ABSTRACT
For Sartre, imagining is central to mental life. Along with perceiving, it is one of the two main forms that consciousness takes. Imagining and perceiving are fundamentally different, both in phenomenology and in their deeper nature. Neither can be reduced to the other, and they cannot combine in a single mental state. The range of imagining includes not merely visualizing and the purely mental states that provide its equivalents in other sense modalities, but also our engagement with a range of external objects and events, such as “seeing” faces in the flames of a fire or reading a novel. Indeed, imagining is the basis of our engagement with all art. More than this, however, it is essential to consciousness, in the form in which we enjoy it, and to the freedom that consciousness essentially involves. Few other thinkers have given the imagination such significance in human life, and few have explored so thoroughly what marks it apart from other mental states. In elaborating Sartre’s position, I draw mostly on L’Imaginaire (Sartre 1940): all unat-
tributed page numbers below refer to the most recent English translation of this work (Webber trans., Sartre 1940/2005).1 This book represents the height of Sartre’s engagement with Phenomenology, the tradition in philosophy that centers on the study of the structure of conscious states, as experienced by their subjects. At its core is thus a description of the phenomenology (with a small ‘p’) that distinguishes imagining from perceiving: the features of each that characterize what it’s like to undergo them. I begin with those features (Section 1), before turning to the range of phenomena Sartre takes to exhibit them (Section 2). However, Sartre steps beyond both phenomenology and Phenomenology in offering an account of the deep nature of the state that has those features, in his doctrine of the “analogon” (Section 3). I close by briefly sketching his views on the significance of imagining (Section 4).
