The Imagination

Immanuel Kant’s philosophy (1747-1803) was in several respects the epoch-making corpus in European rationalism because it introduced the imagination as the key operator in human consciousness (human subjectivity). Kant’s essays in philosophy limited human claims on knowledge of divinity, separated professions of religious faith from those of scientific knowledge and pushed scientific practice in the direction of cognition or theory. They pushed morality, as the epitome of practical reason, into the key role in religion and linked it to the exercise of individual freedom. They also made a fundamental claim on reality, making it conform to the human mind rather than the other way around.

These revolutions in worldview and practice were largely accomplished by Kant’s theory of psychological schemas, anticipatory templates or patterns people use to connect very general categories of understanding such as space and time with specific moments of sensory intuition. These schemas are inner moments of imagination or consciousness.

Our objective with this website is to justify a way to reintroduce the Kantian framework into contemporary culture and society. We think today’s science very readily can study anticipatory conversational moments, which are always undertaken in freedom. This study, once adequately founded, communicated and underway, should have far-reaching consequences. Conversation, after all, is the fundamental unit of society, and if society learns to control it, it will have gained control of itself. Currently science, Kant might say, is in possession of no theory of conversation, no elegant and simple, understandable and explainable, wholly useful understanding of reality itself.

We think we can get this understanding.

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.