SARTRE ON IMAGINATION AS WORLD-PRODUCTIVE SPONTANEITY

In his 1940 essay “L’Imaginaire: psychologie de l’imagination,” Jean-Paul Sartre develops a unique and original phenomenological account of imagination. Following Husserl’s method of investigation, Sartre attacks the “illusion of immanence,” which is the belief that imaginary objects are somehow “in” consciousness. He argues against this view by illustrating how the imaginary, as a correlate of consciousness and pure negativity, is essentially a nothing (néant), an irreality that does not exist “in” consciousness but rather insists as consciousness. When I form an image, its emergence out of nothing and its persistence in existence fully coincide with my intention. As soon as I cease to maintain the image, it disappears. Moreover, since the image is the spontaneous expression of my own consciousness, I cannot discover anything new in it. This marks a fundamental difference with perception, where the objects must be discovered by me and subsist independently of my intention. By distinguishing the essential traits of the imaginary and the object of perception, Sartre shows that these two modes of consciousness belong to two fundamentally different domains that are strictly separated from each other. For Sartre, the objects of imagination cannot exist in the world of perception, and an imaginary can never be confused with a perception. This thesis has generated controversy among theorists who insist on the intrusive nature of imagination with respect to perception or emphasize the entanglement between imagination and perception. The former is mainly represented by psychoanalysis and the idea that consciousness is dominated by forces not of the order of consciousness. Sartre goes to great lengths to demonstrate how phenomena such as hallucination and dreaming can be understood in terms of concepts and structures that pertain exclusively to the domain of the cogito. The latter kind of theorists, in turn, is mainly represented by Merleau-Ponty, who sees the imaginary (the invisible) as the precondition for the appearance of the world (the visible). Sartre, however, would never deny this Kantian insight into how the imaginary provides the “texture” of the real, but he would stress that such texture pertains to the constitution of reality rather than irreality, and hence involves a different phenomenon than the imaginary altogether. Finally, although Sartre drew a great deal from Husserl’s work, he also fundamentally diverged from him by focusing on the essential connection between imagination and the freedom of consciousness, understood as absolute spontaneity in relation to being-in-the-world. Imagination allows us to break with the present by orienting ourselves towards the future that is not-yet. By running ahead of ourselves towards what is not, we negate the current situation in favor of an imaginary alternative. Our ability to conceive a non-existent alternative to the given present state of affairs is a form of revolt that at all times affirms our freedom in the face of the present, even if that alternative cannot be actualized. Imagination thus denotes for Sartre not only our ability to negate the world but just as much our ability to produce it.