This presentation of a procedure of the imagination for providing an image for a concept is what I call the schema for that concept. (B 179–80).120
And:
The schema is to be distinguished from an image. (B 179).121
Then comes the surprising sentence:
The schema of a pure concept of the understanding cannot be brought to an image at all. (B 181)
The first consequence of this [367] is that the idea of the schematism that was to be evinced precisely for the pure concepts and categories of the understanding has been overcome.
To a schema—the sensibilization of a concept—there belongs an image. In fact, it is the very purpose of the sensibilization, or schematization, to provide an image for a concept. The question is: What do we mean by “image”? To start, Kant calls these five dots (• • • • •) an image of the number five, without explaining, here or anywhere else, what the phenomenon of an image is. Is it possible at all for a number to have an image in the sense of a copy? Obviously not, since the number five does not look anything like these five dots. In fact, the number five has no “look” at all. Therefore, these five dots are in no way an image in the sense of a copy. And likewise, “schema” cannot mean “image” in this case, precisely because later on Kant will separate this image of the number five from the schema of a number.
In order to pursue this idea of an image of the number five and a possible copy of it and to briefly illustrate Kant’s way of presenting it, let us try to clarify to what degree there is such a thing as the sensibilization of number. We will stick with the example of the number five.
This “5” and “V” here on the chalkboard are even less an image of the number five than these five dots are. We call these things here [“5” and “V”] numeric signs. But on the other hand, the five dots are more than a “sign” of the number. They have a very definite relation to “five”—although not to “five” in the sense of this thing [“5” or “V”] here on the
120. [Heidegger omits the word allgemeinen before Verfahren, i.e., “general” before “procedure.”]
121. [Heidegger omits doch before Schema (while Guyer and Wood do not translate it). The use of doch (“certainly”) in this sentence is to emphasize the difference between Bild, an image that is a copy of a specific thing, and Schema as the rule governing the sensibilization of a concept. Whereas an image-qua-copy-of-something “aims at an individual intuition” (“einzelne Anschauung . . . zur Absicht hat”), a schema has as its aim “the unity in the determination of sensibility” (B 179).]