Preparing the Particular: Arendt on the Imagination’s Role in Judgment
Nick Dunn
“There are two mental operations in judgment. There is the operation of the imagination, in which one judges objects that are no longer present, that are removed from immediate sense perception and therefore no longer affect on directly, and yet, though the object is removed from one’s outward senses, it now becomes an object for one’s inner senses…. This operation of imagination prepares the object for ‘the operation of reflection.’ And this second operation…is the actual activity of judging something.”
- Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (‘Twelfth Session,’ p. 68)
Arendt’s political interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics is generally considered to be wildly inaccurate. There is almost universal consensus among scholars that Arendt did not get Kant right, even if the result was something creative and interesting. In this passage, Arendt articulates a view of the role of imagination in judgment — one that I believe is entirely faithful to Kant. What’s more, there is reason to see this key insight as a crucial part of her political turn. That is, we can see Arendt’s recognition, per Kant, that the imagination is essential for judging as motivating her to consider the political import of the faculty of judgment.
Kant assigns many different functions to the imagination throughout his Critical philosophy. Some key tasks include what he calls ‘synthesis,’ the act of taking up and combining of what we encounter in sensation, and ‘schematization,’ whereby it sensibly represents the pure concepts of the understanding so that they can be applied to objects of experience. Imagination is also central for Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment, where it exhibits a certain level of creativity and freedom.
Kant ascribes to judgment the function of thinking particulars under universals. In the third Critique, he notably distinguishes between what he calls its ‘determining’ and ‘reflecting’ uses. In the first case, judgment subsumes concrete cases, which are given, under general rules. For example, I might think that an object before me is a spruce tree. In the second case, no such rules are present, so judgment must instead reflect on the particular as such and seek out a universal under which it might be placed. Think, for example, of the first time one sees a spruce tree and did not yet possess the concept.
Readers of Arendt might be more familiar with Arendt’s remarks on imagination in some seminar notes entitled ‘Imagination,’ which Ronald Beiner includes in his edition of the Kant Lectures. However, the above passage from the Twelfth Session of the lectures themselves is particularly instructive of her conception of imagination insofar as it is an essential activity for making judging possible. Here Arendt characterizes judgment as composed of two mental operations — the first is imagination, which “prepares” an object for judgment. The second is reflection, which, she claims, is the “actual activity” of judging.
The latter claim — provocative in its own right — expresses Arendt’s take on Kant’s distinction between determining and reflecting judgment. Elsewhere, Arendt more clearly contends that it is reflection which is not only paradigmatic of judging, but the truly interesting activity of the mind — one in which we render a verdict without any standards at our disposal, without any rules or instructions to guide us. I have argued that this is in fact Kant’s view, as well — and thus another way in which Arendt accurately reads Kant. However, my interest here is in the first claim.
I suggest characterizing the first claim as follows: insofar as judgment is the faculty of thinking the particular under the universal, imagination is the faculty of preparing the particular for judgment. Before judgment can subsume a particular under a universal, or reflect on it, it must be given a particular. Thus, we would be right to ask: where does a particular come from? For Arendt, as for Kant, the idea is that imagination produces particulars for judgment. Put another way: imagination provides the materials for judgment — without which, judgment would have nothing to judge.
We can consider what this looks like in a range of cases, from our ordinary perceptual judgments to moral and aesthetic judgments. Kant famously claims that imagination is a “necessary ingredient of perception.” We might fruitfully think of this alongside Kant’s most famous definition of imagination: namely, as “the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition.” The general thought is that we apprehend a myriad of sense impressions at different points in time; the imagination reproduces these so that they can be held together in a singular representation, which he calls an ‘image.’ It is this which we bring under an empirical concept in a judgment. For example, I take in the house in temporally successive moments by walking around it; by calling to mind past perceptions (even those from, say, five seconds ago), my imagination allows me to combine these into an image of the entire object — after which I can judge that ‘This is a house’ or ‘The house is made of brick.’
But the imagination also plays a role in our moral and aesthetic lives. It constructs possible actions that are the subject of our moral assessment. When I consider what to do, I envision something not yet actual. For example, I might consider telling a lie. In order to represent an action I could perform, I might call to mind past instances of lying that I have experienced; in this, the imagination furnishes the content necessary for making a moral judgment. Finally, Kant ascribes a central role to the imagination in our experience of beauty. Notably, the imagination is not constrained by concepts or rules in its apprehension of a work of art, but is instead free to ‘play’ with it in a multitude of ways. And it is this act which Kant takes to be paradigmatic of judgment in its merely reflecting use.
Following Kant, Arendt highlights several other ways that the imagination is in the service of judgment — and which can be taken in a political direction. The first concerns its role in selecting examples. Examples remain particulars but instantiate (indeed, exemplify) universals. I make the abstract notion of courage concrete by pointing to Achilles. Here the example plays the role of the rule, which is notably absent in the reflecting use of judgment. It is the imagination which is responsible for finding the right example. Insofar as judgments are not themselves truth claims, and so cannot be compelled, we might think that the possibility of persuasion in the political realm depends on one’s choice of example. Second, imagination is also that by which I am able to think from the standpoint of the other — a feature which, Arendt claims, makes judgment the most political of all of our faculties. In both cases, I make present that which is absent: an object or event from the past, or the perspective of another.
About the Author:
Nicholas Dunn is the Klemens von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he teaches in Philosophy, Politics, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), and the M.A. in Global Studies (MAGS) program. He is the editor of a forthcoming volume on Arendt’s Kant Lectures (Berlin: De Gruyter). To learn more about Nick and his work, visit https://nicholasdunn.me and follow him on Twitter (@nm_dunn).
