Avshalom Schwartz is a Postdoctoral Fellow with Stanford University’s Civics Initiative, studying the role of imagination in politics and in the history of philosophy and political thought. His current book project, Democratic Phantasies: Political Imagination and the Athenian Democracy, offers a new account of the “democratic imagination” by attending to the role played by the imagination in ancient Athenian democracy and in classical political thought.
A post by Avshalom Schwartz
The current crisis of liberal democracy has brought with it growing concerns over the inability of citizens to agree on basic facts, beliefs, and views about the world. This issue, which is sometimes described as “deep disagreement” or “belief polarization” (cf. Suhay, Tenenbaum, and Bartola 2022; de Ridder 2021), poses a profound challenge to democratic politics. When citizens no longer share in these basic things—when they perceive the world in radically different ways—democratic politics become hard, if not impossible. As Muirhead and Rosenblum have recently put it, “without a shared understanding of what it means to know something and to hold a common account of the essential contours of political reality, collective political action is impossible. Common sense is the required touchstone of democratic public life, and it is under attack” (2019, 123).
Although these concerns have become increasingly salient in contemporary political discourse, they are far from new. Philosophers have been grappling with them since at least classical antiquity, often turning to the mental faculty of imagination in attempting to explain the psychological and epistemological underpinnings of this problem. For Plato—who offered one of the earliest theoretical accounts of this mental faculty—the divergence between how different individuals may perceive and experience the physical world has to do, in part, with how phantoms and images (phantasmata and eikones) operate on the imagination (phantasia or eikasia) (cf. Resp., 510d–11). Similarly, Aristotle held that the variance between different individuals’ perceptions and misperceptions of the world might be due to their imagination. Unlike ‘proper sensation’ or reason, our imagination (phantasia) could be right or wrong, a fact reflected in the role it plays in dreams, hallucinations, and errors more generally (DA, 428a6-20).
For generations of philosophers, scientists, and theologians, the imagination was thus seen as posing a serious epistemic problem. In short, if the way we perceive the world is mediated and shaped by our imagination, and if the imagination often deceives us, we may end up with a distorted view of reality. However, this epistemic issue also points to a deeper political worry. If the operation of imagination is not uniform across individuals—if, in other words, it causes each individual to form their own unique, and uniquely distorted, view of the world—how can we hope to inhabit a shared social and political world? To come up with a shared language and communicate with each other? To agree not only on what “is” but also on what ought to be done?
In this short essay, I would like to sketch a democratic approach to this problem of imagination.[1] More generally, I am interested here in a solution to the problem of imagination that is compatible with democratic ideals, values, and practices and strengthens—rather than undermines—the capacity of democratic citizens to do things together and collaborate in a shared project of collective self-governance.
One way to approach this question is by contrasting this democratic solution to the problem of imagination with its absolutist alternative. An “absolutist imagination” solves the problem of imagination by imposing a closed and totalizing imaginary unity from above. It overcomes imaginative subjectivity and relativism by producing a powerful and unified mental representation that will dominate the minds of subjects while simultaneously posing limits on the degree to which subjects can form mental representations that deviate from this imposed and unified framework.
This absolutist solution to the problem of imagination is illustrated in the famous frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan. The frontispiece depicts a giant person composed of many individuals, with all these individuals’ faces turned upwards, fixing their gaze on the sovereign. Viewing this image through the lens of the problem of the imagination, we may say that it solves this problem by having the subjects give up on their individual sensual impressions and the unique mental representations produced by their imaginations. The subjects will rely instead on their sovereign’s active imagination, who is the only figure in this frontispiece whose face is visible and, therefore, the only source of sensual input for this giant composite individual. Hobbes’s frontispiece, then, reflects an absolutist solution to the problem of imagination: it overcomes the inevitable diversity and heterogeneity of individual sensual impressions and mental representations by imposing on them the single, unified, and centralized imaginary of an absolute sovereign.
The problem of imagination can be easily described as a problem of collective action: in the absence of a third-party enforcer or external source of authority, each individual is going to be guided by their own imagination, thus making it very hard to generate the basic shared understanding that will allow multiple individuals to coordinate their actions. This version of the problem is also echoed in Aristotle, especially in his so-called “Wisdom of the Multitude” argument of Politics III.11. In this famous passage, Aristotle, too, likens the assembled multitude to a giant person “with many feet and many hands and many senses (polupoda kai polucheira kai pollas echont’ aisthēseis)” and with “one personality as regards the moral and intellectual faculties (peri ta ēthē kai tēn dianoian)” (Pol., 1281b5-8).[2] If this giant person were guided in different directions and towards different ends by his many limbs and senses, it would be impossible for him to move or achieve any goal. For this odd creature to be capable of movement and action—and for Aristotle’s analogy to make sense—the multiple sensual impressions provided by the many senses must be unified into a single mental representation, and the many feet and hands must be moving towards the same end or goal.
Aristotle’s analogy of the giant person provides a basis for a democratic alternative to the absolutist imagination. Like the composite individual of Hobbes’s frontispiece, the Aristotelian giant person must exhibit some unity to be capable of movement and action. At the very least, the multiple inputs received by the many limbs and senses must be gathered and processed by a single mental faculty of imagination, thus producing the agency and intentionality required for movement and action. Yet, unlike the absolutist solution to the problem of imagination and its vivid representation in the Leviathan frontispiece, the unity of the Aristotelian giant person is not achieved by eliminating the diversity and heterogeneity of the individuals who compose it. Instead, the unified imaginary or mental representation that guides the giant person is based on and maintains the unique and diverse contributions of its constituent parts.
A democratic solution to the problem of imagination must recognize that collective self-governance, just like any other shared project that requires collective action, is grounded in some imaginative unity that allows a diverse group of individuals to see themselves as part of a collective agent capable of action. Yet, to be democratic, this unity cannot be imposed from above, nor can it present itself as necessary and unchangeable. Instead, it must be composed out of the heterogeneous contribution of its constituent parts and remain open to contestation and revisions. This democratic solution to the problem of imagination is reflected in the ancient Athenian democratic institutions—above all, the assembly. Each of the assembly goers was guided by what Hannah Arendt called the dokei moi, “it seems to me” (1993, 237), or the individual appearances produced by the imagination. But when the assembly announced its decisions, it proclaimed that they “seemed [good] to the demos” (edoxe tōi dēmōi). The transformation, by means of democratic deliberation, persuasion, and decision-making, of what seems good to me to what seems good to the demos, to us, captures precisely the democratic alternative to the absolutist attempt to impose a close and totalizing imaginative unity from above.
The problem of imagination poses a real challenge to democratic politics. Today, it is reflected in the growing concern with the capacity of democratic citizens to inhabit a common world of shared facts, information, and norms. With this challenge comes a temptation to solve the problem of imagination by erasing imaginative heterogeneity and diversity altogether, imposing instead a single, totalizing, and closed imaginary unity that presents itself as natural, necessary, and unchangeable. This absolutist solution to the problem of imagination represents more than a theoretical difficulty. It can be seen today in efforts by authoritarian leaders to depict democracy as fragile, fragmented, unstable, and inefficient in order to make authoritarianism appear not only unavoidable but also desirable (Walker 2013).
While the questions of how a democratic imagination might look today and how it may come about remain open, the democratic alternative to the absolutist solution to the problem of imagination explored in this short essay offers a first step in addressing it. Once developed, a democratic imagination can allow us to address contemporary concerns with “deep disagreement” or “belief polarization” in democratic politics by producing background agreement between citizens on basic facts, beliefs, and views about the world. It can generate the shared identity and civic sensibilities required for preserving a democratic society, promote fruitful association among its members, and foster their capacity to act together in pursuit of some common goals, most importantly in promoting a shared project of collective self-governance.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1993. “Truth and Politics.” In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin.
Aristotle. 1907. De Anima. Translated by R.D. Hicks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1944. Politics. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Muirhead, Russell, and Nancy L. Rosenblum. 2019. A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Plato. 1969. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
de Ridder, Jeroen. 2021. “Deep Disagreements and Political Polarization.” In Political Epistemology, edited by Elizabeth Edenberg and Michael Hannon. Oxford University Press.
Schwartz, Avshalom M. 2022. “Political Phantasies: Aristotle on Imagination and Collective Action.” American Journal of Political Science, September.
———. forthcoming. “Towards a Democratic Imagination.” Polity.
Suhay, Elizabeth, Mark Tenenbaum, and Austin Bartola. 2022. “Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980–2020.” The Forum 20 (1): 5–36.
Walker, Christopher. 2013. “How Anti-Democratic Propaganda Is Taking Over the World - POLITICO Magazine.” Politico. March 2013. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/anti-democratic-propaganda-beijing-moscow-214858/.