In contrast to that, Kant says of the imagination, “Imagination is the faculty [374] for presenting an object even without the object being present-now in intuition” (B 151). Here again, in the phrase “without the object being present-now,” we find the same fundamental lack of clarity. Does Kant mean “without the presence {Anwesenheit} of the influence [Einwirkung] of the object”? Or is it “without the object being seen and intended in its bodily presence”? (For good reasons, we necessarily interpret it in the second sense, even though Kant presumably thought it in the first and opposite sense.) So the imaginatio shows something, it provides an image (“image” in the sense our interpretation has finally established)—not in the sense of going out to something already there, but in the sense of Ein-bildung, forming-an-image.125 In conceptual, structural terms, the imaginatio provides a specific mode of [intentional] presence {Anwesenheit} for something that is not there. The image of the “five dots” is, as Kant says, a product of the empirical faculty of imagination. As I think the number “five,” I can always “bring visually to mind” the five dots; I can, freely and from out of myself, bring into a specific kind of [intentional] presence {Anwesenheit}, something that is not there.
By contrast, “the schema of sensible concepts (such as figures in space) is a product and as it were a monogram of pure a priori imagination” (B 181). The schema is a product of the imagination. With the concept “schema” Kant again oscillates, as he does with the concepts of depiction, intuition, sensation, and so on.126 “Schema” means both the image that springs from schematization and at the same time the schematization itself, or the rule of schematization, the rule governing the procedure of the synthesis speciosa.
Because our intuition is in principle sensible (B 151), the provision of an image, as it can be freely carried out in the imagination, is always referred to sensibility. But even the freest and least constrained imagination can serve up only visible aspects whose possibilities are somehow prescribed by the qualities of appearances in general. Therefore, that wherein the imagination’s image is formed is limited by what can possibly be given in sensibility in general.
A schema is the mode of the general procedure governing figurative synthesis. It is the provision of an image according to a rule, and the rule is prescribed by the concept that is to be sensibly depicted. [375] The rule says: The free, intuitive visualization [of the concept] must proceed in such a way that the intuitive aspect that is to be formed renders
125. [The German word for “imagination” is Einbildungskraft, literally “the power of imagining something,” creating fantasies, etc. Heidegger interprets the term as the power of forming or giving an image.]
126. [The following paragraphs have profited from a comparison of GA 21 with Moser, pp. 751ff.]