So I am reading about book by Terry Pinkard on German idealism. It quotes Kant as follows: "But the figurative synthesis, if it be directed merely to the original synthetic unity of apperception, must, in order to be distinguished from the merely intellectual combination, be called the transcendental synthesis of imagination. Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present... But in as much as its synthesis is an expression of spontaneity, which is determination and not, like sense, determinable merely, and which is therefore able to determine sense a priori in respect of its form in accordance with the unity of apperception, imagination is to that extent a faculty which determines the sensibility a priori; and its synthesis of intuitions, conforming as it does to the categories, must be the trancendental synthesis of imagination. This synthesis is an action of the understanding on the sensibility; and is its first application- and thereby the ground of all its other applications- to the objects of our possible intuition. As figurative, it is distinguished from the intellectual synthesis, which is carried out by the understanding alone, with the aid of the imagination." Critique of Pure Reason, 1251-252

Pinkard comments on this by saying, "Hegel was especially taken with Kant's conception of a 'figurative synthesis' which transforms what would otherwise be non-normatively significant sensations into normatively significant intuitions; it is in figurative synthesis that we generate the pure intuitions of space and time (as representations of possible objects) and thereby the form of the appearing world itself."

I like to start with the Greeks and to consider the opposition between Parmenides and Heraclitus. Pythagoras has had a mystical philosophy of mathematics, but did not express the hierarchy of math within a larger framework. Parmenides claimed all was one Being, the infinite through the illusion of the finite. Heraclitus claims however that the finite was infinite and all was infinite flux. Aristotle tried to find some middle ground here but had a less than cosmic answer to the whole of reality. Phenomenology, the school of thought that started with Kant I believe, says that reality is being and flux together, thereny taking the steps of the ancient Greeks to a third point. Phenomena, I believe, means that reality is both becoming and being, both subjective and objective, and both phenomena and noumena. Although we are biological beings, there is a sense of us being more than that, of us being rational beings. Perhaps phenomenology is not a true doctrine and we are literally monkeys on a flying rock. But phenomenology for me indicates that there is something mysterious in us and in nature, something that Spinoza felt too, although perhaps he tried to define it too much. At the end of thought, we can only think of things outside us and have our concepts about our own concepts. The question that is at the heart of metaphysics is: am i the originator of my reality (thru my thoughts) or am I completely controlled by forces outside me