Sartre began writing "Imaginary"

Jean-Paul Sartre’s decision to write about imagination began as a teacher’s project in 1934 and became a sustained challenge to the assumptions of academic psychology. The work developed alongside The Imagination and The Imaginary, moving from a school subject toward a phenomenological account of how consciousness imagines, perceives, and apprehends art.

Background and undertaking

In 1934, Sartre was a young schoolteacher in Le Havre, where he taught pupils preparing for the baccalaureate. Imagination belonged to the psychology he taught, alongside perception, memory, attention, association of ideas, and emotion. The subject therefore offered both a curricular starting point and a set of accepted explanations to examine.

The psychology of the period presented itself as a positive science of psychic facts and the laws governing them, while excluding practical or aesthetic concerns and questions of ontology or norms. Sartre’s project retained, at least formally, the appearance of an inquiry into psychology. Yet the facts and laws at issue would not, in his treatment, mean what they meant in the official handbook. The undertaking thus began within a discipline whose boundaries it would test.

From classroom psychology to a critique of inherited theories

Sartre knew the competing accounts he was turning against: sensualist theories that tried to derive human faculties from elementary sensations, associationist explanations, and rationalist positions that opposed associationism but, in his view, retained its spirit. His work did not simply add another psychological account to this field. It reconsidered what an image is and how consciousness relates to it, challenging explanations that treat imagination as a rearrangement or supplement of sensory material.

The analysis gives that challenge concrete form through schematic drawings. A few black lines can first appear as disconnected marks organized by perceptual habits; under an imaging intention, the same lines can take shape as a face. Eye movements, bodily orientation, and the viewer’s knowledge help organize the figure, but the face is not simply discovered as a property of the ink. The example makes the project’s central distinction visible: perception and imaging are different ways of intending an object, even when they work upon the same material.

Sartre also contrasts such schematic images with perceptual figures that direct eye movements through their structure. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, open and closed angles organize contrary movements, which are projected onto the line segments as opposed powers of extension. This remains a perceptual organization of the object, not an image. With a schematic image, by contrast, the movements are spontaneous and the lines acquire hypothetical, imaged directions; the figure can crystallize as a man only through the viewer’s imaging activity. These analyses show how the project replaces a simple inventory of psychic contents with an account of consciousness in action.

Development and publication

The historical account distinguishes two closely connected works. The Imagination appeared in 1936; The Imaginary was written at the same time but published four years later. The 1934 undertaking therefore led into a project with a longer publication history than its initial, short study might suggest. The later book could have served as Sartre’s doctoral thesis, although it did not do so.

The distinction between the works also matters to the project’s development. The inquiry was formally attached to psychology, but the conclusions of The Imaginary pressed beyond that formal remit. Its account treats imagining not as an occasional mental addition to perception but as bound up with consciousness’s capacity to surpass the given world. The transition from a subject taught to school pupils to this broader claim is the project’s decisive intellectual consequence.

The work’s consequences for aesthetics

In its concluding discussion, The Imaginary carries its theory into the arts. Sartre argues that the aesthetic object is not identical with the real material object that supports it. In a portrait, the canvas, frame, and paint are physically present; the depicted person appears only when the viewer adopts an imaging attitude. The real surface makes the image accessible without turning the imagined object into a perceptible thing in the world.

The same distinction extends to painting, theatre, fiction, and music. A painter arranges real tones so that an irreal whole can appear; an actor uses body, feeling, and gesture as an analogon for a character without literally becoming that character. Even the performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony can be distinguished from the symphony apprehended through it: the concert is a dated event, while the work is encountered as the object of aesthetic attention. These examples bring the original undertaking to a significant endpoint. An investigation that began with imagination in the psychology classroom becomes an account of how consciousness makes an irreal object present through real materials without confusing the two.