Art as Cognitio Imaginativa: Gadamer on Intuition and Imagination in Kant's Aesthetic Theory

Abstract

ion”.6 Recognition of this fact enables us to transcend the framework opposing intuition and concept (as well as the contrast of sensible and intellectual intuition based upon it). Once the privilege of immediacy is rejected, intuition need not be confined to the sensible given in perception. Hence, Gadamer concludes, “the concept of intuition is not really defined by its relation to the sensible”.7 Gadamer carries this conclusion over to art as well. The basis of the arts, he claims, is not to be found in the immediacy of sensible givenness, but rather in the presentation of the imagination (RB 160/KA 192). By aligning intuition with imagination instead of perception, Gadamer sees himself as following Kant’s lead in the third Critique. He appeals to the Kantian imagination, first, because it suggests a concept of intuition that does not endorse the dogma of immediate givenness. Intuition is not simply given, but must be built up through the encounter with the work of art. This prompts Gadamer to emphasize the power of imagination to synthesize intuitions and, in the case of art, to do so in novel combinations quite independent of a given object. Although a sensible particular, the work of art is a synthetic whole that communicates a totality of sense. Here it becomes possible to speak of the work of art as an ‘invitation to intuition’ that provokes much thought, but without allowing its meaning to be fully rendered in determinate concepts. By accepting such an invitation the spectator becomes essentially involved as one who is engaged with the work and participates in the process by which the intuitions are formed into an image. This re-evaluation of intuition is central to Gadamer’s retrieval of the Kantian imagination. As I argue below, this concept of intuition as a formative process is decisive for Gadamer’s attempt to reconstruct intuition as the function of imagination. Freed from the dogma of sensible immediacy, the originality of intuition is liberated by its appropriation to the productivity of imagination. Gadamer appeals to the Kantian imagination, second, because it invokes an experience of art that is not determined by concepts. According to the Kantian analysis this experience expresses an accord of the cognitive faculties that is not governed by a given concept. Being ‘without a concept’ means that the harmony achieved between imagination and understanding is free or spontaneous rather than determined. In ordinary cognition, where intuitions are subsumed by concepts, understanding rules over imagination. But in the experience of beautiful art, where imagination is released from conceptual constraints, it is the reverse. Here imagination produces a synthesis of intuitions that is not determined by the understanding and its concepts. Through the process of image-formation something comes to presence in the encounter with the work of art. Nevertheless, Gadamer is concerned that the role of intuition and imagination in the experience of art is misconstrued if it is utterly severed from language and concepts. “We live in the logos, and the logos, the linguistic