Alfred,
I know you're going away for several days but would be most interested to pursue the direction you opened with the following passage:
By the way, it may interest philosophically minded readers that Kant
used the term "affinity" in the understanding of it being "the ground
of the possibility of association of the manifold [phenomena] in so
far as it lies in the object". He differentiates "empirical" (as
above) from "transcedental" affinity of which the former is a sequel
while the latter has its foundation in the"unity of
self-consciousness". (KrV A113f.) So this word use has a tradition
which appears quite general. All the while I clearly refute Kant's
metaphysical apparatus and the idea that transcendental affinity
should follow necessary and enduring law. Affinity can only in
anthropocentric and self-aggrandizing fiction be "a necessary effect
of a synthesis in the Einbildungskraft which is grounded a priori in
rules" (A123).
This is clearly a very critical point in Kant's philosophy and one that was dealt with quite seriously by both Hegel and Peirce. Yes, Kant distinguished two forms of synthesis of imagination (Einbildugskraft). One of my favorite passages from the Critique of Pure Reason is found in Kant's discussion of the "the schematism of the pure concepts of understanding" (A137 - A147) Here Kant distinguished "images" by which he meant psychological images (reproductive imagination), such as the image of a tree or a dog or the moon, from schemata, which are the product of imagination directed at "the unity of the determination of sensibility." (A140) Within the framework of the kantian dualism of phenomena/noumena, and faced with the need to guarantee an object for the categories of thought, Kant proposed the schemata as the intuition of that unknowable world; essentially a negative image contituting the possibility of a unity of sensibility and understanding that had been sundered with the insistence on the cogito as the source of all certainty. Of these schemata Kant wrote, "This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly like ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze." (A142) One of the greatest cop-outs in the history of Western Thought. Throwing in the towel on a problem that Hegel only a few years later would provide the seed that Marx and those who followed in that tradition would plant firmly in the ground of practice yielding little by little the fruit of understanding what Kant properly called "real modes of activity" of what he termed "schemata".
In the Critique of Judgement Kant based his entire theory of the Beautiful on an elaboration of the schemata of pure understanding. Here the separation between sensibility and understanding dissolves. Hegel wrote: "The capital feature of Kant's Criticism of the Judgement" is, that in it he gave a representation and a name, if not even an intellectual expression, to the Idea. Such a representation , as an Intuitive Understanding, or an inner adaptation, suggests a universal which is at the same time apprehended as essentially a concrete unity." (Shorter Logic, Sec. 55) In other words, Hegel credited Kant with having stumbled across (or having been forced by his own compulsive rationality to concede the existence of) a form of what is referred to in the dialectical tradition as concrete universals. Peirce trod similar ground and like Hegel found the ultimate unifying ground for the possibility of abductive inferences based on the recognition of what you are calling affinities in a cosmic teleology.
The appeal to Kant's schematism is quite broad. Marcuse used it in Eros and Civilization to propose the the resolution of the alienation of which Freud despaired in "Civilization and its Discontents". In " Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man" Mick Taussig appealed to Kant's schemata to explain what happens in Amazonian curing ceremonies that make use of the psychedelic root, yage, "It seems to me that the dialogic relationship between healer and patient in the yage night is something like the schematism, that the polyphony therein is the schematism in vivo--existing thus neither in the interiority of the mind nor in the hidden and profound depths of the soul. In their coming together, bringing misfortune to a head, healer and patient articulate distinct "moments" of knowing such as the noumenal with the phenomenal and do so in a socially active and reactive process that also connects quite distinct forces of flux and steadiness, human and despair, undertainty and certainty." (462-63)
ummm. . . these thoughts themselves don't reach resolution but I think any attempt to appeal to Kant's schemata to buttress a theory of affinities must at least confront the Hegelian critique directly and in terms of that critique itself. This because the notion of schemata is only necessary if one one has already separated what is known from the one knowing.
Paul H. Dillon
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