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Descartes had radicalized the Platonic-Aristotelian conceptual topology of imagination in his mathematical natural science, which was rapidly adopted over the next century. But the empiricist treatment of images as weak representations of sensation and the tendency of empiricists and lesser rationalists to conceive mathematics as rational produced the modern split between imagination and reason that ultimately led to the Romantic rebellion. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) nevertheless recognized that imagination was not just weakly reproductive but actively constructive and synthetic. Empiricists had overlooked what produces the most basic regularities and continuities of experience, especially the fundamental coherence of space–time appearance that is required for any kind of mathematics and natural science. This led to his mature critical-transcendental philosophy, which argued that imagination in its transcendental uses synthesizes into a unified whole the manifold of sense experience and then "schematizes" concepts in the particular appearances in that manifold. Less technically: even before understanding can commence its work, the field of sensation has to be produced by a basic structuring function of imagination. Only then will ordinary experience appear as a connected whole and make sense in terms of cause, effect, and other explanatory concepts. Kant then used this kind of transcendental psychology of imagination to explain how human beings can experience the world as purposeful, beautiful, and awe-inspiring, without having to understand these concepts as purely subjective. He was reluctant, however, to ascribe ethical functions to imagination.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_7

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