 140/B 180. Kant: KrV, A 141 f/B 181 f. The Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Wolff and Baumgarten 3289 The picture that Kant paints is quite literal: the imagination is a monogram because it inter-acts with both sensibility and the understanding. The imagination schematizes sensibility insofar as it directs the pure forms of intuition of space within experience. At the same time, the imagination also lifts the category out of abstraction, takes its rule, and applies it to those same intuitions. For Kant, the time-determinations made by the imagination are instructed by rules expressed in the categories, which would have no meaning in themselves otherwise. Although I passed over the A-deduction, I take it that this is what apprehension through the imagination is all about – i. e., taking a particular facet of the manifold and structuring it. He gives us a rather poignant example: if I place five points in a row […], this is an image of the number five. On the contrary, if I only think a number in general, which could be five or a hundred, this thinking is more the representation of a method for representing a multitude (e. g., a thousand) in accordance with a certain concept than the image itself.²² The number five is merely an image produced by the synthesis carried about the imagination, but its possibility depends on a rule given by the category of quantity, which requires the imagination to provide it with a temporal determination. Because the schemata are temporal and spatial representations of a priori rules contained in the categories, both outer and inner sense are determined by the imagination in accordance with the understanding. Conclusion As we saw previously, Wolff argues that the understanding distinguishes representations that are, at best, made clear by the imagination. And while Kant also points out that the synthesis is brought to concepts by the understanding, he does so with a completely different view than Wolff’s. For Kant, there is already a transcendental synthesis enacted by the imagination prior to the application of concepts to intuitions. We see that Wolff and Baumgarten weigh the cognitive currency of the imagination on its ability to achieve clear representations of sensibility––and hence, how near it approaches the intellectual domain, but without ever reaching it, ultimately determines the worth of its images. By contrast, for Kant, the problem is no longer how obscure images access the understanding. Rather, he argues that the imagination operates for the sake of both the understanding and sensibility; it creates a reciprocal relation be-  Kant: KrV, A 140/B 179. 3290 Cody Staton tween the two; it synthesizes sensible representations by determining the pure forms of space and time insofar as it gives the categories temporal determination. Both Wolff and Baumgarten speak of the total perception as if it is something that can only be achieved by abstracting from experience because they had yet to realize, at least according to Kant, the way in which time is determined. In my view, it is not by relating to the past, Kant argues, that the imagination synchronizes the noon that occurred yesterday with the noon of today – that much is easily carried out by the empirical imagination in cooperation with memory. Rather, the transcendental imagination has a more fundamental role in determining the manifold of time that occurs always now. Kant’s criticisms of the Wolffian notion of sensibility amounts to reconfiguring how the imagination structures the mutually exclusive relationship between sensibility, the understanding, and inner sense, hence giving organization to the whole of cognition in general.