Imagine

Imagine. D. N. Rodowick (University of Chicago) Imagine. Only one word. Yet, there are worlds of meaning and process expressed in this deceptively simple expression. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, presents a number of suggestive meanings, both transitive and intransitive: to project a schema as a plan for future action (“Let’s imagine a book of essays on Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy”); to take into consideration in thought as a mental image or a picture; to picture in the mind things not real or present to perception; to think, consider, or ponder; to speculate or theorize about things not known with certainty, but also to create or to fancy, perhaps with wild abandon. No less important is “Imagine!” expressed as an imperative, a request, or exhortation: “Imagine there's no heaven / It's easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us, only sky” (Lennon 1971). It is often difficult to separate or distinguish these actions in particular instances of usage, and this heterogeneity is one of the most significant powers of imagining or imagination. Finally, I would suggest that we never imagine from the standpoint of a single temporality. As these various definitions suggest, imagining is subjective, projective, and historical. The past, present, and possible or potential futures are all dynamically interrelated, and in addition, within this temporal context memory is always in conversation with imagination. Accounting for the powers of imagination is one of the most important problems for philosophical anthropology, and yet, despite an expansive literature, these powers remain incompletely understood. And, like judgment, imagination has its failures and limits as well as its flights of originality. My recent book, An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities, examined the role of judgment in the arts and humanities, but there is no Rodowick 2 judgment without imagination. In fact, aesthetic judgments would not arise if not inspired by imaginative responses to art works and novel situations. Nor, of course, is creation possible without imagination. The originality of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which have occasioned as much criticism as admiration, resides in her conviction that the elements of an original political philosophy inhabit Kant’s third Critique, as if a restless sleeper anxious to be awakened. And just as judgment is reconsidered here in relation to politics, Arendt also suggests that in many senses, politics and aesthetics are inextricably linked. In my book on Arendt and the humanities, I read the Lectures to draw out and define what I call the operations of judgment as activities fundamental to teaching and research in the arts and humanities. In my contribution here, I want to reorient my reading toward the activities of imagination. Just as Arendt’s Lectures redirect our understanding of judgment in quite original directions, I believe that there are also important lessons about imagination waiting to be brought into clearer focus. For example, a renewed emphasis on imagination reframes Arendt’s arguments about thinking and moral considerations. Without the capacity to exercise and apply imagination, there is no possibility for critiquing and revising one’s beliefs, ideas, or form of life. Lack of imagination, or reticence or refusal to apply one’s powers of imagination, is in turn a sign of ethical obstinance and the inability or refusal to entertain contrary ideas or beliefs. A related danger is an overactive imagination fueled by “alternative facts” that if unchecked serve to form an active consensus around a fantasy. Imagination is not fantasy, however. Acts of imagination are always anchored to perceptual reality, and indeed what Arendt would call a factual reality, though this reality is modifiable in highly dynamic ways, especially though activities of invention and the proposition of counterfactuals. Even if not Rodowick 3 addressed directly, the Lectures are nonetheless attentive to these problems. In any case, an important political question raised by the Lectures is how to free oneself from the temptation to associate only with others who reinforce what one already believes? How to communicate with others who lack the will to achieve broadmindedness or to revise their beliefs? The question of imagination first appears in the Seventh Session of the Lectures in a discussion of the value of an enlarged thought to critical thinking that “by the force of imagination . . . makes others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen. To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting” (Arendt 1992, 43). This is Arendt’s picture of an intersubjective political imagination where solitary thought is set loose to explore as widely as possible the perspectives and opinions of others. No one was less traveled than Kant. Yet he imagined and conceptualized a world spectator engaged in thought with the significant actions and events occurring across continents. To go visiting in this sense requires the mobility of a world historical imagination. Kant and Arendt imagine this mobility as a kind of disinterested spectatorship, but passive observation is not the only characteristic of this mental voyaging. The enlargement of thought is also a way of recontextualizing one’s ideas and beliefs, and thus revising them. Arendt often insists that one can only judge from within a community of others. Imagination comes into play because this broad-mindedness must include the potential to anticipate and compare one’s judgments with the possible as well as actual judgments of others who may be distributed elsewhere in space and time, and thus may be able to respond to us directly or not. In this manner, the world-spectator judges not as an individual in the presence of others, but rather as an aspirant for a community to come. Rodowick 4 There are three intriguing ideas embedded in this brief but important citation. One suggests the inherent mobility of imagination, that it is capable of reaching out to the external world before returning home again. In imagination, there is also a certain porousness between internality and externality where the force of imagination moves in waves that advance and recede between the subjective and objective worlds, and it may well be that in imagination, there is no strict border between those worlds. Third is the suggestion that imagination is fundamental to forming political relationships. In its openness to others, imagination is a primary condition for forging a political community, no matter how small, capable of reaching consensus and acting in concert. Importantly, this enlargement cannot function in isolation or solitude, for it needs the presence of others for its space of operation and expression. In other words, through what Arendt calls representative thinking the actor must engage with a polis (whether possible or actual), become part of it, and negotiate its place within the polis through public acts of criticism. To think in the place of others is to know how to project oneself into the perspective of others. To visit others through imagination, whether they are present or not, means being receptive to their ideas and opinions, to try to understand in what degree you together belong to a common community. At the end of the Tenth Session, Arendt proposes a definition of imagination as recall, of making present to mind objects that are absent. This operation of reflection, as Kant puts it, turns external sensations into internal representation or “objects” of inner sense. As I have suggested, this is a kind of mobility passing from the external to the internal and back again bringing the mind into direct contact with the sensate world. In the Eleventh Session, Arendt adds that the operation of reflection is what prepares sensations for judgment, which is concerned with representations not sensation. As external experience Rodowick 5 comes into contact with imagination, a kind of dematerialization occurs as it is “mirrored” in thought as a representation. The operation of reflection is framed by Kant (and Arendt) by the distinction between reproductive and productive imagination. Arendt examines this distinction in the opening of her seminar on imagination: Imagination, Kant says, is the faculty of making present what is absent, the faculty of re-presentation: “Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present.” [Kant 1963 B151] Or: “Imagination (facultas imaginandi) is a faculty of perception in the absence of an object." [Kant 1974 §28] To give the name "imagination" to this faculty of having present what is absent is natural enough. If I represent what is absent, I have an image in my mind--an image of something I have seen and now somehow reproduce. (In the Critique of Judgment, Kant sometimes calls this faculty "reproductive"—I represent what I have seen—to distinguish it from the "productive" faculty—the artistic faculty that produces something it has never seen. But productive imagination [genius] is never entirely productive. It produces, for instance, the centaur out of the given: the horse and the man.) (Arendt 1992, 79) In other words, Arendt understands productive imagination as the combination of two empirical ‘representations’ that do not otherwise exist in reality, rather than as free creation.1 Imagination is characterized as reproductive because a perception has been disconnected or freed from its object and internalized as an image in the mind. The 1 In § 32 of his Anthropology, Kant asserts that “The power of imagination, however, is not as creative as one would like to pretend. We cannot think of any other form that would be suitable for a rational being than that of a human being. Thus the sculptor or painter always depicts a human being when he makes an angel or a god. Every other figure seems to him to include parts (such as wings, claws, or hooves) which, according to his idea, do not combine together with the structure of a rational being” (Kant 2007, 287). Rodowick 6 operation of reflection is no doubt an important step in the formation of judgments. Yet Arendt’s emphasis on reproductive imagination may obscure the powers of productive imagination for political philosophy. Revisit, then, Kant’s words “On the power of imagination” in §28 of the Anthropology: “The power of imagination (facultas imaginandi), as a faculty of intuition without the presence of the object, is either productive, that is, a faculty of the original presentation of the object (exhibitio originaria), which thus precedes experience; or reproductive, a faculty of the derivative presentation of the object (exhibitio derivativa), which brings back to the mind an empirical intuition that it had previously. – Pure intuitions of space and time belong to the productive faculty; all others presuppose empirical intuition, which, when it is connected with the concept of the object and thus becomes empirical cognition, is called experience” (Kant 2007, 278). Are pure intuitions of space and time either images or representations in an ordinary or empirical sense? In her outline of the decisive points presented in the seminar on imagination, Arendt first suggests that no perception is possible without imagination. Perhaps this is another way of saying that just as there is in principle no pure cognition, there are also no purely objective perceptions. All human perception is to greater or lesser degrees gapped and incomplete, subject to many misapprehensions and misinterpretations. The human mind is neither a reflective mirror nor a recording machine—imagination is a bridge between memory, thought, and perception that affects them all, making them mobile, dynamic, and open to revision and remodeling. Without imagination there would be no freedom to create as thought and perception would both be enslaved as it were by empirical conditions. If we accept this idea, then there is, first, no strict distinction between reproductive and productive imagination, and second, the powers of imagination could be considered as fundamentally productive. Productive imagination can create images of things Rodowick 7 that have never existed, but in turn, reproductive imagination can also decontextualize, recontextualize, and remodel actual experiences. Call this free creation using our perceptual experiences as its material. Among other activities, what imagination produces are schemata for cognition and examples for judgment. In this way, Kant insists that imagination and cognition are not distinct; or in other words, there is no knowledge purified of imagination because the operations of sensibility and the understanding are synthetic. Intuition is also what bridges, indeed synthesizes, external and internal experience, and in turn, imagination and cognition. These ideas are presented in Arendt’s discussion of the schematic powers of imagination, and here another important question is raised: In what sense is a schema something like an image? Schemas provide abstract patterns for recognition. Arendt compares them to Plato’s characterization of eidos as ideal Form, for example, the abstract and unperceivable Tree by which we recognize singular entities as trees, of having the common formal properties of trees in all their manifold diversity. In Arendt’s reading, although schemas exist in thought only, they are nonetheless a kind of doubly absent image—they are neither produced by thought nor do they derive from sensibility, and least of all, Arendt writes, are schema “the product of an abstraction from sensibly given data. It is something beyond or between thought and sensibility; it belongs to thought insofar as it is outwardly invisible, and it belongs to sensibility insofar as it is something like an image” (Arendt 1992, 82). Perhaps this is the best way of characterizing pure intuitions of space and time, but a more radical conclusion is also possible. It may well be the case that perception does not produce “mental representations.” Imagination does not effect a “representation” of empirical experiences, it remodels and transforms them. Imagination is a priori productive—it produces, it creates as an act of freedom unconstrained by external Rodowick 8 conditions. In this respect, of course, it may also lead us to err, to misunderstand and misinterpret, and for these reasons judgment is required to assess the fancies of imagination. While imagination enables us to travel in space—to go visiting as Arendt relates—in §34 of his Anthropology, Kant also suggests that through imagination, we move in and through time. Imagination is a site where memory, the faculty for making the past present, comes into contact with a faculty of foresight that makes future possibilities and potentialities present to thought. Memory and foresight connect in the present the no longer and the not yet. I consider these two absences of past and future as comprising two dimensions of virtuality that are not themselves perceptions nor are they perceivable. Kant puts it this way: Provided that they belong to sensibility, both of them are based on the association of representations of the past and future consciousness of the subject with the present; and although they are not themselves perceptions, as a connecting of perceptions in time, they serve to connect in a coherent experience what no longer exists with what does not yet exist through what presently exists. They are called the faculties of memory and divination, of respicience and prospicience (if we may use these expressions), where one is conscious of one’s ideas as those which would be encountered in one’s past or future state. (Kant 2007, 291) Alternatively, one of the powers of imagination is that it is free of this temporal association—it creates possibilities for making present whatever it can create or envision, whether in relation to the past or to the future. This is a crucial idea that foregrounds the possibility of bridging historical imagination and prophetic imagination. Political actions Rodowick 9 would not be possible if actors could not envision possible futures out of the failures and successes of the past. I am thinking here of the beautiful and oft-quoted line from Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech at the National Mall in 1963—“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice”—which is often invoked as an example of prophetic imagination at work. King’s faith is congruent with Kant’s view of human history as guided by providence, a recurrent theme of his later essays on human history. For example, in responding to criticism from Moses Mendelssohn, in his essay “On the Common Saying: ’This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice,’” Kant defends his argument that human progress may be interrupted but it is never broken off, and that evil is self-destructive by nature. While the action and aims of individuals may and will contradict and erode the arc of human progress toward a peaceful cosmopolitan existence, human progress in the whole is unstoppable in its evolution as long as an idea of reason guided by providence prevails in human actions. But what if progress in human history could not be assured? What if human history is rather a series of contingent and often catastrophic events? In Arendt’s understanding, time is not a chronological and homogenous continuum extending smoothly in causal chains from past to future. Rather, she adapts from her friend Walter Benjamin the perspective that history is a series of accidents and emergency situations, and that each moment of time is not a repetition but rather an unexpected opportunity to begin anew if only we are capable of imagining novel responses to these opportunities. Here faith in providence confronts Arendt’s understanding of natality as an event where thought and action coincide with creation, and especially, a new freedom for creation. While not discussed in the Lectures as such, it is important to consider imagination as a space where freedom can be exercised in thought and action, because, as Kant argues, Rodowick 10 of the looseness of its connection to the external sensory world as well its disconnection from the temporal association of respicience and prospicience. It is a startling discovery to develop the capacity to view the world and human history not in their continuities, but rather as an experiential matrix composed of infinitely improbable events, of accidents happy and unhappy, and contingent rather than determinate forces. Of course, this does not mean that we can expect positive historical change to occur automatically and of itself nor does creation come out of nothing. This is where imagination sets loose formidable powers that appear almost miraculous. The physical world is more closely ruled by laws and continuities though even this domain is subject to accidents and evolution. Yet, in contrast to nature, human history is full of surprising events. In her essay “What is Freedom?, Arendt writes that “the miracle of accident and infinite improbability occurs so frequently that it seems strange to speak of miracles at all. But the reason for this frequency is merely that historical processes are created and constantly interrupted by human initiative, by the initium man is insofar as he is an acting being. Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect ‘miracles’ in the political realm” (Arendt 2006, 168-169). Historical and political imagination prepare us to take advantage of the possibilities of thought and action offered up by these “miracles” of natality. Human actors are never wholly free, but they are freely acting, or can become so, in their improvisational responses to novel and unforeseen events and experiences. Before concluding, it might be advisable to consider how imagination can inspire nonsense and delusion as well as works of significant aesthetic and social accomplishment. There is a popular tendency to think of imagination as something uniformly positive and as an always progressive enhancement of human freedom. Kant himself is not so incautious. Rodowick 11 Ever the Enlightenment thinker and advocate of reason, in his writing on imagination Kant is equally guided by the unhappy conviction that mundus vult decipii—the world wants to be deceived. Arendt shares this opinion in many of her writings although it is not a dominant theme in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, perhaps because of her interest in acts of judgment as informing the formation of political communities as well as a belief in the value of civic engagement. Alternatively, Kant warns in his Anthropology that “We play with the imagination frequently and gladly, but imagination (as fantasy) plays just as frequently with us, and sometimes very inconveniently” (Kant 2007, 285). Imagination is often the source of misperception, misunderstanding, fantasy, and creative falsehoods, and therefore every act of imaginative creation requires evaluation, meaning reasoned judgments that help us to identify pure fancy and critique destructive illusion. And here another point needs reemphasizing. There is no perception free of imagination. In order to create, the imagination must get the material for its images from the senses, which can also include recollections. “But these images,” Kant warns, “according to the memories formed of them, are not so universally communicable as concepts of the understanding” (Kant 2007, 279). Invention can mix with experience to form sensations open to varieties of misinterpretation and misprision. Imagination can inspire, but it can also foment nonsense, that is, expressions and representations devoid of sense and ungrounded by fact. At the same time, imagination is never completely devoid of reality. It must create from and with material provided by the senses, experience, and memory. There is a danger here as imagination always hovers ambiguously between fact and belief. As Kant puts it, “the power of imagination, which puts material under the understanding in order to provide content for its concepts (for cognition), seems to provide a reality to its (invented) intuitions Rodowick 12 due to the analogy between them and real perceptions” (Kant 2007, 280). Misunderstanding or incomplete understanding occurs when one is unable to grasp and communicate representation and to unite it with thought and measure it against the competing perceptions of others. In this manner, imagination provides “irrational” support for beliefs that are not otherwise grounded in reality. “The offenses (vitia) of the power of imagination,” Kant continues, “are that its inventions are either merely unbridled or entirely ruleless (effrenis aut perversa). The latter fault is the worst kind. The former inventions could still find their place in a possible world (the world of fable); but ruleless inventions have no place in any world at all, because they are self-contradictory. . . . [R]uleless fantasy approaches madness, where fantasy plays completely with the human being and the unfortunate victim has no control at all over the course of his representations” (Kant 2007, 290-91). These offenses can lead to manipulation and violent outcomes. This is a recurrent and deeply unhappy lesson often confirmed by our current political circumstances, both locally and geopolitically. Kant warns that there are political as well as aesthetic artists, whose aim is to guide and rule the world “by deluding it through images in place of reality; for example, the freedom of the people (as in the English Parliament), or their rank and equality (as in the French Assembly), which consist of mere formalities. However, it is still better to have only the illusion of possessing this good that ennobles humanity than to feel manifestly deprived of it” (Kant 2007, 291). Freedom and equality might serves as ideals of human society in these contexts, yet they can still be pragmatically or even cynically applied as hierarchical controls to popular power. One might say the same of concepts such a democracy and self-determination whose meanings and applications in government and experience are equally contested today in the competing domains of ideology, belief, and history. Rodowick 13 In conclusion, in her reading of Kant’s writings on judgment, politics, and history, Arendt offer four arguments that I feel are fundamental to her understanding of imagination. First is the claim that imagination is integral to human experience. Neither thinking nor judging can be purged of imagination. Indeed, both would be impoverished if not nourished by imagination. The imagination is something like a pure a priori faculty— nothing comes before it and everything descends from it. A more obvious point to emphasize is the importance of the powers of imagination with respect to creativity in whatever domain. Attention to the arts is certainly significant here, but imaginative creation is also essential to world-building as an exercise of human freedom. Here Linda Zerilli directs us to come crucial lines in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: “In his discussion of ‘aesthetic ideas’ Kant describes the imagination as ‘very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it’ (CJ, §49, p. 182). Indeed, ‘we may even restructure experience’ and ‘[i]n this process we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical [i.e., reproductive]) use of the imagination; for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature.’ (Ibid., emphasis added)” (Zerilli 2005, 179). Imagination is also essential to those processes where we find solidarity with others and freely join them in the formation of communities of interest. Through imagination, in the form of representative thinking, agents can come to agreement, no matter how temporary, of how the world is to look and who belongs together in it. They picture a world to which they aspire in common and act collectively to bring it into being. Rodowick 14 Finally, a thought concerning the imagination of coming communities. Even if human progress cannot be assured, it would not even be possible without the prospective powers of imagination, its powers of fashioning the desire for new communities and new worlds to which we can aspire. We might call this utopian imagination, the anticipation of worlds that do not yet exist, but which may still come into being through our collective political acts. To return to the words of John Lennon, “Imagine there's no countries / It isn't hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too / Imagine all the people / Livin' life in peace / You may say I'm a dreamer / But I'm not the only one / I hope someday you'll join us / And the world will be as one (Lennon 2001). Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 2006. “What is Freedom?” In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 142-169. New York: Penguin Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. The Hague: Nijoff. Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In Anthropology, History, and Education, edited by Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Translated by Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1963. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. K. Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. On the Common Saying: ’This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice’.” In Kant: Political Writings. Edited by Hans Reiss. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lennon, John. 1971. “Imagine.” Track 1 on Imagine. London: Apple Records. Rodowick, D. N. 2021. An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rodowick 15 Zerilli, Linda M. 2005. “’We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt.” Political Theory Volume 33, Number 2 (April): 158-188.