Transcendental imagination and intuitive understanding are the same faculty

Evidence

Kant recognized that we are necessarily driven towards this Idea; and the Idea of an archetypal (urbildlichen), intuitive understanding (Verstand) is at bottom nothing else than this same Idea of transcendental imagination, which we have discussed above. For it is the activity of intuiting; and at the same time its inner unity is nothing else than the unity of the understanding itself, a category still immersed in the field of extension but which will become understanding and category to the extent that it separates itself out of extension. Transcendental imagination is itself intuitive understanding (anschauender Verstand). — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 894

Categorization

• DEFINE: The decisive equivalence: imagination = intuitive understanding = archetypal understanding. A category still immersed in extension that becomes understanding by separating from extension — the genetic-formative account of plasticity.
• XREF: A category emerging out of extension and separating itself — formation arising from material substrate — maps onto emergent neural structure in brain plasticity discourse.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 894