Markus Gante

This paper reconsiders the role of imagination in Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit, arguing against the standard view that imagination is merely a transitional faculty on the path from intuition to thought. By integrating Hegel’s account of imagination in the Encyclopaedia with his theory of symbolic art in the Aesthetics, I show that imagination plays a foundational role in the social constitution of meaning. Far from being surpassed in mechanical memory or aestheticized in art alone, imagination is the condition under which sense material becomes communicable and thus thinkable. I argue that Hegel conceives of imagination as overriding sensibility with socially instituted ‘independent representations’ that shape our access to the world. This socially mediated structure of meaning persists within thought itself, making imagination a necessary precondition for finite, reflective thinking.

This paper discusses a shift in contemporary ideological justification and its implications for the critique of ideology. Traditionally, the critique of ideology aimed to dispel ideological illusions. However, it has become increasingly challenging to pinpoint these illusions. Instead, ideological justifications hinge more than ever on functional necessities, presenting themselves as the sole practical solution to a given problem. I argue that ideologies of functional necessities pose problems for the established standard model of ideology. In section 1, I discuss the standard model. In section 2, I introduce the “functionalist challenge” to the notion of ideology and lay out my reasoning for the contended inefficacy of simply dispelling ideological illusions. In section 3, I discuss the resulting problems for a critical theory of ideology and possible ways to address them.

In this article I suggest that we should understand symbolic art not as some kind of wonderous prequel to classical art, but as a theory of the advent of spiritual self-reflection on a collective scale. Symbolic art is the first form of what Hegel calls ‘absolute spirit’. I understand absolute spirit as the realm of reflective social practices through which humans discuss and reflect on what it is to be human. Symbolic art is thus the first form in which spirit generates genuine self-knowledge. I argue that symbolic art should be understood as the unprecedented beginning of asking what it is to be human, without having a picture of what it is to be human preceding it. The advantage of understanding Hegel's symbolic art in this way is that we are able to go beyond the narrow conception of symbolic art as existing only in the oriental world and arrive at an understanding of symbolic art which includes social practices from the deep history of our species.

Die These dieses Aufsatzes besteht darin, dass menschliches Leben als genuin politisch begriffen werden sollte. Dieser Gedanke wird in Form einer aristotelischen Kritik am ethischen Naturalismus entwickelt. (1) Zunächst rekonstruiere ich den ethischen Naturalismus vor der Frage, was genau naturalistisch an dieser Position ist. Es wird gezeigt, dass es sich nicht um ein naturalistisches Begründungsprogramm von Normativität handelt, das Normativität in einem außerethischen Bereich begründen will. Naturalistisch ist der ethische Naturalismus, insofern die Position vertreten wird, der natürliche Vollzug menschlichen Lebens impliziere praktische Rationalität und Tugenden. (2) In einem zweiten Schritt wird mit Aristoteles argumentiert, dass die besonderen Realisierungsformen dieser praktischen Rationalität in Genese und Geltung stark lokale Aspekte aufweisen und von Aristoteles zirkulär bestimmt werden. Ich rekonstruiere dies als polis- statt lebensformrelative Normativität. (3) Der dritte Abschnitt diskutiert Implikationen dieser Umstellung vor dem Hintergrund älterer Fassungen des Neoaristotelismus, die durch die Leitbegriffe von Brauchtum und Tradition die Lokalität von Normativität explizit herausstellen. Gegen diese Theorien versuche ich abschließend vorzuschlagen, die aristotelische Zirkularität des menschlich Guten als Offenheit der menschlichen Lebensform zu begreifen, die nicht zwingenderweise durch Rekurs auf Natur oder Tradition geschlossen werden muss.

This article explores the role of imagination in critical theory, addressing its conceptual ambiguity and its synthesis of three distinct but interrelated strands. The first, rooted in Freud's theory, sees imagination as wish-fulfillment—necessarily unreal yet foundational to utopian thought. The second strand addresses the ideological corruption of imagination, a concern central to early critical theory's sociological inquiries. The third draws from Kant's influential view of imagination as a mediator between sensibility and understanding, linking it to aesthetic forms of liberation. The article argues that the ideological erosion of imagination manifests less as its corruption than as a diminishment of imaginative capacity itself, positioning imagination as inherently resilient but weakened under certain social conditions. Section 2 traces this view to Freud's influence and its adoption in Marcuse's early work. Section 3 examines ideological dimensions more closely, using the authoritarian personality as a primary reference. Section 4 discusses the aesthetic imagination as a counterforce that amplifies the capacity for envisioning better futures. In Section 5, the article outlines the strengths of this integrative approach: It brings together diverse conceptual strands and reinterprets ideology as a continuum rather than a strict binary. Yet, a central concern remains—the conception of imagination as inherently incorruptible, grounded in Freud's notion of it as a “nature reserve” within the human psyche, resistant to external reality's pressures. The article concludes by proposing a defense of this position.

This paper argues that Hegel's concept of absolute spirit should be understood as central to his social philosophy. Rather than designating a metaphysical endpoint, absolute spirit refers to reflexive practices—art, religion, and philosophy—through which societies critically engage with the norms and assumptions that structure social life. While objective spirit secures freedom through institutionalized norms, it does so by relying on elements that often remain implicit. Absolute spirit makes these elements visible and open to transformation. I propose that absolute and objective spirit are connected through a feedback loop: objective spirit generates binding norms, while absolute spirit reflects on and potentially reshapes them.