JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

94Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsconsciousness from the fact that it is a consciousness capable of imagining. Thisquestion can be taken in the sense of a critical analysis under the form: of what naturemust a consciousness be in general if the construction of an image should always bepossible? And no doubt it is in this form that our minds, accustomed to raisingphilosophical questions in the Kantian perspective, will best understand it. But, as amatter of fact, the problem in its deepest meaning can only be grasped from aphenomenological point of view.After the phenomenological reduction we find ourselves in the presence of thetranscendental consciousness which unveils itself to our reflective descriptions. Wecan thus fix by concepts the result of our eidetic intuition of the essence“consciousness”. Now, phenomenological descriptions can discover, for instance,that the very structure of the transcendental consciousness implies that thisconsciousness is constitutive of a world. But it is evident that they will not teach usthat consciousness must be constitutive of such a world, that is to say, exactly the onewhere we are, with its earth, its animals, its men and the story of these men. We arehere in the presence of a primary and irreducible fact which presents itself as acontingent and irrational specification of the essence of the world as we know it. Andmany phenomenologists will call “metaphysics” the investigation whose aim it is touncover this contingent existent in its entirety. This is not exactly what we would callmetaphysics, but that is of little importance here. What will concern us is this: is thefunction of imagination a contingent and metaphysical specification of the essence“consciousness” or should it rather be described as a constitutive structure of thatessence? In other words: can we conceive of a consciousness which would neverimagine and which would be completely absorbed in its intuitions of the real—in thatcase the possibility of imagining, which appears as one quality among others of ourconsciousnesses, would be a contingent enrichment or rather, as soon as we posit aconsciousness, must it be posited as always being able to imagine? We should be ableto settle this question by the simple reflective inspection of the essence “consciousness”,and it is thus in fact that we would attempt to settle it, were we not addressingourselves to a public as yet but little accustomed to phenomenological methods. Butsince the idea of eidetic intuition is still repugnant to many French readers, we shallresort to a subterfuge, that is, to a method somewhat more complex. We shall beginwith the question: what must a consciousness be in order for it to possess the powerto imagine, which we shall try to develop by the usual procedures of critical analysis,that is, by a regressive method. Next we shall compare the results we obtain withthose the Cartesian intuition gives us of the consciousness realized by the cogito, andwe shall see whether the necessary conditions for realizing an imaginative consciousness