JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

100Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsan image is not purely and simply the world-negated, it is always the world negatedfrom a certain point of view, namely, the one that permits the positing of the absenceor the non-existence of the object presented “as an image”. The arbitrary positing ofthe real as a world will not of itself cause the appearance of the centaur as an unrealobject. For the centaur to emerge as unreal, the world must be grasped as a worldwhere-the-centaur-is-not,and this can happen only if consciousness is led by differentmotivations to grasp the world as being exactly the sort in which the centaur has noplace. Likewise, if my friend Peter is to be given me as absent I must be led to grasp theworld as that sort of a whole in which Peter cannot actually exist and be present to me.(He can actually be present for others—in Berlin, for instance.) What motivates theappearance of the unreal is not necessarily nor most often the representative intuitionof the world from some point of view. Consciousness in fact has many other ways ofsurpassing the real in order to make a world of it: the surpassing can and shouldhappen at first by affectivity or by action. The appearance of a dead friend as unreal,for instance, is built on the foundation of affective expectation of the real as an emptyworld from this point of view.We shall give the name of “situations” to the different immediate ways ofapprehending the real as a world. We can therefore say that the essential prerequisitethat enables consciousness to imagine is that it be “situated in the world”, or morebriefly, that it “be-in-the-world”. It is the situation-in-the-world, grasped as a concreteand individual reality of consciousness, which is the motivation for the constructionof any unreal object whatever and the nature of that unreal object is circumscribed bythis motivation. Thus the situation of consciousness does not need to appear as a pureand abstract condition of possibility for all imagination but as the concrete and exactmotivation for the appearance of a certain particular imagination.From this point of view we finally grasp the relation between the unreal and thereal. At first; even if an image is not produced at this moment, every apprehension ofthe real as a world tends of its own accord to end up with the production of unrealobjects because it is always, in one sense, a free negation of the world and that alwaysfrom a particular point of view. Thus, if consciousness is free, the intelligible correlativeof its freedom should be the world which carries in itself its possibility of negation, ateach moment and from each point of view, by means of an image, even while the imagemust as yet be constructed by a particular intention of consciousness. But, reciprocally,an image, being a negation of the world from a particular point of view, can neverappear except on the foundation of the world and in connection with the foundation.Naturally the appearance of the image demands that the particular perceptions shouldbe diluted in the syncretic wholeness world and that this wholeness should withdraw.