In short, Kant postulates a notion of empirical concept and of perceptual judgment (a crucial problem for the Empiricists), but he does not manage to pull either of them out of the mire, from that muddy ground between sensible intuition and the legislatory activity of the intellect. But for his critical theory this no-man’s-land cannot exist.
The various phases of knowledge, in Kant, could be represented by a series of verbalizations in this sequence:
1. This stone.
2. This is a stone (or Here there is a stone).
3a. This stone is white.
3b. This stone is hard.
4. This stone is a mineral and a body.
5. If I throw this stone, it will fall back to earth.
6. All stones (insofar as they are minerals and therefore bodies) have weight.
The first Critique certainly deals with propositions like (5) and (6), it is debatable whether it really deals with propositions like (4), and it certainly is vague about the legitimacy of propositions like (1) and (3b). It is legitimate to wonder if (1) and (2) express different locutionary acts. With the exception of infantile holophrastic language, it is impossible to conceive of someone who, when confronted with a stone, utters (1)—if anything, this syntagm could occur only in (3a) or (3b). But no one has ever said that there must be a verbalization in correspondence with every phase of understanding, and the same freedom holds good even for acts of self-consciousness. Someone could walk along a road at whose sides stand heaps of stones, without paying any attention to them; but if he were asked what there was along the road, he could very well reply that there were only stones.15 Therefore, if the fullness of perception is in fact already a perceptual judgment—and if we wanted to verbalize it at all costs, we would have (1) which is not a proposition and therefore does not imply judgment—by the time we get to the point of verbalizing it, we are immediately at (2).
Therefore, when questioned with regard to what he has seen or is presently looking at, someone who has seen a stone will either answer (2) or there will be no guarantee of his having perceived anything. As for (3a) and (3b), the subject can have all the possible sensations of whiteness or hardness, but the moment he predicates whiteness or hardness, he has already entered the categorial, and the quality he predicates is applied to a substance, precisely to determine it at least from one respect or capacity. Perhaps he might start from something expressible, such as This white thing or This hard thing, but even so he would already have begun the work of hypothesis—and it is worth observing that this would be the situa tion typical of a person who sees a platypus for the first time, a swimming thing with fur and a beak.
It remains for us to decide what happens when our subject says that that stone is a mineral and a body. Peirce would have said that we have already entered the moment of interpretation, whereas for Kant we have constructed a generic concept (but as we have seen, he is very vague about this). The real Kantian problem, however, concerns (1–3).
There is a difference between (3a) and (3b). For Locke, while the first expresses a simple secondary idea (color), the second expresses a simple primary idea. Primary and secondary are qualifications of objectivity, not of the certainty of perception. One by no means irrelevant problem is whether, on seeing a red apple or a white stone, I can also understand that the apple is white and juicy inside, and that the stone is hard inside and has weight. We might say that the difference lies in whether the object perceived is already an effect of the segmentation of the continuum or whether it is an unknown object. If we see a stone, we «know,» in the very act of understanding that it is a stone, what it is like inside. Someone who sees a fossil of coralline origin for the first time (in the form of a stone, but red in color) still does not know what it is like inside.
But also in the case of the known object, what does it mean to say «we know» that the stone, white on the outside, is hard inside? Were someone to ask us such an irritating question, we might reply: «That’s the way I imagine it, stones are usually like that.»
It seems curious to put an imagining at the foundation of a generic concept. What does «imagine» mean? There is a difference between «to imagine^’ in the sense of calling up an image (we are now in the realm of fancy, the delineation of possible worlds, as when my desire portrays a stone I would like to find to crack a nut with—and this process does not call for the experience of the senses) and «to imagine2» in the sense that, on seeing a stone as such, precisely on account of and in concomitance with the sensible impressions that have stimulated my visual organs, I know (but I do not see) that it is hard. What interests us is this second kind of «imagining.» The first sense, as Kant would have put it, might as well be left to empirical psychology; but the second sense is crucial for a theory of understanding, of the perception of things, or—in Kantian terms—in the construction of empirical concepts (not to mention the fact that, even imagining in the first sense, wishing for a stone with which to crack a nut, is possible because, when I imagine 1 a stone, I imagine2″ that it is hard).
Wilfrid Sellars (1978) proposes using the term imagining for to imagine1 and imaging for to imagine2″. For reasons that shall soon be clear, I propose to translate imaging with «to figure» (both in the sense of constructing a figure, of delineating a structural framework, and in the sense in which we say, on seeing the stone, «I figure» it is hard inside).
In this act of figuring some properties of the stone, we make a choice, we figure it in a certain respect or capacity: if on seeing or imagining the stone, I did not intend to crack a nut but to drive off a bothersome animal, I would also see the stone in terms of its dynamic possibilities, as an object that can be projected and that, insofar as it has weight, has the property of falling toward the target rather than rising in the air.
This figuring in order to understand and understanding by figuring is crucial to the Kantian system: it reveals itself as essential both for the transcendental grounding of empirical concepts and for permitting perceptual judgments (implicit and nonverbalized) such as This stone.
2.5 The Schema
In Kantian theory it is necessary to explain why categories that are so astrally abstract can be applied to the concreteness of the sensible intuition. I see the sun and the stone, and I must be able to think that star (in a singular judgment) or all stones (in a universal judgment, even more complex, because in point of fact I have seen only one stone, or a few, heated by the sun). Now, «Special laws, therefore, as they refer to phenomena which are empirically determined, cannot be completely derived from the categories, […] Experience must be superadded» (CPR/B: 127). But, since the pure concepts of the intellect are heterogeneous with respect to sensible intuitions, «in comprehending any object under a concept» (CPR/B: 133, but in reality one should say «in every subsumption of the subject of the intuition under a concept, so that an object may arise»), we need a third mediating element that, so to speak, makes it possible for the concept to wrap itself around the intuition and renders the concept applicable to the intuition. In this way the need for a transcendental schema comes into being.
The transcendental schema is a product of the imagination. Let us leave aside the discrepancy between the first and second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, whereby in the first edition the Imagination is one of the three faculties of the soul, together with Sense (which empirically represents appearances in perception) and Apperception, while in the second edition Imagination becomes only a capacity of the intellect, an effect produced by the intellect on the sensibility. In the view of many interpreters, including Heidegger, this transformation is enormously relevant, to such a degree that one is obliged to go back to the first edition and overlook the second thoughts found in its successor. From our point of view this issue is secondary. Let us grant therefore that the Imagination, whatever faculty or activity it may be, provides the intellect with a schema, so that it can apply it to the intuition. Imagination is the capacity to represent an object even without its being present in the intuition (it is «reproductive» in the sense that we have called to imagine^, or it
