The Role of Imagination in Constituting Objectivity According to Kant

Kant believes providing objectivity is one of the most essential functions of imagination. The role of imagination in establishing objectivity includes both the epistemic determinant judgment related to understanding, and the aesthetic reflective judgment. Kant constantly places imagination in connection with matters such as understanding, self-consciousness and/or pure intuition, or common sense, and reflective judgment. Imagination has always maintained a core role in relation to other faculties of cognition. This role could be simply regarded as the possibility of constituting objectivity. This paper seeks, in the first step, to critique pure reason by addressing how imagination in relation with understanding serves as a source of objectivity and then provides answers as to how imagination in its unity with common sense and the operation of reflection presented in the critique of the faculty of judgment, provides an objective reference to them, without which, the common validity for aesthetic-taste judgment will be lost. Hence, in Kant’s view, imagination has a requisite role in providing objectivity.