抄録
This paper investigates the systematic significance of Einbildungskraft (imagination) in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, showing how the third Critique repositions imagination within the broader architecture of critical philosophy. First, I begin with Kant's claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that cognition consists of two “stems”—sensibility and understanding—“arising from a common yet unknowable root.” By examining Heidegger's reinterpretation of this thesis alongside Cassirer's contrasting account, I argue that the decisive task is not, as Heidegger proposes, to retrieve the hidden root of the faculties in imagination, but rather, as Cassirer emphasizes, to elucidate the functional interrelations among them.
Second, I clarify the role imagination plays in the Critique of Pure Reason. By showing that sensibility and understanding are defined as two distinct “stems” while imagination performs the productive synthesis required for perception, I highlight the degree to which imagination remains ultimately subordinated to conceptual determination through the categories. It is precisely this subordination that the third Critique will revise.
The analysis then examines Kant's reconceptualization of imagination in the third Critique, where the emphasis shifts from the earlier dichotomy of receptivity and spontaneity to the self-active operations of the faculties. Imagination is now treated, alongside understanding, as a self-active power and is primarily characterized as the faculty of apprehension in intuition. Although this corresponds to the synthesis of apprehension familiar from the first Critique, imagination is no longer immediately bound to the categories. In cognitive judgments it must still present concepts by providing them with sensible intuition; but in aesthetic judgment, no determinate concept is given in advance. Imagination therefore operates freely and without determinate rules, allowing its spontaneity to manifest in a manner impossible within the framework of cognition.
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