Hegel's Theory of Imagination (review)

Hegel's Theory of Imagination is intended as both an argument for the idea that Hegel has a theory of imagination and an explication of what Bates takes that theory to be. Against those who would cite its absence from the list of "faculties" that designate the first chapters of the Phenomenology—Sense Certainty, Perception, and so forth—as proof of disinterest, Bates argues that not only does the imagination play a role in the Phenomenology, but it plays the central role. It is, on her telling, both the protagonist and the ultimate object of that book, a book she takes to perform the task of bringing the imagination, the condition of the possibility of theory, into the light of day, thereby also constituting it as the kind of object susceptible to theoretical approach. "With the Phenomenology, Hegel has finally successfully worked out the dialectical nature of representation. It is because he has thought through the imagination, and now thinks through it, that his 'truly philosophical grasping' of the imagination, and of any other object, is now possible" (98).

Although Bates argues that we should read the Phenomenology as an epistemological and epistemologically transformative text—a claim that places her book squarely in the debate about that work's position within, as a propaedeutic to, or as superseded by Hegel's later systematic thought—Bates' central focus is not actually the Phenomenology. Much of the book (chapters 2–5) is occupied with the three sets of Philosophy of Spirit lecture notes. She launches her analysis in Chapter 1 with historical context for understanding Hegel's thought insofar as it develops out of and ultimately over and against the philosophies of subjectivity (Kant and Fichte). Given that Hegel's predecessors were much taken with the topic of the imagination, Bates argues, its absence in the Phenomenology is palpable and in need of explanation. Since the imagination makes more of an appearance in the Philosophy of Spirit lectures, Bates turns to these in order to track the development of Hegel's thought on the matter, a development that she equates with the emergence of what becomes his phenomenological mode of argument or presentation.

Bates charges Kant and Fichte, in Hegel's voice, with the "failure to reconcile thought and being" (17). The cipher for the reconciliation of thought and being in Bates' book is what she calls the "dovetailing of space and time" (as when she writes, for example, that the "self is nothing other than the dovetailing dialectic of space and time, folded back on itself, considered in terms of space," 67). Bates moves us through increasingly complex visions of the imagination as an inwardizing and externalizing form of cognition. She associates these functions with theoretical and practical reason respectively, the former as the work of apprehension and the latter as that of producing what is to be apprehended. This is initially a confusing trajectory, given Hegel's early focus on the individual imagination (chapters 2–4). As Bates shows in chapter 5, it becomes less so once the question of communication has become central: "In this way, the self that is the 'I' of language, is the 'we' of community, and the negation needed to create the symbol becomes the interpersonal otherness needed to create the sign" (100). Surprisingly, however, this move does not disrupt the narrative structure of the development of language, which Bates still presents as a transition from symbol-making imagination to sign-making imagination (81). Thus, the movement is from subjective and internal (or at least independent) work, toward symbolization and signification, and finally to language. It is in order to get this narrative on the table that Bates disrupts her otherwise mainly chronological presentation by presenting the three Philosophy of Spirit lectures together before turning to Hegel's phenomenological and aesthetic thought (chapters 6–7).

Although Bates doesn't thematize the relationship between the texts in this...