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Preface
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Preface THE BASIC CONCERNS OF THIS BOOK Several years ago I became interested in the fact that although the imagination (die Einbildungskraft) is absolutely central to Hegel’s predecessors Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the imagination appears to play a relatively small role in Hegel’s thought. The word occurs only once in what is perhaps the best known of Hegel’s works and that which put him clearly on the philosophical map of the time, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Why, when Sensation, Perception, Understanding, and Reason all had chapters devoted to them in that work, did the imagination not likewise appear? My research has shown that the imagination is not only absolutely central to Hegel’s thought, it is also one of the central places from which a proper defense of Hegelian speculative science can be made. My argument involves close analysis of the role of the imagination in Hegel’s three series of lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit from 1803 to 1830, and of its role in his Lectures on Aesthetics and in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The Introduction begins with an overview of why the imagination is important. Then I look at why we should look to Hegel’s view of it. This involves looking at what the role of the imagination was for Kant, Fichte, and Schelling and then at how the imagination appears in Hegel’s first publication , the 1801 Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. Following that, in the spirit of Hegel, the book as a whole is divided into three parts. ix ﱠ Part One, “Imagination in Theory,” begins (chapter 1) with a look at Hegel’s theory of the imagination in the context of his criticism of the philosophies of subjective reflection. I look at his criticism of those philosophies of the period that were based on a subjective ontology as opposed to a substance ontology. The main textual focus of the chapter is Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge. I also make use of Hegel’s Differenzschrift, considering Fichte’s philosophy for contrast and Schelling’s for his influence. The reason Hegel criticizes subjective philosophies is that, at the time he published his first works (the Differenzschrift and Faith and Knowledge), Hegel was under the influence of Schelling. Hegel’s productive imagination (productive Einbildungskraft) is essentially what Schelling calls the “indifference point.” The indifference point is a productive self-sundering, and it is at the heart not only of all subject-object relations but of the creative process of the Absolute. Indeed, it is identified as Absolute Reason. In chapter 1, I discuss this sundering imagination. I also discuss the difference between a one-sided reconstruction from that sundering, on the one hand, and a proper reconstruction from that sundering, on the other. I show, in conclusion, why for Hegel the philosophies of subjective reflection are locked within a logic of loss. The subsequent chapters of Part One deal with how this changes for Hegel, and why. As Hegel’s thought moves away from Schelling and adopts (while transforming) a more Fichtean subject ontology, the imagination is specified as a moment within subjective spirit. It is therefore in the Jena System manuscripts, in the two Geistesphilosophie (Philosophy of Spirit) lecture series (1803–04, and 1805–06), that the imagination turns up in detail. After an introduction to dialectical identity in chapter 2, an analysis of the role given to the imagination in these two Geistesphilosophie is given in chapter 3 and chapter 4 respectively. The role that Hegel gives to the imagination in these works is particularly interesting to sort out, since the relationship between what would eventually become distinct parts of Hegel’s methodology—the logical, the phenomenological, and the Scientific investigation of spirit—are not clearly defined before 1807. Hegel’s final discussion of the imagination in his 1830 Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit (discussed in chapter 5) does not suffer as much from the confusion we see in his earlier versions of the Philosophy of Spirit. Hegel’s thought on the role of the imagination is clearer by this time and thus “moments” or phases of the imagination are discussed in detail. This clarity is due, I argue, to the fact that by 1830 Hegel has the Phenomenology of Spirit behind him. That is, having figured out what work a phenomenology is supx Preface [3.235.243.45] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:13 GMT) posed to do—namely, prepare one for speculative science—he is...