L’Imagination. [The Imaginary].

SARTRE, Jean-Paul.

$7,500.00

Item Number: 139855

Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1936.

First edition of Sartre’s first book, published as volume 10 of the Nouvelle Encyclopedie Philosophique and commissioned by the editor, Henri Delacroix. Octavo, original wrappers. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “A Brice Parain en tout amitie! JP Sartre.” The recipient, Brice Parain was a fellow French philosopher and friend of Sartre’s, mainly interested in Communism, Surrealism, and Existentialism, the failures of which he anticipated in part in some of his earlier works, such as Essai sur la misère humaine (1934) and Retour à la France (1936). Parain was one of the chief collaborators in the beginnings of Éditions Gallimard (since 1927), as well as a close friend of the Gallimard brothers, particularly Gaston. He was the principal director of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade collection, and translated various Russian classic works published through Gallimard, including works by Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Aleksandr Pushkin. Near fine in the original glassine which is in near fine condition with a small annotation “Envoi” to the crown of the spine. First editions are rare, presentation copies exceedingly so.

Understanding the imagination was central to Sartre’s attempts to understand what it was to be human, and how one should live. In L'Imagination, Sartre discusses what the existence of imagination shows about the nature of human consciousness and argues that while some believe imagining to be like an internal perception, it is in fact, nothing like it. Ultimately, Sartre argues that because we can imagine, we are ontologically free. A consciousness that could not imagine, he points out, would be hopelessly mired in the "real", incapable of the perception of unrealized possibilities, and thus any real freedom of thought or choice. In order to imagine, a consciousness must be able to posit an object as irreal—nonexistent, absent, somewhere else and it does so always from a particular point of view.