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Alexandru Petrescu
Ontology is the science of Being. The subject matter of ontology is
Being in / and its particular modes of manifestation. For Hegel, ontology
is Absolute Knowing, Spirit’s own Absolute Self-Knowing:
“Ontology terminates in self-knowledge and self-knowledge is
ontologically significant”.
Hegel’s attempt in the section on Psychology is nothing other than to
reveal the moments or modes of manifestation of the Absolute Spirit in
its own self-knowing process. The final moment will thus be Spirit’s own
Absolute Self-Knowledge. Imagination is presented as one of the
necessary stages towards this completion or self-realization of Spirit,
namely as Theoretical Spirit (Intelligence).
Learning its basic determinations (modes) of its own epistemological
activity (in and through their very actualization), Absolute Spirit thereby
reveals the basic, ontological determinations of whatever there is (for
whatever there is, taken by its own, is just a moment of the Spirit’s own
actualization). This fundamental thesis of Hegel’s philosophy still
requires some justification: a proper deduction. My present reading of
Hegel’s analyses of the Theoretical Spirit, and, in particular, of the
imagination, takes it to be nothing but an onto-psychological deduction
(in the Kantian sense of an elucidation of its conditions of possibility) of
the thesis of the identity of Subject and Object, of Thought and Being.
The final achievement of the Absolute Knowledge on the part of the
Spirit, Hegel says, means its achievement of absolute freedom. Absolute
Spirit achieves its own true infinite freedom when it realizes that
whatever there is, is nothing but its own actualization; that it is not
bounded from outside, i.e., that it is self-bounded. Its psychological (truly
ontological) absolute knowledge of itself is therefore not only an
instrument by means of which, once possessed, it could probably
thereafter investigate and learn something about a supposed external
world. On the contrary, its own psychological self-investigation is already
the proper ontological investigation, which, as absolute knowledge
(Erkennen, not merely, Wissen) reveals the Being (“substantial nature”)
of everything whatsoever.
Up to the point when imagination is introduced, the stages already
developed – feeling, attention, intuition proper (within the more general
moment of Intuition) and recollection (as the first mode of Vorstellung) –
reveal already a gradual (yet incomplete) achievement of freedom from
the part of Spirit. A brief summary of them is required in order to show
where from the necessity of imagination arises.