JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Imagination and emotion95are the same or different from the conditions of possibility of a consciousness ingeneral.Indeed, the problem stated thus may appear to be completely new and even triflingto French psychologists. And, in fact, as long as we are the victims of the illusion ofimmanence, there is no general problem of imagination. Images are in fact supplied, inthese theories, by a type of existence strictly like that of things. They are rebornsensations which may differ in degree, in cohesion, in meaning from primary sensations,but which belong, as do sensations, to the intra-mundane existence. The image is asreal as any other existence. The only question concerning the image is the problem ofits relationship to other existences but, whatever this relationship may be, the existenceof the image remains intact. This is like saying that whether the portrait of KingCharles VI is or is not a true likeness, whether the king is dead or alive or even whetherhe ever existed, the portrait is nevertheless something that exists in the world. Thereis therefore no existential problem of the image.But if the image is looked upon as we have viewed it in this work, the existentialproblem of the image can no longer be sidetracked. In fact, to the existence of an objectfor consciousness there corresponds noetically a hypothesis or position of existence.Now, the hypothesis of the imaginative consciousness is radically different from thehypothesis of a consciousness of the real. This means that the type of existence of theobject of the image as long as it is imagined, differs in nature from the type ofexistence of the object grasped as real. And surely, if I now form an image of Peter, myimaginative consciousness includes a certain positing of the existence of Peter, in so faras he is now at this very moment in Berlin or London. But while he appears to me asan image, this Peter who is in London appears to me absent. This absence in actuality,this essential nothingness of the imagined object, is enough to distinguish it from theobject of perception. What then must the nature of a consciousness be in order that itbe able successively to posit real objects and imagined objects ?We must at once make an important observation, which the reader may have madehimself if he has studied the problem of the relationships between perception andimagery, as outlined in Chapter 2. For an object or any element of an object there is agreat difference between being grasped as nothing and being-given-as-absent. In aperception of whatever sort many empty intentions are directed, from the elements ofthe object now given, towards other aspects and other elements of the object which nolonger reveal themselves to our intuition. For instance, the arabesques of the rug I amviewing are both in part given to my intuition. The legs of the armchair which standsbefore the window conceal certain curves, certain designs. But I nevertheless seizethese hidden arabesques as existing now, as hidden but not at all as absent. And I grasp