JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Imagination and emotion99the totality of the real, so long as it is grasped by consciousness as a syntheticsituation for that consciousness, is the world. There is then a two-fold requisite ifconsciousness is to imagine: it must be able to posit the world in its synthetic totality,and it must be able to posit the imagined object as being out of reach of this synthetictotality, that is, posit the world as a nothingness in relation to the image. From this itfollows clearly that all creation of the imaginary would be completely impossible to aconsciousness whose nature was precisely to be “in-the-midst-of-the-world”. If weassume a consciousness placed in the very bosom of the world as one existence amongothers, we must conceive it hypothetically as completely subjected to the action of avariety of realities—without its being able to avoid the detail of these realities by anintuition capable of grasping their totality. This consciousness could therefore containonly real modifications aroused by real actions, and all imagination would be prohibitedto it, exactly in the degree to which it was engulfed in the real. This conception of animagination enmired in the world is not unknown to us, since it is precisely that ofpsychological determinism. We can affirm fearlessly that if consciousness is asuccession of determined psychical facts it is entirely impossible for it ever to produceanything but the real. For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escapefrom the world by its very nature; it must be able by its own efforts to withdraw fromthe world. In a word it must be free. Thus the thesis of unreality has yielded us thepossibility of negation as its condition. Now, the latter is possible only by the “negation”of the world as a whole, and this negation has revealed itself to us as the reverse of thevery freedom of consciousness. But at this point several comments force themselvesto the fore: first of all, we must bear in mind that the act of positing the world as asynthetic totality and the act of “taking perspective” from the world are one and thesame. If we may use a comparison, it is precisely by placing oneself at a convenientdistance from the picture that the impressionist painter disengages the whole “forest”or the “white water lilies” from the multitude of small strokes he has placed on thecanvas. But, reciprocally, the possibility of constructing a whole is given as theprimary structure of the act of taking perspective. Therefore merely to be able to positreality as a synthetic whole is enough to enable one to posit oneself as free from it; andthis going-beyond is freedom itself since it could not happen if consciousness werenot free. Thus to posit the world as a world, or to “negate” it, is one and the samething. In this sense Heidegger can say that nothingness is the constitutive structure ofexistence. To be able to imagine, it is enough that consciousness be able to surpass thereal in constituting it as a world, since the negating of the real is always implied by itsconstitution in the world. But this surpassing cannot be brought about by just anymeans, and the freedom of consciousness must not be confused with the arbitrary. For