It is significant that Sartre distinguishes two distinct methods for
relating consciousness and imagination: the phenomenological, which
entails the “phenomenological reduction” to “transcendental conscious-
ness” and its eidetic reductions to the essence of consciousness, on the
one hand, and what he calls the “oblique” or “regressive” method of
reasoning from the fact to the foundations of its possibility, on the other.
As a concession to his audience steeped in the neo-Kantian philosophy of
the academy, for whom “the idea of an eidetic intuition is still repug-
nant,” he proposes to employ the latter method. In fact, he undertakes a
comparative study of each method to see the advantage of the phenom-
enological descriptive analysis in revealing the necessary connection
between consciousness and the ability to “irrealize” objects over the
“regressive” argument of the neo-Kantians.
He asserts that, because of their succumbing to the “illusion of imma-
nence” discussed throughout the book, the neo-Kantians have no problem
with the existence of an image. Images like the objects of perception, on
their view, are simply weaker but no less real things amongst things. The
limits of this position have been charted earlier in his book. But if one
understands imaging consciousness as Sartre has described it, “the existen-
tial problem” of the image can no longer be pushed aside. Consciousness
entails athesisor “positing of existence” for every object. But the thesis of an
imaging consciousness is radically different from that of a realizing con-
sciousness. As we know, the “type of existence” of the object as imagined is
“irreal”; that is, present-absent, as Sartre paradoxically phrases it. “This
fundamental absence, this essential nothingness of the imaged object,
suffices to differentiate it from the objects of perception.” So the initial
questions can now be rephrased: “What therefore must a consciousness be
in order that it can successively positrealobjects andimagedobjects?”
(Imaginary 181 ). He summarizes this position by insisting that “the
imaginative act is at onceconstituting,isolating,andannihilating(anne ́anti-
sant).”^38 It is constitutive of its object as is any conscious act; it isolates its
object from the larger field of the real from which it detaches it; and it
“annihilates” it in the sense of conferring on it its existence as “irreal.”
(^38) He describes consciousness generally inBeing and Nothingnessas “nihilating” (Ne ́antissant).
We have noted his use of “nothingness” (le ne ́ant) to distinguish consciousness in the present
chapter. “Annihilating,” in this context, is closer to the “irrealizing” charter of imaging
consciousness.
130 Consciousness as imagination