JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Imagination and emotion101But it is exactly the withdrawal of the wholeness which turns it into a foundation, thefoundation from which the unreal form must detach itself. Thus, although as a resultof producing the unreal, consciousness can appear momentarily delivered from “beingin-the-world”,it is just this “being-in-the-world” which is the necessary condition forthe imagination.Thus the critical analysis of the conditions that made all imagination possible hasled us to the following discoveries: in order to imagine, consciousness must be freefrom all specific reality and this freedom must be able to define itself by a “being-inthe-world”which is at once the constitution and the negation of the world; the concretesituation of consciousness in the world must at each moment serve as the singularmotivation for the constitution of the unreal. Thus the unreal—which is always a twofoldnothingness: nothingness of itself in relation to the world, nothingness of theworld in relation to itself—must always be constituted on the foundation of the worldwhich it denies, it being well understood, moreover, that the world does not presentitself only to a representative intuition, and that this synthetic foundation demands tobe lived as a situation. If these are the conditions that make imagination possible, dothey correspond to a specification, to an enrichment contingent upon the essence“consciousness” or are they nothing else but the very essence of that consciousnessconsidered from a particular point of view? It seems that the answer lies in thequestion. Indeed, what is this free consciousness whose nature is to be the consciousnessof something, but which, for this very reason, constructs itself before the real andwhich surpasses it at each moment because it can exist only by “being-in-the-world”,that is, by living its relation to the real as situation, what is it, indeed, if not simplyconsciousness such as it reveals itself to itself in the cogito?Is not doubt the very primary condition of the cogito, that is, at once the constitutionof the real as a world and its negation from this same point of view, and does not areflective grasp of the doubt as doubt coincide with the indisputable intuition offreedom?We may therefore conclude that imagination is not a contingent and superaddedpower of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom;every concrete and real situation of consciousness in the world is pregnant withimagination in as much as it always presents itself as a withdrawing from the real. Itdoes not follow that all perception of the real must reverse itself in imagination, but asconsciousness is always “in a situation” because it is always free, it always and at eachmoment has the concrete possibility of producing the unreal. These are the variousmotivations which decide at each moment whether consciousness will only be realizedor whether it will imagine. The unreal is produced outside the world by a consciousness