ÁLVARO ITIE FEBRÔNIO NONAKA

The present research aims to understand how the problem of the image appears in Sartre’s philosophy, particularly in The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, and to clarify, from this perspective, aspects of the relationship between the concepts of imagination and freedom. To this end, we rely on the critical and scientific results of The Imagination and The Imaginary, starting from a new theory of the image, according to which the image loses its status as a copy or simulacrum of the thing present in the mind—as maintained by the classical conception — and is transformed into a special type of consciousness, by virtue of Husserlian intentionality. Within this framework, the central questions guiding our research are the following: How can we understand that imagination, insofar as it is capable of establishing a state of non-freedom or alienation, can at the same time engender freedom? Based on Sartre’s early works, at this stage of the constitution of his philosophy, how is the problem of imagination constituted? If Sartre identifies the nature of the image with intentional consciousness and rejects the role of perception in its constitution, what would be the conditions for a consciousness to imagine? What does it mean to characterize human freedom by the possibility of consciousness forming images? Why is the image defined by its power of negation? As a hypothesis, we maintain that the centrality of The Imaginary lies not only in the problematic of the image, but above all in the problem of freedom as a problem of the image described phenomenologically.