JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

96Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsthem not for themselves in trying to present them by means of an analogue but in thevery way in which I grasp what has been given me of their continuation. I perceive thebeginnings and the endings of the hidden arabesques (which appear to me before andbehind the leg of the chair) as continuing under the legs of the chair. It is therefore in theway in which I grasp the data that I posit that which is not given as being real. Real bythe same right as the data, as that which gives it its meaning and its very nature.Likewise the successive tones of a melody are grasped by appropriate retentions asthat which makes of the tone now heard exactly what it is. In this sense, to perceivethis or that real datum is to perceive it on the foundation of total reality as a whole.This reality never becomes the object of any special act of my attention, but it is copresentas an essential condition of the existence of the reality actually perceived.Here we see that the imaginative act is the reverse of the act of reality. If I want toimagine the hidden arabesques, I direct my attention upon them and isolate them, justas I isolate on the foundation of an undifferentiated universe the thing I actuallyperceive. I cease to grasp them as empty but constituting the sense of the perceivedreality; instead I present them to myself, in themselves. But at the moment that I ceaseto conceive them as continuous present in order to grasp them in themselves, I graspthem as absent. Of course they really exist over there, under the chair, and it is overthere that I think of them, but in thinking of them where they are not given to me, Igrasp them as nothing for me. Thus the imaginative act is at once constitutive, isolatingand annihilating.It is this which turns the problem of memory and that of anticipation into twoproblems which are radically different from the problem of imagination. No doubtrecollection is in many respects very close to the image, and at times we were able todraw our examples from memory to clarify the nature of the image. There is neverthelessan essential difference between the theme of recollection and that of the image. If Irecall an incident of my past life I do not imagine it, I recall it. That is, I do not positit as given-in-its absence, but as given-now-as-in-the-past. The handshake of Peter oflast evening in leaving me did not turn into an unreality as it became a thing of the past:it simply went into retirement; it is always real but past. It exists past, which is onemode of real existence among others. And when I want to apprehend it anew I pursueit where it is, I direct my consciousness towards that past object which is yesterday,and, at the heart of that object, I recover the event I am looking for, the handshake ofPeter. In a word, just as when I want actually to see the hidden arabesques under thechair I have to look for them where they are, that is, move the chair; so when I recallthis or that memory I do not call it forth but I betake myself to where it is, I direct myconsciousness to the past where it awaits me as a real event in retirement. But if I