The psychologists address the problem of the imageBecause they are captivated by what Sartre calls (and in various contexts
will continue to designate) the “spirit of analysis,” philosophers like
Descartes, Leibniz and Hume, he argues, see no essential difference
between sensation and image. Differences of degree, yes, but not of
kind. Philosophical psychologists like Taine and Maine de Biran shared
this opinion as well. In Sartre’s view, this analytic spirit fostered “asso-
ciationism” in psychology and mechanism in metaphysics.^11 The spirit
of synthesis, on the other hand, which Sartre links to nineteenth-century
romanticism is nonreductionist and holistic in its psychology and
organic or vitalist in its metaphysics.^12
This contrast between the cluster of terms analytic-atomistic-
associative-mechanistic, on the one side, and synthetic-holistic-
nonreductionist-organic (or sometimes -vitalist), on the other, will
function as recurrent, critical instruments in these psychological texts of
the 1930 s while assuming ethical and political significance for Sartre in the
following decades. They are a permanent acquisition in his critical
vocabulary. At this stage, however, Sartre’s targets are psychologists like
the members of the Wu ̈rzburg school who insist on “imageless thought”
or the philosophical psychologists who acknowledge only a difference of
degree between sensations and images. In view of his well-known rejection
of the Freudian unconscious, it is significant that Sartre finds these
“analytic” thinkers forced by the data of our conscious life and their
(^11) “Associationism” is a kind of atomistic approach to memory that Hume considered his chief
contribution to the field, though in fact it already occurs in Aristotle.
(^12) This connection of the spirit of synthesis with Romanticism is a noteworthy relationship,
given Sartre’s subsequent espousal of that spirit after the war (see, for exampleAnti-Semite
and Jew[ 1948 ], trans. George J. Becker [New York: Shocken, 1995 ], 59 ). Philosophers have
pointed out amazing parallels between Sartre’s existential philosophy and the transcendental
idealism of German philosopher Johann Fichte ( 1762 – 1814 ). See, for example Dorothea
Wildenburg,Ist der Existentialismus ein Idealismus?(Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
2003 ); Lucia Theresia Heumann,Ethik und Aesthtik bei Fichte und Sartre(Amsterdam and
New York: Rodopi, 2009 ); and the volume on Fichte and Sartre edited by Violet Weibel and
Peter Kampits (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, forthcoming).Though arguably not a
“Romantic” himself, but certainly a major influence on several of the leading German
Romantics in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, it
is not inappropriate to apply to Fichte the paradoxical label “Romantic Rationalist” that we
observed British philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch attach to Sartre in her insightful book
with that title,Sartre. Romantic Rationalist.
The Imagination 83