Chapter 3 - Sartre and Thinking as Imaging

Summary

The third chapter explores Sartre’s account of thinking, focusing on his relatively neglected early work on the imagination. It takes up Sartre’s largely unacknowledged debt to Bergson, showing that despite Sartre’s move to phenomenology, his account of the difference between imagining and perceiving relies on Bergson’s logic of multiplicities. It argues that this influence carries on into Being and Nothingness where Sartre’s account of the situation as the process that makes judgement possible relies on a pre-juridical moment that inverts Bergson’s account of free will while remaining true to the categories underlying it. It analyses Sartre’s account of why we falsely understand consciousness as juridical, which reworks Kant’s own arguments in the paralogisms before showing how his account of consciousness ultimately fails to provide the positive account of the constitution of a situation that he requires.