1936

1936 is the publication year of Jean-Paul Sartre’s short work The Imagination, an early outcome of his sustained inquiry into imagination. The date also falls within the composition period of The Imaginary: written at the same time, that companion work appeared four years later, in 1940. Together, the two books mark a shift from the psychology Sartre taught toward a more radical account of how consciousness imagines.

The project behind the date

In 1934, Sartre was a young schoolteacher in Le Havre, teaching pupils preparing for the baccalaureate. Imagination belonged to the psychology curriculum, alongside perception, memory, attention, association of ideas, and emotion. The discipline was officially presented as a positive science of psychic facts and their governing laws, excluding practical, aesthetic, ontological, and normative concerns. Sartre’s work on imagination began inside this teaching context, but the date of publication marks more than a contribution to that syllabus: his treatment would challenge the inherited meanings of psychological facts and laws.

Publication and composition

The 1936 publication of The Imagination should be distinguished from the history of The Imaginary. The latter was composed during the same period but published four years after the shorter book. The two titles therefore belong to one developing inquiry without being the same publication or appearing in the same year. In the account of Sartre’s early work, 1936 is both a firm bibliographical marker and part of a wider interval in which his thinking took shape.

Intellectual significance

The arguments associated with this project contest explanations that reduce imagination to assembled sensations or to images inserted into perception. In the later discussion of schematic figures, a drawing can be perceived first as separate lines and then, after a change of intention and bodily orientation, as a face. The lines alone do not supply the represented person: eye movements and the viewer’s imaginative activity help organize them into an image. The distinction makes the project’s departure from a simple psychology of sensory facts concrete: the same visible marks can support different acts of consciousness.

The inquiry also separates perception from imaging in its treatment of art. A canvas and its pigments are real, material things, while the aesthetic object apprehended through them is irreal; the painting functions as a material medium through which an imaging consciousness constitutes that object. This account extends beyond painting to fiction, drama, and music. Read alongside the 1936 publication, these analyses show why the period matters: imagination is not treated as a minor mental faculty added to ordinary experience, but as central to how consciousness relates to objects and to the world.