The Imagination by Sartre Jean-Paul

Author:Sartre, Jean-Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135763473
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Thus thought remains a reality, since the notion of principle is weighted down and hypostatized into that of the unconscious, but it is no longer accessible to itself. If I think the sentence ‘I will leave tomorrow for the country’, it may be that it will only be accompanied in my mind by the vague image of a square of grass. In this case, says Binet, the image is insufficient to render all the meaning contained in the words. We must therefore posit its necessary complement outside of consciousness in the unconscious.

But there is here a grave confusion. By right (en droit) this phrase, ‘I will leave tomorrow for the country’, encompasses the infinite. First, indeed, there must be a ‘tomorrow’, that is to say, a solar system, physical and chemical constants. It is also necessary that I still live, that no grave event comes to upturn my family or the society in which I live. All these conditions are, surely, implicitly required by this simple sentence. Moreover, as Binet well said, the meaning of the word ‘country’ is inexhaustible. We should add: and the meaning of the word I and that of the words ‘to leave’ and ‘tomorrow’. Finally, one recoils, frightened before the depth of this innocent little sentence. This is the occasion to recall Valéry's remark that there is no speech that we can understand, if one goes to the bottom.

But Valéry adds, ‘whoever hastens has understood’,79 which means that in fact we never go to the bottom. The inexhaustible meaning of the cited sentence does exist, but it is virtual and social. It exists for the grammarian, for the logician, for the sociologist, but the psychologist does not have to be preoccupied by it because he will never encounter its equivalent, neither in consciousness nor in a problematic unconscious invented for the sake of the cause. Surely cases in which thought tends to make explicit the entire comprehension of a sentence can be found. But if, as in the case that occupies us here, we scarcely find a meagre image, wouldn't it be worth more to ask oneself if there was not also a meagre thought in our mind? Better still: we have only had consciousness of the image. After all, wouldn't this image be the very form under which thought has appeared to consciousness? This square of green grass, it's not just any square. I recognize it; it's a piece of the large meadow that is located at the bottom of my garden. It is there that I am accustomed to go and sit. On the other hand, it is not an anonymous square of this meadow. It is exactly the place where I choose to lie down. Precisely, one will say, how do you know it, if not by thought? But this question contains a hidden postulate: that the image is different from thought; that it is thought's support. In this case it would stand in the same relation to the latter as the sign to the signification.

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