Preference for the imaginary

The Preference for the imaginary, as Jean-Paul Sartre defines it, is not simply a taste for more beautiful or desirable images. It is a choice of an entire mode of existence: a way to avoid the presence, unpredictability, and demands of the real. Its significance lies in the contrast between an imagined life that can be arranged to suit feeling and a real life that exceeds any prior wish. Sartre uses this contrast to describe morbid dreaming and schizophrenia, while his later account of art shows that the imaginary is not confined to pathology: aesthetic objects, too, appear through real materials without becoming real objects.

A Choice of a Whole Mode of Existence

Sartre first distinguishes the imagined content a person desires from the form of life that imagining makes possible. Someone may imagine wealth, beauty, or a successful love while real life feels mediocre or disappointing. But preference for the imaginary, in his account, cannot be reduced to choosing those more appealing contents while remaining aware that they are unreal. It also means adopting imagined feelings and conduct because they belong to an imaginary mode of existence.

That choice involves more than retreat from particular hardships such as poverty, disappointed love, or business failure. It is an escape from reality’s very character: its presence, its demand that conduct answer to objects, the inexhaustibility and independence of perception, and the changing course of feeling. The imagined life is therefore not simply a more attractive version of the same world. It avoids the conditions that make real experience resistant to a person’s wishes.

Sartre associates this preference with the morbid dreamer and with people experiencing Schizophrenia, but he does not describe their imagined worlds as richly improved substitutes for reality. The imagined life may instead be factitious, solidified, and slowed down. The contrast concerns not only what appears in imagination, but the kind of life that can be sustained there: one with fewer surprises and fewer demands for adjustment.

Desire Meets the Independence of Reality

A real object can resemble what was desired and still fail to fulfil the imagined wish. Sartre illustrates this with the arrival of Annie. The Annie desired was only the correlate of the desire; the actual Annie exceeds it. Encountering her requires a new apprenticeship, because the real person has a fullness and range of consequences that the imagined counterpart did not possess.

This difference produces a distinctive hesitation. A person who does not act immediately may be surprised by the reality now confronting them and may wonder whether this is what they wanted. The morbid dreamer, Sartre argues, does not make that adjustment: the actual object is not what was wanted, because it belongs to another plane of existence. Real life requires feelings to remain plastic and partly indeterminate, since what happens is new and unforeseeable. Imagined life can preserve the wish in its prepared form; reality changes the terms of the encounter.

The same contrast explains why an imagined desire cannot simply be granted in reality. Even if its object is obtained, the real object brings consequences and demands a response. What was wanted in imagination and what is encountered in presence are not interchangeable versions of one thing. Their difference is not merely a shortfall in satisfaction; it is a difference between modes of existence.

Fixed Feelings and a Rehearsed World

Imagined feelings, in Sartre’s account, are solemn and fixed. The dreamer has had time to construct them, so they return with the same form and etiquette rather than developing in response to an independent situation. Their corresponding imagined objects are likewise frozen. The dreamer can select among prepared roles and objects, changing from ambition to loving desire as if choosing a costume, while avoiding the unpredictable development of feeling in real life.

This world’s apparent controllability follows from what Sartre calls the essential poverty of imaged objects. They satisfy a feeling docilely: they cannot surprise, deceive, or guide it in the way an independent real object can. They can also be brought to an end when the dreamer’s caprice changes, and they have no consequences beyond those the dreamer chooses to draw from them. Control is purchased through limitation: what cannot resist or exceed the dreamer cannot offer the unforeseen fullness of reality.

For that reason, Sartre rejects the picture of the schizophrenic’s world as a sparkling torrent of images compensating for monotonous reality. He characterizes it instead as poor and meticulous: the same scenes recur in the same detail, accompanied by a ceremonial whose elements are settled in advance. Nothing in it can escape, resist, or surprise. Repetition is not incidental decoration but evidence of the world’s restricted range. Sartre further argues that repeated amorous scenes may express not only disappointment in real love but an incapacity for loving, since real love would require meeting what cannot be fixed beforehand.

The Imaginary Beyond Pathology

Sartre’s discussion of art extends the distinction between real material and imaginary object beyond morbid dreaming. He states that the work of art is an irreality, and uses the portrait of Charles VIII to distinguish the depicted figure from the canvas, frame, and layers of paint. Those material features are real; Charles VIII as the aesthetic object appears when consciousness takes an imaging attitude. The painting does not turn the imagined figure into a real person or make the aesthetic object available to ordinary perception.

The artist, on this account, does not first possess a private mental image and then transfer that image into reality. The artist constructs a material analogon through which a spectator can apprehend an image. Brushstrokes and painted tones are real, but they are arranged in connection with an irreal whole. The painting remains a material thing; the depicted object appears through it when a spectator adopts the imaging attitude.

This distinction also explains why aesthetic appreciation is not identical with sensory pleasure in a real colour. Sartre discusses the red of a rug near a table: its aesthetic significance depends on grasping it as part of an irreal whole, including the rug’s woollen quality and its relation to other depicted elements. A colour can please the senses in isolation, but that pleasure alone is not aesthetic appreciation. In aesthetic experience, the real material supports an imaginary object rather than replacing it. Thus the preference for the imaginary belongs to Sartre’s broader account of how imagined objects can shape experience, while its pathological form is marked by withdrawal from reality’s independence and capacity to surprise.