The Imagination

Jean-Paul Sartre, Kenneth Williford, David Rudrauf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135763473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

'No matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there. It is in this fact that we find the distinction between an image and a perception.' - Jean-Paul Sartre

L'Imagination was published in 1936 when Jean-Paul Sartre was thirty years old. Long out of print, this is the first English translation in many years. The Imagination is Sartre's first full philosophical work, presenting some of the basic arguments concerning phenomenology, consciousness and intentionality that were to later appear in his master works and be so influential in the course of twentieth-century philosophy.

Sartre begins by criticising philosophical theories of the imagination, particularly those of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume, before establishing his central thesis. Imagination does not involve the perception of 'mental images' in any literal sense, Sartre argues, yet reveals some of the fundamental capacities of consciousness. He then reviews psychological theories of the imagination, including a fascinating discussion of the work of Henri Bergson. Sartre argues that the 'classical conception' is fundamentally flawed because it begins by conceiving of the imagination as being like perception and then seeks, in vain, to re-establish the difference between the two. Sartre concludes with an important chapter on Husserl's theory of the imagination which, despite sharing the flaws of earlier approaches, signals a new phenomenological way forward in understanding the imagination.

The Imagination is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy.

This new translation includes a helpful historical and philosophical introduction by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. Also included is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's important review of L'Imagination upon its publication in French in 1936.

Translated by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf.

THE IMAGINATION

Jean-Paul Sartre

INTRODUCTION

I look at this white page on my table. I perceive its shape, its colour, its position. These different qualities have common characteristics: first they give themselves to my gaze as existences that I can only bear witness to (constater) and whose being does not depend on my caprice in any way. They are for me; they are not me. But nor are they others, that is to say, they do not depend on any spontaneity, neither mine nor that of another consciousness. They are at once present and inert. This inertia of sensible content, which has often been described, is existence in itself. It is useless to discuss whether this sheet of paper can be reduced to an ensemble of representations or whether it is, and must be, more than that. What is certain is that the white that I bear witness to (constater) cannot be produced by my spontaneity. This inert form, which is set back from all conscious spontaneities and which one must observe and learn little by little, is what is called a thing. In no case could my consciousness be a thing because its way of being in itself is precisely a being for itself. To exist is for it to have consciousness of its own existence. It appears as a pure spontaneity facing the world of things, which is pure inertia. We can then posit from the beginning two types of existence. Indeed, it is insofar as they are inert that things escape the domination of consciousness; it is their inertia that protects and preserves their autonomy.

But now I turn my head away. I do not see the sheet of paper anymore. Now I see the grey wallpaper. The sheet is no longer present. It is not there anymore. I know well though that it has not been annihilated; its inertia protects it from that. The sheet has simply ceased to be for me. Yet here it is once again. I did not turn my head back. My gaze is still directed towards the grey wallpaper; nothing has moved in the room. Nevertheless the sheet does appear to me again with its shape, its colour and its position; and I know very well, at the moment it appears, that it is precisely the sheet that I was seeing earlier. But is it the sheet in person? Yes and no. Certainly I affirm that it is the same sheet with the same qualities, but I am not unaware that the sheet has remained over there. I do know that I am not enjoying its presence. If I want to see it in fact, I have to turn back towards my desk and draw my gaze back to the blotter where the sheet is placed. The sheet that appears to me at this moment has an identity of essence with the sheet that I was looking at earlier. And by ‘essence’ I intend not only the structure but also the very individuality. However, this identity of essence is not accompanied by an identity of existence. It is indeed the same sheet, the one that is presently on my desk, but it exists differently. I do not see it, it does not impose itself as a limit to my spontaneity; nor is it an inert datum existing in itself. In a word, it does not exist in fact; it exists as imaged (en image).

If I examine myself without prejudice, I will realize that I spontaneously make the discrimination between existence as thing and existence as image. I would not know how to count those apparitions we call images. But whether or not their evocations are voluntary, images give themselves, at the very moment they appear, as something other than presences. I am never mistaken about this. It would even greatly surprise someone who never studied psychology if, after explaining to him what the psychologist calls an image, one would ask him: Do you sometimes confuse the image of your brother with his real presence? The recognition of the image as such is an immediate given of the intimate sense (sens intime).

Now, it is one thing to immediately apprehend an image as an image, but it is something else to form thoughts about the nature of images in general. The only way to build a true theory of existence-as-imaged (l'existence en image) would be to rigorously keep oneself from asserting anything about such existence that does not directly find its source in a reflective experience. For existence-as-imaged (l'existence en image) is a mode of being quite difficult to grasp. Grasping it requires some straining of mind, but above all it requires us to get rid of our almost unbreakable habit of construing all modes of existence on the model of physical existence. Here more than anywhere else, this confusion among modes of being is tempting, since, after all, the sheet as imaged (en image) and the sheet in reality are but the same sheet on two different planes of existence. Thus, as soon as we turn our minds from the pure contemplation of the image as such, as soon as we think about the image without forming images, a slide occurs: from the affirmation of the identity of essence between the image and the object, one moves on to an affirmation of an identity of existence. Since the image is the object, one concludes that the image exists in the same way the object does. And in this fashion one fabricates what we will call the naïve metaphysics of the image. This metaphysics consists in making of the image a copy of the thing, which then itself exists as a thing. Here is the sheet of paper ‘as imaged’ («en image»), imbued with the same qualities as the sheet ‘in person’. It is inert, it does not exist anymore solely for consciousness; it exists in itself. It appears and disappears as it pleases, and not at the whim of consciousness. It does not cease to exist when it ceases to be perceived, but maintains, outside of consciousness, the existence of a thing. This metaphysics or rather this naïve ontology is everyone's. And this is why one notices this curious paradox: the same man, without psychological culture, who assured us earlier of being able to recognize immediately his images as images, will now add that he sees his images, that he hears them, etc. His first affirmation results from spontaneous experience and his second from a naïvely construed theory. And precisely, he does not realize that if he were to see his images, if he were to perceive them as things, he would not be able to distinguish them from objects anymore. And he ends by construing one single sheet of paper on two planes of existence as two rigorously similar sheets existing on the same plane. A beautiful illustration of this naïve thingism (chosisme) of images is provided by the Epicurean theory of ‘simulacra’. Things keep emitting ‘simulacra’, ‘idols’, which are just sheaths. These sheaths have all the qualities of the object—content, shape, etc. And it is exactly the case that they are objects. Once emitted, they exist in themselves, just like the emitting object, and can wander in the air for some undetermined time. Perception will occur when a sensory apparatus encounters and absorbs one of these sheaths.

Pure a priori theory made a thing out of the image, but internal intuition teaches us that the image is not the thing. The data of intuition are thus going to be incorporated in the theoretical construction under a new form: the image is a thing, just as much as the thing it is an image of, but by the very fact that it is an image, it receives a sort of metaphysical inferiority in comparison with the thing it represents. In a word, the image is a lesser thing. The ontology of the image is now complete and systematic: the image is a lesser thing, which has its own existence, gives itself to consciousness as any other thing, and maintains external relationships with the thing it is an image of. One sees that it is only this vague and ill-defined inferiority (that can become only a sort of magical weakness, or that one will, on the contrary, describe as a lesser degree of distinction and clarity) and this external relationship that justify the appellation image. One can also foresee all the contradictions that will result from this.

It is nevertheless this naive ontology of the image that we will meet up with, as a more or less implicit postulate, in all the psychologists who have studied the question. All or almost all have made the confusion indicated above between identity of essence and identity of existence. All have built the theory of the image a priori. And when they came back to experience it was too late. Instead of letting themselves be guided by experience, they forced it to respond yes or no to tendentious questions. To be sure, a superficial reading of the innumerable writings that have been dedicated to the problem of the image for the last sixty years seems to reveal an extraordinary diversity of points of view, but we would like to show that one can find a single theory underneath this diversity. This theory, which first resulted from the naïve ontology, was perfected under the influence of diverse preoccupations extraneous to the question and transmitted to contemporary psychologists by the great metaphysicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Descartes, Leibniz and Hume have the same conception of the image. They only disagree when it comes to the determination of the relationships between image and thought. Positive psychology has retained the notion of the image inherited from these philosophers. But it did not know how to choose between the three solutions they had proposed to the image-thought problem, nor could it. We want to show that it had to be that way, necessarily, as soon as the postulate of an image-thing was adopted. But in order to stress this more clearly, we need to begin with Descartes and a brief history of the problem of the imagination.

I

THE GREAT
METAPHYSICAL SYSTEMS

Faced with a Scholastic tradition in which species were conceived of as half-material, half-mental (demi-spirituelles) entities, Descartes' main concern was to separate with exactitude mechanism and thought. The corporeal was to be entirely reduced to the mechanistic. The image is a corporeal thing; it is the product of the action of external bodies on our own body via the intermediaries of the senses and the nerves. Since matter and consciousness exclude one another, the image as it is depicted materially in some part of the brain could not be animated with consciousness. It is an object by the same right as external objects. It is exactly the limit of exteriority.

The imagination, or knowledge of the image, comes from the understanding; it is the understanding, applied to the material impression produced in the brain, that provides us with a consciousness of the image. Incidentally, the image is not set in front of consciousness as a new object of knowledge, in spite of its corporeal nature. This would in fact throw back to infinity the possibility of a relation between consciousness and its objects. It possesses this strange property of being able to motivate the actions of the soul. The motions of the brain, caused by the external objects, although they do not resemble the latter, awaken ideas in the soul. The ideas do not come from the motions; they are innate in man. But it is on the occasion of the motions that the ideas appear in consciousness. The motions are like signs that provoke certain feelings in the soul. But Descartes does not develop this idea of the sign, to which he seems to give the sense of an arbitr...