1940

1940 marks the first publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary, originally issued in French as L’imaginaire by Éditions Gallimard in Paris. The year also appears in the book’s intellectual context: in February 1940, Sartre described his effort to work through Edmund Husserl’s philosophy, a study that had begun in 1933 and continued while he wrote the book. The date therefore links the work’s publication to both its phenomenological method and its sustained engagement with Husserl.

Publication and Dating

The original French edition appeared in 1940 under the title L’imaginaire. The English translation was first published in 2004 by Routledge, placing its publication 64 years after the French edition. These dates distinguish the book’s first appearance from its later English-language circulation.

Intellectual Context

Sartre began studying Edmund Husserl in 1933, reading Ideas in the original German, when Husserl was still little known in France. That engagement continued during the writing of The Imaginary. In a statement dated February 1940, Sartre described having taken four years to exhaust Husserl: he understood philosophical study as thinking within a philosophy’s perspectives and developing ideas through that engagement, even to the point of reaching a dead end. The book’s date thus falls within a period of active philosophical appropriation, not merely after-the-fact commentary on Husserl.

Method and Claim

The book’s subtitle, A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, names its method. Instead of beginning with explanatory theories about how images arise, Sartre proposes producing images, reflecting on them, and describing their distinctive characteristics. Reflection makes it possible to distinguish the object imagined from the way it is given to consciousness; its immediate findings, he argues, are certain, whereas inductive explanations of the image remain probable. This distinction between description and hypothesis is central to the work’s project.

Conclusions on Imagination and Art

In its conclusion, The Imaginary treats the relation between imagination and the real world as fundamental to consciousness: imagining is not an accidental extra, but an essential condition of consciousness. The work carries this analysis into aesthetics, arguing that an artwork’s aesthetic object is irre real rather than identical with its material support. A painted figure, for example, is not the canvas or its layers of paint; it appears when the viewer takes up an imaging attitude toward the painting. The publication date consequently anchors a study whose argument moves from the description of image-consciousness to a broader account of imagination and artistic experience.