This essay argues that, contrary to the prevailing view according to which reflection in Kant's aesthetic judgment is interpreted as ‘the logical actus of the understanding’, we should pay closer attention to Kant's own formulation of aesthetic reflection as ‘an action of the power of imagination’. Put differently, I contend in this essay that the rule that governs and orders the manifold in aesthetic judgment is imagination's own achievement, the achievement of the productive synthesis of the ‘fictive power’ (Dichtungsvermögen), entirely independent of the understanding. While this view does not entail that the faculty of the understanding is not necessary in aesthetic reflection, a stronger emphasis on the role of imagination in aesthetic reflection allows us to realize that its schematizing and interpretive activity, while consistent with, goes well beyond the discursive demands of the understanding insofar as it intimates the supersensible ground of freedom that manifests itself as ‘the feeling of life’. Therefore, I show in this essay that the imagination's unique interpretive power has a special role in completing Kant's critical system by facilitating the connection of the sensible to the supersensible, which further helps us appreciate imagination's practical as opposed to merely cognitive significance.
The essay traces closely Schelling’s criticism of Kant’s postulates, to wit, that Kant cannot consistently hold that theoretical reason’s cognition of the Unconditioned from the practical perspective (i.e., the assent of theoretical reason to the postulates) is possible while having the same conception of ‘weak’ theoretical reason to which the same cognition from the theoretical perspective remains closed. Schelling’s solution is a demand to realize the Absolute, i.e., the Unconditioned that grounds the unity of the realm of freedom and the realm of nature, solely through one’s own action. By the latter Schelling does not understand a moral action but the action of a ‘creative reason’. Critical philosophy conceived thusly, to wit, in its complete form, would be able to “deduce from the essence of reason” both systems: dogmatism (the Unconditioned as the object of theoretical knowledge) and criticism (the Unconditioned as the object of infinite realization in moral practice).
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