The Imagination

’Every theory of imagination must satisfy two requirements. It must account for the spontaneous discrimination that the mind makes between its images and its perceptions, and it must explain the role that the image plays in the operation of thought. Whatever form it has taken, the classical conception of the image could not fulfil these two essential tasks.’ - Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imagination was published in 1936 when he was thirty years old. The Imagination is Sartre’s first full philosophical work, presenting some of the basic arguments concerning phenomenology, consciousness, and intentionality that were to mark his philosophy as a whole and be so influential in the course of twentieth-century philosophy.

Sartre begins by criticizing philosophical theories of the imagination, particularly those of Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume, before establishing his central thesis. Imagination does not involve the perception of ’mental images’ in any literal sense, Sartre argues, yet reveals some of the fundamental capacities of consciousness. He then reviews psychological theories of the imagination, including a fascinating discussion of the work of Henri Bergson.

Sartre argues that the ’classical conception’ is fundamentally flawed because it begins by conceiving of the imagination as being like perception and then seeks, in vain, to re-establish the difference between the two. Sartre concludes with an important chapter on Husserl’s theory of the imagination which, despite sharing the flaws of earlier approaches, signals a new phenomenological way forward in understanding the imagination.

The Imagination is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. The translation has been revised throughout for this Routledge Classics edition. There is also a revised Translators’ Introduction and a new Foreword, both by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. Also included is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s important review of L’Imagination upon its publication in French in 1936.

Translated by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980) was one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century and a renowned novelist, dramatist, and political activist. He passed the agrégation in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1929. His first novel La Nausée, which Sartre considered one of his best works, was published in 1938. Sartre served as a meteorologist in the French army before being captured by German troops in 1940, spending nine months as a prisoner of war. He continued to write during his captivity, and, after his release, he published his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté. In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but declined it. During the events of 1968 he was arrested for civil disobedience but swiftly released by President Charles de Gaulle, who allegedly said ＂one does not arrest Voltaire＂. He died on 15 April 1980 in Paris, his funeral attracting an enormous crowd of up to 50,000 mourners. He is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.