Schematism
As Schematismus philosophical positions are referred to the scheme as an abstract form to assign and action to produce it a fundamental role. "Scheme" is a term that has always had numerous meanings: In the ancient Greek understanding, in addition to the usual lexical translations "signs" and "accidentals", geometric figures, dance steps, forms of argumentation and forms of presented speech are schemes. In late antiquity, the scheme was particularly important in grammar and rhetoric . The Latin equivalent is figura . With Kant, schematism becomes a pivotal term in epistemology , which connects sensuality and understanding and denotes the creative action that creates schemata.
The term scheme gains another fixed meaning in the 20th century in cognitive psychology , where it describes regularities of thought that represent typical situations as knowledge in the long term and with the inclusion of schema variables (see scheme (psychology) ).
Francis Bacon
As a philosophical program, schematism first appears in modern times with Francis Bacon . Here it is the demand to research the “schematism of things” or the “meta-schematism” of nature, and to make it useful for understanding and manipulating material objects. Bacon, who goes back to an older use of the term scheme by Democritus , assumes that regularities, "formae", which humans consider to be determinations of nature, essentially arise from his own imagination and thereby the real qualities and relationships between the Cover components of matter and thus the reason for changes in natural and technical processes. The disregard of the 'formae' and the investigation of the schematism that regulates the existence and change of things is thus an essential goal of the knowledge of nature, since it explains the rules according to which things or states can be created, maintained and changed. To implement this schematic of nature, Bacon suggests binary distinctions (e.g. dense / loose, heavy / light).
Immanuel Kant
For Immanuel Kant, the schemata of the imagination are the connecting third between the perceptions of sensuality and the concepts of the understanding (KrV B 177). They serve the determining power of judgment (subsumption) as well as the reflective power of judgment. This mediation has a transcendental character because it connects the two tribes of knowledge, sensuality and understanding with one another (KrV B 29).
Critique of Pure Reason
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The so-called Schematism chapter forms a difficult to access but central part of the epistemology of the Critique of Pure Reason . Kant treats sensuality and understanding as separate but mutually dependent sources of knowledge. While sensuality takes in perceptions that are subject to the forms of perception space and time, the mind operates with concepts . Just as space and time are forms of perception that necessarily underlie it as a structure, the structure of the understanding, which underlies all judging, imagining and also experience , consists of the “pure concepts of the understanding” or categories . These are necessary in order to combine individual ideas into judgments (“guidelines”). According to Kant, experience is only possible through the connection of ideas in a consciousness. The categories only become knowledge when they are presented according to the view of space and time. In this way they can create the content of the consciousness of the knowledge subject and constitute appearances. ("Transcendental Deduction").
Since the pure concepts of the understanding do not in themselves contain any tangible components, a transcendental schematism is necessary as mediation , which enables the categories to be applied to the forms of perception. Sensuality and understanding are linked through judgment and imagination. The relationship between imagination and schematism is represented by Kant in such a way that “the scheme of sensual concepts ... embodies a product and, as it were, a monogram of the pure imagination a priori”. (KrV B 181) Schematism is thus an achievement of the power of judgment , which allows a term to be made “clear”.
According to Kant, the respective “use of a term” includes “another function of the power of judgment”, whereby a particular object is summarized or subsumed under this same general term as a unit (KrV B 93, B 176). “If this condition of the power of judgment (schema) is missing, all subsumption falls away; because nothing is given that can be subsumed (grasped) under the term (KrV A 247). ”The scheme is an idea of how an object would have to be structured in the perception in order to be able to fall under a certain term. It is, as it were, a guide for the productive imagination to construct the representation of the object under the conditions of perception.
- The " idea ... of a general process of the imagination to provide a concept with its image, I call the scheme for this concept " (KrV B 179 f.).
This guide differs from the definition. For example, the circle can be defined as a flat geometric figure from the set of all points on a plane that are at a constant distance from a given point on this plane (the center point). To construct a circle with a compass and ruler, the compass must be set to the radius and then the line must be drawn around the center point on a flat surface - this rule should create an object that always meets the definition. The schema here is therefore the general and abstract conceptual picture, never the concrete one.
In order to understand what constitutes transcendental schematism and thus the interaction of sensuality and understanding, it must be determined how the definitions of the categories can be translated into a prescription for the imagination, which enables the categories to be viewed as characteristics or relationships both to imagine and to recognize them. This is achieved through the interpretation of the pure concepts of the understanding as determinations of time; space is only recognizable through the idea of something being given at the same time and is therefore secondary to time.
- “Time as the formal condition of the manifold of the inner sense, hence the connection of all ideas, contains a manifold a priori in the pure intuition” (KrV B 177).
Critique of Judgement
Since the schemata are the products of the application of the concepts of the understanding to the inner sense of time and are the condition for every empirical intuition, the question arises whether the schematism also has a function in judgments that cannot be constructed in the intuition, that is in reflective judgments, for example “this is a despotic state” or “the thought is beautiful”.
In order to clarify this, Kant goes into the Critique of Judgment on the possibility of the “intuitive way of thinking” and divides it into a schematic and a symbolic one. Because the “despotic state”, which itself has no view, can be represented as a symbol by an analogy, for example by a hand mill, since “it is ruled by a single absolute will (...). Because there is no similarity between a despotic state and a hand mill, but there is between the rules to reflect on both and their causality. ”( Immanuel Kant: AA V, 35 ) The hand mill is, even as an idea, however again subject to the scheme , so for example inconceivable without the scheme of the persistence of a sensual object. Since in Kant the symbol is always based on an intuitive analogy, the following applies to the schema: the analogical is the schematic in the symbolic .
"But knowledge for experience contains the Schematism, either the real Schematism (transscendental), or the Schematism according to the analogy (symbolic)."
But a perception can never be properly assigned to an idea (KdU § 59 B 254), because the idea is by definition transcendent, that is, it transcends the perception. Likewise, evaluative judgment is an idea without perception, and the taste judgment is not one of knowledge, but one of judgment, like reflective judgment as a whole, "which is also called the facultas diiudicandi." (KdU, Introduction, First Version, v )
When judging the beautiful and sublime, the intellectual act of schematism is therefore not possible, rather the exemplary validity is decisive for it (KdU, § 22, B 67), which leads into the area of ideas in which the rigidly regular schematism of perception is not can be applied. Although we can mark many things with the general claim to beauty, beauty in itself only becomes fleetingly apparent. The effect here is perhaps only a quickly passing one, a reality that cannot be grasped by the schema, which mysteriously relates to ontology, the science of being, “a fleeting view of something that does not appear”, writes the political one Philosopher Hannah Arendt , in her posthumously published texts on Kant's political philosophy.
With the fleetingness of beauty, the contrast between the static, structuring conceptual understanding - as with every visible object - and the unsematised, reflective observation, which can be demonstrated using the example of experience and evaluation, becomes apparent.
See also
literature
- Gerd Irrlitz: Kant manual. Leben und Werk , 3rd A. 2015, Metzler, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02613-2 , esp. Pp. 217–220 ( Schematism of pure understanding concepts ) and 323f ( The Typics of Practical Judgment ), with further literature.
Web links
- Schematism. In: Rudolf Eisler: Kant-Lexikon. 1930.
- Scheme. In: Rudolf Eisler: Kant-Lexikon. 1930.
Individual evidence
- ↑ W. Stegmaier: Scheme, Schematismus. In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy. Volume 8, p. 1246.
- ↑ Th. Herrmann: Schema, Schematismus. In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy. Volume 8, p. 1260.
- ↑ W. Stegmaier: Scheme, Schematismus. In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy. Volume 8, p. 1248.
- ↑ Immanuel Kant, Collected Writings. Ed .: Vol. 1-22 Prussian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 23 German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, from Vol. 24 Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Berlin 1900ff., AA V, 35 .
- ↑ Immanuel Kant, Collected Writings. Ed .: Vol. 1-22 Prussian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 23 German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, from Vol. 24 Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Berlin 1900ff., AA XX, 332 .
- ↑ Hannah Arendt: Judging. Texts on Kant's political philosophy. 1st edition. Piper, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-492-02824-1 , p. 106, para. 1.