ABSTRACT
The Existentialist Imagination IISartre The existentialist philosophy of imagination which developed in the twentieth century is, in many respects, a critical prolongation of Nietzsche’s ‘pessimism of strength’. If the nineteenth-century existentialists may be said to have exposed the void at the root of the romantic imagination, Sartre takes this equation of l’imaginaire and le néant as his point of departure-adding, as we shall see, a new ‘phenomenological’ rigour. Sartre brings the modern philosophy of imagination to its ultimate humanist conclusions. He disregards the Kierkegaardian paradox of the leap of faith in favour of a radical atheism. And he dismisses the Nietzschean paradox of amor fati by restoring the imaginative subject as an act of perpetual renovation through negation-scorning the idea of an ‘eternal recurrence of the same’ as a leftover from mystical paganism. Sartre’s existentialist view of imagination takes the form of an unconditional humanism. The last of its kind.
