Hegel's Theory of Imagination

CHAPTER 7 Imagination and the Medium of Thought (Phenomenology of Spirit “Preface”)

CHAPTER 7 Imagination and the Medium of Thought (Phenomenology of Spirit “Preface”) The Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel’s science of experience. Therefore, his focus is not artistic Vorstellen. Rather, he is concerned with the more encompassing , phenomenological Vorstellen. While the former deals only with Phantasie and its products, the latter deals with all forms of representing experience including such forms as scientific paradigms and political revolutions. In all Vorstellungen prior to Absolute Knowing, the comprehending and disclosing movements of the imagination are central but they only manifest as the experience, as the content of thought, not as the self-realizing Concept. The Concept works dialectically through each new level in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but the imagination’s sublating (aufhebende) work remains latent. What is revealed at each new level is a new shape of universal experience, a new phenomenological Vorstellung. When the Concept is finally realized to have been at work throughout the Vorstellungen and their transitions up the phenomenological ladder, the sublating work of the imagination becomes explicit, and we pass beyond merely representing our experience (Vorstellen) to full speculative comprehension of it. In this sense, we already have an answer to the question why the imagination is not a chapter heading alongside sense-certainty, perception, understanding , and reason: Hegel’s notion of imagination is so central to the whole book that it figures implicitly at every moment of the dialectic. But we need to look more closely at this. 137 ‫ﱠ‬ The only passage in which the term Einbildungskraft arises in the entire Phenomenology of Spirit is in fourth last paragraph in the Preface (paragraph 68). In it we find a critique of genius and bad forms of philosophizing. In place of the long process of culture towards genuine philosophy , a movement as rich as it is profound, through which Spirit achieves knowledge, we are offered as quite equivalent either direct revelations from heaven, or the sound common sense that has never laboured over, or informed itself regarding, other knowledge or genuine philosophy; and we are assured that these are quite as good substitutes as some claim chicory is for coffee. It is not a pleasant experience to see ignorance, and a crudity without form or taste, which cannot focus its thought on a single abstract proposition, still less on a connected chain of them, claiming at one moment to be freedom of thought and toleration , and at the next to be even genius. Genius, we all know, was once all the rage in poetry as it now is in philosophy; but when its productions made sense at all, such genius begat only trite prose instead of poetry, or, getting beyond that, only crazy rhetoric. So, nowadays, philosophizing by the light of nature, which regards itself as too good for the Notion [Concept],1 and as being an intuitive and poetic thinking in virtue of this deficiency , brings to market the arbitrary combinations of an imagination [Einbildungskraft] that has only been disorganized by its thought, an imagery that is neither fish nor flesh, neither poetry nor philosophy. (PoS ¶68, 42; PdG 64) In this passage, Hegel shows his disdain for the supposed philosophies and art forms that submit concepts to imaginative synthesis without attention to the Concept. The Concept is Reason, and central to it is the activity of sublation . I have argued that imagination is the inwardizing and externalizing activity at the heart of this sublating. So the failure of these “philosophers” and “artists” to concern themselves with the Concept is really a failure of their imagination. Just like the Mnemonic practitioners whom Hegel later criticizes in 1830, these “philosophers” and “artists” use the imagination in a misguided way. They have abandoned an interpersonally complex, systematic Phantasie in favor of immediate, “direct revelations from Heaven,” and of arrogant common sense. Neither genius nor common sense re-members its content as and through the complexity of Spirit’s self-interpreting development. Neither, therefore, generates the Vorstellungen that adequately express our experience. There are a number of issues to be drawn out of this passage. 138 Hegel’s Theory of Imagination HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF GENIUS The notion of philosophical and artistic genius was a well-developed one in philosophy in Hegel’s time: Kant discusses it in the Critique of Judgment (CJ 174–89) and Schelling refers to the creative genius in the last part of the System of Transcendental Idealism. Hegel too discusses it...