Sartre - The Imaginary

London and New York

by Arlette Elkam-Sartre

Sartre was a young schoolteacher in Le Havre in 1934 when he undertook to write a work on imagination., hardly depart from the aims of psychology thus defined at least formally except in the conclusions of this latter writing.

But as we will soon see, facts, as Sartre understands them here, and consequently laws, will not have the same meaning as in the official handbook of psychology.

Right from the start, The Imaginary manifests Sartres resolution to turn his back on the theories that he was taught and in turn had to inculcate in his pupils. He knew by heart the arguments for these theories based on certain facts and the objections to these arguments based on other facts, themselves more or less challenged by rival theories: Condillacs sensualism, according to which all the human faculties can be produced by assembling elementary sensations; the associationist theories, due to Hume, Mill, Taine, etc., and all the nuances that distinguish them in their ways of conceiving the relation between sensory impressions and states of consciousness as well as in their

It must be that each man has been born to make, in order to understand the world, a new and solitary effort, the young Sartre wrote candidly in a notebook. He retained the ambition to construct a new and concrete philosophy and it is with the concrete that he intends to begin here. This does not mean that in his exploration of the imaginary life, he will give primacy to matter, and even less so to the matter that science studies. He is convinced, for example, that cerebral localisations, however precise and complex the progress of technical instruments permits us to determine them, can explain nothing other than the conditions necessary for the existence of the psychic functions; they can never provide an account of the fact that I am a consciousness that perceives, remembers, imagines, and projects itself into the future.

It is worth remembering that another philosopher had, forty years earlier, opened a study of the psychic life by invoking concrete experience and intuition. It was Henri Bergson (18591914), whose Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness had originally given Sartre the taste for philosophy. Although he had first published his outstanding books, such as Matter and Memory, at the end of the nineteenth century, the originality of his philosophy was still fully felt in France in the thirties, as much among psychologists as among metaphysicians. The 1935 edition of Cuvilliers manual clearly counts his ideas as standing out strongly from previous theories, but with many reservations. Sartre cited it approvingly in his Ecrits de Jeunesse. Its relevance here is that the author of Nausea often has it in mind when writing The Imaginary, either to refute it, or to draw on one of its ideas, such as duration in psychic life. It is impossible to give even a vague idea of the whole of Bergsons philosophy, in which psychology and metaphysics are interlinked, within the scope of this introduction: I want only to outline the intellectual framework within which Sartre wrote this work. I am content to point out that the author of Matter and Memory intended to refute associationism; like Sartre, he held that the mental image is not a weakened perception, a more or less automatic revival, but that it differs from perception in its very nature and, more generally, that the metaphysical question of human freedom and that of the being of consciousness are closely linked. In The Imagination, Sartre provided a detailed analysis of the contradictions that he saw in the position of the vitalist philosopher for whom the evolution of life, from its origins to man, evokes the image of a current of consciousness inserted in matter like an underground passage.

But the concrete that concerns Sartre is far from Bergsonian intuition, which he considers too subjective. Besides, it will lead the philosopher to argue less and less, to cosmic reverie which is foreign to Sartres concerns. By concrete, he understands the points of support that make it possible for the data of experience to have sense. The most indubitable concrete is for him the cogito of Descartes. I think, therefore I am is the affirmation that reflective consciousness is possible, and is a solid springboard for researching other truths: for Descartes, if I can be mistaken about the existence of the world so long as I have not proven that there is a God who guarantees its existence, I can at least be certain that I exist, since I think. It is the same for Sartre: someone who, in an act of reflection, becomes conscious of having an image cannot be mistaken. One should therefore initially explore all that reflective consciousness can reveal about the specific characteristics of the image, about what occurs for me when I have an image.