Introduction The

Imagination Sartre

INTRODUCTION

I look at this white page on my table. I perceive its

shape, its color, its position. These different qualities have
common characteristics: first they give themselves to my gaze
as existences that I can only bear witness to (constater) and
whose being does not depend on my caprice in any way. They
are for me, they are not me. But nor are they others, that is to
say, they do not depend on any spontaneity, neither mine nor
that of another consciousness. They are at once present and
inert. This inertia of sensible content, which has often been
described, is existence in itself. It is useless to discuss whether
this sheet of paper can be reduced to an ensemble of
representations or whether it is, and must be, more than that.
What is certain is that the white that I bear witness to
(constater) cannot be produced by my spontaneity. This inert
form, which is set back from all conscious spontaneities and
which one must observe and learn little by little, is what is
called a thing, in no case could my consciousness be a thing
because its way of
being in itself is precisely a being for itself. To exist is for it to
have consciousness of its own existence. It appears as a pure
spontaneity facing the world of things, which is pure inertia. We
can then posit from the beginning two types of existence. Indeed,
it is insofar as they are inert that things escape the domination of
consciousness; it is their inertia that protects and preserves their
autonomy.
But now I turn my head away. I do not see the sheet of
paper anymore. Now I see the grey wallpaper. The sheet is no
longer present. It is not there anymore. I know well though that it
has not been annihilated; its inertia protects it from that. The
sheet has simply ceased to be for me. Yet here it is once again. I
did not turn my head back. My gaze is still directed towards the
grey wallpaper; nothing has moved in the room. Nevertheless,
the sheet does appear to me again with its shape, its color and its
position; and I know very well, at the moment it appears, that it
is precisely the sheet that I was seeing earlier. But is it the sheet
in person? Yes and no. Certainly I affirm that it is the same sheet
with the same qualities, but I am not unaware that the sheet has
remained over there. I do know that I am not enjoying its
presence. If I want to see it in fact, I have to turn back towards
my desk and draw my gaze back to the blotter where the sheet is
placed. The sheet that appears to me at this moment has an
identity of essence with the
sheet that I was looking at earlier. And by essence I intend not
only the structure but also the very individuality. However, this
identity of essence is not accompanied by an identity of
existence. It is indeed the same sheet, the one that is presently on
my desk, but it exists differently. I do not see it, it does not
impose itself .as a. lot to my spontaneity; nor is it an inertia
datum ex1stmg m itself. In a word, it does not exist in fact; it
exists as imaged (en image).

If I examine myself without prejudice, I will realize that

I spontaneously make the discrimination between existence as
thing and existence as image. I would not know how to count
those apparitions we call images. But whether or not their
evocations are voluntary, images give themselves, at the very
moment they appear, as something other than presences. I am
never mistaken about this. It would even greatly surprise
someone who never studied psychology if, after explaining to
him what the psychologist calls an image, one would ask him:
Do you sometimes confuse the image of your brother with his
real presence? The recognition of the image as such is an
immediate given of the intimate sense (sens intime).

Now, it is one thing to immediately apprehend an image

as an image but it is something else to form thoughts about the
nature of images in general. The only way to build a true theory
of existence-as-imaged (l'existence en image) would be to
rigorously keep oneself from asserting anything about such
existence that does not directly find its source in a reflective
experience. For existence-as-imaged (l'existence en image) is a
mode of being quite difficult to grasp. Grasping it, require some
staining of mind, but above all it requires us to get rid of our
almost unbreakable habit of construing all modes of existence on
the model of physical existence. Here more than anywhere else,
this confusion among modes of being is tempting, since, after all,
the sheet as imaged (en image) and the sheet in reality are but the
same sheet on two different planes of existence. Thus, as soon as
we turn our minds from the pure contemplation of the image as
such, as soon as we think about the image without forming
images, a slide occurs: from the affirmation of the identity of
essence between the image and the object, one moves on to an
affirmation of an identity of existence. Since the image is the
object, one
concludes that the image exists in the same way the object does.
And in this fashion one fabricates what we will call the naive
metaphysics of the image. This metaphysics consists in making
of the image a copy of the thing, which then itself exists as a
thing. Here is the sheet of paper 'as imaged' (en image),
imbued with the same qualities as the sheet 'in person'. It is inert,
it does not exist anymore solely for consciousness; it exists in
itself. It appears and disappears as it pleases, and not at the whim
of consciousness. It does not ease to exist when it ceases to be
perceived, but maintains, outside of consciousness, the existence
of a thing. This metaphysics or rather this naive ontology is
everyone's. And this is why one notices this curious paradox: the
same man, without psychological culture, who assured us earlier
of being able to recognize immediately his images as images,
will now add that he-sees his images, that he hears them, etc. His
first affirmation results from spontaneous experience and his
second from a naively construed theory. And precisely, he does
not realize that if he were to see his images, if he were to
perceive them as things, he would not be able to distinguish them
from objects anymore. And he ends by construing one single
sheet of paper on two planes of existence as two rigorously
similar sheets existing on the same plane. A beautiful illustration
of this naive thingism (chosisme) of images is provided by the
Epicurean theory of 'simulacra'. Things keep emitting 'simulacra
', idols', which are just sheaths. These sheaths have all the
qualities of the object-content, shape, etc. And it is exactly the
case that they are objects. Once emitted, they exist in themselves,
just like the emitting object, and can wander in the air for some
undetermined time. Perception will occur when a sensory
apparatus encounters and absorbs one of these sheaths.

Pure a priori theory made a thingt of the image, but internal

intuition teaches us that the image is not the thing. The data of
intuition are thus going to be incorporated in the theoretical
construction under a new form: the image is a thing, just as much
as the thing it is an image of, but by the very fact that it is an
image, it receives a sort of metaphysical inferiority in
comparison with the thing it represents. In a word the image is a
lesser thing. The ontology of the image is now complete and
systematic: the image is a lesser thing, which has its own
existence, gives itself to consciousness as any other thing, and
maintains external relationships with the thing it is an image of.
One sees that it is only this vague and ill-defined inferiority (that
can become only a sort of magical weakness, or that one will, on
the contrary, describe as a lesser degree of distinction and clarity)
and this external relationship that justify the appellation image.
One can also foresee the contradictions that will result from this.
It is nevertheless this naive ontology of the image that
we will meet up with, as a more or less implicit postulate, in all
the psychologists who have studied the question. All or almost all
have made the confusion indicated above between identity of
essence and identity of existence. All have built the theory of the
image a priori. And when they come back to experience it was
too late. Instead of letting themselves be guided by experience,
they forced it to respond yes or no to tendentious questions. be
sure, a superficial reading the innumerable writings that have
been dedicated to the problem of image for e last sixty years
seems to reveal an extraordinary diversity of points of view, but
we would like to show that one can find a single theory
underneath this diversity. This theory, which first results from the
naive ontology was perfected under the influence of diverse
preoccupations extraneous to