The claim that the imagination belongs to the faculty of sensibility has been most emphatically defended by Robert Hanna and Lucy Allais.18 The thought is that a type of synthesis not involving the understanding is required for perceptual awareness, as opposed to the synthesis that is required for conceptual thought. As Allais has put the point, “synthesizing is not the same as conceptualizing.”19 In particular, it is held that the structures of space and time that Kant discusses in the Aesthetic allow for an independent synthesis on the part of sensibility that facilitates the intuitional presentation of objects, functioning without involvement of the understanding and the concepts associated with it. As Hanna has expressed the thought: “our capacities for spatial and temporal representation constitutively explain non-conceptual content: that is, non-conceptual content is nothing but cognitive content that is essentially structured by our a priori representations of phenomenal space and time. [….] the representational content of non- conceptual cognition is to be so explained.”20 It follows that sensibility cannot be entirely passive, but must be in part spontaneous. As Hanna grants:
the sensibility [is] only relatively passive, but not entirely passive [....] by virtue of its expressing a mental power for spontaneous synthesis, or mental processing. This mental power is the ‘power of imagination’.21
18 Allais and Hanna differ significantly in the non-conceptualism they develop. Allais’ view appears to bear similarities to contemporary relational views of perception, on which perceptual states do not involve content in the representational sense of the word but constitute direct relations to objects, while Hanna explicitly develops a theory of non-conceptual representational content. However, both are united in attributing imaginative synthesis to the faculty of sensibility, and therefore represent a common position as far as the conceptualism/non-conceptualism debate is concerned. As I note below (fn. 55) it is ultimately not clear that conceptualism is inconsistent with the motivations for either of Allais’ and Hanna’s preferred views.
19 Allais 2009, p. 396.
20 Hanna 2005, p. 278 (italics original). Compare also Allais 2009, p. 402, who holds that sensibility independently provides subjects with “an egocentric, oriented, three-dimensional frame of reference which enables us to locate particulars.”
It also follows for these non-conceptualists that we can separate the conceptual cognition rational animals have of their environment from the less demanding perceptual awareness rational animals share in common with other creatures: “the unity of consciousness in this [conceptual] sense is a relatively sophisticated and fragile achievement of rational animals, but unnecessary for [perceptual] conscious animal cognition in general, whether the animal is rational or non-rational, and whether the animal is human or non-human.”22
The claim that imaginative synthesis is not implicated in perception has been forcefully argued by Clinton Tolley. On Tolley’s view, to include synthesis in intuitions leads inexorably to conceptualism: “at several points Kant […] asserts that the spontaneity of imagination is ‘one and the same with’ that of understanding (cf. B162n), which would seem to block the escape route [Hanna and Allais suggest].”23 Tolley thinks that it is a mistake to suppose that intuition requires any synthesis from the power of imagination. Tolley suggests that for Kant intuitions have a unity that is “absolute” and that “belongs to [intuition] per se”:
That some unity pertains to an intuition per se follows from Kant’s claim that a single intuition ‘as contained in one moment’ has ‘an absolute unity’ (A99) [Tolley’s emphasis]. What is more, Kant’s use of ‘absolute’ here points to the fact that this unity is one that has no further ground whatsoever, let alone one in any act of synthesis.24
For Tolley, the productive imagination does not play a role in intuition, but rather in synthesizing intuitions into what, as Tolley emphasizes, Kant himself calls “perception” or “experience” (B160). On Tolley’s gloss, this intuition-experience distinction amounts to “a clear distinction
22 Hanna 2005, p. 253.
23 Tolley 2013, fn. 32. While I agree with Tolley’s conclusion, I doubt that B162n settles the failure of the view that imaginative synthesis belongs to sensibility, because while B162n suggests both imagination and understanding share their spontaneous character, the additional premise is needed that only the understanding, as opposed to sensibility, is spontaneous. I provide this premise in §5 below.
24 Tolley 2013, p. 123. Tolley does allow that “absolute” intuitional unity results not from synthesis but from what Kant calls “synopsis of the manifold a priori through sense (A94)” (Tolley 2013, fn. 33. Italics mine). The difference between “synthesis” and “synopsis” as regards spontaneity is independently interesting, but it will not affect the point I am making below: that intuitional unity requires a form that can be provided only by synthesis.
between (a) an intuition’s being a unity, and containing a manifold, and (b) that intuition’s being
represented as a unity, or as containing a manifold.”25 Or again,
What [Kant] is concerned with [in “experience” as opposed to intuition] are the conditions under which intuitions must stand ‘in order to become an object for me’ (B138) […] This, however, is a concern distinct from the conditions that intuitions must meet in order to themselves already represent or relate to an object.26
Tolley further aligns the distinction between the “absolute” unity of intuitions and the “synthetic” unity of experience with Kant’s distinction between intuition and concept, i.e., the distinction between representations that put the subject into immediate relations (“Beziehungen”) to objects, and representations that provide merely mediate contact. In this way, Tolley suggests that intuitions require no synthesis in order to count as placing the mind in immediate relations to objects, and synthesis is only subsequently required to produce mediate awareness of the subject
as standing in relations to objects. For Tolley, this distinction between two types of awareness-
relations to objects can be glossed as a divide between two types of content. Accordingly, since perception for Kant is characterized by intuitional content, this means that conceptual content must be excluded. After all, it would seem implausible that perception simultaneously bears mediate and immediate relations to its objects.
It is worth observing here that despite their different conceptions of the imagination, proponents of both non-conceptualist theses largely share a common understanding of the conceptualist thesis about Kant’s view. This point is illustrated by Tolley’s opposition to the thought that intuitions represent items “as a unity.” Tolley here emphasizes the same idea Allais expresses by distinguishing synthesizing from “conceptualizing.” On both readings, the conceptualist view is understood as the claim that imaginative synthesis classifies items under
25 Tolley 2013, p. 122. Compare also Tolley’s invocation of (A120) “intuitions are the material the imagination synthesizes to produce a certain awareness of ourselves as standing in a determinate relation to an object.” 26 Tolley 2013, p. 123.
concepts. This point is further reflected in the common non-conceptualist view of “determinacy” in Kant, which non-conceptualists associate with conceptual classification. As Hanna writes,
We learn in the first Critique that empirical intuitions must be combined with concepts in the context of judgments in order to be ‘determined’ and thus represent determinate objects of experience […]. But empirical intuitions are, as such, very strongly non-conceptual […]. The object of such a representation is not a determinate object of experience, but instead an undetermined or at best partially-determined object of the senses, that is, an appearance.27
Thus, on the common non-conceptualist picture, intuitions are themselves indeterminate relations to objects, which subsequently gain determination through conceptualization to produce states of awareness of the self as standing in relations to objections. Conversely, the disagreement merely concerns the role of the imagination: whether the synthesis of the imagination is implicated in intuitions but is not determinative (Hanna), or whether imaginative synthesis is coeval with conceptual synthesis, and therefore determinative (Tolley). In the view I will develop in this chapter and throughout this dissertation, the view non-conceptualists share in common commits the critical error of associating the operations of the understanding exclusively with the sort of determinate cognitions Kant associates with “concepts” (B105). This misses the alternative possibility that the understanding as a capacity for thought plays a more systemic, non-discursive role in intuition, viz. a role specified by the way the operations of the imagination imbue experience with a “synthetic unity.”