Abstract

The purpose and conclusions of Sartre’s analysis of imagination are remarkably similar to Ryle’s. Like Ryle, Sartre is intent on rebutting image-theories of imagination—those theories which claim that to imagine anything is to be aware of a private mental image, which exists in its own right, has its own properties and relations and which can, as a result, be distinguished as a separate entity from the things of which it is an image. Sartre’s argument against image-theories of imagination leads him to a conclusion very similar to Ryle’s. Sartre concludes that imagining and perceiving are not to be distinguished by reference to the objects which these activities take. We cannot say, Sartre maintains, that imagining and perceiving are similar activities which differ only by virtue of the fact that imagining takes an object different in kind from the object of perception. For Sartre, just as for Ryle, there are no objects other than the objects of perception. Thus he concludes, like Ryle, that imagining and perceiving can only be distinguished by reference to these activities themselves. Imagining and perceiving, Sartre contends, are two mutually exclusive activities, directed at the same objects—viz. at the objects of perception.