Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl is the central methodological influence on Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of imagination in The Imaginary. His phenomenology directs Sartre away from treating consciousness as an object inside the world and toward describing it as an intentional activity: consciousness is always directed toward something. Sartre applies that approach to images, perception, and thought, using reflective description to distinguish how an object is given in imagination from how it is perceived or conceived.

Intellectual Influence and Study

Jean-Paul Sartre began studying Husserl in 1933, when the German philosopher was still little known in France, and read Ideas in the original. That study continued during the work on The Imaginary. Sartre later described his engagement as an extended effort to think within Husserl’s perspectives and work through them; he said it had taken him four years to exhaust Husserl. The influence was therefore not simply an appeal to an authority but a sustained philosophical engagement.

Husserl’s work helped convince Sartre that appearance could yield truth. The subtitle of The Imaginary, A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, signals this commitment: phenomena are what appear and can be described. Sartre’s project is to investigate what reflective consciousness can disclose about having an image, rather than to begin with a causal theory of how images are produced.

Reduction, Intentionality, and Description

A key Husserlian move is to bracket the natural positing of the world. This suspension does not deny the world; it sets aside the habitual assumption that consciousness should be treated as one more thing within it. Sartre takes that move as a radical foundation for inquiry. In his account, psychology commonly treats consciousness as a thing in the world, whereas phenomenological analysis attends to consciousness as an act and asks how its objects are given.

The principle of intentionality supplies the basis for that analysis. Consciousness is not a receptacle containing inner objects: perception, imagery, and thought are directed toward something beyond consciousness itself. Sartre uses this perspective to distinguish modes of intentionality according to the situations in which they operate, and to consider sensory givens and knowledge in relation to those acts. In his analysis of an image, the image’s object is the object of the present consciousness; describing the image as an image requires a further, reflective act that turns attention from the object to the way it is given.

This method also establishes a distinction between certain description and probable explanation. Sartre argues that reflection can disclose the characteristics by which an image is immediately recognized, while psychological theories about its inner nature remain hypotheses. He therefore begins by producing images, reflecting on them, and describing and classifying their distinctive features, leaving explanatory theories aside for the time being. Husserl’s phenomenological orientation supports this priority of careful description over premature causal claims.

Matter, Form, and Imagination

Husserl’s distinction between the matter of an experience and its form underpins Sartre’s account of how experience acquires sense. In ordinary perception, material surroundings provide the matter, while an attitude shaped by knowledge, feelings, and aims gives the perceived object its form or sense. A piece of matter can thus be encountered as a door handle to be turned, or a person can appear repulsive in the light of anger.

Imagination differs from perception in how sense is bestowed. Its matter is not experienced as properly possessing the sense of the imagined object; rather, it presents a sense borrowed from that other object. A hobby-horse serves as a prop through which a child imagines a horse, without mistaking the prop for an actual horse. Likewise, a photograph is not confused with what it depicts: the depicted object is imagined through it. Sartre uses these cases to identify a shared structure across different forms of imagining, including mental images, while emphasizing that the matter involved need not always be part of the perceivable material world.

Husserl’s description of the image as a fulfilment of signification also provides a point of contrast. Sartre’s analysis of imitation and schematic drawings leads him to treat the image not as a signification simply completed by intuition, but as a change in kind. In a schematic drawing, sparse lines may provide little intuitive detail; intention and knowledge do much of the work of presenting the represented object. The schema falls between image and sign, and its matter often must be interpreted through conventions. Sartre uses this case to show how conscious activity can compensate for the limits of what is perceptually present.

Clinical Questions and Philosophical Reach

Sartre’s discussions of mental illness apply this framework to the difference between an image and a perception. In his analysis, an imagined object is already external to consciousness in its own way, but it is given as irreal, whereas a perceived object initially presents a claim to reality. He draws on this distinction to argue that hallucination cannot be explained simply as an image projected outward or mistaken for an external object. The difficulty is instead to explain how a person can believe in the reality of an object that, as an image, is constituted as irreal.

The same framework shapes Sartre’s account of hallucination as involving changes in belief and personal synthesis, not the destruction of the basic structure by which an irreal object is constituted as irreal. He describes hallucinations as spontaneous consciousnesses, while distinguishing them from ordinary, deliberate observation: patients may realize the hallucination rather than contemplate it. In the most thoroughgoing cases, personal synthesis and oriented thought falter, perception becomes dark or foggy, and the hallucinatory system has a furtive, ungraspable character. These are Sartre’s developments of phenomenological analysis, not clinical doctrines that the supplied account attributes directly to Husserl.

At the conclusion of The Imaginary, Sartre frames the possibility of imagining as a question about the essence of consciousness: is imagination a contingent addition, or a constitutive structure of consciousness itself? He presents phenomenological reduction and reflective description as the means of approaching that question. Husserl’s significance in the book lies in furnishing the method and conceptual distinctions through which Sartre can move from describing particular images to asking what consciousness must be if it can imagine at all.