Hegel's Theory of Imagination

CHAPTER 6 Memory, the Artist’s Einbildungskraft, Phantasie, and Aesthetic Vorstellungen (Lectures on Aesthetics)

CHAPTER 6 Memory, the Artist’s Einbildungskraft, Phantasie, and Aesthetic Vorstellungen (Lectures on Aesthetics) The only place in which the word Einbildungskraft arises in the Phenomenology of Spirit is in a passage in which Hegel is explicitly distancing his philosophy from the celebration of creative artistic genius. His distancing is based on a Romantic movement’s misuse of Einbildungskraft in their Phantasie, and on his belief that we must avoid such misuse when we are trying to understand the forms (Vorstellungen) of experience. Since the Phenomenology of Spirit is the science of experience, its concern is precisely the development of a proper grasp of these forms of experience and of how representing (vorstellen) works. Therefore, a close examination of the role of Einbildungskraft in Phantasie, and how the Romantics failed to understand that role in their poetic representing (vorstellen) is essential for our subsequent discussion of the role of die Einbildungskraft and das Vorstellen in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The first key player in this discussion is Memory. MEMORY We recall that in the 1830 Philosophy of Spirit lectures, representation (Vorstellung) has three moments: recollection, imagination (Einbildungskraft), and memory. Memory is the transition from representation to thought. 103 ‫ﱠ‬ The paragraph in which Hegel discusses the objective, absolute authentication through signs is the same one in which he introduces memory (¶458). The right place for the sign is that just given: where intelligence— which as intuiting generates the form of time and space, but appears as recipient of sensible matter, out of which it forms ideas—now gives its own original ideas a definite existence from itself, treating the intuition (or time and space as filled full) as its own property, deleting the connotation which properly and naturally belongs to it, and conferring on it another connotation as its soul and import. This sign-creating activity may be distinctively named “productive” Memory (the primarily abstract “Mnemosyne”); since memory, which in ordinary life is often used as interchangeable and synonymous with remembrance (recollection ), and even with conception and imagination, has always to do with signs only. (Enc.Phil.Spir. ¶458, 213) Memory is the activity that (a) retains the meaning of names, (b) recollects the meaning of a given tone, and (c) is mechanical insofar as we can memorize a sentence and repeat it without understanding it. Memory reenacts the earlier moments of recollection and imagination , but it also differs from these earlier moments. Memory repeats the activity of recollection in that we take into our mine (Schacht) a sensible intuition—the tone of voice expressing a name. Just as in recollection another external intuition can invoke the reproduction of the image in the mine, in memory an external intuition—the tone—solicits for memory representations from the mine. There is however a difference between memory and recollection. Instead of the recollection of a simple image, memory recalls a name. A name, unlike an image, is complex in that memory’s representations bear the trait of the imagination’s work. Memory involves the repeated traversing of the associational pathways of the imagination. Hearing a word or a sequence of words causes the mind to reproduce universals. These are not images but orders of their association. What is called forth by memory, or what bodies-forth as a memory is not a temporally and spatially detached image, but a representation (Vorstellung). It is a synthesis that no longer necessarily depends on an image. As sign-making Phantasie it is still picture thinking (vorstellen), but as the creation of names, it is independent of images. Recollection, in contrast, always has to do with the reproduction of images. Also, although recollection and memory are the same in the sense that in each the reproduced representation is familiar to me, recollection makes 104 Hegel’s Theory of Imagination something subjectively familiar to me (and potentially only to me), whereas memory concerns socially accepted, objective universals. In memory, the sign is recognized by others. When something becomes familiar to me through memory, I am learning to communicate in my culture and language. What is remembered belongs to the world of intuited, shared utterances, and includes all the potential and actual particularizations of that universal sign into other people’s particular experiences of it. I am a member of the waking Spirit. I belong to the community with a self-reflective, communicative imagination. Recollection is private; memory is both private and public. The place of the...