Being-in-the-world

Being-in-the-world is the name for consciousness’s concrete relation to reality, a relation that Jean-Paul Sartre treats not as an obstacle to imagination but as its necessary condition. Consciousness can negate the real and produce imaginary objects only from within a situation in the world; the situation supplies the particular motivation and point of view through which each imaginary object takes shape. Imagination may seem to release consciousness from reality, but it depends on the world it surpasses and denies.

Meaning and method

Sartre uses Being-in-the-world for the relation between consciousness and reality. His account distinguishes this concrete relation from an abstract condition of possibility: consciousness does not imagine in general, from nowhere, but imagines from a particular situation. The real is apprehended as a world, and that apprehension can be surpassed from a particular point of view. The imagined object then appears against the world it denies, rather than as an independent object housed within consciousness.

The distinction fits Sartre’s method in his study of images. Instead of beginning with explanatory hypotheses about what an image is made of, he proposes producing images, reflecting on them, and describing the characteristics reflection reveals. Reflection turns attention from the object represented to the way it is given: when someone imagines Pierre, Pierre is the object of that consciousness, while identifying the experience as an image requires a further reflective act. Sartre treats such reflective description as certain and separates it from inductive theories, which remain probable. This method guards against treating the image as a little object inside the mind and clarifies why Being-in-the-world concerns the relation between consciousness and its world, not a container in which images reside.

Situation as the condition of imagining

The situation of consciousness is not merely a general background that makes imagination possible. It is the concrete motivation for a particular imaginary object. A centaur does not arise simply because consciousness arbitrarily declares the real to be a world; the world must be grasped as one in which the centaur has no place. Likewise, Pierre can appear as absent only when the world is apprehended in a way that excludes his presence for the person imagining him, even though he might be present to someone elsewhere, such as in Berlin. The character of the imaginary is thus circumscribed by the situation from which it emerges.

That situation need not be formed by detached representation. Affectivity and action can also lead consciousness to surpass the real and apprehend it as a world. Sartre’s example is the appearance of a dead friend as irreal against an affective apprehension of the real as empty from a particular point of view. The imagined or absent object therefore carries the mark of how the world matters to consciousness; its appearance is not simply an arbitrary invention imposed on an otherwise neutral scene.

The real world and the imaginary

Being-in-the-world explains the two-way connection between reality and imagination. An image negates the world from a particular point of view, yet it can appear only on the ground of that world. For the image to stand out, particular perceptions recede and the world’s synthetic whole withdraws into the background. The world is not abolished: its withdrawal makes it the ground against which the imaginary form is constituted. Sartre therefore describes consciousness as momentarily appearing delivered from its relation to the world through the production of the irreal, while insisting that this relation remains the necessary condition for imagining.

The connection also runs in the other direction. Apprehending the real as a world carries the possibility of surpassing it, and thus of producing irreal objects, although it does not mean that every act of perception turns into imagination. Consciousness may remain in a realizing attitude or, when particular motivations lead it to do so, imagine. Freedom is expressed in this capacity to go beyond the real, but it is exercised from within a concrete situation rather than from an elsewhere outside the world.

Dreams and the scope of the concept

Dreams show why the relation cannot be reduced to placing a real waking person inside an imaginary scene. Sartre argues that introducing a real consciousness into the dream’s imaginary drama would bring with it the conditions of waking life: existence in real time and the world, together with real memories. In his account, the dreamer is not inserted into the dream as a real consciousness; the dreaming consciousness is non-thetically conscious of itself as fascinated by the dream, and recovers its ordinary being-in-the-world on awakening.

A dreamer may nevertheless appear within the dream. Someone who has watched an imaginary person’s adventures may suddenly believe that the fleeing figure is themselves. Sartre describes this not as the arrival of the real person in the dream, but as the figure remaining unreal while the dreamer becomes an imaginary self projected onto it. A later note qualifies the suggestion that dreaming loses Being-in-the-world: the matter is more complicated, and the relation persists in some fashion. The claim of loss is retained as a metaphorical indication, not a complete account of dream consciousness.

Imagination as freedom

In the conclusion, Being-in-the-world becomes central to Sartre’s account of freedom. Consciousness is free not by escaping the real situation but by living its relation to reality as a situation that can be surpassed. The world is at once constituted and capable of being negated; the imaginary is a double nothingness, dependent on the world it denies and lacking independent existence in relation to it. Each particular imaginary is motivated by the concrete situation from which consciousness takes its point of view.

Imagination is therefore not an empirical power added to an otherwise complete consciousness. Sartre presents it as an expression of consciousness’s freedom and as inseparable from its capacity to be conscious of something. This does not make imagination constant in practice: motivations determine whether consciousness realizes the real or imagines. But the possibility of imagining is always available because consciousness remains situated in a world it can surpass. Being-in-the-world names both sides of that account: the anchoring of consciousness in reality and the condition that lets it reach beyond the real without severing its ties to it.