In Mind’s World, Alexander Schlutz demonstrates how imagination evolves from a vague mediator in ancient thinking to a doubtful but necessary function in modern knowledge to a space of metaphysical opening and political risk. Imagination can be viewed as a threshold between sense and thought, spontaneity and receptivity, law and freedom. As such, it poses a threat to the order of systems, the authority of reason, and the coherency of the subject.
From the ancient idea of phantasia to Kant’s schematism and the transcendental subject, imagination never really fits into the categories reason ascribes to it. It is first deemed an activity between sense and thought, later becoming limited with the rise of modern subjectivity, and reappearing as a foundational and destabilizing force in metaphysics. Rather than being a passive mirror, it appears as a battleground where the definitions and demarcations of subject, reason, and freedom are at stake.
In ancient Greece, “phantasia” was not the same as the modern idea of imagination. Instead of being a creative force, it served as a bridge between sensation and thought. Plato viewed phantasia with suspicion; it belonged to the world of shadows and illusion and needed rational control for the subject to reach true knowledge. On the other hand, for Aristotle, phantasia was an important activity; it was neither purely sensory nor rational. It helped create the internal images (phantasmata) necessary for thought, yet it remained subordinate to reason.
It is in rhetorical traditions and later Stoic thought that phantasia starts to look more like the current understanding of imagination. Orators used it to create vivid images in their audience’s minds. Artists like Phidias were thought to access divine forms through phantasia, but this was still rooted in a Platonic hierarchy where philosophy ruled and imagination was its subordinate.
Descartes’ philosophy, representing the rise of the modern subject, largely depends on repressing imagination. He viewed imagination, linked to the senses, with doubt; as a realm of illusion, not knowledge. For Descartes, the thinking self must separate from everything imagined in order to find certainty. Yet, this separation isn’t straightforward. Descartes’ early writings and dream narratives show his deep interest in inspiration, intuition, and imaginative vision. He introduces his scientific methods through a “fable”, and his radical doubt relies on imagination’s ability to create and pretend. Thus, while the cogito excludes imagination, it also depends on it. This contradiction creates a space, a “return of the repressed”, where imagination haunts the very certainty it is supposed to challenge.
Kant attempts to resolve this tension by placing imagination within a transcendental framework. Imagination becomes the faculty that connects intuitions from the senses and concepts from understanding. Without it, cognition cannot happen. Thus, it is essential, but also risky. Kant raises and lowers imagination. In his Critique of Pure Reason, imagination is central to cognition, yet it must be controlled by reason and understanding. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the dangers of imagination become much clearer: it is connected to fantasy, madness, and political chaos. The “Phantast” is not just a madman; he poses a threat to rational discourse and social order. Kant recoils from not just insanity but revolution and unchecked desire.
However, for all his efforts to constrain imagination, Kant’s system depends on it. His version of the cogito hinges on the synthetic powers of imagination, even if it fails to acknowledge them completely. For Kant, freedom exists because of the gap that imagination creates: the subject must choose to follow the moral law without certainty.
Heidegger sees this gap and does not shy away. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, he argues that Kant nearly recognized imagination’s foundational role but held back. For Heidegger, imagination is more than a thinking tool; it is the essence of being, where human finitude meets the question of Being. He redefines Kant’s transcendental faculties as part of the structure of being: imagination unites sensibility and understanding, opening up the horizon of Being. For Heidegger, imagination is no longer dangerous because it might be chaotic. It poses a risk because it reveals the truth of human existence. However, Schlutz warns that Heidegger may fall into the same trap he critiques Kant for: not fully addressing the radical potential of imagination.
Slavoj Žižek takes up that radical potential. He rejects both Kant’s repression and Heidegger’s metaphysical revival. For Žižek, imagination is not mainly a unifying force; it ruptures the status quo. It enables us to break reality apart and challenge the continuity of the symbolic order, allowing us to consider the impossible. This dives into the heart of subjectivity as radical and sometimes violent freedom. Žižek’s critique shows how both Kant and Heidegger tried to tame imagination either through moral law or metaphysical support. But for Žižek, imagination exposes the split within the subject and its inherent conflict. This isn’t a flaw in philosophy; it rather defines freedom itself.
Engaging with imagination is not about escaping philosophy. Instead, it reveals its limits and possibilities, and leads us to envision radical alternatives.
Alexander Schlutz, Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism (University of Washington Press, 2009)
“A philosophical reading of Capital is quite the opposite of an innocent reading. It is a guilty reading, but not one that absolves its crime on confessing it. On the contrary, it takes the responsibility for its crime as a ‘justified crime’ and defends it by proving its necessity.”
Louis Althusser, Reading Capital
When Louis Althusser famously set out to read Capital, he didn’t do so as an economist, historian, or even as a committed Marxist hoping to decode the text’s revolutionary potential. He read it as a philosopher. And for him, that distinction made all the difference. His close, methodical re-reading of Marx’s Capital -line by line, in both French and German- was not a neutral scholarly exercise. He knew there was no such thing as an “innocent” reading. All reading is already an interpretation. His own, he freely admits, is a guilty one. Guilty, but necessary.
As a philosopher, Althusser brought a particular kind of questioning to Capital: What is its object? What is the nature of its relationship to that object? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of discourse makes this relationship possible? What distinguishes Capital (in both its object and its language) from classical political economy, or even from the early philosophical writings of the Young Marx?
These questions are not just academic nitpicking. They are, in Althusser’s view, epistemological. That is, they concern how Capital produces knowledge, and whether that knowledge represents a genuine rupture—a founding moment for a new science of history and society.
To ask these questions, Althusser argues, is to break with the illusion that a text transparently communicates its meaning. And here, his reading begins to echo the structuralist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Like Lacan, Althusser is interested not in what a subject (or a text) says, but in what it cannot say: what it represses, omits, or fails to articulate, even as it inadvertently reveals those absences. In Lacanian terms, the unconscious is structured like a language. And for Althusser, so too are texts and ideologies. What matters, then, is not just what a text says, but how its silences structure what is said—and what those silences reveal about the limits of its conceptual apparatus.
Althusser takes seriously Lacan’s lesson that absence is not simply a void or lack outside a structure; it is a structural effect within it. In fact, Althusser’s “symptomatic reading” owes a clear debt to Lacan’s notion of the symptom. This formation marks a return of the repressed, a trace of what cannot be fully integrated into the symbolic order. In the same way, Althusser reads classical political economy for its symptoms: those places where the text stumbles, contradicts itself, or substitutes one term for another without realizing the shift.
For example, classical economists talked about the “value of labor.” On the surface, their answer made sense: the value of labor equals the value of the subsistence goods necessary to maintain the laborer. But something is off. “Labor” and “laborer” are not interchangeable. And it is not the laborer who is bought in the wage relation, but their labor. Marx notices this slippage—not by imposing something from the outside, but by reading the text against itself. He sees that what’s missing is not simply absent, but structured into the very answer that classical economists gave. The concept of labor power (crucial to Marx’s theory of exploitation) was already haunting the classical discourse, present in its absences.
This is what Althusser calls a symptomatic reading. It doesn’t just note what’s there and what’s not. It reads the relationship between the visible and the invisible, and how what is unseen actually structures what is seen. In Lacanian terms, this is the logic of the extimate –what is both external and intimate, both inside and outside the field of vision.
Althusser insists that Marx’s greatness lies not in “seeing what Smith could not see,” as if he were simply a more astute observer. That would be to fall back into the old myth of knowledge as “clear sight”—a mirror reflection of reality. Instead, Marx occupied a different terrain—he worked within a different problematic, a different structure of thought. That’s why he could read classical economics symptomatically—because he had already broken with its assumptions, even if they were still structuring the discourse he read.
This structural understanding of visibility and blindness is deeply Lacanian. For Lacan, what we do not see is not simply what lies outside our field of vision. It is what is foreclosed within it. The real is not what is merely outside the symbolic; it is what returns as a rupture, a symptom, a trauma. Althusser applies a similar logic to theoretical texts: the most significant truths lie not in what they state, but in what they cannot state. Their ideological blind spots are internal to their structure.
And this is why, for Althusser, reading Capital is not just an academic task; it is a philosophical and political one. It is about understanding how knowledge is produced, how ideology functions, and how science emerges not through continuity but through rupture. Capital is not merely the endpoint of a linear intellectual development from the Young Marx. It is a break, a dislocation, a theoretical revolution.
This revolution also requires a new practice of reading. Just as Freud made us suspicious of speech and dreams, and Lacan taught us to distrust the clarity of language, Marx makes us suspicious of reading itself. Althusser says we had to “track down the religious myth of reading to its lair.” That is, we had to abandon the comforting belief that the truth of history, society, or the economy lies on the surface, just waiting to be deciphered. The text of history is not one in which a divine Logos speaks. Rather, it is made up of silences, gaps, and illegibilities: “the effects of a structure of structures.”
To read Capital philosophically, then, is to break with the idea that language and meaning are transparent. It is to understand that knowledge is produced in specific historical and ideological conditions. It is to approach the visible always through the logic of the invisible. And it is to see that sometimes, the most meaningful thing a text can tell us is what it does not say, but what it cannot help but reveal.
Bibliography
Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” Reading Capital, New Left Books, 1970.
In his exploration of Hegelian philosophy, Alexandre Kojève confronts the complex relationship between Time, Eternity, and the Concept. He begins with the fundamental definition of truth: it must be universally and necessarily valid, eternal, or non-temporal. Yet paradoxically, truth is encountered in time, within the world. This paradox forces Kojève to confront the essential philosophical problem of the relation between Time and Eternity.
For Kojève, truth is always conceptual—“a coherent whole of words having a meaning”—and the totality of such coherence is called the Begriff (Concept). Consequently, the critical question becomes: what is the relationship between the Concept and Time?
Drawing from Hegel, who states that “Time is the Concept itself, which exists empirically,” Kojève argues that any discussion of truth must engage with the temporality of the Concept.
He reviews historical alternatives to clarify the stakes.
The first possibility (that the Concept is Eternity, as Parmenides or Spinoza might claim) is dismissed as inaccessible to man. The fourth possibility, in which the Concept is purely temporal and truth is denied altogether, is dismissed as skepticism. The second possibility (where the Concept is eternal but related to something else) appears in two variants: the ancient (Plato and Aristotle) and the modern (Kant). These models offer partial insights, but only Hegel’s third possibility (that the Concept is Time) fully accounts for history and humanity’s role within it.
Kojève explains that for Hegel, reality (Dasein) is change, and change is Time itself. The Concept, while eternal, becomes empirically real when it takes the form of human speech and thought. This means that the Concept exists in Time and as Time; specifically, as historical Time. In contrast to Plato’s otherworldly eternity or Kant’s structuring of experience through the timeless categories of understanding, Hegel locates truth in the temporality of human existence.
This identification of Concept and Time makes the philosophical project of absolute knowledge possible. If the Concept is temporal, it can evolve, realize itself through history, and account for the historical becoming of truth. Kojève symbolizes this using the geometry of circles: the Concept can recur in time without changing, maintaining a constant relation to Eternity while appearing in the empirical world.
Kojève elaborates this double relation through the metaphor of the Word. The eternal Concept, manifested in human discourse, simultaneously rises toward Eternity and allows Eternity to descend into time. This dual movement is what creates truth. Without the Word, Eternity would be inaccessible to man; without Eternity, the Word would be meaningless. Truth, therefore, exists only through this dynamic relation. And although this relation happens in time, it is not of time—truth is eternal in its structure, yet expressed temporally.
Kojève further distinguishes Hegel’s position from mystical or skeptical systems. In mystical thought, the ineffable lies beyond language and discourse, implying a limit to what can be known or said. Skeptical systems, by contrast, reject the idea of stable truth, as they regard knowledge as endlessly open-ended and evolving. But Hegel’s system, Kojève insists, offers a dialectical path between these extremes. While human knowledge evolves through history and appears temporally, it can ultimately achieve an “absolute” form—a closure of the historical circle. Yet this closure does not eliminate temporality; it presupposes it.
Kojève arrives at one of his central claims: that truth exists only in relation to human time. And human time, he argues, is structured by desire. Desire, especially the desire for recognition, creates a temporal structure in which the future takes precedence over the present. This is the basis of historical movement. Desire negates the present in view of a projected future and transforms the world through labor. Labor (mainly as conceptualized in the Master-Slave dialectic) is thus central to the emergence of the Concept in history.
Kojève explains that conceptual understanding is possible only through human action in time. The detachment of meaning from the empirical reality it signifies is made possible by the temporal nature of being. Mortality allows the separation of word and thing; it is because the real perishes into the past that its meaning can survive as Concept. The word “dog,” for instance, exists only because the living dog is mortal and perishes, leaving behind a meaning.
This analysis culminates in Kojève’s famous formula: Man is Time. Time is not a background container in which events unfold, but the very structure of human existence. Time is the empirically existing Concept, because only through the temporal unfolding of desire, action, and speech does the Concept come into being. When Hegel says, “Spirit is Time,” Kojève interprets this to mean that the human spirit—humanity as a whole in its historical existence—is Time itself. Without man, Nature would be mere Space.
For Hegel (and Kojève), Time is historical time: the time of action, change, and becoming. It is the time shaped by desire and work. Work, born from the Slave’s response to the Master’s domination, mediates between desire and reality. Through work, man transforms the world and gives rise to knowledge. Without work, there is no Concept. Therefore, “the Concept is Work, and Work is the Concept.”
Finally, Kojève emphasizes the mortal nature of man. To attain absolute knowledge, man must accept death. Only a being that can die can experience the world temporally and generate conceptual understanding. Time is not just a measure of change; it is the very form of historical and human existence.
In conclusion, Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel centers on the radical idea that the Concept is not outside of time, but is time. Through this identification, he offers a powerful account of how truth, knowledge, and history are possible; not in spite of human temporality, but because of it. In doing so, Kojève affirms that philosophy, far from being a timeless exercise, is a deeply historical endeavor rooted in the mortal and transformative nature of man.
Notes on Kojève’s Five Possibilities and Their Figures
As stated above, in this chapter, Kojève outlines the metaphysical possibilities for the relationship between the Concept (Begriff), Time, and Eternity –using geometrical diagrams to express these relations, each symbolizing a different metaphysical or epistemological position.
Source: Alexandre Kojève, “A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept,” Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on thePbenomenology of Spirit, trans.James H . Nichols, Jr., Cornell University Press, 1980.
1. The Concept is Eternity, Related to Nothing (Parmenides, Spinoza)
This first position takes the Concept as self-contained Eternity, unrelated to Time or anything external. Kojève aligns this with Parmenides and Spinoza, who assert a closed, unchanging unity (Being or Substance) where conceptual understanding is no longer relational. Here, there is no radius –no movement or relation between the empirical and the eternal –as there is no distinction to bridge.
The Concept is a perfect circle with no points, no entry or exit: no discourse, no temporality.
Since this system does not allow for communication, change, or historical action, Kojève critiques it as inaccessible. It silences the possibility of truth in the world.
2. The Concept is Eternal, and Related to Something Else
This second possibility is divided into two historical variations:
A. Ancient Variant: The Eternal Concept Related to Eternity
a. Plato: Theology (Figure 7)
Plato’s metaphysics posits that the Concept is eternal and refers to an Eternity beyond time. This is represented by a circle with a central point and a radius reaching outward, symbolizing the relation of the temporal word (the point) to an eternal Form.
The radius: the relation between Concept (within Time) and the Eternal (outside Time).
The circle: circular Time (the World), in which the Concept can appear repeatedly.
But, since Eternity lies outside of Time, this system is transcendental and theological –marked by a separation between man and God, between finite existence and infinite truth.
Figure 7 – “Theology” (Plato): The small circle (Concept) relates via a radius to the large enclosing circle (Eternity), but Eternity lies beyond the temporal sphere.
b. Aristotle: Eternity Situated Within Time
In Aristotle’s system, the eternal Forms or concepts are immanent in Time, particularly in the cyclic eternity of Nature. Eternity is present in the cosmos. This is shown in Figure 4, where the radius touches multiple equidistant points on the circle’s edge, suggesting eternal recurrence. The circle of Time turns, and at each point, the Concept appears again in the same relation to a stable eternity within Time.
This biological/cosmological vision explains animals and stars, but not historical, free, mortal man. It collapses the freedom of the Concept into a closed, repetitive nature.
B. Modern Variant: The Eternal Concept Related to Time (Kant)
Figure 10 – “Optimistic Skepticism” or “Criticism” (Kant)
In Kant’s system, the eternal categories (Concepts) structure temporal experience, but never entirely grasp reality. There is a partial, directional relation (arrow), symbolizing that knowledge is always reaching toward completion but never arriving. Time is necessary for the application of concepts but their relation remains open-ended.
The arrow on the circle (Figure 10) shows continuous movement, but the circle is not fully closed: knowledge is an infinite task, not a completed truth.
The skeptical optimism of Kant is that while we cannot know things-in-themselves, we can structure experience intelligibly.
The circle never closes. The Concept relates to Time but never fully overcomes it.
3. The Concept is Time (Hegel)
Figure 11 – “Absolute Knowledge” (Hegel)
This is Kojève’s preferred and most radical option. Here, the Concept is no longer external to Time. It is Time itself. This means that truth is historical and emerges only through temporality, action, and negation.
The closed circle (Figure 11) now represents historical Time that has achieved closure through self-reflective Conceptuality.
The Concept exists empirically, as speech, work, and desire (Dasein), and through this existence, becomes absolute knowledge.
Figure 11 represents the full unity of Time and Concept: Time is no longer an obstacle to truth but its medium.
Kojève writes that this system can explain human freedom, mortality, and history. It is neither silent like mysticism nor endlessly open like Kantian skepticism –it is self-grounding and complete because the Concept has passed through Time and returned to itself.
4. The Concept is Temporal and Relative Only
Figure 8 – “Pessimistic Skepticism” or “Relativism”
This figure shows a broken or incomplete circle, illustrating a worldview in which truth is always deferred and never attained. Kojève links this to historicism or radical relativism.
There is no fixed point or radius, no Concept that can transcend change.
Knowledge becomes an endless flux: learning without knowing.
Kojève sees this as philosophy’s failure: an eternal “why” without ever reaching wisdom.
5. The Concept is Eternal, But the Eternal is Ineffable
Figure 9 – “Mysticism”
In mystical systems, Eternity exists, but cannot be represented or articulated. Truth is accessible only through silence. The Concept, in its attempt to speak of the ineffable, falls short.
The circle is intact, but marked by a silence—a gap in discourse.
There is a radius, but it does not reach the center.
This system postulates something beyond speech: truth exists, but not in language.
Additional Figures
Figure 6 represents the double movement of the Concept: from Word (discourse) to eternal meaning, and from meaning back into speech. This double arrow or radius crossing both ways symbolizes the relation that “cuts through the circle” of Time and allows the Concept to transcend temporality without leaving it.
Figure 5 shows the upward movement from the Word to Eternity: a unidirectional ascent toward truth. But Kojève critiques this as half of the process –without the return, Eternity remains unrepresented in Time.
Figures 1-3 may represent linear temporalities, divided points of access to discourse, or symbolic preliminaries to the circular representations of higher knowledge systems. For instance, Figure 3 might symbolize a fragmented or pluralistic access to the eternal (multiple points, no circle), unlike the holistic systems Kojève favors.
Conclusion: The Circle as Metaphysical Symbol
For Kojève, the circle becomes the central metaphor of philosophical systems:
A closed circle (Hegel) represents a self-reflexive Concept that encompasses Time and attains absolute knowledge.
A broken or silent circle represents skepticism or mysticism.
A radius marks the possibility of relation: either between Time and Eternity, or between the Word and Meaning.
Ultimately, Kojève’s Hegelian circle (Figure 11) achieves what all others attempt but fail to do: it unifies temporality and truth, discourse and being, man and Concept.
This is not a static truth outside of Time, but Eternity engendered by Time, revealed through the labor, desire, and mortality of man.
Bibliography
Alexandre Kojève, “A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept,” Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on thePbenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, trans.James H . Nichols, Jr., Cornell University Press, 1980.
“In me everything is already flowing, and you flow along too if you only stop minding such unaccustomed motion, and its song. Learn to swim, as once you danced on dry land, for the thaw is much nearer at hand than you think. And what ice could resist your sun? And, before it disappears, perhaps chance will have the ice enflame you, dissolving your hardness, melting your gold.
So remember the liquid ground. And taste the saliva in your mouth also—notice her familiar presence during your silence, how she is forgotten when you speak. Or again: how you stop speaking when you drink. And how necessary all of that is for you! These fluids softly mark the time. And there is no need to knock, just listen to hear the music. With very small ears.”
Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
liquid ground 