In the course of his arguments, Sartre is careful to insist on the
epistemological primacy of perception. In this he agrees with “the
Germans” that perception is “the original presentational intuition”
(origina ̈r gebende Anschauung)(Ion 107 ). And while perception usually
guides our imaginations and granted that we can have partial and
incomplete perception of objects, Sartre claims that “no image is ever
intermixed with real [perceptual] objects” (Ion 113 ). We shall see if he
can maintain this sharp dichotomy in his discussion of aesthetic objects
discussed inThe Imaginary.
Before turning to Sartre’s explicit exposition of Husserl’s account in
the final chapter, let us observe his Husserlian clarification of the
distinction between image and perception as a critique of “the
common opinion” among his contemporaries. Again, this argument is
a corollary to what we have been calling Sartre’s fundamental dichot-
omy between spontaneity (consciousness) and inertia (“things”).
Accepting Husserl’s view that the connection among the contents of
our sense perception is the result of “passive syntheses” ordered by the
flow of internal time consciousness, the defenders of image as a content
in consciousness must either accept it as an inert “thing” similar to
perception, or admit that “consciousness is an organization, a system-
atization [and] that the stream [e ́coulement]ofpsychicfactsisguidedby
directive themes: so in this case the image can no longer be likened to a
content of receptive opacity.” The psychological champions of synthe-
sis, Sartre urges, have not chosen. Rather, they lived with this ambigu-
ity, occasionally making implicit appeal to the unconscious to resolve
the contradiction. What they fail to recognize is that “if the image is
conscious, it is pure spontaneity...[For] it is an ontological law that
there are only two types of existence [again Sartre’s mantra]: existence
as thing in the world and existence as consciousness.” And “spontan-
eity,” as Sartre will explain inBeing and Nothingness, is “self conscious-
ness, transparency for itself and existence only in so far as it knows
itself (se connaıˆt)” (Ion 126 ), a strong claim he will refine in the
later work.
After a critique of Alain’s theory of “imagination without images,”
appealing to the same principles enunciated above, Sartre summarizes
his understanding of Husserl’s position in a tightly reasoned
concluding chapter. It would serve as a useful prelude toBeing and
Nothingness.
The Imagination 87