ELIAKIM FERREIRA OLIVEIRA

The problem we focus on in this dissertation concerns the examination of imagination in the constitution of knowledge and aesthetic experience. The question that guides us can be formulated as follows: in Kant’s thought, what conditions allow imagination to be invoked both to understanding cognition and to understanding aesthetic contemplation? The problem that arises from this question is that of the role of imagination in the schematization of pure concepts of understanding, as in the Critique of Pure Reason, and what should be understood by a “schematization without concepts”, such as that on which aesthetic reflection depends, in the Critique of Judgment. From this problem derive the subproblems of what schematism itself is, the relationship between schematism and the synthesis of imagination and, finally, the subproblem of the identity between schematism in its cognitive expression and schematism in its aesthetic expression. In each of the five chapters that make up this dissertation, an answer to each of these problems will be developed, taken as layers to deepen the answer to that more general question about imagination.
The fundamental theses that we defend concern the essential role of imagination in each of these schematic activities, which respectively express their theoretical and aesthetic character. With regard to cognitive schematism, we defend the thesis, in line with that of some interpreters, that the schema is not so much a representation merely produced by the imagination, but is the product of a procedure of this faculty, therefore from its spontaneous nature. The schema is the transcendental determination of time from an a priori synthesis of the imagination. The schema results, therefore, from a procedure that is linked to the figurative synthesis as exposed in the Deduction. This synthesis, directed towards the inner sense (which is the condition of all our knowledge), takes place according to the unity of the category, which is, in the same process, exposed in intuition, that is to say, exposed in the inner sense, namely, the time. This determination of time by a synthesis of the imagination according to the unity of the category translates the unity of the category into temporal sequences, therefore in sensible terms. The category is then sensified.
With regard to the schematism without concepts, of the aesthetic experience, we defend that, since there is not, in aesthetic reflection, a determined concept that gives unity to the judgment of taste, the sensification must be restricted to the sensification of the mere unity of composition, without which the unity of the judgment of taste is not possible. In this case, the sensification is in process, not of a determined concept, but of the representation of that unity of composition represented by the judgment of taste, which must be the very rule sought by the faculty of reflective judgment, and which is linked to the subjective purpose for which this faculty is guided. It is necessary that the imagination act, in this process, in the very maintenance of the mental state, without which the unity of the judgment of taste does not present in the very feeling, which is based, in turn, on that same mental state, represented by the predicate of the judgment of taste.