Just as the ideality of objects of sense as phenomena is the only way of explaining the possibility of their forms admitting of a priori determination, so, also, the idealism of the finality in estimating the beautiful in nature and in art is the only hypothesis upon which a critique can explain the possibility of a judgement of taste that demands a priori validity for every one (yet without basing the finality represented in the object upon concepts).
SS 59.Beauty as the symbol of morality.
Intuitions are always required to verify the reality of our concepts.
If the concepts are empirical, the intuitions are called examples:
if they are pure concepts of the understanding, the intuitions go by the name of schemata.But to call for a verification of the objective reality of rational concepts, i.e., of ideas, and, what is more, on behalf of the theoretical cognition of such a reality, is to demand an impossibility, because absolutely no intuition adequate to them can be given.
All hypotyposis (presentation, subjectio sub adspectum) as a rendering in terms of sense, is twofold.Either it is schematic, as where the intuition corresponding to a concept comprehended by the understanding is given a priori, or else it is symbolic, as where the concept is one which only reason can think, and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate.In the latter case the concept is supplied with an intuition such that the procedure of judgement in dealing with it is merely analogous to that which it observes in schematism.In other words, what agrees with the concept is merely the rule of this procedure, and not the intuition itself.Hence the agreement is merely in the form of reflection, and not in the content.
Notwithstanding the adoption of the word symbolic by modern logicians in a sense opposed to an intuitive mode of representation, it is a wrong use of the word and subversive of its true meaning;for the symbolic is only a mode of any intrinsic connection with the intuition of sentation is, in fact, divisible into the schematic and the symbolic.Both are hypotyposes, i.e., presentations (exhibitiones), not mere marks.Marks are merely designations of concepts by the aid of accompanying sensible signs devoid of any intrinsic connection with the intuition of the object.Their sole function is to afford a means of reinvoking the concepts according to the imagination's law of association-a purely subjective role.Such marks are either words or visible (algebraic or even mimetic) signs, simply as expressions for concepts.The intuitive mode of knowledge must be contrasted with the discursive mode (not with the symbolic).The former is either schematic, by mean demonstration, symbolic, as a representation following a mere analogy.
All intuitions by which a priori concepts are given a foothold are, therefore, either schemata or symbols.Schemata contain direct, symbols indirect, presentations of the concept.Schemata effect this presentation demonstratively, symbols by the aid of an analogy (for which recourse is had even to empirical intuitions), in which analogy judgement performs a double function: first in applying the concept to the object of a sensible intuition, and then, secondly, in applying the mere rule of its reflection upon that intuition to quite another object, of which the former is but the symbol.In this way, a monarchical state is represented as a living body when it is governed by constitutional laws, but as a mere machine (like a handmill) when it is governed by an individual absolute will; but in both cases the representation is merely symbolic.For there is certainly no likeness between a despotic state and a handmill, whereas there surely is between the rules of reflection upon both and their causality.Hitherto this function has been but little analysed, worthy as it is of a deeper study.Still this is not the place to dwell upon it.In language we have many such indirect presentations modelled upon an analogy enabling the expression in question to contain, not the proper schema for the concept, but merely a symbol for reflection.
Thus the words ground (support, basis), to depend (to be held up from above), to flow from (instead of to follow), substance (as Locke puts it: the support of accidents), and numberless others, are not schematic, but rather symbolic hypotyposes, and express concepts without employing a direct intuition for the purpose, but only drawing upon an analogy with one, i.e., transferring the reflection upon an object of intuition to quite a new concept, and one with which perhaps no intuition could ever directly correspond.Supposing the name of knowledge may be given to what only amounts to a mere mode of representation (which is quite permissible where this is not a principle of the theoretical determination of the object in respect of what it is in itself, but of the practical determination of what the idea of it ought to be for us and for its final employment), then all our knowledge of God is merely symbolic; and one who takes it, with the properties of understanding, will, and so forth, which only evidence their objective reality in beings of this world, to be schematic, falls into anthropomorphism, just as, if he abandons every intuitive element, he falls into Deism which furnishes no knowledge whatsoever-not even from a practical point of view.
