Kant's definition of the imagination, B151

This was posed on Philosophy Stack Exchange on June 10th in 2024.

The post was:

In paragraph B151 of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), he defines the imagination as follows:

Imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition.

However, from the very first line of the Transcendental Ascetic, intuition is defined as everything related to the cognition of objects. These two definitions taken together introduce something of a contradiction, as one cannot define an object outside of intuition when intuition itself is defined as relating only to objects. It seems, however, that in intuition is used throughout the text basically synonymously with in sensibility. Am I correct is claiming that intuition in the CPR in fact has two different meanings, one when referring to something as an intuition, and another when speaking of something in intuition?

My answer:

I think the main misunderstanding here originates from the given translation. I will therefore try to resolve the confusion by taking the German original as I am German native. First, I don’t see Kant saying at the beginning of the “Transzendentale Ästhetik” that only intuition has any relation to objects. He says that intuition is that representation through which cognition relates to objects immediately. Then he adds that through sensibility objects are given to us, through the understanding they are thought. So the opening distinction is not “object vs. no object” but “given vs. thought” and more precisely “immediate relation vs. mediate relation.” Your question generates confusion because it implicitly replaces “immediate relation to objects” with “all relation to objects.” I don’t think that this stronger claim was Kant’s intension. But other logical coherent interpretations are of course always possible.

Now apply that to B151. The sentence imo must be parsed as: “Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, [einen Gegenstand] auch [ohne [dessen Gegenwart in der Anschauung]] vorzustellen.” So what is negated by “ohne” is not “Anschauung” as such, but the object’s “Gegenwart in der Anschauung”. In plain German: Kant is not saying that imagination represents an object “outside intuition altogether”; he is saying that imagination represents an object although the object is not presently there for intuition. A maybe better German paraphrase is: “Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, einen Gegenstand auch dann vorzustellen, wenn der Gegenstand der Anschauung nicht gegenwärtig ist.”

Here “Gegenwart” means “Anwesenheit / Zugegensein”, not “the present” in a merely temporal sense, and not some abstract ontological “presence.” Contemporary dictionaries around Kant’s time make this very clear: Adelung says “Anwesend” is still fully current for “gegenwärtig”; “Anwesen” is glossed by “in meiner Gegenwart”; “Abwesend” is “nicht gegenwärtig” and “Daseyn” in one sense is literally “die Gegenwart an einem Orte.” So in B151 the relevant meaning is the object’s being-there for intuition, its intuitive or sensible presence.

Kant himself confirms this meaning in two other texts btw. In the Prolegomena, §8, he says that intuition is a representation “as if” it depended immediately on the presence of the object, and then explicitly raises the problem how a priori intuition is possible. His answer in §§9-10 is that a priori intuition is possible only because what is given a priori is not the thing itself, but the form of sensibility. And in the Anthropologie, §15, he formulates the distinction almost schematically: “Sinn” is the faculty of intuition in the object’s presence; “Einbildungskraft” is intuition without the object’s presence. Then §28 repeats the point: imagination is the faculty of intuitions even without the object’s presence, either productive or reproductive. So B151 is not an isolated odd sentence; it is the Kantian distinction between “Sinn” and “Einbildungskraft”.

This way there is also no contradiction with Kant’s later claims about cognition. In B151-52 he says that imagination belongs to sensibility, because only under that subjective condition can it provide a corresponding intuition to concepts; but because its synthesis is spontaneity, it can determine sensibility a priori. Then in §22 he says explicitly that thinking an object and cognizing an object are not the same: cognition requires both concept and intuition. So imagination does not give us knowledge of objects outside sensibility. It gives or better: re-gives intuitive material under the forms of sensibility, while understanding thinks that material under concepts.