ABSTRACT
Our question won’t quite be Wollheim’s, but it is very close. Many exercises of imagination are in some way bound up with affective states or (as I shall also call them) feelings. How, exactly, does feeling enter into imagining? Is the feeling merely imagined, along with whatever objects for it we conjure? Or is the feeling real, a genuine response on our part to a merely imaginary scene? Perhaps there are other possibilities. And perhaps imagining exhibits them all, different possibilities obtaining on different occasions. In The Imaginary Sartre offers a wonderfully rich discussion of these
matters. In answering our question, we will take him as our guide. But first let’s see why the issue mattered to him. Whatever the question’s wider significance, Sartre had quite specific reasons for investigating it.
