The Imaginary

A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination

Jean-Paul Sartre, revised by Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, Jonathan Webber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134445028
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

First published in 1940, Sartre's The Imaginary is a cornerstone of his philosophy. Sartre had become acquainted with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Berlin and was fascinated by his idea of the intentionality of consciousness as a key to the puzzle of existence.
Against this background, The Imaginary crystallized Sartre's worldview and artistic vision. Here he presented the first extended examination of the concepts of nothingness and freedom, both of which are derived from the ability of consciousness to imagine objects both as they are and as they are not. These ideas would drive Sartre's existentialism and his entire theory of human freedom, laying the foundation for his masterwork Being and Nothingness three years later. This new translation by Jonathan Webber rectifies flaws in the terminology of the first translation and recaptures the essence of Sartre's phenomenology. Webber's perceptive new introduction helps to decipher this challenging, seminal work, placing it in the context of the author's work and the history of philosophy.

Part I
The Certain

THE INTENTIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE IMAGE

This work aims to describe the great ‘irrealizing’ function of consciousness, or ‘imagination’, and its noematic correlate, the imaginary.

I have permitted myself to use the word ‘consciousness’ in a sense a little different from that which it usually receives. The expression ‘state of consciousness’ implies, for psychic structures, a kind of inertia or passivity that seems to me incompatible with the data of reflection. I use the term ‘consciousness’ not to designate the monad and the set of its psychic structures, but to name each of these structures in its concrete particularity. I will therefore speak of the image consciousness, the perceptual consciousness, etc., inspired by one of the senses of the German word Bewusstsein.

1
DESCRIPTION

I. THE METHOD

Despite some prejudices, to which we will return, it is certain that when I produce in myself the image of Pierre, it is Pierre who is the object of my current consciousness. So long as that consciousness remains unaltered, I can give a description of the object as it appears to me as imaged, but not of the image as such. To determine the characteristics of the image as image, it is necessary to turn to a new act of consciousness: it is necessary to reflect. So the image as image is describable only by a second-order act in which the look is turned away from the object and directed at the way in which the object is given. It is this reflective act that permits the judgement ‘I have an image’.

It is necessary to repeat here what has been known since Descartes: a reflective consciousness delivers us absolutely certain data; someone who, in an act of reflection, becomes conscious of ‘having an image’ cannot be mistaken. Undoubtedly there have been psychologists who affirm that we cannot, in the limiting case, distinguish an intense image from a weak perception. Titchener even appeals to certain experiments in support of this thesis. But we will see later on that these affirmations depend on an error. In fact, confusion is impossible: what is conventionally called an ‘image’ gives itself immediately as such to reflection. But this is not a matter of a metaphysical and ineffable revelation. If these consciousnesses are immediately distinguishable from all others, it is because they present themselves to reflec-tion with certain marks, certain characteristics that immediately determine the judgement ‘I have an image’. The act of reflection therefore has an immediately certain content that I will call the essence of the image. This essence is the same for everyone; the first task of psychology is to make it explicit, describe it, fix it.

Why then, one might ask, is there an extreme diversity of doctrines? The psychologists should all agree, if they refer to this immediate knowledge. My answer is that the majority of psychologists do not refer to it. They leave it in an implicit state and prefer to build explanatory hypotheses about the nature of the image.¹ These, like all scientific hypotheses, never have more than a certain probability: the data of reflection are certain.

All new studies of the image must therefore begin with a radical distinction: a description of the image is one thing, inductive claims about its nature another. Passing from one to the other is passing from the certain to the probable. The first duty of the psychologist is evidently to fix in concepts the immediate and certain knowledge.

We will leave the theories on one side. We want to know nothing of the image but what reflection can teach us. Later on, I will try, as do other psychologists, to classify the image consciousness among the other con-sciousnesses, to find it a ‘family’, and to form hypotheses about its inner nature. For now I want only to attempt a ‘phenomenology’ of the image. The method is simple: produce images in ourselves, reflect on these images, describe them, which is to say, try to determine and classify their distinctive characteristics.

II. FIRST CHARACTERISTIC: THE IMAGE IS A CONSCIOUSNESS

At the first reflective glance, we see that we have so far committed a double error. We thought, without justifying it to ourselves, that the image was in consciousness and that the object of the image was in the image. We depicted consciousness as a place peopled with small imitations and these imitations were the images. Without any doubt, the origin of this illusion must be sought in our habit of thinking in space and in terms of space. I will call it: the illusion of immanence. It finds its clearest expression in Hume, who distinguishes ideas and impressions:

The perceptions, which enter with the most force and violence, we may name impressions . . . By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning . . . ²

These ideas are none other than what we call images. Then he adds, a few pages further on:

But to form the idea of an object, and to form an idea simply is the same thing; the reference of the idea to an object being an extraneous denomination, of which in itself it bears no mark or character. Now as ’tis impossible to form an idea of an object, that is possest of quantity and quality, and yet is possest of no precise degree of either; it follows that there is an equal impossibility of forming an idea, that is not limited and confin’d in both these particulars.³

So my current idea of chair refers only externally to an existing chair. It is not the chair in the external world, the chair that I perceived earlier; it is not that chair of straw and wood that allows me to distinguish my idea from ideas of table or of inkwell. Nevertheless my current idea really is an idea of chair. What does this mean, if not that, for Hume, the idea of chair and the chair as idea are one and the same thing? To have an idea of chair is to have a chair in consciousness. Good proof of this is that what applies to the object applies to the idea. If the object must have a determinate quantity and quality, the idea must also possess these determinations.

Psychologists and philosophers have mainly adopted this point of view. It is also that of common sense. When I say that ‘I have an image’ of Pierre, it is thought that I presently have a certain portrait of Pierre in consciousness. The object of my current consciousness is precisely this portrait, and Pierre, the man of flesh and blood, is reached only very indirectly, in an ‘extrinsic’ manner, only by the fact that he is what the portrait represents. Likewise, in an exhibition, I can contemplate a portrait for itself at length, without seeing written at the bottom of the picture ‘Portrait of Pierre Z . . .’. In other words, an image is implicitly assimilated to the material object that it represents.

What can be surprising is that the radical heterogeneity of consciousness and the image thus conceived was never felt. Without doubt, the illusion of immanence was always left implicit. Otherwise it would have been understood that it was impossible to slip these material portraits into a conscious synthetic structure without destroying the structure, cutting the contacts, stopping the current, breaking the continuity. Consciousness would cease to be transparent to itself; everywhere its unity would be broken by the inassimilable, opaque screens. In vain did works like those of Spaier, Bühler, Flach soften this same notion of image, showing it full of life, penetrated with feeling and knowledge; the image, raised to the status of an organism, remains nonetheless an inassimilable product for consciousness. It is for this reason that certain logical minds, like F. Moutier, believed that we must deny the existence of mental images to save the integrity of the psychic synthesis.⁴ This radical solution is contradicted by the data of introspection. I can, at will, imagine a horse, a tree, a house. And yet if we accept the illusion of immanence, we are necessarily led to constitute the world of the mind from objects very similar to those of the external world and which, simply, obey different laws. Let us leave these theories aside and, to deliver us from the illusion of immanence, let us see what reflection teaches us.

When I perceive a chair, it would be absurd to say that the chair is in my perception. My perception is, in accordance with the terminology that we have adopted, a certain consciousness and the chair is the object of that consciousness. Now I close my eyes and I produce the image of the chair that I have just perceived. The chair, now being given as imaged, can no more enter into consciousness than previously. An image of a chair is not and cannot be a chair. Actually, whether I perceive or imagine this straw-bottomed chair on which I sit, it always remains outside of consciousness. In both cases it is there, in space, in that room, in front of the desk. Now – this is, above all, what reflection teaches us – whether I perceive or imagine that chair, the object of my perception and that of my image are identical: it is that straw-bottomed chair on which I sit. It is simply that consciousness is related to this same chair in two different ways. In both cases, it aims at the chair in its concrete individuality, in its corporeality. Only, in one of the cases, the chair is ‘encountered’ by consciousness; in the other, it is not. But the chair is not in consciousness. Not even as an image. It is not a matter of an imitation chair that suddenly entered into consciousness and has only an ‘extrinsic’ relation to the existing chair; it is a matter of a certain type of consciousness, which is to say of a synthetic organization, relating directly to the existing chair and whose inner essence is precisely to relate in such-and-such a manner to the existing chair.

And what exactly is the image? It is evidently not the chair: in general, the object of the image is not itself an image. Will we say that the image is the total synthetic organization, the consciousness? But this consciousness is a current and concrete nature, which exists in itself and for itself, and can always give itself to reflection without intermediary. The word ‘image’ could only indicate therefore the relation of consciousness to the object; in other words, it is a certain way in which the object appears to consciousness, or, if one prefers, a certain way in which consciousness presents to itself an object. To tell the truth, the expression ‘mental image’ gives rise to confusion. It would be better to say ‘consciousness of Pierre-as-imaged’ or ‘imaging consciousness of Pierre’. As the word ‘image’ is long-standing, we cannot reject it completely. But, to avoid all ambiguity, I repeat here that an image is nothing other than a relation. The imaging consciousness that I have of Pierre is not a consciousness of an image of Pierre: Pierre is directly reached, my attention is not directed at an image, but at an object.⁵

So, in the weave of the synthetic acts of consciousness there appear at times certain structures that we call imaging consciousnesses. They are born, develop, and disappear according to laws specific to them and that we will try to determine. And it would be a grave error to confuse this life of the imaging consciousness, which endures, becomes organized, and disintegrates, with the object of this consciousness, which, meanwhile, may well remain immutable.

III. SECOND CHARACTERISTIC: THE PHENOMENON OF QUASI-OBSERVATION

When we began this study we thought that we would be dealing with images, which is to say with elements of consciousness. We now see that we are dealing with complete consciousnesses, which is to say with complex structures that ‘intend’ certain objects. Let us see whether reflection cannot teach us more about these consciousnesses. It will be simplest to consider the image in relation to the concept and to perception. To perceive, to conceive, to imagine: such are indeed the three types of consciousness by which the same object can be given to us.

In perception I observe objects. It should be understood by this that the object, though it enters whole into my perception, is never given to me but one side at a time. Consider the example of a cube: I do not know it is a cube unless I have seen its six faces; I can possibly see three together, but never more. It is necessary therefore that I apprehend them successively. And when I pass, for example, from the apprehension of faces ABC to faces BCD, it always remains possible that face A disappeared during my change of position. The existence of the cube will therefore remain doubtful. At the same time, we must notice that when I see three faces of the cube together, these three faces are never presented to me like squares: their lines are flattened, their angles become obtuse, and I must reconstitute their nature as squares starting from the appearances in my perception. All this has been said a hundred times: it is characteristic of perception that the object never appears except in a series of profiles, of projections. The cube is indeed present to me, I can touch it, see it; but I can never see it except in a certain way, which calls for and excludes at the same time an infinity of other points of view. One must learn objects, which is to say, multiply the possible points of view on them. The object itself is the synthesis of all these appearances. The perception of an object is therefore a phenomenon of an infinity of aspects. What does this signify for us? The necessity of making a tour of objects, of waiting, as Bergson said, until the ‘sugar dissolves’.

When, on the other hand, I think of a cube by a concrete concept, I think of its six sides and its eight angles at the same time; I think that its angles are right angles, its sides squares.⁶ I am at the centre of my idea, I apprehend its entirety in one glance. Naturally, this is not to say that my idea does not need to be completed by an infinite progression. But I can think the concrete essences in a single act of consciousness; I do not need to recover images, I have no apprenticeship to serve. Such is without doubt the clearest difference between thought and perception. That is why we can never perceive a thought nor think a perception. They are radically distinct phenomena: one is knowledge conscious of itself, which places itself at once in the centre of the object; the other is a synthetic unity of a multiplicity of appearances, which slowly serves its apprenticeship.

What will we say of the image? Is it apprenticeship or knowledge? Let us note initially that it seems ‘on the side of’ perception. In the one as in the other the object gives itself by profiles, by projections, by what the Germans designate by the apt term ‘Abschattungen’. Only, we no longer need to make the tour of it: the imaged cube is given immediately for what it is. When I say ‘the object I perceive is a cube’, I make a hypothesis that the later course of my perceptions may oblige me to abandon. When I say ‘the object of which I have an image at this moment is a cube’, I make here a judgement of obviousness: it is absolutely certain that the object of my image is a cube. What does this say? In perception, knowledge is formed slowly; in the image, knowledge is immediate. We see now that the image is a synthetic act that links a concrete, not imaged, knowledge to elements more properly representative. An image is not learned: it is organized exactly as the objects that are learned, but, in fact, it is given whole, for what it is, in its appearance. If you turn a cube-image in thought to amuse yourself, if you pretend that it presents its various faces to you, then you will not be more advanced at the end of the operation: you will not have learned anything.

This is not all. Let us consider this sheet of paper on the table. The more we look at it, the more it reveals to us of its characteristics.

Each new orientation of my attention, of my analysis, reveals to me a new detail: the upper edge of the sheet is slightly warped, the end of the third line is dotted, etc. But I can keep an image in view as long as I want: I will never find anything there but what I put there. This remark is of the utmost importance in distinguishing the image from perception. In the world of perception, no ‘thing’ can appear without maintaining an infinity of relations to other things. Better, it is this infinity of relations – as well as the infinity of the relations that its elements support between them – it is this infinity of relations that constitutes the very essence of a thing. Hence a kind of overflowing in the world of ‘things’: there is, at every moment, always infinitely more than we can see; to exhaust the richness of my current perception would take an infinite time. Let us not be mistaken here: this kind of ‘overflowing’ is constitutive of the very nature of objects. When it is said that an object cannot exist without a definite individuality, it is necessary to understand by this ‘without maintaining an infinity of determinate relations with the infinity of ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
• PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION
• NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION
• PART I: THE CERTAIN
• PART II: THE PROBABLE
• PART III: THE ROLE OF THE IMAGE IN PSYCHIC LIFE
• PART IV: THE IMAGINARY LIFE
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES