Valerie Bernard

The question as to whether imaginative experience involves phenomenal presence is increasingly a subject of philosophical debate. In contrast to many contemporary thinkers who hold that waking imaginative experience and dreaming involve a feeling of presence, Jean-Paul Sartre (1940/2004, 1936/2012) argues that the phenomenology of presence accompanies perception only. Sartre thus rejects both that there is such a thing as “imaginative presence” and that dreaming involves the phenomenology of presence or a sense of immersion in a spatiotemporal dreamscape. This position puts him at odds with Amy Kind (2018) who holds that the imagination furnishes a sense of “presence in absence,” and Jennifer Windt (2018) and Michael Barkasi (2021), among others, who hold that dreaming involves a feeling of immersion in an imagined spatiotemporal dreamscape. I argue that Sartre’s position on presence emerges from his theory of perception that shares key objectives with contemporary naïve realism, and that his rejection of imaginative presence is consistent with the reasons why a contemporary naïve realist or relationalist would also reject the concept. This paper explains Sartre’s theory of phenomenal presence in the context of his theory of perception and contrasts his position on why a dreamer lacks a true sense of immersion in a dreamscape with the views of Windt and Barkasi.

In this paper, I argue that Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of the imagination emerges out of a position on perception that is similar to modern naïve realism in that he seeks to add elements of what today is called “relationalism” to his phenomenological description of perceptual and imaginative experience. The problem is that it is not clear that relationalism can be added to the phenomenologist's intentional theory of consciousness in the way Sartre recommends. This paper takes an analytic approach to understanding Sartre's theory of perception, traces his motivation in arguing that perception and imagination are sui generis mental activity and identifies the ways in which Sartre's attempt to add elements of relationalism to the Husserlian account of perception runs into trouble with hallucinatory experience.