The Imagination

On The Imaginary Power of Liberation – an Existential Phenomenological Analysis
David Proud, MPhil, BA, BA(Open), PGCE (ICT)
Implicit in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre on the imaginary is a conviction that any
psychology must apprehend the human ‘in situation’,1 its methodology grounded in a general
principle of inquiry that has an overt practicality, rather than in a conception of human reality
that has been, as Sartre claims, ‘described and fixed by an intuition a priori’.2 Such a
conviction underlies this phenomenological analysis3 of the Sartrean thesis that ‘every
concrete and real situation of consciousness in the world is pregnant with the imaginary in so
far as it is always presented as a surpassing of the real’;4 my purpose being to reveal, from the
way the imaginary is thus shown to function in consciousness, a paradox at the heart of this
1
thesis.
The essay has the following structure: 1. Methodology: Eidetic Reflection, a method that
clarifies that which is essential about a phenomenon of the imaginary. 2. Making Sense of
the Imaginary, the imaginary is given its fullest sense, so that, 3. Reflecting on the
Imaginary, it can be reflected upon to determine its essence. It is not perception, and, 4.
Knowing the Imaginary, it is informed by knowledge, but the latter makes no advancement.
Therefore, 5. Living Through the Imaginary, the imaginary cannot exemplify reality, but is
motivated by the latter, but then, 6. The Paradox of the Imaginary, the imaginary is self-creating
if it is to be motivated by real situations that are a product of itself. However, 7.
1 Jean- Paul Sartre, The Imaginary, (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 186.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1962), p. 93.
3 Phenomenology follows Descartes on how to avoid error: ‘Whatever method of proof I use, I am always
brought back to the fact that it is only what I clearly and distinctly perceive that completely convinces me’.
(René Descartes, ‘Meditations’, in Philosophical Writings, Vol. II, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984). p.47). That is, neither obscure nor confused, or whatever is immediately given to me, the phenomena; I
confine myself to describing these.
4 Ibid. 1, p. 186.

Conclusion: The Treachery of Images, this paradox emerges because Sartre characterizes
the imaginary through a referral to the real, the latter taken as obvious.
2
1. Methodology: Eidetic Reflection
Eidetic reflection is a descriptive method whereby, as Sartre says, we ‘produc[e] images in
ourselves, reflect on these images, describe them, which is to say, try to determine and
classify their distinctive characteristics’.5 The objective is an imaginary that is indicative of a
human reality that is situated, but is something more than merely a description of various
givens; the latter being the procedure of traditional psychologies.6 Perhaps such a procedure
threatens a naïve Cartesianism, whereby it is supposed that through the performance of some
reflective act the phenomenologist can simply describe the object of reflection, despite the
very act of description bringing with it the possibility of misdescription. But eidetic
reflection begins with a psychological fact, the image, and through a process of imaginatively
varying its different aspects, the limitations in this variation are thereby given immediately
and with certainty; I then intuit the eidos, or essence, that which cannot be varied, even in
imagination, of the object. It investigates the phenomenon through an explication of its
essence, and has at least the form of a conceptual analysis, the specifying of the necessary
conditions for the correct application of a concept.
It may be objected that appropriating the human ‘in situation’ already presupposes a
conception of human reality. But this is simply a regulative idea required by the method. As
Sartre explains, ‘the various disciplines of phenomenological psychology are regressive,
5 Ibid. 1, p. 5.
6 For example, psychoanalysis, whereby the image is a ‘material trace, an inanimate element that afterwards
plays the role of symbol’. (Ibid. 1, p. 97). As Jeanson says, with these views ‘there is a power in consciousness,
but it is not a power of consciousness’. (Francis Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality (Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 1980), p. 25).

although the ultimate term of their regression is, for them, purely ideal’.7 Although my
method will restrict itself to the phenomenon on which I reflect, I will not attain immediate
access to it, though I will be guided by a regulative ideal of human reality, with the proviso
that, just as Sartre found with his study of the emotions that phenomenology is unable to
‘show that human-reality must necessarily manifest itself in such emotions as it does’, and
‘that there are such-and-such emotions and not others - this is…evidence of the factitious
character of human existence’,8 so too with the imaginary. To circumvent this problem,
alongside the essentialist method is an existential analysis, to allow for the facticity9 of the
3
imaginary.
2. Making Sense of the Imaginary.
To give a sense to the imaginary, we can begin with a simple characterization of ‘the act of
imagination [as] a magical act’,10 as Sartre puts it, ‘an incantation destined to make the
objects of one’s thought, the thing one desires, appear in such a way that one can take
possession of it’.11 In the performance of an imaging act the world appears in magical mode,
the given laws of nature no longer apply, the unpredictable and the spontaneous occur, both
characteristics of the mental (and it is a necessary condition of the imaginary that it is
mental). The magical is ‘an irrational synthesis of spontaneity and passivity… an inert
activity, a consciousness rendered passive’.12 For a passive, inert state to produce a
7 Ibid. 2, pp. 93 – 94.
8 Ibid., p. 94.
9 Sartre’s term for ‘a pure apprehension of the self as a factual existence’. (Jean -Paul Sartre, Being and
Nothingness (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 338).
10 Ibid. 1, p. 125.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid. 2, p. 85.

spontaneous act there is a magical connection,13 for the second is a consequence of the first,
4
but cannot be the cause of it.
When in love, for instance, consciousness has to infuse itself with a sustaining amatory
mood, for love is an attitude, directed toward the beloved. But for this to occur the word love
has to be invoked, a means not so much of getting in touch with the inner feelings of being in
love, but of constituting those feelings in a loving attitude. When Andrew Marvell, in ‘The
Definition of Love’, wrote: ‘My Love…was begotten by Despair/Upon Impossibility’,14 he is
not defining love but conceptualising his own love, to consider it and appropriate it, the
articulation of words enabling the conjuring up of images by consciousness, the latter placing
itself within an emotional atmosphere connected with such images; his intoxicated soul thus
conveyed to another sphere of existence.
Words therefore play a significant part in the imaginary, but what does a word like love
really achieve? The poet responds to his erotic obsession by conceptualizing it, appropriating
it in notions composed in an act of reflection. Were he not a poet he could have opted for
some more inane enunciation, within the seclusion of his own mind, of the words
corresponding to such notions, the words then being just words, inert things. Having thus
renounced his capacity to conceptualize he is unable to appropriate the requisite viewpoint on
his situation, through reflecting on its salient characteristics; instead he assumes an inertness
that arrests any attempt toward understanding this situation. But in either case, when the
lover reflects on his love all that is given to him is a momentary experience, a feeling, toward
an object; everything else is inference, or interpretation, that is, the imaginary is constituted
by the subject.
But, it may be asked, what if the lover is disposed to have that same feeling again and again
over a long period, and is conceptualisation required to turn the feeling into love? Such a
13 An ‘emanation’. (Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), p. 67).
14 Andrew Marvell, ‘The Definition of Love’, in The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 49.

disposition, however, is a pattern of behaviour unified by an inert state, love, but this state is
something apart from the repeated feelings themselves, these latter being the phenomena that
are immediately given to consciousness and that constitute the love in the first place. And the
feelings have to be constituted as loving feelings, by invoking the word love.15 Reflection
can therefore be certain about the feelings, but the state of love itself is always open to
5
doubt.16
Having given sense to the imaginary, I can now reflectively access an image.
3. Reflecting on the Imaginary.
It may be objected, however, that to reflect upon an image is to change the image reflected
upon. But this presupposes of consciousness that it is a kind of container, with events or
states as contents, (Fig. 1.1),17 yet such a container could not reflect upon its own contents.
Rather, if I imagine the woman I love, the imaginary consciousness is in a particular mode of
directedness toward an object, the woman I love, (Fig.1.2).18 Consciousness is of an object
that is external to it: it is not a thing but a relation to an object, the latter thereby maintaining
its integrity in eidetic reflection.
And an image is not a thing traversing consciousness, it is a relation initiated by the
imaging activity of consciousness as it directs itself toward an object. Whether I am
imagining the woman I love, or perceiving her, there is in each case a logical relation
between the mode of intending and its intentional object, the latter occupying a realm of non-
15 The word love is needed to produce the thought that one is in love, as was understood by Stendhal, for whom
love was not discovered, but created. In The Charterhouse of Parma, Mosca, who loves Sanseverina, observes
the coach carrying her away with Fabrizio and says: ‘If the word Love comes up between them, I’m lost’.
(Quoted in Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1949), pp. 23 – 24).
16 This explains how it can be that I may be mistaken about being in love, without needing to posit an
unconscious.
17 The representationalist thesis, held by, among others, John Locke, and Sigmund Freud.
18 The intentionality thesis, held by, among others, Edmund Husserl, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

accidental possibilities, for what is present in a perceptual intentional object is not necessarily
6
present in an imaginative intentional object.
Suppose I see Jessie Matthews,19 she is there, the perceptual object gives itself as
overflowing, whereas both a photograph and a portrait of Jessie Matthews, (Fig. 2), can
‘serve as representatives of the absent object’, as Sartre explains, ‘without managing however
to suspend that characteristic of the objects of an imaging consciousness: absence’.20 But
whereas the portrait, though recognizable, distorts the face, the nose is too long, the eyes
lifeless, in the photograph the divine spheres of the eyes manifest an expression of an
enigmatic melancholia; I ask myself, what is she thinking?
a representation of the woman I love
1. 2.
my mind (represented the arrow of consciousness the object intended
as a container) (representing the intending) (the woman I lo ve)
Fig. 1
This procedure can thus be seen to make use of a mutual connection to the object, which
Sartre designates the ‘analogon’, in place of a direct perception ‘I make use of a certain
matter that acts as an analagon, as an equivalent of perception’.21 Imaging consciousness
reaches its object by means of this analogon that it gives itself, or is given to it. That is, the
19 An actress from the 1920s and 1930s; my choice of image is entirely arbitrary.
20 Ibid. 1, p. 20.
21 Ibid., p. 18.

analogon is some kind of thing, perhaps a photograph, a drawing, or a mental image conjured
up by consciousness itself. And I can reach the essence of the image only insofar as the
imagined appearance of the object implies a mental given, whatever material is acting as an
analogon. However, the image is not the analogon, it is the constituting of the analogon, or
the meaning that consciousness confers on the analogon in constituting it as it is thus
constituted. To interiorize the image would be to misread the image.
Fig. 2
Jessie Matthews
An act of imaging is, however, unlike perceiving, because an image is not a random
impression brought about by some enigmatic law of association. It is true that there are
images that do not appear as a consequence of a conscious decision. Their source is
unknown, their relevance to my present preoccupations unclear, they give an impression of
extending throughout consciousness, disposing me to regard object and image has having
equivalent determinants. But though a thing may suddenly manifest itself, for that thing to
become image it must be re-apprehended within a new imaging attitude expressed as such.
At times consciousness has relaxed attitudes, in reverie, for example, but for a thing to be
7

conscious, and to have continuity thereby, it has to mean something, and for this to be
possible it has to be engaged in a development of thinking.
Image and percept are both spatial, in their different ways, and have the same object, but
the object as perceived is of infinite determinants, whereas the object as imaged gives all it
possesses at once, its determinants finite. And given that my relation to this object is
confined to its original materializations, I do not observe it; I can only contemplate it without
expanding my knowledge of it.22 It holds no surprises, restricted to whatever determinants
obtained at its inception, lacking any possibility of development. But if the imaginary is
closed in upon itself in this manner, how can it be presented as ‘surpassing the real’? The
relation between the imaginary and knowledge needs further clarifying.
8
4. Knowing the Imaginary
But here we encounter a problem, because if consciousness is of its object, the object is at a
distance from consciousness, the latter at a distance from itself. A pre-reflective distance,
however, affords a weaker sort of distancing, (consciousness (of), Fig. 3),23 a minimal self-awareness
consciousness has of itself, not treating itself as an object, (consciousness of). To
use Sartre’s example: ‘It is very possible that I have no [reflective] consciousness of counting
[my cigarettes]. Then I do not know myself as counting’, but ‘if anyone should ask, ‘What
are you doing there?’’ I should reply at once, ‘I am counting’’.24 Of counting he is pre-reflectively
aware, but his counting is not an object of consciousness.
Consciousness is therefore distant from the object but not from its images, because these
are merely relations to the object. The objects of imaging and perceiving are the same
objects, but with different characteristics; they both minister to a theme and objective, but the
22 A ‘quasi-observation’. (Ibid., p. 8).
23 Ibid. 9, p. xxx.
24 Ibid., p. xxix.

thematic continuity created by consciousness in the light of them bears a different meaning, a
consequence of various attitudes and the relational types of consciousness of the world
contained within these attitudes. And an image requires an imaging directedness; the relation
between the underlying knowledge that orientates images and the images themselves is
therefore not an external relation. Knowledge informs the image with meaning and an
internal consistency that allows it to appear and preserve itself. However meagre the image,
it does possess a collection of determinants that do not indicate numberless other
determinants, but immediately present it as restricted.
9
(of)
of
consciousness of
consciousness (of)
Fig. 3
In the absence of the woman I love I see her face, and I know it is her because it is to her
that I direct my attention. But the nature of this knowledge that traverses the image of an
imaging attitude differs from that of a conceptualizing attitude, because if I imagine the
woman I love I am self-evidentially guaranteed my object, at no risk of being surprised to
find out it is not her after all, which can happen with perception. Now, given that all
knowledge is conceptual, the ability to apply suitable concepts to a thing constitutes
knowledge of that thing, the imaginary itself is not knowledge, but it is traversed by a
knowledge that is immediate. Consciousness therefore begins with conception and then

assumes an attitude which presupposes conception while differing from it depending on
whether it has an imaging intentional structure or a perceiving intentional structure.
Consciousness is thus pre-reflectively aware of an imaging act, this latter lacking a theme
that can be thought of as knowledge, but the object of my affections is there, though not as an
object of reflection. And then her image is suddenly enhanced, I have her all at once in a
single intentional act, and the knowledge that informs the image attributes to her the
minimum of characteristics by which her image is unambiguous to me, though it is intuitive,
unlike the knowledge that informs perception. But this aspect of consciousness’s imaging is
a denial of the real, or an act of surpassing, but in what way does such an act serve a
consciousness momentarily submitting to it, without being completely disoriented by it?
10
5. Living Through the Imaginary
An image, unlike a percept, is formed when consciousness directs itself toward an object that
it considers as not there, it is a presentation of the object as not there, it is a relation that is
lived through by consciousness, it is a phenomenon of consciousness, not an object in
consciousness. The image of the woman I love is given as not present to intuition, she is not
‘non-intuitive’ but ‘intuitive-absent’,25 as Sartre puts it. The image is consciousness imaging
the woman I love, it merely indicates a sensuous intuition that cannot occur. The woman I
love herself I cannot caress, presented as she is at not being at such a distance, in such a
position: ‘However lively, appealing, strong the image, it gives its object as not being’.26 I
can imagine the woman I love as far away, or even as non-existent.
However, my consciousness could only adopt such a non-committal attitude through its
own creative spontaneity, a creative act that posits a denial of the world itself, rather than a
25 Ibid. 1, p. 14.
26 Ibid.

particular denial. For example, I can imagine with the intent to imagine, to deny reality, an
act that has conflicting consequences. Suppose I am missing the woman I love and I
endeavour to imaginatively call up her face. I pay the price of causing her face to appear,
apprehending that it is her image only, and I am frustrated in my attempt to satisfy my desire
for her presence, a disappointment constantly revived by my efforts to sustain her image. But
suppose I am merely daydreaming, producing imaginary faces for the sake of amusement. I
am then no longer preoccupied with the one face of the woman I love, I am instead employed
in imagining imaginary faces, and am thus detached in my relations with them.
But this latter is not such a serious pursuit for me, for I am free of the pangs of an absent
love, and the detachment I feel is due to an absence of any particular objective. In fact, I am
evading the difficulty I might encounter in the real world had I a real world objective. In a
condition of dreamy abstraction I am not interested in any particular thing, but repel the
world in an attitude of disinterestedness.27 Imagination is the ‘‘irrealizing’ function of
consciousness’,28 the imaginary is the ‘irreal object’,29 and I am active in realizing this irreal
appearance; that is, living through the irreal, beguiled by the imaginary, I can irrealize
myself; for example, I can image and mimic a coital act that has an irreal object, the woman I
11
love, while knowing she is not there.
While engaged thus, the fabricated nature of my behaviour is still at least pre-reflectively at
hand, so to speak, and yet my inclination is still to repel any promptings towards realistic
behaviour. But this is a mode of imaginary pre-reflective reflectivity that I will, and I live
through, as an evasion of the world, and which is more threatening to me than an unreflective
27 The imaginary is always motivated by a situation, however, but how this works in practice is so complicated
and unpredictable that it evades theory. For example, for myself philosophy is always in the air, whatever the
situation, (Fig. 4).
28 Ibid. 1, p. 3.
29 Ibid., p. 125. That is, an object as imaged by consciousness, not an unreal object, (one that could exist but
does not). An important point, missed by White: ‘It may be because what is imagined is not necessarily real or
present that…Sartre…thought of what is imagined as necessarily not real or present. (Alan R. White, The
Language of Imagination (London: Blackwell, 1990), p. 188). On the contrary, the imagined is not not real.

dreamy behaviour that I am forever forewarned about. I follow the guidance of my own
fabrications, and just as I may become passionately bedevilled by an emotional attitude, so
too I may by an imaginary attitude, a recurring behavioural evasiveness.
But the feelings I experience in encountering images are essentially unlike those I
experience before the objects themselves; I have to perform them, to try and go through with
them, to affect a suffering caused by them.30 But it is certainly easier to live through the
imaginary, it having rendered my feelings less complicated; so even a normal person like
myself can encounter problems in reconnecting with reality, even when the object made
12
uncomplicated is the woman I love.
Fig. 4
Excursion into Philosophy
Edward Hopper
30 ‘Quasi feelings’, counterparts to ‘quasi observations’.

But it may be objected that our eidetic descriptions feed upon what Wittgenstein terms ‘a
one-sided diet: [that] nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example… doesn’t our
understanding reach beyond all the examples?’’31 Do hallucinatory images, for example,
reach beyond our eidetic descriptions of the constituent elements of the image, like
13
Macbeth’s dagger?:
…Come, let me clutch thee -
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still!
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight?32
Macbeth’s image presents itself as open to sensory apprehension to the extent that he clutches
at it. His description of the image endows it with the characteristics of a percept:
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.33
But Macbeth has to perform a fictive act in order to realize himself, clutching at an imaginary
dagger in order to insert himself into the real world, upon which he wishes to act but to which
he is ill-adapted. Attuned to the horror of it, he aspires towards a consistency with his ‘fatal’
vision:
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going,
And such an instrument I was to use.-
Mine eyes are made the fools o’the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest.34
31 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Blackwell, 1978), §593, p. 155.
32 William Shakespeare, Macbeth (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 73.
33 Ibid.

The dagger seemingly floating before him and leading him to his victim, he actively pursues
his path, indicative of a man who knows he has ‘black and deep desires’.35 He is not a
captive of the imaginary, he is exploiting the imaginary to reach reality and to become real
himself. The imaginary is always motivated by one situation or another, but once it offers up
to Macbeth the irreal stuff of its productions, he can make them as necessary, or otherwise,
14
however much he likes.
Fig. 5
Lady Macbeth receives the daggers
Henry Fuseli
But what of Macbeth’s disjunctive argument that either the dagger does not exist, a false
perception, or the vision presents a higher truth? This latter possibility is ruled out by
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., p. 64.

Macbeth’s dissatisfaction with the image, of the kind of which Sartre describes: ‘I leave no
time for the image to develop according to its own laws… the laws of development belonging
to the image are frequently confused with the laws of the essence being considered’.36 The
imaginary dagger, rather than attempting to render its own essence as intuitive, is produced to
serve as an intermediary goal for Macbeth, a goal achieved as he continuously mimes his
feelings and exteriorizes them so as to give them the consistency which he knows they ought
to have. And the value of resorting to this particular image is determined by Macbeth’s
peculiar difficulty, but it remains unproductive, an object given in the form of an image is
closed in upon itself, never containing more than whatever consciousness places in it.
Macbeth’s hallucinatory dagger teaches him nothing, it represents to him only his own
avowals, conveniently rendering his questions forever unanswerable.
An imaginary act, for Sartre, ‘takes the imaged form when it wants to be intuitive, when it
wants to ground its affirmations on the sight of an object. In that case, it tries to make the
object appear before it, to see it, or better still to possess it. But this attempt… is always a
failure: the objects are affected with the character of irreality’.37 The imaginary thus assists
thinking as it confronts a complication, but we sense its irreality as we enquire into its
meaning, for have we not determined its meaning already? Has the Sartrean thesis not led us
15
to a paradox?
6. The Paradox of the Imaginary
What the paradox is exactly can be clarified if we investigate the irrealizing capacity of
consciousness further. I can realize the woman I love in the past by directing my
consciousness to past events in order to find among them the kiss she gave me, a kiss that
36 Ibid. 1, p 119.
37 Ibid., p. 122.

does not thereby become irreal, just past. Or I can isolate this kiss, desist from living it as
real, disconnect it from the real. But then this past kiss as it could have been is only
obtainable to me within the scope of reality as a whole, the latter retained at a distance as I
deny and surpass it; as I search for it I deny the real time accessible to me. The image of the
kiss has thereby a timeless appearance, like a work of art that denies reality while revealing it,
16
(Fig. 6); it is presented as irreal.
Fig. 6
The Kiss
Pablo Picasso
But the formation of images, manifesting consciousness’s active ability to escape from the
thrall of a perceptual existence and passivity, is a poor sort of liberation from the real if the

denial through imaging is just imaging for its own sake, consciousness in the thrall of its own
productions, the latter unreceptive to the requirements of consciousness to place a value on its
own existence. In love, on the other hand, the imaginary assumes especial importance as the
lover looks for another that she can mould into any form in accordance with her amatory
desires, that can offer her a look free of antagonism, that can favour her with preference, and
17
can reflect back to her her own avowals.
Fig. 7
Metamorphosis of Narcissus
Salvador Dali, 1937
And yet the lover still senses the vanity of love because she senses its irreality, produced by
her own irrealization. Like Narcissus falling in love with his own image,38 alarmed by the
presence of impure carnal existents, directing his attention to his own reflection in a stream,
38 The irreal is sensed in a way that the unreal is not, an important point missed by Kearney: ‘The narcissistic
lover is infatuated with nothing other than himself. This gives rise to an ambivalent affection that cannot
actually be felt (since it is no longer another person that moves me but my own fictional construct)’. (Richard
Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 232). But the affection Narcissus has toward
himself as beloved object is felt, its irreality is sensed; and the lover in love with another is in the same way
moved by her own fictional (imaginary) construct (while sensing its irreality).

admiring endlessly his own allure reflected back to him. An irreal existence, allurement
circumscribed by itself, Narcissus captivated by a delicate image that would disperse into
nothing were he to attempt to clutch it. But if the lover instead endeavours to brave, not an
image, but a reality never-ending in its capacity to surprise, she becomes the beloved’s thrall;
no longer endeavouring to possess but to constantly discover her beloved.
For Sartre this indicates that ‘the imagination is not an empirical power added to
consciousness, but is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom’.39 There is a
permanent possibility of going beyond the consciousness which intends reality ‘towards a
particular imaging consciousness that is like the inverse side of the situation and in relation to
which the situation is defined’.40 However, Sartre defines situations as ‘the different
immediate modes of apprehension of the real as a world’,41 they are not merely interactions
between the real and the imaginary, they are products of the imaginary. But if ‘every
concrete and real situation of consciousness in the world is pregnant with the imaginary’, as
the Sartrean thesis states, what then counts as a ‘concrete and real situation’? Imaginary
events indicate more than a directional change from the real to the mental, they acquire
ambiguity, for imaging is not constituted on the basis of natural laws; and consciousness can
18
surpass itself because it is real.
‘Can we conceive of a consciousness that would never imagine’, Sartre asks, ‘and that
would be entirely absorbed in its intuitions of the real’42 Only insofar as the woman I love
cannot be actually present to me, am I able to imagine her as absent. That is, ‘an image is…
always the world denied from a certain point of view’.43 And yet, because an image cannot
appear without indicating its absence, we sense its irreality, it always disappoints; but if a
point of view is itself a product of the imaginary, it must always disappoint.
39 Ibid. 1, p. 186.
40 Ibid., p. 187.
41 Ibid., p. 185. The real, taken as obvious, is merely invoked, without explanation, as in the Sartrean thesis.
42 Ibid. 1, p. 179.
43 Ibid., pp. 184 – 185.

Consciousness is a relation to the real, the latter surpassed through its imaginary function,
enabling the surpassing of everything existent, a grasping of the latter as real by disengaging
itself from it, allowing it to grasp the particular meaning of the situation, itself produced by
the imaginary function, in which reality appears to it. ‘There could be no realizing
consciousness without imaging consciousness, and vice versa’.44 But given the essential
directedness of consciousness, a disengagement from the real is only possible through a
change of direction to some other thing, this latter a product of the imaginary.
But given that consciousness can never ignore the real, surely this indicates that the
imaginary is not itself constitutive of reality, although it must be thematically constitutive of
the objects of our action. With this interplay of engagement and denial consciousness
becomes a subject that constitutes the world as meaningful. But in eidetic reflection
consciousness was isolated from the world in order to consider its essential structures of
directedness toward the world; and the result indicated a consciousness in the world pregnant
with the imaginary, but as part of that world it is itself a product of the imaginary. How
could I then engage with a psychology that characterizes the imaginary with a necessity that
makes it comprehensible, if my feeling of existence is continually accompanied with an
irreality sense. In such a set-up, how could I ever know who I am, the real me?
The imaginary function serves as a means toward an end, self-knowledge perhaps, but as a
product of the imaginary, that is, as truly self-creating, it can only take hold of its own
irrealizations, and is thereby incapable of effecting the real. If it suppresses the real, the
imaging subject irrealizes itself. If it suppresses itself to give value to the real, the imaging
subject submits itself to an impersonal knowledge of itself. In either case consciousness loses
itself in supressing its relation to the world, either by suppressing the world or its distance
19
from it.
44 Ibid., p. 188.

7. Conclusion: The Treachery of Images
But rather than supposing there to be a contradiction at the heart of the Sartrean thesis, the
paradox could perhaps be made less paradoxical through a reappraisal of what is meant by
the real, and of a real situation, as opposed to an imaginary one. For example, in section 2 it
was suggested that the articulation of words are needed to provoke the imaginary into the
direction of constituting of my own feelings, and in section 5 imaging consciousness emerged
as an unstable relation. But so is the semantic relation between thought and words. I used as
an example of an imaging relation imagining the woman I love; the woman I love is a
singular term, with singular terms I touch the world as closely as I ever can.45 But in general
there is very little relation between an object and that which represents it, be it a word or
20
image.
For example, I can deny that an image of a pipe is a pipe, (Fig. 8), thereby using imaginary
evidence itself to refute a demonstration of the imaginary,46 and not only can the analogon of
a pipe not be smoked, neither can the word pipe. A real pipe is a pipe that functions as a
pipe. But if this is the basis of the identity of a real thing, so too, it would seem, is it of an
irreal thing.47 And yet the latter is affected by the arbitrariness that we find between word
and image; that which threatens my confidence in language is now threatening my confidence
in the imaginary. But it is the very clarity of language that is the source of this threat,48 as it
is the very obviousness of the real that is now threatening my understanding of the imaginary.
45 As Davidson says, ‘what touches singular terms touches what they touch, and that is everything: quantifiers,
variables, predicates, connectives’. (Donald Davidson, ‘On Saying That’, in Synthese (Dordrecht, Holland: D.
Reidel Publishing Co., 1968 – 1969), pp. 130 – 146), pp. 130 -131).
46 Which suggests that using the imaginary as a philosophical device in explicating the imaginary, through
eidetic reflection, leads to situations that are, if not quite paradoxical, at least disorienting.
47 The problem is that the precise ontological status (if I may speak of reality in such terms) of the irreal, being
neither real nor unreal, is unclear; and I can see no way of making it more clear.
48 The meaning of this is not a pipe is clear enough, but the context in which it is expressed disorientates.

This is because Sartre, the irreal notwithstanding, takes the position of previous philosophers
in characterising the imaginary through a referral to what is real, the latter taken as obvious.49
Fig. 8
La Trahison des Images
René Magritte
Without knowing what the real is we cannot know what a ‘real situation of consciousness’
is, and how it differs from an imaginary situation, and, because of this ambiguity concerning
a situation, we have our paradox, that the imaginary, perhaps uniquely, is self-created. In
conclusion, I suggest that the Sartrean thesis has found support in this exercise in eidetic
reflection, but with the proviso that it is our sense of the vitality of the real, whatever that
49 John Locke, for instance; imaginary ideas ‘have no foundation in nature, nor have any conformity with that
reality of being to which they are tacitly referred, as to their archetypes’. (John Locke, An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, Vol 1 (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1959). p. 497).
21

may be, that informs our sense of the irreal; as any practitioner of the art technique of
trompe-l'oeil50 knows, as they exploit this sense of the real to surpass the real, (Fig. 9).
Fig. 9
Escaping Criticism
Pere Borrell de Caso
22
50 Realistic imagery creating illusory imagery.

23
Bibliography
Davidson, Donald, ‘On Saying That’, in Synthese (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing
Co., 1968 – 1969), pp. 130 – 146.
Descartes, René, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, in Philosophical Writings, Vol. II,
translated by John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Jeanson, Francis, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, translated by Robert V. Stone (Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1980).
Kearney, Richard, The Wake of Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998).
Marvell, Andrew, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2005).
Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol 1 (New York: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1959).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology,
translated by Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1972).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, translated by Philip Mairet (London:
Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1962).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Imaginary, translated by Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness,
translated by Robert Kirkpatrick and Forrest Williams (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, What is Literature?, translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York:
Philosophical Library, Inc., 1949).
Shakespeare, William, Macbeth (London: Penguin, 1967).
White, Alan R., The Language of Imagination (London: Blackwell, 1990).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe
(London: Blackwell, 1978).

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