Sartre distinguishes imaging from memory and from anticipation.
Memory, he explains, gives us access to a real object but as past. The
remembered object is “brought out of retirement,” as it were; it is
revived with its real status as past.^39 To exist past, Sartre assures us,
“is one mode of existence among others” (Imaginary 181 ). Unfortu-
nately, he fails to distinguish between the lived and the distant past as
he will do for the future. Perhaps he doesn’t employ this parallel lest he
slip into the “illusion of immanence” himself, by speaking of the
“imagined” past. His descriptive analysis of the past could have used
some fine tuning, which he never provides either here or elsewhere.
As for anticipation, Sartre distinguished the lived future from the
imagined future. The former is the lived ground on which my present
perception develops, the latter is “posited for itself but asthat which is not
yet.” It too seems to be a form of the real as is the past. “All real existence
is given with present, past, and future structures, therefore the past and
the future as essential structures of the real are equally real, which is to
say correlates of a realizing thesis” (Imaginary 182 ). The imagined future
retains the features of imaging consciousness in that it presents itself as
“not yet, which is to say as absent or if one prefers as a nothingness.” If it
seems difficult to understand why one can “annihilate” a future situation
by “presentifying it as a nothingness” in the image but cannot do the
same for the past situation, one must recognize that Sartre will later
locate the past event or state of affairs in the category of the “in-itself ”
and grant it an “absolute” character.^40 He will claim that our recollec-
tions are often accompanied by images but that they are not themselves
images.
Regarding the relation between consciousness and imagination,
Sartre can now conclude that “the essential condition for a conscious-
ness to be able toimage: it must have the possibility of positing a thesis
(^39) Sartre would have benefitted from Heidegger’s distinction between the past-as-present (die
Gewesenheit) and the present-as-past (die Vergangenheit) (see Martin Heidegger,Being and
Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper & Row, 1962 ], 373 ,
40 n.^4 ).
That is, recognize that one cannot change the past “event” even though its interpretation
remains liable to constant revision (seeNE 73 ;WL 158 n.). I develop this aspect of Sartre’s
theory of history in mySartre, Foucault and Historical Reason,vol.I,Toward an Existentialist
Theory of History(University of Chicago Press, 1997 ), “The Ambiguous Historical Event”
and “The Absolute Event,” 25 – 32 et passim.
Conclusion 131