Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of the Sartrean Conception of the Imaginary

First of all, as we have already glimpsed above, especially in Phenomenology of Perception, “Structures and Conflicts in Child Consciousness,” and “The Human Sciences and Phenomenology,” Merleau-Ponty criticizes Sartre for having set perception and imagination in an overly strong opposition at the beginning of The Imaginary, and for having assumed that the distinction between them was apparent to consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s argument, in these three texts, is that certain phenomena (hallucination, dream, mythic consciousness) exhibit a power of imaginary conviction that prompts us to understand its kinship with perception: “This fiction [hallucination] can only count as reality because reality itself is reached for the normal subject through an analogous operation.” “In order for the imaginary to be able to displace the real, real and imaginary must not be antinomies”—“if the image were nothing but […] emptiness, we would never confuse it with a perception.”