The Husserlian solutionIn light of hints dropped along the way, it should come as no surprise
that Sartre describes the publication of the first volume of Husserl’s
Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy ( 1913 )as“thegreateventofprewarphilosophy”
(Ion 139 ).
Sartre is careful to mention Husserl’s respect for empirical psych-
ology and the supportive role that he assigned to a “phenomenological
psychology” which, though eidetic, did not employ the transcendental
reduction (Ion 143 ). But his remark which brings this short volume into
focus even as it gestures toward his major study,The Imaginary, is that
“one finds inIdeasthe bases of an entirely new theory of images.” And as
if he had sketched the argument of that latter work at this stage, Sartre
proposes what such a study of the image should entail:
One should seek to establish an eidetic of the image; that is to say, to fix and to
describe the essence of that psychological structure such as it appears to reflexive
intuition. Then, once one has determined the set of conditions that a psychological
state must necessarily fulfill to realize an image, only then can one move from the
certain to the probable and ask of experience what it can teach us about images as
they present themselves in a present-day human consciousness.
(Ion 143 )
Notwithstanding the originality of his thesis, Sartre informs us that
Husserl did not pursue the matter of the image at any length and adds
that he is not entirely in agreement with what Husserl has to say on this
topic.^16 By now, we would not have expected that he would be. In fact,
true to character, sixteen years later Sartre will assure us that, if he agrees
(^16) We should remember that Sartre seems not to have read anything that Husserl published
after his return from Germany in 1934. On the other hand, Husserl’s writings on the
imagination were never published in his lifetime and he died in 1938. Among his posthu-
mous publications were texts on the imagination, image consciousness and memory, material
relevant to the very topics that Sartre was discussing inThe Imaginaryand earlier (see
Edmund Husserl,Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, 1898 – 1925 , ed. Eduard Marbach,
Husserlianavol.xxiii[The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980 ]). For an informed account of
how these later Husserlian texts correct Sartre’s reading of the earlier ones, see Andrea
Smeranda Aldea, “Phantasie and Phenomenological Inquiry – Thinking with Edmund
Husserl,” doctoral dissertation, Emory University, 2011.
88 First triumph:The Imagination