Plato and Hobbes on Imagination and Political Instability
Avshalom Schwartz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He studies ancient and early modern political thought, and is especially interested in pre-modern theories of the imagination and their implications for political theory.
A post by Avshalom M. Schwartz
Although the imagination is often seen as the most neglected mental faculty in the history of Western political thought (Ezrahi, 2012, 7; Bottici and Challand 2011, 4), pre-modern scientists and philosophers took the imagination to be a significant mental faculty. From antiquity, through the middle ages and Renaissance and up until early modernity, political philosophers viewed the imagination as not only central to sense perception and knowledge, but also as presenting a significant threat to political order and stability. This is perhaps most clearly evident in the works of Plato and Hobbes. In this post, I will explore their accounts of the imagination as a mental faculty and point to their similar fear of the corrupting role the imagination can play in destabilizing a political regime, especially a regime whose authority and legitimacy are grounded in reason. As I will argue, since both thinkers attempted to solve the endemic problem of disorder by grounding absolute political authority in reason, they both viewed imagination’s susceptibility to deception and corruption by irrational sources as representing a significant threat.
Writing in the fourth century BC, Plato is the first thinker in the history of Western philosophy to develop an explicit theoretical account of the imagination (although not as systematic and precise as those found in the later work of Aristotle (1907; 1957) or Galen (1916; 1997)). For Plato, the imagination is primarily associated with the irrational (alogistos) part of the soul in its dealing with the visible realm, especially with images (eikones), shadows, and reflections (phantasmata). Imagination’s capacity to perceive and process images suggests that it plays a role in the higher activities of the soul as well, since both reasoning and understanding require some use of images (for example, Republic 510d-e). While the imagination partakes in the production of knowledge and understanding, it is at the same time unstable, prone to mistakes, and susceptible to deception. The sensual perception of shadows and reflection may create “confusion in our souls,” which can be abused by various agents, most importantly mimetic artists. The imitator (mimētēs), Plato argues, is nothing other than a producer of appearances and phantoms (eidōlon) (R. 601b), which are directed at and operate on the imagination. This exploitation of the soul’s weakness by the various products of mimetic art, in turn, is compared by Plato to nothing less than witchcraft, or “a mighty spells or charm” that captures the soul (R. 601b).
Writing roughly two millennia later, seventeenth-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes also viewed the imagination as an essential mental faculty. Like Plato, Hobbes assigned an important role to the imagination in sense perception and knowledge production. What we view as sense perception is, according to Hobbes, the result of an external motion that causes pressure on one or more of the sense organs. This, in turn, leads to inner motions, pressure within the human body, and then an internal movement away from the heart that results in seeming or fancy. Thus, he argues, “Sense in all cases, is nothing els but original fancy, caused by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained” (Leviathan 24 [1]).
A figure from Hobbes’s 1646 “A Minute or First Draught on the Optiques.” The figure illustrates his early conception of sense perception as the outcome of external movements.
The imagination, therefore, is responsible for what we view as sensual impression, and is therefore constructive and constitutive of knowledge (Leviathan, 36 [2]). At the same time, the imagination is also responsible for the unstable nature of human knowledge. The imagination might lead us to mistake visions and waking dreams as reality and to mistake various “fancies” of the imagination to be spirits and ghosts, “which is not the acknowledging of this truth: that spirits are; but a false opinion concerning the force of imagination” (Elements of Law 66-67 [6.5-6]). Given such irrational fear of ghosts, spirits, and other immaterial phenomena, the imagination has the potential for making humans more susceptible to deception and thus may play into the hand of various seditious forces, especially religious institutions and figures (Leviathan 34 [2]).
Plato and Hobbes thus shared a complex conception of the imagination: on the one hand, it seems to play an important role in sense perception and knowledge production, but on the other hand, it is unstable and fickle, prone to mistakes and confusion, and is susceptible to deception. Of course, such complex conception in itself is not unique to these two philosophers. In fact, it was shared by many thinkers, from antiquity through the middle ages and Renaissance and up to the enlightenment and was even captured in Goya’s famous “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”
Goya, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1799). The full epigraph for the etching reads "imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, it is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”
Yet, Plato’s and Hobbes’s political thought share several additional important ideas, which makes the comparison between their position on the problem of the imagination especially insightful. Most importantly, both attempted to solve the problem of political stability by constructing an absolute political authority, and both grounded this absolute political authority in reason. Since the imagination accounts for the human susceptibility to irrational sources of deception, both thinkers viewed the imagination as posing a unique threat to political legitimacy, order, and stability, and devised a set of radical policies to address this threat.
For Plato, the only possible solution to the disorder, instability, and constant conflict that characterized both democratic Athens and the other Greek poleis is for politics to be grounded upon reason and truth and for the state to be led by the philosophers—whose superior rational capacity and education grant them access to the truth (R. 473c-d). Similarly, Hobbes famously argued that the only solution to the pervasive problem of political instability—of the sort that culminated in the English Civil War—was the creation of an absolute sovereignty. Grounded in natural reason, the rational laws of nature that reason dictates, and the rational fear of violent death, only the Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’ could end the anarchy and ‘war of all against all’ of the state of nature (Leviathan 196 [13], 200 [14]).
This similarity between Plato’s and Hobbes’s solution to the problem of political stability teaches us something important about their approach to the problem of imagination. For both, threats to political stability originate not only from challenges to the material basis of the sovereign’s power but also from individuals who are capable of manipulating and taking advantage of the subjects’ imagination in order to undermine the ruler’s authority. For Plato, the poet is the primary figure who symbolizes this threat. The poets, according to him, not only corrupt the souls of the citizens by teaching them falsehoods and lies (R. 377e), but also operate under the false pretense of having knowledge, of being ‘wise men’ (sophoi) (R. 600e-601b). Given their ability to deceive and manipulate the citizens’ imagination, the poets represent a genuine threat to the legitimacy and authority of the philosophers, a threat that justifies their banishment from the ideal city (R. 595a-b) and a strict censorship of mimetic art in general (R. 379a). For Hobbes, the threat posed by the imagination is personified in the figure of the prophet. Like Plato’s poets, the prophets take advantage of the easily manipulatable imagination in order to undermine the authority of the absolute sovereign and to present themselves as alternative sources of authority. Capturing the subjects’ imagination with terrifying images of apocalypse and hell, the prophet is able to undermine the rational basis of the citizens’ honor of the sovereign—the fear of death—with the greater fear of eternal damnation (or the potential rewards of afterlife) (Leviathan 698 [38]). In order to secure the legitimacy of the sovereign and the well-being of the state, the Hobbesian sovereign—just like the Platonic philosopher king—would have to secure not only monopoly over the means of violence but also over the symbolic and imaginary realm, which justifies a state monopoly in matters of religion as well as strict state censorship in matters of religion and philosophy alike (Leviathan 502, 506-8 [29]).
As this short discussion suggests, both Plato and Hobbes saw the imagination as a potential threat to political order that is grounded in reason and thus to political stability. Even if the worry with the imagination is not unique to Plato and Hobbes, their radical solution to this problem makes their position especially intriguing for scholars interested in the conceptual history of the imagination. Furthermore, their position may be of interest to scholars of the political imagination, and may shed some light on contemporary political practices, especially in authoritarian regimes. Such regimes often employ various forms of artistic censorship and religious intolerance to sustain uniformity of belief and secure political stability. Taking the lessons of Plato and Hobbes seriously, we can look even today to the ways in which such regimes perceive the imagination as posing a threat to political stability and interrogate how certain policies might be attempts on the part of political authorities to manage this threat of the imagination.
References
Aristotle. 1907. De Anima. Ed. and trans. by R.D. Hicks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aristotle. 1957. Parva Naturalia. Translated by W. S. Hett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bottici, Chiara, and Benoit Challand. 2011. "Introduction". In Politics of Imagination, edited by Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand, 1-16. New York: Birkbeck Law Press.
Ezrahi, Yaron. 2012. Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Galen. 1916. On the Natural Faculties. Translated by A. J. Brock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Galen. 1997. "The Soul's Dependence on the Body." In Selected Works, by Galen, translated by P. N. Singer, 150-176. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1983. A minute or First Draught of the Optiques: A Critical Edition. Madison: The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hobbes, Thomas. 2008. The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic. Edited by J.C.A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. 2012. Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Plato. 1997. "Republic." In Complete Works, by Plato, edited by John M. Cooper, translated by G.M.A Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett.