Hegel’s Theory of Imagination
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SUNY series in Hegelian Studies
William Desmond, editor
Hegel’s Theory of Imagination
JENNIFER ANN BATES
State University of New York Press
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Bates, Jennifer Ann, 1964–
Hegel’s theory of imagination/by Jennifer Bates.
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1. Imagination (Philosophy) 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. I.
Title II.

Chapter 6 Memory, the Artist’s Einbildungskraft,
Phantasie, and Aesthetic Vorstellungen
(Lectures on Aesthetics) 103
PART THREE
Synthesis and Disclosure: The Phenomenology of Spirit
Chapter 7 Imagination and the Medium of Thought
(Phenomenology of Spirit “Preface”) 137
Notes 155
Bibliography 185
Index 193
viii Contents
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

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 particu-
larly interesting to sort out, since the relationship between what would even-
tually 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 sup-
x Preface
posed to do—namely, prepare one for speculative science—he is able to dis-
tinguish between a phenomenological account of the imagination and a sci-
entific, speculative account of it. In fact, in 1830 Hegel expects his readers to
have done the work involved in a phenomenology of spirit in order to be able
to read his Philosophy of Spirit. He expects his readers to have thoroughly com-
prehended the role of picture-thinking in their thinking, or, as I phrase it, he
expects his readers to have “thought the imagination through to its end.”
Because Hegel’s account becomes clearer and clearer, there is a pro-
gression in clarity about the imagination’s activity from chapter 1 through to
chapter 5. I chose to keep the obscurities in my exegesis, in order to avoid
explaining the earlier texts through the later ones. I hope in this way to have
provided some insight into the development of Hegel’s thought about the
imagination. Nonetheless, to alleviate some of the obscurity I have indicated,

not always artistic; Phantasie (which I keep in the German) is always artistic;
and Einbildungskraft or “imagination,” means one or more of three things: (a)
the overall notion of imagination which incorporates the three moments
explained in the 1830 Philosophy of Spirit, namely reproduction, symbol, and
sign making;
1
(b) the middle moment of representation; (c) in the Aesthetics,
the specifically reproductive imagination, which can be “passive” but is never
creative or artistic. The difference between these terms is crucial for under-
standing Hegel’s Aesthetics. I therefore emend Knox’s translation throughout
my discussion of it.
My discussion of Hegel’s Aesthetics in chapter 6 concerns in particular
the following: Hegel’s account of the Artist’s Phantasie; the Artist’s products
and how the inwardizing and externalizing activity of reproductive
Einbildungskraft and Phantasie in Vorstellungen manifest in the History of Art;
Hegel’s concept of das poetische Vorstellen (the poetic way of looking at things);
and finally, the difference between Hegel’s concept of poetry as a form of
Romantic art and German Romanticism’s theory about universal poetry.
By the end of Part Two, we have clarity concerning the context of the
single appearance of “Einbildungskraft” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The
context is that of his criticism of German Romanticism. For Hegel, the
German Romantics do not grasp how the Concept works in Vorstellen.Our
discussion reveals that what this means is that the German Romantics never
grasped the role of imagination as the sublating (aufhebende), spatiotemporal-
izing, internalizing, and externalizing activity of a historically developing
Spirit. The failure of the German Romantics is therefore a failure of the imag-
ination, a failure to understand its role in thinking and creativity. This is made
particularly clear in Hegel’s discussion of their concept of irony. With regard
to the question why the word only comes up once in the book—we have to
look next more closely at the role of Vorstellen.

nature in general, as Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature shows us. But cognition of the
Concept occurs only with the inception of imagination. The reason for this is
that the imagination is the first cognitive form of Aufhebung. Imagination is
the sine qua non of our knowledge of the Concept in nature and ourselves.
The dialectic of the imagination is a spatiotemporal one, so under-
standing how the imagination works within the production of representa-
tions (Vorstellungen) implies coming to grips with the history of Spirit and
its self-presentations.
The final section of Part Three concerns how the consciousness that
develops in the Phenomenology of Spirit arrives at a point where it thoroughly
comprehends the role of picture-thinking in its thinking. Consciousness has,
as I phrase it, successfully “thought the imagination through to its end.” It is
in the transition from Religion to Absolute Knowing, the final transition in
the Phenomenology of Spirit, that consciousness grasps for itself the sublating
role of its own imagination. In other words, in the presence and subsequent
death of the absolute representation of Absolute Spirit (the God-man; in
Christianity, Jesus), consciousness grasps the nature of its own picture-
thinking. In so grasping, it attains what Hegel calls Absolute Knowing. Since
time is central to all the discussions of the imagination in the Philosophy of
Spirit lectures, I conclude with a discussion of the time of the Concept. Since
time, history, our intentions, and our actions are not separable, for Hegel com-
prehension of the Concept makes possible the highest form of ethical life.
Chapter 7 thus provides the answer to the question that got me started
on this project in the first place: the imagination does not appear as a chapter
Preface xiii
heading or dialectical moment within the Phenomenology of Spirit because the
proper thinking through of reflection necessitates the proper thinking through
of representation. Imagination, as the central moment of Vorstellen, is at the
heart of the very movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The imagination
is the moment of synthesis, of comprehension, but as such it is also the

The wedding of epistemology and ontology in Hegel’s philosophy
means that a conventional sign system is not arbitrarily set up. It is onto-his-
torically developed. It is the result of several levels of the mind, each a dialectic
xiv Preface
between subject and object, and time and space, developing into communally
experienced objects. As I show, especially in chapter 5, convention is a com-
prehensive folding of the imagination’s activity back on the mind’s previous
dialectical moments. The moment before we have shared signs in a conven-
tional sign system, is the moment where we have only subjective attempts at
making meaning. These attempts produce symbols. Symbols are not shared
information in the same way that signs are. Signs are systematic, whereas
symbols are not. But the sign rises out of repeated uses of symbols. A con-
ventional sign, before it becomes a dogma, is originally motivated by the
desire to make a purely subjective symbol intelligible.
The gathering up of experiences that eventually constitute a convention,
is therefore, originally an act of a self-conscious effort to communicate and
stabilize meaning into a system. The gathering up derives its necessity as
much from that self-conscious effort, as from the actual experiences that make
up the meaningful, conventional sign.The process of developing a convention
is both a subjective and a communal history. It is not an arbitrary exercise of
a single or a collective will.
A sign is thus best understood as an organic growth. It develops out of
the union of epistemology and ontology, of cognition and its objects. This
book discusses that growth in terms of the following. A convention arises
from the dovetailing of time and space; since the dialectical imagination pro-
duces images that endure and disappear, and since the dialectical imagination
is itself a consciousness that endures and disappears, the conventional arises
from imagination’s inwardizing, that is, from its taking in of intuitions, its
familiar recollections and its attempts at meaningful reproductions. Through
further dialectical reproductions, these first attempts at meaningful reproduc-

expressed in a conventional system. It does not exist for us, outside of the lan-
guage Hegel or we use to explain it. (As Hegel says, the ineffable is the least
interesting.)
2
As a result, even pure speculative philosophy has to be mediated
by and for every generation of Hegel students across many cultures and lan-
guages. It is necessarily open to its own development. That is not to deny the
existence of a logical system. Nor is it to deny that, in Hegel’s psychology,
there is a logic to the dialectical comprehension of one level of cognition in
another. It is to say that the significance of the Logic in history, and the sig-
nificance of those psychological comprehensions in our psychology, will be
spelled out differently at different times and places. Which is to say that the
Logic in history, and those psychological comprehensions, will spell their dif-
ferences out across time and space. There will be logic to those differences.
Time will tell.
TWO OBJECTIONS TO THIS WORK AND MY REPLIES TO THEM
There are two objections to the argument of the book that I would now like
to address. The first objection is that I have imposed an externally derived
notion of the imagination on Hegel’s texts. The objection is supposedly sup-
ported by the very fact I have picked up on, namely, that Hegel does not
discuss the imagination explicitly in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The second
objection is that there is no reason to privilege the imagination over other nec-
essary cognitive subprocesses whose absence would prevent thought. The
objection states further that Hegel explicitly claims that there are no presup-
posed determinants of our thought process; rather, according to him, thought
xvi Preface
is completely self-determining. The objection is that I have brought in the
imagination as a “hidden hand” that controls thought. I would like to reply to
these two objections separately.
With regard to the claim that I have imposed an externally derived

nology can work without key players in the construction of experience. The
psychology lectures show that the imagination is one of the key players. It is
no less important to our experience than are the senses, perception, under-
standing, desire, reason, or spirit. I show that it only stands to reason, that, if
the imagination is one of the key players in his psychology, it is also one of
several key players in his phenomemology. I show how it works in the
Preface xvii
Phenomenology, based on its role in the psychology. Thus, by looking at his
psychology, my book shows beyond a doubt that the imagination is a key
player in Hegel’s philosophy (even in the Logic, although showing that is not
a concern of this book).
But two important questions remain. Why is there no direct dis-
cussion of the imagination in the Phenomenology of Spirit? Is the imagination
the key player of the Phenomenology of Spirit? The answer to the first is, as I
show, that the dialectic of the imagination is so central to picture-thinking
(vorstellen) that it cannot be isolated as one of the moments to be con-
sidered. It underlies all phenomenological moments. Nor can its activity be
limited to picture-thinking, for the dialectic of the imagination is the
activity that presents objects, even logical ones, to us. The imagination is,
therefore, not the same sort of dialectical misapprehension as sense-cer-
tainty or understanding or reason is in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The
dialectic of the imagination, as the basis of representational thought is the
fundamental character of those moments. It cannot be addressed in the
same manner. Each chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit unravels a one-
sided dialectic precisely because consciousness at that stage has not grasped
the fundamental character of representation, at the heart of which is the
imagination. Each moment of the Phenomenology of Spirit moves on to the
next until it has thoroughly thought through the nature of representation.
Spirit thereby, in the end, comes to know how it appears to itself in space
and time, and as space and time. The dialectic of the imagination as the

inwardizing (zurücktreten) and externalizing, that are central to Hegel’s thought
and to the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Richard Kearney’s In the Wake of the Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in
Western Culture (London: Hutchinson Education, 1988) provides a his-
torical analysis of the use of and theories about the imagination, ending with
an account of its role in postmodernism. Hegel is mentioned in a single sen-
tence. Kearney’s failure to include Hegel even in his discussion of Kant and
post-Kantian idealism is one more indication that while much has been
written on Kant’s theory of imagination (an excellent example is Sarah L.
Gibbon’s book by that title [Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University
Press, 1994]), very little has reached the academic or general public about
Hegel’s theory of the imagination.
THE AUDIENCE FOR WHICH THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
Hegel’s Theory of the Imagination was written for academic readers in phi-
losophy in general, in the history of philosophy and/or Continental episte-
mology in particular, and for readers in psychology, as well as for
nonacademics interested in the activity of the imagination. Philosophically
the book fills a gap in post-Kantian philosophy; but its scope is wider since
most of Continental philosophy following Hegel cannot be thought without
Hegel, and this topic is central to his thought. For example, the philosophies
of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida rely extensively on their readings of
Hegel; an understanding of his theory of the imagination could change how
we read these philosophers. The book also sheds light on the ideals of the
Enlightenment and on German Romanticism. The complexity and depth of
Hegel’s insights makes this book important for anyone seriously interested in
understanding how central the imagination is to our every thought.
Preface xix

xxi
Acknowledgments

gious studies. (For example, the ancient Hebraic view was that the imagi-
nation, yetser, was linked to both creation and transgression.)
1
Many religions
use visualizations to engender insight into experience.
2
So why do a philo-
sophical investigation of it?
The fact is, the imagination has been taken up as a topic by almost
every major philosopher in the history of Western philosophy. As early as
Aristotle,
3
the imagination was viewed as playing a central role in how we
piece together the world. Its role in epistemology has a long and varied
history.
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When we consider the imagination epistemologically a key opposition
emerges: is it mimetic (merely reproductive of what is “out there” for us to
sense) or productive (that is, partially or even wholly creative of how the world
appears to us)? In the history of Western philosophy up until Immanuel Kant,
many philosophers held some version of the Aristotelian view that the imag-
ination is a secondary movement following upon perception of a thing, some-
thing like a perceptual echo in the mind. (Some went so far as to say it was
decaying sense impressions.) That is, its role was essentially reproductive, and
in the service of memory and reason. But despite any helpful, reproductive
role it might play, the imagination’s ability to combine things that did not go
together in our sense experience caused it to be regarded as an inappropriate
faculty to rely on for knowledge. It needed the corrective input of sense veri-
fication or to be tested for rational coherency, or both.
The view of the imagination as essentially mimetic was rejected in the