Imagination and Progress (1924)*
Luis Araquistáin writes that “the conservative spirit, in its most disinterested form, when it is not born from a base selfishness, but from the fear of the unknown and uncertain, is at bottom a lack of imagination.” Being a revolutionary or a renovator is, from this point of view, a consequence of being more or less imaginative. The conservative rejects every idea of change because of a kind of mental inability to conceive of it and to accept it. This is, of course, the case of the pure conservative, because the attitude of the practical conservative, who adapts his ideology to his utility and comfort, undoubtedly has a different genesis.
Traditionalism, conservatism, are thus defined as a simple spiritual limitation. The traditionalist has no aptitude except to imagine life as it was. The conservative has no aptitude except to imagine it as it is. The progress of humanity, consequently, is fulfilled abortively to traditionalism and in spite of conservatism.
Several years ago Oscar Wilde, in his original essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” said that “to progress is to realize utopias.” Thinking similarly to Wilde, Luis Araquistáin adds that “without imagination there is no progress of any kind.” And in truth, progress would not be possible if the human imagination suddenly suffered a collapse.
History always gives reason to imaginative men. In South America, for example, we have just commemorated the figure and work of the animators and conductors of the independence revolution. These men seem to us, justifiably, great. But what is the first condition of genius? It is, without a doubt, a powerful faculty of imagination. The liberators were great because they were, above all, imaginative. They rebelled against the limited reality, against the imperfect reality of their time.
They worked to create a new reality. Bolívar had futuristic dreams. He contemplated a confederation of Indo-Spanish states. Without this ideal, it is likely that Bolívar would not have come to fight for our independence. The fortune of Peru’s independence has depended, therefore, in large part, on the Liberator’s imaginative aptitude. When we celebrate the centenary of a victory of Ayacucho, we are really celebrating the centenary of a victory of the imagination. The sensible reality, the evident reality, in the times of the revolution of independence; it was not, by the way, either republican or nationalist. The benefaction of the liberators consists in having seen a potential reality, a higher reality, an imaginary reality.
This is the story of all great human events. Progress has always been made by the imaginative. Posterity has invariably accepted its work. The conservatism of a later epoch never has more defenders or proselytes than a few romantics and a few extravagants. Humanity, with rare exceptions, esteems and studies the men of the French Revolution much more than those of the monarchy and feudalism then overthrown. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette seem to many people, above all, disgraced. They don’t seem great to anyone.
On the other hand, the imagination is generally less free and less arbitrary than is supposed. The poor thing has been much defamed and very deformed. Some believe it more or less insane; others judge it unlimited and even infinite. Actually, imagination is rather modest. Like all human things, imagination also has its limits. In all men, in the most brilliant, as in the most idiotic, it is conditioned by circumstances of time and space. The human spirit reacts against contingent reality. But it is precisely when it reacts against reality that perhaps it depends most on it. It strives to modify what it sees and what it feels; not what it is ignorant of. Therefore, only those utopias that could be called realistic are valid. Those utopias that are born from the very core of reality. Georg Simmel once wrote that a collectivist society moves towards individualist ideals and that, conversely, an individualist society moves towards socialist ideals. Hegelian philosophy explains the creative force of the ideal as a consequence, at the same time, of the resistance and the stimulus that it encounters in reality. It could be said that man foresees and imagines only what is already germinating, maturing, in the dark bowels of history.
Idealists need to rely on the concrete interest of an extensive and conscious social layer. The ideal prospers only when it represents a vast interest. When it acquires, in short, characters of utility and comfort. When a social class becomes an instrument of its realization.
In our epoch, in our civilization, there have never been utopias that are too audacious. Modern man has managed almost to predict progress. Even the fantasy of novelists has often been overtaken by reality in a short time. Western science has gone with greater haste than Jules Verne dreamed. The same has happened in politics. Anatole France predicted the Russian Revolution by the end of this century, a few years before this revolution inaugurated a new chapter in the history of the world.
And it is precisely in the novel by Anatole France, who, trying to predict the future, formulates these omens, — The White Stone — it is noted how culture and wisdom do not confer any privileged power on the imagination. Gallio, the figure of an episode of Roman decadence evoked by Anatole France, was a supreme example of a learned and wise man of his epoch. However, this man absolutely did not perceive the decline of his civilization. Christianity seemed to him an absurd and stupid sect. The Roman civilization in his judgment could not pass, could not perish. Gallio conceived the future as a mere prolongation of the present. For this he seems to us, in his speeches, lamentably and ridiculously lacking in inspiration. He was a very intelligent man, very learned, very refined; but he had the immense misfortune of not being an imaginative man. Hence, his attitude to life was mediocre and conservative.
This thesis about imagination, conservatism and progress, could lead us to very interesting and original conclusions. To conclusions that would move us, for example, to no longer classify men as revolutionaries and conservatives but as imaginative and unimaginative. By distinguishing them in this way, we would perhaps be committing the injustice of flattering the vanity of the revolutionaries too much and of slightly offending the vanity, of course respectable, of the conservatives. Moreover, to the university and methodical intelligentsia, the new classification would seem quite arbitrary, quite extraordinary: But, evidently, it is very monotonous to always classify and qualify men in the same way. And, above all, if humanity has not yet found a new name for the conservatives and the revolutionaries, it is undoubtedly also due to a lack of imagination.
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*Published in Mundial: Lima, December 12, 1924. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/la%20imaginacion%20y%20el%20progreso.htm>.
