of irreality” (Imaginary 183 ). But this thesis, he insists, in turn requires
placing the irrealized object “on the margin of the totality of the real,”
which is what we mean by “world.” So there is a double condition for
consciousness to be able to imagine: “It must be able to posit the world
in its synthetic totality and, at the same time, it must be able to posit
the imagined object as out of reach in relation to that synthetic whole,
which is to say posit the world as a nothingness in relation to the
image” (Imaginary 184 ).
What this is leading to is the claim, which has been stated briefly
earlier, that a consciousness stuck in the world like a thing-among-things
is precisely what psychological determinism offers us. Sartre now repeats
a leitmotif of his work sinceTranscendence of the Ego, as the conclusion of
a regressive argument: “For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must
be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to
stand back from the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free”
(Imaginary 183 ).
At this point Heidegger makes another appearance. Sartre associates
what he understands as Heidegger’s ascription of “nothingness” with the
constitutive structure of the existent, as being precisely this “surpassing
of the real” that constitutes it as a world. “The nihilation of the real is
always implied by its constitution as a world” (Imaginary 184 ). Sartre
seems to have overlooked the fact that Heidegger decidedly avoids appeal
to “consciousness” inBeing and Time, while he himself is fashioning his
ontology on that very concept as will emerge with Cartesian clarity in
Being and Nothingness. Still, we must not overlook Sartre’s admission
that “there are, for consciousness, many other ways to surpass the real in
order to make a world of it: the surpassing can and should be made at
first by affectivity or by action” (Imaginary 185 ). Already formulating
concepts that will figure centrally in his so-called “existentialist”
writings of the 1940 s, he adds: “I will call the different immediate
modes of apprehension of the real as a world ‘situations.’ We can then
say that the essential condition for a consciousness to imagine is that
it be ‘situated in the world’ or more briefly that it ‘be-in-the-world’
[in Heidegger’s canonical phrase]” (Imaginary 185 ). It is the “situation-
in-the-world” that motivates and directs the constitution of a particular
imaginary. Just as Husserl was criticized inTranscendence of the Ego
for failing to address the motivation of the phenomenological
reduction (see above,Chapter 2 ), so Sartre sees the weakness of the
132 Consciousness as imagination