Sartre on imaginative presence

Jean-Paul Sartre argues that the feeling of phenomenal presence—the sense that what one experiences is actually there—accompanies only perception, not imagination or dreaming. This puts him against contemporary philosophers like Amy Kind, who holds that imagination provides a sense of “presence in absence,” and Jennifer Windt and Michael Barkasi, who claim that dreaming involves immersion in a spatiotemporal dreamscape. The paper explains how Sartre’s theory of perception shares key objectives with contemporary naïve realism, and that his rejection of imaginative presence is consistent with why a naïve realist would also reject it. It contrasts Sartre’s view of why a dreamer lacks true immersion with the views of Windt and Barkasi.

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Abstract

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.