Simon Evnine teaches philosophy at the University of Miami. He now works on metaphysics, especially on artifacts and the ontology of the social. His current book project, A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!, is a cross-genre work involving commentaries (dealing with philosophy, psychoanalysis, Judaism, and his own life) on over a hundred memes he has made with the image of Batman slapping Robin.
A post by Simon Evnine
In his well-known book, Benedict Anderson (2006) describes nations as imagined communities. This is a haunting and suggestive expression and I want here to think a bit about the relation between nation and imagination. Anderson says relatively little about how to understand the expression but it is not too hard to see some of what he is getting at. Nations exist as collective projects of the imagination of their members. But what is it, precisely, that is supposed to be imagined? And how does the imagining of whatever it is ground the existence of a nation or otherwise figure into its mode of being?
When he first uses the phrase, Anderson seems to be suggesting that what members of a nation must imagine are the other members. He writes:
[The nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion (6; emphasis in the original)
The idea seems to be that a community is formed when some people link themselves together through some kind of mutual holding in mind. Best of all would be a holding in mind born of direct acquaintance. But in groups the size of “even the smallest nation,” such mutual acquaintance is impossible. Imagination, therefore, must step in to make up for the deficiencies of acquaintance.
Questions immediately arise. In virtue of what does this mental linking of hands sustain the existence of a community? Can there be de re imagining of people with whom one is unacquainted? If not, can the community-forming power of de re acquaintance be approximated by each person’s simply imagining, de dicto, that there are other people of a certain kind? But let us set these questions aside since I do not think this is the role that Anderson assigns to imagination in the ontology of the nation.
Shortly after the passage quoted above, Anderson writes:
All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. (6; emphasis mine)
If even primordial villages of face-to-face contact can be imagined communities, then the role of imagination is not to make up for a shortfall in face-to-face contact. And in fact, in the first quotation, he does not tell us that in the mind of each member “lives the image of their fellow members” (as we would expect if the problem were just too many people to know personally) but rather “the image of their communion.”
What then is a communion of some people? I suggest, and this is surely the only plausible answer, that it is a community comprising those people. So, what must be imagined, in the minds of the members of a nation and in virtue of which the nation exists, is itself a community. Which community? Well, it must be either a community which is distinct from the community that is the nation, or it must be the nation itself.
Let us start by looking at the first option. This might recommend itself because of the apparent ill-foundedness of the second option. But what community, apart from the nation itself, would be such that imagining it would ground the existence of the nation? How could imagining one community underwrite the existence of another? Furthermore, it would have to be a community that had the members of the nation as members, since imagining it is imagining “their communion.” The only possibility I can think of which could conform to these constraints is this. As an imagined community, the nation, of course, is not at all imaginary. It is quite real. But perhaps for each nation there is an imaginary community that somehow mirrors it. It would not be wholly implausible, were that true, that the existence of the imagined community might be grounded in the imagining of its imaginary counterpart. And that would give the sense in which the nation is an imagined community. It is real, but its existence depends on the imagining of something imaginary.
I do not think, however, that this is the right way to go. For one thing, it remains unclear why imagining one community should underwrite the existence of another, whatever kind of correspondence relates them. For another, there are well-known problems concerning the identity conditions of imaginary objects. Should it be required that all members have the same imaginary community in mind? If so, in virtue of what would that be true? If not, the problem of how the existence of the real community is grounded is even more intractable.
That brings us to the second option. The object the imagining of which grounds the existence of the nation is the nation itself. Before we look at the obvious difficulty of the ill-foundedness of nations that this implies, let us just pause to notice some of the positive features of the approach. First, we eliminate the gap between what is imagined and what exists in virtue of that imagining. Secondly, while the identity conditions of nations are not unproblematic, the problems are not of the same order as those besetting the identity conditions of imaginary objects. Hence, there is a good sense in which it can be judged that all the members are imagining the same thing. Finally, what they imagine is clearly their communion.
Now for that ill-foundedness. How can it be that the existence of the nation is grounded in the imagining of that very nation itself? This is the crux of the issue, though it is evident that anything short of this would be a disappointing come-down for the idea of the imagined community. Kit Fine (2020) has attempted to show how there need be no problem here. Of a parallel case – a committee the existence of which depends on a department’s consent to its existence – he writes:
the reference to the objects whose identity is in question is always made within the context of an attitude. The department must consent to a committee or to the continued existence of the committee. The object or objects hide behind a mental barrier, so to speak. They do not have a full existence in the world but only a partial form of existence in the mind. (87)
This is a somewhat terse statement of an exciting but obscure idea. My best attempt (so far) to elucidate it is this. Fine has just made a comparison with the case of a singleton whose only member is itself. If we are staunchly realist, he says, we can just insist that there is such an object and the fact that in specifying it we have to mention it itself is of no ontological significance. However, if we want to think of sets in the context of a constructive ontology, this circularity will be a problem. The committee case, however, is different and can be accommodated by a constructive ontology. This is because the reference of the object in the characterization of that object is not bare, but shielded by its occurrence within the mind. When he writes that the object does “not have a full existence in the world but only a partial form of existence in the mind” this cannot mean, of course, that the object never has existence in the world. It must mean that in specifying the conditions for its existence (in the world), we need only rely on its partial existence in the mind. The object itself straddles the mind-world distinction in a particular way – a way by means of which its worldly existence depends on its mental existence. On this construal, the imagined community is so-called not because its real existence depends on the existence of a distinct, purely imaginary community, but because it necessarily exists itself partly in the imagination (while the imaginary plays no role at all).
If the imaginary is out of the picture, why should the mental aspect of the imagined community have to be something imagined? After all, the committee that Fine discusses has its shadowy partial existence in the mind in the realm of consent, not imagination. I think that Anderson’s focus on the imagination points to the fact that the imagination has more to do with the nation than we have so far uncovered. Nations are essentially historical entities in that they contain within themselves images of their past and their future. No nation can think of itself as existing in a purely ahistorical present. There may be other types of community like that, but not, specifically, nations. But of course, like every other contingent entity, nations come into and go out of existence. As a nation comes to exist, the image of its past must, therefore, be fictitious – or imaginary. And here, imagination occurs with its full force. The projected past of the nation is fantastic, the site of dreams and fabulations, full of glories and catastrophes. Not that all the events in that past are necessarily fictitious, but the story they are put together to tell is the product of a collective daydream. Similarly with the nation’s image of its future. Every nation is a utopian project to itself and utopia is, par excellence, a construct of our imaginative faculties.
A nation, then, is an imagined community through and through. Its existence in the world depends on its partial existence in the imagination and its history, both past and future, is almost entirely a product of imagination.
Reference
Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, second edition. Verso Books.
Fine, Kit (2020) “The Identity of Social Groups,” Metaphysics 3(1): 81-91.