Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa is an Assistant Professor at Vassar College, where she studies and teaches Latin American philosophy, contemporary philosophy of mind, and epistemology. She is also interested in the philosophy of science and in applied ethics, especially as applied in philosophy of psychiatry.
A post by Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa.
In his Address to the Congress of Angostura, on February 15th, 1819, Simón Bolívar sketches his vision of the future for ‘Gran Colombia’, the state he wanted to help build after fighting for South American independence against Spain.
“Flying from age to age, my imagination reflects on the centuries to come … I feel a kind of rapture, as if this land stood at the heart of the universe [...] I see her as unifier, center, emporium for the human family” (The Angostura Address).
This passage closes a long speech where Bolívar is making concrete (though not infallible) projections and normative judgments about the political future, including denouncing slavery, defending democratic ideals, and rejecting the viability of a federalist system. I suggest that this speech is an example of the use of political and social imagination, that is, imagination that has as its object political or social change, consideration of the thoughts and feelings at the personal, group, and institutional level. I will argue that we need a concept of political imagination.
Firstly, political imagination is necessary for political prediction. How do we test hypotheses about the political future, when considering radical alternatives, if not in imagination? Before the Angostura Address, Bolívar successfully predicted the success of the fight for independence, writing, “Success will crown our efforts because the destiny of America is irrevocably fixed; the tie that bound her to Spain is severed, for it was nothing but an illusion” (The Jamaica Letter). He gave as supporting evidence the antipathy Spanish Americans feel toward Spain, and suspicion that the whole continent is in a similar mood.
Secondly, I think describing Bolívar’s broad political reasoning as “imagination” is accurate. It is speculative, involves thinking about possibilities, and requires immersive projection of him as an individual through physical, social, and geographic space, as well as through individual and group thoughts, emotions, preferences, and behavior. For example, he has to think about available military might, geography and its impact on politics, and about the collective mood. He also relies on first-hand and testimonial experiential evidence.
The problem is that a lot of current writing about imagination in philosophy of mind makes it difficult to describe what Bolívar is doing, and what many political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and other social scientists currently do, as a way of imagining, as opposed to doing some other mental activity that may only figuratively be described as ‘imagining’.
One reason for this is that some current analyses favor a kind of process reductionism. For example, in Amy Kind’s “The Heterogeneity of Imagination” (2013), we see a worry that ‘imagination’ in folk psychology encompasses too many activities to be explainable by a single mental process or a set of related mental processes. This suggests that the concept of “imagination,” when understood scientifically, must in fact be substituted by a set of narrower concepts that delineate more specific mental actions or processes or small sets of processes, such as (and I am here avoiding using terms coined by any one theorist), mental visualization, first-personal empathetic projection, embodied pretense, or simple inferential reasoning. The threat is: either “imagination” tracks some small, well-defined mental process, a few of them differentially, or it simply has no referent, because it is too ill-defined.
But it is not clear why a nonreductive concept of imagination is not in the wings. These reductionist tendencies in our theorizing about imagination are explanatorily helpful for certain kinds of projects, to be sure. Folk psychology can be misleading, and precision is valuable for both cognitive science and epistemology. However, they do not always give us tools to be able to talk about certain legitimate uses of imagination – or so I argue. We might do well to allow ourselves philosophical interest in other productive uses of the term, which need not be at odds with current cognitive science or mental taxonomy.
Let’s go back to Bolívar. One thing that makes it hard to describe what he is doing in terms of currently well-defined cognitive processes (besides the layered complexity of his reasoning) is that the objects of his cognition, of his social imagination, are not singular in kind: they are not purely visualizable, purely psychological or empathetic targets, or purely propositional. This is not just Bolívar. Many political theorists occupy the same liminal space, where they at times invoke perceivable objects like topography or personal appearances, and other times invoke emotions, beliefs, or preferences in individuals or groups, or, at least as frequently, social categories themselves. I will argue that social entities are legitimate objects of imagination.
Consider the following understanding of political change outlined by Nancy Hartsock in The Feminist Standpoint Revisited & Other Essays:
“A feminist redefinition of the concept of political change… [regards] change as a process that takes place on several levels: the personal, the group or organizational, and the level of social institutions. Political change, then, involves redefining the self, building different kinds of political organizations, gaining economic power… and most important, a sense of how each of these arenas for change relates to the interlocking structures of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.” (Hartsock, p. 18)
What kinds of objects are these listed by Hartsock, and what mental activity considers them? These levels of political analysis, as well as the “structures of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism,” are objects in a social space. It is not helpful to call them just conceptual abstractions. Things like genders, races, ethnic groups, and occupations are things that are used in perceptual categorization and show up in perceptual and cognitive implicit biases. They are the kinds of things, I am suggesting, that you can imagine, in the sense of ‘experientially reason about’, not merely, to be maximally vague, “think about.”
The idea that we can cognize about social entities is hardly new. One particularly evocative discussion of social representational capacities occurs in Seyfarth and Cheney’s Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (2008), where they argue that baboon representations of their social hierarchy and potential changes in this social hierarchy could be clues to the evolution of language in human primates (for a contrary opinion on language evolution that does not reject the idea of social representations in baboons, see Camp, 2009).
If we accept that we can represent social entities, perceptually or otherwise, why not accept that we can imagine changes in social entities? For example, as many British residents did last year, I could try to imagine how Brexit would change day-to-day life in the United Kingdom. This might involve conceiving of differences in relations between non-British European consumers and British producers, or differences in social interactions between Brits and non-Brits, or between white Brits and non-white Brits. Would this imagining not be different from imagining something visually, such as imagining a flower wilting over time, or empathetically, such as imagining my grandparents’ emotions on the day they got married?
We have good reason to believe that humans care at least as much about social and power relations as baboons do, and thus have robust capacities for social reasoning. Wait, you say: this may have the upshot that we can do a ‘reductionist’ style analysis of the cognitive processes for social reasoning, and thus pick out a specialized process or set of processes that we might call ‘social imagination’ if we like, should they demonstrate characteristics similar to our already accepted examples of ‘imagination’. Although this would require robust support, this strategy is more resonant with the reductionist project. However, research on social cognition may also eventually reveal that what I call “social imagination” is not a single thing but many otherwise differentiated cognitive processes, not all of which are involved in any one ‘use’ of imagination about the social world, and some of which perhaps are not distinctively social at all. Must this mean, then, that philosophers of mind cannot responsibly talk about “social” or “political imagination” until the matter is settled?
It may be more helpful to reframe this question. What do we lose, theoretically, if we talk about political or social imagination before we know the proper mental taxonomy of social or political imagination? What if social and political imagination is not a unified, properly imaginative, mental activity?
I will suggest, in closing, that the philosophical loss is greater if we exhibit too much caution prematurely. Social epistemology is a young and burgeoning sub-field that has found productive use in many new and old concepts, including the idea of epistemic injustice, of a social epistemic standpoint, of epistemic authority, and of collective attention, to name a few. The notion of “political imagination” is an old concept. We need it, I think, in order to make sense of how we manage to make predictions about the social future. Imagination is how we conduct tests in the absence of firsthand experience. When we are wondering about radical social change and how best to think about it, political imagination must get the epistemological attention it deserves.
References:
Bolivar, Simon, et al. El Libertador : Writings of Simon Bolivar. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Camp, Elisabeth. “A Language of Baboon Thought?” (Philosophy of Animal Minds, ed. R. Lurz, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 108-127.)
Cheney, Dorothy L. and Seyfarth, Robert M. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Hartsock, Nancy C. M. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited & Other Essays. Westview Press, 1998.
Kind, Amy. “The Heterogeneity of the Imagination,” Erkenntnis 78: 141-159 (2013)