Imagination versus Intellect? (DRAFT)

This piece is an attempt to investigate certain aspects of the enlightenment thought. We tend to take categories and concepts put forward by the thinkers of the 19th century at their face value. There is reason to believe that these have been arrived at after considerable intellectual effort. Two such categories that of imagination and intellect were deployed by Marx and Hegel in their writings I will be arguing that the way Marx takes up these Hegelian categories needs to be probed further.

Consider this paragraph of Hegel; “The concept of Monarch is therefore the hardest for ratiocination that is for the method of reflection employed by understanding. This method refuses to move beyond isolated points of view and deductive argumentation. Consequently it exhibits the dignity of the Monarch as something deduced, not only in its form but in its essence. The truth is, however, that to be something not deduced but purely self originating is precisely the concept of Monarchy. Akin then to this reasoning is the idea of the treating the Monarch’s right as grounded in the authority of God, since it is in its divinity that its unconditional character is contained.”

Marx replied to this; “In a certain sense every inevitable existent is purely self originating; in this respect the Monarch’s louse as well as the Monarch. Hegel, in saying that, has not said something special about the monarch. But should something specifically distinct from all other objects of science and philosophy of right be said about the Monarch then this would be real foolishness, correct only in so far as the one person idea is something derived only from the imagination and not the intellect” (both paragraphs from Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

Needs to be thought over I think. Hegel is urging going beyond isolated categories and finite points of view and deductive argumentation. What Hegel is urging is to move beyond “understanding.” Marx here by calling to the intellect again seems to be pushing Hegel back to understanding. However the great thinker does concede that this one person idea and self originating has a validity or correctness if it is derived from imagination. Let me respectfully submit here that historically there exists in the long transition of kinship societies to territoriality institutions like Rakhi among the Sikhs. These institutions embodied the idea or prelude as ideational reality prior to conquest or occupation of territory. (See Indu Banga, the Agrarian System of the Sikhs) These institutions were the driving spirit of kinship society till the 18th century. Another anthropologist Maurice Godelier has argued for a category ideal – real to understand the institutions of kinship society. The one person concept emerges from the dynamics of these institutions. The Monarch exhibits the ideality of the transition from kinship to territorial societies. He reflects the arbitrary, caprice filled moment in which perhaps the finality of decision to occupy the territory is rooted. The kinship system perhaps on its own will not make the transition but would rely on that one person to make the move. Since it is such a big step it evokes divine authority to conjoin with the temporality of the sovereign to carry out a task which it itself dare not undertake.

Marx points out that a great deal of confusion prevails here. According to him it is not the actual person who brings his actual content into existence, objectifies himself and leaves behind the abstraction of ‘person quand meme’. Thus in this process instead of recognizing the actualization of the person as the most concrete thing the state is to have the priority “In order that the moments of concept, individuality attain a mystical existence. Rationality does not consist in the reason of the actual person achieving actuality but in the moments of the abstract concept achieving it.”

Here again it looks like that the categories of rationality and reason seem to be employed as categories of “understanding”. In his philosophical notebooks Lenin did point out that the mystical does come in when figuring out things like “causation”.(V.I.Lenin,Philosophical Notebooks,vol.38,PPH)

As Hegel himself pointed out “but as we have seen, the abstract thinking of understanding is so far from being either ultimate or stable, that it shows a perpetual tendency to work its own dissolution and swing around into its opposite. Reasonableness, on the contrary, just consists in embracing within itself these opposites as unsubstantial elements. ”Thus the reason world may be equally styled mystical – not because thought cannot both reach and comprehend it, but merely because it lies beyond the compass of understanding.” (Hegel, Science of Logic)

Further Hegel elaborates on imagination, “The main point is that productive imagination is a truly speculative idea both in the form of sensuous intuition and in that of experience which is the comprehending of the intuition”. He takes the polemic much further, “there are those, who when they here talk of the power of imagination do not even think of the intellect, still of reason, but only of unlawfulness, whim and fiction (See Marx on Monarchy) ‘They can not free themselves from the idea of a qualitative manifold of faculties and capacities of the spirit. It is they above all who must grasp that the In – itself of the empirical consciousness is reason itself, that productive imagination as intuition and productive imagination as experience are not particular faculties quite sundered from reason. They must grasp that this productive imagination is only called intellect because the categories, as the determinate forms of experiential imagination are posited under the form of infinite, and fixated as concepts which also form a complete system within their own Sphere. Productive imagination has been allowed to get by easily in the Kantian philosophy, first because its pure idea is set forth in a rather mixed up way, like other potencies, almost in the ordinary form of a psychological faculty though an a priori one and because Kant did not recognize reason as the one and only a priori whether it be of sensibility of intellect or what have you. Instead he conceived of the a priori only under formal concepts of universality and necessity. As we shall see he turned the a priori back into a pure unity that is one that is not originally synthetic.” (From Hegel, 1802 Faith and knowledge)

My argument is that Hegel here both in terms of defining mystical and in defining imagination and intellect sets forth some very concrete arguments. His concern is to go beyond understanding as a means of grasping a reality like Monarchy. Further he makes a case very concretely for not separating the concepts of imagination and intellect. Marx on the other hand as we have seen in the Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right sees the two categories of imagination and intellect in a dichotomy. In the Critique at least Marx does not take into account the way that Hegel has integrated the concept of imagination and intellect. For us to figure out why Marx uses these two categories in dichotomy we would need to probe his work a little further.
(The quotations are from i) Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right by Karl Marx(Internet Edition of www.marxists.org website ii) Indu Banga's Agrarian System of the Sikhs and Maurice Godelier's work on anthropology unless cited in the text.)