Abstract
This chapter approaches our experience of virtual worlds through Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology of the imagination. It looks at Sartre’s argument that the existential significance of the imagination lies in its giving us the capacity to surpass our being-in-the-world. On this basis, the chapter draws a line between virtual subjectivity and how Sartre’s frames the concept of imaginary consciousness, considering how our relationships with virtual environments both reflect the phenomenological structure Sartre attributes to the imagination and puts it into question.
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Notes
- 1.
Heidegger writes that “man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance” (1969, 131). What Sartre picks up on is precisely the idea of “the primordial distance he established towards all being in his transcendence” (ibid.).
- 2.
Sartre uses the term analogon to refer to the object—generally a material object of perception, but potentially also a concept or other mental object—which serves as the analogical material for an irreal object. In this example, the painting is the analogon which allows us to imagine Charles VIII. The analogon is itself surpassed in image-consciousness—we no longer see the painting as an object before our perception, we see the king it allows us to imagine.
- 3.
This is one of the points in The Imaginary where, contrary to his own claim that there are no such things as irreal or imaginary worlds, Sartre not only explicitly uses the term, but does in fact appear to be thinking of a domain of irreal existence.
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Gualeni, S., Vella, D. (2020). Jean-Paul Sartre and Escaping from Being-in-the-World. In: Virtual Existentialism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38478-4_5
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